Pacific Ocean Questions

China and Japan.—The Suez canal came earlier; but that would have been cut had there been no great ocean beyond Asia; its aim was to bring Oriental possessions nearer to their managers and the Oriental market nearer to the manufacturing nations of Europe. The greatest of all Oriental markets, China, was the last to come within the range of Western commerce, though the Arabs had been trading with Canton for many centuries. Like all lands enriched by the overflow of rivers, northern and eastern China were early populated and were organised first socially and then politically soon after the old stone age gave way to the neolithic. But the spill of peoples from the steppes of central Asia continued to be recurrent. The northern plains and plateaux of China were ever overcrowded, and drought or flood from "China's sorrow," the Hwang Ho, followed by famine, caused the people to overflow southwards into a zone that was warmer and seldom or never troubled with droughts. Thus this rich section of the earth came to hold one-fourth of the human race, so wedded to the soil and to the graves of their ancestry that it became the most stable of peoples, ready for the strong and vigorous ruler to civilise and unify ; and when civil war ceased it had long periods of peace that made it easy for so prolific a race to fill its borders to over flowing, ripe for the discipline of famine and plague.

Further north the closer proximity of the Japanese islands to the continental coast stimulated migration throughout at least the neolithic and bronze ages. It was doubtless the central Asiatic push that drove the Mongoloids over the straits of Tsushima in the bronze age. But they found the archipelago already filled with a vigorous Caucasoid people whom they called the "hairy Ainu" because of their having much face-hair. Though aided and led by a seafaring people who came overseas from the south, it took them till the I2th century to drive the aborigines north of Tokio. That another race different from all three had found its way into the archipelago is evident in the tall people over the mountains of the central island.

The East and West developed their civilisations in isolation from each other. Japan closed„ its doors against alien civilisations and foreign commerce just when with its maritime bent it might have gone freely all over the great ocean and planted its colonies in Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand and on the western shores of America without any hindrance. At its awakening in the latter part of the 19th century and its welcome to Occidental trade and culture the Occident had placed its mark upon these lands and begun to pour in its immigrants. Now that the East is eager to find issues for the overflow of its prolific population, the white man has fenced in by head tax and prohibitions these open lands to the west and south against the Oriental who has to find the main arena for his immigration on the continent of Asia. The islands of the ocean where it is not merely welcomed but sought after affords but little scope for a country like China which, according to a recent rough Shanghai estimate, added nearly 50,000,000 to its population between 1923 and 1926, in spite of civil war, and like Japan which added 700,000 to its 65,000,000 in 1927, in spite of its decreasing birth-rate and increasing death rate.

Industrialization of the East.

Manchuria is, now that it has a network of railways, giving issue to the overflow of China ; nearly a million trooped into it in 1927, chiefly from northern China which was harassed with civil war and famine and especially from Shantung. Japan, after the defeat of Russia, thought it had secured an arena for its overflow in taking over the Southern Manchurian railway, but failed to turn the current of emigration thither; in 1909, for example, 600,000 Japanese entered, but by the end of the year, 575,000 had gone back to their own land. But Manchuria is essential to the life of Japan as a producer of its food, of raw material for its manufactures and of profit from its railways; little wonder that Japan is ever expanding the rail way system and making the future of this great market secure. For the island nation is rapidly industrializing itself as the only solution of its problem of over-population. Whether this is to be the solution of China's still more clamant problem of ter Man churia and Mongolia and eastern Siberia have received their full complement of farmers and coolies is a Pacific question that will have to be answered before the end of this century. The process has already begun in the cities on the deltas of the rivers ; the labour is cheap enough and, in its own way, virile enough; but its financial success depends on the honesty and thoroughness of the business methods; and hitherto few or no Chinese companies have paid dividend and the railways managed by the Chinese are failures. This is due to the eleventh commandment of "squeeze," a tradition born of the payment of Government officials by what they could extract from the tax-payers. It is still a question whether Oriental mass-production managed by Orientals can attain the standard and honesty of the former individual crafts manship; and on that depends the stability of the markets the products may find.

Whether China can follow the lead of Japan and westernize its ancient civilization is the question of Pacific questions, when we consider the mass and fecundity of its population and the po tentialities of its resources. As yet its republican form of Govern ment has proved itself a failure. How long it will take to make it a reality instead of a pretence depends upon the answer to a variety of questions; chief of which is this : Can a nation so huge and unorganized overcome the handicap of its script as Japan has done and make education universal and compulsory? A Chinese scholar, James Yen, of Pekin, has reduced the zo,000 ideographs essential for education to i,000, and, within a year or two, has had a million of his countrymen taught them through volunteer teachers. Japan has raised the standard of living of her population at least 50% in spite of the doubling of its numbers during the last half-century; this she has done by her vigorous industrialization; but she is the most organizable of Oriental nations, because of her insular character, the absence of disturbing racial differences, and the atmosphere of social discipline that was left when the revolution abolished the pri vileges of her highly-educated aristocracy; but most of all because she set herself at once to the task of establishing a system of universal education.