joined any social clubs that admitted Jews, and said that liked the company of only Aryans. In April 1936, Dirksen finally made it to Changchun and concluded a Manchukuo–German trade agreement, which did not constitute de jure German recognition of Manchukuo, which the Reich continued to proclaim to remain part of China, but it was a de facto recognition of Manchukuo. In May 1936, Dirksen complained that the visit to China of General Walther von Reichenau, a well-known German general on the active list and known as one of Hitler's favorite generals, would offend Japan. At the same time, Dirksen emerged as one of the proponents of signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, which caused tensions with the Wehrmacht, which opposed the pact, and Neurath, not the least because plans for the pact had originated with Neurath's enemy, Joachim von Ribbentrop. In his dispatches to Berlin, Dirksen consistently advocated Germany choosing Japan over China. In one dispatch, Dirksen argued the Kuomintang was too corrupt and disorganised to defeat the Chinese Communists, who would inevitably win the Chinese Civil War. In a conscious echo of the Wilhelmine fear of the Yellow Peril, Dirksen argued a Communist China would ally itself with the Soviet Union, and both would invade Europe. Happily for the Reich, Dirksen argued that there was a strong power in the form of Japan that had a "civilising mission" in China, eas willing and able to impose "order" on the hopeless Chinese and stop communism in Asia, which led him to the conclusion that Germany's Asian ally should be Japan, rather than China. After the Xian Incident of December 1936, which led to the formation of the "united front" of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang to resist any further Japanese encroachments on China, Dirksen reported to Berlin that Japan would never stand for it and predicted that the Japanese would strike China sometime in 1937. In July 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began with the Marco Polo Incident. Dirksen reported that his Japanese hosts were extremely unhappy that Germany was the largest supplier of arms to China and that officers of the German military mission were training and, in some cases, leading the troops of the Chinese National Revolutionary Army to battle against the Imperial Japanese Army. In response to Dirksen's suggestion for the German military mission to be recalled from China, War Minister Field Marshal Werner