ng the retrocession of the Kiaochow
territory when the news reached him that Japan, after some rapid
negotiations with her British Ally, had filed an ultimatum on Germany,
peremptorily demanding the handing-over of all those interests that had
been forcibly acquired in Shantung province in the great leasing-year of
1898.

At once Yuan Shih-kai realized that the Nemesis which had dogged his
footsteps all his life was again close behind him. In the Japanese
attack on Kiaochow he foresaw a web of complications which even his
unrivalled diplomacy might be unable to unravel; for he knew well from
bitter experience that wherever the Japanese sets his foot there he
remains. It is consequently round this single factor of Japan that the
history of the two succeeding years revolves. From being indisputably
the central figure on the Chinese canvas, Yuan Shih-kai suddenly becomes
subordinate to the terror of Japanese intervention which hangs over him
constantly like a black cloud, and governs every move he made from the
15th August, 1914, to the day of his dramatic death on the 6th June,
1916. We shall attempt to write down the true explanation of why this
should have been so.

It is extremely hard to discuss the question of Japan for the benefit of
an exclusively Western audience in a convincing way because Japanese
policy has two distinct facets which seem utterly contradictory, and yet
which are in a great measure understandable if the objects of that
diplomacy are set down. Being endowed with an extraordinary capacity for
taking detached views, the Statesmen of Tokio long ago discerned the
necessity of having two independent policies--an Eastern policy for
Eastern Asia and a Western policy for Western nations--because East and
West are essentially antithetical, and cannot be treated (at least not
yet) in precisely the same manner. Whilst the Western policy is frank
and manly, and is exclusively in the hands of brilliant and attractive
men who have been largely educated in the schools of Europe and America
and who are fully able to deal with all matters in accordance with the
customary traditions of diplomacy, the Eastern policy is the work of
obscurantists whose imaginations are held by the vast projects which the
Military Party believes are capable of realization in China. There is
thus a constant contradiction in the attitude of Japan which men have
sought in vain to reconcile. It is for this reason that the outer world
is