A Chinese Squib.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 176, 31 July 1888, Page 3

A Chinese Squib.

The Sydney News pokes fun at the Chinese circular which recently caused a small amount of sensation in New Zealand. It says :—The Chinese in Dunedin, the chief town of Otago, where the Chinamen in New Zealand most do congregate, have been letting off a squib. They have been assisted in their pyrotechnic display by an enterprising Caucasian journalist and the result is a very characteristic display of fireworks. It consists of a report that the Chinese Emperor has communicated to his faithful subjects that he does not consider his army

sufficiently well drilled or his navy quite strong enough just now to smash up the British Empire and its colonies, but that by waiting three years, and bringing up his land and water forces to a proper state of perfection he will be able to dictate terms to Great Britain, and compel Australia, or any other part of of the Empire, to receive just as many Chinamen as he chooses to send. Meantime, the Emperor of China exhorts all his subjects in Australia to pack up their trunks and return to their native land, there to await the time when they shall return to Australia —not as poor immigrants,

but as conquerors. This is a very good joke indeed, as most Chinese squibs are; but if the squib be the concoction of the Chinese alone, and has not had any help from European fingers, it only shows what the meek and mild Chinaman, as his friends here suppose him to be, would do if he only dared. It is not want of will that prevents the Chinaman from showing his teeth in Australia. It is only dread of the consequences. Were he sufficiently powerful here to-morrow his real nature would come out, and Europeans and Australians would have to beware. It is most probable, however, that the Chinese “ proclamation ” is only mockery after all. The canny Scottish element, which is so strong in Otago, has been before now made the

subject of a Chinese joke. The members of a road board there once gave a contract to the lowest tenderer, whose name professed upon the tender to be MacPherson. But when MacPherson was called into the board-room to receive news of his good fortune he was found to be an umnistakeable Chinaman. Being asked how he had come to call himself MacPherson, he explained that he had been given to understand that it was to use sending in a tender to a road board in Otago unless the tenderer was a Scotchman.

“ So,” as he said, “me allee same Scioshman now.” He got the contract.