The Far East

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ASIA, like the rest of the world, has been profoundly affected by the great switch in Russian policy. The first startling manifestation was in Azerbaijan, where the Russians failed to contest a crackdown by the Iranian government which had strong American moral support. The complete lack of any Russian incitement of the Azerbaijanis to resist the Teheran forces was in the strongest possible contrast to the tough Soviet attitude last spring, when the withdrawal of Russian troops from Azerbaijan was delayed for two months.

On the eve of military action the Soviet Ambassador proffered a “friendly admonition” to Ahmad Ghavam’s Teheran government. According to one report (and it is remarkable how many reports from Iran read as if they were written by cloak-and-dagger alumni of General Donovan’s OSS or Colonel Schwartzkopf’s seminary for Iranian cops), a Soviet emissary then flew from Teheran to Tabriz to warn the Azerbaijanis that the jig was up. The American Ambassador, on the other hand, was quoted as believing that the use of troops was “quite normal and appropriate.” Prarda, in Moscow, called this an indication of “a desire to provoke armed conflict.”

From then on, the Russians straddled the issue, Jaafar Pishevari, the Soviet-trained Azerbaijanian leader, was apparently allowed asylum in Russia. The Soviet press showed concern over violence and murder in Azerbaijan, arrests of minority leaders all over Iran, suppression of their newspapers, and the breaking up of labor organizations; but at the same time the Baku radio tush-tushed the Azerbaijanian leaders for not compromising in time.

Are the Soviets in retreat? Does their retreat include repudiation of their satellites? On the other hand will Anglo-American policy accept the “soft” Soviet line as a bid for compromise, or will it tighten up control over British and American satellites and increase the pressure against Russia in both Asia and Europe?

American policy, at least for the time being, is triumphant. Russia has either been stopped or has stopped of her own accord in order to avoid a showdown with America.

How we subsidize Asia

American policy is, however, enormously expensive. Compared with any policy of neutralization and nonarmament (a different thing from disarmament), the project for control of Pacific islands and bases will entail expenditures in billions. Heavy industry and employment will benefit, but they will be engaged in sterile production.

In Japan, costs of the American occupation are running to a minimum of half a billion dollars a year; the figure is much higher if we add the depreciation of installations and equipment.

Japan, like Switzerland, has an industrially skilled population, marginal food production, a shortage of coal and iron, and plenty of hydroelectric power; but Japan is not solvent. To make Japan solvent, either the present largely fictitious capital values must be wiped out, by expropriation of the Zaibatsu corporate owners, or we must refinance Japanese industry with big American loans.

Our policy is heading straight toward the big-loan alternative because, in order to prevent confiscation of private property in Japan, we are willing to subject private property in America to the slow but debilitating drain of political loans.

In China our economic policy is much more important than our military policy, and the serious criticism of our unproductive political charity to China is now coming from banking, business, and industrial interests.

An example of the economics of Shanghai today is the fate of a single UNRRA shipment — a gift supposed to be put to immediate use for China’s rehabilitation. The story began with somebody’s idea of sending out some blacksmith’s equipment to make hoes and shovels, to help farm production. Chinese bureaucrats high-graded this idea into a five-million-dollar order of the most gadgetty modern machine tools. The stuff was then shipped to Shanghai, where it disappeared into warehouses.

Then the machinery began to change hands, week by week. Not one of the successive owners has even uncrated it. This valuable inventory simply serves as a medium of speculation in China’s jet-propelled inflation.

Our total economic subsidy to China, in money and goods, since V-J Day, now exceeds our three and three-quarter billion dollar loan to Britain and is running ahead at a rate which is likely to reach not less than a billion a year and perhaps two billion a year. Most of Nanking’s revenues are going into civil war. The effort to keep up civil war accounts for the accelerating decline in production. American financial aid, equipment, and goods account for the ability to keep up the civil war.

Republicans who like to purr contentedly over the project of a sharply reduced national budget should probe cautiously into our expenditures in the Pacific and Asia. They are likely to amount to a goodly slice of their dream budget, depending on how much is laid out for fortifications and how much for political loans and credits.

British worries

Britain has been more skillful in conserving as much as possible of her old position east of Suez than America in staking out new positions. But the British position is now deteriorating, because the scope of British policy is more and more curtailed by an American policy which decides which of Britain’s interests to adopt and which to override. The friction between American interests and British interests is consequently increasing, and the backlash of policy in Asia on politics in Britain is much more severe and painful than has yet been realized in America.

A sullen, obstinate deterioration of morale continues among colonial troops. The Indian Army, once a superb instrument of colonial policy, can no longer be used at will either in India or out of India, especially in Moslem countries. The use of Moslems against Moslems is politically dangerous. The use of Hindus, Sikhs, or Gurkhas against Moslems is becoming even more dangerous.

The touchiness among Indian troops that had not fought the Japanese prevented drastic action when Indian officers were court-martialed for serving in the Japanese-organized India Liberation Army in Burma during the war. Because of concern for Army morale, men who by ordinary colonial standards of discipline would have been summarily shot had to be let off with comparatively light sentences.

To the loss of enthusiasm among colonial troops there must now be added a growing resentment among British troops in England against beingshipped out for service in the Near East and Far East, a growing homesickness among British troops whose service in Asia has been protracted far beyond the end of the war, and a growing irritation among civilians against the continuation of conscription.

The latest symptom of trouble brewing has been a series of embarkation snafus among troops going aboard ship in England for service east of Suez. Refusal to go aboard ship has been based on protests against food and accommodations, and thus a showdown on the deadly word “mutiny” has been avoided both by the men and by the authorities.

The significance of the storm signal, however, has not been missed in England. After the First World War, the insistence of Winston Churchill on intervention in Russia roused at last that mulishness which is seen occasionally among the British, and is known as “fed-upness.” It was this fed-upness among his constituents which compelled Ernie Bevin, though he was as anti-Communist then as he is now, to organize strikes which crippled Churchill’s anti-Russian policy. He had to give the labor unions the leadership they demanded, or be superseded by some other leader.

That cycle is now repeating itself, but with Bevin as Foreign Minister in the place of Churchill, and with R. H. S. Crossman as leader of the opposition within the Labor Party in the position of Bevin. Crossman is as anti-Communist as Bevin ever was; but he is close enough to the men and women who vote to realize that he must give them what they want or be discarded. What they want is what they wanted a quarter of a century ago: an end to what they are convinced, rightly or wrongly, is an anti-Russian policy that is keeping the boys from coming home and preventing post-war recovery in England.

Little Kuomintangs

Intervention within Asiatic states is thus compelled to look for military resources, as well as political sympathy, within the society which is being subjected to intervention, which means reliance on class conflict. In the recent campaign in Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijanian autonomy movement was first split by bringing over to the government side large landowners and tribal chieftains with armed forces of their own. It was these private forces which settled local political scores by tracking down and killing all peasants who had defied feudal authority.

The result, restoring the control of landowners and a prosperous urban minority over a nation of peasants and shepherds, confirms in a striking way the tendency toward use of a Kuomintang type of satellite political party in Asiatic states. The trouble with these “ Kuomintangs ” throughout the Middle and Far East is that they are insatiably corrupt. They can drink up incredible quantities of American money in loans and credits, and their party boys have quite an appetite for automobiles, refrigerators, and porcelain plumbing; but the peoples they rule never seem to prosper or to develop really large markets for American-made goods.

Ferment in Asia

In India a rapid deterioration is going on which undermines the apparent gains made by AngloAmerican policy in the Near East. The more sensational aspects of threatening civil war between Hindus and Moslems distract attention from the two real keys to the situation; India is no longer a dependable base for use against the growing industrial and economic power and political stability of the Soviet position in Central Asia, and at the same time the Russians do not have to spend either money or manpower to keep the pot boiling in India.

An interesting symptom of British loss of confidence in India is the changing balance in capital reserves and ownership of enterprises. During the war, India exported heavily to support the British war effort, and thus accumulated huge sterling credit balances which were frozen in London, because the British simply could not afford to pay them back freely.

Using control of these funds as leverage, the British could have kept control over the industrialization of India. But far from advancing confidently toward new enterprises, the British are even pulling their own capital out of stable enterprises of the old colonial type, such as tea plantations, which Indians are willing to take over as a hedge against inflation.

Indonesia and Indo-China are now conspicuous as the two important Asiatic countries in which the attempt to set up a Kuomintang type of indirect control has failed. The Dutch have 100,000 men in Indonesia, but the British estimate that it would take another 50,000 men even to begin to force on the Indonesians decisions which the Indonesians resist. The Dutch still hope, by protracting final negotiations to 1949, to bring some of the more conservative Indonesians over to their side. On the other hand the Indonesian coalition, by a tough policy of bluff and force, has gained confidence and built up cohesion.

It is ironical that while the Dutch borrowed the “colonial federation” idea from the French in IndoChina in order to head off Indonesian demands for full independence, the French are making a last appeal to force and intimidation in the hope of not having to concede as much in Indo-China as the Dutch have in Indonesia. The time limit on France’s efforts to capture full control in Indo-China is being set by the rate at which the de Gaullists of militant persuasion are losing ground in France.

The French in Indo-China are still dominated by Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, a priest who returned to the armed forces for the war against Germany, and an exponent of the de Gaullist mystic authoritarianism. The dispatch of the famed General LeClerc to support d’Argenlieu increased bloodshed without leading to a solution. LeClerc is much too tough and implacable to handle the modern type of colonial nationalism.

The great Russian switch

In turning to a cautious estimate of the Russian policy switch, it would seem that we can at least say that Russian expansion is no longer the major issue. But the Russians are not in a weak position. America now holds the initiative, with a not altogether willing Britain in tow; but it is America which now has to run the gantlet of liberal criticism throughout the Western democratic world, and of suspicion throughout Asia.

Both Iran and Turkey are busily suppressing labor organizations, opposition parties, and newspapers; and Iran and Turkey are America’s friends, not Russia’s. In China it is America’s friends, not Russia’s, who are receiving aid and arms. And in India and Southeast Asia the friends of liberation and self-government cannot be suspected of being American puppets.

It may be that the Russians have withdrawn themselves as the spearhead of opposition to American and British policy because they are banking on the ability of local, largely non-Communist oppositions, in Asia and in Europe too, to dish up more trouble than Britain is willing to stomach or America to continue to pay for indefinitely.

The two major political determinants in Asia now are the slow frittering away of British power and the rapid expenditure by America, in political boondoggling, of sums surpassing the imagination. The next development will take the form of a British effort to get out from under.