893.00/5947: Telegram
The Minister in China (Schurman) to the Secretary of State
[Received January 15—noon.]
23. 1. I sat beside the Chief Executive yesterday for 2 hours at and after luncheon given to half a dozen chiefs of mission and had opportunity to talk with him alone and also in company with my British colleague on the present situation. He professed complete confidence that there would be no more fighting in the Yangtze provinces and stated, as though it were very important and reassuring, that 19 out of 22 provinces had accepted invitations to his rehabilitation conference.
2. That conference however is the subject of constant attack by the Kuomintang as undemocratic, useless, and completely under the control of Marshal Tuan.
3. One of the ablest intellectual leaders of the Kuomintang Party and a close friend of Dr. Sun talked with me here yesterday for an hour and a half with great frankness and apparent sincerity. He said that Tuan was sitting on a volcano but did not know it; that Dr. Sun if he were well enough would soon come to the Presidency but that no individual could do much for China, which was too vast, complex, and chaotic for human control, and that intelligent Chinese now were simply watching events with fatalistic resignation. The same fatalistic view of China’s development and the futility of foreign efforts to make any impression upon it was expressed privately by my Belgian colleague, Everts, who has been here several years, on leaving Peking in December for his new post as Ambassador to Germany.
4. But when I compare the China I saw 25 years ago with the China of today I am profoundly convinced that many important [Page 592] salutatory [salutary?] changes have been effected here whether intentionally or not through the influence of foreign sentiments, ideas, science, inventions, industrial organization and economic and political institutions.