Sessional_Paper_1926 — Page 87

83

No. 1925

HONGKONG.

COMMUNIQUÉS AND STATEMENTS IN CONNECTION WITH THE CONFERENCE FOR SETTLEMENT OF CHINESE-BRITISH DISPUTES IN THE LIANG-KUANG

PROVINCES.

No. 1.

FIRST JOINT COMMUNIQUE

RELATING TO THE

MEETING OF THURSDAY, THE 15тu July, 1926.

The following communiqué is jointly issued by the Chinese and the British delega- tions who are negotiating the anti-British boycott and strike questions.

The negotiations for the settlement of the anti-British boycott and Canton-Hong- kong strike questions opened at noon to-day at the Canton Foreign Office. All the members of the Chinese and British delegations were present. Mr. Eugene Chen, Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, who is head of the Chinese delegation, opened the proceed- ings with the following speech :-

"In formally opening these negotiations to-day we wish to extend to the British representatives a friendly welcome from our Government. We wish also to ex- press the desire of those in whose name we are authorised to speak that the question which we are charged to resolve may be approached in a sense and in a spirit of realism and of determination to secure its settlement on terms which, while assuring to British nationals in the Liang-Kuang a friendly and profitable market for their goods and services, shall enable the Chinese people as represented by our Government to go on, unhindered, with the work of unifying and modernising China and, on this new basis, to strive to build a great structure of relations with the outer world.

"It is manifest that striking and real real changes are taking place in this country, socially, economically and politically. These changes, generally, are a necessary conse- quence of the structural readjustment or new equilibrium which is in process of establish- ment, consciously as well as unconsciously, between the Chinese people organised as a social aggregate and the new conditions of environment resulting from their definite in- clusion in the larger system of the modern world.

"Whether these changes are good or bad for the Chinese people is mainly a question for them to decide if they are truly to be regarded and treated as an independent nation and not as a people fit and suited for the exercise of international tutelage. At any rate it is a fundamental thesis of the Chinese Nationalist Movement-which is the greatest of the forces underlying and sustaining the new equilibrium that the time has come when the Chinese people must be free to work out their own salvation. And though most of the country is unhappily to-day under the domination of leaders, mediaeval and therefore re- actionary in their outlook and methods, the dynamic section of the nation as represented by the intelligentsia, the students, the workers, the new agrarian and industrial and com- mercial groups--the classes definitely thrown up as political forces by the post-war factors in operation in our midst-are with the Nationalist Government at Canton in its assertion of this right to national independence.