China, j.a.pan and the U.S.A.
by John Dewey.
_Introductory Note_
_The articles following are reprinted as they were written in spite of the fact that any picture of contemporary events is modified by subsequent increase of knowledge and by later events. In the main, however, the writer would still stand by what was said at the time. A few foot notes have been inserted where the text is likely to give rise to misapprehensions. The date of writing has been retained as a guide to the reader._
I
On Two Sides of the Eastern Seas
It is three days" easy journey from j.a.pan to China. It is doubtful whether anywhere in the world another journey of the same length brings with it such a complete change of political temper and belief.
Certainly it is greater than the alteration perceived in journeying directly from San Francisco to Shanghai. The difference is not one in customs and modes of life; that goes without saying. It concerns the ideas, beliefs and alleged information current about one and the same fact: the status of j.a.pan in the international world and especially its att.i.tude toward China. One finds everywhere in j.a.pan a feeling of uncertainty, hesitation, even of weakness. There is a subtle nervous tension in the atmosphere as of a country on the verge of change but not knowing where the change will take it. Liberalism is in the air, but genuine liberals are encompa.s.sed with all sorts of difficulties especially in combining their liberalism with the devotion to theocratic robes which the imperialist militarists who rule j.a.pan have so skilfully thrown about the Throne and the Government. But what one senses in China from the first moment is the feeling of the all-pervading power of j.a.pan which is working as surely as fate to its unhesitating conclusion--the domination of Chinese politics and industry by j.a.pan with a view to its final absorption. It is not my object to a.n.a.lyze the realities of the situation or to inquire whether the universal feeling in China is a collective hallucination or is grounded in fact. The phenomenon is worthy of record on its own account. Even if it be merely psychological, it is a fact which must be reckoned with in both its Chinese and its j.a.panese aspects. In the first place, as to the differences in psychological atmosphere.
Everybody who knows anything about j.a.pan knows that it is the land of reserves and reticences. The half-informed American will tell you that this is put on for the misleading of foreigners. The informed know that it is an att.i.tude shown to foreigners only because it is deeply engrained in the moral and social tradition of j.a.pan; and that, if anything, the j.a.panese are more likely to be communicative--about many things at least--to a sympathetic foreigner, than to one another. The habit of reserve is so deeply embedded in all the etiquette, convention and daily ceremony of living, as well as in the ideals of strength of character, that only the j.a.panese who have subjected themselves to foreign influences escape it--and many of them revert.
To put it mildly, the j.a.panese are not a loquacious people; they have the gift of doing rather than of gab.
When accordingly a j.a.panese statesman or visiting diplomatist engages in unusually prolonged and frank discourse setting forth the aims and procedures of j.a.pan, the student of politics who has been long in the East at once becomes alert, not to say suspicious. A recent ill.u.s.tration is so extreme that it will doubtless seem fantastic beyond belief. But the student at home will have to take these seeming fantasies seriously if he wishes to appreciate the present atmosphere of China. Cables have brought fragmentary reports of some addresses of Baron Goto in America. Doubtless in the American atmosphere these have the effect of rea.s.suring America as to any improper ambitions on the part of j.a.pan. In China, they were taken as announcements that j.a.pan has about completed its plans for the absorption of China, and that the lucubration preliminary to operations of swallowing are about to begin. The reader is forgiven in advance any scepticism he feels about both the fact itself and the correctness of my report of the belief in the alleged fact. His scepticism will not surpa.s.s what I should feel in his place. But the suspicion aroused by such statements as this and the recent interview of Foreign Minister Uchida and Baron Ishii must be noted as evidences of the universal belief in China that j.a.pan has one mode of diplomacy for the East and another for the West, and that what is said in the West must be read in reverse in the East.
China, whatever else it is, is not the land of privacies. It is a proverb that nothing long remains secret in China. The Chinese talk more easily than they act--especially in politics. They are adepts in revealing their own shortcomings. They dissect their own weaknesses and failures with the most extraordinary reasonableness. One of the defects upon which they dwell is the love of finding subst.i.tutes for positive action, of avoiding entering upon a course of action which might be irrevocable. One almost wonders whether their power of self-criticism is not itself another of these subst.i.tutes. At all events, they are frank to the point of loquacity. Between the opposite camps there are always communications flowing. Among official enemies there are "sworn friends." In a land of perpetual compromise, etiquette as well as necessity demands that the ways for later accommodations be kept open. Consequently things which are spoken of only under the breath in j.a.pan are shouted from the housetops in China. It would hardly be good taste in j.a.pan to allude to the report that influential Chinese ministers are in constant receipt of j.a.panese funds and these corrupt officials are the agencies by which political and economic concessions were wrung from China while Europe and America were busy with the war. But in China n.o.body even takes the trouble to deny it or even to discuss it. What is psychologically most impressive is the fact that it is merely taken for granted. When it is spoken of, it is as one mentions the heat on an unusually hot day.
In speaking of the feeling of weakness current in j.a.pan about j.a.pan itself, one must refer to the economic situation because of its obvious connection with the international situation. In the first place, there is the strong impression that j.a.pan is over-extended.
Even in normal times, j.a.pan relies more upon production for foreign markets than is regarded in most countries as safe policy. And there is the belief that j.a.pan _must_ do so, because only by large foreign sellings--large in comparison with the purchasing power of a people still having a low standard of life--can it purchase the raw materials--and even food--it has to have. But during the war, the dependence of manufacturing and trade at home upon the foreign market was greatly increased. The domestic increase of wealth, though very great, is still too much in the hands of the few to affect seriously the internal demand for goods. Item one, which awakens sympathy for j.a.pan as being in a somewhat precarious situation.
Another item concerns the labor situation. j.a.pan seems to feel itself in a dilemma. If she pa.s.ses even reasonably decent factory laws (or rather attempts their enforcement) and regulates child and women"s labor, she will lose that advantage of cheap labor which she now counts on to offset her many disadvantages. On the other hand, strikes, labor difficulties, agitation for unions, etc., are constantly increasing, and the tension in the atmosphere is unmistakable. The rice riots are not often spoken of, but their memory persists, and the fact that they came very near to a.s.suming a directly political aspect. Is there a race between fulfillment of the aspirations of the military clans who still hold the reins, and the growth of genuinely democratic forces which will forever terminate those aspirations? Certainly the defeat of Germany gave a blow to bureaucratic militarism in j.a.pan which in time will go far. Will it have the time required to take effect on foreign policy? The hope that it will is a large factor in stimulating liberal sympathy for a j.a.pan which is beginning to undergo the throes of transition.
As for the direct international situation of j.a.pan, the feeling in j.a.pan is that of the threatening danger of isolation. Germany is gone; Russia is gone. While those facts simplify matters for j.a.pan somewhat, there is also the belief that in taking away potential allies, they have weakened j.a.pan in the general game of balance and counter-balance of power. Particularly does the removal of imperialistic Russia relieve the threat on India which was such a factor in the willingness of Great Britain to make the offensive-defensive alliance. The revelation of the militaristic possibilities of America is another serious factor. Certainly the new triple entente cordiale of j.a.pan, Italy and France is no adequate subst.i.tute for a realignment of international forces in which a common understanding between Great Britain and America is a dominant factor. This factor explains, if it does not excuse, some of the querulousness and studied discourtesies with which the j.a.panese press for some months treated President Wilson, the United States in general and its relation to the League of Nations in particular, while it also throws light on the ardor with which the opportune question of racial discrimination was discussed.
(The Chinese have an unfailing refuge in a sense of humor. It was interesting to note the delight with which they received the utterance of the j.a.panese Foreign Minister, after j.a.panese success at Paris, that "his attention had recently been called" to various press attacks on America which he much deprecated). In any case there is no mistaking the air of tension and nervous overstrain which now attends all discussion of j.a.panese foreign relations. In all directions, there are characteristic signs of hesitation, shaking of old beliefs and movement along new lines. j.a.pan seems to be much in the same mood as that which it experienced in the early eighties before, toward the close of that decade, it crystallized its inst.i.tutions through acceptance of the German const.i.tution, militarism, educational system, and diplomatic methods. So that, once more, the observer gets the impression that substantially all of j.a.pan"s energy, abundant as that is, must be devoted to her urgent problems of readjustment.
Come to China, and the difference is incredible. It almost seems as if one were living in a dream; or as if some new Alice had ventured behind an international looking-gla.s.s wherein everything is reversed.
That we in America should have little idea of the state of things and the frame of mind in China is not astonishing--especially in view of the censorship and the distraction of attention of the last few years.
But that j.a.pan and China should be so geographically near, and yet every fact that concerns them appear in precisely opposite perspective, is an experience of a life time. j.a.panese liberalism?
Yes, it is heard of, but only in connection with one form which the longing for the miraculous _deus ex machina_ takes. Perhaps a revolution in j.a.pan may intervene to save China from the fate which now hangs over her. But there is no suggestion that anything less than a complete revolution will alter or even r.e.t.a.r.d the course which is attributed to j.a.panese diplomacy working hand in hand with j.a.panese business interests and militarism. The collapse of Russia and Germany?
These things only mean that j.a.pan has in a few years fallen complete heir to Russian hopes, achievements and possessions in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, and has had opportunities in Siberia thrown into her hands which she could hardly have hoped for in her most optimistic moments. And now j.a.pan has, with the blessing of the great Powers at Paris, become also the heir of German concessions, intrigues and ambitions, with added concessions, wrung (or bought) from incompetent and corrupt officials by secret agreements when the world was busy with war. If all the great Powers are so afraid of j.a.pan that they give way to her every wish, what is China that she can escape the doom prepared for her? That is the cry of helplessness going up all over China. And j.a.panese propagandists take advantage of the situation, pointing to the action of the Peace Conference as proof that the Allies care nothing for China, and that China must throw herself into the arms of j.a.pan if she is to have any protection at all. In short, j.a.pan stands ready as she stood ready in Korea to guarantee the integrity and independence of China. And the fear that the latter must, in spite of her animosity toward j.a.pan, accept this fate in order to escape something worse swims in the sinister air. It is the exact counterpart of the feeling current among the liberals in j.a.pan that j.a.pan has alienated China permanently when a considerate and slower course might have united the two countries. If the economic straits of j.a.pan are alluded to, it is only as a reason why j.a.pan has hurried her diplomatic coercion, her corrupt and secret bargainings with Chinese traitors and her industrial invasion. While the western world supposes that the military and the industrial party in j.a.pan have opposite ideas as to best methods of securing j.a.panese supremacy in the East, it is the universal opinion in China that they two are working in complete understanding with one another, and the differences that sometimes occur between the Foreign Office in Tokyo and the Ministry of War (which is extra-const.i.tutional in its status) are staged for effect.
These are some of the aspects of the most complete transformation scene that it has ever been the lot of the writer to experience. May it turn out to be only an extraordinary psychological experience! But in the interests of truth it must be recorded that every resident of China, Chinese or American, with whom I have talked in the last four weeks has volunteered the belief that all the seeds of a future great war are now deeply implanted in China. To avert such a calamity they look to the League of Nations or to some other force outside the immediate scene. Unfortunately the press of j.a.pan treats every attempt to discuss the state of opinion in China or the state of facts as evidence that America, having tasted blood in the war, now has its eyes on Asia with the expectation later on of getting its hands on Asia. Consequently America is interested in trying to foster ill-will between China and j.a.pan. If the pro-American j.a.panese do not enlighten their fellow-countrymen as to the facts, then America ought to return some of the propaganda that visits its sh.o.r.es. But every American who goes to j.a.pan ought also to visit China--if only to complete his education.
May, 1919.
II
Shantung, As Seen From Within
1.
American apologists for that part of the Peace Treaty which relates to China have the advantage of the illusions of distance. Most of the arguments seem strange to anyone who lives in China even for a few months. He finds the j.a.panese on the spot using the old saying about territory consecrated by treasure spent and blood shed. He reads in j.a.panese papers and hears from moderately liberal j.a.panese that j.a.pan must protect China, as well as j.a.pan, against herself, against her own weak or corrupt government, by keeping control of Shantung to prevent China from again alienating that territory to some other power.
The history of European aggression in China gives this argument great force among the j.a.panese, who for the most part know nothing more about what actually goes on in China than they used to know about Korean conditions. These considerations, together with the immense expectations raised among the j.a.panese during the war concerning their coming domination of the Far East and the unswerving demand of excited public opinion in j.a.pan during the Versailles Conference for the settlement that actually resulted, give an ironic turn to the statement so often made that j.a.pan may be trusted to carry out her promises. Yes, one is often tempted to say, that is precisely what China fears, that j.a.pan will carry out her promises, for then China is doomed. To one who knows the history of foreign aggression in China, especially the technique of conquest by railway and finance, the irony of promising to keep economic rights while returning sovereignty lies so on the surface that it is hardly irony. China might as well be offered Kant"s Critique of Pure Reason on a silver platter as be offered sovereignty under such conditions. The latter is equally metaphysical.
A visit to Shantung and a short residence in its capital city, Tsinan, made the conclusions, which so far as I know every foreigner in China has arrived at, a living thing. It gave a vivid picture of the many and intimate ways in which economic and political rights are inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret treaties during the war, could be nave enough to believe that the promise to return complete sovereignty retaining _only_ economic rights is a satisfactory solution. It threw fresh light upon the contention that at most and at worst j.a.pan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced in the latter"s arrogations we had no call to make a fuss about j.a.pan. It revealed the hollowness of the claim that pro-Chinese propaganda had wilfully misled Americans into confusing the few hundred square miles around the port of Tsing-tao with the Province of Shantung with its thirty millions of Chinese population.
As for the comparison of Germany and j.a.pan one might suppose that the objects for which America nominally entered the war had made, in any case, a difference. But aside from this consideration, the Germans exclusively employed Chinese in the railway shops and for all the minor positions on the railway itself. The railway guards (the difference between police and soldiers is nominal in China) were all Chinese, the Germans merely training them. As soon as j.a.pan invaded Shantung and took over the railway, Chinese workmen and Chinese military guards were at once dismissed and j.a.panese imported to take their places. Tsinan-fu, the inland terminus of the ex-German railway, is over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao. When the j.a.panese took over the German railway business office, they at once built barracks, and today there are several hundred soldiers still there--where Germany kept none. Since the armistice even, j.a.pan has erected a powerful military wireless within the grounds of the garrison, against of course the unavailing protest of Chinese authorities. No foreigner can be found who will state that Germany used her ownership of port and railway to discriminate against other nations. No Chinese can be found who will claim that this ownership was used to force the Chinese out of business, or to extend German economic rights beyond those definitely a.s.signed her by treaty. Common sense should also teach even the highest paid propagandist in America that there is, from the standpoint of China, an immense distinction between a national menace located half way around the globe, and one within two days" sail over an inland sea absolutely controlled by a foreign navy, especially as the remote nation has no other foothold and the nearby one already dominates additional territory of enormous strategic and economic value--namely, Manchuria.
These facts bear upon the shadowy distinction between the Tsing-tao and the Shantung claim, as well as upon the solid distinction between German and j.a.panese occupancy. If there still seemed to be a thin wall between j.a.panese possession of the port of Tsing-tao and usurpation of Shantung, it was enough to stop off the train in Tsinan-fu to see the wall crumble. For the j.a.panese wireless and the barracks of the army of occupation are the first things that greet your eyes. Within a few hundred feet of the railway that connects Shanghai, via the important center of Tientsin, with the capital, Peking, you see j.a.panese soldiers on the nominally Chinese street, guarding their barracks.
Then you learn that if you travel upon the ex-German railway towards Tsing-tao, you are ordered to show your pa.s.sport as if you were entering a foreign country. And as you travel along the road (remembering that you are over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao) you find j.a.panese soldiers at every station, and several garrisons and barracks at important towns on the line. Then you realize that at the shortest possible notice, j.a.pan could cut all communications between southern China (together with the rich Yangste region) and the capital, and with the aid of the Southern Manchurian Railway at the north of the capital, hold the entire coast and descend at its good pleasure upon Peking.
You are then prepared to learn from eye-witnesses that when j.a.pan made its Twenty-one Demands upon China, machine guns were actually in position at strategic points throughout Shantung, with trenches dug and sandbags placed. You know that the j.a.panese liberal spoke the truth, who told you, after a visit to China and his return to protest against the action of his government, that the j.a.panese already had such a military hold upon China that they could control the country within a week, after a minimum of fighting, if war should arise. You also realize the efficiency of official control of information and domestic propaganda as you recall that he also told you that these things were true at the time of his visit, under the Terauchi cabinet, but had been completely reversed by the present Hara ministry. For I have yet to find a single foreigner or Chinese who is conscious of any difference of policy, save as the end of the war has forced the necessity of caution, since other nations can now look China-wards as they could not during the war.
An American can get an idea of the realities of the present situation if he imagines a foreign garrison and military wireless in Wilmington, with a railway from that point to a fortified sea-port controlled by the foreign power, at which the foreign nation can land, without resistance, troops as fast as they can be transported, and with bases of supply, munitions, food, uniforms, etc., already located at Wilmington, at the sea-port and several places along the line. Reverse the directions from south to north, and Wilmington will stand for Tsinan-fu, Shanghai for New York, Nanking for Philadelphia with Peking standing for the seat of government at Washington, and Tientsin for Baltimore. Suppose in addition that the Pennsylvania road is the sole means of communication between Washington and the chief commercial and industrial centers, and you have the framework of the Shantung picture as it presents itself daily to the inhabitants of China. Upon second thought, however, the parallel is not quite accurate. You have to add that the same foreign nation controls also all coast communications from, say, Raleigh southwards, with railway lines both to the nearby coast and to New Orleans. For (still reversing directions) this corresponds to the position of Imperial j.a.pan in Manchuria with its railways to Dairen and through Korea to a port twelve hours sail from a great military center in j.a.pan proper. These are not remote possibilities nor vague prognostications. They are accomplished facts.
Yet the facts give _only_ the framework of the picture. What is actually going on within Shantung? One of the demands of the "postponed" group of the Twenty-one Demands was that j.a.pan should supply military and police advisers to China. They are not so much postponed but that j.a.pan enforced specific concessions from China during the war by diplomatic threats to reintroduce their discussion, or so postponed that j.a.panese advisers are not already installed in the police headquarters of the city of Tsinan, the capital city of Shantung of three hundred thousand population where the Provincial a.s.sembly meets and all the Provincial officials reside. Within recent months the j.a.panese consul has taken a company of armed soldiers with him when he visited the Provincial Governor to make certain demands upon him, the visit being punctuated by an ostentatious surrounding of the Governor"s yamen by these troops. Within the past few weeks, two hundred cavalry came to Tsinan and remained there while j.a.panese officials demanded of the Governor drastic measures to suppress the boycott, while it was threatened to send j.a.panese troops to police the foreign settlement if the demand was not heeded.
A former consul was indiscreet enough to put into writing that if the Chinese Governor did not stop the boycott and the students" movement by force if need be, he would take matters into his own hands. The chief tangible charge he brought against the Chinese as a basis of his demand for "protection" was that Chinese store-keepers actually refused to accept j.a.panese money in payment for goods, not ordinary j.a.panese money at that, but the military notes with which, so as to save drain upon the bullion reserves, the army of occupation is paid.
And all this, be it remembered, is more than two hundred miles from Tsing-tao and from eight to twelve months after the armistice. Today"s paper reports a visit of j.a.panese to the Governor to inform him that unless he should prevent a private theatrical performance from being given in Tsinan by the students, they would send their own forces into the settlement to protect themselves. And the utmost they might need protection from, was that the students were to give some plays designed to foster the boycott!
j.a.panese troops overran the Province before they made any serious attempt to capture Tsing-tao. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that they "took" the Chinese Tsinan before they took the German Tsing-tao. Propaganda in America has justified this act on the ground that a German railway to the rear of j.a.panese forces would have been a menace. As there were no troops but only legal and diplomatic papers with which to attack the j.a.panese, it is a fair inference that the "menace" was located in Versailles rather than in Shantung, and concerned the danger of Chinese control of their own territory.
Chinese have been arrested by j.a.panese gendarmes in Tsinan and subjected to a torturing third degree of the kind that Korea has made sickeningly familiar. The j.a.panese claim that the injuries were received while the men were resisting arrest. Considering that there was no more legal ground for arrest than there would be if j.a.panese police arrested Americans in New York, almost anybody but the pacifist Chinese certainly would have resisted. But official hospital reports testify to bayonet wounds and the marks of flogging. In the interior where the j.a.panese had been disconcerted by the student propaganda they raided a High School, seized a school boy at random, and took him to a distant point and kept him locked up several days. When the j.a.panese consul at Tsinan was visited by Chinese officials in protest against these illegal arrests, the consul disclaimed all jurisdiction.
The matter, he said, was wholly in the hands of the military authorities in Tsing-tao. His disclaimer was emphasized by the fact that some of the kidnapped Chinese were taken to Tsing-tao for "trial."
The matter of economic rights in relation to political domination will be discussed later in this article. It is no pleasure for one with many warm friends in j.a.pan, who has a great admiration for the j.a.panese people as distinct from the ruling military and bureaucratic cla.s.s, to report such facts as have been stated. One might almost say, one might positively say from the standpoint of j.a.pan itself, that the worst thing that can be charged against the policy of j.a.pan in China for the last six years is its immeasurable stupidity. No nation has ever misjudged the national psychology of another people as j.a.pan has that of China. The alienation of China is widespread, deep, bitter.
Even the most pessimistic of the Chinese who think that China is to undergo a complete economic and political domination by j.a.pan do not think it can last, even without outside intervention, more than half a century.
Today, at the beginning of a new year, (1920) the boycott is much more complete and efficient than in the most tense days of last summer.
Unfortunately, the j.a.panese policy seems to be under a truly Greek fate which drives it on. Concessions that would have produced a revulsion of feeling in favor of j.a.pan a year ago will now merely salve the surface of the wound. What would have been welcomed even eight months ago would now be received with contempt. There is but one way in which j.a.pan can now restore herself. It is nothing less than complete withdrawal from Shantung, with possibly a strictly commercial concession at Tsing-tao and a real, not a Manchurian, Open Door.
According to the j.a.panese-owned newspapers published in Tsinan, the j.a.panese military commander in Tsing-tao recently made a speech to visiting journalists from Tokyo in which he said: "The suspicions of China cannot now be allayed merely by repeating that we have no territorial ambitions in China. We must attain complete economic domination of the Far East. But if Chino-j.a.panese relations do not improve, some third party will reap the benefit. j.a.panese residing in China incur the hatred of the Chinese. For they regard themselves as the proud citizens of a conquering country. When the j.a.panese go into partnership with the Chinese they manage in the greater number of cases to have the profits accrue to themselves. If friendship between China and j.a.pan is to depend wholly upon the government it will come to nothing. Diplomatists, soldiers, merchants, journalists should repent the past. The change must be complete." But it will not be complete until the j.a.panese withdraw from Shantung leaving their nationals there upon the footing of other foreigners in China.
2.
In discussing the return to China by j.a.pan of a metaphysical sovereignty while economic rights are retained, I shall not repeat the details of German treaty rights as to the railway and the mines. The reader is a.s.sumed to be familiar with those facts. The German seizure was outrageous. It was a flagrant case of Might making Right. As von Buelow cynically but frankly told the Reichstag, while Germany did not intend to part.i.tion China, she also did not intend to be the pa.s.senger left behind in the station when the train started. Germany had the excuse of prior European aggressions, and in turn her usurpation was the precedent for further foreign rape. If judgments are made on a comparative basis, j.a.pan is ent.i.tled to all of the white-washing that can be derived from the provocations of European imperialistic powers, including those countries that in domestic policy are democratic. And every fairminded person will recognize that, leaving China out of the reckoning, j.a.pan"s proximity to China gives her aggressions the color of self-defence in a way that cannot be urged in behalf of any European power.
It is possible to look at European aggressions in, say, Africa as incidents of a colonization movement. But no foreign policy in Asia can shelter itself behind any colonization plea. For continental Asia is, for practical purposes, India and China, representing two of the oldest civilizations of the globe and presenting two of its densest populations. If there is any such thing in truth as a philosophy of history with its own inner and inevitable logic, one may well shudder to think of what the closing acts of the drama of the intercourse of the West and East are to be. In any case, and with whatever comfort may be derived from the fact that the American continents have not taken part in the aggression and hence may act as a mediator to avert the final tragedy, residence in China forces upon one the realization that Asia is, after all, a large figure in the future reckoning of history. Asia is really here after all. It is not simply a symbol in western algebraic balances of trade. And in the future, so to speak, it is going to be even more here, with its awakened national consciousness of about half the population of the whole globe.
Let the agreements of France and Great Britain made with j.a.pan during the war stand for the measure of western consciousness of the reality of only a small part of Asia, a consciousness generated by the patriotism of j.a.pan backed by its powerful army and navy. The same agreement measures western unconsciousness of the reality of that part of Asia which lies within the confines of China. An even better measure of western unconsciousness may be found perhaps in such a trifling incident as this:--An English friend long resident in Shantung told me of writing indignantly home concerning the British part in the Shantung settlement. The reply came, complacently stating that j.a.panese ships did so much in the war that the Allies could not properly refuse to recognize j.a.pan"s claims. The secret agreements themselves hardly speak as eloquently for the absence of China from the average western consciousness. In saying that China and Asia are to be enormously significant figures in future reckonings, the spectre of a military Yellow Peril is not meant nor even the more credible spectre of an industrial Yellow Peril. But Asia has come to consciousness, and her consciousness of herself will soon be such a ma.s.sive and persistent thing that it will force itself upon the reluctant consciousness of the west, and lie heavily upon its conscience. And for this fact, China and the western world are indebted to j.a.pan.
These remarks are more relevant to a consideration of the relationship of economic and political rights in Shantung than they perhaps seem.
For a moment"s reflection will call to mind that all political foreign aggression in China has been carried out for commercial and financial ends, and usually upon some economic pretext. As to the immediate part played by j.a.pan in bringing about a consciousness which will from the present time completely change the relations of the western powers to China, let one little story testify. Some representatives of an English missionary board were making a tour of inspection through China. They went into an interior town in Shantung. They were received with extraordinary cordiality by the entire population. Some time afterwards some of their accompanying friends returned to the village and were received with equally surprising coldness. It came out upon inquiry that the inhabitants had first been moved by the rumor that these people were sent by the British government to secure the removal of the j.a.panese. Later they were moved by indignation that they had been disappointed.