The Far East

on the World Today

BRITAIN, in spite of dollar-hunger and trouble in Europe, has made a hardheaded and skillfully executed comeback in Asia. The diversity of British policy in different countries in Asia has led many to think that it is mere opportunism. It is not. It is in part the product of systematic thinking, stemming from the Fabian Society. In part it is a product of the Tory tradition that when a retreat has become inevitable, it is better to withdraw gracefully, just in time to give the impression of a voluntary agreement.

Churchill, in his attitude toward the inevitable, is of course a defiant Tory heretic. In the debate in Parliament on the agreement by which Burma becomes a republic— not even a dominion he said bitterly of the late U Aung San, nationalist leader of Burma, “I had not expected to see him, his hands dyed in British blood and the blood of loyal Burmese, march up the steps of Buckingham Palace as the plenipotentiary of the Burmese Government.”

It is true that U Aung San was both a political and a military collaborator of the Japanese. The attitude of the Labor Government toward him is an instructive combination of the British gift for pastel shadings in legal definitions and the British talent for closing a deal while the closing is good.

In dealing with U Aung San and his like, the British Government rules that if a man who is not a citizen but an unwilling subject collaborated with the enemy not solely for his personal advantage but with undeniable popular backing, and if later he turns up to negotiate with the British, still with a popular backing that cannot be wooed away from him, then he must be dealt with not as a personal quisling but as a representative of his people.

Burma, as an independent republic, will have a status somewhere between that of the Philippines as an American satellite and that of Outer Mongolia as a Soviet satellite. It will be a multi-national state, in which the British have helped to negotiate a favorable status for such minority peoples as the Shans, Karens, Chins, and Kachins. They will have a free voice in the federal government, while the power of the federal government to intervene in their territorial affairs will be constitutionally limited.

The new republic will stand outside of “His Majesty’s protection”; which means that the British are neither obligated to provide protection nor entitled to insist on offering protection; but British troops can be called back into Burma if both Burmans and British agree that security requires it. The British expect that the Burmans, having won maximum political concessions, will now lean heavily on them not only for military protection but for economic and technical aid.

The French hesitate

In Indo-China and Indonesia the French and the Dutch still doggedly deny both the British practice and the principle behind it. Ho Chi Minh of Viet Nam is conspicuously a man trained in the French tradition and the French culture. The political rights he has taught his people to demand are those which Frenchmen regard as the minimum definition not merely of freedom but of self-respect.

He turned toward Moscow years ago, following a gradually unfolding historical change: the French rule in Indo-China, after a period in which it had made the best French ideals available to the best minds of Indo-China, had barred the application of those ideals to the people of Indo-China as a whole. As it hardened from permitting equality for the few into prohibiting freedom for the many, French rule converted itself into “a machine for manufacturing Communists.”

The French cannot move with assurance in IndoChina until the de Gaulle problem is settled at home. De Gaulle in power would reach out with a firm hand to the French Empire; but de Gaulle on his way to power might shake France and ruin the effort to reconquer Indo-China.

These are questions that test the political acumen of Bao Dai, deposed Emperor of Annum, who after a period of good relations with the Viet Nam nationalists is now a political refugee in Hong Kong. He is dickering with the French, but his estimate of the situation can be gauged by the fact that he is holding out for much more real power and real independence than the French are willing to concede; and it is for this reason that the Viet Nam nationalists, though wary of claiming him as their own, have not denounced him.

Dutch squeeze

In trying to evade the issues of twentieth-century colonial politics the Dutch, like the French, have been forced back on nineteenth-century principles of action. In their “police action,” begun in July, they seized key points, lines of communication, and sources of raw materials, and gambled heavily on what used to be a reliable axiom — the assumption that in order to avoid being reduced to the level of the peasantry and the coolies, many educated natives capable of leadership, administration, and management would knuckle under and serve as auxiliaries.

The Dutch seemed at first, by their bold police action, to have turned the trick. They attained their announced objectives with what looked like shattering ease. The Indonesians were incompetent even in scorching the earth, barge stockpiles of rubber and other valuables fell into Dutch hands. Shipment of these spoils to America appeared to confirm that everything was under control.

But when the Dutch tried to force political recognition of their military victories the Indonesians hung on. The “details” of mopping up are beginning to seem more important than the “decisive” victories of July and August; and the Indonesians still hold oil fields they could severely damage.

The Indonesians are reacting as the Chinese did in 1937 in the face of Japanese aggression. They insist that before they will negotiate, the Dutch must withdraw to the lines from which they jumped off. Nationalist prestige is rising beyond the territory actually held by the Indonesian Republic. The indications point to a long period of confusion, with the Dutch squeezed between resistance in the territories which they do not control and rising demands on them, backed by increasing restlessness among the people, in the regions which they do control.

The U.S. subsidizes Japan

Farther north in Asia, American preoccupation with the problem of Russia continues to prevent the consideration of the problems of Japan, Korea, and China on their own merits. In Japan, the current is running to the right in the policies of the Japanese government, while an undertow is setting to the left in the labor movement. Both sides agree on the main premise: the test will come when the Americans go.

This dual trend reflects the personality of General MacArthur. More than any other American proconsul as he showed long ago in the Philippines — he has a sure instinct for the controls of power in a system of indirect government. The sensitivity of his fingertips to the feel of power is not matched by an equally sensitive tingling in his toes to warn him when there is danger of tripping over economic obstacles.

Japan’s industrial recovery is an illusion. The country is living on an American dole. Japan’s lopsided economy used to be kept up by blood transfusions from Formosa, China, Manchuria, and Korea. This tribute is now cut off, not only by Japan’s loss of empire but by economic chaos, civil war, and political paralysis.

Even America, which took that empire away, cannot now coördinate its resources with Japan’s economy. The operations of the U.S. Commodity Credit Corporation, shipments under the War Department budget, and other dollar transactions, combined with an admittedly arbitrary dollar-yen exchange rate, make it impossible to state the relationship between costs of imported raw materials, labor, and other manufacturing costs added in Japan, and the true competitive price of finished Japanese products.

When the occupation ends, America will have to decide whether to move from hidden subsidy of Japan to open subsidy, for political reasons. In an unsubsidized Japan there would be an immediate demand that the industrialists and landowners pay a far larger share of the costs of Japan’s fall from empire than they have yet had to pay. Such demands could only be made effective through a farmer-labor alliance, which is the aim of the leftists in the Japanese labor movement. Translate “farmer-labor” into “workers and peasants,” and Japan will be swung right into the clash between the American fear of Russian-backed revolution and the Russian dogma that all regimes backed or subsidized by America are proof of America’s imperialist expansion.

Deadlock in Korea

In Korea the clash is already undisguised. The strength of the American position is that large numbers of Koreans who do not like the present American political nominees are vaguely but deeply afraid of what might happen if the Russians and their friends were to take over.

The weakness of the American position is that the well-meant policy of encouraging private enterprise has encouraged a runaway black market. The black market has spread even into politics. Koreans are bitter about the men who played right along with the Japanese and are now active in Americansponsored politics. They are especially bitter about the way the Japanese-trained police, the most conspicuous traitors in Korea, have been retained and strengthened.

The weakness of the Russians is their weakness in every country they dominate. They live off the country—if not entirely, at least much more, and much more conspicuously, than the Americans do. They are hated by the former propertied classes, dreaded by most of the intermediate class of clerks, civil servants, shopkeepers, and small-scale employers like city tailors and housebuilders, and feared even by peasants who are rich enough to employ hired hands. Their strength is among industrial workers and miners, among peasants who have received land of their own, and among those technicians, bureaucrats, and management, personnel who have been given more power and responsibility than the Japanese ever allowed them.

In the United Nations, we have now won a votevictory over the Russians on our proposal for internationally supervised elections before withdrawing troops. The Russian proposal was to withdraw troops and leave the Koreans to themselves. The Russians, though outvoted, can boycott the American-sponsored procedure and keep the international observers out of Northern Korea.

The deadlock could be broken if the Russians should have sufficient confidence in the Korean army they have trained, to withdraw and leave it on its own. That would confront us with something like the Kuomintang-Communist situation in China, with the difference that in South Korea there does not yet exist, for us to back, a political and military organization with even as much cohesion as the Kuomintang, which has proved so inadequate in China.

No coalition in China

The situation in China is growing more and more discouraging. The Kuomintang troops, even with some degree of continuing American training and support, look more like factional armies and less like a national army with every month that passes.

The Communist forces are steadily hardening from guerrillas and militia levies into regular armies with good staff work and formidable American artillery, captured from the Kuomintang. Increasingly frequent purges on the Kuomintang side, affecting men of high military rank and political prominence, contrast with the fact that even the Chinese government propaganda is unable to claim the defection of important Communist leaders.

In Washington, Secretary Marshall has let it be known that he does not agree with parts of the report of General Wedemeyer, formerly one of his brightest military brain-trusters and recently the President’s hand-picked envoy to bring back the facts on China. The disagreement is part of a double conflict of views, between two groups of American experts in China and between the Administration and a Republican group in Washington. In China, one American view is that by and large the Chinese themselves must settle who has the tickee and who has the washee, and that America can influence the outcome but not predetermine it.

According to this view, the outcome must be a compromise, which means a coalition government, in which American influence can somewhat weight the Kuomintang representation but cannot freely dictate the proportions. This view is detectable in the Marshall Report of nearly a year ago, which pointed to an American policy of waiting until the stubborn Chinese rivals are again ready for mediation. The other view is that America can and should get behind the Kuomintang and push it to a victory which it is too limp to reach on its own legs.

Marshall gives way on China

Marshall has promised 300 million dollars to China, in installments of 20 million dollars a month, beginning next April. Marshall agreed to this expenditure in spite of his expressed opinion that there is “no firm basis” for rehabilitation in China while inflation is out of control and the civil war is devouring 75 to 80 per cent of the government’s income. He gave way in the face of Republican pressure typified by Vandenberg’s warning that “many members of Congress will consider the foreign aid program one-legged” unless China is included.

Policy in China has thus been transferred from the field of the expert on the Far East to that of the expert on Washington. The shadow of partisanship, in a presidential election year, eclipses the issue of soundness of judgment on what is actually happening in China.