JAPAN-CHINA: Five Wise Westerners

To find the facts in Japan and China’s quarrel about Manchuria, to establish these facts with high authority, and to suggest an impartial solution, five wise Westerners went out to the everchanging East eight months ago.

Their chairman, Victor Alexander George Robert, second Earl of Lytton, first drew breath at Simla, the summer capital of British India, while his father was Viceroy 56 years ago. In 1925 lean, scholarly Lord Lytton was himself Viceroy of India for five months. He knows his East. Release of the Lytton Report last week stirred the deepest interest of both East and West. If the League of Nations, which sent out the Lytton Commission, now proceeds to accept its findings and back up its recommendations, the League, threatened today with financial bank-ruptcy (see p. 13), has a last chance to escape political and moral bankruptcy as well.

Number of words in the Lytton Report: 100,000. Eminently readable three-decker novels of twice that length used to be tossed off with ease by Lord Lytton’s grandfather, famed Victorian Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Such tossing is in the Lytton blood. The Report, as the London Times promptly declared last week, is “an admirable and exhaustive survey, compiled with the literary distinction traditional in the family of the Chairman.”

With Chairman Lytton worked the “unofficial” U. S. commissioner, dynamic, fact-ferreting General Frank Ross McCoy (close friend of President Roosevelt) and the three “official” Commissioners: French General Henri Claudel, who commanded the ist French Colonial Corps (African) in the War; German Dr. Heinrich Schnee, last Governor of German East Africa (1912-19); and Italian Count Aldrovandi-Marescotti, recalled in 1929 from his post as Ambassador to Germany because a copy of Il Duce’s most private code had vanished inexplicably from the Berlin Embassy.

Facts found. Casting out hypocrisy, the Lytton Report defines the relations of China and Japan today as “war in disguise.”

Manchuria is found to be the Three Eastern Provinces of China, whereas Japan has contended that it includes a fourth province (Jehol) and much of Inner Mongolia.

Henry Pu Yi, onetime “Boy Emperor of China” and now Japan’s puppet head of the new state of “Manchukuo” (Manchuria), is stated to be not its Regent but its “President.”

“The new state could not have been formed,” the Report finds, “without . . . the presence of Japanese troops and the activities of Japanese officials, both civil and military. For this reason the present regime cannot be considered to have been called into existence by a genuine and spontaneous independence movement” as the Japanese Government still claims it was.

Finally the Report finds that the closely interlocked Communist-bandit armies now dominating central China constitute a regime which has become an “actual rival of the National Government. Thus with rare courage the Commission bared the fact that what is recognized by the Great Powers as the Government of China is a regime no more than “competitive” with China’s Communists.

Thoughts & Opinions. The Report finds that “the military operations of the Japanese troops [on the night they began their conquest of Manchuria] cannot be regarded as measures of legitimate self-defense” [as claimed by Japan].

Boldly realistic, the Report does not stick to Manchuria, but finds that a related and inseparable issue is the boycotting of Japanese goods by Chinese either in or out of Manchuria.

“No one can deny the right of individual Chinese to refuse to buy Japanese goods,” says the Report, then continues: “Whether, however, the organized application of the boycott to the trade of one particular country is consistent with friendly relations or in conformity with treaty obligations is rather a problem of international law than a subject for our inquiry.”

Again & again the five wise Westerners mention “Japan’s treaty rights” and “the rights claimed by Japan” but leave as anybody’s guess what these rights are and whether or not they include Japan’s claims under her notorious “Twenty-One Demands.”

Recommendations by the Commission cover1) establishment of “a completely new status” for Manchuria (Manchukuo) ; 2) termination of the “war in disguise” by an entire new set of treaties between China and Japan.

Manchuria, the Report recommends, should “secure, consistently with the sovereignty and administrative integrity of China, a large measure of autonomy.” Specifically the Report recommends that the head of the new “autonomous Manchurian Government” should be appointed by the Chinese Government and should rule with the assistance of “foreign advisers,” some of them Japanese and some (by implication) non-Asiatics.

Chinese soldiers, Japanese soldiers and all military forces whatsoever (including railway guards), should be replaced in Manchuria, the Report recommends, by a completely new “gendarmerie.” Such sweeping changes, the Commissioners admit, could only be worked out by “temporary international cooperation” of the Great Powers.

The second set of Lytton recommendations calls for the signing by Japan and China of three new treaties1) settling what are Japan’s “rights” or “interests”; 2) a “Treaty of Conciliation and Arbitration, Non-Aggression and Mutual Assistance”; 3) a “Commercial Treaty” to end boycotts amicably.

Procedure. In reporting to the League Council last week Lord Lytton & Commissioners suggested that the Council “invite” China and Japan to “discuss a solution of their dispute along the lines indicated.”

Next, “if the invitation is accepted” an “advisory conference” should be called.

If this conference deadlocks, the Council should “attempt to secure an agreed settlement” (i. e. try to arbitrate). Finally —assuming all the big IFs have been surmounted—the new status of Manchuria would be “declared” by China and the treaties would be signed.

Chances of Success? In Tokyo last week the Imperial Government announced firmly and without heat that if the League takes the stand taken by the Lytton Report then Japan will withdraw from the League—thus presenting League States with a supreme challenge to their courage and their power.

Chinese statesmen privately hailed the Lytton Report as “the best solution thus far offered,” but no member of China’s National Government would say a word for publication. They feared of course that the Chinese people will find in the Report just enough concessions to Japan (and to common sense) to reject it in toto as “a betrayal of China.”

In Washington it was easy for Statesman Stimson to congratulate himself on passages in the Lytton Report which seemed to accord with his passive policy of “nonrecognition of Manchukuo.” On the contrary the Lytton Report calls for action, action and more action by the League and all Great Powers, including the U. S.

London’s Conservative Morning Post, organ of Britain’s ruling party, was “sorry to have to say it” but felt that “the Chinese Government … is a polite fiction” and therefore that the Lytton procedure of inducing Japan to negotiate with a nullity was absurd—the inference being that Japan should keep what she can.

In Paris Le Matin, semi-official French Government daily, dismissed the Report as mere ammunition for Chinese propagandists, added that Soviet propagandists will doubtless pervert it (i. e. will represent the Great Powers as trying to seize a share of Japan’s loot in Manchuria through the “foreign advisers” recommended by Imperialist Lytton).

Nowhere? “The Report leads nowhere!” stormed Viscount Rothermere’s Daily Mail, charging that Lord Lytton ignored “the all-important fact that but for Japan’s prodigious sacrifices in her war of 1904 and 1905 with Russia. Manchuria would be today a Soviet province.”

On Nov. 14 the League Council must consider the Lytton Report, may send it to the Assembly for full-dress discussion by 57 League powers & nations. Taking the optimistic view, London’s urbane Times calmly remarked that Japan’s occupation of Manchuria is costing her millions of dollars, yielding no returns and that the Japanese Treasury “is not in a position to stand this drain if it continues much longer.”

In Tokyo last week the Army & Navy demanded “extra appropriations” totaling $96,000,000—this with the yen off gold and with Japan entering the second decade of her Depression. Remorseless economic factors seemed, last week, the strongest force tending to Lyttonize Japan.