Sessional_Paper_1926 — Page 89

85

No. 3.

STATEMENT

MADE BY THE

CHINESE DELEGATION

AT THE

MEETING OF FRIDAY, THE 16TH JULY, 1926.

In accordance with what are doubtless the wishes of the British delegation, we pro- pose to begin consideration of the anti-British trouble in the Liang-Kuang by first con- centrating attention on the aspect of it which has found expression in the anti-British boycott.

What is this boycott? Ignoring mere details or purely accidental features, it consists essentially in Chinese workers refusing to load or unload British ships and in the Chinese neople in our territory refusing to buy or deal in British goods, or to sell goods to the British. It is admitted that the boycott is an organised patriotic movement which has been sustained by the Chinese people in South China for more than a year.

If the anti-British boycott is to be SETTLED and not simply suppressed by force and so transformed into an enduring element in Chinese-British relations throughout China, it is necessary to find out, at least, its direct and immediate cause. In homely phrase, a malady is cured by treating its cause.

The anti-British boycott in its typical form began immediately after the events of June 23, 1925, off the Shameen. And none with a sense of causation can possibly doubt that the boycott was the first direct and immediate outcome of the killing and maiming of Chinese students and others on that fateful day. If, therefore, the anti-British boycott is to be terminated by a NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT, we must first deal with the transaction of June 23, 1925.

Broadly speaking, the material facts of the case are not in real dispute save one, namely whether the British or the Chinese fired the fisrt shot. But even this point became of secondary importance when the entire incident is examined from the stand- point of juridical responsibility. Such an examination leads us first to a brief review of what may be called the causal background out of which sprang the tragedy of June 23.

It is an historical fact that the Chinese people as a whole were powerfully stirred by Sergeant Evanson's order to his men "to shoot to kill" the Chinese students and others who demonstrated at Shanghai on May 30, 1925. In China, as elsewhere, school boys and girls of to-day are the rulers and workers of to-morrow, and a nation is necessarily inter- ested in its student class. There is also special reason why the Chinese people are interested in their students. A nation that is not dying must have an articulate group, and for reasons inherent in the present period of transition through which China is passing, this mark and quality of vitality in a nation is possessed by the Chinese student class. If China is to live her students must continue to voice the new economic and political needs of the Transition until a new equilibrium is established between the Chinese people and the changed environ- ment in which they find themselves after three-quarters of a century of commercial, diplomatic and social intercourse with foreigners.

This view of the Chinese student class explains the range and depth of the repercus- sion of May 30 on the nation. Along the great line of the Yangtsze-at Hankow, Kiukiang, Nanking and in the North, notably in Peking, significant manifestations of national feel- ing and a new consciousness occurred. Even to-day, more than a year after the event, the conception of Sergeant Evanson's action on May 30 as a massacre persists in the Chinese Nationalist mind. And the sense of wrong engendered is all the greater now that the bloodless. handling of a far more dangerous crowd at Shanghai on the first anniversary of May 30 proves that Evanson's action. was wholly unnecessary as an application of the doctrine of the preventive massacre, i.e., the prevention of a bigger massacre by the mob, which Lieut.-Colonel Hilton-Johnson and other British witnesses at the Shanghai Judicial Enquiry swore would have taken place had Evanson not ordered firing into an unarmed crowd of students and others.