As Foreign Minster Motono Ichiro put it in December 1916: ‘There are those who say that we should make China a protectorate or partition it, and there are those who advocate the extreme position that we should use the European war to make China completely our territory . . . but even if we were able to do that temporarily, the (Japanese) Empire lacks real power to hold on to it very long’.25 A Chinese warlord put the same point rather more crudely. For all their aggression, the Japanese were ‘not sure’ that they could ‘swallow’ China. ‘We are weak, we are stupid, we are divided, but we are
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