Word: manchukuo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Britain and France were no longer the whalebones in China's financial corset. The Army's greatest blessing was that it no longer had Russia to fear. Soldiers read reports from Domei, the official news agency, telling that in the no man's land of the Manchukuo-Outer Mongolian border, a Japanese lieutenant colonel and a Soviet major general stepped from cars decorated with white flags and shook hands in formal recognition of their truce. Domei reported nothing, not even the gist, of their conversation. All it said was that the Japanese officer "made a loud laugh...
...given to one of the Army's best strategists, Toshizo Nishio. Recently resigned War Minister Seishiro Itagaki was made Lieut. General Nishio's Chief of Staff. Command of the Kwantung Army, the able if imaginative force which since May 11 had been making the barren plains of Manchukuo a bramble of practically uncountable wrecked Russian planes, was given to one of the Army's best diplomats, Lieut. General Yoshijiro Umezu, already Japanese Ambassador to Manchukuo. It looked (but no one dared say so, since Japanese are as unpredictable as shooting stars) as if Japan wanted to talk...
Sure enough, next day, Commander-Ambassador Umezu sang a pretty overture: the "present deplorable situation" on the Manchukuo-Mongolia border, he said, was merely the result of the Russians not wanting to negotiate a definite boundary line, which Japan had always wanted...
...begun to protest that this was not cricket when a squadron of Russian bombers peppered Furoruji, almost 400 miles from the scene of battle. This, the Japanese announced, "differed radically from the border affair" and was going too far. If the Russians do not stop dumping bombs deep in Manchukuo, they said, Japanese planes will carry the war into Siberia. Next day seven Red bombers took the dare and blasted Halunarshan again...
Class Struggle. Three times as many Mongols as there are in the Mongolian People's Republic live in Manchukuo and the chunk of Inner Mongolia now occupied by the Japanese. The Japanese have taken the other side of the Mongol class struggle and lavished gifts and titles on the hereditary princes who have fled from Outer Mongolia. Some day, the Japanese tell them, there will be an independent Mongol confederation and the princes dispossessed by revolution will regain their land and power. In return, when the time comes for war with Russia, they are expected to lead a counterrevolution...