THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 171 No. 5098

LONDON JANUARY 22nd, 1938

SIXPENCE

IN TH IS IS SU E

POPULATION PROSPECTS

T. The Decline and the Catholics

By E. R. ROPER POWER

DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

The Doctrinal Commission’s Report Reviewed By HUMPHREY J. T. JOHNSON, Cong. Orat.

BEN JONSON AND GUNPOWDER PLOT

By B. H. NEWDIGATE

Full List o f Contents on page 100.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK Japanese Ambitions

The Japanese declarations that Japan has finished with Chiang Kai-shek, and that the Chinese must, under Japanese leadership, “have their undesirable national traits recast and refined, ’’ make it certain that there will be no early close to the fighting in China. The long debate inside Japan, whether to meet Chinese hostility by conciliation and insinuation, or by force, has been settled in favour of force, mainly because the other policy, partially pursued, was yielding no results. The Japanese are now bracing themselves to settle down to a gigantic task, the creation through the Chinese mainland of governments of which they approve. The Japanese have been accustomed to take as an axiom the disunity of China, and it has generally been the fact. But the last decade has seen a rapid growth in Nationalist feeling, and it may well prove that the Japanese will be the hammer welding the national unity of China. Military operations have now reached the Canton area, and the mere existence of hostilities is, in itself, a very heavy blow to Hong Kong.

The question arises how far there was agreement when the Germans and Japanese first contracted their alliance that the Japanese should have a free hand in the Far East. M. Jacques Bardoux, in Le Temps, on Tuesday repeated, from an undisclosed but, he declared, authoritative source, that there were secret articles of agreement, and that these include the conquest of the Dutch East Indies, and their allocation to Germany in close association with Japan. This seems in the last degree improbable on the face of it, because the Germans would have to rely upon Japanese both to conquer and hold those large possessions for them. And if the Japanese were equal to such an effort they would be little likely to give the prize away. In the last war the Dutch were, all through, in the most nervous state, because while their own country lay open to invasion all the time from Germany, their colonies were at the mercy of the British. By strict neutrality and longanimity, they emerged with their country and their empire untouched. But it is understandable that they are nervous today, like all small countries, of being lined up, on an ideological classification, as for a policy of collective action, and then of losing their possessions after giving a technical justification for hostile action.

What the Japanese envisage is the sort of hegemony that American finance and the American Government have often exercised in Central America, with amenable local Governments to arrange for the maintenance of good business conditions. It is quite possible that the Japanese will be largely successful in Asia, and that a deal will be done with them which will protect the European capital which is tied up in buildings and capital equipment mainly in Shanghai. British capital is 36 per cent of the total foreign investment in China, and this British holding of some £200,000,000 is twothirds in Shanghai. The Japanese run the British very close with 35 per cent, but two-thirds of their holding is spread through Manchuria. The Russians come next, having about a quarter of the British stake, and the Americans have a holding two-thirds of the Russian, or a sixth of the British. By contrast the foreign investment in Japan is £148,000,000, mostly as loans to the Government, and is only about a quarter of the investment in China. Of this £148,000,000 the United States own more than half. It is interesting to note that foreign investment in China today is roughly equal in value to foreign investment, nearly all British, in India.