The Far East

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THERE is, for the moment, no center of gravity in Asia. China was the center of gravity up to the end of the Marshall mission; but events in China are not decisive now. The policy of “containing” Russia by control of Greece and Turkey, which block access to the Mediterranean, and by a stepped-up program in Southern Korea, which partially blocks Russia’s access to the Pacific, leaves untouched the vast continental region in between.

Between the Dardanelles and Korea there is no part of Asia that cannot be devastated by aircraft and guided missiles. The new, hyperdestructive methods of warfare threaten instant paralysis in a war between industrialized nations.

Beyond the narrow coastal fringes of Asia there are large potential resources and large populations, but there are no nerve centers to paralyze. Life goes on in a honeycomb of small-scale economic units. In this context, use of the new weapons would burn to a crisp potential customers and workers, but would not ensure the control of raw materials.

The race for the control of Asia will be a marathon, not a sprint. While the great powers are trying to work out methods for coördinating the new military values with suitable devices for long-range economic control and political operation, Asia is trying to determine its own center of gravity. There may be a considerable interim period in which there will be several centers of gravity.

Asia under new management

At the Inter-Asian Relations Conference at New Delhi, India made a bid to supersede China as the most important country in Asia. Southeast Asia also made its bid for increased importance. The Vietnamese, in whose country continuing military action is most acute, were emotionally the heroes of

the Conference, while Sutan Sjahrir of Indonesia, whose country has passed from successful military defense of its status to a considerable degree of success in political negotiation, was recognized as an Asiatic protagonist of international stature.

An index to changing values in Asia was the fact that the Chinese Government delegates conspicuously failed to take a leading place either as representatives of an independent structure of power in Asia or as moral leaders of the cause of Asia as a whole. They scored a point procedurally but lost morally by insisting that on the huge display map of Asia the boundary line between Tibet and China be erased.

The Chinese thus buttressed the legal claim that the relationship of China to Tibet is one of overlordship, not of voluntary or federal unity. But the legal point was undermined by the fact that the Tibetans were represented by their own delegation, not chosen or controlled by the Chinese.

Is there an octopus in Asia?

Geographically, the search for a center of gravity was widened by the inclusion not only of Tibet and independent Outer Mongolia but the Soviet Asiatic Republics which have common frontiers with Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and China. Never before have these republics been participants in an international conference without being supervised by Russians.

The presence of these non-Russian Soviet delegates was regarded by some specialists as a portent of future Russian infiltration into the politics of India and other countries in Asia. There is, however, a split in well-informed opinion as to the future prospects of Communist political movements in Asia.

Specialists who are primarily grounded in the history of the Comintern and of Communist movements in the West are looking for evidence that the abolished Comintern has been superseded by some secret political general staff in the Kremlin.

Experts whose grounding is in the study of Asiatic political issues from within Asiatic countries are inclined to believe that Communism is much more on its own in Asia than it is in the West. They argue that the examples and precedents in the history of Chinese Communism are more important in Asia as a whole than the study of Russian Communism.

Wartime collaboration

India itself is an important test case. During the war-at least after the German attack on Russia — the British welcomed the Indian Communists as collaborators and found them valuable. Both in putting out propaganda and in gathering intelligence, the Communists had a unique opportunity to infiltrate Indian life. Excellent illustrated material, the spread of which was promoted by the British themselves, for the first, time gave large numbers of Indians visual evidence of economic, social, hygienic, cultural, and scientific achievements in the Soviet Asiatic Republics.

The British intention was to convince Indians that the war was one in which Asiatic and European peoples had a common interest. One by-product of this propaganda was a greatly increased belief among Indians that Russia really has something to offer to backward Asiatic countries.

On the other hand, the wartime collaboration also gave British Intelligence an opportunity to counterinfiltrate the Indian Communist movement. In this operation the odds were heavily in favor of the British, whose highly trained operatives greatly exceed in number the few well-educated and really skilled Indian Communist leaders. On the basis of the knowledge thus gained, the British, while continuing for international purposes the propaganda against “Moscow inspiration,” are for practical purposes concentrating their police attention on organizers who show local initiative.

American policy is likely To succeed

In colonial Southeast Asia the whole Russian issue is at its most remote. Here American policy, while shunning publicity, has been active, firm, and encouragingly successful. We have consistently discouraged the use of force and encouraged voluntary agreements to bring out genuine good will on both sides. The State Department premises its policy on several convictions. Direct colonial controls and administration, it is convinced, cannot be restored.

The future position of the former rulers can be graded according to their promptness in recognizing the shape of things to come. The French, who tried the hardest to hang on the longest, will lose most. In Indo-China, where rightist authoritarians like Admiral d’Argenlieu had a free hand for too long, they are pretty well washed up.

The Dutch, whose military also tried to grab more than they could consolidate but were somewhat restrained by the farsighted civilian Van Mook, will be able to salvage a great deal; but they will have to salvage it in the form of a series of partnerships to which the Indonesians willingly agree. Controls backed by force will no longer work.

The British are likely to be in the best position of all. They alone have followed a double policy of reaching out for trade advantages in other people’s colonies while surrendering a considerable degree of control in their own. While recognizing the necessity of a descent from the heights of sahibdom in their own domains, they have seen an opportunity for a new kind of hegemony, indirectly exercised.

Virtually every colonial possession will attain a new status marking a stride, long or short, toward true independence. None of them will quite know what to do with that status. Each new country will deal largely with the country which formerly ruled it, because in spite of the legacy of hard feelings, the old rulers know best how to get things running again.

New interests

There is, however, also a great need for secondary coördination between all the new governments, no matter under what flag they were formerly ruled. They have a wide range of overlapping interests in the kinds of colonial produce and raw materials which they export. They already feel the need of cooperation and are wary of being “tricked,” as they see it, into forms of competition that will weaken them and restore the strength of their former rulers.

It is this form of coördination which the British hope to capture. If they succeed, they will gain a profitable ascendancy in shipping, banking, insurance, and in a new, streamlined generation of British agents in key advisory jobs.

The American view supports the British view. It is felt that the urgent need is to retain and strengthen voluntary forms of association between the colonies and their former rulers, and to make moderation profitable enough to retain moderate nationalists in control of the new governments. Extremist and Communist movements are only rudimentary in all these countries, but the continued or renewed application of force would strengthen them.

Viet Nam is considered an object lesson. It has a tiny but very tough core of Communists, because the cruelty of French repression over the past twenty years made it inevitable that those revolutionaries who survived would be men of outstanding ability.

American business is wary

American policy has encouraged the stand taken by the Indonesians in claiming that they have the right to sell, without control by the Dutch, rubber grown and tin mined while the Dutch were absent from the islands. The American attitude was emphasized by limited recognition of the Indonesian Republic.

American private enterprise is going along with the official policy, but rather unevenly. Straight commercial concerns are going right ahead. The boldness of one shipping line in dealing directly with the Indonesians before the Dutch had partly abandoned their tough line resulted in an incident which enabled the State Department to let the Dutch know, quietly, that they were being unreasonable.

Interests like oil and mining, on the other hand, still have their fingers crossed. They deal in huge investments for installations, and like to feel that they can count on stability for a long term of years. They fear that new governments such as that of the Indonesian Republic may go in for a degree of nationalized control that oil men are nervously ready to call “communistic.”The State Department hopes that the sale of stockpiled export commodities will stabilize the new governments enough to make them look respectable to long-term oil and mining investors.

Put and take in Korea

Marshall and Molotov, at Moscow, warily agreed to reopen negotiations which may abolish the hermetic border which separates North and South Korea. The differences have been more than ideological. America, a wealthy country, tends to assume that any situation can be handled if enough credits and commodities and food are pumped in. Russia, a poor country, is forced to do what can be done on the spot with the materials available on the spot, and even to take out wealth instead of putting in wealth.

Necessity, as well as ideological preference, leads the Russians to liquidate opponents first, and then give a fairly free hand to those who are left. The Americans, with strength and wealth to spare, practice democracy by giving a free field to all comers; but if the results are not satisfactory, we intervene to restore the balance in favor of democracy.

The American assumption is that there is discontent in North Korea because the peasants, though given land, were saddled with drastic crop requisitions. A great deal depends on whether the Russian takehome is as heavy as the former Japanese take-home. If it is not, then Korean satisfaction with the acquisition of land and the nationalization of industry may offset grumbling against heavy requisitions.

The Russian assumption is that although the Americans in South Korea have been handing things out instead of taking things away, too much of the handout has been intercepted and hoarded by Koreans who are disliked by the majority as former collaborators with the Japanese. There is enough that is correct in the calculations of both sides to make unlikely an overwhelming tide in favor of either one.

Up the Chinese garden

The prevailing official opinion in Washington is that China can be straightened out by a judicious program of rewards and punishments. The appointment of the conservative but moderate Chang Chun as Premier is regarded as a step in the right direction. It should, according to the neo-Confucian theory, be rewarded by a cautious opening of American purse strings — a little loan, say, for some specified and worthy project in the rehabilitation of an industry or the repair of a railway.

Then, if the good step is followed by another good step, another cautious opening of the purse strings. If not, then hold back the money and wait until there is another good step.

A minority of weary cynics maintain that the trouble with this program is that the Kuomintang bosses know all about it. As the experienced Tillman Durdin (who acted for a time as a special adviser to General Marshall in China) reported to the New York Times, recent government “reforms” have been wholly for the purpose of publicity abroad. In China, as in Greece, the government we support has a joker it can always play. If everything else fails, an alarming military setback will bring Washington rushing in.

The civil war itself is dragging along at that level of chronic indecisiveness possible only in China. The longer it drags on, the greater would be the effort required if America should decide at last to try to push the Kuomintang over the scoring line.

Most overlooked development: the Hakkas. The Hakkas are a warlike people who live on poor farms in hilly country south of the Yangtze. Their principal export is mercenary soldiers and professional officers. They played a big part in the Taiping Rebellion and in the triumph of the Kuomintang over the Northern militarists in 1926.

Hakka generals, excluded from the inner military clique of the Kuomintang, are now busily building a strip of power south of the Yangtze, based on the retraining of Hakka militia. They are hostile to the Kuomintang and willing to enter a coalition with the Communists if they can persuade Li Chai-sum to represent them politically. Li Chai-sum, a Kuomintang elder statesman and close associate ot Sun Yatsen, is now in retirement in Hongkong.