Part 9

But at present China is in a state of political impotence. Her Manchu imperialism has proved itself to be hopelessly inefficient and China is now struggling to reconstruct upon modern republican lines, obviously suggested by the American example. A few decades ago Japan astonished the world by Europeanizing herself upon Prussian lines. China now, under far less favorable conditions and with a vaster country and a less disciplined people, is struggling to Americanize herself.

But it is no easy task to make over a people at one stride from a mediæval autocracy to a modern democracy. It is far easier to Prussianize than to Americanize, for in the one case you have only to train an official class and in the other you must educate a whole people. China is torn by dissensions; the south jars with the north; she has two or more Governments, each claiming to be THE Chinese Government, and whole provinces have fallen under the sway of military adventurers. It is a distressing spectacle, but it was probably an inevitable phase in the development of New China.

Before we fall a prey to anti-Chinese propaganda it is well to recall how long it has always taken to build up the necessary understandings and habits of association upon which a new political system rests.

France, for example, was a land of revolutions and political instability for nearly a century after the Great Revolution. America wrangled feebly and dangerously for several years after the War of Independence, before she established her Federal Government; she only cemented her union after a colossal struggle; she was not really and securely one until a century had elapsed.

During these long decades of probation foreign observers preached endlessly about the fickleness of the French and the political inefficiency of the Americans and foretold the certainty of a break-up of the United States, just as today they sneer at Young China and foretell the political disintegration of the Chinese. And we have to bear in mind that the forces of reorganization and renewal in China struggle against peculiar difficulties and interferences quite outside the happier experiences of France and America. In particular, they struggle against an intolerable and paralyzing amount of foreign interference.

The brilliant series of adventures and accidents by which a London trading company added the Empire of Great Mogul as a picturesque but incongruously big jewel to the British Crown set an extraordinarily bad precedent in Asiatic affairs. It obsessed European political thought with the impossible dream of carving up all Asia into similar domains. The Mogul’s empire was itself an empire of conquest in a land saturated by ideas of caste, and this gave all these European adventurers the attitude of high caste men benevolently consuming inferior races.

In that spirit, Europe—with Japan coming in presently as a hopeful student of European methods—had been trying to cook, carve up and fight for the portions of China for nearly a century, treating these wonderful people as an inferior race. The very worst that can be said about Japan with regard to China is that she has been too vigorously European.

Consider how it would have been with the United States in the years of discord that led up to the Civil War if these difficulties had been complicated by three such embarrassments as these: First, that most foreigners, except now the Germans and Austrians, are outside the reach of the native courts, that their disputes with Chinese go before special foreign courts, that they are specially favored in regard to property and shipping; secondly, that the Chinese Government is restricted from raising revenue by any tariff above a flat rate of 5 per cent., and that they are also strictly restricted to 2½ per cent. in their interior dues upon foreign (but not Chinese) trade, so that they are in fact unable to raise enough revenue to maintain an efficient Government; and thirdly, that nearly all the Chinese railways—and as every American knows, transport is the very life of modern state—are in the grip of this foreign country or that.

These are the open and manifest inconveniences of the situation, but behind these more open aspects there is a vast tangle of intervention between Chinamen and Chinese affairs—schemes for further exploitation, financial entanglements, vast concession plans and projects for “spheres of influence” for this aggressive foreign nation or that. And this foreign influence is not the influence of one foreign power pursuing a single and consistent policy but a number of competing powers, all pursuing different ends and pulling things this way and that. How could any country reconstruct itself while it was entangled in such a net of interference? No people on earth could do such a thing.

The plain fact is that if China is to reconstruct herself that net has to be cut away. It is not enough to warn Japan out of China or to say “open door” for China. The open door is good for the ventilation of that great apartment, but what is also needed is a clearing out of the encumbrance inside. These encumbrances are not primarily Japanese.

The five great powers sit at a green table in the form of a horseshoe in the conference and the four lesser powers are at a straight table like the armature of a horseshoe magnet. At the left hand corner, next the Japanese, are the three Chinese representatives. I gather they will be allowed to say “Shantung” at the conference in moderation but not Thibet nor Tonquin nor the East China—or indeed any—railway. I doubt if either Mr. Balfour or M. Briand will nerve himself to say these forbidden words. But an irresponsible journalist may write them.

If there is to be a real end to war and disarmament there has to be release of China to free Chinese control, and that means a self-denying ordinance from ALL the great powers. It will be an easy one for America and Italy to accept, but it will be a difficult sacrifice indeed for those two hoary leaders in the break-up of China, Great Britain and France. Neither country has a bad heart, but long ago in the East they acquired some very bad habits. This is a time when bad habits lead very quickly to disaster.

The real test of the quality of the conference will appear when some issue arises which involves an assertion or denial of the principle of “Unhand and keep your hands off China.” If the Chinese are worth while, the conference has to establish that principle. It cannot be gracefully advanced by America because America has so little to relinquish. It CAN be established at the initiative of either Britain or France.

It seems plain to me that official America is waiting for some move in this direction from either or both of these powers. If that principle of a free China is established at the Washington Conference the way will have been opened in the not very remote future to a healthy and vigorous United States of China, a great modern, pacific and progressive power. And when I write “China” I mean what any sensible man means when he writes “China”—I mean all those parts of Asia in which the Chinese people and the Chinese culture prevail. I include at least South Manchuria, which is as surely Chinese as Texas is American, and which can no more be GIVEN to any other power without the consent of China than my overcoat can be given by one passerby to another.

The plain alternative to a released and renascent China is the cutting up of China among the aggressive powers to the tune of that popular American air “The Open Door,” the demoralization and disintegration of the Chinese, international elbowing, competition, quarrels among the powers who have “shared” China, and, at last, the next great war—which it will be just as easy for America to keep out of as the great war of 1914–1918.

IX THE FUTURE OF JAPAN

Washington, Nov. 18.

If we adopt as our guiding principle that China is “worth while,” if we make up our minds—and it seems to me that the American public at least is making up its mind—that China is to bring itself up to date and to reorganize itself as a great union of states under purely Chinese control, and that it is to be protected by mutual agreement among the powers from outside interference during the age of reorganization, then it is clear that all dreams of empire in China or any fragments of China on the part of any other power must cease.

This building up of a united, peaceful China by the conscious, self-denying action of the chief powers of the world is evidently, under present conditions, the only sane policy before the powers assembled at Washington, but it is, unhappily, quite diametrically opposed to all traditions of competitive nationality. And I find a most extraordinary conflict going on in men’s minds here in Washington between the manifest sanities of the world situation and those habits of thought and action in which we have all been bred. Competitive nationalism and the long established competitive traditions of European diplomacy have gone far toward wrecking the world; and they may yet go far toward wrecking the Washington Conference. We have all got these traditions strong in us, every one of us. These traditions, these ideas of international intercourse as a sort of game to beat the other fellow, have as tough a vitality as the appetite of the wasp, which will go on eating greedily after its abdomen has been cut off. Indeed, some of the representatives of the powers at Washington seem still to be clinging to the ambition of finally devouring China, or large parts of China—a feast which they will not have the remotest prospect of digesting.

If that sort of thing goes on, a continuation of war preparation, a renewal of war and the consummation of the social smash now in progress is inevitable. Yet, on the face of that plain, inevitable consequence, my diplomatic friends in Washington go on talking about such insane projects as that of ceding Manchuria to Japan right down the Great Wall; of giving Japan practical possession of the mines of China; of giving “compensation” in the matter of Chinese railways to France; of getting this “advantage” or that for Great Britain, and so forth and so on. I remain permanently astounded before the Foreign Office officials. They have such excellent, brilliant minds, but, alas! so highly specialized—so highly specialized—that at times one doubts whether they have, in the general sense of the word, any minds at all.

In the face of the universal hopefulness for satisfactory results from the conference I find myself full of doubts. The naval disarmament proposal of Secretary Hughes was obviously meant only as the opening proposition, the quite splendid opening proposition, of the conference. The second meeting, I felt, would find Mr. Balfour and Admiral Kato and M. Briand in eloquent sympathy, saying: “Certainly. All this and more also we can do on the understanding that a stable, explicit, exhaustive, permanent Pacific agreement can be framed by this conference that will remove all causes of war whatever.” But the second meeting was disappointing. One nation after another agreed, as Mr. Balfour, that “old parliamentary hand,” put it, “in principle. But”——And now we are all playing four-handed chess with reservations about dockyards, naval stations, cruisers, large submarines, and the like. We are all trying to put the effective disarmament onto the other fellow. Meanwhile the nine powers are sitting in secret session on the Pacific question, and it is clear from the rumors that nine-handed chess is in progress there.

Yet the fact, plain enough to any one who is not lost in the game of diplomacy, is that this conference is an occasion for generosity and renunciation. There is no way out of the Pacific imbroglio except to disentangle China and form a self-denying ordinance of all the powers concerned to leave her alone while she reconstructs. I submit that even Japan, most intent of all the chess players, will do best to fall in line with such a plan.

Would a world covenant to protect China from aggression and to concede her the progressive abolition of extra-territorial privileges and the same unlimited rights over her own railways and soil and revenue that are enjoyed by the Americans and Japanese over theirs be any serious harm to Japan? Would it not release Japan from her imitative career as a pseudo-Britain or a pseudo-Germany and enable her to get on with her own proper business, which is to be, to the fullest, completest and richest extent, Japan?

For what, after all, is it that Japan wants? She wants safety, she declares—just as France wants safety. She wants safety to be Japan, just as France wants safety to be France and England wants safety to be England. And she makes these declarations with considerable justification. For 300 years she believed she had that safety, and we must admit she was the least dangerous state in the whole world. For 300 years Japan waged no foreign wars; she was a peaceful, self-contained hermit. It was American enterprise that dragged her out of her seclusion and fear of Europe that drove her to the practices of modern imperialism. They are not natural Japanese practices. She fought China and grabbed Corea, because otherwise Russia would have held it like a pistol at her throat; she fought Russia, because otherwise Russia would have held Manchuria and Port Arthur against her; she fought in the Great War to oust Germany from Shantung. She is now pursuing an entirely “European” policy in China, intriguing to get a free hand in Manchuria and Eastern Siberia; scheming for concessions, privileges and the creation of obedient puppet governments in a dismembered China; planning to divert the natural resources of China to her own use, primarily because she fears that otherwise these things will be done by rival powers and she will be cut off from trade, from raw materials and all prosperity until at last, when she is sufficiently starved and enfeebled, she will be attacked and Indiaized. These are reasonable, honorable fears. They oblige her to keep armed and aggressive; hers is an “offensive defensive.” There is no other way of allaying her reasonable, just fears except by a permanent binding association of world powers to put an end forever to the headlong scramble for Asia that began a century and a half ago in India between the French and English, to recognize frankly and to put it upon record that that phase of history has closed, and to provide some effective means of restoration now and the prevention of fresh aggressions in the future.

No doubt there is a military caste in Japan loving war and not even dreading modern war. We have to reckon with that. When we ask Japan to release China, we ask for something very much against Japanese habits of thought. Her dominant military note is due both to ancient traditions and recent experience. Japan had most of the fun and little of the bitterness of the Great War and her people may conceivably have a lighter attitude toward aggressive war than any European nation. But if the alternatives presented to her were on the one hand disarmament and a self-denying ordinance of the powers in relation to China, and on the other war against the other chief powers of the world, I doubt if the patriotism of even the most war-loving Japanese would not outbalance his war lust. And I cannot imagine any other permanent settlement of the Pacific situation except a self-denying ordinance to which Japan, America and the European powers can ever possibly agree.

Now, Japan, disarmed and pledged and self-restrained by treaties and associations against aggression on the mainland of Asia, would nevertheless reap enormous benefits from the liberation of China. Given just and reasonable treaties, she can do very well without armaments. Her geographical position would make her naturally and properly the first merchant and the first customer of a renascent China. She would have the first bid for all the coal and ore and foodstuffs she needed. American goods and European goods would have to come past her over thousands of miles of sea. Chinese goods that didn’t come to her would go elsewhere up a steep hill of freight charges. It is a preposterous imagination that China would refuse to sell to her nearest and best customer. Moreover, Japan’s artistic and literary culture, at once so distinctive and so sympathetic with that of China, would receive enormous stimulation, as it has done in the past, by a Chinese revival. Japan would be able to keep in the van of nations not by that headlong imitation and adoption of European devices into which circumstances have forced her hitherto, but by a natural and orderly development of her own idiosyncracies in the face of the enhanced power that modern resources supply. An association of Japan with other nations to insure uninterrupted development to China would insure that to Japan also. It would be a mutual assurance of peace and security.

But there is one set of facts, and one only, that militates against this idea of a pacific and progressive Japan, a splendid leader in civilization amidst a brotherhood of nations, and that is this, that Japan is already overpopulated, she has to import not only food but industrial raw material, and that her population increases now by the tremendous figure of half a million a year. That is the reality that gives substance to the aggressive imperialism of Japan. That is why she casts about for such regions for expansion as Eastern Siberia—a region not represented at the conference, and so beyond its purview, and that is why she covets some preferential control in Chinese metals and minerals and food. Were it not for this steady invasion of the world by hungry lives, the principle of Japan for the Japanese, China for the Chinese, England for the English, Eastern Siberia for its own people, would give us the simplest, most satisfactory principle for international peace. But Japan teems.

Has any country a right to slop its population over and beyond its boundaries or to claim trade and food because of its heedless self-congestion? Diplomacy is curiously mealy mouthed about many things; I have made a British official here blush at the words of birth control, but it is a fact that this aggressive fecundity of peoples is something that can be changed and restrained within a country, and that this sort of modesty and innocence that leads to a morbid development of population and to great wars calls for intelligent discouragement in international relations.