THE NEW FAR EAST

Evening Star, Issue 21716, 10 May 1934, Page 14

THE NEW FAR EAST

JAPAN AS LEADER GREATLY CHANGED SCENE FAR FROM STABILITY Thirty-six years is but a moment in the life of the ancient East, but this last third of a century has been long enough to show such reversals and overturnings as profoundly to affect the world in which we have to live (writes Professor Tyler Dennett, of Princeton University, in the ‘ Christian Science Monitor ’) ■ It is convenient for purposes of comparison to establish a base line at the close of the last century. Those were the days of youth for many of us. In those days we were just “ lookhtg up ” in the old battered geography the location of the Philippines. We collected pictures of battleships and cruisers, and re-enacted, in our minds, or on the playground, the glorious victory of Dewey at Manila Bay. Shanghai was in our vocabulary only as the port of abducted sailors. China suggested hand laundries—among the first of the chain stores. Japan was hardly on the horizon. In those days only the very few were aware that the Par East was a supremely important factor in a political equation of worldwide dimensions, and of which the United States was already a part. There is still such an equation. Both actually'and potentially it'is immensely more important than it was in 1898. But the combinations and correlations are quite different. The old ideographs are not very useful now; the equation itself is new. Tlie centre' of interest in those days was the struggle of the Western Powers for concessions and for the partition of the Chinese Empire, then, politically, rotting to pieces. The “ break-up ” of China seemed at hand. France would take a slice in the south. England would have the Yangtse Valley. Germany was consolidating a preliminary position in Shantung. Russia was already well advanced down through Manchuria and was suspected of having designs on a large part of North China. Italy would get nothing, but Japan, having already made sure of Formosa as a part of the settlement of, the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, would have a bite out of the adjacent mainland to include Fukien. PRIOR CLAIM. , The United States did not intend to be outwitted. It had the Philippines, which.; on the map if not on the globe—globes were not common in those days —seemed to offer a convenient perch from which the American bird could survey the panorama and serve its purposes from day to day as might be required. The retention of the Philippines had represented a policy of opportunism. A few years later the American Government, no longer content with what it had, sought a naval base on the coast of Fukien only to be informed that the Japanese had already established their prior claim. The Japanese Government never lias been sufficiently thanked by Americans for that piece of happy foresight. The outstanding factor in the political equation at the turn of the century was the Anglo-Russian rivalry, on the one hand, and, on the other, the growing Russo-Japanese conflict. There came in 1902 the first Anglo-Japanese alliance. The British and the Japanese, not yet commercial rivals, were driven into each other’s arms. Both desired in China the open door which neither, unaided, was strong enough to keep open. The United States was to be counted in the newly-formed fellowship, which now seems so absurd. In America the days were gone when the American poet could sing with so much emotion: ‘‘ God bless the great people who love the great Tsar.” hi the Far East Russia stood squarely athwart the path of American advance. Henry Adams had foreseen this as early as 1890. He thought that in twenty-five years his countrymen might Americanise Siberia. The United States was, potentially, a natural friend of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Nor was it otherwise in fact; for several years American policy was definitely friendly to the declared purposes of the first alliance, and when in 1903 John Hay felt called upon to warn the Japanese Minister in Washington that the United States would actually lend no material assistance to Japan in the approaching war with Russia it was, in his words, “a hard thing to say.” A TRADE WAR. And now what do we find? Not only has the Anglo-Japanese Alliance faded out, but in the fe.w short years since 1922 it has been replaced by as bitter a trade war between England and Japan as the modern world has known. ’ That this economic conflict will produce the corresponding political emotions and policies seems inevitable. Vestiges of the old Anglo-Russian rivalry remain, but in the face of Japanese competition in China, India, and all around the shores of the Indian Ocean, as well; as in the carrying trade of the world, it is impotent again to drive England and Japan into political alliance. The Russo-Japanese rivalry remains in essence what it has been for more than half a century, yet even that has changed. Russia is no longer provocative; Japan is quite clearly the aggressor. For some years at the- beginning of the century it was feared that the partition of China would set Europe by the ears and be the episode which would bring on the first World War. Eastern Asia was a tinder box which might ignite the world. The expected conflagration came in due course, hut it was ignited on the edge of the Balkans. The idea still survives that the second Russo-Japanese War, whenever it comes, is likely to set off a second world War. Such expectation fails to take account of these astonishing changes in political associations under review. The new equations in Europe have given us new equations in the Far East. The most certain reason why the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 did not spread to Europe was that Europe was not then politically ready for war. The alignments were not yet matured or completed. To-day the European political situation is even more muddled than it was then. It is even less probable than in 1904 that a wav begun in the Far East would convulse the world at this time. CHINA’S FALL. Having picked our way through the tangled paths of politics which lead into and out of the Far East, we pass to the area itself. In some respects it also is so new as to present quite a different problem from what was represented so long by the hoary phrase —the Far Eastern question. Politically China is, perhaps, even less important than it was at the outbreak of the Boxer affair. In those days the Chinese Empire was far down the slide towards political disintegration, To-day the Nanking Government

is even further down that same slippery decline. On the other hand, economic China unquestionably presents something new —the definite beginnings of mechanisation and modern industry. In these lines the Chinese are probably as relatively far advanced as the Japanese were a few years before the Sino-Jap-anese War. . It is plain that China will become with Increasing success a competitor in her own market for such kinds of manufactured goods as first England, then America, and now Japan is supplying in great quantity. Another inch added to Wu Ting Fang’s shirt will in the future be of more benefit to the looms of Shanghai than to _ those of Manchester, Lowell, or Osaka. On the other hand, China no longer has the lure of the gold of Cathay. The country is not rich in metals, precious or base. H. Foster Bain tells us that it does not possess even enough of the baser metals to build a mechanical civilisation such as has come to characterise the West. VERY DIFFERENT. The Japan of to-day, both politically and economically, is scarcely recognisable as the State whose debut the Americans of a generation ago took so much pride in having sponsored. Politically unimportant then, Japan for years has sat at Geneva in the seat reserved only fora first-class Power. Then Japan turned upon her associates and did what only a very few Powers in all the world would dare to do, defied the League of Nations. And, so far as we can see now, “ got away with it.” Whether we welcome it or not, Japan to-day enjoys unchallenged the paramount position in Eastern Asia and in the Western Pacific. This is a novel, but very important political fact to which we shall have to become accustomed. It is one of the fixed points in the political constellation. Industrially, Japan is riding a wave. Her machinery is hew and of the latest design, She is near her markets. She has a low labour cost, now made lower still by inflation. Recently she has been able to sell in India more yards of cotton cloth than England sold. Dependent upon a British market, she has struck back with a boycott on Indian raw cotton in response to a tariff designed to close the Indian market to Japan. In a perfectly free competition she seems to have the British manufacturer beaten in the cheap grades of many commodities. Just now Japan is making an energetic and promising drive in South America and in the Caribbean. POLICY OF EMPIRE. There are certain reefs against which this wave will break. Nationalism in the regions of China and India, where live a little less than one-half the world population, will even more in the future than in the past raise trade barriers while they develop similar industries. Japan has committed itself to a policy of “ Empire ” which carries the seeds of its own destruction, as should have been apparent to every statesman everywhere before the World War was finished and the spoils distributed. Even for the richest nations it was an expensive game, as expensive to play as it was unprofitable in the end. To become strong, Japan is already using up her own vital forces. So it will some day appear when even capital levies for war budgets are no longer possible; And Japan is not even a rich country, lacking, as does China, the metals out of which to forge a mechanical civilisation. Japan hag no capital surplus such as became the dower of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. Worst of all, as Professor John E. Orchard has repeatedly pointed out, Japan is, on the one hand, depending on the sale to fickle fashion of a luxury product, silk, and on the other, on selling to a vast area of low purchasing power the very products which the expected purchasers are even now learning to make for themselves. In short, the newness of the new Far East consists more in the instability of the new political constellations, not merely in Asia, but elsewhere, than in any essential changes of potentiality. There is no reason to believe that there has been any change in the basic causes, whatever they were, which several centuries ago divided mankind east and west, and favoured the latter with power.