JAPAN'S ACTION IN CHINA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 3

JAPAN'S ACTION IN CHINA

POLICY DEFENDED. BY JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER. The following article, from the pen of the Japanese Prime Minister, Tsuyoohi Inukai, is part of his preface to a recent book,“Japan Speaks on the Sino-Japanese Question.” It is written in defence of Japan’s policy in Manchuria, and, more recently, at Shanghai. Few can be more genuinely sympathetic toward the Chinese Nationalists and their aspirations than I have been for more than 30 years. When Sun Yat-sen and his associates were exiles among us, hounded by Chinese emissaries and threatened with deportation by our Government, I shielded them. I had once myself been driven out of Tokyo by a reactionary Cabinet when I was in the van of the constitutional movement, and I at once took a friendly interest in these Chinese who sought my help. For a time Sun Yat-sen lived with me. My house was a secret meeting place for the revolutionists. Often they shared my food and clothes and even my meagre income. None could have been more jubilant than I was when the new republic sounded the knell of the Manchu dynasty.

Throughout all the political vicissitudes which followed the birth of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen did not forget me and continued to seek my counsel. When, in 1923, he invited a Soviet emissary to Canton I cautioned him, feeling that he was making a grave mistake in enlisting “Red" assistance. He did not heed me. The consequence is the China of to-day, rife with anti-foreignism, harassed by Communist risings, invo’vcd in foreign complications. Looking back over 30 years of my friendship with the Nationalists, nothing is so distressing to me as to see our nation forced to launch an armed intervention in their country. This intervention was not started by my Cabinet —it was started by its predecessor. I say this not in a partisan spirit, but because I believe that the hostilities could have been avoided if the party in power before us had taken a firmer stand against China’s treaty violation and her encroachment upon our vital interests before the situation became too serious to permit peaceful adjustment. This does not mean that I do not admire the extraordinary tolerance so long maintained by that party in dealing with China’s wilful disregard of accepted principles of international amity. But the regrettable fact is that when that policy of toleration has merely invited Chinese contempt of us and has inevitably dragged us into the present deplorable situation, the world remembers little, or has never known anything, about our long years of silent efforts for remaining on friendly terms with China, but hears only the guns roaring on the plains of Manchuria and on the banks of the Whangpoo River. Surely this could have been forestalled had our diplomacy dealt with China in such a way as would inspire respect, not contempt, for

When the Powers met in conference at Washington 10 years ago none of them entertained the slightest idea of absolving China of the moral and legal obligations usually observed by all civilised nations in their intercourse with one another. The covenant then adopted was. not meant to concede to China unbridled liberty to violate treaties, incite the masses against the foreigners through officially compiled school books and officially subsidised associations. What the treaty meant was to give China an opportunity to put her house in order without foreig'n interference. If the Powers did not wish to embarrass China in her period of domestic reform neither did they wish to be embarrassed by China in the peaceful economic pursuits of their nationals within their borders. The Washington treaty was a covenant of mutual forbearance. If the Powers obligated themselves to keep their hands off China’s internal affairs, China on her part pledged herself to respect foreign lives and rights. That was taken for granted. China could have undertaken the task of internal rehabilitation, if she only had the will, without disturbing the foreigners and foreign rights. To attribute all her domestic troubles to “alien imperialism” is neither truthful nor manly. Only by admitting her own shortcomings and inabilities and by making honest efforts to remedy them can she become an ordered and efficient nation and thus win the respect of her neighbours. When Sun Yat-sen lived with me I told him that the only sensible way China should follow was the way pursued by Japan; for Japan, too, passed through a long period when she had her foreign settlements, her unilateral tariff conventions, her extraterritoriality. How did we rid ourselves of this imperium in imperio? Not by inciting anti-foreign violence but by following a friendly policy towards the Powers. We did not exploit foreign “aggression” to conceal our own failings. We frankly admitted the superiority of hte i Western civilisation which had im-

posed alien jurisdiction upon us and made supreme endeavours to assimilate what seemed to best in it. It is a matter of profund regret that our intervention in Manchuria and Shanghai has caused so much concern among the Powers with which we wish to be on the best of terms. No nation can be more glad than Japan herself when the regrettable situation is brought to an end. The intervention was not of our own seeking; we were forced to a position where we had no other course. We shall bend all our efforts to bring about its speedy conclusion. The Shanghai affair was unexpected and accidental; it is not an extension or continuation of the Manchurian intervention. Meanwhile the world may rest assured that we seek no special privileges either at Shanghai or in Manchuria. Since the beginning of the intervention we have concluded no new treaties, nor have we secured any new concession. All that we seek is the enforcement of the old agreements, which have wilfully been disregarded either by the Nationalists or by the old Manchurian regime, or by both. If we prove ourselves instrumental, even to a small extent, in the birth of a new Manchuria where militarist exploitation of the innocent toilers shall cease, where organised banditry shall no longer murder and pillage, where nationals of all countries may work and trade under the established principles of the open door and equal opportunity, then future historians, far removed from the excitement of the moment, will, I am sure, judge us more kindly than is at present possible. With this firm conviction we face the whole world, unhesitatingly, unregretting, confident of the ultimate vindication of our cause.

Japan is not imperialistic. She is not actuated by land lust. She has not deliberately embarked upon a course of aggression. All that the Japanese desire in Manchuria is to live and toil peacefully and harmoniously with other peoples. Only when that privilege, to which we are fully entitled by treaty and by the great sacrifice we had made for Chnia, was persistently denied us through 30 years’ deliberate policy of obstruction and exclusion did we resort to an armed intervention which seemed the only means to cut the Gordian knot. This, I am sure, will be appreciated when the world can look at the stirring events of these days through the perspective of history.