The Charlotte News

Friday August 25, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Jap Threat" tells a story to be told in blood: "The matter deserves a swift decision. If we plan to get out of China, it had better be done at once. If we don't, then the fleet may as well begin to get up steam at Pearl Harbor."

Tension between China and Japan had by then nearly a half century of continuous history, made manifest initially in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 over control of Korea. Japan won the war and Korea was made an independent state as a result, with Japan granted Taiwan and the Pescadores, as well as manufacturing and trade rights in Chinese ports.

China had already suffered mightily at the hands of foreign interests and was weak as a result. Britain had already achieved rights at Shanghai and the cession to them of Hong Kong in the wake of the Opium War of 1839-42, in which British importation of opium to match exports of tea from China was sought to be stemmed by the Chinese government seizing British opium. Then the failure of the Boxer Rebellion, in which 140,000 Chinese nationalist rebels laid siege to Beijing in 1900 for the ultimate purpose of expelling foreigners and foreign interests from China, resulted in a heavy war reparation debt to China and the reduction of it to a subservient nation, primarily to the trading interests of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and Japan, the countries which put down the Rebellion.

Then, in 1914, Japan, after declaring war on Germany at the beginning of the World War invaded the German leasehold in China, Kiaochow in Shandong province, and after taking it over, presented to the Chinese Government a list of 21 demands, including the right to colonize exclusively Manchuria and Mongolia, the right to exploit all of China's coal deposits, as well as demanding Japanese control over China's military, commercial and financial resources. The latter demands for control were excepted at the insistence of the United States, but the other demands ultimately prevailed.

In 1919, at the end of the War, the Versailles Treaty gave the German interests in Shandong to Japan but the Chinese Government refused to sign the Treaty; eventually, after a nationalistic uprising in Beijing known as the May Fourth Movement, Japan relented and at the Washington Conference of 1921-22, agreed to restore full sovereignty of all Chinese territory to China. The Nine-Power Treaty signed at the Conference also guaranteed Chinese territorial integrity generally and the Open Door Policy, the policy of equal foreign access to Chinese trade among all nations as favored by Great Britain and the U.S. since the late nineteenth century.

During the 1920's, China devolved into a state of divisive conflict between rival warlords, ultimately out of which came both a Nationalist government, or Kuomintang, established at Nanjing by Chiang Kai-Shek, and a rival Communist government.

Taking advantage of this internally fractionated and weakened state, Japan used a purported act of sabotage on a Japanese railroad interest as a pretext to invade China's industrial heartland, Manchuria, on September 18, 1931, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo there in 1932.

In July, 1937, Japan attacked China proper by occupying Beijing and Tientsin (also known as Tianjin), beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War. Later that year, Shanghai and Nanjing fell as well. Both Tientsin and Shanghai implicated British, U.S., and French rights enjoyed there since the mid-nineteenth century.

The government of Chiang Kai-Shek removed inward and established a capital at Chongquing and depended on supplies from the western allies via the Burma Road starting in 1940.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the need for distribution of the Japanese military throughout the Pacific, the stress on China was diminished, especially as more aid was poured into it from Great Britain and the U.S. Nevertheless, the Japanese occupation continued throughout the war until Japan's surrender in China on September 9, 1945.

The power vacuum left in the regions formerly occupied by the Japanese, and their military and industrial equipment left behind, especially in Manchuria, seized and turned over by the occupying Russians to the Communist government of Mao Zedong after the war, ultimately enabled the Communists to first take over Manchuria in 1947 and then eventually Beijing and the remaining major cities in 1949; the Nationalists under Chiang, after losing all aid even from the U. S. in 1949, removed to Taiwan. Things have thus stood since.

The maps below, (formed from images of three maps contained in Global Atlas of the World at War, 1944, World Publishing, NY), show the status of China in 1944, the orange section on the top map, including that with diagional lines, (darkened areas on second map), being under the control of Japan, (including Korea, under full Japanese control since 1910). Note also the Burma Road, marked in blue, in the lower middle section of the top map, leading from the Burmese railhead at Lashio, near Mandalay, (to which supplies would come by rail from the port of Rangoon directly south of Mandalay), to the Nationalist capital of China, "Chungking", (Chongquing). The second and third maps show a more expansive view, including the entire western Pacific rim and Dutch East Indies. The third map has the Philippines inset in the left top corner.

(Click on the Map to Enlarge)

Hitler Has Left Himself And World Little Choice

As this is written, it appears that Adolf Hitler will reject Mr. Roosevelt's plea with the same nonsensical reply that he gave last September--that it was sent to the wrong address. However, no sensible person expected anything else and probably least of all the President himself. This was a message designed not so much to bring practical results as simply for the record.

The President speaks of reason but is perfectly well aware that Adolf Hitler and the German nation led by him cannot be reasoned with. But the blame for war is placed exactly where it belongs--on a leader who has turned both himself and his nation (which has done the same thing before) into mad dogs.

War seems almost inevitable. Hitler in his headlong course has got himself on a limb from which he cannot afford to retreat. That he knows now that England and France means to fight is quite likely. But he must go on pretending that he believes no such thing, and must sneer elaborately about his certainty that they will flinch before his terrible countenance at the last moment, in the faint hope that he may yet succeed in breaking their nerve. For that, and for the keeping of the fact from the German people until it is too late for anybody to think of retreating.

In the case books of the psychiatrists you can find many thousands of instances of the God-pose he is now striking, and invariably it represents a compensation for dreadful fear, and escape from the sense of walls closing in to frustrate the patient's dreams and to menace his safety. He grants "days of grace" after the manner of Jehovah on the throne of the universe. If he is denied, he is going to partition Poland resistlessly though he is well aware that when the issue is joined not all his will or all his words but only the weight of ultimate power can decide who is to be partitioned.

And he has good reason to be afraid. For if he cannot back down, neither can England and France. To do so would be to accept a defeat worse than had they lost the last war. Nor is compromise really feasible. Hitler's aims have been clearly revealed: he means to destroy Poland. And to compromise by giving him only Danzig now would be simply to defer a final settlement for a few weeks or months at best. For the possession of Danzig would enable him to choke Poland at will. And if he chokes Poland, his demands will grow insatiable.

If England and France do not now mean business, they will never mean it in this world. And that is fearful news for Lord Hitler, whatever he says.

"It may be, of course, that he will win the war. But one thing is reasonably certain. He won't win it by any lightning strokes. It is true enough that the odds are probably slightly in his favor if the thing begins. The French unquestionably have the far better army. It is ultimately more numerous, and it has not been trained by the whipping of helpless Jews. And the French and British have the overwhelming preponderance of sea power--so that both can keep fighting indefinitely. His superiority lies in two things--that he will be fighting on interior lines and that he has the best of it in mechanical equipment, especially in the air. In the latter, however, he no longer has any such great lead as he had at the time of Munich. When babies begin to be killed in London, they will begin to be killed in Berlin--a thing for which the German people are not prepared as the British are. And in the long pull, the British and the French will undoubtedly far out distance him in the air, if necessary, until life in Germany is no longer tenable save in caves under the earth.

It promises to be a long war he is making, and the most terrible ever dreamed by man. For the British and French having been driven to it, are unquestionably going into it with the grand determination that "they shall not do it again." If he wins, he can carve up not only Poland, but the British and French empire as well--maybe South America, if the United States is brought in. If he doesn't, then the price is the gallows for himself and all his gang and the extinction of Germany as a nation.

That is the prospect he has made for himself. And worst of it all from his standpoint is the fact that he goes into it hated as no man has been hated in modern times--hated by all the civilized world at least ten times as hard as the Kaiser was hated at the end of the last war.

This Places A Decision Pretty Squarely Up To Us

In the shadow the European crisis it has been dwarfed and almost unnoticed. But while trouble is brewing for England and France on the Continent it is also brewing for them at Shanghai. And for the United States as well.

The Japanese have landed 6,000 troops at the great Chinese port, allegedly for the purpose of occupying and taking over the International Settlement, which has existed since 1845 under extra-territorial rule and which is garrisoned by 5,000 British, French, and American troops. Plan is to stir up rice riots among the huge Chinese population of the city, and then to claim that the international police is unable to maintain order.

That will put our choice up to us much more squarely than has yet been the case, even in the Panay incident. Unless the most rigid orders are given the marines stationed in the settlement, they, like the French and British troops, are certain to resist any attempt to take the place with force. And that probably would mean their immediate destruction. And that in its turn means war as certainly as anything could mean it.

Indeed, about the only way to make sure that this doesn't happen would be to withdraw the marines first. And if we did that, we may as well prepare to abandon all American properties in China and to evacuate every American citizen. The loss of face involved would destroy all respect for American rights on the part of both Japs and Chinese.

The matter deserves a swift decision. If we plan to get out of China, it had better be done at once. If we don't, then the fleet may as well begin to get up steam at Pearl Harbor.

He's A Hired Hand With Very Positive Opinions

We had thought, without ever really thinking of it, that the duty of an executive officer of the Government was much like that of a well-trained policeman--to enforce the law as it was written without expressing publicly any opinion about it until asked for one.

Howard O. Hunter, acting Works Progress Commissioner in the absence of Commissioner Harrington, evidently has a different conception of his job. At any rate, he made a speech in which he said that the new laws governing WPA were to be blamed on "a reactionary coalition in Congress," and that the "brutal requirements" of this law had been dictated by "pressure from a small but highly organized group of industrialists."

He further contended that the new relief policy laid down by Congress was based on testimony before a House subcommittee which was "mainly unsubstantiated" and much of which was "completely untrue."

This is the first time we have encountered Mr. Hunter. We'll probably be hearing of him again, however.

The Printers Thumb Their Noses At Boss Green

Boss Bill Green, if he had been out to make the worst possible headache for himself, couldn't have gone better about it than by suspending the International Typographical Union for failure to pay an assessment that they had twice voted, in accordance with their constitution, not to pay.

Out at Fort Worth, the ITU boys are squabbling in convention. But the issue is not at all whether they shall or shall not pay that assessment, but merely whether they shall serve notice that they will stand, entirely aloof from AFL until it has been reconciled with CIO or shall merely tell AFL to go jump in the lake if it refuses to seat their delegates at the next convention.

What weapons Bill thinks he can use to make these printers reconsider is hard to understand. Their participation in the AFL never came to anything more than a gesture in favor of general labor unity. AFL needs them far more than they need AFL, as Bill Green would probably see if he can only stop hating John Lewis long enough to gather his wits about him once more.