THE PATTERN FOR PEACE IN THE ORIENT
Chamberlin, William Henry
The Pattern For Peace In The Orient By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of two articles by Mr. Chamberlin on the war in the Far East. The first, on military problems,...
...The Chinese soldier has great stoical endurance and fights bravely with the weapons at his disposal when he is led with passable intelligence...
...In relation to China we should try to encourage development along progressive democratic lines, to throw our weight behind the maintenance of Chinese territorial integrity, and to assist in the industrial development which alone can make China capable of standing on her own feet...
...It would be contrary to Stalin's entire design of cushioning the Soviet frontiers with a belt of satellite states to permit strong American air and ground units to establish themselves so close to strategic Vladivostok as Manchuria or Korea...
...The people of Korea have suffered under harsh Japanese rule...
...The first, on military problems, appeared in the Jan...
...A ringing declaration of intention to end all forms of imperial domination at the earliest possible moment would have impressed all the colonial peoples of Asia and would have been a masterstroke of political warfare against the Japanese militarists...
...Now this Cairo Declaration suffers from certain weaknesses, both on the theoretical and on the practical side...
...The most important reason is that Japan possesses the only well developed modern industrial plants in East Asia...
...Out of it came a declaration of war aims, couched in rather moralistic and self-righteous terms: "The Three Great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan...
...a period of recuperation will be necessary before the modest standard of industrial progress which had been reached in 1986, on the eve of the war, can be regained...
...China lost both after unsuccessful wars...
...And China just cannot do this, and will not be able to do this for a long time to come, probably at least for a generation...
...Restricted to a very thin trickle of foreign supplies (much of which goes for the needs of the American military and air units) by a blockade that has been almost airtight since the cutting of the Burma Road, China has been unable to build up large substitute industrial plants...
...In all such eventualities we shall be obliged to rely, in the last analysis, on our own judgment...
...being proved erroneous more and more decisively as the war continues...
...On the practical side the Cairo Declaration might be likened to a check that lacks a needed endorsement, so far as the references to Manchuria and Korea are concerned...
...Complete military defeat will show the Japanese what they cannot do...
...Nor should we give Japanese reactionaries an ideal rallying slogan by insisting on its abolition...
...Unfortunately this assumption is...
...China has a great history and a great culture...
...And, if America has found it difficult to adjust itself to Russian and British power politics maneuverings in Europe, the same problem is not likely to be easier of solution in the Orient...
...It is an iron age that we are living in and it is not becoming softer as the global.war approaches its climactic phases...
...Because, for obvious geographic and strategic reasons, the Soviet Union1 will almost certainly occupy these regions before either American or Chinese forces can arrive...
...Let us hope that in the Far East, where it will be difficult for us to step out of the situation entirely, we shall use our postwar power with such a mixture of realism and intelligent idealism that we will not feel the bitter disillusionment of having sowed a harvest of war sacrifice, of which other powers will reap the fruits...
...The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea,, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent...
...But China cannot qualify as a great power...
...They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion...
...My acquaintance took umbrage at this suggestion and promised to write a long memorandum proving that the Japanese record in Korea was far superior to the French in Indo-China, from the standpoint of the well-being of the natives...
...We certainly should not impose it on the Japanese if they want to get rid of it...
...What was actually achieved conveys the impression of the mountain laboring and producing a mouse...
...The reference to the territories which Japan has "stolen" from the Chinese would have also been more effective if (a) no other powers had engaged in larcency at China's expense or (b) if there had been some promise of restitution...
...They did not reckon with the enormous potential output of American industries or they did not believe that this output could be effectively transported across the Pacific...
...It is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores shall be restored to the Republic of China...
...For, however weak China may be physically, there will be strong nationalist sentiment for recovery of the island...
...But no political or economic system that does not command the consent of the Japanese people will possess any stability...
...This is an all too frequent American habit...
...The limited Chinese industry before the war was largely located in the cities and ports which the Japanese have occupied, in Shanghai and Tientsin, to a lesser extent in Tsingtao, Hankow, Canton...
...But they are no more and no less "enslaved" than the natives of many British, French, and Dutch possessions...
...I suggested, perhaps a little cynically, that the French were obviously not in Indo-China for their health, but that their motives and conduct were not very different from those of the Japanese in Korea...
...When this industry, together with Japan's merchant marine, the third largest in the world before the war, was mobilized for war service...
...S issue...
...And so, until China goes through a period of intensive industrialization, it will be weak in relation to powers which can produce airplanes, tanks, flamethrowers, and rocket bombs...
...And the disposition of Hong Kong will be a ticklish question after the end of the war...
...is extremely doubtful whether Soviet troops, if they enter Manchuria and Korea, will ever withdraw, at least until regimes thor* oughly satisfactory to Moscow have been established...
...This will also be true in the event of a Chinese-British clash over Hong Kong...
...In all China there is not a factory capable of turning out airplanes and tanks...
...China cannot fill this vacuum immediately...
...While the final casualty lists will show that we have done our full share of dying, a precarious and uneasy division of the spoils is being worked out between London and Moscow, with* a minimum of regard for the American peace ideals expressed in the Atlantic Charter...
...Japan possessed an enormous advantage in munitions and supplies over any nearby Asiatic country...
...A Question Of Larceny There was a meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo in November, 1943...
...When we have completed our assigned task of defeating Germany we will most probably be invited to step out of Europe, politely by England, more gruffly by the Soviet Union...
...Big Three Will Control One would have to make trips that would take three weeks by sea, from Japan, to Southern Australia or to India, in order to reach centers of industrial production comparable with Tokyo and Osaka, Nagoya and North Kyushu, together with some newer factory regions in Manchuria and Korea...
...And a good many Americans, soldiers and civilians alike, will feel that this is just about the most sensible thing we can do, in view of the dreary wreck to which the old continent has been reduced...
...For what is the first condition of being a "great power...
...WHERE do we go from victory over Japan...
...Otherwise the war against Japan has little sense or meaning...
...But Chinese strength has not been growing in proportion as Japanese industries have been devastated by B-29 bombing, as the Japanese people have been caught in an ever tighter ring of American naval and air power...
...And it...
...The Dumbarton Oaks plan, so misleadingly called a scheme for world security, offers no machinery whatever for the settlement of disputes between the powers which, after the end of the war, will be strong enough to commit acts of aggression...
...In the case of Japan we should try simultaneously to draw the teeth of Japanese militarism while offering the Japanese people the opportunity to improve their standard of living through development of peacetime production and trade...
...Why has Japan been able to occupy all China's ports and main cities, to push the Chinese forces of resistance into the remote, economically undeveloped provinces of the interior, to overrun, in the first few months of the war, such extensive and rich countries as the Philippines and Malaya, the Netherlands Indies and Burma...
...This is one reason why the Japanese militarists developed megalomania...
...Great Britain and the Soviet Union have more or less definite ideas about filling the European power vacuum...
...On the contrary, China has been getting weaker politically, economically, physically...
...It is ability to manufacture up-to-date lethal weapons in unlimited quantities...
...We should be ill-advised to try to impose any ready-made blue prints of government or education on the Japanese, or on any other people...
...Toward A Democratic Peace Should there be a clash between the Soviet Union and China over Manchuria, Korea, Sinkiang, or other border areas, the Dumbarton Oaks oracle will give us no guidance...
...But the evils of imperialism are obviously not limited to Korea, as the authors of the Cairo Declaration would seem to imply...
...But give him a flame-thrower, a rocket bomb, or some other refinement of Western civilization, and he would scarcely know what to do with it...
...In fact I remember meeting a well educated Japanese journalist in Hanoi, in Indo-China, who professed to be shocked at the exploitation of the natives by the French...
...China's war casualties are staggering and its political unity has been gravely impaired...
...The check represented by the Cairo Declaration is not of much value without Stalin's endorsement...
...Unless all signs are misleading, we need not worry about future territorial settlements in Europe...
...Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed...
...Barring some unforeseen turn of the war or some upheaval that will upset all calculations, power in the Far East, in the immediate postwar period, will be largely in the hands of the Big Three, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain...
...The Japanese title to Formosa is just as good, or as bad, as the British title to Hong Kong...
...If we should defeat Japan, no matter how decisively, and then turn our backs on the Far East, the same set of circumstances that led to Japan's emergence as a major military power would very probably repeat themselves within 10 or 20 years...
...China's Basic Weakness Whether we like it or not, we are in the Far East to stay, militarily, politically, and economically...
...He never produced the memorandum, and I do not know whether he could have made a convincing case...
...It seems unlikely that Japan will give up the struggle until its industries are pretty thoroughly wrecked, until the greater part of its shipping has been sent to the bottom of the ocean...
...Our Allies are taking care of this question...
...The Chinese possess many qualities that mark them as a great people...
...Our Far Eastern policy has been more or less consciously based on the assumption that China is a great power, capable of maintaining peace in the Orient by its own efforts as soon as Japan is defeated...
...So the immediate effect of the destruction of Japan's military and industrial power will be to create a vacuum in East Asia, just as the downfall of Germany will create a vacuum in Europe...
...This, I think, supplies the answer to the much discussed question: What to do with the Imperial system...
...But the East Asian power vacuum is very definitely our concern...
...But in the Far East we cannot step out after the defeat of Japan, no matter how much we might like to do so...
...One of the surest results of this war will be the creation'of two huge power vacuums, one in continental Europe, the other in East Asia...
Vol. 9 • January 1945 • No. 5
