The Far East

on the World Today

IN ASIA, our Department of State has to adjust and make consistent with each other three major lines of American policy. The first of these lines is concerned with attaining a stable counterpoise between America and Russia as the giant powers of the world, in order to eliminate the military jitters felt in 1948. The second aims at stabilizing politically and economically the Atlantic Pact countries of Western Europe. This cannot be done until the relations between Western Europe and colonial Asia are shifted from inconclusive warfare to negotiated agreements. The third major responsibility of American policy is to bring Asia as a whole back into the complex world structure of investment, development, and the interchange of raw materials and manufactured goods.

In the adjustment of all three lines of policy China will prove to be much more important than Japan. In the long run, Japan can always be fitted satisfactorily into made-in-China solutions, but there is now no prospect whatever of made-in-Japan solutions that can be successfully applied to China.

It is clear that the Russians are not going to be sucked into China on a vast scale. The Russians interpret the Chinese Communist victory as an assurance that they can now face their problems in Europe, and in the still unfinished business of economic recovery in the Soviet Union, with no nervous feeling that the Asian wing of world Communism will collapse.

In the maneuvers of world Communism outside of China, the Chinese Communists will act as ideological and political satellites of the Kremlin. Within China, however, they will attempt, without interference from Moscow, to shift from a system based almost exclusively on rural economies and on the political and military support of the peasants to a system that takes in the great cities, with their meager modern industry and urban proletariat.

The theories and methods that will count, therefore, are those of the Chinese Communists. These theories and methods now have behind them a quarter of a century of development within China. The main center of Chinese Marxist controversy long ago moved away from the Russian pattern of a Left opposition and a Right opposition deviating from a central Marx-Lenin-Stalin orthodoxy. The principal cleavage has been between the knockdown, drag-out revolutionaries and the supple “moderate” or “evolutionary” methods patiently worked out by Mao Tze-tung. These methods lay a very heavy emphasis on neutralizing as much as possible of the opposition, instead of challenging it.

Mao neutralizes the middle class

In his peasant policy, Mao organizes and indoctrinates those who have no land, or not enough to support themselves. These are the “nothing to lose, everything to gain” hard core of his revolutionary drive. At the same time, he exempts from confiscation, and thus neutralizes, those who are fairly well off but not rich enough to risk everything in defense of an old order that seems to be collapsing. He thereby isolates the remaining small minority — well under 10 per cent, he claims who have a real vested interest in the old order. His principle is that when this minority has been liquidated, the previously neutralized middle group will be incapable of organizing major resistance, and will have to continue to go along.

It took many years for Mao Tze-tung to win unchallenged acceptance of this simple procedure. The principal difficulty was the savagery of the peasants themselves toward landlords and bailiffs. In the first year after the surrender of Japan, in newly “liberated" districts, Communist agitators were kept busy at the paradoxical job of restraining the mob action of poor peasants, in order to prevent them from stampeding the middle group into the arms of the few powerful landlords.

The Communists take over industry

The same principle is now being transferred to the great cities and to private industry and trade. In the cities, the factory workers are being taught to consider themselves a political elite, but are warned against extravagant wage demands that might imperil their political gains. Industries owned or managed by important supporters of Chiang Kai-shek are being nationalized. Many of them were nominally national property under the Kuomintang, though managed by political appointees who siphoned off the profits.

The Communists are handling private trade and industry with delicate caution. They are sure that with no big business leadership behind which to rally, the smaller fry are incapable of organizing an effective anti-Communist stand.

As long as he can feed and clothe and house his family better than in the long nightmare years of Japanese invasion and civil war, neither farmer, city worker, nor businessman has enough antiCommunist ideology left to make him organize and light. Security and the feeling that next year may even be a little better than this year are swamping ideology. The Communists are content to slow down as soon as they have secured their newly won positions against counterattack. They do not care if it takes them fifty years to fill in the details, so long as they have grounded the main framework firmly.

Thus far the Communists have surprised American observers by their ability to enlist the services of bankers, industrialists, and former Kuomintang administrators. In keeping an eye on these people, however, the Communist security service may yet build itself into a police that controls the state. Up to the present, there has been no police state or post-Kuomintang anti-Communist movement. The Mao Tze-tung policy, nevertheless, has made inaccessible to American policy the all-important middle groups without which it would be impossible to organize an effective anti-Communist resistance.

How Asia reacts to China

It is not too late to apply to the rest of Asia the sobering lesson of what has happened in China. The heart of the lesson is that in no country in Asia can strong loyalty to the existing order be organized on the basis of the antipathy to Russia of American business interests or the interests of European colonial rulers. It must be organized around the conviction of numerically large groups of people that the government under which they live holds more benefit for them in the present, and more hope for the future, than local nationalist and reform movements infiltrated by Communists.

In the Union of India, anti-Communism has real vitality because national emancipation has been accompanied by enough internal reform to ease a great many pressures. India has much more modern industry, banking, and trade than Pakistan. India’s businessmen, freed from British rule which inevitably favored British interests against Indian interests, have a stake of their own to defend. The cutting down of the privileges, powers, and revenues of the Independent native princes and the removal, to a large extent, of the religious standard in politics have eased the burdens of millions of people.

The agrarian problem has not been solved, but India now has an opportunity to attack this problem more positively than the Kuomintang did in China in the 1920’s. Nationalist pride in selfgovernment, combined with a widespread conviction that life under self-government is going to be better than life under British rule, offers an alternative to Communism.

In Indonesia, American policy has wisely put pressure on the Dutch to make more real concessions to nationalism while there is yet time. More important than American pressure, however, has been the failure of Holland’s own policies. The Dutch were partially successful in splitting the nationalist movement. They set up a number of “federal” states which stood apart from the Indonesian Republic and accepted Dutch protection. But the rulers of these states were soon made uneasy by the fact that their people looked for moral leadership not to them but to the Republic.

Then, after the Dutch “police action” against the Republic in December, 1948, the Indonesians moved many of their guerrillas out of the territory of the Republic and into the territories of the “federal” states. The weakness of the Dutch was exposed: they did not have enough troops both to occupy the Republic and to garrison the “federal” states, and the people of the states would not fight the forces of the Republic.

The Indonesians have a few brilliant leaders, but not enough able trained men. They would rather continue to associate with a weak Holland than with Britain or America, whose business interests would be so powerful that they would choke the growth of independent Indonesian enterprise.

Indo-China and Malaya

In Indo-China the situation is much more difficult to salvage. The French have just made one of the most misguided moves in colonial diplomacy: they are sending back to Indo-China Bao Dai, exEmperor of Annum, to try to set up a government that will nominally be a free member of the French Union, but will require French troops as a garrison to maintain the regime.

The move would not have been made had it not been for the alarming gains made by Ho Chi Minh, who, though a Communist, is a genuine national leader. It is highly doubtful that important forces will entrust themselves to a leader who has not fought, has no political organization of his own, and has given no indication that he can keep IndoChina free from French domination.

In Malaya, there is still another type of problem. The British have successfully broken a Communistled rising, but a stable, long-term solution has yet to be worked out. The Chinese in Malaya now outnumber the Malays. The Malaya of the future must therefore be some form of composite state.

At present the Chinese are being kept in restraint partly by their own fear of the Communist extremists in their midst, partly by the old and no longer reliable device of making Singapore, where the Chinese are heavily concentrated, a Crown Colony separate from the rest of Malaya. This device disfranchises the Chinese.

Resentment will grow as the Communists become established in China and as the human instinct to jump on the bandwagon begins to operate even among the non-Communist Chinese of Malaya. Disfranchised colonial subjects admire a strong government in the home country, and look to it for support.

Small powors, big issues

No general solution of these diverse problems can be reached except through the United Nations, in a form that acknowledges the importance of countries that do not come before the court as interested parties. On Indonesia, on the Italian colonies in Africa, and on controversies in which the moral and political issues are similar, these countries have often by their votes, or by adroit abstention from voting, morally rebuked the imperial powers and shown lack of enthusiasm for the cautious conservatism of American policy.

At the same time, they have not lined up with Russia. They hold the balance, and their hold is getting stronger. Either the balance must be allowed to operate, within the United Nations, or the strain will break the United Nations apart.