Correspondence
LA LETTER FROM MANCHURIA.] I. To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,--I am writing on October 21st from Shanghai. Almost exactly a month has elapsed since Japan's military occupation of Manchuria precipitated a Far Eastern crisis ; nobody can say how many days are still to run before news, good or bad, comes from Geneva to shape in men's minds the outcome of a situation the local implications of which have for the past four weeks remained virtually—though at times pre- cariously—unchanged. Anything may, much must, have happened by the time these words appear in print. Their concern is accordingly less with prophecy than with per- spective ; I write in the hope that impressions formed in the course of a jo,trney through Manchuria shortly after its occupation, and by contact with Chinese and foreign opinion in Peking and Shanghai, will help the reader to interpret whatever developments occur while this article is on its way to London.
Stated in their most simple terms, the determining factors in the Manchurian problem are these : After her war with Russia Japan found herself virtually mistress of a large, rich, thinly populated country, in which, however, her rights were very loosely and vaguely defined. She invested a great deal of money in its exploitation, and undoubtedly made good use of her investments. She had what amounted economically to carte blanche. There were no other competitors in the same field.
A pie so rich in plums was naturally attractive to Chinese fingers. Migration, spontaneous and lacking any sort of co-ordination and direction, began from . the surrounding provinces, which suffered in varying degrees from the residential disadvantages of overcrowding and insecurity. It was not long before twenty-five million Chinese were living in the territory which Japan had been at pains and expense to develop. Japan had nothing to lose from the presence of a large, but not uncomfortably large, agrarian population, mostly of a sturdy racial type. But it was unhappily inevitable that a proportion of the newcomers should be engaged in at once the most lucrative and the least productive of China's subsidiary industries—civil administration. Manchuria was governed very badly indeed. Taxes were heavy, bandits plentiful. Justice, security and efficiency were commodities which the local officials were seldom qualified, and hardly ever minded, to supply. In course of time this maladministra- tion acquired an increasingly anti-Japanese bias. The element of tension in relations traditionally strained was increased by behaviour on the part of the Chinese which had too often the appearance, and too seldom the excuse, of irresponsibility.
The dissemination of anti-Japanese sentiment was a passion and a pastime. Japan's railway, mining, and other economic interests were carried on under galling and in some cases almost paralysing handicaps.
The result of all this was only a question of time. A long series of incidents—of which it was plain that the killing of Captain Nakamura last summer must be very nearly the last—culminated a month ago in the Japanese nulitary occupation of the Chinese cities at Mukden, Changchun, and other strategic points in the neighbourhood of the South Manchuria Railway. It is doubtful whether the circumstances surrounding the casus belli of September 18th can ever be satisfactorily investigated. Only three things" are certain about the alleged attempt by Chinese soldiers to blow up the permanent way of the South Manchurian Railway north of Mukden—first, that it looks " fishy " : second, that if it was faked, it was faked without the knowledge of those Japanese authorities who stood to profit most from any act of provocation, whether spontaneous or stage-managed : and third, that it is quite immaterial whether posterity includes the incident under Cause—China's attitude to Japan in Manchuria—or under Effect—Japan's response to that attitude.
China's sins in Manchuria have been the long slow sins of maladministration spread over a period of years. Japan's have been the sins of resistance, rising to active aggression during the last month. It is possible only to guess at the extent to which her military authorities have been taking the law into their own hands, first in carrying out, with quiet and on the whole fairly considerate efficiency, the occupation, and secondly in refusing, in the vivid phrase of a Japanese- editor writing in English, to " withdraw the mailed thumb." Though it is still doubtful whether her troops in Manchuria have at any time exceeded the number stipulated by treaty, they have committed at least two serious and—to an observer impressed by the air of sweet reasonableness which charac- terized her control of Mukden—rather unaccountable acts of indiscretion.
The bullets from a military aeroplane which raked a crowded refugee train on the Peking-Mukden Railway, and the bombs dropped on the seat of the provisional Manchurian Government at Chinchow—these things contrast unfavourably with the notable self-restraint which China has shown. It has broken down only once, and then most unluckily, when a Japanese family were killed in the outskirts of Hong-kong. Otherwise, though feeling everywhere runs dangerously high and is fostered by posters and propaganda, reprisals against Japanese nationals have not been allowed to- jeopardize the technical correctness of China's attitude. But the economic boycott has been enforced with a comprehensive stringency which lifts it out of its normal plane of casual racketeering. It is a weapon the continued use of which Japan cannot afford to provoke for long.
That, roughly, is the elementary outline of a situation the main interest of which to the Western world has been its repercussions at Geneva. That it will produce a Sino- Japanese war is now extremely unlikely, though it must be remembered that a war, which would necessarily be short, sharp, and popular as far as China was concerned, might in the last resort commend itself to the Government at Nanking. since the terms of whatever- peace concluded it, though they might be temporarily more humiliating, could in the future be more colourably protested against and revised than those arrived at by direct negotiation with Japan while she so obviously holds the whiphand. But any forecast of war would postulate an admission of failure on the part of the League.
Both sides acknowledge to themselves—and I have been lucky enough to hear them acknowledge, in private, to each other—that, if there are six faults on one side, there are half a dozen on the other. Enlightened Chinese know that the behaviour of their officials in Manchuria has been consistently
unwise and frequently inexcusable. No sensible Japanese.
supposes for a moment that his country wants to " acquire " Manchuria in the territorial sense ; he knows that Japan's tenure of Korea results in an annual financial loss, and that for many years to come Manchuria would cost far more to govern than it would be worth, apart from the odium a' • to its annexation. There is a settlement within easy reachwhich would suit both sides, if they will only, in a simultaneous access of sanity, admit that it suits them. Under a Chinese Government of guaranteed adequacy and with railways
operating under some scheme in which the element of unification would be sufficiently well established to ensure that
they served the purposes both of the people who used them and the people who invested in them, Manchuria need no longer be a bone of contention. By the time this article appears
in print it seems more than possible, judging by the latest news from Geneva, that the captains and the kings and the rumours of war will have been replaced in Manchuria by the more prosaic figures, the less ominous bickerings, of experts
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