Word: hainan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Jumping off from Hainan Island, which the Japanese have held by squatters' rights since February, a combined Army-Navy party braved a monsoon and heavy rain, landed on the China coast near Pakhoi, about 100 miles from the Indo-Chinese border, and thence drove inland toward the city of Nanning. This was their long-expected drive to cut the routes to China from French Indo-China and British Burma. It was a threat not only to China (which will be dry as a rootless tree if the routes are cut) but also to French and British and indirectly Dutch...
...colonial powers scarcely needed this landing, or the newspaper campaign introducing it, to inform them of Japan's ambitions in their spheres of empire. There had been previous signals: the peremptory seizure of Hainan, the occupation of the strategic Spratly Islands, the frank avowal of many a world-imperialist Japanese. Punctuating the European war as it did, the landing served rather to make the world review just what was still to be found in the treasure of the Indies. Were the outposts worth defending...
...four nations concerned, only France, the legal if doubtful owner, entered a formal diplomatic complaint. The Japanese, who can keep silence as well as steal like gypsies, said little when France complained about the snatch of Hainan in February. They were mum this week...
...from France and Britain, this fertile and strategic patch of about 13,500 square miles. Once more the Anti-Comintern bloc was up to its clever trick of kicking the democracies in the pants when they were worried about troubles elsewhere. The Japanese war office hissed assurances that the Hainan occupation was purely a military operation to keep the Chinese from shipping arms to South China. The Japanese said they would withdraw when there was no further military necessity for their presence. Every government in the world knew they would not if they could help...
...Hoihow, Hainan's chief port, is potentially a good harbor, and a naval base there would command the Indo-China coast, some 200 miles to the west. It sits across the British Singapore-Hong Kong line and might menace the line from the Philippines to Singapore, should the U. S. and Britain ever act in concert in the East. It gives Japan a better jumping off place toward the oil-rich Netherlands Indies than it has ever had before. The Japanese Empire now stretches 2,400 miles from its farthest northern to its farthest southern outposts...