Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/100

 which later she further accentuated by uniting it with the Korean railway system, thus making a Chinese railway and a Japanese railway one and the same entity. It encouraged her to adopt, on the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution and the disappearance of the Manchu dynasty, the doctrine Germany had adopted regarding the Anglo-German understanding of 1900—because Germany had then a secret agreement with Russia—that Manchuria must be held as outside the scope of any agreement regarding China, China meaning China Proper, although this Western geographical distinction is unknown among the Chinese themselves, who for many hundreds of years have treated all Chinese-settled territory precisely on the same footing. Finally, with the outbreak of the European war, it awakened in her the ambition to acquire openly dominant rights northwards to the Amur River, and westwards to the Gobi Desert—the whole original empire of Manchus, which was a Manchu-Mongolian realm governed from Moukden and including by alliance all the banners or "hordes" of Tartary—a thing her military officers declared easy of accomplishment. The complications and irritations which have attended Japanese participation in the Allied intervention in the Russian