JAPANESE PLANS

Evening Star, Issue 22880, 11 February 1938, Page 12

JAPANESE PLANS

CHINA DEVELOPMENT ANGLO-AMERICAN POSITION INFLUENCE OF PEACE One of the largest reconstruction programmes ever undertaken anywhere in the world is planned by Japan tor the exploitation of China as soon as peace is established there, it is learned authoritatively, says a writer in the ‘ Christian Science Monitor.’ It includes political stabilisation and sweeping industrial development. The industrial programme is aiflied at making China pay for her own rehabilitation, political and economic, since Japan is not financially able to hear so vast a burden costing many billions of yen. The undertaking is divided into two phases, both completely correlated and dndivisibly linked for simultaneous furtherance. The only fly in the ointment is where the money will come from to start. There are conceivably only two places in the ‘world to-day where it could be obtained.—the United States and Great Britain—and popular sentiment strongly influencing the Governments of both nations is admitted even by authorised Japanese spokesmen to be hostile to extending any helpful hand to Nippon in her conquest of the Chinese Republic. One of the foremost international bankers in the world told the writer that no foreign loan could_ be floated either in this country or in England without the approval of Washington and Downing Street. It was made clear that Japan must do more than force China to sign a peace treaty, Tokio will have to make that treaty satisfactory to the British Government and the Roosevelt Administration. In the vernacular of the day, the Japanese “ cannot have their cake and eat it. too.” . POLITICAL PLANS. The political programme which Japan will follow in China will, it was said in quarters known to be informed, provide, first, for the setting up of a friendly Government in Peking and thereafter an equally friendly Government in each of the 21 provinces of China proper, and, second, to mobilise under these provincial overlords native forces which would enable them to keep the peace in the territory assigned to_ them to govern. The central power in Peking would be upheld by a similar force, augmented by Japanese military units. The reasons for this, it was explained, also are twofold; first, the recognised impossibi'ity of Japan policing so great a territory as China, and, secondly, because of the expense involved in maintaining large Japanese armies there. Here again the Japanese Government comes face to face with bankruptcy if it places reliance exclusively on its army and navy to carry out its China programme. It must have other help, and sees no _ more logical source-place than China itself. The almost hereditary rivalries among the Chinese and the peculiar psychology of the Chinese fighting man, with his impassivity either as endurer or inflictor of suffering, make for Japanese optimism regarding this aspect of the problem. ■ The industrial up-building programme appears naively simple for an enterprise so important that the success of the conquest hinges upon it. Failure would mean the doom of Japan in China, since out of the proposed development must come the wherewithal to maintain Japanese hold on the continent across tha Fellow Sea from the Island Empire. SOUTH OF PEKING. The first step following the peace is to develop industrially those regions of China most easily cultivated. These are not in the windswept north, but in the rich loess-covered reaches south of Peking, with the Yellow River region, now practically in Japanese control, a natural starting point. Here centre the fabulous Shanshi and Shantung provinces, leading to the ocean outlet of Esing-tao, which was wrested from the Germans by the Japanese navy during the World War and returned to China through the efforts of President Wilson and Wellington Koo at the Paris Peace Conference. Along this 2,700-mile artery the Japanese propose to start the economic development they envisage wifi eventually embrace all China and enable them to pay their way out of their costly conquest with vast riches left over from the resulting intensive exploitation of Chinese resources. The Yellow River plans, drawn by Japanese army engineers, call for nothing less than the harnessing of the great stream called China s Sorrow,” because of the devastation caused by its recurrent floods. The