JAPAN'S FOREIGN POLICY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21708, 25 January 1934, Page 15

JAPAN'S FOREIGN POLICY

Sir,—After some years of residence in North China, particularly during the months succeeding the Japanese attack on Moukden and the Northern Chinese Provinces, it is disappointing to find 011 one's return to New Zenland that you, in company with many other English-speaking journals, are still advocating the very dangerous theory that "Japan, if allowed and aided, may do better than the West" has dono in promoting peace in Eastern Asia, and may perhaps bring order out of chaos in China. To the average Britisher —with his admiration for law and order, and without any real knowledge of conditions existing throughout China to-day, or of the facts of the past 35 years of her history, and of the appalling problems that her few really progressive leaders have had to face —it is quite an attractive dictum that "the efficient little Jap." should be given a free hand to deal with that great country as the Japanese Government intends to. because he (the Britisher) considers the result is pretty certain to be order out of chaos. But to some of us who have the honour to know many educated Chinese gentlemen in their own country pretty intimately, ami who are proud of them as friends for their many splendid qualities, this theory is appalling in its heartlessness as a policy of futility, and fraught with incalculable consequences for the peace and progress of the human race. To mention just a few of the fallacies involved: —(1) It completely ignores the fact that the Chinese revolution against her medieval Imperial regime is only 23 years old —a revolution which is still incomplete as regards national customs, written language, illiteracy, etc., and which was handicapped in its infancy by the world upheaval of 1914. (2) The universal spirit of intense national feeling which has swept all races since 1914, and which is exceptionally strong among the Chinese students, who have learned a great deal that is true and much that is exaggerated about what their country has suffered at the hands of the Western Powers and Japan, when she was completely helpless to resist. The Chinese student is a voracious reader, and his libraries are now stocked- with an extraordinary amount of Western literature of all grades, good and bad. Peace-loving as the Chinese character is. we can no longer expect Young China to stand silently, without a protest, and watch his country being experimented on in methods of maintaining peace by either Western nations or Japan, whoso first consideration is obviously the exploiting of Chinese trade and wealth. (3> The effects of Japanese conquest and government in Korea, which pproximately coincides in time with the foundation of the Chinese Republic, have certainly been to bring a certain amount of order out of chaos in that country, but at the cost of binding the unfortunate Koreans in a servitude they have no escape from, and by completely denationalising the younger generation, and by appropriating their lands. C. W. Parr.