PROBLEM OF CHINA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22000, 5 January 1935, Page 9 (Supplement)

PROBLEM OF CHINA

AN INFORMATIVE BOOK

An informative hook concerning the present unrest in China and the causes underlying it has been written by Mr. 0. D. Rasmussen under the title of " The Reconquest of Asia." The author has spent his life in China and so writes with first-hand knowledge. Every phase of the conflict between East and West is dealt with in an enlightening manner. Although the sympathies of the author arc with the Chinese, he is scrupulously fair to both the Japanese and those Western nations which have penetrated China. The scope of the book is so wide that it woi.ld be impossible to give here any adequate outline of it. Jt may, however, be said that the volume is well worth the serious attention of both the general reader and the student of international affairs. Mr. Rasmusscn believes that the West has never been told the truth about China, and for this he largely blames the Concession English-language press, the writers of which were also the correspondents of the overseas newspapers. " Editors." he writes, " who could not read, write or speak Chinese wrote confidently of China's civilisation and psychological reactions to various political systems." He accuses writers —safe from Chinese libel laws behind the walls of extra-territori-ality—of evading the facts and distorting the truth to serve their own, interests. Such methods, it should be said, met with the disapproval of the British officials in China on more than one occasion. The author also frankly admits that scores of the grievances ventilated in the local press were genuine. He blames not so much the individual as the system of which the. individual is part. Since 1927, thanks to independent writers, the world has begun to get closer to the truth. The author is of the opinion that no inducements held out by Japan under a Pan-Asiatic Utopia would ever attract the Chinese as would sovereign independence. Thus, the one gesture by which tlie West could prevent China from joining Japan in an antiwhite hegemony would be voluntary relinquishment of the domination-by-treaty doctrines and the substitution of pacts based on racial and political equalitj r . Even as late as 1934 he thinks that the West still held this power to frustrate a rampant PanAsianism —a chance to maintain goodwill and retrieve something permanent from the ashes .of a dead system—but it remained obstinately indifferent. Japan, politely defiant and not a little contemptuous of the White Horde which has played into her hands, he considers, is to-day going ahead with plans for another empire—" another insane attempt to make different races think alike politically."

" The Reconquest of Asia, " by O. D Rasmussen. (Hamish Hamilton.)