JAPAN’S UNEASY COURSE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 December 1940, Page 4

JAPAN’S UNEASY COURSE.

JN deeds as well as in words, China under its National Government, headed by General Chiang Kai-shek, is demonstrating that the treaty Japan has just concluded with the puppet administration of Wang Chingwei—a treaty which purports to provide for a readjustment of SinoJapanese relations—is a particularly worthless scrap of paper. Besides denouncing Wang Ching-wei as a traitor and putting a price on his head, the Chungking Government has set its forces in motion and one of yesterday’s cablegrams announced that the Japanese offensive in North Hupeh and other areas had been smashed and that more than 12.658 Japanese had been killed “in a score of scattered sanguinary battles.” Whether the Chinese can hope for continued military success on this scale may be in doubt. Hitherto, in her invasion of China. Japan has almost always been able to win battles by concentrated action in limited areas, though sometimes her success has been won slowly and at great cost. The essential point is, however, that she is still far from having approached the military conquest of China, or an effective occupation and domination of the country. Instead Japan is faced, as she has been, by a military task which stretches out inimitably and imposes an ever more exhausting drain on her human and material resources. At the same time, her attempt, particularly in entering into a three-Power pact with Germany and Italy, to bluff the English-speaking nations into withdrawing support from China has broken down in complete failure. Both Britain and the United States have stated that they will continue to recognise General Chiang Kaishek's Government, and an announcement of further American loans to that Government followed closely on a statement by Admiral Nomura, the new Japanese Ambassador to the United States, that “a danger to peace in the Pacific was United States aid to Chungking.” Although anti-American agitation is reported today to be rising in Tokio, the Japanese Government presumably must by this time be alive to the fact that it made one false move when it entered into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy—obviously as a threat primarily to the United States—and another when it concluded its worse than meaningless treaty with Wang Ching-wei. Since the conclusion of the AxisJapan pact was announced, Washington correspondents have reported a stiffening of American policy towards Japan to a point where no further American retreat before Japanese aggression can be expected. So long as Japan persists in her policy of aggression, the situation will continue to hold serious dangers, but it must be hoped, as Mr Churchill observed in the House of Commons not long ago, “that all such dangers will be averted by a prudence and patience which Japan has often shown in the gravest situations.”