JAPAN AND CHINA

Evening Star, Issue 17543, 24 December 1920, Page 9

JAPAN AND CHINA

A NEW VIEW. Writing to New York ' Times,' John Foord discusses from a new aspect "Japanese acts in China. It has suited the anti-Japanese propagandiets {he_ says) to discuss fa terms of lurid rhetorical exaggeration the danger of the Japanese penetration of China, and Young _ China has not been at all averse to making the most of that peril. This is a case where a little historical perspective is quite essential to any sane treatment of the subject. To people who know something of the slow, inscrutable processes that go to the making of history in the Far East, there is a certain tragic pathos in the Japanese essays at absorption and assimilation in China. Hence also there is a grotesque absurdity in the idea of a Japanese envelopment of China. Much thj more probable event is the relegation of Japan to the position of the oyster which the star-fish envelops, shell and all, and digests at leisure. Much has been written about the investment of Japanese capital in China—the mortgaging to Japanese owners of Chinese mines, and the control by Japanese investors over tho material resources - of Manchuria. Bnt it belongs to the irony of fate that,, the most noticeable results, immediate and proximate, of the employment of Japanese money in China is to make a stronger, more progressive, and' less dependent China that cordially dislikes Japan. In supporting Marshal" Tuan and the AnfuAnhui clique, Japan backed the wrong horee. Bnt most of the money that these corrupt intriguers borrowed from Japan went into productive enterprises from which they expected to derive future profit. Nor was the equipment of the mjw industrial plants uniformly a source of advantage to the Japanese manufacturer. I have one notable case in mind in which money borrowed from Japan on the security of a locked-np aggregate of overissued notes of tho Bank of Communications—a security that none but a. Japanese banker would accept —was deposited in New York to pay for certain Wast furnaces' made in the United States.

Briefly, it is a Sisyphean task that confronts Japan in China. In the broad spaces of Manchuria, where raneherqs and' cowboys flourish, there is little or no place for the methods of the intensive culture of the Japanese farmer. In petty commerce the Chinaman is more than a match for the Japanese, in manual labor and hi most handicrafts he is easily superior. The transformation which the Jap-' anese have effected in the commercial quarter of Mukden is a very impressive testimony to their energy and enterprise. But it is energy and enterprise which, in the long run,. may operate to their own undoing, as the vast, formless mass of China develops spines, nerves, and central ganglia and becomes the greatest of the organised States of the world.