[Inclosure.]
[Extract from North China Daily News,
August 17, 1905.]
The boycott.
We asked the other day whether the Chinese merchants here did not
think the boycott had gone far enough. Their answer practically is
that it has gone not only far enough but a great deal too far, for
it has got beyond their control altogether, the reins having been
taken up by a crowd of irresponsible students and talkers, who are
full of patriotism because they have nothing to lose but their
heads, which in a sense they have lost already. The boycott has
spread so dangerously in the country, urged on by inflammatory
posters and pictures and pamphlets in which Americans are reviled
almost in the fashion of Chou Han, and terrible stories are told of
the cruelties practised on Chinese immigrants at American ports and
other places, that we understand that unquestionably English goods
are now being returned from the country as unsaleable, because they
were imported here by a firm supposed to be American. We are glad to
know that the Waiwu Pu has telegraphed orders to his excellency Chou
Fu, the viceroy at Nanking, to use every effort to suppress the
boycott in his jurisdiction. The diplomatic body generally has taken
up the question, and when our taot’ai returns he will be asked to
explain why it is he has not ordered the issue here of the
antiboycott proclamation similar to that issued at Wuhu, which the
magistrates at Sungkiang, which is within his honor Yuan’s
taot’aiship, have put forth there. We understand that the Chinese
merchants here have asked the general chamber of commerce to assist
them in undoing the work they so imprudently inaugurated, but the
movement has become so general now that the central government,
through the provincial authorities, must put it down. Peking must be
made to realize the gravity of the movement, which from being
anti-American is becoming antiforeign and antidynastic. His
excellency Yuan Shih-k’ai has suppressed it so thoroughly in his
jurisdiction that the Chinese merchants at Tientsin are now ordering
from America direct goods which would otherwise have been imported
from Shanghai, and the Japanese administration at Niuchwang will
have none of the boycott on any account. Our taot’ai when he comes
back must be made to understand that unless he suppresses the
boycott here it will infallibly bring on the most serious financial
crisis that Shanghai has experienced, with heavy losses to foreign,
and losses that will mean ruin to native, merchants and bankers. A
very heavy responsibility rests on Viceroy Chou Fu. What Yuan
Shih-k’ai has done he can do, and he is expected to do it promptly,
every day’s delay increasing the danger. Two thoughtful letters on
the boycott will be found in our columns to-day, both written by
American citizens. Mr. Grafton repeats what we have said more than
once, that the threat of the boycott was effective, as the American
papers show, in making the Americans realize the injustice that has
been done for years by “asinine immigrant inspectors;” but as soon
as President Roosevelt and the American people understood how the
provisions of the exclusion act were being abused by the inspectors,
strict injunctions were issued to these inspectors to change their
attitude altogether. If the former treatment of the exempt
immigrants justified the threat of the boycott, the present position
does not justify for a minute the dangerous antiforeign complexion
that the boycott has now assumed, as we are sure Mr. Grafton himself
would now concede.
The letter signed “Onlooker” gives a very forcible yet temperate
presentation of the other side of the question. That there has been
a great deal of fraud in the past on the part of the Chinese is
undoubted, but there is unfortunately reason to believe that in many
cases these frauds were connived at by American officials on this
side of the Pacific. It is important, too, for the Chinese who are
now raging against their best friends, the Americans, to remember
that, as “Onlooker” points out, “while the charges of harsh,
humiliating, and discriminating
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treatment of the Chinese in entering the
United States are, in many cases, well founded, the Chinese have as
much liberty in the country, after they once pass the customhouse as
they would have in any other country in the world—much more than
they enjoy in their own country.” “Onlooker” goes on to remind the
Chinese—and it ought not to be necessary to remind them—of what the
Americans, as a people and as individuals, have done for their
elevation. An enormous stream of American money, freely sent without
any idea of putting the Chinese under an obligation, pours steadily
into China for the maintenance of schools, hospitals, and other
charitable objects. Not only is this very boycott in its methods the
fruit of American teaching, but many of its hotheaded promoters and
supporters have received their education in American schools, and
are now biting the hand that fed them. “I will not dwell,” says our
correspondent, “on the American Government’s stand for the
preservation of China’s integrity while most of the world was
planning the partition of the Empire, nor on the many other acts of
constant friendship—contemplated return of Boxer indemnity, for
instance—that the great Republic has shown to this country.” Indeed,
as we have said already, no foreign power has been a better friend
to China in the past than the United States has been, and that
hundreds, or rather thousands, of Americans in China are showing
themselves everyday.
The boycott in the form it has now assumed is a phenomenon of madness
that must be crushed by the power of the government, whose sincerity
will necessarily be judged by the result of its efforts to crush it;
and it must be crushed promptly, or injury will be done which it
will take months or even years to repair.
