Peace or War in the East?
Carter, John
PEACE OR WAR IN THE EAST? By JOHN CARTER THE world's greatest poker game is being played today. The table is eastern Asia and the chips are bills of lading and invoices. The cards are the...
...The trade of the most densely settled continent is worth having...
...To say that Asia stands at the cross-roads today is a truism...
...We took the right course with Japan and today we find that the trade which once came to us through London, now comes to us direct and that we are accordingly able to make of that trade a bulwark of prosperous and peaceful power in eastern Asia...
...We set out in 1916 to build a navy capable of defending our commercial intercourse with Asia, and we have been uneasy about it ever since...
...We have doubled our share of the imports of British Malaya and of India, and we now supply over half of all Philippine imports...
...As it is, where we find other nations in physical possession, we must evolve a set of political principles which will not involve a direct challenge to the status quo...
...valuable vegetable products like jute, rubber and camphor...
...We must find some means of reconciling our instinctive sympathy for self-determinant nationalism with a political dispensation which, though apparently opposed to our predilections, rests upon a highly complex racial and social situation...
...Possession of the Philippines enabled the United States to enunciate the policy of the Open Door as the second basic American foreign policy...
...If there is anything to the argument that trade precludes war—and there is— the Japanese-American trade of $700,000,000 a year is a potent force for peace in the Pacific...
...In fifteen years we have tripled our share of Ceylon's imports and have more than tripled our share of the imports of the Indies...
...Every major nation in the world is rolling its eyes with commercial greed toward the imperialistic district...
...commercial enterprises, such as the Japanese fishing industry and the Chinese trading communities of Malaya: these indicate the special economic qualities of the far East...
...If we take the wrong turning we may miss our political destiny...
...before the war we suplied 16 percent of Japanese imports...
...the India of Rudyard Kipling is still eyeing the Khyber Pass and looking with dispassionate curiosity at a man named Gandhi...
...before the war we purchased 9 percent of China's exports...
...Japan's 70,000,000 do upward of $2,000,000,000 worth of trade a year...
...The cards are the 700,000,000 people of eastern and southern Asia...
...We are apt to forget that it also means that we stand at the cross-roads...
...Chinese merchants are dominating the trade of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and are spreading south into the Pacific...
...We may grant that the imperialistic nations collect their fees in the shape of economic or commercial advantage...
...Our economic influence in the far East may be preponderant in another generation, or it may be negligible...
...We are feeling our way in China...
...otherwise, the temptation to economic aggression would be uncomfortably powerful...
...that is not to argue that their "victims" are worse off in consequence...
...Moreover, knowledge of the Orient is the beginning of political wisdom...
...today we supply over 25 percent...
...It has compelled us to think intelligently on the subject of sea power, to study the points of view of races alien to ours, to learn that good intentions are no substitute for a practical sense of responsibility...
...Japan which twenty years ago was the bugaboo of our naval alarmists is today one of our best customers...
...Once again, it is important to remember that statistics are not the best guide to the future...
...Their trade, profitable though it is to certain commercial circles, does not begin to repay the cost of conquest, defense and administration...
...AH Asia is being shaken with nationalism...
...Every year the value of the Asiatic jackpot increases...
...In 1913, we took a third of Philippine exports...
...If India with her 320,000,000 souls were to do foreign trade on a scale comparable to that of the United States—which is by no means dependent on trade in the sense that the united kingdom is dependent—India's foreign trade would amount to $25,000,000,000 a year...
...We can discover the right course only by experience and patience...
...What wonder the thinkers of our "forward" naval school are urging us to turn our backs on Europe and to cultivate the Pacific...
...In other words, it takes two to make an empire...
...It is in China that the game is being played most strenuously today...
...Possession of the East Indies has enabled Holland to survive eclipse as a world power and to remain the most economically stable of European countries...
...and the red bear walks like a commissar on the marshes of Mongolia...
...Chinese immigrants are today dominating the economic life of Manchuria so completely that in another decade the stake for which Russia and Japan have striven for thirty years as an outlet for their peoples, will be a Chinese province...
...Commercially, the Islands are almost an embarrassment to us...
...In other words, we are obtaining a constantly increasing share of the constantly expanding markets of the far East...
...Empire does not always reflect simple superior brutality...
...Work on the Singapore base proceeds and proposals to demilitarize the Philippines died aborning at London...
...Before the war, we bought 29 percent of Japanese exports...
...The world will not easily forget the fate of those who assumed that the Japanese were equally easy prey to European military intervention...
...So long as Japan must live by trade, it can hardly ignore the fact that the United States purchases nearly one-half of all Japanese exports, or that we are the source of more than a quarter of their imports...
...We are still struggling bravely along beneath the white man's burden of the Philippines...
...In brief, here is a market whose surface has been barely scratched and which is already as important, in terms of world trade, as that of the United States...
...Events themselves may decide against us...
...Russian eyes are watching with close and sympathetic interest the nationalistic agitation in India, Java, the Philippines and China...
...And we are sitting in on a game in which the other players are both our best customers and our most resolute competitors...
...A handful of English and Dutch traders and officials, for example, did not conquer the millions of Hindus and Japanese simply because the Asiatics were incompetent...
...In the meantime, India is erecting a protective tariff against British cotton goods...
...the Japanese are still in fruitful possession of Korea and Manchuria...
...We opened Japan and Korea to the world, to see the first drift for a while into an attitude of rivalry and the second absorbed by the first...
...Before the war we supplied 6 percent of China's imports...
...The result will depend upon the wisdom and success of our political policy, which may be overborne by other policies...
...Extraterritoriality is being surrendered and as the civil war progresses Chinese armies are becoming more efficient in training and equipment, more formidable from a military point of view, while Chinese diplomacy is showing itself more and more resistant...
...Nevertheless the Islands are our jumping-off place for the Asiatic mainland, they are teaching us to respect and appreciate the achievements of the British and the Dutch, and they are giving us an invaluable training in oriental psychology...
...It is for this reason that our administration of the Philippines is a touchstone in our foreign policy...
...China and Japan between them have a fifth of the world's population...
...The rewards of such success may well be immense...
...while British Malaya does nearly $1,000,000,000 more...
...We have been so apt to condemn foreign imperialism that we have failed to recognize that empire has been a means of securing tolerable conditions for myriads of human beings who otherwise would have continued to struggle miserably in a mire of political incompetence, economic disorder and social iniquity...
...They possess or produce far less than their share of minerals and of fuel, and they are industrially backward...
...Gandhi in India may be a false dawn and the Nanking experiment may not be the last word in China's regeneration, but it is obvious that the old imperialistic formulae are undergoing modification...
...Nowhere else is there such an agglomeration of possible customers...
...over a third of the world's tea...
...We have sponsored the Open Door as a theory and we do not confer it in the Philippines nor do we enjoy it in European possessions...
...today it is over 40 percent...
...So it goes...
...We won the Philippines in our war with Spain and have not been able to make up our minds what to do with them ever since...
...the French still fly the tricolor in Indo-China...
...little Siam, $200,000,000...
...Hitherto our commercial relations with Asia have been comparatively simple...
...It is, very largely, the possession of the Indian empire which has turned the united kingdom from a European principality into the world's greatest sea power...
...It is fortunate for us that this is the case...
...Japan's political commitments in Manchuria and Korea have enabled the island empire to bridge in a single generation the gap between the middle-ages and the present...
...Fortunately the Pacific-ists are not alone in realizing the possibilities of eastern Asia as a market for wares and a source of raw materials...
...The result is to make one ponder whether solitaire is the best of training for an international poker game in which a stripped deck, deuces wild and table stakes are the rule...
...They produce nearly half of the world's rice...
...vTheir sugar and palm products have already aroused the economic antagonism of the American farmer...
...The greatest single commodity which we can acquire in eastern Asia is experience...
...What has the Orient to offer us...
...the Open Door is still an issue in China...
...nearly a third of the world's copra...
...Ceylon, China, India, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, British Malaya and the Philippines together import goods worth $4,000,000,000 a year and export goods worth $4,328,000,000...
...However, the world's primary interest in eastern Asia is its potential capacity for consumption...
...More important still we are the best customer of the Japanese...
...the Dutch East Indies close to $1,000,000,000...
...Moscow may have burned the fingers of the Third Internationale in the abortive Red movement which started at Canton five years ago, but Moscow is as capable of learning by experience as is any other world capital, and present developments in pan-Asiatic movements and in Asiatic nationalism indicate that the Soviet government has learned to leave well enough alone...
...We buy close to a quarter of all that Ceylon has to sell, nearly 45 percent of the exports of British Malaya, 15 percent of the exports of the Dutch East Indies and 11 percent of Indian exports...
...Nor is it entirely fair to condemn the West for its "unequal" relations with China, without taking into account that "poor little China" is an immense country with the largest population of any nation in the world...
...now it is close to 14 percent...
...Without the political training which India has given Great Britain, it would have been difficult for the British to have evolved a school of statesmanship superior to the Georgian stupidities of Lord North...
...we benefited by the direct British action in China and have ever since been accused of "crawling behind British guns...
...the Dutch still May 28, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 101 do very nicely in the East Indies...
...Russia is pushing railroads into the heart of central Asia, is opening commercial agencies in north China and will, in a few years, find herself with the industrial equipment to compete economically with the capitalistic powers in the Orient, unless the five-year plan goes hopelessly awry...
...Our political theorists are constantly disturbed by the constitutional questions raised by insular spokesmen and advocates of independence...
...China's reawakening is incoherent, spasmodic and not entirely effective, but the Chinese people are remaking the map of Asia...
...England, which has $4,000,000,000 worth of investments tied up in India, is seriously considering conferring dominion status upon the peninsula...
...For the western Pacific region is the last surviving stronghold of nineteenth-century imperialism...
...todays it is 16 percent...
...Their conquest was historically necessary, in the sense that if they had not obtained sovereign power someone else would have done so...
...in 1927, we took three-fourths...
...Even the comparatively small and backward Philippine archipelago, under American economic guidance has a foreign trade worth over $250,000,000 a year...
...That the lesson is bearing fruit in the form of more intimate economic relationships between America and Asia is obvious...
...What may happen to India and the Indies is beyond computation and no business of ours, but what we do with the Philippines may well determine our entire economic position as a world power To what extent we may find our progress helped or hindered by the competition of European nations and by the rivalry of Soviet Russia with the capitalistic world is also beyond our power to anticipate...
...Japan, Great Britain and the United States are working progressively for the surrender of special privileges in China, following the lead of Russia and Germany...
...If China's 400,000,000 more or less were to add a cent per capita per day, not counting holidays, to their foreign purchases, it would add $1,250,000,000 a year to China's imports...
...Rare metals, such as tin, antimony and tungsten...
...nine-tenths of the world's raw silk...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 4
