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The Fight for the Republic in China. B. L. Putnam Weale
Читать онлайн.Название The Fight for the Republic in China
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isbn 4064066196042
Автор произведения B. L. Putnam Weale
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
Article 4. China shall purchase from Japan a fixed amount of munitions of war (say 50% or more) of what is needed by the Chinese Government or that there shall be established in China a Sino-Japanese jointly worked arsenal. Japanese technical experts are to be employed and Japanese material to be purchased.
Article 5. China agrees to grant to Japan the right of constructing a railway connecting Wuchang with Kiukiang and Nanchang, another line between Nanchang and Hanchow, and another between Nanchang and Chaochou.
Article 6. If China needs foreign capital to work mines, build railways and construct harbour-works (including dock-yards) in the Provinces of Fukien, Japan shall be first consulted.
Article 7. China agrees that Japanese subjects shall have the right of missionary propaganda in China.[13]
The five groups into which the Japanese divided their demands possess a remarkable interest not because of their sequence, or the style of their phraseology, but because every word reveals a peculiar and very illuminating chemistry of the soul. To study the original Chinese text is to pass as it were into the secret recesses of the Japanese brain, and to find in that darkened chamber a whole world of things which advertise ambitions mixed with limitations, hesitations overwhelmed by audacities, greatnesses succumbing to littlenesses, and vanities having the appearance of velleities. Given an intimate knowledge of Far Eastern politics and Far Eastern languages, only a few minutes are required to re-write the demands in the sequence in which they were originally conceived as well as to trace the natural history of their genesis. Unfortunately a great deal is lost in their official translation, and the menace revealed in the Chinese original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup destined to become classic in the new text-books of political science. All the way through the twenty-one articles it is easy to see the desire for action, the love of accomplished facts, struggling with the necessity to observe the conventions of a stereotyped diplomacy and often overwhelming those conventions. As the thoughts thicken and the plot develops, the effort to mask the real intention lying behind every word plainly breaks down, and a growing exultation rings louder and louder as if the coveted Chinese prize were already firmly grasped. One sees as it were the Japanese nation, released from bondage imposed by the Treaties which have been binding on all nations since 1860, swarming madly through the breached walls of ancient Cathay and disputing hotly the spoils of age-old domains.
Group I, which deals with the fruits of victory in Shantung, has little to detain us since events which have just unrolled there have already told the story of those demands. In Shantung we have a simple and easily-understood repeated performance of the history of 1905 and the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. Placed at the very head of the list of demands, though its legitimate position should be after Manchuria, obviously the purpose of Group I is conspicuously to call attention to the fact that Japan had been at war with Germany, and is still at war with her. This flourish of trumpets, after the battle is over, however, scarcely serves to disguise that the fate of Shantung, following so hard on the heels of the Russian débâcle in Manchuria, is the great moral which Western peoples are called upon to note. Japan, determined as she has repeatedly announced to preserve the peace of the Orient by any means she deems necessary, has found the one and only formula that is satisfactory—that of methodically annexing everything worth fighting about.
So far so good. The insertion of a special preamble to Group II, which covers not only South Manchuria but Eastern Inner Mongolia as well, is an ingenious piece of work since it shows that the hot mood of conquest suitable for Shantung must be exchanged for a certain judicial detachment. The preamble undoubtedly betrays the guiding hand of Viscount Kato, the then astute Minister of Foreign Affairs, who saturated in the great series of international undertakings made by Japan since the first Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, clearly believes that the stately Elizabethan manner which still characterizes British official phrasing is an admirable method to be here employed. The preamble is quite English; it is so English that one is almost lulled into believing that one's previous reasoning has been at fault and that Japan is only demanding what she is entitled to. Yet study Group II closely and subtleties gradually emerge. By boldly and categorically placing Eastern Inner Mongolia on precisely the same footing as Southern Manchuria—though they have nothing in common—the assumption is made that the collapse in 1908 of the great Anglo-American scheme to run a neutral railway up the flank of Southern Manchuria to Northern Manchuria (the once celebrated Chinchow-Aigun scheme), coupled with general agreement with Russia which was then arrived at, now impose upon China the necessity of publicly resigning herself to a Japanese overlordship of that region. In other words, the preamble of Group II lays down that Eastern Inner Mongolia has become part and parcel of the Manchurian Question because Japan has found a parallel for what she is doing in the acts of European Powers.
These things, however, need not detain us. Not that Manchuria or the adjoining Mongolian plain is not important; not that the threads of destiny are not woven thickly there. For it is certain that the vast region immediately beyond the Great Wall of China is the Flanders of the Far East—and that the next inevitable war which will destroy China or make her something of a nation must be fought on that soil just as two other wars have been fought there during the past twenty years. But this does not belong to contemporary politics; it is possibly an affair of the Chinese army of 1925 or 1935. Some day China will fight for Manchuria if it is impossible to recover it in any other way—nobody need doubt that. For Manchuria is absolutely Chinese—people must remember. No matter how far the town-dwelling Japanese may invade the country during the next two or three decades, no matter what large alien garrisons may be planted there, the Chinese must and will remain the dominant racial element, since their population which already numbers twenty-five millions is growing at the rate of half a million a year, and in a few decades will equal the population of a first-class European Power.
When we reach Group III we touch matters that are not only immediately vital but quite new in their type of audacity and which every one can to-day understand since they are politico-industrial. Group III, as it stands in the original text, is simply the plan for the conquest of the mineral wealth of the Yangtsze Valley which mainly centres round Hankow because the vast alluvial plains of the lower reaches of this greatest of rivers were once the floor of the Yellow Sea, the upper provinces of Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi being the region of prehistoric forests clothing the coasts, which once looked down upon the slowly-receding waste of waters, and which to-day contain all the coal and iron. Hitherto every one has always believed that the Yangtsze Valley was par excellence the British sphere in China; and every one has always thought that that belief was enough. It is true that political students, going carefully over all published documents, have ended their search by declaring that the matter certainly required further elucidation. To be precise, this so-called British sphere is not an enclave at all in the proper sense; indeed it can only seem one to those who still believe that it is still possible to pre-empt provinces by ministerial declarations. The Japanese have been the first to dare to say that the preconceived general belief was stupid. They know, of course, that it was a British force which invaded the Yangtsze Valley seventy-five years ago, and forced the signature of the Treaty of Nanking which first opened China to the world's trade; but they are by no means impressed with the rights which that action has been held to confer, since the mineral resources of this region are priceless in their eyes and must somehow be won.
The study of twenty years of history proves this assumption to be correct. Ever since 1895, Japan has been driving wedges into the Yangtsze Valley of a peculiar kind to form the foundations for her sweeping claims of 1915. Thus after the war with China in 1894–95, she opened by her Treaty of Peace four ports in the Yangtsze Valley region, Soochow,