Japan would provide a backbone of military expertise and equipment for the Chinese Army. Together, Japan and China would take control of the orphaned Russian railway network in the Far East.9 In December 1917 Nishihara Kamezo, Japan’s financial representative in China, called for a ‘fundamental union’ of Japan and China to ensure ‘eastern self-sufficiency’ and to ‘prevent for all time, the intrusion of European power in the Japan sea’.
