JAPAN IN CHINA

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 15

JAPAN IN CHINA

Manchoukuo. By D. M. B. Collier and Ut.-Col. C. L’e Malone. Allen and Unwin. 267 pp. (12/6 net.)

The authors of “Manchoukuo” are concerned simply to put down their material as plainly as possible. As far as can be judged from internal evidence, the collaborators have rigidly divided matter and expression. One of the authors appears to have travelled in Manchuria; the other writes down what is related to him. The traveller has seen and remembered much, and although his generalisations on the new politics of the Far East are mostly conventional and sometimes naive, he knows enough of the country to give a convincing account of present-day conditions under Japanese rule. He has been in the shabby cosmopolitan cities and across a countryside infested with bandits. He knows how the poor live, and for those who have wondered what happened to the hordes of White Russians who fied across the border during the years of the red terror there are revelations of an almost incredible human hardship. Much of the information in this book is valuable and interesting, and it is a pity that it was not served up a little more attractively. Unfortunately the stay-at-home collaborator does not write well, and although this does not lessen the value of the data for students of the East, it gives the book a somewhat patchy effect which will not recommend it to the general reader. '