CHAPTER X
AUSTRALIA’S INTEREST
THIS review, necessarily curtailed, of the evidence in case, has been directed to show that, if the cause is peace, the League of Nations and the Great Powers have made serious errors in the handling of the Far Eastern question. The evidence is overwhelming; and, when events are fairly reviewed on the scene of the conflict, there can hardly be any but one determination, either in justice to Japan or towards removal of friction among the treaty Powers in the Pacific.
Australia has a voice in the Empire’s foreign policy and is a member of the League. If the Australian Government and the Australian people agree that the verdict of Geneva and British eastern policy have been wrong, vital interests should impel us to call for a frank and full review of the whole case. Geneva presented that case to the world in a false perspective.
The League’s presumptions have been that China is a united nation, and that the revolutionary junta at Nanking is a supreme and sovereign government. The truth is that the authority of the Chinese Republic has been a fiction outside a restricted area in the Yangtse and mid-coastal region; that Manchuria never was subject to that authority; and that Chinese professions at Geneva have been sheer pretence–as complaints against provocative aggression, even hypocritical. It seems impossible that, whatever the ignorance of the public, the governments of the Great Powers can have accepted those professions in complete ignorance of the truth. The scandals of the opium traffic are surely sufficiently manifest. To such domestic reforms, long proposed on paper, as are now being attempted in any direction, the Nanking Government had been spurred chiefly by Japanese action.
Japan an Aggressor?
Equally serious a mistake has been the branding of Japan as an aggressor under various pacts–a half-truth, let us say, distorted by propaganda. The denial of a just hearing for Japan has aggravated the dispute. It has put Japan’s back up. It has enlarged as a feature of the issue the matter of Japan’s prestige and national honour, that radical cause of war which the nations have professedly worked to avoid.
As for Japan’s alleged aggression, as a feature in her general policy, there is one supremely important qualification which, it seems, the Western Powers must take into account. The Washington meeting next year may or may not be the right place to debate it. But Britain and the United States ought somehow to seek again an understanding with Japan for co-operation in China. So long as the two English-speaking Powers continue there the latter-day policy of “conciliation and concession” in face of China’s threats, they will expose themselves in the East to a charge of weakness, and Chinese provocation will be encouraged. If Britain is not going to give up the treaty port concessions, if she means to stay in the East, then there must be no doubt about the asserting the conditions which make foreign security possible there. The East has seen the Western Powers fighting each other to the death in the Great War. It has seen Germany eliminated from the local scene. To-day it deduces that Britain and America are “pulling out.” Schemes for independent self-government in India and the Philippines unfortunately reinforce that deduction. That is where Japan has parted company with the Western Powers. She has abandoned the policy of patient indulgence towards China because it was productive only of Chinese hostility and insolence. Japan holds her interests to be vital, whether or not ours are vital to us. Is that to be called Japanese aggression? Or is it nearer the truth to say that the West has only made Japan’s task harder as well as its own?
Manchuria-Afghanistan
We can come to terms with Japan again for collaboration, and perhaps bring her back to the League - possibly the establishment of a Pacific auxiliary of the League may become expedient - by recognizing Manchoukuo as an initial step. It will require admission at Geneva of past mistakes; but world peace will probably continue to require from time to time admissions of mistakes by so harassed a body as the League. Does not avoidance of quarrel necessarily demand such admissions in the cause of reconciliation?
For Britain especially persistence in a mistaken course is perilous. So vast are her world-wide interests, so far-ranging are the influences by which British prestige is maintained, that a mouse may not gnaw a hole anywhere in the world’s political structure without Britain’s feeling the disturbance. Did Downing Street miss the significance of Manchuria as Japan’s Afghanistan? In Tokyo I talked with Captain M. D. Kennedy, late 1st Cameronians, who, after being badly wounded at Loos, was in 1916 sent as a language officer to be attached to the Japanese Army, and has, with one short interval, been in Japan since that date. Latterly he was head of Reuter’s Agency in Tokyo. He is the author of a standard book on the Japanese Army. He knows Korea and Manchuria intimately. He pointed out that till 1931 the Korean frontier was to Japan, in all essential respects, just what the north-west frontier of India is to Britain - in each strategic quarter the same wild mountains, the same turbulence of border tribes, fierce and predatory; the same constant need for small expeditions to combat disorder and protect friendly tribes; the same Russian influence creating unrest beyond the border, with Communist propaganda aggravating discontent. Does Britain presume that she will never again have to interfere beyond the Khyber Pass? Or, if a day comes when she should do so, will recollection of her reproaches against Japan in Manchuria restrain her?
These are realities far outweighing in importance any moral value which an ineffectual policy of trying to help China may bring to Britain’s good name. Trying to help China has gained Britain no added respect in the fluctuating opinion of Nanking, where Chinese professors of reform have pursued no settled policy at all; or with that still more uncertain body, the Kuomintang, to which every traitor against Nanking can, it seems equally with Nanking’s ruling executives, claim adherence. “The Governments of the United States and of Great Britain were both to blame,” says Mr Bland, “but there was more excuse for America than for ourselves. For we, as an Asiatic Power, have sinned against the light, whilst America has had little experience to teach her.”
Looking Ahead
There can surely be no Australian who will deny the supreme interest to this Commonwealth in a clearing up of these mistakes. We ought to urge reform of the League’s deficiencies, if we are to rely upon the League’s machinery and the rule of the Covenant for assurance of our own security. If we look forward through the next twenty years, it requires little prophetic vision to see Japan established as the pre-eminent Power in the Far East. That is her ambition, and she is throwing everything into the effort to realize it. We in Australia cannot contemplate the future with confidence if Japan’s relations with the British Empire and the United States are to become embittered over this Manchurian issue. We have a voice in British policy; here is an emergency in which we might justifiably ask whither that policy is tending. Considerations of fair play ought also to prompt us. Australia and the United States have each by law barred a continent to Japanese immigration and are seeking, for reasons perfectly understood in Japan, to regulate (as all nations are doing) the inflow of competitive manufactures. What right have we and the United States to oppose Japanese expansion, driven as it is by irrepressible forces at home, towards the nearest and natural outlet - a No-man’s-land and a quarter where Japanese overseas activity does us, and Britain too, the least possible harm, if any real harm at all?
The Australian Government sent one of its leading Ministers on a mission of good will to the Far East. Goodwill should, and did, cover every possible investigation. This observer knows no more than any of his compatriots what Mr Latham’s confidential reports to Cabinet contain. But he is convinced that what they ought to contain - in the cause of better relations in the Pacific, of fair play, and of Australia’s own interests - is a call for the review of the League’s judgement against Japan, and a reconsideration of Britain’s recent Eastern policy.