# The Truth about China and Japan/Chapter 2

II
THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST
The writer can lay claim to an intimate knowledge of the Far East and of everything that affects it. Almost his earliest memory of childhood is of a great crowd of many thousands of shouting men, stripped to the waist, and armed with bamboo carriers' poles, who had swarmed forward determined to destroy the house of his father because five square black characters on the door-plate proclaimed that it was the official residence of a commissioner—one responsible for the levying of taxes. The salt-tax had just been raised, to pay for the Tonkin war of 1884; and these men, coming on shore from the great fleet of salt-junks which were tied up along miles of the Yangtsze River, were trying to secure a remission by intimidation. Characteristically, they were threatening the wrong authority; but long experience had taught them that in a country of compromises violence of any sort is effective as a political argument, and that it ​is better to hit the wrong man rather than no man at all. . . . That was the curious Chinese question thrusting itself on his immature attention, a vast question in many ways, yet nevertheless inherently simple, since it is made up of the crudest economic problems, which have not changed throughout the ages.
Since those days of thirty-five years ago a good deal of water has flowed under the bridges and a good many changes have come. War, and war's alarms, were responsible a quarter-of-a-century ago for the handing-over of China to the international money-lender. With indebtedness came complications and irritations. The year 1900 was signalized by that big 'blow-out' called the Boxer rising; and the settlement which followed was still further complicated by the complete breakdown in 1905 of the fiction of Russian invincibility which had so obsessed the late Lord Salisbury and the present Lord Lansdowne that to it alone must be traced most of the disasters of our own hectic decade. The fabric of Far Eastern relations having been based on balance-of-power, which is only another name for a refusal to face the inevitable, the declension of Russia destroyed the patchwork scheme, and made one of two things certain—that either ​China must win her complete independence or be carved up.
In 1911 a valiant attempt was made on the part of Young China to secure the first alternative by erecting a republic. But, as the writer has sought to explain in a recent work, the attempt was not a great success mainly because the liberal Powers of the world, being every whit as short-sighted then as they have shown themselves in the case of Russia, did not love the Chinese Revolution—only tolerating the elimination of the Manchu autocracy because the bondholders' interest in the country was not directly affected. At the earliest possible opportunity they assisted reaction in the person of Yuan Shih-kai; subsidized him so that he might destroy all his rivals and the embryo of parliamentary government into the bargain; and then were mightily surprised that he should have aspired to a burlesque kingship which killed him and left the country pretty well wrecked.
The results of the republican experiment in China, so far as Europe was concerned, were thus counted quite negligible. It was said by professional diplomats, who probably know less about modern politics than any other body of men, and who have been badly frightened ​all the world over by the rise of popular power, that the Chinese were not fit for self-government, whatever they may mean; and so when President Li Yuan-hung assumed office in the summer of 1916 the Powers had nothing left in the way of a reconstructive plan excepting to induce China to enter the war, hoping that this act would tide things over, and serve to mask five years' discreditable diplomacy. On 14th August, 1917, China did declare war on the Teutonic Powers—being speeded to take that decision by Viscount Ishii's special mission to the United States, which it was feared had sinister objects. But the Chinese declaration was stripped of half its international significance because the country was once more at war with itself—North facing South, and each side declaring that the other was a rebel and seeking by force of arms to subdue it. And as this kind of provincial militarism has become just as much the enemy in China as Kaiserism has been in Europe, it is well carefully to consider it.
The modern army of China is the child of the collapse of 1900. It is true that prior to the Boxer explosion a few 'model' divisions had already been organized as a result of the disastrous Japanese war of 1894-95. There ​was, for instance, one division of Northern troops under a General Nieh which, although the fact has never been properly chronicled, fought with the utmost gallantry against the international armies around Tientsin, advancing against entrenched positions until it was almost entirely destroyed. There were also some well-trained troops at Nanking and Hankow, and above all there was Yuan Shih-kai's picked division in Shantung.
It was this division which was the germ of the modern Chinese army. When the fugitive Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi and the Emperor Kwang Hsu returned to Peking from far-off Hsianfu in 1902, and sanctioned Yuan Shih-kai's scheme for a National Army, events marched so rapidly—for Asia at least—that by 1905 Yuan Shih-kai as viceroy of the metropolitan province of Chihli and chief of the Army Board was able to hold army manœuvres in which 100,000 well-trained men participated.
At the time this created a great sensation: it was felt by all far-seeing men that Yuan Shih-kai was deliberately raising a force to take the place of the Eight Banners, or Manchu army-corps, which had been the means of effecting the Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century and whose organization— ​on paper—survived although the men were entirely worthless and unequipped. Japan, who had just beaten Russia in her Manchurian war, began to realize anew that China was not really a negligible quantity, and that given an army and navy of even moderate efficiency China could re-establish the Far Eastern situation which had existed prior to the Korean war of 1894. The writer believes that a portion of the astonishing diplomatic story which has been enacted in Peking in the period 1914-18 is due to this one fact—namely, the Japanese fear of a militant China.
Had the revolution of 1911 not created an interregnum, the modern Chinese army would have reached its full authorized establishment (thirty-six field divisions with a peace-footing of half-a-million men and a war-footing of something over a million) at about the time of the commencement of the World War. But the revolution broke up the reorganization scheme long before it was completed; mixed the old-style and the new troops; and by lowering the standard and introducing politics into the army destroyed unity and discipline.
What Gambetta found in clericalism republican China indeed soon discovered in her militarists. The army, reinforced by myriads ​of men who had managed to acquire firearms, was plainly the enemy; for the soldiers openly declared that they had made the revolution, and that without them the revolutionary leaders could not have lived an hour. This was unfortunately only half the truth and therefore as dangerous as all half-truths inherently are. For the revolution was as much the work of the foreigner as it was of the Chinese. The Manchus could never have been dethroned had their borrowing-power on foreign markets not been deliberately cancelled by the action of foreign diplomacy, which yielding to the clamour of publicists declared that the Western world would maintain strict neutrality until a decision was reached. Consequently, the army in spite of its boast was really dependent on an alien paymaster who could only be reached by a method which its leader and creator—Yuan Shih-kai—had brought to a fine art. This method was a mixture of bluff, promises to rival legations, and threats—above all, threats that if hard cash were not forthcoming all China would go up in flames. By finding the monthly quotas for the troops Yuan Shih-kai became supreme.
Only on the surface, however. For the army had become contumacious even before the ​Manchus had abdicated. Its Northern leaders, roughly grouped together under the name of the Peiyang Party—Anglice, the party of the Northern seas or, better, the Northern vice-royalties—had nearly all risen from humble captaincies in Yuan Shih-kai's original model corps (organized in 1896 after the Korean war) to divisional commands; and one and all they coveted the direct control of provinces. In other words, the revolution, having abolished the viceroys, who had ruled over single or linked provinces, and substituted the Tu-tuh (now Tu-chun) or military governor for each province, the aim of all these men was to rule at the provincial capitals where provincial taxation was centred and where money necessarily was to be found.
By the use of terrorist methods, which commenced in Peking on the memorable 29th February, 1912, when the capital was sacked by the Third Division, these divisional commanders soon became the most solid factors in the very fluid post-revolutionary China. Commander after commander received as reward for fealty to Yuan Shih-kai the gift of a provincial capital; and although a parliament or assembly of some kind has been in session in Peking most of the time, such real power as ​there has been since 1911 has been divided among these men.
Nevertheless, the idea of constitutionalism—and the necessity of civil rule being made supreme—has never perished. That idea is stronger to-day than it has ever been before—it is the goal all educated Chinese in their heart of hearts are determined to attain. And because civil rule as opposed to militarism is the proclaimed object of the South-Western group of revolting provinces with their capital at Canton, let us see precisely how the matter stands.
The struggle between North and South in China is very old. In one form or another it has gone on for eight hundred years—in fact ever since the Kitan and Chin Tartars burst through the Great Wall in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and commenced the Tartar military supremacy in North China which has so profoundly modified the old Chinese ritual of government. For although the Ming dynasty (Chinese) broke the Mongol supremacy, and moved the capital from Nanking to Peking five hundred years ago, the Mings were soon enough ousted by the Manchus (Tartars again), who stereotyped nearly three centuries ago the conception of a military domination directed from ​Peking—a domination which, no matter how unreal it may have become, still lives in Northern China as a political concept, tradition playing such a powerful rôle among the educated and uneducated alike that no amount of argument can kill it. This, then, is the real quarrel between North and South in spite of all talk about constitutionalism,—namely, that the Peking tradition of a military domination has not been killed and cannot be killed until universal education has definitely relegated it to the limbo of forgotten things.
From the beginning of the revolution—that is, from October, 1911—the Northern army was not only filled with this tradition but was conscious of its strength. A number of the Northern provinces had so far completed their reorganization that Yuan Shih-kai at the time of the Manchu abdication had certainly a quarter-of-a-million fairly well-found troops under his direct orders. South of the Yangtsze the situation was very different. Some provinces had no more than mixed brigades of reorganized troops; and although five Southern provinces—Hupeh, Kiangsi, Chekiang, Kwangtung, and Yunnan—could each muster at least one good modern division with artillery and transport, they were without proper arsenals and were ​vastly outnumbered by swarms of old levies. Moreover, all the machinery of army administration, as well as all the reserves of arms and ammunition, were under the control of Peking; and when we add that the borrowing-power had been inherited by those who were ten minutes from Legation Street, it will be seen that the odds could not but be heavily in favour of the North.
Nevertheless the South remained determined regarding the necessity of substituting effective parliamentary government for military dictation. The Southern leaders, of course, knew that they had not really won in 1912 when the infant emperor Hsuan-Tung abdicated, and that the big battle had yet to be fought. The abdication had been due primarily to Yuan Shih-kai, who was influenced by three things—hatred of a dynasty that had desired his blood; ambition to rule the nation himself; and an inveterate habit of following foreign opinion because that opinion controlled the stock markets on which China had lived for twenty years. Consequently, when the Manchus had been eliminated, there remained for him two controlling impulses and only two—his ambition and the foreign money-market. Everything else—parliament, people, and provincial capi​tals—was for him mere shadow-play and not reality. It is only when the problem is thus envisaged that what took place can be understood.
In the spring of 1913, i.e. considerably more than a year later than it should have occurred, the first republican parliament with a large Southern majority met in Peking in spite of the assassination of their leader Sung Chiao-jen at Shanghai under Yuan Shih-kai's orders. Not only was there this majority, but by virtue of the provisional constitution, which was the law of the land, the Southern leaders believed that they could effectively control Yuan Shih-kai by reducing him to a figurehead. Quickly disillunionized by his signature without parliamentary endorsement of the great Reorganization Loan, which gave him the one thing he needed to secure open mastery—money, they nevertheless held to their point for several months, only inciting open rebellion in the end because they saw that force was still the only argument.
This trumpery affair of July and August, 1913, commonly called the Second Revolution, which was over in a few weeks thanks to the military strength of the North, further weakened the South by allowing the Northern divi​sional generals, who had hitherto not been in office south of the Yangtsze, to occupy the whole line of provincial capitals running from Wuchang (Hankow) to the sea. By the end of the revolt the North was therefore considerably stronger than it had been in 1912. Not only were fourteen out of twenty-one provinces openly in its hand—forming a solid block of territory from the Amur to a point south of Shanghai—but portions of the remaining seven provinces were menaced, making the Southern outlook as black as it could be.
Had Yuan Shih-kai not yielded to the last of the three impulses which had dictated his entire policy from 1911—his ambition—he would possibly be alive to-day as ruler of a very centralized and very bureaucratic commonwealth. But in 1915, yielding to the importunities of his family circle and of his friends—who declared that the moment had arrived for the substitution of a legalized regime for his de facto dictatorship—he gave his consent for the monarchy movement and thereby signed his death-warrant.
There is even to-day a controversy among scholars as to precisely why there should have been such a pother about his attempting to do what so many Chinese had successfully done ​in their four thousand years of written history. From the beginning of time—that is, from the days of Yao and Shun, who are said to have flourished long before the Tartar shepherd kings, the Hyksos, invaded Egypt (2000 B.C.)—Chinese citizens have been upsetting old dynasties and making new ones. The right which the early emperors had of nominating anyone they pleased as successor—the doctrine of the blood royal being unknown—was held to be good warrant for an illustrious minister mounting the Dragon Throne, the Imperial yellow signifying a priestship rather than a military kingship. Yuan Shih-kai's friends indeed declared that really constitutional monarchy, in which Chinese thought and Western political thought would be impartially mixed, would kill the Tartar-military taint attaching to Peking, and bring national contentment. But his enemies retorted that not only was his sanction of such a scheme deliberate treachery—and the revelations since made regarding the so-called national referendum certainly disclose unblushing fraud—but that what he aimed at was simply the selfsame family rule, with all its corruption and sycophancy made ten times worse with the help of well-trained men—who would have the skill of scientific criminals. Moreover, those ​in touch with political life were assured that since Yuan Shih-kai had rejected the Japanese protectorate which Mr. Hioki, the Japanese plenipotentiary, had offered him at the time of the Twenty-one Demands (18th January, 1915), Japan would certainly defeat his plan by hook or crook. Consequently, the outbreak of the so-called Third Revolution on Christmas Day, 1915, this time not on the Yangtsze but in the inaccessible province of Yunnan, foreshadowed his fall, since even the Northern generals refused to support him generally.
On the 6th June, 1916, Yuan Shih-kai died a broken-hearted man. The South once more was jubilant, declaring that at last it had won. But in 1916 as in 1912 it was not really a victory for the Southern party: it was a qualified victory for certain Southern military leaders in certain Southern provinces, Tsai-ao, the brilliant young Yunnan leader, who had done all the fighting, dying before he could consolidate his gains and make his weight really felt. Vice-President Li Yuan-hung, who now assumed office as President, although a thoroughly honest man, was a mere hostage in Peking without a single soldier from his native province of Hupeh to support him. It required the revolt of the whole navy to force ​the Northern military party to agree even to the restoration of the provisional Constitution and the re-convocation of the dissolved Parliament of 1913; and, therefore, under the surface, when Parliament reassembled it was simply the situation of 1913 over again, minus Yuan Shih-kai. When the war-issue came up early in 1917, owing to America's invitation to China to join in the battle against submarine piracy, the question of the permanent Constitution had already nearly wrecked Parliament, the Southern majority not being sufficient to force through the vital clauses. Consequently, just as Yuan Shih-kai had used the signature of the great Reorganization Loan to break the power of Parliament in 1913, so in 1917 the Northern Party began to use the question of a declaration of war against Germany as an intimidation against the majority party, being greatly fortified by the attitude of the Allied legations, who so greatly desired that step to be taken that everything else was held immaterial.
Thereupon began an extraordinary struggle. President Li Yuan-hung seemed to have it in his hands not only to settle the constitutional question by a display of firmness but to define once and for all China's foreign policy. But, being without competent help and without ​troops, his nerve failed him at the psychological moment; and illegally he dissolved Parliament after diplomatic relations with Germany had been broken off, but before any formal declaration of war had been made. At the same time adding folly to his great mistake, he had called to Peking the illiterate General Chang Hsün, who carried out a burlesque restoration of the Manchus—a mockery which was dissipated by a brief fusillade. The result was to leave North and South worse divided than ever; the Northern military party being once more in firm control of Peking, whilst the fugitive Southerners were once more forced back to the home of the Revolution—Canton. For eighteen months the situation has continued like that, with fitful fighting along the northern edge of the seven south-western provinces, and with the foreign Powers looking on helplessly and wondering whether it would ever end.
Whilst the expression "the foreign Powers" is still in general use to signify the whole group of nations in treaty relations with China, recent events have proved that the proper way of expressing foreign political activities should be "the foreign Powers and Japan". For although Japan is an ally of the Allies, and although since her first treaty of alliance with ​England in 1902, in which Chinese integrity was so carefully guaranteed, she has repeatedly exchanged agreements, notes, secret memoranda, and what not with half the Powers of Christendom, affirming the selfsame principles, her Chinese policy is as purely a Japanese product as are the geta (wooden clogs) of the Japanese people. That policy clatters noisily along the international highroad just as if it were shod in resonant geta so that everyone can see and hear it; but every so often the clogs are slipped off and Japan enters her neighbour's house in her stockinged feet (as good manners demand); and then very secretly behind the shoji (screens) she whispers that unless her tutelage is accepted it will be highly unfortunate for China.
It would be mere repetition of things already outlined to re-examine the problem of the Chinese Revolution from the Japanese standpoint. But this at least ought to be said: that nothing which has occurred in the Far East since the Perry expedition of sixty years ago has more disconcerted Japan than the institution of republicanism at her very doors. Having with vast difficulty and trouble adjusted her national life to the requirements of the modern world from the time of the Restoration of 1868 to the ​Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, she viewed with real horror Westernism sweeping in on China like a torrent and threatening entirely to capture it under the name of Democracy. For the isolation which existed under the Tokugawa Shogunate for two and half centuries still lives spiritually in Japan: Japanese national life remains a curious compound of adjustments and half-tones, a rather delicate thing that like a hothouse plant might easily be blasted if left exposed to the cold winds of Reason. To preserve in the second decennium of the twentieth century not only a belief in the divine right of kings, but to propagate officially in every school, in every college, and in every university of the land the cult of the actual divinity of the Emperor, emphatically necessitates a juggling with the problems of the other world of an almost fantastic nature. In the writer's belief the secret of Japanese diplomacy may be traced to this unreal foundation of government, which is further complicated by the haunting conviction that the Western races are really stronger, more virile, and more efficient than the races of the East and must infallibly dominate them whenever it comes to an open trial of strength. And if we take this hypothesis as a starting-point obscurity vanishes.
​Let us explain. Already after the Russo-Japanese war—i.e. fourteen years ago—all classes of Japanese knew that their material development was wholly insufficient for the fierce competition of the modern world, and that Russia had really been defeated by a miracle. Crushed by taxation to pay the war debt incurred, the Japanese people instinctively favoured a double policy—the exploitation of China for her raw products and the stimulating of Chinese opinion in such a way as to secure, if not the union of the yellow races, at least the general acceptance of the idea that internationally the Far East must be considered as one entity under the hegemony of Japan.
It was when Japanese people were in this mood that the Knox Neutralization scheme of the Manchurian railways was presented to the world (1908) as a solution for the political-territorial tangle which the Russian war had left. That such a proposal, in the circumstances narrated, should have struck the Japanese people much as the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger struck the British people at the time of the South African imbroglio is not at all surprising. It was looked upon as unwarranted interference, almost as an affront. For there was the diplomatic record of the days prior to ​the Manchurian war to prove that Japan had deliberately and categorically offered to abstain from all interference in Manchuria if Russia would enter into a similar commitment regarding Korea. The fact that the Japanese had been forced to fight a ruinous war, with no real margin of safety either on land or on sea, because that offer had been refused, in their opinion entitled them to a consideration which the jealous Western world was not giving them. It is necessary to insist upon this half-forgotten matter even to the point of weariness, as it is the secret of much tortuous diplomacy. For when the Neutralization scheme fell through, and Japan found the alternative plan for a parallel railway (the Chinchow-Aigun trunk-line) being pushed by British and American interests in 1909, she became convinced that a new battle had already commenced having for object her economic restriction on the Asiatic mainland. And although the formal annexation of Korea was successfully accomplished in 1910, in 1911 the British Government insisted on a revision of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, inserting a clause which made the inapplicability of that instrument to America absolutely clear.
It was with these things weighing heavily on ​Japan that the Manchu abdication of February, 1912, came—after a British refusal to countenance armed force being lent to retain the dynasty. And when it was plainly shown that Yuan Shih-kai, who for quarter-of-a-century had been the arch-enemy of the Tokio Government, was being supported by all the Western Powers alike as an instrument to continue the politico-financial policy of the pre-abdication days, every group of Japanese became convinced of the necessity of drastic action.
The outbreak of the World War gave the needed opportunity. Japan consented to declare war on Germany only on her own conditions. The mishandling of the Tsingtao question by the Allies—the British Government, for instance, could easily have induced Yuan Shih-kai to deliver a twenty-four hours' ultimatum on Germany to evaculate Chinese soil, since the President of China had 50,000 troops almost at Tsingtao's back doors—allowed Japan to make war as if by favour, using the belligerent conditions throughout the world to hasten on a policy which had nothing to do with the issues being so savagely fought out on European soil. And when Yuan Shih-kai, tardily recovering from the surprise into which ​he had been thrown by the international catastrophe, declared a war-zone in Shantung province so as to restrict the Japanese military effort, and then cancelled that zone as soon as Tsingtao had been captured, Japanese irritation reached such a point that they were forced to action.
On the 18th January, 1915, they accordingly served their famous Twenty-one Demands on him; and although a violent press defensive did something to mitigate the terms, (Group V, which was the outline of a Japanese protectorate being withdrawn,) by means of an ultimatum they forced through all the Manchurian and Shantung articles, with many other valuable closed-door privileges which will be later the cause of international oonflict.
Yet even this left Japan dissatisfied: she was still fearful that China would enter the war and thereby regain a certain liberty of action. The direct efforts the Tokio Government made at the end of the year 1915 to prevent such a consummation were followed in 1916 by direct efforts abroad to improve Japan's international standing. It was naturally at Petrograd that Japanese diplomacy first set to work; and as the Bolshevist publication of the Secret Treaties has shown, the Japanese succeeded so ​well that in 1916 they wrote a reinsurance of their China policy with Russia aimed at any third Power who might wish to oppose their China schemes.
But the Russian Revolution totally destroyed the value of this undertaking, whilst almost at the same time China, invited by America to do so, in a most surprising and unexpected way broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and was on the eve of a formal declaration of war. Seeing the prize once more slipping through their fingers, the Terauchi Ministry developed in the late spring of 1917 a new policy.
Deliberately they associated themselves with the Peiyang military party, promising every kind of financial support if this party would fight under their banner. Nominally acquiescent, the Peiyang party, in spite of the odium cast on them by their Southern adversaries, were still first and last Chinese, i.e. men who knew perfectly well what Japan's plans really were, and who only pretended that they were in entire accord with them. Thus once more there was a play within the play, the number of factors involved being so immense that most people soon lost sight of the main issue—which was that Japan was for the time being ​merely concentrating on one matter, i.e. pushing Peking to pawn every liquid asset so that Tokio's claims would be so overwhelmingly strong that when it came to a settlement of the Far Eastern question her wishes would be law.
It was under these auspices that Viscount Ishii sailed for the United States, a signal for the keen-witted that things were still deemed unsatisfactory by the Tokio Government and that the last refractory element must be forced into the melting-pot. Finding that two months' sojourn in Washington yielded no tangible results, the Japanese Special Envoy became almost desperate. Then followed a brief and curious departure for New York, with a brief and curious return to Washington, resulting in the Lansing-Ishii Notes of the 2d November, 1917. That this exchange of notes was very largely prompted by the reports of serious developments of Japanese policy if nothing were done to placate Japanese public opinion, there can to-day be no doubt. The manner in which German emissaries were constantly attempting to enter into relations with Japan—notably at the Scandinavian capitals—is well-known to those behind the scenes; and although Japan remained loyal in word and in deed during this ​dangerous pause in the World War, that temptations of an extraordinary character were dangled before her eyes is an undisputed fact.
And yet even these Notes, with their untenable doctrine of geographical propinquity, did not capture will-o'-the-wisp China. They assisted, no doubt, in the promotion of the peculiar Japanese policy of the period 1917-18, when so many hundreds of millions of dollars were lent to the Peking Government on ruinous terms to be squandered on a meaningless civil war; but internationally they were failures. England, still the chief Western Power in Eastern Asia, did not recede from the position she took up in her treaty of 1911—that she possessed special interests in China as well as Japan, and that these special interests, British as well as the Japanese special interests, must be maintained. This is a very important fact which has never been given its proper importance: it is a fact which even now troubles Japan.
And then at last Bolshevism, invading Asiatic Russia in the spring of 1918, brought a new complication; for although there never was any German menace to the Far East as Japanese agents declared, there was certainly a menace to Japanese plans. In the long story ​of the intrigues and counter-intrigues at Harbin—during the first half of 1918—in which Japan characteristically backed the reactionary General Horvath, master of the Chinese Eastern Railway, in order to gain control of the railway—we see a fire being fanned to a blaze so as to allow deft fingers to secure the chestnuts. Had the reactionary Russian element in the Russian Far East, and among the Cossack communities of Transbaikalia, not been incited to attack the Bolshevists, there would not have been any of the complications which still await solution.
But Japan required frontier warfare, since these activities on the rim of Northern Manchuria allowed her to force through the Sino-Japanese Military Secret Agreement which seemed to bind the Peking Government to her chariot-wheel for the term of the war; and although the astute use made by the United States of the Czecho-Slovak impasse finally brought Allied intervention at Vladivostok and prevented the fruition of the full plan, which was the Japanese military occupation of everything east of Lake Baikal, it is necessary to note that Japan has acted independently, in spite of the Allies, in Northern Manchuria, in Transbaikalia, and in the Amur province, and ​is to-day virtual master of Harbin, of Chita, and of Blavovestchensk.
Here we must pause, for the involved outline is now complete. How the Chinese imbroglio is to be solved, how a reasonable balance is to be reconstituted for the whole Far East, and peace thereby assured—these things must be separately treated, since they are every whit as complicated as this discussion which has only touched the fringe of the subject.