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6 CHANG TSO-LIN’S STRUGGLE

CHAPTER I HOW NORTH-CHINA

Russia, having Germany virtually as an ally on her flank in China, and still retaining France as her inexhaustible purse, could snap her fingers, she foolishly thought, at Japan. The Japanese, having waited ten years for their revenge about the Liaotung, lost no time in accepting the challenge. The bloody encounter at Port Arthur and on the plains of Manchuria in 1904 which changed the balance of power in the West as in the East and was a harbinger of the European conflict, was soon shaking the world; when it was concluded the Japanese were back again in the Liaotung not as lords of the soil, but as masters of a ready-built railway system and of a great commercial harbour (Dairen) besides possessing the Port Arthur fortress on the southernmost spit of territory called the Regent’s Sword.

The voyage of the Tsarevitch had indeed borne bitter fruit! In exactly fifteen years it had produced precisely the contrary effect to everything that had been expected from it. All the zone which had been earmarked as prospectively Russian had passed definitely under the military control of others; and there was nothing left but the trans-Manchurian railway (the Chinese Eastern Railway) which was virtually a

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