CHINESE HOPES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 March 1939, Page 2

CHINESE HOPES

COMING REVOLUTION IN JAPAN i AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT SCEPTICAL. SOME SIGNIFICANT FACTS OVERLOOKED. (By William Henry Chamberlain, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) Belief that Japan is headed for a revolution that will overthrow the power of its military leaders is widespread—except in Japan. During a recent trip in China I was bombarded with questions by Chinese and by foreign residents of China as to whether, sometimes as to when, revolution might be expected in Japan: The idea that the war will end in a Japanese revolution is being widely spread in order to bolster up the Chinese will to resist. Chiang Kai-Shek referred to it in a recent message to the Chinese people, and Mao Tse-Tung outstanding Chinese Communist leader, said to his American journalistic visitor, Edgar Snow: The Japanese revolution, is not only a possibility, but a. certainty. It is inevitable and will begin to occur promptly after the first severe defeats suffered by the Japanese Army. Belief that Japan is already beaten is also frequently encountered. Typical of this school of thinking is the following excerpt from an article which endeavours to interpret the significance of the Soviet-Japanese border clash at Changkufeng last summer: Without swinging from underestimation of Soviet strength to overestimation, it can at least be said that Japan is finished. Its fate has been sealed by the latest of the Siberian incidents . . The Japanese are now in a far worse position than Napoleon was at Moscow. But, as I have written, there is one country where a Japanese revolution is not anticipated as a serious probability, much less a certainty, of the near future. That country is Japan. Naturally a realistic inquirer would not go to the official spokesman of the Foreign Office or to any other public, official for a frank impartial exposition of such a delicate question. But this writer’s circle of friends and acquaintances includes both submerged and inarticulate Japanese liberals and radicals and foreigners of long experience in Japan. From neither of these groups has there been any responsive echo to the confident foreign predictions of Japanese resolution. To be sure, there is always a large element of the unexpected and the unforeseen in a political, economic and social upheaval, which is big enough to deserve the name of a revolution. Anyone who in 1915 would have given an accurate forecast of the course of Bolshevism in Russia, anyone who in 1928 would have predicted the Third Reich of 1938, would have been dismissed by the keenest students of Russian and German affairs as a hopeless crank. Yet the lessons of the past, and not necessarily of the distant past, cast some light on the conditions under which revolution becomes possible. The first and surest cause of revolution is overwhelming defeat in war. The second is great and widespread misery and distress, unaccompanied by any hope of alleviation. The third is a kind of stagnation on the part of the legally constituted government, irresolution and uncertainty as to policy, unwillingness or inability to enforce respect for its authority. In such a situation a revolutionary minority which is ruthless, well organised, purposeful, is often ultimately able to impose its will on the masses of the people. How do these prerequisites of revolution fit the situation in Japan today? Overwhelming defeat in war is scarcely a practical possibility so long as Japan is fighting only China. Mao Tsetung’s conviction that revolution would overtake Japan after the’ “first severe defeats,” overlooked the possibility that there may be no such defeats. The Chinese military policy of withdrawing into the deep interior, leaving the coast, the railways and the largest cities to the Japanese, has disadvantages for China as well as advantages. The war has brought cuts in a Japanese standard of living that was always low, measured in terms of the West, although it was higher than that of any other Oriental country. But it has produced no food shortage, no distress of such dimensions as to’suggest possibilities of social upheavel. As for stagnation among the ruling classes, the Japanese Army, now in largely effective control of Japan’s destinies, certainly does not suffer from this defect. The Army knows pretty well what it wants and believes it knows how to get it. The dream of a revolt of the Japanese people, as a whole, against military domination, overlooks two significant facts. First the army, recruited on a basis of universal liability to service, is closely identified with the masses. It carries on an energetic propaganda along lines of nationalism and social radicalism and many of the poorer classes, especially in the country districts, look on the Army as their champion against self-seeking capitalists and corrupt politicians. Second, there was no strong popular movement, in the years before the war, against the power of the military, whereas there were repeated outbursts of violence, big and small, under the leadership of extremist young officers. This would seem to indicate where the revolutionary initiative in Japan lies. All these considerations do not mean that Japan will escape social change in the wake of the war. But the kind of revolution which Chinese and foreign sympathisers with China dream o , the kind of revolution that would change the military nature of the Japanese state and cause Japan to withdraw from China, is not visible on the Japanese horizon.