CHINA AND JAPAN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 99, 23 October 1935, Page 17

CHINA AND JAPAN

TROUBLE IN MANCHURIA

AN OBSERVER'S VIEW

A very interesting review of the Sino-Japanese situation was given, by Miss A. M. Moncrieff to members' of the Rotary Club at their weekly luncheon yesterday. Miss Moncrieß has spent the last five or six years in China in connection with student work carried out by the Y.W.C.A. and has been a witness of recent events.

The present trouble, between China and Japan, she said, is but one chapter in a long history, with Manchuria as the bone of contention. Chinese interests in Manchuria have been rapidly increasing and at the same time Japanese have, and then there have also been Russian interests. Japan grabs, saki Miss Moncrieff, Russia protests; Japan gives back to China, and then grabs again. Japan had very definite treaty and economic interests in Manchuria, and when she struck she did so at a psychological-moment. China had been very much disappointed at the lack of action on the part of the League of Nations, and was at a severe disadvantage from a military point of view and from the point of view of foreign treaties. Russia was all the time willing to meet Japanese demands in the Par East, knowing how easily her maritime provinces could, be taken if Japan so desired.

Miss Moncrieff said that -when she visited Japan she was surpriseel to find that thepeople as a whole did not know what was going on in Manchuria: a strictly censored Press saw to that. . Japan, she 'was convinced, would go her own way in finding fresh markets and room for expansion. She was doing what other countries had done in the nineteenth century and did not really believe in the twentieth century progress. Japan, too, felt that she was doing a service to China in freeing her from the domination of the West, but China did not look at it in quite the same light. Japan, on the one hand, complained that there was no political unity in China, and on the other hand did all possible to destroy what little there was. In the meantime. China went patiently on: she had too much sense to think that such questions could be settled by fighting. "Neither Japan. nor the West will save China," concluded Miss Moncrieff. "She has got-to'save herself, but she needs time to adjust herself to the great chaages .that are going oh, but she does riot want the interference of the West; or of Japan'"