ELBOW-ROOM IN THE EAST

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 15314, 15 August 1923, Page 4

ELBOW-ROOM IN THE EAST

The statement may often bo heard that Japan looks longingly at Canada, Australia and South America as liclds for expansion. Tin's is, no doubt, partially correct, but it is not true, though Westerners believe that it is, that there is no further elbow-room in the East. There is a great deal of land in the East which is capable of carrying ten times as many people as it now holds. So great an authority as Professor .1. W. Gregory, at present of the University of Glasgow, but formerly of Melbourne, and at one time or another on most of 1 lie important surveys of geographical expeditions of modern science, says that Asia's claim on Australia has, ami can have, no moral basis as long as there are fertile areas nearer home still undeveloped. Having travelled recently with liis son through Northern Burma and Soulli-Western China, the Professor has returned to Scotland convinced that what Japan and China want is not room to breathe, but a plcasanter kind of pioneering than subduing unoccupied territory or competing with labour as cheap as their own. "The disappointment in Australia" with Asiatic immigrants during the "long period in which the continent was open to llicm was that Ihey "would settle only in the unoccupied districts, and would give no material "help in breaking in new land." It is much easier to compete with people who require more comfortable conditions of life than to attempt to under-sell labour which accepts lower standards. In his first march inland from lihamo Dr. Gregory entered virgin forest which "came up to the road except for a few clearings around the "scattered villages." lie found vast areas supporting fewer than 20 people to the square mile, though Uie soil was

capable of almost any crop and any degree of intensive cultivation. In one area of 4000 square miles, most of it. enormously rich, the cultivated lands were less than one per cent. And even in China , which most suppose to lie crowded beyond all hygienic limits, the travellers found "large areas of good country still inadequately peopled." The province of Yunnan, the second largest in the land, has an ofliciai population of 53 to the square mile, but an actual population, the Professor says, of at most 30, and since most of the inhabitants are gathered in the south and east. Dr. Gregory believes that the western districts of this vast area have no more than ten people to the square mile. His conclusion after much travelling and close observation is that China can expand both West and South, that there is plenty of mora for Japanese emigrants on the eastern borderland of the continent of Asia, and that the land-hunger of the East often means little more than that most Orientals would prefer to settle as markel-gar-dencrs in the suburbs of a large Australian city than in a remote valley in Yunnan. It is possible that Dr. Gregory pushes his argument as far as his facts will allow him, but at all events he deals with an aspect of the question that is sometimes disregarded, and is worth remembering when references are made to the cramped and congested millions of Far Eastern countries.