Nelson Earning Mail WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 1945 CHINA AND RUSSIA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 29 August 1945, Page 4

Nelson Earning Mail WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 1945 CHINA AND RUSSIA

IN the Far East, as in Europe, Russia’s eagerness to buttress her frontiers through bilateral agreement with her neighbours runs well ahead of any general territorial settlement by United Nations around the peace table. Applied to the Asiatic hinterland these methods do not raise sq many delicate issues as they do in Central Europe. For hundreds of miles the U.S.S.R. frontier abuts on the large state of Manchuria, which was Chinese outer territory until the Japanese aggression 0 f 1931, and for hundreds more miles it runs along the borders of Outer Mongolia and Sinkiang, two vast tracts of country of somewhat indefinable political status which act as buffers between Russia and China proper as she was prior to the Japanese occupation. It is therefore clear that any settlement in this part of Asia primarily concerned these two nations and what appears to be an equitable agreement has been embodied in a 30-year treaty of alliance between them. The terms do not suggest that Russia has been land-grabbing. One of the first concerns of both nations is to see that Japan does not again threaten either of them on the Asiatic mainland and to this end a pact of mutual aid in such an eventuality has been entered into. China is to have full sovereignty over Manchuria, and Russia, in her turn, gets much sought-after admittance to the warm-water harbour of Port Arthur, which she lost in the RussoJapanese war, and also to warmwater Dairen, which is to be a free port. Two trunk railways feeding these sea outlets are to be operated jointly so it would seem that the U.S.S.R. has been well content to obtain what she most desired: unfettered access to the Pacific. In the interior China will recognise the independence of Outer Mongolia if the people there show by a plebiscite that they want it while Russia reaffirms her intention not to interfere with China’s internal affairs in Sinkiang. Territorially the implications of such arrangements are in favour of China, with moderate Soviet requirements having been satisfied. Transcending these in importance, for the time being at any rate, are the political issues. In China now there is a deep cleavage, amounting almost to armed hostility, between the Communists and Chiang Kaishek’s Chungking administration and the fear was that Russia might throw in her weight with the Communists and against Generalissimo Chiarig, who is strongly supported by the United States and Britain. This has not happened. In their negotiations with Mosofcw the Chinese nave evidently been very careful to clarify this point and have tied it closelv to the Soviet request for concessions in Manchuria. Russia, apparently, is more interested in trade outlets to the Pacific than with the clash of political creeds inside China. At any rate she has agreed that the dispute there is a domestic one in which she undertakes not to interfere. If this means what it says the Chungking regime, which has fallen into very low water, will receive a substantia! lift-up and, with*American support, may be able to muster sufficient strength to tide ovfer the present internal crisis and establish a stable all-China government. The treaty as a whole can be looked upon as a satisfactory settlement of outstanding issues between the two predominant nations in East Asia and should facilitate a solution of the still wider problems of the Far East.