The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

VAST changes have come about in the position of the Japanese Empire during the last year. We must recognize the political shifts which have occurred and face the difficulty of maintaining our positions in the East while our major attention is given to Europe. There can be no useful public discussion of the high strategy, openly stated at the Casablanca Conference, of dealing with Hitler First and Japan later, but such a decision implies two cautions which we can usefully keep in mind:—

1. The fact that we do not wish to have anything fundamental happen in the Far East does not mean that nothing will happen.

2. Our fortunes in the East —as indeed in the West — cannot be measured entirely by the progress of our armed forces.

The consequences of defeat or victory are never limited to the narrow areas in which they occur. It is easy to see that the freeing of the Mediterranean for Allied shipping changes the whole balance of naval forces and merchant shipping east of Suez. By the same token Japan’s political consolidation of her empire or the political distress of our allies in the East may change the whole balance of forces in Europe.

Japan’s real achievement during the last twelve months can be stated very simply. It consists in the slow and painstaking elimination of the political footholds which the United Nations retained in Japan’s newly conquered territories of the Pacific. At a time when Japan was flushed with victory and able to strike farther into our defenses, she did not choose to do so. She chose rather to construct within her “Co-prosperity Sphere” a stable political system.

Japan can still choose

To say that political construction has been Japan’s main effort during the last year is not to underestimate her military achievements. Some of the fighting, as in the Solomons, has been forced upon her, but most of it she has chosen to do herself. Japan today is still in a position to strike in several directions, and only the blindest optimism could shut our eyes to the still precarious position of Australia.

Our natural pride in the brilliant campaigns of our armed forces in the Southwest Pacific should not lead us to suppose that we are doing much more than holding our own. Japan has thrown up a ring of bases along the southern frontiers of her empire which can still be used for offensive as well as for defensive purposes. She holds China with fewer troops than she needed last year. In Burma the Japanese continue to show themselves masters of jungle fighting. In other words, Japan has lost very little on the military front.

What has been the nature of Japan’s political achievements? Certain things are becoming clear. She is having more success than we like to admit in crushing resistance in the territories once associated with the United Nations. We are losing touch with opinion in the Philippines, in the Netherlands East Indies, in Malaya, in Burma, and in the occupied parts of China. By ruthless methods Japan is cutting off the peoples of these areas from their former leaders, who find it more and more difficult to maintain dynamic political contacts with them.

Japan’s political formula

The secret of Japan’s methods is not so much to create a positive loyalty among the peoples of her empire as to crush political thoughts altogether and to substitute a few simple notions. These notions — hatred of the white man, unity of Asiatic peoples, Japan’s mission of liberation — can be reinforced with extravagant lies because there is no competition in news.

To understand the political climate within Japan’s empire today we have to keep in mind unpleasant facts. One is that Japan’s problem, compared with Germany’s, has been simple. Most of the people she has conquered were in large measure illiterate and without political self-consciousness.

In China and the Philippines Japan has met with tough political resistance. But can we assume that even in Occupied China the Japanese occupation has not accomplished some political victories? Can we assume that the opposition to Japan among the people of Occupied China — Japan probably controls nearly 200,000,000 Chinese-—is strong and well directed? Are the Japanese accepted passively? What changes have there been in Chinese attitudes during the past two or three years?

China is weary

The real point of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s speeches is that China has suffered as a result of over five years of war. Her people are weary of war, even if her government is no less determined than before to continue the struggle. Behind China’s concern for her position in the United Nations — for her share in the direction of the war, and more particularly in shaping the peace — lies the untalked-of assumption that China cannot, out of her own strength, mount a military offensive against the Japanese Army.

Most of the reasons for this condition are historical, the most important being the loss of Burma. Some of them are contemporary, such as the split between the government and the Communists. China’s armies have fought well with poor equipment, but no armies can fight on the miserable diet Chinese troops receive today. The ravages of diseases born of malnutrition are far greater than losses in battle. The demoralizing effects of inflation on the best of China’s potential leaders must be seen to be believed. Public health has practically disappeared, and education has been put back a generation. Only a people who could not compromise with the Japanese could have taken such punishment and remained in the fight.

Free China will always be with us, but it has suffered so much that we can no longer count with confidence on the life-giving impulses which it used to send into Occupied China. On the contrary, we have to reckon that there is some degree, at least, of Japanese success in these areas. How great it is we do not know, but the form the Japanese would like it to take is clear.

Co-prosperity marches on

Premier Hideki Tojo’s visits to the puppet regimes of the Japanese Empire are obviously designed to dramatize the concept of an East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. There have been many comings and goings in the Co-prosperity Sphere. Dr. Ba Maw of Burma followed Wang Ching-wei to Tokyo, while Premier Tojo capped his visit to Nanking with a trip to Hsinking, Manchuria. Vichy, Italy, Denmark, and Spain surrendered their “rights” in China. Control over traffic in the lower Yangtze has been returned to Nanking — at least on paper.

Japanese concessions result from careful calculation. All these moves to build up the prestige of Japan’s puppets are designed to impress upon the minds of the occupied peoples their partnership with Japan in the war against Anglo-American “domination.” This partnership, we need to remind ourselves, is offered by the dominant military power in Asia, whose military successes against the Anglo-American combination have not yet been reversed.

The puppet foreign minister in Nanking, Chu Min-yi, has already compared Nanking’s relations with Japan to those of France with Germany. Wang Ching-wei stresses that “China” can benefit from Japan’s “concessions” only by Japanese victory. Japan today is in a better position than in 1937 to make propaganda capital out of the real or imaginary grievances that Oriental peoples have harbored against the Western powers.

Given the economic and political situation in Free China, the dangers of Japan’s new propaganda line must not be underestimated. It will go far towards convincing the Japanese people at home that the “China incident” is practically over. Have not the Japanese seen Wang Ching-wei in Tokyo? Does not Premier Tojo move freely among the satellite capitals?

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Furthermore, during three years of puppet rule a large Chinese bureaucracy has been built up in Occupied China which has a vested interest in the puppet regime. It is easy for us to assume that the rightness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory must be apparent to all right-minded men in Occupied China, but such convictions are not maintained w ithout accurate information and active leadership. The Japanese are experts at suppressing both.

Japan learns a lesson

Japan at the least can count on creating political disunity. She has learned a few lessons in China. The most important lesson was that the Chinese can be controlled through Chinese, and not through Japanese, symbols. Japan’s early failure to ram down the throats of the people of North China the “kingly way” and other paraphernalia of Japan’s domestic political thought led to the line that Wang Ching-wei’s regime was the true heir of the Chinese Revolution.

Now, after years of joint struggle against England and America and the “renegade” Chungking government, in which Nanking’s puppet troops have taken part — and have been honorably mentioned in Japanese dispatches -—the new “ China ” has achieved the aims of the Chinese Revolution. Extraterritoriality, treaty port concessions, unequal treaties, subjection to Anglo-American domination — these are things of the past.

Why should any right-thinking Chinese, therefore, suffer with Chungking in a struggle which, should it end with the defeat of Japan, can only result in the continuation of Anglo-American “domination”? Or if not that, should not the Chinese seek protection against their neighbor to the west —Russia? It requires no knowledge of Chinese politics to understand that Japan’s propaganda is potentially dangerous. No wonder that the Chungking government is interested in the post-war status and relations of China.

Can Japan succeed?

Japan’s efforts to sell these ideas to the Chinese will depend for their success on many factors. One is obviously the extent to which she is able to bridge the gap between propaganda and action. This depends mainly upon the effectiveness of Japanese control. As in Formosa and Korea, Japan is capable of removing practically all trace of organized opposition. The cruelties and atrocities which went with conquest are forgotten, and the possibility of rebellion is but a memory. The only way in which Japan can be prevented from consolidating her political rule is by breaking down the isolation of conquered peoples from the intellectual currents of the world.

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Such a task requires two kinds of weapons. There must be powerful political weapons in the hands of those who fight Japan. Formulation and agreement — here is the difficulty, perhaps the greatest difficulty. It is not a matter of political compromises between Allies, but of dynamic social development and political rebirth. Because China is the key to politics in Asia, it is upon the social development of Free China that most of our hopes must be pinned in the battle of ideas against Japan.

The job of breaking through the Japanese news vacuum, of bringing to life peoples dulled by years of oppression, misled, trapped and tortured by vicious propaganda, tempted by promises and betrayed by sections of their own kind, is one of the most difficult that can be conceived. It grows more difficult as time goes on. Those upon whom this task falls must be sure of the direction in which they are going and confident that they have something to offer.

What can save China?

Premier Tojo is emerging as a very remarkable man. He appears to be accomplishing an extraordinary unification of Japanese administration as well as a restoration of discipline in the army.

In the Philippines and in China the Japanese are appeasing the rich. They are trying to organize the landed gentry behind Wang Ching-wei — and through them to control the peasantry. They tried this maneuver in North China after the invasion of 1937. But they failed then because the peasants found other leaders who organized them to resist and linked them to the struggle of the national armies against Japan. They failed because the landed gentry were no longer safe in their own districts if they did not resist Japan and had to flee to the occupied towns.

They will fail again if there are enough trained men to break the landlords’ ancient hold over the peasantry and to keep alive the hopes and courage of those worthy of a better fate than the social feudalism of Japan. Because China is the only country which can provide that leadership in the East, we need very much to see a revival in China of that magnificent spirit of 1938 and 1939, for this spirit can do what we cannot: it can destroy again, as it destroyed before, Japan’s numbing grip over the minds of Asia.