YELLOW MAN’S LAND
Yellow Man’s Land is the Far East. Here the group of kindred stocks usually termed Mongolian have dwelt for unnumbered ages. Down to the most recent times the yellows lived virtually a life apart. Sundered from the rest of mankind by stupendous mountains, burning deserts, and the illimitable ocean, the Far East constituted a world in itself, living its own life and developing its own peculiar civilization. Only the wild nomads of its northern marches—Huns, Mongols, Tartars, and the like—succeeded in gaining direct contact with the brown and white worlds to the West.
The ethnic focus of the yellow world has always been China. Since the dawn of history this immense human ganglion has been the centre from which civilization has radiated throughout the Far East. About this “Middle Kingdom,” as it sapiently styled itself, the other yellow folk were disposed—Japanese and Koreans to the east; Siamese, Annamites, and Cambodians to the south; and to the north the nomad Mongols and Manchus. To all these peoples China was the august preceptor, sometimes chastising their presumption, yet always instilling the principles of its ordered civilization. However diverse may have been the individual developments of the various Far Eastern peoples, they spring from a common Chinese foundation. Despite modern Japan’s meteoric rise to political mastery of the Far East, it must not be forgotten that China remains not only the cultural but also the territorial and racial centre of the yellow world. Four-fifths of the yellow race is concentrated in China, there being nearly 400,000,000 Chinese as against 60,000,000 Japanese, 16,000,000 Koreans, 26,000,000 Indo-Chinese, and perhaps 10,000,000 people of non-Chinese stocks included within China’s political frontiers.
The age-long seclusion of the yellow world, first decreed by nature, was subsequently maintained by the voluntary decision of the yellow peoples themselves. The great expansive movement of the white race which began four centuries ago soon brought white men to the Far East, by sea in the persons of the Portuguese navigators and by land with the Cossack adventurers ranging through the empty spaces of Siberia. Yet after a brief acquaintance with the white strangers the yellow world decided that it wanted none of them, and they were rigidly excluded. This exclusion policy was not a Chinese peculiarity; it was common to all the yellow peoples and was adopted spontaneously at about the same time. In China, Japan, Korea, and Indo-China, the same reaction produced the same results. The yellow world instinctively felt the white man to be a destructive, dissolving influence on its highly specialized line of evolution, which it wished to maintain unaltered. For three centuries the yellow world succeeded in maintaining its isolation, then, in the middle of the last century, insistent white pressure broke down the barriers and forced the yellow races into full contact with the outer world.
At the moment, the “opening” of the Far East was hailed by white men with general approval, but of late years many white observers have regretted this forcible dragging of reluctant races into the full stream of world affairs. As an Australian writer, J. Liddell Kelly, remarks: “We have erred grievously by prematurely forcing ourselves upon Asiatic races. The instinct of the Asiatic in desiring isolation and separation from other forms of civilization was much more correct than our craze for imposing our forms of religion, morals, and industrialism upon them. It is not race-hatred, nor even race-antagonism, that is at the root of this attitude; it is an unerring intuition, which in years gone by has taught the Asiatic that his evolution in the scale of civilization could best be accomplished by his being allowed to develop on his own lines. Pernicious European compulsion has led him to abandon that attitude. Let us not be ashamed to confess that he was right and we were wrong.”[7]
However, rightly or wrongly, the deed was done, and the yellow races, forced into the world-arena, proceeded to adapt themselves to their new political environment and to learn the correct methods of survival under the strenuous conditions which there prevailed. In place of their traditional equilibrated, self-sufficient order, the yellow peoples now felt the ubiquitous impacts of the dynamic Western spirit, insistent upon rapid material progress and forceful, expansive evolution. Japan was the first yellow people to go methodically to the white man’s school, and Japan’s rapid acquirement of the white man’s technology soon showed itself in dramatic demonstrations like her military triumphs over China in 1894, and over Russia a decade later.
Japan’s easy victory over huge China astounded the whole world. That these “highly intelligent children,” as one of the early British ministers to Japan had characterized them, should have so rapidly acquired the technique of Western methods was almost unbelievable. Indeed, the full significance of the lesson was not immediately grasped, and the power of New Japan was still underestimated. A good example of Europe’s underestimation of Japanese strength was the proposal a Dutch writer made in 1896 to curb possible Japanese aggression on the Dutch Indies by taking from Japan the island of Formosa which Japan had acquired from China as one of the fruits of victory. “Holland,” asserted this writer, “must take possession of Formosa.”[8] The grotesqueness of this dictum as it appears to us in the light of subsequent history shows how the world has moved in twenty-five years.
But even at that time Japan’s expansionist tendencies were well developed, and voices were warning against Japanese imperialism. In the very month when our Hollander was advocating a Dutch seizure of Formosa, an Australian wrote the following lines in a Melbourne newspaper concerning his recent travels in Japan: “While in a car with several Japanese officers, they were conversing about Australia, saying that it was a fine, large country, with great forests and excellent soil for the cultivation of rice and other products. The whites settled in Australia, so thought these officers, are like the dog in the manger. Some one will have to take a good part of Australia to develop it, for it is a pity to see so fine a country lying waste. If any ill-feeling arose between the two countries, it would be a wise thing to send some battleships to Australia and annex part of it.”[9]
Whatever may have been the world’s misreading of the Chino-Japanese conflict, the same cannot be said of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. The echoes of that yellow triumph over one of the great white Powers reverberated to the ends of the earth and started obscure trains of consequences even to-day not yet fully disclosed. The war’s reactions in these remoter fields will be discussed in later chapters. Its effect upon the Far East is our present concern. And the well-nigh unanimous opinion of both natives and resident Europeans was that the war signified a body-blow to white ascendancy. So profound an English student of the Orient as Meredith Townsend wrote: “It may be taken as certain that the victory of Japan will be profoundly felt by the majority of European states. With the exception of Austria, all European countries have implicated themselves in the great effort to conquer Asia, which has now been going on for two centuries, but which, as this author thinks, must now terminate.... The disposition, therefore, to edge out intrusive Europeans from their Asiatic possessions is certain to exist even if it is not manifested in Tokio, and it may be fostered by a movement of which, as yet, but little has been said. No one who has ever studied the question doubts that as there is a comity of Europe, so there is a comity of Asia, a disposition to believe that Asia belongs of right to Asiatics, and that any event which brings that right nearer to realization is to all Asiatics a pleasurable one. Japanese victories will give new heart and energy to all the Asiatic nations and tribes which now fret under European rule, will inspire in them a new confidence in their own power to resist, and will spread through them a strong impulse to avail themselves of Japanese instruction. It will take, of course, many years to bring this new force into play; but time matters nothing to Asiatics, and they all possess that capacity for complete secrecy which the Japanese displayed.”[10]
That Meredith Townsend was reading the Asiatic mind aright seems clear from the pronouncements of Orientals themselves. For example, Buddhism, of Rangoon, Burmah, a country of the Indo-Chinese borderland between the yellow and brown worlds, expressed hopes for an Oriental alliance against the whites. “It would, we think,” said this paper, “be no great wonder if a few years after the conclusion of this war saw the completion of a defensive alliance between Japan, China, and not impossibly Siam—the formulation of a new Monroe Doctrine for the Far East, guaranteeing the integrity of existing states against further aggression from the West. The West has justified—perhaps with some reason—every aggression on weaker races by the doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest; on the ground that it is best for future humanity that the unfit should be eliminated and give place to the most able race. That doctrine applies equally well to any possible struggle between Aryan and Mongolian—whichever survives, should it ever come to a struggle between the two for world-mastery, will, on their own doctrine, be the one most fit to do so, and if the survivor be the Mongolian, then is the Mongolian no ‘peril’ to humanity, but the better part of it.”[11]