The purpose of this petition is to plead for the punishment of local scoundrels
and for the rehabilitation of the newspaper office.91 Since the recent Qingdao incident,
students all over China and various public organizations have made their voices heard,
even at the risk of the greatest sacrifice, to awaken their compatriots for a common
effort to rescue the country from perishing. We students of Hunan are unanimous in
our actions. Inspired by sincere patriotism, we have explained and propagated our goal
of saving the motherland. After several months, we were beginning to see results. We
were ready to step up our efforts and were hoping for a speedy reconciliation of the
North and the South so that we could unite against the foreigners. Who could have
foreseen that the remnants of the imperial system, and the old partisans of the Anfu
clique, thinking only of their personal interest, would not scruple to lobby in such
deceptive language as to hoodwink Your Honor. Illegal elections that were canceled in
91 As in the text entitled “Contents of the Treaty,” we give the original English of Lloyd George’s
speech of July 3, 1919 (Temperley, Peace Conference, Vol. III, p. 97), rather than a literal translation
of Mao’s Chinese, since the sense is virtually identical.