PROBLEMS IN ASIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 1, 2 January 1929, Page 10

PROBLEMS IN ASIA

NEW “MONROE DOCTRINE” JAPAN AND MANCHURIA NEW YORK, Dec. 24. That Japan is studying the Monroe Doctrine especially in regard to the relations between United States and Nicaragua, was a statement made by Mr Chester Rowell, a California publicist, before a body known as the Foreign Policy Association, at its tenth annual reunio'n. He expressed the view that Japan might undertake to construct such a doctrine o£ her own for Manchuria. Mr Rowell asserted that “the white man could not continue to rule some part of Asia and dominate others.” He said that Japanese, Chinese and Hindus were being taught nationalism at American universities, that one of the first steps of that nationalism was an “anti l foreignism, ’’ and that Orientals observed that “the white man set himself up as a social superior everywhere, that is, except in Japan.”

“In Japan we treat the Japanese in terms of equality,” Mr Rowell added. “The Chinese avow we do not do this out of justified respect for the qualities of the Japanese civilisation and of the Japanese people. The Chinese have equally high qualities, but they do not get equally considerate treatment. They know perfectly well that it is because the Japanese have a strong Government and a great army and navy. George Washington did not warn us against entangling alliances in. Asia. An Asia awakening- politically’, industrially an(! socially confronts us, for our good or our harm. Whatever happens there we shall not escape involvinent. “Asia faces new problems which in Europe and America arc old. There arc problems which we in the past have solved only by war. Unles Asia shall , better our example, unless it shall j adapt its thought and its institutions to I the new world more rapidly that j America has done, it will inevitably solve them in war also. And, since the ■ world has become a city, there is al- I ways the danger that a fire anywhere ! may become a conflagration. “America, for itself, could, if necessary, isolate itself for the new organi-

sation of the world. It might thereby contribute to shrinking the League of Nations into a European organisation. Europe, by itself, could perhaps survive that, too. But Asia could not. And the rest of us might find it hard to stand under the consequences of isolating Asia to solve its new problems in the old way. M