WAR OF PARADOXES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 February 1939, Page 3

WAR OF PARADOXES

THE JAPANESE IN CHINA. EFFECT ON COMMUNISM. The Sino-Japanese conflict may well be called a war of paradoxes. In surprisingly many respects its realities have run counter to its slogans. The most stirring of these paradoxes, perhaps, is that, on Japan’s part it has been a war to win a friend, writes William Henry Chamberlain. Whenever a Japanese statesman or unofficial spokesman discusses war aims, a “friendly” or “sincere" attitude on the part of China ranks high among Japan’s professed objectives. The incongruity between the end which is professedly sought and the means which are being used to achieve it (widespread military invasion and air bombings, with all the attendant misery for the civilian population) does not seem to impress the Japanese mind. A second paradox lies in the fact that, while Japan's military leaders unquestionably believe that they are fighting Communism and undesirable Soviet influence in China, the net result of the first year of war has been to make Communism, or at least the Chinese Communists, more powerful and more respectable, while Japan has been weakened vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

The Japanese invasion has furnished much of the cement that has -thus far held the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists together, despite the mutual antagonisms and suspicions that can scarcely have evaporated altogether after a decade of very fierce civil strife. By shelving their social revolutionary programme for an indefinite period and taking an active part in the struggle against Japan, through the guerilla war which they have been carrying on in Shansi and Hopei provinces, the Chinese Communists have increased their chances of playing an important role in the Chinese State after the war.

In still another sense, the war has caused conditions in which Communism might be expected to flourish. Millions of people have been uprooted and driven from their homes by the ravages of war accompanied in some cases by devastating floods. Although the New Minister of Education, General Sadao Araki, adheres to the idea that Japan is fighting the Soviet Union in China, the actual centre of gravity of the war has been swinging steadily farther away from Russia, to the Yangtse Valley and even farther south. Great bodies of Japanese troops flounder in the ooze and mud of the valleys of the Yellow and Yangtse Rivers. Japanese airplanes raid Canton and Hainan Island, at the other extremity of China from the Russian Border. The Japanese military effort is expanding itself in blows at objectives which are very far indeed removed from the region of Soviet special interests, Eastern Siberia and Outer Mongolia.

Incidentally, Soviet influence in China is almost inevitably strengthened, by a war which has forced China to look for military help, especially in airplanes, very largely from Russia. A final paradox is that, just when Japan has opened with the sword access for its goods to a territory inhabited by more than 100,000,000 Chinese, there is a positive effort to discourage the exportation of Japanese goods to China. The answer to this puzzle is that Japan is gasping, like a fish out of water, for currencies which can freely by used for the purchase of munitions and essential raw materials. Neither China nor Manchukuo can supply such currencies, so there is now a marked effort to divert the stream of Japanese exports away from these nearby Asiatic markets and toward countries whore the currencies possess international buying power. This is only one example of a larger paradox: that the more Japan swallows, in a military. sense, the more her capacity for economic digestion contracts, thanks to the sacrifices in capital and resources which must be made to carry on the war.