Wuhan

“ Chiang Kai Shek in Nanchang, after greeting the Joint Conference and making proposals to it, changed his mind and denounced it as an illegal body. After negotiations, it was agreed in Nanchang to move to Wuhan on February 9; when that date arrived, postponement was again made until the 16th; on that date it was again postponed. Whereupon, at an enlarged Joint Conference in Wuhan, it was decided that the Central Kuomintang and the National Government should both begin office to succeed the Joint Conference without further waiting. ”

“ This was the period which began with the reorganization of the Kuomintang Nationalist government, the split by Chiang Kai Shek and the establishment of the Nanking government, and ended with the breakup of the reorganized National government of Wuhan. It was a time of civil war in almost every city and town which the Delegation visited. A tremendous regrouping of class forces was occurring in the Chinese Revolution. ”

“ His small act of bravery, in late December, was to pass along a warning via WeChat to his former medical school classmates that patients afflicted by a dangerous new virus were turning up in Wuhan hospitals. He urged his friends to protect their families. ”

“ Hankow is the capital city of Nationalist China. It is the industrial and commercial center of China, having the most modern industry and developed working class of any city except Shanghai, which is in many respects a foreign city. As might be expected, therefore, the labor movement here is the most highly developed. There are 300,000 trade union members in the Wuhan cities (Hankow, Wuchang and Hanyang) which make up one economic whole. In order to have a definite idea of the conditions of these 300,000 workers, it is necessary to examine in detail a few separate groups. ”

“ In 1910 the first risings directed actually against the regency took place, in the province of Hunan. In 1911 the "railway disturbances" broke out in western China as a reply of the railway shareholders in the province of Szechwan to the government decree of nationalization of all the railways. The modernist students, most of whom were sons of merchants who owned railway shares, supported the movement, and the government was unable to control them. At the same time a great anti-Manchu revolution began in Wuch'ang, one of the cities of which Wuhan, on the Yangtze, now consists. ”

“ The plant is owned and manned throughout by Chinese. There are no foreigners employed in any capacity.
After visiting this mill and another, the Yu Wah mill with 41,000 spindles and 4,400 workers, we talked with the representatives of the Textile Workers Union about their organization, and about the living and working conditions. The following information was given us by Han Yu-win and Fun Chin-vin, members of the Executive Bureau of the Wuhan Union. The last-named is a young woman, head of the secretarial department and of the women's committee. ”

“ The issue that would have someone think it’s possible to have escaped from a lab would mean that it essentially entered the outside human population already well adapted to humans, suggesting that it was adapted in the lab.However, the alternative explanation, which most public health individuals go by, is that this virus was actually circulating in China, likely in Wuhan, for a month or more before they were clinically recognized at the end of December of 2019. ”

“ Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.
The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China. ”

“ Shanghai is, in fact, an independent republic with a government of its own, which treats all other authorities with whom it is brought into contact—Chinese provincial officials, foreign consuls, the legations at Peking—as so many external bodies to be met and dealt with upon terms of equality.
That it flourishes amazingly is a fact beyond dispute. Prosperity—arrogance the Chinese of to-day, flushed with his new-born spirit of nationality, would probably say—stares you in the face as you steam up the Whang-poo river lined with vast piles of modern architecture. ”

“ The Imperial City, all round the Forbidden City, consists of a network of narrow streets and alleys lined with low buildings with windows of delicate lattice-work, and curved tiled roofs. Here, hidden away in silent peaceful courtyards shaded by gnarled old trees, are temples guarded by shaven priests in faded red robes. Their hangings are torn and faded, the dust lies on their altars, and the scent of the incense is stale in their courts, for the gods are dead; and yet because the dead are never forgotten in China—China that clings to her past—they linger on. ”

“ For if Hong-Kong is an example of adulterated British imperialism, Shanghai is one of European internationalism grafted upon China. At Shanghai the forces of two contending racial streams meet, like the waters at the entrance of Port Philip, and here, though the surface is smooth and glassy, there are eddies and whirlpools within, which are a menace to any small craft that may attempt to cross.
How strange to wander about streets and buildings quite European but to see only here and there a white face! It is an ultra-modern city built upon a flat plain. ”

“ Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an electric, force in its influence on China. Whatever the Chinese are to become in their struggle towards the light of day will be in some measure due to the example set by these two cities, the only samples of Western civilization which the Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The missionary tells him of the God of the Western peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates humankind; the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then turns to look at the samples of regenerated peoples that fringe his Coast. ”

“ And as it was with Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, and villages of the Empire. The plague smote them all. Nor was it one plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every virulent form of infectious death stalked through the land. Too late the Chinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossal preparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights of the tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass. ”

“ From the fine parade along the river,—the Bund it is called,—with its turfed slopes, Shanghai is alive, right away to the men-of-war, local steamers, and launches. The streets are full, even crowded, with passers-by and rickshas—the original "Pull-man car of Shanghai." On the Bund the business is performed, and its occupants are indeed busy. It is a wonderful sight for the stranger from Europe, who expects things to be Chinese-like. ”

“ Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow, gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the immediate following of the Son of Heaven. ”

“ When that time arrives, the Chinese will find the elements of all they are in search of at the foreign settlements in Shanghai, where the schools, the splendid commerce, the merchant palaces, the fleets of steamers, the local foreign government, the opulence of the inhabitants, and the condition of the streets and dwellings, offer an instructive contrast to the condition of the Chinese walled city which lies to the south of the foreign settlements. The labour of centuries has brought this city to its present state, and the result is little to the credit of the authorities who rule there. ”

“ I am Wu, and the house of Wu shall be avenged. I shall live for that and for China. My venerable grandfather, three thousand times wise, did well to send me to England. And he bade me study Englishmen closely. But I did ill to take to myself too much of their custom. We have learned too much of Europe. It is well to learn of every nation, but to accept too much from inferior peoples is a hideous crime; and in that crime I have shared to China’s hurt—and yours. You are undone. China is threatened with the loss of all that has made her for thousands of years paramount and exquisite. ”

“ Shanghai exerts a direct and result-breeding influence on fifty to seventy-five million native minds, and an indirect influence on all China. How many scores of fair-minded, straightforward merchants, how many thousands of scattered missionaries and teachers will it take, think you, to counteract that influence?
China, grappling with the problem of decay, fighting desperately against an evil which the most nearly Christian of the Christian nations has fastened on her, looks westward for enlightenment, and sees—Shanghai. ”

“ No Imperial Commissioner ever conducts business at Shanghai. There being a particular sphere of duty allotted to every official on the establishment of the Celestial Empire, and the principle that between them and the foreigner there is no intercourse being one ever religiously adhered to by the servants of our Government of China, it would not be proper for me to reply in person to the letter of the English Minister. ”

“ Being implicated by harboring the reformers, and in deep sympathy with them, I had to flee for my own life and succeeded in escaping from Peking. I took up quarters in the foreign settlement of Shanghai. While there, I organized the “Deliberative Association of China,” of which I was chosen the first president. The object of the association was to discuss the leading question of the day, especially those of reform.
In 1899, I was advised for my own personal safety, to change my residence. I went to Hong Kong and placed myself under the protection of the British government. ”

“ The foreign concession is surrounded by streams and ditch from the rest, and is virtually an island isolated. The river bounds one side, and brooks the others; one crossed bridges and ditches, and finds change and decay! There is an Anglo-Chinese settlement, but all the foreign side is clean, well lighted by lamps and electricity, with fine houses, warehouses, and public buildings. Shanghai is no longer China in the settlements.
In the American settlement my friend Eagan, whom I suspected was an American bred, had indicated the hotel on the Broadway. ”

“ In descending, we return to the main thoroughfare of Queen's Road, and after some shopping, go to the City Hall, and the marble palace of the Shanghai and Hong Kong bank, where I wait outside to watch the ever-varying stream of passers-by. Chinamen in their cool cotton jackets and glazed pantaloons, coolies with their bamboo-slung burdens, sedan-chairs, jinrickshas, wheelbarrows, chairs, Sikh policemen with their scarlet turbans, Cinghalese, Parsees, mingling with our own officers and soldiers, under the shadow of the trees. ”

“ Regarding the bearing on the sanitation of Shanghai of the relationship between Eastern and Western hygiene, it may be said, that if prolonged national life is indicative of sound sanitation, the Chinese are a race worthy of study by all who concern themselves with Public Health. Even without the returns of a Registrar-General it is evident that in China the birth rate must very considerably exceed the death rate, and have done so in an average way during the three or four thousand years that the Chinese nation has existed. ”

“ Yet against the background of sturdy Shanghai, their labor and their travail does not hurt as much as it does in Chinese City. The perplexities of life—national, racial, of caste—pervaded my thoughts. Why has China remained dormant so long? Why is she now waking? How will she tackle the problem of poverty? To me it seems that nations rise and fall not because fluctuation is the inherent law of life, but simply because universally accepted glory and prestige are positions generally paid for by accompanying poverty and disease. ”

“ All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and {135} in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly, of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmentionable foulness of them often smells to heaven. ”

“ It is, indeed, a vast commercial emporium at which the products of European and American factories are first collected before being distributed to the consumers of China, and for this very reason it is not here that the would-be investigator will find material for forming a just estimate of the future of China, commercial, industrial, or political: Shanghai, in other words, is not China, it is an exotic which flourishes because it is not subjected to Chinese conditions. ”

“ Yes, Shanghai on a spring afternoon is a most interesting place; and yet as you turn your eyes to the river and catch sight of the dark grey warship, you realise that beneath all this peace and busy commerce lies the fear of the grim realities of war. China may assimilate the adjuncts of Western life, but she will never welcome the Western. The racial gulf that divides them is far too deep. ”