The Far East

ON THE WORLD TODAY

DAY to day reporting has blurred the distinctions between what politics is all about in the different countries of Asia. The distinctions are important, however, and before they are all pegged down, American approval, disapproval, or indecision will have far-reaching effects on many peoples.

American public opinion is still going on the assumption that the native nationalist movements in French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia are trying to win a minimum degree of recognition. But the Viet Nam Republic in dealing with the French, and the Indonesian Republic in dealing with the Dutch, are fighting out the validity of a quite different assumption. Both republics take the stand that they are already in possession of certain rights entitling them to exercise a number of the functions of sovereignty, and are fighting now to prevent these rights and functions from being whittled down by the returning troops and administrators of France and Holland.

In both countries this claim is founded on a formidable truth. When Japan fell, France and Holland had only token forces available for Asia. Acting on their behalf, the British raced for the colonial beachheads, to plant the flag of sovereignty. In both countries, in this touch-and-go phase, surrendering Japanese troops were actually ordered to fire on native nationalists, in the effort to prevent them from seizing control. In both countries American equipment was used for the same purpose, though in Indonesia the shamefaced request was made that the identifying marks be removed.

In spite of everything, however, the Viet Nam and Indonesian nationalists took over a measure of power that for a while was not only large but preponderant. The upshot was that in both nationalist republics the unassailable conviction was implanted that all that they had won, they had won for themselves, in spite of hell and high policy.

What was clear beyond misconception in both countries, however, was soon obscured from the outside world. First the Dutch and then the French negotiated agreements with the Indonesian and Viet Nam Republics. The agreements were general in character. Details were left to be worked out.

In working them out the French and Dutch, gradually recovering courage and banking on the fact that the ultimate sovereignty which is internationally recognized is still their sovereignty, have picked an issue on which to fight. That issue is the claim that the French or Dutch interpretation of an agreement is more authoritative than the native interpretation. It is to make good or to repudiate that claim that the fighting is still going on.

In Cochin China, for instance, the French are determined to maintain the option to arrange a plebiscite at such a time and under such conditions that that territory will not vote itself into the Viet Nam Republic, in spite of the fact that the majority of the population are known to be pro-Viet Nam. The nationalists are equally determined to force a decision that will result in incorporating Cochin China in Viet Nam.

The Dutch get tough with Indonesian trade

With the Dutch, control of the international trade of Indonesia, an anachronistic echo of the mercantilism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is one of the important prerogatives of sovereignty. When the Dutch, half-merchant and half-pirate, first wedged their way into the Spice Islands, they were quite ready to recognize the local rulers as rajahs. All they wanted was the monopoly of international trade.

Today, once more the Dutch are temporizing with the local sovereignty of the Indonesian Republic, but are getting tough with sea-borne trade. Indonesian vessels have been sunk at sight; Chinese vessels have been interfered with; even British ships have been nudged out of port before they could unload cargoes that might be of aid and comfort to the Indonesians,

Britain still holds the reins

In such countries as Malaya and Burma (he political center of gravity is differently placed. These two countries are not similar, but they resemble each other in one all-important point. They were taken over from the .Japanese by the British before the native nationalists could set up governments that had a claim to be going concerns.

In Malaya and Burma, consequently, the nationalist movements have not become, as in Indonesia and Indo-China, coalitions firmly knit together by the resolve to retain a power already won. The British still control the initiative. They can select those leaders with whom they prefer to deal. To an extent which allows a margin for maneuver, they can often weaken the association between a leader and his following by offering him a quantum of British patronage which compares favorably with the advantages he might win by serving the confused interests of his followers.

India is the widest, vaguest twilight zone in the world’s politics. The coalitions of men seeking power are so loose and unstable that the British wish they could tighten them up sufficiently to be able to deal with a firmer political texture.

To sharpen issues and prod the Indians into decisions, the British have tried to create a sense of urgency by making their schedule of withdrawal from India more definite. They have retained the initiative all along, but only if they can force the Indians to make proposals for workable compromises and adjustments can they use that initiative to advantage. The British believe that, once the Indians have decided that they really want things to work, it will be found that only with British coöperation will they work properly.

American aid down the Chinese drain

America still hesitates over renewing and increasing its support, for Nanking, which in its utterances is anti-totalitarian and pro-democratic, but in areas recovered from the Communists has been ruthlessly totalitarian and undemocratic. The trouble with the aid hitherto given has been that it was like running warm, invigorating water into an excellently designed tub, the plug to which the Kuomintang could never lay its hands on. Everything ran to waste.

In the Philippines, on the other hand, although the the Roxas regime may have no plug either, the tub is much smaller. It is possible that America could run enough aid through the tap so that even the Roxas government could not let all of it escape in waste. Thus American aid for the crushing of the Hukbalahaps and Philippine agrarian unrest might be a practical proposition at the same time that American aid for the crushing of the Chinese Communists and the prevention of Chinese agrarian reform is too expensive.

Subsidies for Korea

In Korea, the eventual outcome still seems to be a nip-and-tuck proposition, with perhaps more nip on the American end and more tuck on the Russian end. General Hodge, who has returned to America for consultations, believes that if we pour enough subsidies and other forms of aid into Southern Korea, we can eventually make the Russians give up and go home.

The Russians, on their side of the thirty-eighth parallel, are not putting a cent of subsidy into Northern Korea. Their bet is that they will be able to revive industrial production enough, out of local resources, and expand food production enough, through their land reforms, to satisfy the Koreans and make us give up and go home. The current conflict of opinion in Washington is between those who believe that the Russians are ruthless, but efficient enough to make good, and those who believe that the Russians are ruthless, but so inefficient that they cannot make good.

Many thousands of Koreans have fled from the Russian zone into the American zone. It is clear that this adds to the number of Koreans who would like the Americans to back them against the Russians; but it is not clear just how much it adds to the number of Koreans who really want the reforms that America considers a necessary minimum.

Japanese labor goes into politics

Japan is in a category apart. MacArthur tried to set a long-term trend early in the occupation when he made it clear that American policy would be to prune the upper class, maintain the middle class as the balance wheel of Japanese society, and give the working class a fair deal economically, but without, it was hoped, a political labor movement.

Economic pressures, however, have forced first labor issues and then the labor movement itself into politics. When MacArthur intervened to have a threatened genera] strike called off, he succeeded in preventing the direct application of labor’s power to a political issue; but the very fact that he had to resort to his immense personal prestige enhanced the political importance of labor.

The roundup shows that there is still a lot of confusion in coördinating American policy in Europe and in Asia. In the short interval between his return from China and his departure for Moscow, Secretary Marshall did not have time for the Augean task of cleaning the deposits of the European subdivisions of the State Department out of the Asiatic subdivisions.

In Abbot Low Moffat, who recently returned from a tour around Southeast Asia, Marshall has an aide who defies many decades of convention. An enlightened conservative, he has actually seen for himself something of the highhandedness and the underhandedness of colonial rule.

But the experts and subexperts on Britain, France, and Holland are still so strategically placed in the State Department bureaucracy that they can cut corners on the experts like Moffat who know most about Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, or Indo-China. And the old-line European experts, of course, get their views on Asia mostly from old-line Europeans.

Europeans who deal with policy are working overtime on the lack of cohesion in American policymaking, Franco has succeeded in placing a representative in the Philippines, in spite of the United Nations recommendation for withdrawing diplomatic representatives from Spain.

Van Mook looks ahead

Admiral d’Argenlieu made an appeal for a colorline axis which, considering the traditions of France, was rather startling. He thought that America ought to encourage the European empires to fence Asia in. Hubertus Van Mook, Governor General of the Netherlands East Indies, has come out with a cautious Dutch version of the Argenlieu appeal for American backing.

Van Mook believes that all problems of changing colonialism are so interwoven that they must be tackled as a whole, and cannot really be solved by uncoordinated deals between the British and their subjects, the Dutch and their subjects, and so on down the line. He is right, as he has often been. Dutch, British, and French alike are short of manpower and are living above their means in trying to keep up production for military purposes. All need to repair their non-military industry and put their manpower to work in it.

For all of them, consequently, the real “enigma within a riddle, wrapped in a mystery,” is America. If Asia is to be stabilized primarily by disciplinary methods, then America must nod approval. The minimum of approval must be credits, with the full knowledge that a large part of the credits will be shot out of guns. If, on the other hand, the real foundations of post-war Asia are to be laid by negotiation, then the negotiated changes will not stick and will not work unless America signifies approval by coming in to invest and trade.

But is American policy a line of action or a drift resulting from powerful but un-thought-out tendencies? Scour Washington today and what you will find is a> number of attitudes. The two most important recent “policy” statements on China, by President Truman in December and Cxeneral Marshall in January, are in reality statements of attitude. In the Truman statement the actual phrase “the American attitude” was used.

Business guides American policy

Other countries and peoples, desperately in need of American policies to help polarize their problems for them, but unable to come to grips with anything more definite than attitudes, now work increasingly on the one basic assumption which they do consider a solid truth. They assume that America is more business-minded than politics-minded. It is on this assumption that European countries which are trying to retain what hold they can in Asia emphasize the danger of “chaos,” which is ruinous to business.

On the same assumption, Asia’s nationalist and liberationist leaders are counting on their ability to hold out until the economic drain exhausts those who are trying to salvage as much of the old order as possible. Each side hopes that it will at last succeed in precipitating an American policy favorable to itself.

It is likely that this issue will soon come to a head in China. Nanking is trying to convince us that only a renewal of American intervention and subsidy can save China from chaos. The anti-government coalition led by the Communists, but increasingly supported by some regional interests and even some treaty-port businessmen, is sure that in the end we will be convinced that only an international agreement not to intervene, combined with a federalization of the government and recognition of the diversity of China’s provincial interests and political groupings, will get China out of the chaos that already exists.

We wind up with the fact that in America a businessman’s Republican Congress has the veto power over a businessman’s Democratic Administration. The upshot may be that in the Philippines, Korea, and perhaps Malaya, where credits and other expenditures, relatively speaking, would not be astronomical, we shall give the nod to patience and firmness to restore law and order by methods that are essentially police methods.

In such vast areas as China, India, and Indonesia, on the other hand, and in Burma and Indo-China, where American interests are rather vague, the costs of committing America to a definite policy and following through on it would be incalculable. In those countries we are likely to deal, in the end, not so much with what emerges from the violent upheaval of the new as with what is left after the creaking collapse of the old.