New Frontiers in Asia

EVIDENCE accumulates that American interest in Pacific affairs will long outlast the more immediate consequences of victory. This interest is emphasized not only by an alert attention to the evolution of our policy respecting China’s place in post-war Pacific Asia; it is equally evident in our nation’s plans for Pacific bases and in the discussions relating to Japan’s future. For the first time since the days of the old China trade and the clipper ship, the vast, intricate problems of the Pacific world stir popular imagination and economic curiosity simultaneously.

One stumbling block that has hitherto slowed progress in understanding the Orient has been the casual character of our diplomacy toward Asia. Even so recently as the Hurley affair, there has been testimony to the persisting hang-over of old-fashioned ideas among our policy makers. Of the social and economic forces at work among Asia’s billion and a half human beings, little seems to have been officially known of them, and there has been only scant appraisal of their importance.

Brilliantly written, richly informed, bold in its challenge to the common sense of the West, New Frontiers in Asia is at once a warning and an appeal. The warning is set down in unmistakable fashion. Its gist is that the days of the old colonialism are finished, and the sooner all holders of imperial preserves in Asia recognize that fact, the better for all concerned.

No recent book on the Orient provides a more expert and cogent analysis of present political and social realities than the reader will find in these pages. Few critics of imperialism have performed a more workmanlike job of laying bare the inner impulses and consequences of the system. In the successive studies of India, China. and Japan which form the body of this volume, and in the two penetrating studies of Britain’s and Russia’s Asiatic policies which complete the book, Mr. Jaffe moves with confident familiarity.

New Frontiers in Asia is, however, much more than a warning to the West to mend its ways. It is a study of the relationships between the advanced industrial powers and the vast, undeveloped Oriental world, and the author seeks to chart a course of accommodation of mutual interests between them.

Mr. Jaffe’s thesis, dramatized against the background of surging nationalisms, is that progressive industrialization of Asia, through the coöperative assistance of the Western powers, promises prosperity for both and offers the only hope for preventing a fundamental division of the world into two armed camps. The industrial development sorely needed by India, China, and other Asiatic peoples is bound to proceed, whether or not an archaic and a frightened European imperialism seeks to thwart it. The Asia depicted in these pages is in no mood for continued quiescence. Mr. Jaffe foresees the teeming peoples of the greatest of continents, with other help denied them, turning to Russia.

The authority which the author brings to this whole subject is immense. As editor of the outstanding journal on Asiatic affairs published in this country, Amerasia, as an inveterate traveler throughout the regions he discusses, as an expert in politics, and as a superbly equipped economist, he merits attention. A specially notable quality of his book is its excellent temper.

JAMES H. POWERS