THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1931. THE ISSUES IN MANCHURIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20991, 30 September 1931, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1931. THE ISSUES IN MANCHURIA.

To settle the trouble in Manchuria is no easy matter. The Council of the League, its general business finished, is remaining in session in order to assist in a settlement. At Shanghai it is being openly said that the League has failed at its first real crisis. That opinion is coloured bv local experiences and should not be idly echoed ; but it is part of the evidence that, while Geneva awaits an opportunity to interpose, the disputants are bent on deciding thcii own courses of action. Intervention in the Orient has never been .welcome there. Arbitration on Manch.urian quarrels has been offered on several occasions, only to be resented. At times, it is true, either .J-pan or China has suggested arbitration, with the unvarying result that the other disputant has pointblank refused to hear of it. Russia and Japan were equally opposed in 1929 to the application of the Pact of Paris to their quarrel over the Chinese Eastern Railway. A reasonable deduction from these things is that the issues at stake are too vital to the disputing parties to allow ol their being readily entrusted to others foi a decisive and binding judgment. At the moment, tlieie is confirmation of this view in the reported attitudes of all three concerned : in China, despite the declared official wish for peace, the people everywhere are demanding war to eject the Japanese from Manchuria ; the Japanese, although their delegate at Geneva says his country has no intention of making an attack on China, are not giving way an inch ; the Soviet Government, while making no overt entry to the quarrel, keeps its gunboats manoeuvring in close touch with the scene of it and its troop:? ready to entrain for action.

To China, these Three Eastern Provinces are valuable. From this region of old there came the garrisons of the capital. To it have gone an increasing number of Chinese, until they form the bulk of the population, outnumbering far the earlier non-Chinese inhabitants. Manchurian agriculture, an enterprise of rapid and persistent development, is really Chinese agriculture, and for years this preponderating population has played a large part in local industry and trade. Manchuria, politically owned by China, is a national pride and treasure. Supremacy of title will not be relinquished without a struggle. Japan, however, is there by right of bi-lateral treaty, a fruit of victory in time past over China and Russia in succession, and this right has never been gainsaid by other Powers. The right has been buttressed by Japanese need, not so much now for a large outlet thither for a crowding people in the homeland, but for the supply of raw materials, fertilisers and food, and for a market of wares produced in. increasing quantity in that industrialised homeland. By virtue of this right, Japan has not hesitated to assert a claim to prevent the spread of long-standing civil war to this territory; and the South Manchurian Railway, the centre of the present trouble, has been openly employed—in terms of the concession to Japan for its construction—in Japanese administration. Indeed, the influence of Japan in Manchuria has served the development of the threfe provinces to a remarkable degree, in mining, finance, education, police and even charitable institutions, and there is on record convincing Chinese acknowledgment of this. This service to China and to Manchuria particularly has not been disinterested, but this does not destroy the value of the service. The third party to this crisis, Russia, has large economic interests, also resting on concessions. In the Chinese p]astern Railway, traversing the northern area, is the main item of these, as it provides a short cut for the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. Russian money has been expended on it, and the Soviet Government jealously maintains a dominant control. In addition to these three Powers, Great Britain and the United States have large commercial interests, which have contributed their quota to the development of Manchuria. Unquestioned rights, resting on negotiated treaties, are held by all the foreign Powers concerned, yet there has long been Chinese restiveness about the concessions. To Japan's reminder that China owes much to her for resistance to Russian encroachment, a resistance costing considerable sacrifice in Japanese money and lives, China has replied with a citation of her own suffering in the war waged on what was her own soil, and she has always set her part in Manchuria's progress against the admitted share of Japan. Such things, however, do not provide a profitable basis of discussion about the immediate future: nor does the citing of the terms of the respective treaties .settle the question as to whether particular actions go beyond the scope of a reasonable reading of the rights meant to be conveyed. At the Washington Conference, of ten years ago these treaties were the subject of appeal, and the conference could give only a non-committal judgment. Much has happened since, and the time is over-ripe for a re-examination of the issues. There is need for much more than an assuaging _ of national bitterness. To eliminate the causes of it is urgently necessary. A breaking point seems to have been reached, and the restoration of quiet will leave nothing really settled. No existing compact can suffice. Even the BriandKellogg Pact, to which all the parties are signatories, is inadequate, in vieAv of its easy allowance of movements of troops in defence and its lack of implementing machinery. Only a representative conference, under the jurisdiction of the League —if Russia and the United States could be induced to participate-—can clarify and resolve the conflicting issues.