CHINA: Student Rampage

Students adherent to the new South China Government at Wuchang crossed the Yangtze to Hangkow last week and there propagandized most violently the local American Wesleyan Mission School. While pious female Chinese Wesleyan converts were attending their annual holiday entertainment, the students forced their way into the hall, climbed up on the stage and spoke in terms which were to the Wesleyans unquestionably blasphemous.

Several Wesleyan missionaries who attempted to eject the student propagandists were themselves ejected. Thereupon the chief tenets of the Christian religion were held up to derision and ridicule. Frightened, the Wesleyan female Chinese converts stopped their ears and cowered in their seats. Later the students rushed through a dormitory distributing anti-religious literature to a group of converts, who were afterward discovered to be blindmen.

Borodin. By this intemperate rampage the students greatly vexed that rugged, cautious, middle-aged Soviet Russian adviser to the South China Government, Michael Markovitch Borodin (TIME, Dec. 13). Though Adviser Borodin is a Communist and an atheist he quenches misguided, half-baked attempts to spread these doctrines.

"China," he has said, "is still medieval. . . . To attempt Communism now would be like eating dessert before the soup."