BRITAIN’S INTEREST

Evening Star, Issue 21381, 7 April 1933, Page 12

BRITAIN’S INTEREST

MANCHURIA MENACE ** IN TRUTH, MOT MUCH" SHADOW OF THE BEAR Manchuria or Manchukuo—what is either to Great Britain? In truth, not much. The controversy is not worth the bones, as it used to be said, of a single British Grenadier (declares J. B. Firth, in the London ‘ Daily Telegraph’). Nor is it worth while, he adds, incurring over Manchuria the deep resentment of the greatest Power in the Far East. Conciliation, has failed at Geneva as in the circumstances it was bound to fail. It was foredoomed, probably, in any case. But the intemperate zeal of the Small States made failure certain. and aggravated the difficulties of reaching a diplomatic conclusion which should not look too bad for the League. ' Whatever report may be drawn up for presentation to the Assembly will be academic. It will not issue in strong action, for no Power means to act.

, Its presentation of the facts may be unimpeachable, like, in this respect, the masterly Lytton Report. But its practical suggestions, assuming that it makes any, are almost bound to be as remote . as . those of the same report from the practical politics of the Far East. Manchuria will remain Maiichukub. The shaping hand is Japan’s, not the League’s. So it will be as long as the military chiefs are firm in the saddle at Tokio.

The real result of more than a year’s protracted parleys at Geneva has been to demonstrate that in certain circumstances the Covenant of the League will not work, and if worked would produce a catastrophe. Tb© Japanese armies now hold the Manchurian provinces'of China. They are clearing and cleaning them of the “bandit” forces which are a curse imposed by the incompetence of the Chinese Government. All the indications show that Manchukuo, the new puppet, protected State, is to be rounded off by the inclusion of Jehol, which will provide it with a secure frontier on the west. PERILOUS CRUSADE. Unless Japan meets with totally unlooked for military reverses or an economic crash at home ensues, the immediate destiny of Manchukuo is assured. Its future destiny is quite beyond human scrutiny. The one thing certain is that Japan has launched upon a tremendous undertaking, which will tax , her strength and her statesmanship to the uttermost. For, sooner or later, the Red challenge will come. That, however, is for the future. For the present Japan has sharply recalled the nations to actualities. She has interrupted a dream,"and perturbated a paradise, Whether that, is a crime or a service to humanity is matter for debate. People are saying that the guilt will lie heavy on the great Powers —and, of course, on Great Britain in particular—if they tolerate such an act of “aggression” and do not make a combined stand for the principles of the League. They talk folly. There is not a Power which dare embark on such a perilous crusade, but would lose its -popularity overnight at the first call for either money or men. The attitude of the United States is typical. No Power dislikes and distrusts the recent course of events in the Far East more than America. But all that President Hoover’s solemn Note threatened a few months ago was “ non-recognition ” I There was a time when the highest ecclesiastical authority would not “ recognise ” that the earth was round. But the earth went on spinning, with or without recognition, just the same. The nations which have been shouting most loudly for . the condemnation of Japan are those which have the smallest interests in the Far East, and are as little directly concerned in the future of Manchuria as in that of Nova Zembla. They may believe that they are vindicating the austere virtue of the Covenant. They are really proving that the Covenant cannot function when a virile Power obeys the imperious urge of its destiny, and is in contact with a neighbour, corrupt, incompetent, arrogant, and, so far as she dares, provocative JAPAN’S EXPANSION. Mr Henry Ford has said in his haste that “ history is all bunk.” He is wrong. What has happened before is happening again now. The Covenant has changed the hearts of the nations little, if at all. Ambition and earth hunger remain, and the irresistible forces which impel Japan towards expansion follow steadily the line of least resistance. What provision has the Covenant of the League mad© for a country in the situation of Japan, confined in her home islands to narrow and exiguous limits, with a population growing as fast as that of Great Britain in tbe first half of the nineteenth century, and compelled to a feverish industrial development in order to feed hungry mouths as well as to acquire the wealth which is the common ambition of all peoples, and can only be acquired in her case by foreign markets? The bald fact is that no provision is made for a proletarian nation like Japan to expand in a ]x?aceful and orderly way. _ Yet the more 'nteniperate champions of the League insist on judging her present conduct by narrow juridical considerations, though the Lytton Report itself strongly insisted that the background of the struggle could not be ignored. FAILURE OF CHINA, 1 suppose no one seriously believes that China, as she is to-day, could hold and administer decently the Manchurian Provinces north of the Great Wall. She failed to do so when she had the field all to herself. Nor did she so much as try. ~ _ To wait for Chinese recovery is like waiting for the next millennium but one. The Nanking Government cannot establish order even in the provinces of China proper. China clamours for the protection of the League and will not even pay her League subscription. China’s representatives at international conferences assure the assembled delegates that the Chinese Constitution is based upon the most up-to-date democratic principles. It may be, hut it is not worked on those principles. The facade is lit up like a cinema de luxe. Inside is an antheap of many inherited virtues and vices, but of arrested intelligence. The Lytton Report, after outlining proposals for a new regime in Manchuria, which should leave the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China untouched and yet rescue the administration from the dead or palsied hand of the Chinese Government, declared emphatically that the conditions necessary, for such , a regime conld not be realised until there was a strong

central Government in China proper. Further, the Report insisted that no such strong central Government was possible unless China invited the temporary co-operation of . the Powers for its creation.

Far too little attention has been directed to these remarkable conditions, though expressly underlined as vital to their proposals by the , commissioners themselves. They are the crucial conditions of the whole scheme, without which the suggested Lytton regime for Manchuria is just a house of gilt-edged cards to bo built on a table more slippery than glass. - The Nanking Government would give same welcome to an offer, of temporary co-operation by the Powers as the Sick Man of Europe used to give to the European concert when they pressed their good offices upon him and set up all sorts _of semi and quasiindependent provinces and principalities in his equally misgoverned dominions. China does not want to be reformed by outside help. Her nationalist temper, which finds furious expression in economic boycotts which reduce to helplessness the foreign Powers whose only object is trade, stops far short of any determination to reform her internal administration. The problem of Manchuria cannot wait for China’s awakening.. It is not only Japan which covets its economic and political control, but Russia. Only to recognise two contestants, China and Japan, in this field is to ignore the dark shadow of the Bear, now too engrossed in its desperate economic adventures at home, thousands of miles away, to risk thrusting out a clutching paw so far. SOVIET SHADOWS. But the idea that Soviet Russia has forgotten about the Manchurian plains, j where the Imperial diplomacy, hacked i by masses of troops, won such easy l conquests before encountering a catas- j trophic defeat, is a delusion. Thci U.S.S.R. have not accepted permanent defeat in Manchuria or permanent loss of control over the railway through Tsitsihar and Harbin to Vladivostock. That is the real background to this Manchurian controversy and to Japan’s “ aggressive ” policy. . Her military chiefs saw their chance and took it. Japan has already fought two wars for her footing on the mainland. She has again marched into her Low Countries in anticipation of a possible third, near or distant, according as the development of Soviet militarism may determine.

Great Britain has as little practical concern in the plains of Manchuria or the mountains of Jehol as in the mountains of the moon.