La Quotidienne

A Chinese explorer, Doctor A.-F. Legendre, pointed out the other day, in a noted article, the new form that the "yellow peril" was currently taking, because of Soviet propaganda in Asia, where it recruited numerous and fanatical followers. The Bolshevik does not preach communist dogma there, as in Europe; he strives to exacerbate racial antagonism and to exalt religious sentiment; he works to develop hatred of foreigners, represented as conquerors and oppressors. The ground was, moreover, prepared; it was enough to exploit it, by flattering the confused aspirations of the Asian masses. French people possessing the gift and the taste for observation, had already, well before the current events, even before the great war which has so profoundly shaken the old world and agitated all peoples, had, therefore, noticed this evolution of China and called attention to the dangers which could result from it. Those who traveled through China after the death of the old Empress Tsen-Hi, who reigned over four hundred million inhabitants, and whose power had not suffered an eclipse for fifty years, had clearly discerned that the disappearance of this creature of genius, cunning and cruelty, entailed the shaking of an entire past and marked the birth of a new world.

In conclusion of his book on innovative and warlike China, published in 1906, Captain d'Ollone, now general commanding the group of the Soissons subdivision, insisted on the anxiety that must be caused by the sudden awakening of patriotic sentiment among a people whose apathy and indifference seemed to be the essential characteristics. And, around the same time, the writer who signs Avesnes, a former naval officer, at that time a listened-to member of the mast, after having been a magnificent hero of the epic of the marine fusiliers, in the region of Dixmude, from where he returned cruelly mutilated, Avesnes, therefore, devoted half of the engaging work that he published under the title "In Face of the Rising Sun", to the analysis of this rapid evolution of China, which he had been able to observe closely, and of which he studied the causes and denounced the tendencies. Having read attentively, during several months of an extended stay in China, the most widespread newspapers, he had been struck at first to see that they plagiarized and propagated the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and even more surprised to note the profound influence that these ideas had immediately exercised, not only on the elite but on the popular masses. He noted that as the Chinese assimilate the knowledge and ideas of the West, they become more hostile to us and this by the argument of our own authors "Every patriot is hard on foreigners, said Rousseau". The hundred pages devoted to the study of the new tendencies of China, in the vote of Avesnes, are strangely prophetic, and contain in substance the announcement of the disturbing movement that denounced the other day by this other clear-sighted observer of mysterious China, Doctor Legendre.

PAUL MATHIEX.