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Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 122, 19 November 1937, Page 9

railway if the trafßo is continued.

M. Henry Berenger, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French Senate, in a speech at the Conference dcs Ambasgadeurs, a private organisation of those interested in foreign affairs, recalled a demarche which the Japanese Ambassador made at the Quai d/Orsay at the beginning of the present war in the Far East, the purpose of which was to inform France that any intervention, even the sending of supplies to China across French Indo-China, might result in the occupation of Hainan Island and certain^ French Indo-Chinese ports.

Mr. Yotaro Sugimura, the Japanese Ambassador, denies M. Berenger's statements. Japan, he says, issued' an ultimatum to France concerning arms shipments to China by the Yunnan railway. "We are prepared," he said, "to occupy any part of China where arms might come through. If the French ever considered sending mass armaments to China through IndoChina we would cut their communications in Chinese territory."

The "New York .Times" published a report from Shanghai on October. 17 that China, continuing to prepare for long resistance, and battling against the strangling Japanese blockade, was seeking a new highway route for imports of arms and munitions necessary for war supplies. In South China the Government was rushing the construction of strategic highways linking important cities in Kwangtung and Kwangsi with points in French IndoChina and Burma, and it was suspected but not definitely known that highways of similar importance was.being rushed to completion on the far north-west border to bring imports from Soviet Russia. Henry Manx, League of Nations advisory expert on highways, was reported to be in Kwangsi. assisting in planning and building the south* western network. In addition, plans were being made jn Nanking for speeding the construction oil a branch line from Hengyang, on the Canton-Hankow Railway, to Kweilin, whence eventually an extension to Indo-China was planned. The first construction efforts were already under way from Hengyang, the laying of the rails keeping pace with roadbed construction. Anything capable of carrying trains was being used, and it was hoped to com|plete the 225-mile stretch to Kweilin next June.