April 10, 1917
In the following article our Peking Correspondent discusses the propaganda of the Germans in China. Since it was written the Chinese Government has severed diplomatic relations with Germany, and has decided not to make her any further payment on account of the Boxer indemnity.
It is a matter of course that the Germans are doing their best to damage the Allies and to forward their own interests in China. Some damage they are doing, and they are certainly preparing for fierce commercial competition in the future. It is difficult to say whether all their scheming has serious results. The people who count in China where foreign relations are concerned are extremely limited in number. They comprise the officials who control and execute Government policy; the merchant classes at the Treaty Ports, through whom passes the foreign commerce of the country; Young China representatives, who sit in Parliament in Peking, or in the Provincial Assemblies, and who are demanding development on Western lines. Outside these elements German intrigues would seem to be wasted. So far as the Government of the day is concerned, the Germans have had considerable success. The controlling power in Peking is military, and German military prestige stands as high here as elsewhere. There are several Chinese officers who have been educated in Germany, and German methods are constantly before the Army. The German diplomatic mission at the capital has little to do except to work on the imagination of the military men. The Premier is a soldier with a limited knowledge of world affairs, and there is no gainsaying the effect upon him of the occupation of Belgium, of parts of France and Russia, of the conquest of Serbia and of Rumania. All these points are pressed upon his attention, and nothing is said of the occupation of German colonies, of the destruction of German trade, of the exhausting efforts made by Germany to maintain a front in face of the ever-growing power of the Allies.
PROPAGANDA MAPS
Two maps relating to the war have recently appeared in the Chinese newspapers. They were given by the German Legation to the Premier, and have since been reproduced in the subsidized organs of the Cabinet. One represented the Western front, 400 miles long, with a tiny dent to illustrate the Allied progress on the Somme. The map is correct in detail. The information by which it was accompanied gave no indication of the gigantic nature of the conflict, of the damage done in this small area to the German Army as a whole. The other map depicted the North Sea as a naval sphere continually swept by the German fleets, all but a strip at the Straits of Dover being under German domination. Germans in China have a useful weapon at their disposal. Their share of the Boxer indemnity, their part of the interest in tho two big Anglo-German loans (£16,000,000 each), and various other receipts are estimated to equal over £3,000,000 a year, all of which is paid by the Chinese Government to the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in China. With this money Germans who are stranded in China in consequence of the war are supported, propaganda is maintained, various devious methods of damaging the Allies are financed, and the ground is prepared for future commercial cultivation. The bases of these operations are the German Legation in Peking, the German Concessions in Tientsin and Hankow, and every German Consulate in the country. Press propaganda is limited to the publication of a few newspapers in English, which have a very small circulation, and to small subsidies to many Chinese sheets, the whole limited in effect.
DANGEROUS AGENTS
German enterprise sometimes takes a more dangerous form. At the beginning of the war it will be remembered that Major Pappenheim, the German Military Attache in Peking, left here to shoot in Mongolia, and was discovered by the Russians to be marching north with a caravan of explosives designed to wreck tunnels on the Siberian Railway. A band of Mongols, apprised of his character, destroyed the whole party.
There is no doubt that much trouble of a minor kind on the Russian railways in the Far East has been caused by the expenditure of German money. Another interesting case is that of Major Dinkelman, once of the Legation Guard, and a military adviser to the Chinese Government until his dismissal was secured on the ground that his anti-Ally activities constituted a breach of neutrality. The enterprising Major disappeared from Peking last May, and his whereabouts was a subject of curiosity for some time. In December he was discovered in Kashgar preparing to cross the frontier into Afghanistan, where, doubtless, he intended to add his blandishments to those of Von Hentig. From Kashgar, under the interested observation of the Indian Government, he proceeded along the well-known Pamir route, via Tashkurgan, into Taghdumbash, where “three Empires meet”. Here instead of swinging west into Wakhan, Afghan territory, he continued south, and put his foot into the lion’s mouth at Hunza-Nagar. When arrested 9,000 golden sovereigns were found on him.
When Von Hentig, after a fruitless effort to get the Ameer to declare himself against the Allies, was politely put over the Afghan border into Chinese Turkestan, he proceeded to Yarkand, and there began an anti-Russian propaganda in aid of a Mahomedan rebellion under promotion by German agents. In due course an outbreak took place in Ili, the local Sarts and Kirghiz deluded by vast promises, infinite lying and much money, suddenly rising and murdering many Russian settlers - men, women, and children. A handful of troops easily suppressed the movement. Thousands of the rebels were killed, including some hundreds of Chinese subjects.
Von Hentig, accompanied by an Indian soldier captured on the Western front, and by Hamsa Effendi, a relative of the Emir of Bokhara, afterwards comfortably marched across China, nominally escorted by Chinese soldiers, and is now believed to be safe in the German Consulate at Hankow. British and Russian representations to the Chinese Government as to the desirability of interning this firebrand have hitherto met with no response.
