JAPAN THRUSTS SOUTHWARD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23269, 11 February 1939, Page 12

JAPAN THRUSTS SOUTHWARD

Japan's southward move in an endeavour to get a strangle-hold on China has now reached Hainan Island, where Japanese forces have landed. This move has been progressive. In May of last year Amoy, one of the oldest of Chinese treaty ports and one of the finest harbours on the coast, was the scone of a Japanese landing, which even as a demonstration was serious ; the fact that the port possessed facilities for dry-docking and repairing of ships gave the invasion a particularly sinister meaning. Later occurred the systematically ruthless bombing of Canton, which was viewed with apprehension by foreign Powers, especially in its bringing of Hongkong definitely within the zone of war. The military landing on Hainan Island similarly arouses such anxiety. Early in last year the Paracels, a group of inhospitable islets south-east of Hainan and a third of the way across from French Indo-China to the Philippines, were understood to be the subject of Japanese strategic designs ; so France sent a body of Annainese police to take possession, with a view to establishing a seaplane base there as a precaution against attack on Indo-China. St)on afterwards Franco and Britain, perturbed about the Japanese thrust southward, jointly requested Japan to refrain from occupying Hainan Island, on the ground that such a step would endanger the security of their respective possessions at Kwang-chow-wan and Hongkong; the Portuguese coastal town of Macao would also have been threatened. Japan thereupon protested innocence of any design on Hainan Island. Whatever may have induced Japan to act in contravention of that assurance, the official announcement of the landing must be interpreted as a deliberate disregard of the French and British request. Neither of these Powers, nor Portugal, can bo unconcerned, for a base of Japanese operations in this region may at any moment be turned, by a decision in Tokio, into a grave menace of - their possessions in the Orient,.