China, in the exuberance of a political renascence, was for an altogether unthrottled expression of Chinese sovereignty in the Settlement. America and Britain. whose somewhat overgenerous interpretation of the legitimacy of those sovereign aspirations' had become qualified by the practical findings of Justice Feetham on the spot, favoured a half-throttle pace. namely, "transition" before "rendition". Japan, on the contrary, favoured an instant application of the brake! This she proceeded to apply in disrupting the impending reconeiliation—contemplated in the form of an "Outside Roads Agreement" acknowledging joint rights—between the Chinese sovereign idea, on the one hand, of a greater Shanghai municipality within whose all-embracing compass the two lesser municipalities of France and of the Interional Powers would merge and some day lose their identity, and. on the other hand, the foreign traditional idea of exclusivist foreign domination.
Swift retrogression was all too'soon to succeed to the stalemating by Japan of China's national and political development in the Far East paralleled in the International Settlement by a similar stalemating of municipal evolution. in which the Feetham Reforms, offered in 1931, suffered a rapid eclipse by major political events. For in 1932 China offered Japan the challenge of a near-war "incident", which the following five years served merely to expand in 1937 into full-dress hostile ties. With the coming of war in China. there was necessitated the expedient of a re-orientation of the policies of the two main protagonists in this country and in the Settlement where these policies are focussed, namely the Anglo-American combine on the one hand and Japan on the other. In the Shanghai area, after a brief but valiant defence, Chinese military and political power was rendered important by Japanese arms, thereby to all practical ends reducing the three-cornered political antegonisms in Sino-foreign affairs, at their focus point of Shanghai, to the
[Een combine on the one hand one main one of a conflict in politi purposes between the Anglo-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.