MANCHURIA & MONGOLIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 June 1928, Page 10

MANCHURIA & MONGOLIA

INCIDENTS AND EPISODES. It is said that political ideas and projects that once have obtained ahold on the imagination of statesmen and a place in the outlook of governments never die, but, like styles in people s clothing, they revive periodically. Time after time during the last thirty years the Manchuria-Mongolia question has been decently interred, or camouflaged, by international conventions and agreements. But it bobs up now and then, and demands attention. This is because, like the Balkan situation in Europe, it is a focus of a number of powerful racial and political forces The Balkans are the boiling pot of the meeting of Asia and Europe in the West Manchuria and Mongolia are the boiling pot of the contacts of Asia and Europe in the East. Whenever either of these pots comes to a boil there usually is war. -

The Manchuria-Mongolia pot is not boiling now, nor sizzling quite, but enough is stirring there to send some premonitory bubbles to the surface. Incidents and episodes which compose an international political question often are hard to calculate when taken separately, and they ought to be considered by what they connote. An anonymous lint well informed political writer in the Far East remarked in a. recent article: “When Baron Tanaka got control of the Japanese Government one of his first steps was to send commissioners to Germany and Russia. Thus Air Kuhara, a business magnate, went to Berlin, and Viscount Goto, who more than any other man persuaded the Government to recognise the Soviet regime, went to Moscow. Air Kuhara has now returned, with what results one is unable to say; but Viscount Goto is still in Russia, where, from the latest accounts, 'he is inspecting prisons and educational systems.’ It is safe to say, however, that Viscount Goto has no more been sent to Russia to inspect prisons and educational institutions than Air Kuhara was sent to Berlin to ‘improve German-Japanese commercial relations.’ As one Japanese friend told the writer, the Japanese militarists are fond of entangling alliances. . For history is repeating itself. - ’

Since that article appeared Viscount Goto has returned to Japan, where he gave out interviews painting conditions m Russia in bright colours. Political writers in the Japanese Press assume confidently that a new “understanding” between Japan and Russia has been reached, and that it has to do with the familiar triangle of Manclhuria, Mongolia and China, with, perhaps, an eye askance toward India and the Near East. Germany figures in an obscure way in these prognostications.

BEHIND THE SCREEN.

At about the time when Viscount Goto and Air Kuhara went on their missions to Europe an article was written by the editor of “The Far Eastern Review,’’ Air George Bronson Rea, who has been in the United States for some time and still is there, that was published lately in that magazine in Shanghai. Since 1919 “The Far Eastern Review - ’ lhas been regarded in this part of the world as an organ of the Tokio Foreign Office, which serves on occasion to put out propaganda behind the screen of its nominally American character and which the Japanese Government is prepai-ed to repudiate officially. Air Rea opportunely revived the old hypothesis, which was formally abandoned at the Washington Conference, of Japan's special position and rights in Alandhuria, and he makes the plea that Manchuria really belongs to the Alanchu Emperors, and if the living Emperor (who resides in the Japanese concession at Tientsin and is understood to be under Japanese protection) should resume his matrimony it will be in order for the Japanese Government to support that position. Air Rea wrote

“If the Chinese persist in raising the issue of Japan’s right in Alanchuria the Japanese are justified in supporting the Alanchus in establishing a government in Manchuria and declaring its independence of Pekin, following whidh Japan would enter into an alliance with the new state in accordance with which Japan would become the protector of Alanchuria.” History does, indeed, repeat itself in the minds of some political writers. One remembers how in 1904 Japan went to war against Russia, as her declaration of war said, to maintain the political independece of Korea, and then made “an alliance’’ with the Emperor of Korea, later declared a protectorate, and still later annexed the country. The old Emperor of Korea, after Japan’s occupation there, lived and died in what actually was strict confinement, and the Crown Prince of Korea was married to a Japanese princess and merged with lihe Japanese court The connotation is plain. And now, following these sequences, the remarkably able Air Borodin, so report has it, is being sent to Urga, and intimations come down from the Mongolian plains about a reorganisation of “outer Alongolia” into a state after the Soviet model. Why should anyone who has outgrown. political adolescence wonder, then, that a hullabaloo is raised when there is talk of American bankers, with the acquiescence of the State .Department, lending money to the South Alanchurian railway, a Japanese qua si-government corporation, to improve its present lines and equipment and to build a network of “feeder” lines Wlhat would be said and done by European chancelleries if those American bankers proposed to finance, under Russian or German auspices, the construction of strategically useful railways in the Balkan countries?

In Alongolia and Alanchuria we see now signs of the survival, or the revival, of the “buffer state” political and military idea, which for so long ami so dangerously influenced the polity of Europe.