The Problem of Puppet States
Lawful, well-established indirect rule is a familiar feature of colonial practice. Constituting an internationally recognized legal relationship between the paramount power and the encompassed state, it has been applied extensively by the European powers in Africa and Asia. The Indian and Malay states, under Britain; Cambodia and Annam-Tonkin, under France; the East Indian sultanates, under the Netherlands—these offer a rich repository of precedent.
Unacknowledged intervention involving no legal relationship is also a known feature of modern politics. The practices of the United States in the Caribbean and Central America, particularly during the 1920's, are familiar, but the leading case of intervention without responsibility occurred in the relationship between the Soviet Union (first the R.S.F.S.R.) and the Outer Mongol People's Republic. Four features of what has since come to be called political puppetry are here made fully manifest: first, the establishment of the subordinate through the military aid of the superior; second, the continued effective control, unacknowledged in law, of the subordinate by the superior, coupled with economic coordination of the two; third, bilateral insistence upon the formal independence of the subordinate state; fourth, the claim of the superior that it has not intervened, coupled with international non-recognition of the new relationship. The four features—establishment, coordination, fictitious independence and international nonentity—were clearly defined by Soviet political practice in Outer Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva long before Manchoukuo was created.
In addition to this neighborly example, the Japanese had another source, commonly ignored in current Western comment on the Far East, on which to draw: the quasi-familist Confucian international system which prevailed down to the time of men now living. Successive Chinese Empires developed a clear, viable scheme of senior-junior relationships controlling their intercourse with other organized governments. The other, smaller states acknowledged China to be the senior realm, conceding that the Chinese Emperor was lord of the world. They paid formal tribute to China; their envoys were not ambassadors but tributary agents, while Chinese envoys came as high commissioners, superior in rank to the courts to which they were accredited. This relationship (awkwardly termed "dependency," "vassalage," "tributary" status, or subjection to "suzerainty," in Western terms) could not be fitted into the Western state system. Involving the assertion of Chinese power without concurrent admission of Chinese responsibility, it was rejected by the Western states, and lapsed following the French seizure of Indo-China, the British occupation of Burma, and Korean independence under Japanese compulsion. Today, Japan's moral effusions concerning the New Order in East Asia and her digressions from Western patterns of international law in dealing with Manchoukuo and Wang Ch'ing-wei both indicate that the Japanese move freely, sincerely, and unconsciously in a frame of reference which, obvious to them, is invisible to Westerners. The Japan-Manchoukuo or Japan-Wang relationship could be aligned with the relationship which Li Hung-chang wished, sixty years ago, to maintain in Korea, and found significantly similar. The Japanese understood the position of juniority in international relations: to their intense humiliation, they confessed themselves China's junior during the Ashikaga period.[3]
A third meaningful context for Japanese practice is found in the basic, factual scheme of current international relations. No nation in an interdependent world is independent except by legal fiction; none could maintain its present level of civilization without the existence of the others. In these terms, legal independence fades as time passes, and cross-national power becomes more evident. Western imperialism was described by Sun Yat-sen as reducing China to a hypo-colony. More recently, first the Communists and then the Japanese have accused Chiang K'ai-shek of being the puppet of imperialism,[4] while occasional Leftists regard Chiang as even now a puppet of Japan[5] and a few citizens of imperialist states see him as a Communist puppet. The Germans treat Churchill as the puppet of Roosevelt, and Roosevelt as a puppet for international Jewry, while the present Stalinist line attributes puppetry to the entire catalogue of world political institutions save those made quick by its own infallibility. The fundamental point of such appraisal depends upon the attribution of power relationships. Dependence is indisputable only if one government functions within the military framework of another, or if the personnel of the subordinate is drawn from the superior, or if clear and immediate causal relationships can be proved between the continued fiscal or military action of the sustaining government and the actual existence of the sustained government—although even this last leads to subjective interpretation.
The term puppet is not clear or apt, except in its most concrete sense—that of a person who is almost literally a marionette, whose utterances public and private are not his own, whose actions are supervised, and whose personal choice or opinion is not merely thwarted, but left out of consideration. Not all the Chinese who work with Japan are ventriloquists' dummies. The author talked freely with men who staked their careers on the inescapable success of the Japanese military, and who functioned in absolute conformity to general limits of policy and publicity laid down by the Japanese; these general limits were wide enough to permit a considerable degree of latitude of manners, and to allow variance in power and policy between the various Chinese under Japan. Use of the term puppet in such cases is not clear. It implies a higher degree of effective Japanese control, and a greater pliability of Chinese cooperators, than can be shown to exist.
Since, however, the National Government is recognized, both by the majority of the Chinese people and by all powers (including Germany and Italy) except Japan, to be the legitimate government of China, representing the Chinese nation, action against that government may properly and strictly be denominated treason; a person so acting may be called, formally, a traitor and, less formally but more descriptively, a Japanophile. Juridically the Chinese Soviet leaders were also traitors, but they were never Japanophile. This term gains by specificity what it loses through awkwardness.