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CONTENTS
Vol. 4, No. 4: 19
The Editors - Introduction to Special Section on Imperialism in
China
Andrew J. Nathan - Imperialisms Effects on China
Joseph Esherick - Harvard on China: The Apologetics of
Imperialism
Herbert P. Bix - Report from Japan 1972 - Part II
To Huu, Ho Chi Minh, Nguyen Kim Ngan, Truong Quoc Khanh, Ly
Phuong Lien - Vietnamese Poetry
Letter from the Philippines
Usha Mahajani - Comment on Eqbal Ahmads Notes on South Asia
in Crisis
Fred Branfman - Prospects for Vietnam After the Agreement is
Signed
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts

19,0
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BACK ISSUES
There are still back issues available of the following Bulletin
issues: 11:3,11:4,111:3-4, IV:1, and IV:2. Summer-Fall 1971
(III :3-4), which includes the CCAS research on Modern China
Studies, is in particularly copious supply, and bulk orders will
be welcomed from CCAS chapters, bookstores, etc. for that
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Other back issues of the Bulletin are now out of print. The
will pay $1.50 each for copies of issue III: 1 (spring
1971 ).
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
NatiollalOffices:
West CASS, c/o Helen Chauncey, Building 600T,
Stanford, CA. 94305
Midwest c/o Kenneth Hazelton, 400 Ford Hall, Univ. of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. 55455
East CCAS, c/o Jean Doyle, 86 Elm Sr., Somerville.
MA.02144
Write the Stanford office for information
Statement of Purpose
We first came together in opposition to the brutal
aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to
the complicity or silence of our profession with
regard to that policy. Those 10 the field of Asian
studies bear responsibility for the consequences of
their research and the political posture of their
profession. We are concerned about the present
unwillingness of specialists to speak out against the
implications of an Asian policy committed to ensur
ing American domination of mueh of Asia. We
reject the legitimacy of this aim, and attempt to
change this policy. We recognize that the present
structure of the profession has often pen'erted
scholarship :tnti alicnated man\' people in the field.
The CC\S seeks to develop a humane and knowl
edgeable understanding of Asian societies and their
efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to con
front such problems .is poverty, oppreSSion, and
imperialism. We realize that to be students of other
peoples. we mllst first understand our relations to
tht'lTI,
The CC\S \\'ishes to create alternatives to the
prevailing trends 111 scholarship on Asia \\'hich too
often spring from a parochial eultur,tl perspective
and serve selfish interests and eXpanSlOl1lSm. Our
organization is designed tn function as a catalyst, a
communications network i'or both Asian and West
ern scholars, a provider of central resources for local
chapters, ,1l1d a community for the development of
anti-imperia list research.
IJ'.lsSL'd .II,/rd) 28-30, 1969. nos/oll/
BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Vol. 4, No.4 / December 1972 Contents
The Editors 2
Andrew}. Nathan 3
Joseph Esherick 9
Herbert P. Bix 17
To Huu, Ho Chi Minh, Nguyen Kim Ngan, 31
Truong Quoc Khanh, Ly Phuong Lien
37
Usha Mahajani 41
44
45
Fred Branfman 46
48
General Correspondence: Bay Area Institute, 604 Mission
Street, room 1001, San Francisco, California 94105
Manuscripts: Steve Andors, P.O. Box 24, Minetto, N.Y.
13115, in three copies if possible
COlllmittee oj Concerned Asian Scholars national office:
Building 600T, Stanford, California 94305
Rook Ueviews: Moss Roberts, 100 Bleecker St., I8-A, New
York, N.Y. 10012
Typesetting: Archetype, Berkeley
Printing: UP Press, Redwood City
Cover: Suzuki Akie
Introduction to Special Section on Imperialism in China
Imperialism's Effects on China
Harvard on China: The Apologetics of Imperialism
Report from japan 1972-Part II
Vietnamese Poetry
Letter from the Philippines
Comment on Eqbal Ahmad's "Notes on South Asia in Crisis"
Cumulative Index, BCAS, 1969-1972 [I:3-IV:4)
Communication
Prospects for Vietnam After the Agreement Is Signed
Contributors
Editors: Steve Andors / Nina Adams Managing Edftor: Jon
Livingston Book Review Editor: Moss Roberts Staff: john
Brockett / Betsey Cobb / Ed Hammond I Steve Hart / joe
Huang / Mary Ellen Quintana Editorial Board: Rod Aya /
Frank Baldwin / Marianne Bastid / Herbert Bix / Helen
Chauncey / Noam Chomsky / John Dower / Kathleen Gough /
Richard Kagan / Huynh Kim Khanh / Perry Link / jonathan
Mirsky / Victor Nee / Felicia Oldfather / Gail Omvedt / james
Peck / Franz Schurmann / Mark Selden / Hari Sharma /
Yamashita Tatsuo
l
RUUJTlI\' OF CONCt;UN/':[) 11.')/1\1\' .<'CIIOLARS, December 1972, Volume 4, number 4. Published quarterly in spring,
summer, fail, and winter. $6.00; student rate $4.00; library rate $10.00; foreign rates: $7.00; student rate $4.00. jon Livingston,
I
Publisher, 604 Mission Street, room 1001, San Francisco, California 94105. Second class postage paid at San Francisco,
California.
I
Editor's Note
Some three years ago in this Bulletin, James Peck raised
a number of crucial issues confronting everyone concerned
with serious intellectual discussion of modern China. Only
Professor John K. Fairbank responded seriously to Peck's
arguments, and since then, the issues raised - as crucial and
challenging as they were - have, it seems, neatly been
forgotten. This issue of the Bulletin hopes to revive the
intellectual confrontation and debate that began with the
Peck-Fairbank exchanges.
Special Section:
Professors Andrew Nathan and Joseph Esherick, to their
credit, have seriously confronted these issues in their essays on
the impact of imperialism in China before 1949. It is clear,
after reading these two essays that what is at issue is more than
just a question of choosing "facts" to support one position or
another, though this is a significant part of the profound
disagreement between these two essays. The more important
questions are ones of historical interpretation, questions not
only of seeing how isolated events are linked to other
IItlperialisItl

China
From its inception, many people have looked upon the
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and its publication,
the Bulleti71 of Concerned Asia1l Scbolars, as a biased political
group whose biases happencd to coincide with a morally
acceptable stand - opposition to American aggression in
Vietnam. But whether or not many members and sympathizers
realized it, the formation of CCAS was much more than a
symbol of antipathy to a cruel and immoral war. More
fundamentally, it was a direct challenge to the intellectual and
organizational hegemony of a whole group of scholars who, in
spite of differences In values and personality, had a
discernibly similar approach to scholarship: "liberal"
scholarship on Asia, most notably the vast outpouring from
lIarvard University which has defined /\sian studies since
the 1940s. Jim Peck made an attempt to outline the biascs and
prejudices of this type of scholarship and to offer an
alternative. But somehow nothing happened. Perhaps the
psychological comforts and professional advantages of "know
it all" eclecticism are too much part of American academia,
but such an eclecticism succeeds in doing nothing more than
avoiding the crucial issues of intellectual debate. Certainly, the
differences between Peck and Fairbank were of such a basic
and important nature that one could have hoped for
wide-ranging argument and first steps in a basic reassessment
of the field.
contemporary events, but also of attempting to delineate the
trends and being willing to evaluate the inevitable relationships
between groups of human b e i n g ~ that characterize those
trends. It is precisely here that the most significant difference
between these two essays lies: in accmltety describing human
reality.
The editors feel that the joining of this issue in
intellectual struggle can help to clarify the nature of the world
we live in today, for imperialism in the 1970s is in many ways
a more formidable and a more subtle force than It was in the
century or so before the Second World War. Trends 'that can
only be rather tentatively seen in China before 1945 have since
developed and evolved into a full-blown system of global
hierarchy and inequality. The other contributions to this issue
attempt to explore some of the dimensions of that system in
Asia, including the future development of Japanese
imperialism in the 1970s. And to remind the neo-Spencerian
apologists of the barbarity implied by their support of
imperialism's "modernizing" mission, the poetry of the
Vietnamese is more than enough to make a beginning.
The editors of the Bulletill certainly do not envision this
special issue on imperialism to conclude the debate. We hope,
to the contrary, that there is enough concern, both political
and intellectual, to examine the issues and discuss the reality
in an ongoing confrontation around these important questions.
2
I
I
I
1m.perialism.' s Effects on China
I
,
,
Andrew J. Nathan
J
1
j
I
Three years ago in this journal, James Peck argued that "the
professional ideology of America's China watchers" has tended
to blind them to certain approaches to modern Chinese history
that might be labelled "revolutionary Marxist" interpreta
tions.
1
As an example, Peck argued that the China watchers
have explained China's nineteenth and early twentieth century
difficulties (prolonged economic and military weakness. failed
reforms and revolutions) by reference to internal factors
(culture, social structure), while a revolutionary Marxist
perspective would seek explanations in the effects of
imperialism.
2
He provided several examples or the types of
effects imperialism may have had on China: "The power of the
metropolitan countries to block the formation of vital
domestic industries in the dependent countries competitive
with their own operations; the domination of mercantile over
industrial capital; and the subordination of the economic life
of a dependent nation to the severe fluctuations of the
primary commodities market." 3 But he did not have space in
his article, which was primarily concerned with a critique of
existing work in the China field, to provide a fuller outline of
what the imperialism approach to modern China might
involve.
The present essay is an effort to clear away some of the
underbrush surrounding the problem of the effects of
imperialism in China, in the hope of helping to make
discussion of this important issue as sophisticated and
empirical as the present state of research allows. It \-ViII
become apparent that I do not agree with what Mr. Peck seems
to be saying about these effects, and that I give more weight to
internal factors than he does in explaining China's modern
difficulties. However, having declared my standpoint. r would
like to focus this essay not on the broad question of the overall
explanation for modern China's problems, but on the narrower
question of imperialism's contributions to the shaping of
modern Chinese history. This is particularly appropriate
because recently published research throws new light on the
subject, and because an accurate evaluation of imperialism's
effects is essential to a rounded understanding of the broader
question of why modern China took the course that she did.
In the absence of an extended discussion by Mr. Peck
himself of the effects of imperialism, r take as my text Harold
Isaacs' classic The Tragedy of tbe Cbinese Revo/ution.4 In
doing so, I do not mean to suggest that Peck's views are
exactly those of Isaacs or vice versa. But it seems most
convenient for both author and reader if we focus on this
highly developed, widely available, and influential version of
I
I
!
I
what Peck calls a revolutionary Marxist vie\\ of the effects of
imperialism on China.
s
Issacs provides' a set of concrete
propositions about the effects of imperialism on China, which
we can test against the findings of recent research. If, as I hope
to show, they are substantially inconsistent, we shall have
either to abandon the Isaacs interpretation of imperialism's
effects on China, or to look for some error in the research.
It might be well to begin by fixing in our minds what
arrangements and foreigners' privileges were involved in
imperialism in China. (, The legal bases of the institution called
imperialism were, of course, the Treaty of Nanking (1842), the
Treaty of 1858 and the 1860 convention which modified it.
the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), the treaties and
conventions arising out of the "scramble for concessions"
(1895-1898), and the Boxer Protocol of 1901. Together, these
set up the following complex of institutions'
Tbe Treaty Ports. The ninety or so treaty ports, in the most
important of which foreigners had settlements or concessions,
were the keystone of imperialism. The treaty ports existed for
the convenience of Western businessmen. Western laws of
contract and personal liability were maintained through
exterritoriality, which made foreigners in China subject to the
laws of their own countries, administered by consula, courts.
Foreigners virtually owned property in treaty ports, ~ i n c e they
held it on 99-year leases, and they were thercfor<. able to
found factories, banks, and trading firms. From tbeir enclaves,
the foreign communities looked out with contempt upon the
native life for which they had little sympathy or
understanding. The foreign businessman believed that Chinese
officials were creating obstacles to the natural expansion of
foreign business and that they should be forced, with gunboats
if necessary, to open the country further. The atmnsphere of
the treaty ports was strongly racist, as symbolized by the
legendary (if apocryphal) Shanghai park sign, "Dogs and
Chinese not allowed."
Spberes of Ilifluence. There were in addition the railway
and mining concessions and pieces of additional territory
controlled by certain powers-e.g., the Germans in Shantung,
the Russians and Japanese in Manchuria, the British at
Weihaiwei and Kowloon. Those powers enjoyed the fight to
station their own police forces in Chinese territory and thus
the capability to intervene, by threat or act, in Chinese
politics. They also enjoyed profits from the railways and mines
m the concessions.
Otber Restrictiol1s 011 Cbinese Sovereigllty. The Maritime
Customs Service was officially a Chinese government organ,
3
but was run by foreigners with close diplomatic contacts with
foreign powers. The proceeds collected by Customs were
directly turned over to the service of foreign debts; when in
1917 a surplus appeared, the Powers took over the right of
approving its release and restricting its use. Furthermore, the
treaties gave the Powers the right to set the Chinese tariff; they
kept it at a low 5 % of value in order to encourage the opening
of the China market to foreign trade. This not only kept China
from protecting her industry but deprived her of income.
The Financial Drain. The treaties involved China in fiancial
obligations to foreigners that were crippling to government
finance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To pay the
1895 indemnity of about 30 million pounds, the Chinese took
loans which it took approximately 100 million pounds to
repay. For the $333 million Boxer indemnity, the Chinese had
to make installment payments at a rate that absorbed almost
all the central government's income and would have reached,
with interest, about $739 million. (Since part of the debt was
cancelled after the first world war, the payments ultimately
amounted to only $250 million.)
The Missionary Invasion. The treaties required the Chinese
to permit missionaries in the interior. Missionaries reached
about half of China's hsien, 7 and must have been seen or heard
by a substantial portion of the population. Driven by an
evangelizing fervor ("Shall not the low wail of helpless,
hopeless misery, arising from one-half of the heathen world,
pierce our sluggish ear,"s etc.) the missionaries did not
hesitate to intervene in Chinese politics and lawsuits to
strengthen their local position. They were generally quite
willing to share information on local conditions with their
consuls, for whom they therefore acted as virtual spies. The
racism and contempt in:t.plicit in the concept of China as a
"Niagara of souls" falling to perdition was only enhanced for
most missionaries by the physical deprivation of life in China
and the frustration of trying to reach the largely unresponsive
"heathen. "
We now recognize the moral ugliness of nineteenth and
early twentieth century imperialism in China. But what were
its concrete effects? Isaacs argues as follows:
The Chinese economic and social structure, already in
crisis, reacted swiftly at top and at bottom to the corrosive
influence of the foreign invasion. Economically, China was
laid prostrate. With the help of opium, the foreign traders
established a balance of trade permanently in their
favor. . .. Through the breach made by the drug and
widened by British and French cannon in the Opium Wars
of 1842 and 1858, manufactured commodities made their
way. As British cotton goods came in, the export of
Chinese woven cloth (nankeens) began to fall off and
disappeared almost entirely by 1833.... The flow of
commodities was soon followed by capital investment and
loans. Foreign shipping companies, cotton mills, railways,
and telegraph lines occupied by the end of the century all
the commanding positions in Chinese economic life . ...
The spread of opium, the drain of silver, and the influx
of machine-made commodities greatly aggravated the crisis
in the countryside, which arose primarily from the rapid
growth of population and the shortage of cultivable land.
The widespread use of opium caused a flow of wealth from
the countryside to the towns and led to an alarming
contraction of the internal market. The silver shortage
caused by the drain resulted in a 20 to 30% depreciation of
the copper currency in common use and a sharp rise in the
cost of living. Debased coinage came into use. Foreign
cotton goods and other commodities drove Chinese
handicrafts to the wall, especially in the southern
provinces . ...
Tile accumulative result of all these agencies of
dissolution was mass pauperization and the creation of a
large floating population . ...
The imperialists, on their part, having battered the
Manchu court into submission and adapted the upper strata
of chinese society to their own uses, became the protectors
of the Chinese rulers against the wrath of the people . ...
[Later] the rivalries of the different Western powers fed on
separatist conflicts which undermined the central authority
and encouraged provincial and regional satrapies which
corresponded roughly to the "spheres of influence. "....
By adapting to its own uses the merchants, landlords,
officials, and militarists, imperialism helped perpetuate the
pre capitalist forms of Chinese social organization . ... The
Chinese ruling class could not liberate the peasantry
because, as a result of the peculiar conditions and
belatedness of its growth, it was too organically tied to the
exploitation of the peasantry. 9
With violence to the elo<;uence, but not, I hope, to the
content of this argument, we might reduce it to two sets of
propositions about imperialism's effects.
A. Economic effects.
1. Foreign economic activity "drove Chinese handicrafts to
the wall" and thus contributed to the immiseration of the
peasants.
2. Foreign dominance of the treaty port economy stifled
the growth of native industry and commerce.
3. Unfavorable terms of trade (plus indemnities) drained
China's wealth, increasing the misery of the people and the
weakness of native enterprise.
B. Political effects.
1. The Powers gave direct support to reactionary forces (the
dynasty, the warlords) and thus helped to postpone
revolution.
2. Imperialism distorted normal political evolution-the
growth of a bourgeoisie to lead the revolution against
feudalism-and fostered instead the growth of a treaty port
compradore class which was a non-revolutionary outgrowth of
the feudal landlord class.
How well do these propositions stand up to the evidence?
First, did foreign imports drive Chinese handicrafts to the wall,
leading to mass pauperization of the peasantry? Recent
research tends to suggest that this did not occur.
First of all, it is questionable whether there was any secular
trend toward mass pauperization in modern China. The
existence of severe economic distress in the countryside from
the 1920s onwards was observed by all who visited the Chinese
village, but it may be a mistake to project this back much
before 1910, or to argue that it was a result of structural
features of the Chinese-economy-plus-imperialism. Rhoads
Murphey has shown that European observers of the 19th
century and before tended to describe China as equally or
more prosperous than Europe except for areas that were
temporarily suffering from the devastations of war, flood or
drought.
1O
If, as Dwight Perkins has argued, 11 food
production kept up with population growth in China until the
middle of the twentieth century, it must have been not China's
decreasing prosperity but Europe's wealth, the
revolution of rising expectations among Chinese intellectuals,
and a tendency to overgeneralize from specific cases of
worsening conditions, that created the impression of a secular
trend towards pauperization in the countryside. This, indeed,
is the argument made by Ramon Myers,12 whose research
shows that at least in some North China villages, conditions
tended if anything to improve, except for the intermittent
damage (which tended to be repaired in a few years) done by
the passage of warlord armies or by drought or flood. 13 In
short, in the areas where rural poverty got worse during the
twentieth century, the cause cannot be laid to a structural
feature of the whole economy, and the impact of foreign
imports on handicrafts would have been such a structural
feature.
In any case, research suggests that over the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries as a whole there was not only no decline.
but growth commensurate with population growth, in the
total domestic market enjoyed by native handicraft-produced
goodS.
14
The basic reason for this was that handicraft goods
were cheaper and more suited to peasant needs than foreign
factory-produced equivalents. Foreign goods in general were
unable seriously to dent the Chinese market, which consisted
of tens of thousands of small markets dealing primarily in
locally produced goods. IS Certain exceptions to this
statement must immediately be specified: factory-spun yarn
did make large inroads in the Chinese markets, with serious
dislocation in those bsien where spinning was a major
handicraft industry; 16 cigarettes and kerosene were two
foreign items that deeply penetrated the Chinese countryside,
and although cigarettes did not replace any Chinese handicraft
item, kerosene replaced vegetable oil for burning. There was
also some dislocation when, in the twentieth century, export
demand for silk and tea declined; 17 but domestic demand for
these two items continued strong, so that total demand was
not greatly affected. In general, the China market spelled
frustration for foreign merchants. goods made but a
superficial mark in Chinese markets. Where exports of
handicraft items fell off, domestic demand took up most of
the slack. Dislocation was confined to a few areas.
Turning to Isaacs' second propositIOn, did foreign
dominance of the treaty port econo'my stifle the growth of
native industry and commerce? It is hard to make this
argument stick, for two reasons.
First, we have the well-known findings of Chi-ming Hou. 18
Granted that foreign firms were dominant in banking, foreign
trade, coal mining, cotton weaving, cigarettes and electricity, it
remains the fact that the majority of treaty port enterprises
were small, consumer-goods factories. Taking these into
account, Chinese-owned plants accounted for 78% of factory
output in China proper in 1922.
19
Furthermore, Chinese
owned substantial amounts of stock in the so-called
"foreign-owned" companies. The foreign and Chinese shares of
the industrial sector remained roughly stable over the years
1895 to 1937. Even though some aspects of the treaty port
scene (low tariffs, competition) were harmful to Chinese
industry, there is no evidence that Chinese firms were more
adversely affected by these conditions than foreign firms. So
far from Western treaty port enterprise being harmful to
Chinese enterprises, Hou even argues that the treaty ports
(with their banking facilities, railways, order, and concepts of
contract) and foreign enterprises (serving as technical and
entrepreneurial models and pioneering the demand for new
products) were essential catalysts to the development of
Chinese industry. Hou, in short, shows that it is difficult to
establish a negative relationship between the foreign presence
and the success of Chinese enterprise.
Even if one rejects Hou's arguments, it may be a mistake to
see imperialism as the cause of the weakness of Chinese
modern enterprise. As Albert Feuern'erker has pointed out, far
f
more important than the relative shares of Chinese and foreign
t
enterprise in the modern sector of the economy was the failure
of that sector as a whole to develop. Modern industry and
t
commerce never became more than a miniscule component of
i
the whole Chinese economy. The problem is really the classic
f
one of the failure of industrialization to occur (under foreign
I
or Chinese auspices), and this can hardly be explained by the
depressing effect of foreign treaty port enterprise on Chinese
treaty port enterprise. The probable reason, according to
Feuerwerker, for the weakness of the treaty port sector of the
economy was the failure of demand for modern-style
manufactured goods to develop within the economy; this
failure was in turn due to lack of transport, peasant poverty,
the expense of manufactured goods, and the continued
viability of traditional handicrafts and commercial channels. 20
The continuing backwardness of the Chinese economy, then,
was if anything partially due to the weakness of the effects of
imperialism rather than to the strength of these effects.
What about Issacs' third point, that imperialism caused
China to be drained of wealth? There is no question that the
combination of indemnities and unfavorable terms of trade did
cause a net drain of wealth from China (although this was
balanced to an undetermined extent by overseas Chinese
remittances). 21 And unquestionably, this drain came out of
the pockets of the people, making some incremental
contribution to their poverty. But Hou's data suggest that the
total amount of the outflow, when measured against the
massive body of the Chinese economy, was not very
significant. China's national debt per capita and her foreign
trade per capita must have been among the lowest in the
world. It is hard to see how the impact of this aspect of
imperialism could be regarded as doing more than giving a
slight additional impetus to economic trends already under
way, 22 and the discussion of the two preceding points
already shown that, whatever their nature, these trends were
not due to imperialism.
It is interesting to note in connection with this discussion
of foreign trade that one phenomenon of modern
neo-colonialism to which Peck draws attention 23 emphatically
did not occur in the Chinese case: the restructuring of the
native economy towards heavy reliance on the export of
mineral or agricultural primary products to the mother
country for processing. Foreign trade was entirely too small a
proportion of the huge locally-oriented Chinese economy to
create large-scale restructuring in any direction (including, as
we have shown, the direction of industrialization). 24
The economic effects of imperialism, then, seem to have
been relatively slight in the Chinese economy as a whole. To
say this is not to suggest that people did not suffer from these
effects or that these sufferings are not valid subjects for
research or concern. But on the economic side, at least, the
effects of imperialism seem to have been too limited to serve
5
as a basic explanation for China's problems.
Hut what about the political impact of imperialism? Here
we have to deal with Isaacs' two points about direct foreign
support for reactionary forces on the Chinese scene and the
distortion of normal political evolution by the fostering of a
compradore class.
With respect to the first point, research turns up a familiar
mixed picture. It is true that the Powers in the 1860s initiated
a "cooperative policy" toward the dynasty, which they
thought would reform itself and thus establish the peace
necessary to the full development of the China trade which
was the Powers' main goal; that the Powers provided technical
assistance to the self-strengtheners, who used their new
arsenals and weapons to suppress domestic rebellions; and that
some foreign mercenaries participated in the campaign against
the Taipings.25 But it is clear that these factors were far from
decisive for the survival of the dynasty to 1911. The forces of
rebellion must have been weak indeed if the essentially
peripheral foreign role was sufficient to tip the balance toward
their suppression. In any case, the dynasty did fall and was
succeeded by Yuan Shih-k'ai and then the warlords. Here
again, despite the fact of some foreign loans and some foreign
meddling, and despite the inviting coincidence between certain
spheres of influence and certain warlords, the foreign role was
essentially peripheral. All the evidence so far on this still
ill-researched period is that the Powers deplored rather than
favored warlord ism because of its harmful impact on trade;
that after the Nishihara Loans they gave no substantial
financial support to the Peking government or individual
warlords; and that they were wary of backing any specific
warlord for fear that he might soon fdl out of power.
26
In
short, although the Powers did little "" end warlord ism, it
would be entirely too superficial to regard their presence as its
cause. In conclusion, then, however high-handed and
illegitimate the direct political interventions of imperialism in
China before the 1930s, on a balanced view their effects would
have to be judged inessential to the outcome or even to the
timing of revolution in China.
27
Issacs' final point-the distorting impact of imperialism on
China's political evolution-is harder to evaluate. For one
thing, it requires us to assume that China would have taken the
"normal" (European) course of bourgeois revolution against
feudalism, an assumption which is hard to accept in view of
the fact that the Chinese bourgeoisie, weak as it was, seems to
have developed to the extent that it did largly because of the
foreign impact. Furthermore, a proper evaluation of the
general issue of the class nature of successive regimes and
political forces in modern China would require more
knowledge than we yet have about, for example, which social
classes supported the Nanking government and how important
this support was to its strength. But in the absence of this sort
of knowledge there are at least shreds of evidence that caution
skepticism towards the argument that reactionary regimes
(Manchus, warlords and the KMT) were founded on the
support of a compradore class created by imperialism. If the
treaty port economy was as small a proportion of the total
economy as we have argued above, it is hard to see how any
treaty port c1ass-compradore, boureoisie or proletariat-could
have had a controlling impact on the outcome or timing of the
Chinese revolution.
28
Even if we concede the dubious point
that the strength of the Nationalist Government of 1927-1937
was based primarily or largely on compradore support, we still
have to contend with the preceding 80 or 90 years of
imperialism's effects. At the most, it would seem, the
compradore class was able to delay the revolution by ten of
the one hundred or so years it required to come to fruition.
To the extent, then, that the Isaacs book can represent
what Mr. Peck means by a "revolutionary Marxist"
interpretation of the effect of imperialism on China, the
results of this brief survey of the relevant literature suggest
that Peck is directing us into a blind alley when he calls for
analysis of modern Chinese history to be carried out in this
vein. If the debate over the basic causes of China's modern
difficulties is to have two sides, the external-causation side of
the argume nt will be ill served by adopting the five Isaacs
propositions as the basis of its position. With no disrespect to
Mr. Isaacs' superb book, it appears that in the light of more
recent research his interpretation of imperialism's effects is
simplistic and misdirected.
A more tenable-although not revolutionary Marxist-view
of the effects of imperialism on China, it seems to me, is that
it wrought a profound change in the Chinese national psyche.
In this view, the primary result of imperialism was the rise of
Chinese nationalism and the consequent revolution which was
carried out as a succession of transformations aimed at ridding
China of foreign encroachment. What was important,
according to this interpretation, was not the actual social and
economic impact of imperialism, which was relatively slight,
but the fact that the Chinese themselves believed in the
severity of this impact,29 and the further fact that the Chinese
were deeply humiliated by the unequal treaties and the racism
of the citizens of the Powers. In the nineteenth century,
Chinese diplomats believed they were manipulating the
foreigners by granting privileges that would make the
foreigners grateful to the Empire. But as imperialism grew
more extensive, it created in China a new concept of
sovereignty and a new emotion of nationalism,3O which
stressed the extirpation of foreign privilege and the
preservation of the integrity of the Chinese body politic. China
must strengthen herself to win back sovereignty: such was the
view of successive waves of reformers and revolutionaries from
the self-strengtheners through the communists. 31 If the
necessary national strength could only be earned .at the
expense of the traditional social and political order, the price
had ultimately to be paid. In this way, China's national
conservatism was shaken by the excesses of imperialism, and
revolution replaced restoration as the goal of the political elite.
It was a process that could only be understood as a response to
the impact of imperialism, but to imperialism's psychological,
cultural and intellectual impact rather than to its social and
economic impact.
This view of imperialism's effects has ambiguous
implications for the larger issue of the reasons for China's and
Japan's different experiences in the last century. There
remains the possibility, suggested by Peck, 32 that the
psychological, cultural and intellectual impact of imperialism
on China was heavier that it was on Japan. But if we ask why
it was heavier, we are likely to assign considerable importance
in our answer to the different Chinese and Japanese
perceptions of imperialism, and to their different readiness to
adopt the idea of nationalism and to transform themselves
politically and technologically. We are, in short, likely to be
led back to that stress on internal causes which Mr. Peck
wishes to avoid, despite the fact that we assign no less
6
I
prominent a role than he does to imperialism as an ultimate
cause of China's transformation.
I
i
I
I
NOTES
I
I am grateful to Stephen Andors, joseph Esherick, Steven Levine,
j
Perry Link, Walter Nimocks, Carl Riskin and Ernest Young for valuable
comments on the present essay. Participants at a colloquium at the
Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan also made
useful criticisms. The usual disclaimer that the author remains
i
responsible for the view expressed acquires special force in this
instance, since a number of commentators disagreed with points made
here.
1. james Peck, "The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology
of America's China Watchers," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
1
11:1 (October 1969), 59-69; reprinted in Edward Friedman and Mark
Selden, eds., America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on AsianAmerican
I
Relations (New York: Vintage, 1971), 40-66. Citations here are to the
Bulletin.
2. Ibid., 64-65.
3. Ibid., 65.
4. For the convenience of readers, I will refer to the second revised
edition (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961; New York:
Atheneum, 1966, paperback). However, I have checked the relevant
passages with the first edition (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1938).
Despite many small changes of word and phrase, the essential meaning
of the passages cited from the first two chapters remains unchanged in
the second revised edition.
5. Isaacs is not mentioned in Peck's footnotes, but the sources for a
revolutionary Marxist viewpoint which are cited (Mandel Horowitz
Belden, Myrdal) would not be convenient foci for a of
either because they do not themselves focus on China or because (in
Belden's case) the analysis is less complete that Isaacs'. Instead of
Isaacs, of course, one could select Fei Hsiao-t'ung, Ho Kanchih, or
other authors, but Isaacs is convenient because his discussion of the
effects of imperialism in China is exceptionally clear and well-rounded,
and is conccntrated in two chapters of the book. In any case, the
important thing is not precisely whose views arc discussed, but to
discuss a set of views that are clearly laid out, susceptible to proof or
disproof on the basis of evidence, sufficiently influential to repay the
effort of discussion, and which adequately represent the gist of the
revolutionary Marxist interpretation. Isaacs' book certainly fulfills the
first three criteria; and if I am mistaken in thinking it fulfills the last,
this article will provide an occasion for others to clarify where a
revolutionary Marxist view diverges from Isaacs.
6. These well-known facts can be checked in john K. Fairbank,
Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: The Modern
Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). , do not discuss
here the direct invasion of China by Japan in the twentieth century; of
I
U.S. intervention in the Chinese civil war since the I940s. These had
serious effects on China. But Peck implicitly and Issacs explicitly are
talkmg about Imperialism in its late nineteenth and early twentieth
century form, and , think it is a validly separable question what the
pre-I 9 37 impact of imperialism was on China.
7. I am indebted for this estimate to Roy M. Hofheinz, Jr.
8. The quotation is from Hudson Taylor, as cited in Paul A. Cohen,
I
Chi.na and The Missionary Movement and the Growth of
Chrnese Antiforergmsm, 1860-1870. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1963),78-79.
9.lssacs, Tragedy, 4, 5, 7, 11,23, 31. Isaacs' Marxist argument is
I
parallel in some interesting ways to Tseng Kuo-fan's Confucian view in
1867 of what imperialism was doing to China (see John K. Fairbank
and Ssu-yU China's Response to the West: A Documentary
Survey, 1839-1923, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961,
I
I
I
j
6566). Tseng's view that the economy is not expandable, and that
foreIgn economic activity is always at the expense of Chinese economic
activity, is analogous to argument that foreign trade and
md.ustry stifled <:h.mese handicrafts and industry. Tseng's view that
Chma IS self-suffiCient and does not need the barbarians while the
barbarians need Chinese goods, is analagous to Isaacs' that
foreign economic activity only drains China of her wealth. Tseng's view
that ruler is responsible for popular welfare and that worsening
conditIons may endanger the dynasty is analogous to Isaacs' argument
that the Chmese revolutIOn was a response to immiseration brought on
by Imperialism. Perhaps these parallels testify to the existence of
certain shared points of common wisdom about imperialism's effects
between Westerners and Chinese, Marxists and non-Marxists-shared
points which were not adequately tested against the facts by their
formu lators.
10. Rhoads Murphey, The Treaty Ports and China's Modernization:
What Went Wrong?(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies
Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies No.7, 1970),32-44. '
11. !)wight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China
1368-1968 (Chicago: Aldine, 1-969) 185 and passim. '
12. Ramon H. Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural
Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890-1949 (Cambridge. Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1970), 13-24_
13. Ibid., 273-295.
14. Albert 'o'euerwerker, The Chinese Economy, c. 1870-1911 (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, Michigan Papers in Chinese
Studies No.5, 1969), 17-31. Cf. further Jack M. Potter, Capitalism and
the Chinese Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968),
179-182.
15. G. William Skinner, "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural
China," Journal of Asian Studies XXIV: 1 (November 1964), 3-43.
16. However, the import of foreign yarn gave an impetus to the
domestic doth weaving industry, which expanded, Foreign woven doth
was unable to dominate the Chinese market. See Feuetwerker
I!'conomy, 1870-1911, 18-29. '
17. Silk and tea are mentioned here to give a rounded picture of the
health of handicrafts, but it should be noted that the decline in export
demand for these items cannot be regarded as an effect of imperialism;
rather, the very existence of export demand was an effect of
imperialism.
. 18..Chi-ming Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development
m Chma, 1840-1937 (Cambridge, Mass_: Harvard University Press,
1965). Hou's major findings are confirmed by John E. Schrecker,
Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Sbdntung
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); see, especially.
258.
19. Albert I'euerwerker, The Chinese b'conomy, 1912-1949 (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, Michigan Papers in Chinese
Studies No. I, 1968), 14.
20. Ibid., 17-19. One might, however, argue that a strong
government investment program could have compensated for the
absence of market demand in the initial stages of industrialization. If it
were possible to trace the weakness of the Chinese government's
industrial investment program to imperialism, the case for ascribing a
major detrimental economic impact to imperialism would be
established. But this would require evidence that either the political
weakness of the government or the shortage of capital for government
investment was due to imperialism. The latter point is treated in note
22. The former, rcstated in Isaacs' terms (i.e., that by strengthening the
forces of reaction imperialism postponed the arrival of a truly strong
government which could undertake an industrialization program), is
discussed later in the essay.
1
21. Ibid, 70.
22. The impact of the foreign drain was probably more serious in
some. areas of the country than in others because of the varying
I
effectiveness of tax collection. But the more serious the impact of the
dram of wealth in one locality, the less serious the impact in the rest of
the nation. Research may disclose either that the impact was
widespread but slight, or that it was heaVy but localized. In either case
the impact would not be capable of explaining an overall trend, if
was one, toward poverty or economic weakness.
It may be argued, however, that the sums drained from China were
precisely the crucial amounts that would have stimulated economic
takeoff if they had been invested in industry (cf. note 20). The obvious
rejoinder is to ask how likely it is that, in the absence of imperialism,
7
JOURNAL of CONTEMPORARY ASIA
either the government or capitalists would have gathered this money
and invested it in modern industry?
Isaacs' point about the debasement of the currency is also relevant at
this point: did not the drain of silver cause depreciation of the
widely-used copper currency, thus contributing to the popular misery?
I do not comment on this point in the text because I am not aware of
new research on the subject. But surely the currency squeeze u f f e r e d
by the Chinese masses was not an inevitable result of the drain of silver.
but instead represented a political decision by landlords. merchants and
officials to capitalize on the opportunity offered by the rising price of
silver-to capitalize on it by insisting upon continuing to express the
peasant's obligations in terms of silver and his payments in terms of
copper. Imperialism at most offered the opportunity-perhaps difficult
to resist-for elites to raise the masses' cost of living.
23. Peck, "Roots," 65, as quoted earlier in this article.
24. Feuerwerker, Economy, 1912-1949, 66. The exception to this
statement, as Herbert Bix has pointed out, was Manchuria, but as Bix
also points out, Manchuria was "subordinated far more than the rest of
China to imperialist economic domination." Herbert P. Bix, "Japanese
Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy. 1900-31," The China
QUaI'lerly. 51 (july-September 1972),428.
25. Fairbank. Relschauer and Craig, East Asia. Chs. 2 and 5.
26. These are the tentative findings of the present author and, as he
understands it, of others doing research on the warlord period.
27. As noted in an earlier footnote, U.S. involvement in the Chinese
civil war since the 1940s has been a different matter. Here there was
obviously a considerable effect in terms of postponing the Communist
victory on the mainland and preventing, so far. the final resolution of
the CCP-KMT conflict.
28. Inde/?d, most studies of the Chinese revolutionary process stress
the roles (respectively revolutionary and counter-revolutionary) of the
rwo rural classes, peasants and gentry.
29. Cf. note 9 above.
30. Cf. Schrecker. Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism. 43-58 and
249-259.
31. The point is well brought out in Ernest P. Young, "Nationalism,
Reform, and Republican Revolution: China in the Early Twentieth
Century," in James B. Crowley, ed., Modern East Asia: Essays' in
Interpretation (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 151-179.
32. Peck, "Roots," 64.
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8
Harvard on China:
The Apologetics of IInperialisIn
Joseph Esherick
The classic works on modern China-by Harold Isaacs,
Edgar Snow, Jack Belden, even Mao Tse-tung himself-have all
led us to believe that the revolutionary ferment which surged
through China in the twentieth century was the result of rural
impoverishment, economic stagnation and governmental
weakness and decay. All of them stressed the crucial role of
Western and Japanese imperialism which had reduced China to
such a sorry state in the first half of the twentieth century.
Recently, however, a growing number of American
scholars-a remarkable percentage of whom have been trained
at Harvard and had their works published by Harvard's East
Asian Research Center-have put fonh a radical new version of
China's modern history. Imperialism, it seems, was largely
beneficial to China. On the economic side, Chi-ming Hou
assures us that " ... foreign capital was largely responsible for
the development of whatever economic modernization took
place in China before 1937.,,1 Funhermore, "the often-held
assumption that the traditional or indigenous sector of the
Chinese economy (handicrafts, small mines, junks, etc.)
suffered severe decline as a result of foreign economic
intrusion lacks factual basis."l
John Schrecker's study of Germany in Shantung fully
endorses these conclusions:
. .. the direction of the German impact was posItIve.
Tsingtao, a tiny, isolated fishing village in 1897, had
become a major port by the time the Germans left. It had
an efficient administration and modern public services and
schools. It also had up-to-date facilities for transportation,
communication and banking. As a result, commercial
activities flowered, and there was even some industrial
growth. It was German capital, skills, personnel and
international contracts which laid the foundation for this
development.
3
For Schrecker an even more important contribution of
Western imperialism was its encouragement of the spread of
nationalism which became "the most significant development
of the last decades of the Ch'ing." Nationalism became
possible only when the West taught China to perceive her
problems "not in traditional terms but rather within the
framework of new ideas and categories derived from the
West. ,,4
Foreigners were similarly responsible for China's
institutional "modernization." John K. Fairbank, the founding
father of the Harvard school, has noted that the Imperial
Maritime Customs Service "assisted China's effort at
modernization within the framework of the treaty system, ,,5
and that the employment of foreigners to administer China's
customs was in fact "one of the most con structive features of
the treaty system. ,,6 Similarly, in 1913, when Yuan Shih-k'ai
was forced to turn the administration of China's salt gabelle
over to foreigners in order to secure foreign financial support
for his effort to eradicate Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang, the
result was "the modernization of the Chinese salt
administration.',7 Finally, for any who might have feared that
the foreigners were modernizing urban society and political
institutions while the peasantry was suffering in increasing
poveny, Ramon Myers has assured us that "There is not any
evidence that peasant living standards before 1937
declined......8
In short, imperialism fostered economic development,
progressive Western-style nationalism and institutional
modernization. The Chinese may have suffered wounded pride
and cultural shock at having modernization so abruptly forced
down their throats, but basically what the West did was both
necessary and good. The anti-imperialism of both the KMT
and the CCP was thus shon-sighted-the result of a failure to
understand the beneficent inevitability of Western-type
modernization.
9
While the conclusions of these Harvard studies need not
be accepted as definitive, they cannot be dismissed out of
hand. An extensive monographic literature, backed by
thorough research and patient scholarship, has made the
Harvard school the source of today's "normative science" in
the China field. Scholars interested in developing alternatives
to the Harvard paradigm will have to produce works of similar
scholarly quality in a variety of key areas-the handicraft
industry, the treaty port economy-before a viable alternative
to the Harvard paradigm can be presented. This essay has a
more modest aim: to identify some of the pitfalls of the
Harvard approach and to advance some tentative suggestions
for an alternative paradigm.
Throughout, the focus of discussion will be the role of
imperialism in nineteenth and twentieth century China. Surely
no exercise is more difficult than the effort to factor out and
measure in isolation the role of one panicular force in the
organic development of a nation's history. One cannot expect
to get back to imperialism as the "first cause" or "prime
mover" of some particular historical development. One can,
however, attempt to assess the role of imperialism in
interaction with the complex of forces shaping the
development of modern Chinese history, and demonstrate that
imperialism was something more than the misunderstood,
maligned scapegoat of Chinese nationalism.
9

The term "imperialism" should be understood to refer
to the total historical process wherein foreigners intervene to
restructure the economy, society, polity and culture of Third
World nations in ways which serve the economic and political
interests of the metropolitan powers. In apologetic
scholarship, such restructuring is generally regarded as part of
the process of "modernization." The hypothesis of this essay
is that imperialism produced economic, social and political
disruptions, distortions and instability of such a nature as to
make successful modernization of any bourgeois-democratic
variety impossible. Revolution became the logical alternative.
It is convenient to begin a discussion of imperialism in
China with the Opium War. Back in 1841, John Quincy Adams
expressed an authoritative Harvard view of that AnglO-Chinese
conflict:
The justice ofthe cause between the two parties-which has
the righteous cause? You have perhaps been surprised to
bear me answer, Britain. Britain has the righteous cause.
But to prove it, I have been obliged to show that the opium
question is not the cause of the war . ... The cause of the
war is the kowtow!-the arrogant and insupportable
pretension of China that she will hold commercilll
intercourse with the rest of mankind. not on terms of
reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of
lord and fHlSsal. 10
Subsequent Harvard men have stuck loyally to Adams'view
that China's reluctance to trade with the West was
"insupportable" and that opium was not really the cause of
the war. To quote Fairbank himself:
By the nineteenth century, the Chinese position on foreign
relations, like the contemporary seclusion policy of Japan.
was out of date and no longer supportable.... In
demanding diplomatic equality and commercial
opportunity, Britain represented all the Western states,
which would sooner or later have demanded the same
things if Britain had not. It was an accident of history that
the dynamic British commercial interest in the China trade
was centered not only on tea but also on opium. 11
In fact, the central role of opium was far from "an
accident of history." There were demonstrable economic
causes for the opium trade: not only was the sale of Bengal
opium an important source of revenue for the British
administration in India, but opium was the only commodity
marketable in China in sufficient quantity to balance the
triangular trade between China, Britain and India. This
paramount position of opium among China's imports did not
result from an ignorant xenophobic Chinese resistance to
Western manufactures, but from a well-informed conviction
that China could get along very well without them. Thus, even
if other Western states "sooner or later" had made the same
demands as Britain, opium would have been a major issue. As
late as 1870, well after the opening of China by the "armed
opium propaganda,,12 of the West, opium constituted 43% of
China's imports, and it remained the largest single Chinese
import untiT 1890.
13
Opium, then, was the West's only feasible
entree into the China market and its role was hardly
"accidental." Furthermore, the fact that opium-pushing
remained the West's most important economic activity
through all but the last decade of the nineteenth century
clearly influenced China's "response to the West." It might be
argued, for example, that the puritanical Taiping opposition to
opium was a major barrier to trade between the rebel areas and
Shanghai, and that the Taiping threat to the opium trade
moved the foreign community to aid in the suppression of the
rebellion. In any case, in assessing the impact of imperialism in
China, we must be constantly aware of its unique and narcotic
content.
The importance of opium in China's foreign trade was of
course due to the inability of other foreign products to
compete in China's already well-developed indigenous
producing and marketing system. It is often noted by those
who stress the limited or benign effects of imperialism, that
China's per-capita foreign trade was the lowest of all 83
countries listed by the League of Nations.
14
This is of course
undeniable. China was relatively successful in resisting the
impulse of the Western bourgeoisie to "nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." 15 She
was never reduced to the status of an Egypt, an India or an
Argentina. Furthermore, after 1949, revolutionary China,
"aided" by the U.S. economic blockade, was cut off from the
West and from the possibility of falling into a state of
permanent economic dependence. This happened precisely at
the time when the United States acquired the ability and the
will to make far greater economic inroads into the economies
of the Third World than had even before been possible. In
effect, Mao's revolution-itself in part a response to and
product of imperialism-prevented imperialism from running
its full course.
Despite this abbreviation of imperialism's impact,
China's involvement in the international market economy had
long since become sufficiently intense to induce severe
distortions in her own economy. In 1842, 92% of China's
exports were silk and tea; in 1868, their percentage was 93.S%;
by 1890 the percentage figure had fallen to 64.5%, though in
absolute terms the trade continued to grow. Throughout the
nineteenth century, tea and silk constituted at least one-half of
China's annual exports.
16
In response to this strong export
demand, many peasants shifted their meagre resources to the
production of tea and silk, and a substantial proportion of the
production of these commodities was exclusively for the
export market: at least 40% of the tea in the late nineteenth
century,17 and SO-70% of the silk as late as the 1920s.1
8
By
World War II, foreign markets for Chinese tea and silk had
virtually disappeared, and countless thousands of Chinese
peasants found themselves deprived of their livelihood. 19
While the conventional Western wisdom sees the moral of this
tale of tea and silk to be the inability of an incompetent
Chinese government and an inefficient Chinese business
establishment to enforce quality control and compete
effectively with Japanese silk and Japanese and Ceylonese
tea,2() the inescapable facts remain that (1) foreigners had
created, controlled and then closed a market for Chinese
goods, and to that extent China had been a victim of a world
market in which she was an essentially passive participant; and
(2) for China to have competed effectively she would have had
to allow foreign tea plantations on the South Asian model
(which would have meant an intensification of imperialist
influence in China), or to have established efficient
governmental supervision of these industries as was the case in
Japan. The latter would have required a far stronger Chinese
government than-as we shall presently see-was possible
10

I
before the final expulsion of the imperialists. in 1949. .,
contemporary Chinese historians for having progressively
With the decline of the tea and sdk trade, ChIna s
"crushed" and "exploited" domestic handicraft industry
exports became considerably more diversified-escaping the
from the mid-nineteenth century onward is belied by the
sort of restrictive dependence on the export of two or three
actual state of the Chinese economy as late as tbe
primary products which still plagues most Latin American and
1930's . ... Anyone who would claim that the Hunan or
African nations. This diversification of exports, however, was
Szechwan peasant in the 1930's dressed in Naigaiwata
not accomplished by a shift from the export of extractive
commodities to the export of manufactures. In fact, between
1913 and 1936, beverages, foodstuffs and raw materials
increased from 46.5% to 60.S% of China's exports, while
manufactures and semi-manufactures declined from SO.9% to
39.S%.21 In effect, China's foreign trade was increasingly
conforming to that pattern so common to
nations: she was exporting products the demand for which IS
relatively inelastic and likely to fall as manufactured
substitutes are developed, Thus, in the postwar years, an
unblockaded China would have found her hog bristles replaced
by plastics, her silk overwhelmed by her
and linseed oil replaced by government-subsldlzed production
in the U.S., and her tin and tungsten replaced by lower grade
South American ores which the U.S. learned to refine
efficiently in the course of war production. 22
Well before the 19S0s, the terms of trade had turned
against China. The net barter terms of trade (=price of
over price of exports, 1913 here taken as 100) stood at 76.5 In
1870 and had risen to 122.9 by 1935.
23
What this meant, in
effect, is that in 1935 China would have had to export 160%
as much in real goods to buy the same imports she got in
1870. Needless to say, the pattern of international trade prices
which has prevailed since World War II would have produced a
far greater deterioration in the Chinese: terms of had she
remained within the "Free World" trading system ID the 19S0s
and '60s. 24
If we tum from China's exports to her imports, we are
immediately faced with the enormous question of their effect
on handicraft production. Albert Feuerwerker's meticulous
study of the cotton textile industry indicates that handicraft
spinning of cotton yarn was severely crippled by foreign
imports as early as 1910, suffering a SO% reduction from an
estimated 4,883,381 tan average annual production for
1871-80 to 2,449,71S tan for 1901-10. Handicraft weaving
(with foreign and domestic factory yarn) managed to hold its
own, but weaving CQuid only absorb one-tenth of
million man-years of labor released by the decline In
spinning.25 Furthermore, there was a tendency for weaving to
concentrate in urban weaving shops, which made it an unlikely
alternative source of income for peasants who used to spin at
home in the winter months to supplement their meagre
earnings. Cotton spinning is the classic case of the crippled
handicraft, but it is not the only one: Feuerwerker elsewhere
notes that "native iron and steel production in Hunan and
Kiangsi nearly disappeared by the end of the nineteenth
century,,,26 and of course Standard Oil's kerosene replaced
vegetable oil for lighting purposes. Obviously, in the absence
of tariff autonomy, China was powerless to shield any of these
handicraft industries from the immediate and drastic impact of
the imports, or, for that matter, to reshape in any way the
pattern of her foreign trade.
Despite all this it is undoubtedly true, as Feuerwerker
contends, that
The simplistic indictment of "foreign capitalism" by some
cottons, smoked BA T cigarettes, and used Meiji sugar has a
b
' 27
tg case to prove.
I
,
Is it, however, necessary to prove these propositions?
r
Feuerwerker's own research has demonstrated the decline in !
handicraft spinning. In addition, he has acknowledged ,that
I
when handicraft weaving relies on yarn from foreign mills,
I
handicraft production becomes "ancillary to the mechanized
factories," and "subservient to foreign capitalism." 28
Handicraft workshops thus prove incapable of contributing to
I
the development of an independent, self-sufficient national
economy,. Furthermore, as we attempt to assess the impact of
foreign trade on socio-political developments in China, we
should note the conclusions of Frederic Wakeman on
Kwangtung at the time of the Opium Wars: ..... the rural
areas in which the decline of cottage industry seemed most
marked were precisely those areas which were most
antiforeign. It was almost as if the peasantry rationally blamed
their plight on foreign imports,,,29 The inescapable fact
remains that imperialism transformed a remarkably stable,
albeit "underdeveloped" Chinese economy into an increasingly
unstable and dependent economy in which millions of
peasants would experience displacement and deprivation
traceable to the vagaries of the international market. To such
peasants-for whom one bad year could mean perpetual debt
and poverty-there was little solace in the thought that the
textile industry was being mechanized, GNP was rising and
"modernization" was taking place.
The effects of foreign investments in China were
somewhat different from the effects of foreign trade, Foreign
trade produced instability, while the very permanence of
capital investment produced a lasting impact on the
of the Chinese economy. Both, however, made the ChInese
economy more dependent on foreigners. Here it is perhaps
appropriate to reexamine the claim in the
work on economic imperialism in China: " ... foretgn capital
was largely responsible for the development of whatever
economic modernization took place in China before 1937,,,30
Quite obviously, this same proposition could be stated
somewhat differently: the modern sector of the Chinese
economy was under the domination of foreign capital. To be
sure, this was not true of all segments of the industrial sector:
smaller, labor-intensive, consumer goods industries were
generally left for Chinese capital to develop. In the areas wh:re
foreigners concentrated, however, they overwhelmed all native
competition. The key sectors of mining and transportation
were almost an exclusive foreign preserve. In 1920,99% of the
pig iron, 99% of the iron ore, and 76% of the coal mined by
modern methods was extracted from foreign mines. In the
same year, 83% of the steamer tonnage cleared through
Maritime Customs, and 78% of that on China's main internal
waterway, the Yangtze River, was in foreign bottoms. Foreign
control of railways resulted largely from loans rather than
direct investment, but according to one set of figures, foreign
capital controlled 93% of China's railways in 1911, 98% in
1927, and 91% in 1936.
31
I I
The d e g r e ~ of foreign control of a given industry was
determined above all by the relationship of the industry to
foreign trade. A mercantile mentality dominated the treaty
ports of China, so that foreigners invested in areas which served
to increase the trade of China with their home country. Thus
in 1936, 16.8% of all foreign investment was directly in the
import-export trade, 20.5% in the banking and finance
institutions which served that trade, 25.0% in transport, 9.0%
in treaty port real estate, 5.1 % in communications (telephone
and telegraph) and public utilities, all largely for the benefit of
the treaty fort population, and only 19.6% in
manufacturing. 2 Even within that manufacturing total, some
of the most important enterprises were closely linked to
foreign trade. Cigarette production, for example, was 63.3%
foreign, and led to substantial imports of American tobacco.
As one American commercial attache boasted: "With
American salesmanship and American initiative it became
possible to convert a tobacco producing and exporting nation
into one of the leading importers and consumers of American
tobacco products." 33
Foreign investment's ancillary role to foreign trade led
to a degree of geographic concentration which was clearly
inimical to the best interests of China's balanced economic
development. In 1931, 76.6% of all foreign capital in China
was invested in either Shanghai or Manchuria. 34 Chinese
industries then concentrated where foreigners had developed
public utilities and transport facilities, so that in 193061.5%,
in 1931, 53.7% and in 1932, 61.0% of all newly registered
Chinese firms were located in the one province of Kiangsu. 3S
Similarly, the foreign-built Chinese railway network was
notorious for its service to the political and commercial
interests of the foreign powers, and its irrationality from the
standpoint of China's own development.
36
Perhaps the most
striking illustration of this was the Russia-built
Chinese-Eastern Railway and its connecting branch to Port
Arthur, which were built on the Russian guage to link with the
trans-Siberian Railway, and conversely to prevent convenient
linkage with the rest of China's railways. 37
Banking and finance absorbed more direct foreign
investment than any other sector of the economy (investment
in transport being largely indirect, in the form of loans), and
foreign banks were notably disinterested in the economic
development of China. Early in the twentieth century, the
American Minister to China, Paul S. Reinsch, complained that
Tbe only American bank in China, tbe International
Banking Corporation, . tben confined itself strictly to
exchange business and to dealing in commercial paper; it
had developed no policy of responding to local industrial
needs and belping in the inner development of Cbina. All
tbe foreign hanks had wbolly tbe treaty-port point of view.
They thought not at all of developing interior regions upon
which the commerce of the treaty ports after all depends.
They were satisfied with scooping off tbe cream of
international commercial transactions and exchange
operations. 38
The foreign banks in Shanghai demonstrated the accuracy of
Reinsch's analysis by their behavior after the U.S. Silver
Purchase Act of 1934, which greatly inflated the gold value of
China's silver currency. Between December 1933 and
September 1935 (while the silver stocks of Chinese banks rose
1Z
slightly from Ch.$Z71.8 million to $Z93.4 million), holdings
of foreign banks fell from Ch.$Z75.7 million to $42.7
million-less than 116 their original level. As one author put it,
"Financiers and speculators in China found it more profitable
to export silver as a commodity than to use it in China as
capital." 39 In the credit contraction which resulted, 24 of 92
Chinese textile mills suspended operations,4O and many firms
were forced to sell out to Japanese business interests. 41
In general, foreign financial interests loaned substantial
sums to Chinese business enterprises only when their object
was to gain control of the enterprise. Such was the case with
Japanese loans to the Hanyehping Coal and Iron Company in
the early twentieth century. By 1915 and the Twenty One
Demands, Japan was in a sufficiently strong position to
demand control of the company, which ultimately produced
exclusively for the use of Japan's domestic steel industry. 42
The experience of the Kaiping coal mines was not so very
different, except that even after substantial foreign loans in
the 1890s, Herbert Hoover and his British employers were still
obliged to engage in a great deal of legal finagling to capture
control of the Chinese company during the Boxer
disturbance. 43
Though much evidence has recently been marshalled in
support of the proposition that foreign capitalism never
"oppressed" native Chinese enterprises, and that it in fact
fostered the "coexistence" of the two forms of enterprise and
a rational division of the market,44 there is considerable room
left for doubt. Certainly it would be difficult to persuade the
Chinese stockholders of either the Hanyehping or Kaiping
mines that imperialism had aided their native industries. In the
1911 period, British diplomatic pressure was crucial in
realizing the victory of the British Green Island Cement
Companls over a local Chinese rival for the South China
market. S But diplomatic intervention was usually not
necessary for foreign firms to crush their Chinese competitors.
In most cases their larger size, greater capitalization, longer
experience, better access to raw materials and the ever-present
protection of extraterritoriality were sufficient to allow
foreign firms to overwhelm Chinese competitors. Thus by
1905, two of three Chinese steamship companies organized in
1899-1900 to run between Hankow and Changsha had folded
after British and Japanese firms put ships on the route. 46
Perhaps foreign financiers demonstrated their power most
convincingly in their struggle during the last years of the
Ch'ing to persuade the imperial government to take railway
contracts away from the provincial Chinese companies and
give them to a foreign consortium. The comparative "surplus"
of capital in the industrialized nations allowed them to offer
loans at far lower rates than those prevailing in China.
Therefore, from the Manchu government's point of view, it was
"cheaper" to have foreigners build the railways than Chinese.
As a result, the provincial railway companies were quashed and
the foreigners built China's railways.
The crucial proof of the depressing effects of foreign
capitalism on native Chinese industrial growth is unquestionably
to be found in China's experience during and
immediately after World War I, when foreign competitors
diverted their attention from China to the war and then to the
reconstruction of Europe. Native Chinese industry and
handicrafts experienced their greatest growth in precisely this
period, when China was spared the impact of Western
economic intervention, and suffered its steepest decline in

i
1920-22 when the foreigners returned. 47 these banks were not involved in promoting local industry, this
Another argument often advanced by the apologists is capital was removed from the local economy to finance t
that foreign businesses induce a positive "imitation effect" in international trade or foreign exchange speculation. 56 The
the native economy: they teach by example and train the
cadre for economic development. 48 Unfortunately, the
foreigners-whose enterprises and attitudes were largely
mercantile and often speculative 49 -provided a very poor
model for a national bourgeoisie interested in development.
Franz Fanon has commented with characteristic
perceptiveness on the weakness of a national bourgeoisie
which imitates the Westerners with whom it comes in contact:
It follows tbe Western bourgeoisie along its patb of
negation and decadence witbout even having emulated it in
its first stages of exploration and invention.... In its
beginning, tbe national bourgeoisie of tbe colonial countries
Ulentifies witb tbe decadence of the bourgeoisie of the
West. 50
Finally, if one is to weigh the net effect of foreign investments
in China, it is essential to note that the net capital flow was
not to but from China. Far more was repatriated in profits than
was ever invested or reinvested in China. The average
annual outpayment in the years 1902-1913 was U.S. $31.8
million, and in 1914-1930, U.S. $72.3 million. 51 In the entire
period 1902-1930, the inflow/outflow ration was 0.57.
52
This, of course, does not include the staggering cost of the
Boxer and Japanese indemnities which China was forced to
pay in the early years of the twentieth century. Feuerwerker
has calculated that the cost, between 1895-1911, of
476,982,000 taels for the Boxer indemnity and the loans to
pay the Japanese indemnity amount to "more than twice the
size of the total initial capitalization of all foreign,
Sino-foreign and Chinese owned manufacturing enterprises
established between 1895 and 1913."53
To this point I have concentrated almost exclusively on
economics. It is necessary, however, to realize that imperialism
was a total system-economic, political, social and
cultural-and that its component parts were intimately
interrelated. A key example is the institution of
extraterritoriality, which in its basic sense was a political or
juridical limitation of China's sovereignty-a removal of
foreigners from the jurisdiction of the Chinese system of
justice. Obviously, though, it had key economic consequences.
By exempting treaty port industries from most Chinese
taxation it gave them a considerable advantage. One
calculation of the cost per bale of cotton yarn for Chinese
and Japanese factories in China shows that taxes represented
13.2% of the cost of production in the Japanese mill, and
34.3% in the Chinese. S4 Beyond these tax advantages of
foreign industries was the considerable advantage of
exemption from arbitrary exactions by the Chinese
government. It was these factors as much as any others which
attracted a substantial amount of Chinese capital into foreign
enterprises. Thus extraterritoriality and treaty ports created
the conditions for an indirect attack on native Chinese
industries by channeling elsewhere the developmental capital
needed by those Chinese enterprises. It has been estimated
that in the 1890s 400 million taels in Chinese capital were
invested in foreign enterprises. S5 The search for security under
extraterritoriality also attracted substantial funds from
Chinese depositors in foreign banks. Since, as we have noted,
resources of these banks were further enhanced by their
"right" to issue currency for domestic circulation in China-a
right claimed on the basis of extraterritoriality. Since these
I
notes were issued with less than 100% reserves, "they were the
equivalent to an interest-free loan from the Chinese public to
the foreign banks." 57
1
The gunboat-backed protection which extraterritoriality
provided for foreign enterprises often gave them a decisive
advantage over Chinese competitors. Foreign insurance
companies, recognizing this fact, became an integral part of
the system which virtually guaranteed foreign domination of
China's internal steamship navigation. As one study put it:
... it was the umDiIlingness of the foreign [insurance]
companies to insure junks which frequently persuaded the
Cbinese to ship their goods by foreign vessels. Thus the
advance of foreign shipping in China waters and foreign
insurance companies went hand in hand. In 1863 the
British consul in Tiensin remarked that the 'principle of
marine insurance annihilates the native craft. "Can you
insure?" is a 1uestion which the Chinese merchants
invariably put.5
At this point, the apologetic school will reply: this is
only one side of the coin, and the wrong side at that. The
critical issue is not the security which extraterritoriality
provided for foreign enterprises, but the failure of the Chinese
government to provide similar security for Chinese enterprises.
The advantages enjoyed by the foreign banks are not as
important as China's failure to develop a banking system
which would support her own economic development. The tax
advantages of foreign companies protected by exterritoriality
are less worthy of attention than the excessive burden which
the Chinese government placed on the modern sector of its
own economy. In short, "the idea that the unequal treaties
prevented China's industrialization ... is oversimple and
inadequate to explain what happened. Decision lay first with
the Chinese government; only the government's default gave
the treaty port its later dominant role." 59
This is a serious, though fatally flawed argument, and it
must be answered with some logical precision. In the first
place, concepts of economic security: economic advantage, or
even tax advantage are clearly relative, and China's deficiency in
these regards was significant only in comparison to Western
enterprises protected by extraterritoriality - that is, she was
deficient only given the fact of imperialism. 60 In the absence of
the network of foreign banks, insurance companies, steamship
companies and treaty port enterprises, Chinese capital, trade
and entrepreneurial personnel would not have been absorbed
by the treaty port economy which imperialism had created.
The "opportunity cost" - i.e. the cost in lost opportunities
for healthy indigenous economic growth in China - was real
and was directly attributable to the foreign presence. 61
Secondly, while it might be argued that the political and
military weakness of China allowed the foreign powers to
make their initial inroads in China during the nineteenth
century, once the foreigners were established, their very
presence guaranteed the perpetuation of political weakness. A
strong China, capable of providing a political and economic
"environment conducive to domestic capital formation" 62
13
was inconceivable given the fact of imperialism in China. The
foreign presence, far from providing a solution, lay at the root
of the problem. While the coexistence, claimed by the
apologists, of domestic and foreign industry in China was at
least theoretically possible, the coexistence of a strong
sovereign China and a foreign presence over which she has no
jurisdiction or control was a logical impossibility.
This conclusion proceeds from the very nature of
sovereignty. To the extent that the foreign powers limited
China's sovereignty, they inevitably weakened her politically.
Every concession which the foreigners wrung from the
reluctant Ch'ing-from the rights of missionaries to spheres of
influence-reduced the legitimacy of the dynasty in the eyes of
the Chinese population. By the first decade of the twentieth
century, the Ch'ing was reduced to little more than a despised
tax-collecting agency for the foreign powers. Nearly one-half
of the imperial government's revenue was devoted to loan
service and indemnity payments.
63
Now if China had been
able to increase her import tariff, she might have been able
both to meet these obligations and assist indigenous economic
development. (In the years between China's tariff autonomy in
1929 and the onset of the Sino-Japanese War, China's tariff
receipts increased roughly five-fold in spite of the effects of
world depression on foreign trade.)64 But in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the West set China's tariffs, and
China suffered accordingly, both politically and financially.
To turn from the macroscopic to the microscopic, one
final example might illustrate how imperialism helped to make
China ungovernable. The Sino-British Mackay Treaty of 1902
provided that foreign firms be given three weeks notice of any
prohibition of rice exports from one locality to another. The
terms of this treaty were cited by the British in 1906 to
prevent a prohibition of exports from Hunan, which Ch'ing
officials had desired during a flood-induced famine. Later
when a major popular uprising occurred, the British Consul
explained that "much as I sympathize with any measure
tending to alleviate the distress of the famine-stricken people,
it was nevertheless my duty to see that Treaty stipulations
were compled with."65 Four years later the same situation
arose again: the British insisted that three weeks of exports be
allowed, the price of rice soared, and the famous Changsha
rice riot of 1910 resulted, taking both foreign missions and
businesses and Chinese government offices and schools as its
targets. Foreign restrictions on China's sovereignty were such
that the government was often totally powerless to prevent
such outbreaks of popular discontent.
Just as the unequal treaties sometimes tied the hands of
the Chinese government, so the knowledge and fear of the
foreign threat often severely limited the options open to the
Chinese government. In the nineteenth century, such officials
as Li Hung-chang, a man fully committed to economic and
military self-strengthening, objected to the construction of
railways not on the superstitious grounds that they would
disturb [eng-shui, but on the very realistic grounds that they
would provide the means for foreign military invasion. 66
Turning to politics in the twentieth century, there can be no
doubt that the leaders of the 1911 Revolution felt compelled
to make their revolution acceptable to the foreign powers in
order to prevent intervention or even partition by the
imperialists. Inevitably this meant tempering whatever radical
nationalism was present in the revolutionary movement.
If the imperialists closed options for some, they also
opened up options for others. If Yuan Shih-k'ai had not had
the imperialists to turn to for his Reorganization Loan in
1913, he would have had to come to terms with the
Kuomintang and the reformist gentry leaders who had led the
figh t against foreign railway loans in the spring of 1911, and
had guided the revolution which brought down the Ch'ing in
the fall. Foreign financial support allowed Yuan to by-pass and
ultimately overwhelm this province-based gentry nationalism.
The imperialists' role during the warlord era was scarcely
more progressive. To be sure, the powers regretted the
disruption of trade which warlord ism produced. One must also
admit that other than Japanese aid to Chang Tso-lin and Tuan
Ch'i-jui the extent of imperialist support for particular
warlords is still an open question. Nonetheless, by bestowing
the legitimacy of diplomatic recognition and the revenues of
the Customs administration on anyone who succeeded in
capturing Peking, the powers encouraged the game of musical
chairs which the warlord governments played in Peking. The
economics of imperialism made it more profitable for a
warlord to capture Peking than to straighten out the finances
and develop the economy of the area which he controlled.
When he did concern himself with his local base, the warlord
demonstrated one of the clearest lessons learned from the
West: there is money in opium. The cultivation of "foreign
mud," as it was called, was encouraged as a key source of
many warlords' tax revenues. Imperialism, then, was an
integral part of the process which led to China's political
disintegration in the first half of the twentieth century. To the
extent that political collapse intensified the effects of flood,
drought and famine in the '20s, '30s, and '40s, imperialism
contributed to the impoverishment of the Chinese peasantry.
* * *
This essay has mentioned a series of distinct economic,
social and political effects of imperialism in China. For
analytical purposes, it has been necessary to isolate the various
effects of the foreign presence. Now, however, it is necessary
to tie the separate pieces together and to assess the total
impact of imperialism on China. Imperialism came to China as
an unwelcome intruder: pushing opium, Christianity and
cotton yarn. The opium enhanced political corruption and
moral decay; the Christianity threatened the values and the
status of the gentry; and the yarn deprived handicraft
spinners of their livelihood. Many suffered, a few were helped,
and the people blamed the government for its failure to
adequately deal with the intruders. The government, unable to
rid the country of the imperialists, ultimately found itself
relying on them to collect Customs revenues, help suppress the
Taiping and lesser rebellions, and provide financial assistance
in the form of loans. The imperialist powers, for their part,
were willing to offer sufficient support to conservative
governments to maintain the status quo with a modicum of
political stability, but were quite unwilling (and unable) to aid
in the creation of a political regime capable of restoring full
sovereignty to China. In the realm of economics, the energies
of imperialism were directed toward the profitable
development of China's foreign trade and such ancillary
industries as seemed to serve that general end. While they were
hardly successful in fundamentally restructuring Cll-ina's
massive agrarian economy in the direction of foreign trade,
they skewed the modern sector of the economy in that
direction and in so doing produced a type of "false
modernization" which had little or no hope of producing
14
sustained economic growth. 67
If one were to try to rescate this argument in terms of
the Harvard school's "response to the Wesc" paradigm, one
would say that the West presented China with a problem: how
to preserve her sovereignty against the economic, political and
military incursions of imperialism; and even suggested a model
solution: economic and political modernization along the lines
of Western bourgeois democracy. The only difficulty was that
the solution was bound to fail precisely because of the very
imperialism which presented the problem in the first place.
This is not to say that internal factors did not also contribute
to the failure of that solution. They did indeed playa role.
Theoretically, however, they were less significant, for the
proposition "In the absente of imperialism, internal factors
would have guaranteed an unsuccessful response to the West,"
is meaningless: in the absence of imperialism, the problem of
the response to the West would not exist. 68
Finally, it is not necessary or proper to suggest that
China's response to the West was a "failure"-even if
imperialism is held to be the cause of "failure." That
proposition is true only if Japan's imitation of Western finance
capitalism and economic and military imperialism is to be the
model of "success." What the Chinese case implies is that any
Victim nation's attempt to collaborate or coexist with
imperialism is destined to failure. Imperialism, in effect,
eliminates for its victims the possibility of a
bourgeois-democratic road to development. However, in China
the very struggle to eliminate the economic, political, social
and psychological vestiges of imperialism produced the basis of
sustained, self-reliant economic and political growth. Maoism,
it is safe to say, is inconceivable in the absense of imperialism,
and China's decision to follow a Maoist path to development
can hardly be judged a "failure."
NOTES
I. Chi-ming Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development
in China: 1840-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: H.U.P., 1965), 130.
2.lbid., 218.
3. John E. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism:
Germany in Shantung (Cambridge: H.U.P., 1971),258.
4. Ibid., 256,258.
5. John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig,
East Asia: The Modem Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1965).318.
6. John K. Fairbank. The United States and China. Third edition
(Cambridge, Mass.: H.U.P., 1971). 146.
7. S.A.M. Adshead, The Modernization of the Chinese Salt
Administration (Cambridge, Mass.: H.U.P . 1970).
8. Ramon Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy, Agricultural
Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890-1949 (Cambridge, Mass.:
H.U.P., 1970), 124.
9. James Peck's perceptive article, "The Roots of Rhetoric: the
Professional Ideology of America's China Watchers," in Edward
Friedman and Mark Seiden, America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on
Asian-American Relations (New York: Vintage, 1971). presents a
brilliant analysis of the basic assumptions and hidden purposes behind
such theories. The present essay is a more mundane attempt to
demonstrate that these theories are wrong.
10. John Q. Adams in Boston Evening Transcript, November 24.
1841, quoted in T.W. Overlach. Foreign Financial Control in China
(New York: Macmillan. 1919).8.
11. Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig, p. 136. For the Harvard
monograph which is either the basis for Fairbank's statement. or
perhaps the detailed working out of Fairbank's views, see Hsin-pao
Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.:
H.U.P., 1964), esp. p. 15.
12. The phase belongs to Karl Marx, from New York Daily
Tribune, September 20, 1858, in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on
Colonialism and Modernization (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday-Anchor, 1969), 340.
13. Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, ca. 1870-1911
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, 1969),51-52.
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Gateway
Edition, 1954), 20.
16. George C. Allen and Audrey G. Donnithorne, Western
Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development: China and Japan
(New York: Macmillan, 1954),259. Yu-kwei Cheng, Foreign Trade attd
Industrial Development of China: An Historical and Integrated Analysis
through 1948 (Washington, D.C.: University Prt:ss of Washington,
1956), 34.
17. Boris P. Togasheff, China as a Tea Producer (Shanghai:
Commerical Press, 1926).167, gives export figures of over 2 million
piculs per year for the 1880s. Liu Ta-chung and Yeh Kung-chia. The
Economy of the Chinese Mainland: NRtional Income and Economic
Development, 1933-1959 (Princeton: Princeton U. Press. 1965), 135,
257. give three million piculs as the total production of processed tea in
1933 when Chinese exports had virtually ceased altogether. (Chi-ming
Hou, 194) Even if we assume that domestic consumption was constant
between the 18805 and the 19305 (unlikely given China's rising
population) total annual production in the 18805 would have been five
million piculs, of which exports would be 40%.
18. Hou, 194.
19. Ibid., 190-194; D.K. Lieu. The Silk Industry of China
(Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1941),254-257; Chen Han-seng.lndustrial
Capital and Chinese Peasants (Shanghai: Kelly and W a l ~ h , 1939),24.
20. Allen and Donnithorne, 52-68.
21. Cheng, 35.
22. Ibid., 230-231.
23. Hou, 198. See also e.F. Remer, Foreign Investments in China
(New York: Macmillan. 1933).218.
24. See, for example. some of the statistics cited in Harry
Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of u.s. Foreign
Policy (New York: Monthly Review, Modern Reader, 1969), 154-158.
25. Albert Feuerwerker, "Handicraft and Manufactured (.otton
Textiles in China, 1871-1910," Journal of Economic History XXX: 2
(June 1970), esp. 371-375. (One tan = 133 1/3Ibs.)
26. Feuerwerker, Chinese Economy, 1870-1911,29.
27. Feuerwerker, "Handicraft...... 377.
28. Feuerwerker, Chinese Economy. 1870-1911.29.
29. Frederic Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in
South China, 1839-1861, (Berkeley: U.c. Press, 1966), 187-1118.
30. See note I, above.
31. Hou, 127-128.
32. Ibid., 16.
33. Julean Arnold, China: A Commercial and Industrial
Handbook (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), 206. The
63.3% figure derives from Yu-kwei Cheng, p. 40.
34. Remer, 73. I have excluded the "undistributed" portion of
Remer's figures (largely loans for government administration) and
recalculated the percentages.
35. Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, 1912-1949 (Ann
Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1968), 13.
36. Hou, 64; Allen and Donnithorne, 140.
37. Overlach, Foreign Financial Control in China, 87.
38. Paul S. Reinsch, A 11 A merican Diplomat in Cbilla (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1922), 102.
39. Cheng, 77. Figures are from p. 79.
40. Feuerwerker, Cbinese Economy, 1912-1949,22.
41. Cheng, 39.
42. See Albert Feuerwerker, "China's Nineteenth Century
Industrialization: The Case of the Ilanyehping Coal and Iron Company,
Ltd." in C.D. Cowan, ed., The Economic Development of China and
Japan (London: 1964).
43. See Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Kaiping Mines (1877-1912)
Second Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: H.U.P . 1971), 58-83. Hoover, then
an engineer in the employ of the British promoter C.A. Moreing,
obtained control of the Kaiping Mining Company when the Chinese
director and his German advisor Gustave Detring sought foreign
ownership as protection against possible Russian seizure during the
Russians' anti-Boxer activities. Hoover then helped Moreing convert
15
4
what the Chinese had viewed as a temporary arrangement into
permanent foreign control.
44. See esp. Hou, 125-264.
45. Edward Friedman, The Center Cannot Hold: The Failure of
Parliamentary Democracy in China from the Chinese Revolution to the
World War of 1914 (Harvard University, Ph.D. dissertation: 1968),
265ff.
46. Shiraiwa RyUhei and Yasui Shotaro,Kollall {Hunan] (Tokyo:
1905), 130136.
47. See, for example, the indexes in industrial production in John
K. Chang, "Industrial Development in China, 1912-1949," Journal of
Economic History, Vol. XXVII (March 1967),65-68.
48. Hou, 134-136.
49. See also Allen and Donnithorne,31; Rhoads Murphey, The
Treaty Ports and Cbina's Modernization: What Went Wrong? (Ann
Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1970),48.
50. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), 153.
51. Remer, 167.
52. Hou, 100.
53. Feuerwerker, Chinese Economy, 1870'1911,71-72.
54. Hou , 143.
55. Wang Ching-yu, in Li-sbib Yen-chiu, 1965: No.4, 69-70.
56. Allen and Donnithorne, 113-114. For a discussion of the
same effect in other economies, see Thomas Balough, The Economics
of Poverty (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 12, 30-32.
57. Hou, 57.
58. Allen and Donnithorne, 120.
59. Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, 349.
60. Obviously China was also deficient in comparison to the
home economies of the West and japan, but since Chinese capital was
not realistically free to invest in those economies, this deficiency is not
significant for the present argument.
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61. On the subject of opportunity costs, see H.W. Singer, "The
Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries,"
American Econoll1ic Review, Vol. 40 (May 1950), esp. 476.
62. This felicitous phrase is provided by Chi-ming Hou (p. 91) to
describe the presumed (but effect of foreign investment's
"catalytic role."
63. Feuerwerker, Chinese Economy, 1870-1911,63-70.
64. Cheng, 57.
65. Bertram Giles dispatch from Changsha, July 23, 1906,
Foreign Office file 228/1628.
66. Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the
West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (New York: Atheneum,
1971),110.
67. For one of the most provocative recent articles on this theme,
see Bergere, "De 1a Chine c1assique Ii la Chine actuelle; fluctuations
economiques et revolution: pour une histoire economique de la Chine
moderne," Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilizations, No.
(july-August 1969).
68. Albert Memmi has made a very similar point, argued
somewhat differently: "The question of whether the colonized, if let
alone, would have advanced at the same pace as other people has no
great significance. To be perfectly truthful, we have no way of
knowing. It is possible that he might have not. The colonial factor is
certainly not the only one which explains the backwardness of a
people. . .. However ... can one justify the historical misfortune of
one people by the difficulties of another? The colonized peoples are
not the only victims of history, but the historical misfortune peculiar to
the colonized was colonization." (Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and
the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967], 112.)
A book that demands
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-Publishers Weekly
I
Militarism
\!ID $7.95 HILL &WANG
by Albert
a dl.isJon of Farrar, Straus
Giroux. Inc., 19 Union Square
Axelbank
New York. New York 10003
16
I
Report From. Japan 1972 -- Part II
,
I
1
I
Herbert P. Bix
1. The Problem
Since the Korean War in the early 1950's, the strongest
sustained impetus for altering the Japanese economy and
constitution to serve militaristic ends has come not from
military leaders, bureaucrats or conservative politicians but
from the leaders of big business. Herein lies the crucial
difference between prewar militarism and the still
"non-ideological" variety emerging in Japan today.
In prewar Japan militarism antedated both heavy
industrialization and completion of the Meiji state structure.
To simplify grossly one could say that it sprang primarily from
the political-intellectual superstructure: the centuries-long
tradition of rule by a military class and the persistence of the
idea from pre-Tokugawa times of expansion in Asia
(particularly Korea which, ever since Hideyoshi's late 16th
century invasions, was viewed as the bridgehead for Japan's
advance on the continent). The new militarism, by contrast, is
largely a substructural phenomenon, spurred on by the
imperatives of economic and technological development.
41
Whereas the old militarism was nurtured by war indemnities
(Sino-Japanese War, Liaotung Retrocession and Boxer
Rebellion>, by borrowed British and American capital in the
decade after 1904 and by state deficit-covering bond issues,
the new is fed easily by Japan's own domestically generated
surplus, yet also grows parasitically off of American
imperialism.42 Appearing as a major "problem"- in Japanese
life at the end of a decade of rapid economic growth during
which Japanese capitalism underwent a structural
transformation, it is clearly a phenomenon of that capitalism's
maturity. The Japanese economy by the late 1960's had
arrived at a stage where a saturated domestic market was
insufficient to sustain high economic growth. In this situation
a growing arms budget and access to overseas areas for
investment of surplus capital became essential. The new
militarism thus has its deepest roots not in the
unconstitutional and still psychologically hobbled Self Defense
Forces-though, as we have seen, they can I!O longer be
discounted-but in a defense industrial sector which is steadily
becoming a major growth sector in the Japanese economy.43
While the military-industrial complexes of the US and
the USSR are nurtured partly for economic-technological
reasons and partly in order to "solve" the political difficulties
of administering empires of subject peoples,44 that of Japan is
peculiar in being nurtured, at this stage, primarily to overcome
the internal contradictions of advanced monopoly capitalism.
(The desire to participate with the US as an equal rather than a
I
i
I
!
f
I
t
,
junior partner in policing Pacific Asia is a related but
secondary motive.) Ultimately, it is not Japan's new militarism
per se that poses a threat to the future of America's imperial
hegemony in Asia, but its increasing potential for pursuing an
independent economic imperialism.
But how did this situation come about? Why is Japanese
capitalism mired in contradictions which impel Japan toward
domestic militarism and the imperialism of economic
investment abroad? And why have these issues, which first
surfaced as long ago as 1948, suddenly developed such urgency
in Japanese domestic politics? Answers to these questions can
be had first by describing Japan's postwar economic
development in relation to international affairs, second, by
examining some of the effects of the Japanese economic
challenge on the world capitalist system and
Japanese-American relations in particular, and third, by
analyzing two constituent elements of the Japanese
"success"-technology and agriculture. This last will illuminate
both the contradiction of capitalist development and the
unknown levers of American manipulation of Japan's
I
economy. It will also make possible an assessment of whether
I
Japan is now able to break out of the American empire.
2. International Factors
I
If there was a "reverse course" in US occupation policy
in defeated Japan, then its basis was laid months before the
Japanese surrender. By retaining intact two of prewar Japan's
privileged elites, the imperial institution and the bureaucracy,
I
the Truman administration insured that the formal
democratization of Japan would take place within the I
conservative framework of the old regime. The American plan
for postwar Japan was thus highly conservative from its
t
inception; as it progressed it became positively reactionary.
Indeed, as soon as the occupation commenced, in late August
I
1945, the US took steps "towards preparing Japan for a
possible future military role against the Soviet Union. ,,45 And
f
by January 1947, MacArthur had embarked on a program of
splitting the Japanese labor movement and crippling the left.
But in the area of our primary concern, the economy, the
I
reverse course made itself felt only by degrees and chiefly in
!
t
relation to the unfolding of US cold war policy in Asia.
The first change in US economic policy was a
reinterpretation of the meaning of reparations. The original
Allied conception of reparations, as stipulated in article eleven
of the July 26, 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, called for the
I
exaction from Japan of "just reparations in kind." The idea
17
contained two intertwined elements: (1) that reparations were
a penalty or retribution that Japan should be made to pay for
its aggression against its Asian neighbors and (2) that
reparations were a reminder of Japan's moral responsibility for
the harm it had caused in dominating its neighbors. This
two-fold conception of reparations was soon embodied in the
first American reparations report, drawn up by Edwin Pauley
in the months immediately following Japan's surrender. The
Pauley Report of April 1946 asked the US government to:
... take no action to assist Japan in maintaining a standard
of living higher than that of neighboring Asiatic countries
injured by Japanese aggression. . . . The overall aim should
be both to raise and to even up the level of industrialization
[in Eastern Asia as a whole}. This aim can be served by
considered allocation, to different countries, of industrial
equipment exacted from Japan as reparations.
Reconstruction is an urgent need ofall the countries against
which Japan committed aggression. Reconstruction is also
needed in Japan. In the overall comparison of needs Japan
should have the last priority. 46
Linked to this recommendation on reparations was an insight
into the relationship between monopoly, in the form of the
zaibatsu, and militarism that was profoundly radical in its
implications. Pauley called for the dissolution of Japan's great
monopolies because
... throughout the modern history of Japan [they] have
controlled not only finance, industry and commerce, but
also the government. They are the greatest war potential of
Japan. It was they who made possible all Japan's conquests
and aggressions.... Not only were the Zaibatsu as
responsible for Jap(m's militarism as the militarists
themselves, but they profited immensely by it. Even now,
in defeat, they have actually strengthened their monopoly
position. The industrial facilities owned or controlled by
them stand relatively undamaged from the war, compared
with thousands and thousands of small businesses which
have been wiped out. The 'little men' are not only ruined,
but heavily indebted to the Zaibatsu. Unless the Zaibatsu
are broken up, the Japanese have little prospect of ever
being able to govern themselves as free men. As long as the
Zaibatsu survive, Japan will be their Japan. 47
The occupation authorities made a brief attempt to implement
Pauley'S reparations and monopoly dissolution proposals but
soon abandoned both. In January 1947 the Truman
administration sent Clifford Strike at the head of a team of
industrial engineering executives to Japan to investigate the
reparations question. Three months later, in April, the Strike
commission issued a report "for which the army paid them
$750,000, that rejected all but a minor $79 million in
reparations payments. It called for the complete rehabilitation
of the very industries that the Pauley Commission had
recommended be totally dismantled. And, most critically for
future policy, the commission criticized all the democratic
reforms as adding ' ... additional difficulties in the process of
quickly achieving self sufficiency.' ,,48 In May, following the
Strike report, General MacArthur ordered all interim
reparations removals stopped and tabled the whole issue until
after the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan. Washington
in particular was concerned lest Japanese reparations to the
Kuomintang wind up in the hands of the Chinese communists
as was happening with so much American aid at the time.
Thus by 1947 reparations had ceased to be viewed either
as compensation for damage and injury sustained by Japan's
neighbors or as a reminder of the past. Instead, Japanese
businessmen and American policy makers alike were starting
to see them as a constituent element of Japan's future
economic development. When the San Francisco Peace Treaty
was signed, on September 8, 1951, Japan agreed to pay war
damages "by making available the services of the Japanese
people in production, salvaging and other work for the Allied
Powers in question." Reparations, like Japanese economic aid
a decade later, thus became an instrument for facilitating the
advance of Japanese monopoly capital into Southeast Asia.
49
Washington's decision to drastically scale down Japan's
reparations presaged the first real turning point in the postwar
revival of Japanese capitalism, which came in 1948
concommitandy with the victories of Mao's armies over
US-backed Kuomintang forces in China and the maturation of
a civil war situation in the Korean peninsula in which all
nationalist forces were arrayed against the American-installed
Rhee government. It took these failures of American
Asian policy to finally crystallize the latent implications of the
original American decision to retain in power Japan's
conservative ruling class minus the military elite. During 1948,
as the situation in Asia deteriorated (from the
counter-revolutionary perspective of US policy aims) and as
economic problems accumulated in the US, Washington, acting
through the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP,
or General MacArthur), began to expedite the policy of
nurturing Japan as the military workshop of non-communist
Asia. Democratization and demilitarization, formal goals of
the occupation's early months, were downgraded.
Economically, from 1948 onward the occupation reversed the
decartellization of Japanese industry and revived Japan's
industrial war potential as a sub-contracting component of
American capitalism.
In December 1948, General MacArthur, having already
banned wage increases and strikes in certain key industries,
ordered the Yoshida government to take nine measures to
stab ilize the Japanese economy. These included balancing the
budget, strengthening the tax collection system, wage, price
and trade controls, an improved system of allocating raw
materials in order to increase exports, increased production of
domestic raw materials and manufactures, and more effective
measures for bringing food from the countryside into the
cities. Three months later, in March 1949, Joseph M. Dodge,
Detroit banker and MacArthur's newly appointed economic
adviser, translated the new orientation in occupation policy
into an austerity budget based on these "nine principles". The
Lower House of the Japanese Diet passed it without revision
on April 16, 1949.
50
By eliminating unemployment
countermeasures and all funds for school building
construction, by tightening up procedures for tax eollection in
a period of severe price inflation, the Dodge budget met its
billing as a harsh austerity measure. Yet its real impact lay not
in the rising unemployment and belt tightening which it
occasioned but in a long-lasting financial-economic orientation
to the US economy Y
The April 1949 "Dodge budget" contained both a
hidden military budget and a new mechanism of crucial
importance for subordinating Japanese capitalism to American
interests. This new mechanism was the "US counterpart fund
18
special account," though most of the money in it in 1949
came from taxes paid by the Japanese. As the danger of civil
war in Korea mounted in the last half of 1949, SCAP used the
"counterpart fund special account" to channel Japanese tax
money and US loans into direct and indirect Japanese military
production. 52
Finally, on April 23, 1949, SCAP ordered the yen-dollar
exchange rate fixed at 360: 1 and, at the same time, abolished
many export subsidies. With the yen firmly subordinated to
the dollar, occupied Japan was brought into the US-dominated
international monetary system. The "nine principles," the
"Dodge budget," and the uniform currency rate which
accompanied it together created an economic framework for
recovery which deliberately favored large industrial and
commercial concentrations, particularly exporters, at the
expense of the small businessman and the working class. The
reconstruction of the zaibatsu, the mammoth industrial and
trading houses which dominated Japan's prewar economy,
proceeded apace.
While these changes were being instituted in the
Japanese economy, others, harder to comprehend, were
occurring in the psychological orientation of the Japanese
people. Here two interrelated but contradictory phenomena
can be distinguished within the first two years after the
wartime defeat, before the economic "reverse course" got
underway in earnest: On the one hand a sense of liberation
and acute political awareness as manifested in strikes,
demonstrations and political organizing activities; but on the
other a feeling of "stagnation" and "prostration,,,S3 arising in
part from the demystification of the nation's central symbols,
which left many people temporarily disoriented. These two
psychological poles may have reflected the possibilities for
genuine revolutionary change that were open to the Japanese
people in this critical period. In any case, when deprived of a
unifying focus in the person of the emperor, the national
loyalties of the Japanese, their nationalism as it were, did not,
as many foreigners believed at the time, disintegrate overnight,
but shifted instead from the state to the family, village and
small local groups-the corporate building blocks of Japanese
society.54
Not until their own bureaucracy-SCAP's second, prewar
privileged elite-provided them with the mission of economic
recovery (and made possible a new set of illusions,
materialistic ones rather than the pre-war spiritual variety) did
the Japanese people begin to emerge from this existential
syndrome of political awareness and collective depression. As
! their leaders embarked on this new project, Japanese
nationalism gradually coalesced in an appropriately economic
1 form for a nation relatively isolated from the turmoil of
I
I
I
J international conflict. Simultaneously, many Japanese
employers began to succeed in harnessing the loyalties of their
workers towards company goals, thereby transforming
decentralized postwar nationalism into a remarkably potent
force for economic recovery. Their "success," however, was
made possible by SCAP's repression of the left under
conditions of massive unemployment induced by Dodge's
austerity measures. Shortly before and after the outbreak of
the Korean War, SCAP forced a tremendous contraction in the
number of unions in Japan. In 1949 there were 34,688 unions
with 6,655,483 members representing as estimated 55.8 per
cent of the work force; by 1951 the number had declined to
27,644 unions with 5,686,774 members representing 42.6 per
cent of the work force.
55
Thereafter, aided by unions which
were forced to become something like "industrial patriotism
clubs, ,,56 the companies provided a maximally efficient
framework for channeling the energy of Japanese workers into
the cause of economic growth.
If the first international event shaping the revival of
Japanese capitalism was the triumph of revolution in China
and the disintegration of the US position in the Korean
peninsula, the Korean War (1950-1953) was the second. The
Korean War produced a "special procurements" boom, which,
in turn, created sufficient external demand to spark Japan's
economic recovery. During and immedately after the Korean
War, zaibatsu firm names were revived, the anti-monopoly act
was partially emasculated and old zaibatsu groups reorganized,
this time around banks rather than holding companies, mines
and shipping as in prewar days. 57 In 1951 Japan's mining
industry reached its prewar level (1934-36 average output) and
by 1955 exceeded its peak (1944) wartime out put. 58 The
absolute volume of industrial production and real GNP by that
time also exceeded prewar levels, S9 though several more years
would be required before Japan recovered its prewar
importance in the world economy.
The Korean War also provided the occasion for the start
of large-scale capital and technology imports from abroad.
Whereas only 27 items of technology were authorized for
import in 1949 and 1950, a total of 337 items were brought in
between 1951 and 1953. Between 1950 and 1954 royaltl
payments for imported technology totalled $37,977,000.
6
Since much of this consisted of rights to manufacture standard
guage American weapons or else specific designs and
techniques involved in munitions production, this early phase
of technological importing can be said to have laid the
foundation for the later integration of the Japanese and
American defense industries.
61
By the end of the 1950's six major monopoly groups
had emerged: Mitsui, Sumitomo, the Fuji Bank line, the Dai
Ichi Bank line, the Sanwa Bank line and a partially
reconstituted Mitsubishi.
62
By 1967 these six accounted for
31% of the sales and 40% of the profits of all Japanese
companies.
63
And by 1970 a completely reconstituted
Mitsubishi group of 44 companies-nUcleus of the Japanese
military industrial complex-had achieved a preeminent
position in the economy, outstripping all other monopoly
groups.64
Throughout the 1950s the basic configuration of
Japanese capitalism differed qualitatively from its American
and European counterparts. Japan's early postwar
development had centered almost exclusively on the domestic
market, heavy capital investment in plant facilities and light
industrial exports. In the early 1960s however this
"transitory" pattern began to change in favor of increased
reliance on the world export market and heavy,
capital-intensive industrial commodities such as steel, ships,
automobiles and machine tools.
65
Japan's tightly controlled
economy was well on its way to becoming fully competitive
with the US at the global level and even within the United
States when the critical year 1965 brought conditions which
enabled Japan to achieve a still higher stage of growth. In this
stage Japan became involved economically in nearly all of
Pacific Asia and began a coordinated interaction with
American imperialism.
The war in Indochina provided the first of the
19
conditions for external expansion of Japanese capitalism.
American terror bombing of Laos and Vietnam and, above all,
the massive troop buildup in Vietnam during 1965-68 touched
off a new wave of "special procurements"-this time for
Vietnam. The Indochina War also created favorable conditions
within the US home market for increased imports of
inexpensive Japanese steel and electrical machinery and
facilitated expansion of Japan's export trade with South
Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand-American client
states that fulfilled their own Vietnam war orders only by
importing raw materials and semi-finished products from
Japan.
66
The Sato government, which had been worried about
a recession and a worsening balance of payments deficit during
1964, gave unstinting support to US escalation of the
Indochina war, seeing it correctly as the greatest economic
stimulant in Asia since the Korean War. The shift of US
resources to Southeast Asia forced the US to push Japan
harder than ever to speed up its economic involvement in both
Southeast Asia and in its former colonies of Taiwan and South
Korea. America needed Japan's help for the Indochina war;
Japanese big business needed American help in breaking into
the markets of Southeast Asia. Furthermore, in the late 1960s
one of the factors sparking Japan's rapid growth-contracts
and patents for American technology and manufacturing
techniques-also worked to channel Japanese exports into
these areas by stipulating where the product of the joint
venture or subsidiary would be sold.
One key to Japan's new position in Asia after 1965 was
South Korea. By September 1965 more than 22,000 South
Korean mercenaries had been sent to Vietnam. By then
dictator Park Chung Hee, having exacted a heavy financial
price from US leaders <"national security managers"} who
were desperate to produce evidence of an "allied effort", had
linked South Korea firmly to the Vietnam War in a mercenary
capacity. Meanwhile, against this background of secret body
sales, South Korea's American-trained police and CIA were
busy smashing a two-year long student-led campaign to block
"normalization" of relations with Japan. On August 14, the
twentieth anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese
colonialism, Park's ruling Democratic-Republican Party, in a
move later known as the "snatch," unilaterally forced through
the National Assembly a treaty and four supplementary
agreements normalizing relations with Japan.
68
With equal
contempt for democratic procedures, the Sato government
completed Diet action on the treaty three months later. At
midnight on November 12, 1965, after only six days of full
deliberation and in violation of five basic procedural rules of
the Lower House, it also secured unilateral Diet ratification of
the treaty.69
America's "national security managers" had achieved a
major "victory." By pressuring Japan and South Korea to
resolve their long-standing differences, they effectively fused
the US-Japan Security Treaty with the October 1953
US-South Korea military alliance, thereby laying the "legal"
foundations for shifting the burden of empire in Northeast
Asia to Japan. Building on gains they made during the first five
years of Park's dictatorship, Japanese business leaders
launched a full-scale economic offensive into South Korea. In
1965 direct Japanese investment in South Korea was only $1.2
million; by 1969 it had climbed to $27.1 million. By 1970
Japanese companies controlled about 90% of South Korea's
fertilizer industry, 64% of its chemical fiber industry, 62% of
foodstuffs, 48% of glassmaking and cement and 43.5% of its
chemical industry. Furthermore, in the field of joint ventures
with South Korean companies, Japanese capital as of March
1970 controlled less than half the stock in 19% of all tie ups,
half the stock in 33% of all tie ups, and over 50% but less than
100% of the stock in 22% of all tie ups and 100% of the stock
in 26% of the tie upS.70 Clearly, after 1965, while
concurrently participating in "Vietnam pacification" and
opening itself wide to Japanese economic "assistance," South
Korea did indeed experience a miraculous transformation,
becoming Asia's first mercenary state under dual neo-colonial
control.
A second facet of the turning point in Japan's economic
development in 1965 was her relationship with Indonesia. On
October 1, 1965, a rightist military coup, quite probably
abetted by the CIA, toppled the anti-American Sukarno
regime in Indonesia.
71
The post-coup government severed the
embryonic Peking-Djakarta "axis" and brought resource-rich
Indonesia back into the Western fold in an orgy of mass
murder. With this the curtain was also raised for Japan's return
to Indonesia as economic patron to a partially Japanese-trained
ruling junta led by Suharto. In 1966 the Suharto regime
received a $30 million Japanese government loan, in 1967 a
$95 million loan, in 1968 $112 million in loans and other
forms of assistance, in 1969 $117 million and in 1970 and '71,
jointly with the US government, yen loans of $130 and $155
million respectively. In addition, since 1966, it received $37.5
million in "free grants," primarily "food assistance" made
available between 1968 and 1970.
72
By 1970 Indonesia had
become one of Japan's most important Asian investment
markets and bases from which to extract mineral and
agricultural wealth. With hundreds of Japanese oil tankers on
their way home from the Middle East passing through the
Malacca and Sunda Straits, Indonesia also had come to figure
in justifications for naval expansion which were advanced by
Japanese industrialists tied to the military-industrial
complex.
73
Two other facets of Japan's deepening involvement in
Asia after 1965 are also worth noting. First, it coincided with
China's Cultural Revolution. China's three year preoccupation
with internal affairs may have provided an added incentive to
increased Japanese involvement in Southeast Asia and South
Korea. Second is the sudden spurt of Japanese investments in
Taiwan, which began with a $150 million. government loan in
April 1965 -two months before Washington cut off its foreign
aid (exclusive of military aid). Three years later, in the 1969
Nixon-Sato joint communique, Taiwan was referred to as "a
most important factor for the security of Japan." By 1971
Japanese firms had invested about $100 million in Taiwan
(versus at least $250 million by US firms) but because of
myriad technical tie ups, "the full extent of Japanese
penetration of the Taiwan economy [could] not be measured
on the basis of official statistics. ,,74
Thus the external conditions for strengthening Japanese
capitalism in the late 1960s were provided by a series of events
ranging from the Indochina War and the Indonesian coup to
the mercenarization of South Korea and China's Cultural
Revolution. Added to these factors were the continuing huge
imports into Japan of US technology and loan capital. Japan
has been the second biggest recipient of US-controlled World
Bank loans. By 1971 it had "received more than $850 million
from the World Bank in addition to $150 million in credits
20
from the International Development Bank Association (IDA),
the bank's 'soft loan' affiliate."7s However, according to the
breakdown of foreign capital inductions in Chart No. I, stock
acquisitions, chiefly by American investors, have recently
become the dominant form of capital induction. But only a
small percentage of Japanese corporate shares-estimated in
1971 at upwards of 3.3%-are foreign owned.
By 1970 Japan ranked third globally in overall industrial
production; its GNP was approaching $200 billion (versus
$974 billion for the US); its exports, as a percentage of total
capitalist world exports, had increased from 3.6% in 1961 to
7% in 1970 {versus a US total of 15.5% and a Western
European total of 32.8%}.76 In 1971 Japan was the most
heavily represented country on Fortune's directory of the 200
largest industrials outside of the US, with 51 companies on the
list.
77
For over a decade it had been "rationalizing" its
economic processes (realizing economics of scale) in order to
do battle in world export markets. In the unprecedented
merger wave that swept the capitalist world in the 1960s,
mergers in Japan went from 300 per year in 1958 to about
700-800 annually at the end of the sixties.
78
(Unlike the
conglomerate-merger movement in the US, the merger
movement in Japan was animated chiefly by a desire to meet
foreign competition and not to acquire windfall profits for
management.) This enormous concentration of corporate
power gave Japan the world's largest steel company (Nippon
Steel), with eight integrated plants, a capitalization of $637
million, a work force of 80,000 and an output (in 1969) of
35% of the Japanese national steel output. 79 With 27 million
tons of merchant s h i p p i n g ~ 12% of the world's tonnage as of
July I, 1970-it had the world's largest merchant marine. 80
And, although still heavily dependent on the US for crude oil,
it had the world's largest petrochemical industry, an essential
foundation for all defense production.
But Japan's rapid economic growth and its increased
industrial and financial concentration have done more than
catapult it to the status of a global economic power. These
developments have simultaneously produced new forms of
dependency on the US, accelerated the dissolution of Japanese
agriculture, impoverished the small and middle business class
and exacerbated the income gap between rich and poor, and
between industrial workers and farmers. Moreover, they have
generated chronic inflation and wrought ecological havoc on
the Japanese islands, devouring land and living space, polluting
air and water resources. The maturation of Japanese capitalism
has, in brief, introduced new elements of crisis at home while,
at the same time, intensifying contradictions within the world
system of capitalism.
3. The japanese-American Conflict of Interest
At the global level contradictions have been brewing
since the Korean War, when Japan first showed signs of again
developing as a serious competitor of Western industry. In the
early 1950s they were reflected in japan's relation to the
US-sponsored General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), the free trade association which began operating in
October 1947 on the principle of unconditional-most-favored
nation treatment. In 1952, after regaining its formal
independence, japan officially requested membership in the
GATT, but was refused admittance. When it finally gained
admittance, in September 1955, fourteen countries which
accounted for about 40% of Japan's export's to the whole
group, immediately invoked their legal right to exempt
themselves from applying non-discriminatory treatment where
japanese goods were concerend.
81
Having recovered its
pre-war level of industrial production before Japan had,
Western Europe, Britain and the nations of the British
Commonwealth were, in effect, exercising their power at the
expense of what was then the weakest member of an
American-contrived capitalist bloc. That Japan did not feel the
effects of this discrimination was due to its position within the
GATT as America's economic protege and to America's
sponsorship of japanese trade expansion in Southeast Asia.
Three years later, in 1958, the economic recovery of
both Western Europe and japan began to impinge on the
t
administration of the Pax Americana. In January of that year,
I
the six states of Western Europe formed the European
Economic Community (EEC), in June deGaulle returned to
power in France, and in December the states of Western
i
Europe simultaneously recovered their currency convertibiliry.
The so-called Western alliance thereafter began to split apart as
Europe found in deGaulle a spokesman for its growing sense of
I
self reliance vis-a-vis the US.
82
The US meanwhile had entered
its fourth postwar recession. By the time of the Kennedy
regime the contrast between the dynamism of the economies
of the EEC and japan on the one hand, and the signs of
stagnation in the US economy on the other was even more
striking. How did the US respond to this first structural crisis
of empire?
Towards Europe where the drive toward an independent,
nationally oriented capitalism was more advanced, it
responded at the private level by stepping up investment in the
EEC nations and at the official level by refurbishing its arsenal
of weapons for future trade war. The Trade Expansion Act of
October 1962 gave the imperial president enormous powers to
raise or lower tariffs. Towards japan, then viewed as the lesser
problem, it responded by rationalizing its alliance system,82a
pressuring for more "voluntary" restraints on textile exports,
the removal of restrictions on direct US capital investments,
and for greater Japanese involvement in the economic
development of America's underdeveloped client states.
A decade later, however, as the Indochina crisis came to
a climax, the economic pwblerns complicating US-japan
relations seemed just as serious as the European threat of an
eventual market of 250 million pursuing a common external
tariff policy. In fact, by 1971, the year of the $3.2 billion
American trade deficit with Japan
83
and the Nixon diplomatic
and economic "shocks," Japanese capitalism had clearly
become too powerful to be easily contained within the
framework of the Ameril.'an global system. The mercantilisms
of the two "allies," once comp limentary, 84 had become
antagonistic. Militarily, japan remained dependent on the US;
economically, it had partially extricated itself from Americu
I
!
control and was laying the foundations for a potentially
independent economic bloc. But in the summer of 1971 Japan
was still at the mercy of Washington, even more dependent on
the dollar bloc than Western Europe. Thus when in July,
I
without forewarning Tokyo, Nixon announced his decision to
visit Peking, he automatically undercut the essential premise
t
of the very foreign policy that Washington had imposed upon
all conservative governments in japan since the Korean War:
that is to say, the policy of insuring that Japan not establish
any meaningful economic ties with C!1ina, its natural trading
21
partner. When Nixon followed this in August with the At this point it is necessary to spell out some of the
unilateral abrogation of the gold-dollar exchange rate, the reasons behind the bitter international competition between
imposition of direct controls and higher tariffs mainly on Japanese and American multinational corporations. One
Japanese goods-ali at a time when Japan was in the midst of a reason is the pressing need of both for cheap wage labor. The
mild economic slump-the effect was both to underline the structural transformation of the Japanese economy during the
instability of Japan's new international position and to late 1960s had highlighted the problem of rising labor costs. A
reinforce trends already underway towards militarism and Keidanren resolution noted the seriousness of this problem in
overseas economic expansion. June 1969. And in 1970 Keidanren's president, Uemura
FOREIGN CAPITAL INDUCTIONS IN JAPAN 1950-1969
UNIT: $1000 dollars
Securities
Stock and Private
Year Total Acquisition Company Loans Loans Debentures
50--54 $139,486 $35,571 $791 $103,124 $---
55-- 59 718,970 64,492 705 623,773 30,000
60-64 3 ;1.67,096 625,068 6,393 2,027,861 605,775
60 211,658 74,151 575 127,132 9,800
61 577,529 116,142 1,357 387,605 72,425
62 678,823 164,68R 736 358,419 155,000
63 884,302 185,262 1,045 503,945 194,050
64 912,784 84,845 2,680 650,760 174,500
65..... 69 6,990,863 3,183,711 5,120 3,200,568 601,464
65 528,506 83,331 3,124 379,551 62,500
66 457,097 126,735 651 329,711
---
67 847,784 159,836 407 637,544 50,000
68 1,836,645 670,008 285 947,372 218,980
69 3,488,240 2,462,897 757 789,602 234,984
Source: Moriya Fumio, Sengo Nibon shihrmsbugi-sono bunseki to hihan [Postwar
Japanese Capitalism-Its Analysis and Criticism] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1971),
306. Statistics compiled from the Bank of Japan's Economic Statistics
Yearbook and the Finance Ministry'S Fconomic Survey.
22
Kogoro, warned that " ... the advance of wages can no longer
be absorbed by the elevation of labor productivity .... it is ...
essential to restrict the advance of wages within the purview of
the increase of labor productivity .... [andl to absorb {itl by
. .. rationalization of management and expansion of labor
productivity."ss In their determination to hold down
wages-really an incredible proposition in a country where
wage rates have not yet drawn abreast of the highest Western
European levels, where the wage differential between male ;lllJ
female workers is probably greater than anywhere else in the
world, and where even engineers with college degrees earn only
a tiny fraction of what their counterparts in the US
receive-Japanese capitalists are resorting to two basic
approaches. One is to discipline the domestic work force in the
ideology of labor-capital cooperation. This involves, among
other things, strengthening Domei Kaigi, the right-wing
national labor federation set up in 1964 with AFL-CIO help to
win worker support for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP). The other approach is to undercut the bargaining
power of domestic labor by building tax-free factories in
South Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin
America, where labor costs are a fraction of those in
Japan.
86
Besides competing for cheap labor in underdeveloped
countries, Japanese and American corporations are also
competing for a wide range of limited raw materials. In 1968
Japan consumed 10% of the raw materials exports of the
non-communist world; by 1980 that figure may rise to 30%.
The US, with only 8% of the world's population, is the biggest
consumer of raw materials and its needs are increasing faster
than Japan's, which is second. Oil, for example, accounts for
70% of Japan's energy needs, versus 40 ... for the US. But with
the US alone firmly in control of most of the world's oil and
the worth of its own oil imports expected to soar from the
current annual $3.5 billion to $20 billion by the early 1980s,
the unevenness of the conflict between the two capitalisrns is
even more striking, in this one critical area, than it was in the
1930s.s
7
A third factor stoking the competition between Japanese
and American corporations abroad is pollution. Capitalists in
both countries are seeking territorial space in the
underdeveloped world for situating their pollution-intensive
industries. With every prefecture in Japan affected by
industrial pollution, and nation-wide anti-pollution rallies
eroding support for the LDP, Japanese capitalists are
desperately seeking the cure to pollution at home by exporting
pollution abroad-an approach that is entirely congruent with
their goal of holding down industrial costS.
88
Thus, by 1971, with Japanese and American
corporations locked in bitter competition abroad, many
government and business leaders were enraged at Japan's
growing economic independence. The basic economic power
relations of the postwar world had been
undermined; the dollar was no longer the capitalist world's
reserve currency; new forms of economic leverage would have
to be invoked to contain "selfish allies" who refused to foot
the bill for American aggression. All through 1970 and into
1971 the Japanese were depicted in US business magazines as
"invading," "conspiring" or "plotting to take over" the
American economy.89 Anxious to shift the onus of their own
incompetence and greed onto their foreign competitors and
the American worker, the national elites of government,
business and labor have repeatedly invoked the phoney racist
image of an American industry fighting for its very survival
against a faceless, monolithic entity called "Japan, Inc." No
wonder, then, that against this background of incipient
commercial-psychological warfare, the official American
response to Japanese (and Western European) competition has
been a transmuted version of naval diplomacy, with the
modern weapons of tariffs and quotas doing the job that
battleships and aircraft carriers once did-in short, the tactics
of intimidation.
90
Having subordinated Japanese capitalism in a dependent
relationship in the late 1940s, the American ruling class today
pursues its "conflict of interest" with Japan by operating
levers of manipulation. Since these levers of manipUlation are
little understood and, indeed, have been totally neglected by
academic specialists on Japan, I would like to devote the
remainder of this essay to discussing two of
4. Technology
Japan's rapid industrial growth, which averaged 12.9%
annually for the period 1953-65,91 depended upon massive
imports of US capital in the form of bank loans and credits
and upon technological borrowing in the form of patent and
licensing contracts. Although indispensable for Japan's
economic "success," the result of this aid was intensified
short-term US economic control. According to one Soviet
writer, "By April 1970 Japanese firms had concluded 11,600
technical assistance contracts with foreign companies, over
half of them with the US.,,92 As Halliday and McCormack
point out, Japanese industry was then paying out, chiefly to
American firms, some $400 million annually or as much as 10
times its earnings from technical tie-ups.93 Most significant,
beginning in the late 1960s, American companies involved in
such tie-u ps began to demand: (1) a larger voice in
management as a condition of exchange, (2) guarantees that
gooJs produced with their borrowed technology would be
exported only to Asian countries, and (3) access to new
techniques developed with the aid of their capital or scientific
know-how.
94
The new situation, as Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun
observed on January 6, 1971, was one in which foreign firms
were lately "becoming hesitant to provide even licensing
agreements which in the past they readily agreed to. On the
contrary, they demand Japanese techniques through
cross-licensing and if the domestic company has no such
attractive technit'al information, then the foreign firm requests
managerial participation."
The computer industry provides an instructive example
of American capitalism's effort to keep Japan in a client status
by maintaining monopoly control over technology "diffusion"
and of Japan's struggle to resist and develop its own
technology. According to an excellent recent analysis in
Pacific Basin Reports,
. .. the cost of importing US technology may become
prohibitive to a Japanese computer industry intent on
becoming internationally competitive. Despite the strides of
Japanese companies in developing an independent
computer technology, the industry is still annually paying
30 times more in royalties to foreign interests than it earns
in royalty income from abroad.
It is no coincidence that the Japanese [computer]
firm which is closest to marketing its products in the
23
US --Fujitsu Ltd. -is the company which has the smallest
debt to foreign patent holders. Its products are
japanese-designed, in contrast to the other five which up to
now have manufactured computers basically of us design.
But all japanese computer companies, including
Fujitsu, are dependent on the basic computer patents held
by IBM, and now it has become clear that IBM's terms for
renewing those patents-that is to say, for permitting the
japanese companies to produce computers-is virtually
total access to japan's independently developed computer
technology, past and present.
As of October 1970, foreign computers constituted
only 45.5%, by value, of all machines in operation in japan.
But foreign producers still dominated sales of large
computers. Despite a quota system . .. and despite a basic
tariff of 25% applied against all computer imports ...
foreign manufacturers still provided 60.2% of large
computers installed.
Now, faced with slippage in market share even of
large computers, us makers have mounted an active sales
drive to enlarge the share of the total market. The
offensive, supported by the US Commerce Department, is
concentrating on areas where the japanese are least strong,
such as super-large computers and peripherals. That's the
main plot; the subplot is the drive by IBM's US rivals to do
abroad what they have been unable to do at home: erode
IBM's monolithic market share.
The super-large computer competition began last
summer when IBM started local production of the IBM
370-Model 155, but was swiftly followed up by Sperry
Rand. . .. Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, ...
National Cash Register Corporation, Dayton, Ohio {and]
Burroughs Corporation, Detroit . ...
On the japanese side, Fujitsu bas taken the lead in
responding to the US super-large computer challenge,
although Hitachi and Nippon Electric are also expected to
unveil new models shortly . ... (Butl Foreign sales of
japanese computers have been quite minor thus far.
According to Honolulu's Pacific Business News, a big factor
restricting japan's computer exports has been 'an
understanding not to compete in overseas markets' with
their US technology sources. The 'understanding' is said to
have been a precondition, in many cases, of the technical
tie-ups. Mitsubishi Electric has nonetheless made some sales
to Britain, France and West Germany.
Fujitsu Ltd., which has remained free of such ties, has
installed machines in Bulgaria, Rumania, the Philippines
and Brazil. The company also entered bids last year for two
A ustralia jobs, and although it did not win the contracts,
Fujitsu has appointed a permanent representative in
Sydney. 95
The above example of how the US goes about protecting
its global computer monopoly from future Japanese
competitIOn suggests that the big corporations are using the
US protectionist movement as a club to "threaten Japanese
financial and government circles into precipitously opening
their most important industries to US penetration.,,96 It also
illustrates vividly how technological borrowing, in addition to
costiliness, represents a critical form of dependency and
control. Yet the evidence suggests that Japanese
manufacturers, aided by the state, will succeed, eventually, in
meeting and overcoming the American quest for control of
their domestic computer market, already the world's second
largest. In the short run, however, their efforts to resist
capture are bound to further embitter Japanese-American
economic relations. Clearly, where technological dependency
is concerned, contradictions that are not inherently
antagonistic at the bilateral, US-Japan level become so at the
international level. The computer competition ultimately
reflects the larger conflict between a newly risen Japanese
capitalism struggling to break the fetters of America's global
economic hegemony, and a declining American capitalism
desperately seeking to neutralize its foreign competition by
waging "preventive commercial warfare" against it.
There is a further aspect of this problem. The
technological export process is not limited only to insuring
relations of hierarchical subordination among advanced
nations; it plays a similar role in binding the underdeveloped
countries to their capitalist patrons. Herman Kahn is quite
correct in pointing out that there is "now a reverse and
increasing flow of 'payments for Japanese technology' in that
about 10% of the royalties that the Japanese pay to other
countries now comes back to them in the form of royalties for
their own technology. ,,97 What Kahn and most liberals
altogether ignore, however, is the content of that reverse flow.
For example, in South Korea, where Japanese raw materials,
chemical products and machinery accounted for over 40% of
total imports in 1969, and where the trade balance in that year
was 7: 1 in Japan's favor, Japanese corporations pass on
outmoded technological manuals and ready-to-be-scrapped,
surplus production facilities to Korean manufacturers. Liberals
call this sharing "technological cooperation" and "private
aid," although, where the "diffused" technology is not junk, it
only serves to subordinate South Korea's "zaibatsu"
monopolies to their Japanese creditors. 98
Such subordination, moreover, has its own logic which
has nothing to do with the content of any reverse flow of
technology. The Korean monopolies, it should be
remembered, though giants vis- a-vis their domestic
competitors, are pygmies vis- a-vis the Japanese and other
foreign mu Itinationals. But precisely because they have been
curdled prematurely by foreign capital in an underdeveloped
semi-agrarian capitalist economy, they need to be integrated
into a hierarchy of external subordination if they are: (1) to
maintain a viable internal domination, and (2) avoid the
stagnation effects of monopoly growth.
99
It is in this sense
that one can speak of the logic of premature monopoly growth
creating the need for foreign imperialism. And it is in this
sense too that one can view the dual economy of capitalist
imperialism that is emerging in Asia today. In one economy,
Japan is subordinated to the US in a hierarchy of technological
and capital dependency; in another, thanks to its effective
penetration of South Korea, Taiwan, and certain areas of
Southeast Asia, Japan itself heads up a hierarchy of
technological and capital dependency.
5. Agriculture
Japanese dependency on US capital and technology has
given the US short-term political leverage over Japan. It has
also sharpened the global conflict of interest between Japanese
and American multinational corporations. This conflict was
exacerbated when, following the dissolution of the Japanese
24
1
peasantry during the 1960s and early 70s, which brought
Japan to a new dependency on US food grains, the Japanese
government was led to pursue commercial agricultural export
and policies in America's Asian client states. A
brief discussion of Japan's postwar agricultural development
will illustrate how this situation came about. It will also show
how domestic class exploitation is integrally related to foreign
trade.
Prior to the structural transformation of the japanese
economy in the late 1960s, agriculture in postwar japan had
already gone through two distinct policy phases. The first,
following upon the Occupation land reform, witnessed the
conversion of some tenants into "owner-famers" (historically
the most ephemeral of all land-tenure relationships) and the
deliberate preservation of a certain amount of tenancy. By
1949 approximately 43% of all farm households in Japan
owned less than half a nectare and were unable to sustain
themselves on farming alone.
loo
From the viewpoint of
meeting the export sector's need for cheap labor, the land
reform was undoubtedly a success. But it was bought at the
cost of: (1) creating a stratum of petty owner-farmers who
were unable to sustain themselves by farming alone, and (2)
establishing an exploitative relationship between large
industrial concentrations and the countryside. Within twenty
years, as the mercantilist spirit in Japanese trade gradually
encroached upon agriculture, that relationship would evolve
into a modern facsimile of the city-countryside relationship of
Tokugawa mercantilism. 101
From completion of the Occupation land reform in
1949 until the ending of the Korean War in 1953, no
fundamental change was made in japanese agricultural
policy. lOla The second phase of postwar agricultural policy
began only after the signing of the US-Japan Mutual Defense
Assistance Agreement (MDA) of March 1954. This agreement
pledged the US to continued support for Japanese rearmament
. by furnishing weapons and advisors and by helping finance
japan's fledgling defense industries with "counterpart funds."
In return, the Japanese government agreed to purchase surplus
American grain and to guarantee private American investments
in Japan against expropriation or non convertibility of
currency. 102 One of the first beneficiaries of this
arrangement, New Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, received a total
of 1.5 billion yen in MSA counterpart funds which it invested
in facilities for manufacture of the F-86 figher, which went
into production in 1956.
103
The "counterpart funds" formula thus functioned to
convert surplus US grain into Japanese war potentia1.
104
Under it, Japan bought surplus American grain in yen, the US
returned 10% of the total amount paid in yen to Japan for
strengthening its defenses and used the remaining 80% for its
own "off-shore military procurements." Following the March
1954 agricultural agreement, concluded as part of the MDA,
three others were conlcuded under US Public Law 480 (the
Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act): one on
November 13, 1954, one on May 28, 1955, and another on
August 10, 1956.
105
Apart from their military value, these
four agreements reflected the growing compatibility of US and
Japanese mercantilist trade policies during these years. They
also confirmed that postwar Japanese capitalism, no less than
the prewar variety, intended to cannibalize the countryside for
the development of an urban-industrial japan.
Beginning in 1950 and accelerating steadily throughout
the decade, rural Japan provided a steady stream of cheap
wage labor. Between 1950 and 1955 an average of 20-30,000
young people annually left farming for work in the cities,
while the number of self-supporting farm families engaged in
strictly agricultural pursuits decreased from 50 to 34.8%.106
When this rural surplus labor pool showed signs of drying up in
the early 1960s, the japanese government adopted an
agricultural policy based on increased imports of US
agricultural produce and maintenance of low prices for
home-grown produce. In effect, it abandoned the vast majority
of farm households that were unable to be self supporting.
In the 1960s Japanese agriculture was shaped by two
,
inter-related developments: the uprooting of vast numbers of
people from farming and the widening of the US agricultural
foothold. The first was implicit in the American-directed land
t
reform. Once agriculture failed to generate a sufficient pool of
cheap labor, once it could no longer function to maintain the
traditional "plasticity" of wages, once it had become a
financial burden, japanese capitalism concentrated on keeping
farm prices down and squeezing the villages even harder for
additional bodies. Between 1960 and 1970 a total of
8,130,000 people left farming for other occupations; in this
same period farm households owning 2.5 hectares, the amount
considered the minimum necessary for a self supporting farm
under the June 1961 Basic Agricultural Law, increased by only
64,000 households. Of that number over 60% were forced to
engage in temporary occupations outside of agriculture. 107
However, the Japanese economy as a whole expanded so
rapidly during the high-growth decade of the sixties that even
this vast dislocation of the rural population was insufficient to
meet industry's need for cheap wage labor. In 1963, for the
first time, the demand for labor exceeded its supply among
large and medium enterprises. By 1967 50-60% of enterprises
employing over 1,000 people and 60-70% of those employing
less than 1,000 people reported difficulties in securing
craftsmen and unskilled workers. 108 It was at this point in the
late 1960s, when Japanese capitalism itself was entering a
higher stage of monopoly concentration, that Japanese
agriculture entered a third postwar phase. The new phase has
been characterized by big business's efforts to further
"liberalize" restnctIons on agricultural imports and,
ultimately, to substitute ownership of land by large-scale
enterprises for ownership by farm-households.
The second development shaping Japanese agriculture in
the sixties was the accelerating influx of US surplus foodgrain
and feedstuff. The primary incentive for increased US
dumping in the Japanese market lay in the decline .of US
agricultural exports to the European Common Market, a
decline which began in 1962, the year the Common Market
members finally achieved a unified agricultural policy.
Throughout the 1960s, stepped-up pressure on Japan to take
more US agricultural products was intimately bound up with
the success of the Common Market nations in forging their
defensive barriers against US agricultural dumping. (Now that
Britain, Ireland, and Denmark are going to join the Common
Market, Washington has become frantic in pressuring Japan to
lower all tariffs on agricultural imports; but, at the same time,
recognizing the handwriting on the wall, it is exploring ways to
gain an agricultural foothold in the Soviet Union and even
China.)
In any case, the influx of US agricultural products
contributed directly to the decline in Japanese production of
wheat, barley, soybeans and rapeseed.
I09
By 1969, Japanese
wheat production had dropped to 750,000 tons, compared to
1.78 million in 1961.
110
And by 1971,85% of all the wheat
and 93% of all the soybeans consumed in Japan were imported
from the US. Japan had become the largest market ever for US
farm products, taking more American soybeans, grains and
cotton than any other single country. III
Meanwhile, the Japanese government faced mounting
difficulties in meeting big business's demands for lower rice
prices. In 1962 a 28-billion-pound rice crop made japan
virtually self-sufficient in rice for the first time in its modern
history.112 As its own rice supluses began accumulating, the
Japanese government slowly reduced imports of US, Thai and
Taiwanese rice, which dwindled from 967,000 metric tons in
1965 to about 500,000 tons in 1967 and finally to zero in
1971.
113
At the same time, following the Yankee precedent,
Japan sought to expon its own rice surpluses despite the
disastrous effects such dumping has had in the past on Asia's
underdeveloped agrarian economies. Beginning in 1968, while
the US continued dumping its surplus wheat, soybeans and
corn in Japan, subsidized Japanese rice began competing with
US rice in Indonesia and South Korea, which in 1970 took
151,000 and 307,000 metric tons of Japanese rice respectively
(and much larger tonnage of US rice). In 1971 the Park
dictatorship was forced to more than double its rice imports
from Japan.
1I4
Thus, where rice is concerned, from the start
of its third phase of agricultural development, Japan has been
able to engage the US for the first time as a competitor in the
ruination of backward agricultural economies.
In sum: in order to benefit Japan's more productive
exporters and to obtain investment funds for industrial and
military development, the Japanese government accepted US
surplus agri("ultural prOducts. It received, in return, "loans" in
thl" form of "counterpan funds" and, eventually, easy access
to thl" Alllnicln market for its own manufactures. In pursuit
of a I11ncantilist export policy it sacrificed to American
Jgri( ulture its less productive national grain economy whose
rl'servoir of cheap rural labor had begun to dry up with great
rapidity In the late 1960s. lIowever, since agricultural
dependency IS more dangerous than capital and technological
depcndcncy. If only because it is more likely to be enduring,
prohlem forces the Japanese ruling class to undertake
structural reforms at home and push economic expansion
abroad in {'olllpt'tition with the US. As can be seen today in
the Ilokuso Plateau. Mutsu-ogawara and Shimokita Peninsula
development projects, Japanese monopoly capitalism is
extending its rationalizing activities into domestic
agriculture I I S It is also promoting agricultural
production-for-export in Southeast !\sia and South Korea,
places where rural labor is much cheaper than in Japan.
Gndt"rlying these two forms of capitalist expansion-one
internal, against a relatively small domestic peasantry that it
now dcems superfluous, the other external, against the
peasants in other Asian lands whom it deems more useful
because they are more ahundant-is a common dialectic of
expansion.
In the decade ahead, Japanese big business envisions two
solutions to its agricultural problems. The internal solution
will lead to further rcductions in the number of farm
households and further "liberalization" of import restricttons
of foreign agricultural products. Japan has aln:ad\' l>t'gn nst.
n;!t",n-\\'iJe ,lc\'ciopillent "{'hcllles deSigned to realize sizahk
economies of scale in Japanese farming, to free more land for
urbanization and industrial use, to provide an expanded source
of cheap labor for the factories (both along the coast and in
the heavy industries scheduled for the interior), and perhaps
even to alleviate the SDF's recruitment difficulties. Of course,
such a restructuring of domestic agriculture can hardly avoid
precipitating more protests from oppressed groups in the
economy such as farmers who are being evicted from their
land, as in the San rizuka struggles of 1970-71.
116
In fact, this
oppression opens up the possibility of a new coalition of
farmers and urban laborers-though such a coalition
presupposes effective unmasking of big business's hypocritical
effort to pose as defender of the consumer's need for cheap
food. In any case, "agricultural rationalization" alone is
incapable of meeting big business's need for ever-increasing
amounts of cheap wage labor and land for industrial sites.
Japanese big business, realizing that it must inevitably
exhaust Japan's own supply of land and labor, and realizing
also that an independent agricultural base would by no means
be disadvantageous to an over-industrialized Japan, has come
to feel compelled to expand abroad. For them the external or
foreign trade approach to the agricultural problem, which is
predicated on a transmuted version of the "greater East Asia
co-prosperity sphere," is just as necessary as domestic
"rationalization." In the Southeast Asian and South Korean
countrysides, japanese multinational corporations, usually of
the "integrated trading company" type (see Appendix), have
either started or are planning to develop plantations and
factories to process agricultural produce for export to Japan.
By the 1980s Japan may well be in the extraordinary position
of having built up plantation enclaves within the very
agricultural economies that US agricultural policies have
consistently undermined. If so, one wonders whether some
underdeveloped client states may already be far along the road
of substituting Japanese for US economic hegemony.
Conclusion
Japan is embarked on a course leading to eventual
economic independence from the at the cost of
furthering the growth of domestic militarism, including the
beginning of a mixed civilian-military type economy, similar to
but smaller than the US military-industrial complex. This new
militarism has already become a constituent element of
Japan's further economic growth. It is also fed by japan's
overseas economic expansion. Eventually, as the US domestic
market is eclipsed in importance by Asian and Pacific markets
in general and Japan's embryonic imperio in imperium in
particular, Japan's leaders may be tempted to use military
power to protect their commercial, financial and industrial
investments, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Korea.
This, in fact, is the direction implicitly envisioned in the
Fourth Defense Plan. Despite US setbacks in Indochina and
their own disastrous experience there during World War II,
Japan's leaders are moving toward closer political and military
ties with the client regimes of non-communist Asia, whilc
simultaneously building up their own potential for
counter-insurgency operations.
It is against this background that the present stage in
US-Japan relations should be grasped. The US-Japan alliance is
still viable: Japan continues to be locked into a
-;ell1l-neo-co\onial relationship of dependency on US trade,
1
technology and military cooperation; both countries continue
to share common interests in preserving Asia for capitalist
investment and trade; and the Asian clients of Japan all have
military alliances with the US. And yet, on the other hand,
numerous economic contradictions are steadily eroding the
US-Japan military alliance. The competitive quest of the
world's first and second capitalist economies for
non-renewable raw materials, cheap labor, high profits,
consumer markets, favorable investment conditions and space
for situating pollution-intensive industry increasingly borders
on economic warfare. With each side beset by mounting
domestic contradictions and each seeking to solve its problem
of surplus production along national lines-and with the US's
economic frustrations again showing signs of assuming an
anti-Japanese racial coloration-US-Japan relations stand at a
cross-roads.
Over the long run, therefore, the dominant trend is
toward deteriorating political-economic relations, but for the
next several years the alliance will probably hold. And while it
does, the US has the upper hand. Indeed, it is reasonable to
suppose that the US leverage will be sufficient, at least until
the end of this decade, to force Japan to make concessions and
to sustain even greater "shocks" than it has to date. But each
concession wrought by the American effort to strengthen its
declining control of the Japanese economy will only spur
Japan on, in self defense, to a reorganization of its state
structure and economy along increasingly nationalist and
independent lines. Having succeeded in laying the foundations
for an independent imperial dynamic, Japan will move
forward, decisively throwing off the remnants of US control in
one area after another, with the possible exception of oil.
All of which means that the system of post-World War II
alliances and economic institutions which subordinated Japan
and Western Europe to US power is coming undone. That
system, originally a continuation of the capitalist wartime
economic bloc, incorporated the former Axis partners in the
late 1940s and facilitated their economic reconstruction for
nearly two decades. During most of this period the unevenness
of economic development between the US and the subordinate
bloc members, all of whom had suffered wartime destruction
and the loss of their colonial empires, made the mercantilist
economic policies which its members practiced against one
another essentially non-antagonistic. But as Western Europe
and Japan recovered their prewar strength and then began to
draw abreast of the US, the contradictions of the
bloc-actually a reproduction of those of the 1920s and
30s-began to erupt in the form of "gold rushes," currency
destabilization crises and dumping conflicts. Although it is
impossible to determine where all of this will now lead, it is no
accident that the economic policies of the main capitalist units
are so intimately bound up with preparations for war.
Ever since the 16th century when mercantilist thought
was first advanced against a background of rising commercial
capitalism and in concert with the unification of the
nation-state, mercantilism as economic policy, though not as a
body of thought, has continued to exist, assuming different
forms in different ages. But its primary aim, the pursuit of
national advantage and relative strength, has always tended to
promote war. The US-controlled capitalist bloc which
emerged out of the World War II struggle for the redivision of
the world's markets has been no exception. Though touted as
an arrangement for maintaining "world peace," it has, in fact,
fostered a whole succession of unprecedentedly destructive
wars in countries of the Third World that were deliberately
excluded from it. It has, in addition. fired the greatest arms
race in history. Until recently that race was essentially an
inter-bloc one, limited to the US and the Soviet Union_ The
reemergence of economic warfare between the US, Japan and
Western Europe may now signal the start of a new era of even
more intensified and uncontrolled arms races: between the
two "super powers," between advanced capitalist blocs and
among the subordinate mercenary states which are being
increasingly relied upon to fight the wars of organized
monopoly capitalism.
NOTES: Japan 1972, Part II, The Economic
Dimension
"japan 1972-Part ." appeared in the Spring 1972 Bulletin (Vo\. 4,
No. 1). The entire essay, parts' and II, will appear under the title
"japan: The Roots of Militarism" in Mark Selden and Edward
Friedman, eds., Imperialism in Asia (New York: Pantheon Books,
1973).
41. On this point see Hayashi Naomi, "Nihon gunkokushugi
fukkatsu no keizai kiso" [Economic Foundations for the Revival of
japanese Militarism I , Gendai to sbisii, No. 1 (October 1970). lowe
much to Professor lIayashi whose excellent work helped me situate
japan's military-industrial complex in the context of postwar economic
growth.
42. Late Meiji/Taisho Japan also had a parasitic relationship to
Western imperialism. This was in part due to the fact that Japan's
prewar economy did not become sufficiently independent to finance its
own continental expansion until after it had reaped the economic
benefits of three wars. From the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 through
the Russo-japanese War to World War I and the Twenty-One Demands,
Japan relied on Western loan capital and war plunder in the form of
indemn ities to develop its overseas concessions and spheres of
influence. The initiative at all times was taken by the state acting
through !Wllli-official enterprises such as the South Manchurian Railway
Company. the colonial banks in Taiwan and Korea, the Yokohama
Specie Bank, etc., and by large zaibatsu which also relied heavily on
diverse forms of state subsidization. Big business itself played an
essentially passive role in planning and organizing overseas economic
expansion throughout the entire formative phase of Japanese
imperialism. Not until the 1920s did this situation begin to change in
any significant way. Beginning in the late 19205 and becoming more
pronounced in the 1930s, big business-both old and new
2IJibatsu-played an active role in pushing Japan's continental
expansion. This second phase witnessed the emergence of a
military-industrial alliance increasingly dependent on Asian sources of
critical raw materials.
43. Nitta Shunzo, "Shin sangyo seisaku to sangun fukugo" (The
New Industrial Policy and the Military-Industrial Complex I , Kei2lJi
byoron (November 1971),41-42.
44. On the Russian variety of "military-industrial complex" see
Richard Armstrong, "Military-Industrial Complex: Russian Style,"
"oTtune, LXXX (August 1, 1969).
45. john W. Dower, "The Eye of the Beholder: Background
Notes on the US-japan Military Relationship," Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scbolars, Vol. 2, No.1 (October 1969),16.
46. Quoted in Jerome B. Cohen, Japan's /!.conomy in War and
Reconstruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949),
420.
47. Cohen. 427.
48. J O Y ~ ' e and Gabriel Kolko, Tbe Limits of Power, Tbe World
and United States I:oreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York: Harper and
Row, 1972), 512.
49. For an excellent brief discussion of the entire reparations
issue see Noguchi Yuichiro, "Nikkan Keizai 'kyoryoku' no kyoko"
IThe Fiction of Japan-ROK Economic 'Cooperation'I, in Saito Takashi
and Fujishima Udai, ed., Nikkan mondai 0 kangaeru (Considerations on
Japan-Republic of Korea I'roblemsl (Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha,
1965),138-142.
27
SO. Peter Calvocoressi, ed., Survey of Illtematiollal Alfairs
19471948 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 344. Also see
Toyama Shigeki, ed., Shiryii sengo niju nen shi [Historical Materials on
Twenty Years of Postwar History!, Nempyii [Chronology!, Vo. 6
(Tokyo: Nihon HYOronsha, 1967), 18.
51. Suzuki Masashi, Sengo Nihon no shiteki bunseki [Historical
Analysis of Postwar japanl (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1969),71'77.
52. Suzuki, 78.
53. Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modem Japanese
PolitICS (London: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1963), 148.
54. Maruyama, 150-151.
55. Inoue Kiyoshi, "Dai niji taisengo no Nihon to sekai" [Japan
and the World After World War III, in Iwanami kiha-Nihon rekishi,
Vol. 21,Gendai 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1963), 243.
56. On unions as "industrial patriotism clubs" see Nakane Chic,
Japanese Society (University of California Press, 1970), 18.
57. Kozo Yamamura, Economic Policy in Postwar Japan-Growth
wrsus Economic Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1967), 129-131, 148-149.
58. Kurokawa Toshio, Nihon no teichingin Kozii [Japan's Low
Wage Structure) (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten, 1964), 215.
59. G.C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan (New
York Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 188.
60. Kurokawa, 216.
61. Masao Kihara, "The Militarization of the japanese
Economy," The Kyoto University Economic Review, Vol. XXXVIII,
No.2, whole No. 85 (October 1968), 32.
62. Hayashi, 243-244.
63. A. Kuzminsky, "Behind japan's 'Economic Miracle: " New
Times (March 24,1971),25.
64. Shirota Noboru, Yamamura Yoshiharu, Shironishi Shinichiro,
Mitsubishi gunjusho-Nihon no sangun fukugotai to shihon shinshutsu
(The Mitsubishi Arsenal-japan's Military-Industrial Complex and
Capital Expansionl (Tokyo: Gendai Hyoronsha, 1971),88.
In 1970 the Mitsubishi group accounted for 5.9% of the total
paid up capital of all Japanese companies, had 9.2% of the assets of all
Japanese companies and gross sales (in 1969) amounting to 4.6% of all
Japanese company sales (p. 88).
65. Nitta Shunzo, "Sangyo saihensei to gorika" /Industrial
Reorganization and Rationalizationl, Gendai no me (Eye of the
Present} (November 1969), 92-99. The shift to a new pattern of
exports in the early sixties (1960-1965) is discussed briefly in G.C.
Allen, Japan As A Market and Source of Supply (London: Pergamon
Press, Ltd., 1967), 117-124. Allen states that "A comparison based on
1961 figures showed that the ratio [of heavy industrial products to
total industrial exportsI was then 51 % for Japan, 82% for the United
States, 85% for Germany and 80% for the United Kingdom."
66. "Vietnam Special Procurement and the Economy," Japan
Quarterly, Vol. XIV, No.1 Uanuary-March 1967), 14.
67. Business Week (March 14, 1964),70.
68. David C. Cole and Princeton N. Lyman, Korean
Development-The Interplay of Politics and l::conomics (Harvard
University Press, 1971), 113. The actual signing of the treaty occurred
on June 22,1965.
For Chinese and North Korean press comment on the
Normalization Treaty see BBC-Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 3,
The Far l:;ast, November 16,18, and 19,1965.
69. Suzuki, 306-307. Ratification of the treaty in Japan may have
been the most unprecedented example of forced voting in Japanese
history. The 1960 Security Treaty, which was rammed through the Diet
in violation of numerous procedural rules, had been deliberated on
from February 5 to May 20, 1960.
70. Quoted from ChiiiiNippo (April 9, 1970) in Hayashi, 272_
71. Estimates of people summarily executed in Indonesia range
from several hundred thousand to a million. One reliable authority
points out that
the PKI case is, in fact, that the army, under the leadership of a
right-wing 'Council of Generals, ' financed and supported by the
American CIA had for long been planning to seize
power-perhaps on 5 October-to reverse the leftward direction of
Indonesia's policies. When news of this leaked, short-notice action
by left wing junior army officers and units sympathetic to Sukarno
had to be hastily mounted. This ufforded the army leaders the
perfect justification for the mass murders that followed. The PKI
support their version of events by charging that the American
Seventh Fleet was ill Indonesian waters at the crucial period. It is
also alleged that tbe army moved so swiftly throughout the
archipelago to round up communists and supervise their
'elimination' that the operation can only have been one long
contemplated and planned.
Source: Malcolm Caldwell, Indollesia (Oxford University Press, 1968),
113-114.
In remembering these mass executions, it is important not to
overlook the fact of official U.S. government complicity by virtue of
quick recognition and generous aid to the Suharto regime. An obvious
comparison can be made here with another resource-rich
country-Brazil. Although the military coup in Brazil (April 1964)
occurred before the one in Indonesia, the unfolding of tyranny in both
,""Ountries followed a similar course. In both cases the U.S. government
underwrote regimes that could survive only by murdering and torturing
their opponents, and in both cases the quid pro quo was enormous
profits for US and other foreign business enterprises that poured in in
the wake of the coups.
72. Kotani Shu, "Nihon no Tonan Ajia shinshutsu" (Japan's
Expansion in Southeast Asia), Zen'ei, No. 324 (June 1971), 163.
73. In 1969, when Japanese business circles launched their first
public campaign for renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and
increased defense spending for the purpose of creating an "autonomous
defense," the boldest argument put forth was that of Keidanren's
Kikawada Kazutaka. Kikawada pointed out that since
The Japanese economy ... is following the policy af securing raw
materials from diversified sources abroad for its further expansion
and development, ... efforts mllst be made to have the people
recognize ... that maintenance of the safety routes of marine
transportation is closely connected with the stability of the
country. ... More concretely, the key problem is to defend the
route through the straits of Malacca ... and the routes from Alaska
and Canada across the Western Pacific. These routes constitute a
lifeline for thc Japanese economy ... It may well become necessary
for Japan, therefore, to strengthen its maritime defense power
without concentrating only on the forces to counter civil
insurrection or aggression from the air. {Quoted in Nikkan Kogyo
Shimbun, April 16, 1969. My emphasis-HPBJ
The last time a "lifeline" metaphor surfaced in Japanese domestic
politics was in the late 1920s. Then, rising Chinese nationalism was
rapidly undermining Japan's hold on Manchuria, where the bulk of its
overseas investments was concentrated. In 1931-32 the "lifeline"
metaphor functioned with telling psychological effect to justify the
forcible creation of a client regime in China's three eastern provinces.
But when mooted by Kikawada in 1969, the only conceivable threat to
Japan's overseas economic interests anywhere in the world was
potential rather than actual.
74. Far l::astern l::;conomic Review (March 4, 1972), 67;
Economic Notes, published by the Labor Research Association, New
York (August 1971),7.
75. Far [,astern I:;conomic Review, 30, 1970, quoted in Jon
Halliday and Gavan McCormack, 'Co-Prosperity in Greater East Asia':
Japanese Imperialism Today. Published by the Association for Radical
East Asian Studies, 22 Chepstow Crescent, London, W11, England,
1971 (p. 7). This work is an indispensable reference source for the
entire range of postwar Japanese military and economic activities in
Asia.
76. New China News Agency (Peking), August 28, 1971, as cited
in US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (China), August 30, 1971,
A-3.ln 1971 Japan's GNP reached $255 billion.
77. Fortune, August 1971, 150-158.
78. Y. Shishkov, "New Stage in Monopoly Concentration," New
Times (January 27,1970),25-28.
79. R.A. Pense, "The Mineral Industry of Japan," in Minerals
Yearbook. Vol. IV, Area Reports: International (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1969),421. In 1969, according to Pense,
Only the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. exceeded Japan in the production of
pig iron, ferro alloys, crude steel and special steels .. . , In the
smelting and refining of the major nonferrous metals it placed
approximately as follows: aluminum (4th); copper (5th): lead (6th);
and zinc (3rd). In mine production of metals, the country ranked
28
somewhat less highly, although holding a position amotlf{ the top 10
world producers of copper and zinc.
Japan again led the world in producing pyrites and
talcsoapstone-pyrophyllite and remai7led the third largest producer
of cement. 'The country evidently became the third largest
petroleum refiner during the year, surpassing Italy, but remained the
fourth largest coke producer, after West Germany. The
petro-chemical industry, including the important nitrogenous and
phosphatic fertilizer producing sectors, claimed to be second only to
that of the United States. (p.422)
80. Ariyoshi Voshiya, "Kaiun gyokai tomen no kadai to kongo
no tenbo" [Urgent Problems Confronting the Shipping Industry and
the Future Outlook) , Keidanren geppo [Bulletin of the Federation of
Economic Organizations), (September 1971),7-8.
81. Gardner Pattersor., Discrimination in International Trade, The
Policy Issues 1945-1965 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press,
1966),279,285,286.
82. Enatsu Michiko, Kokusai shibonsen to Nihon (Japan and the
War of International Capital) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1969),69-76.
82a. For example, in January 1960 the US revised its Security
Treaty with Japan in a more equitable form and, shortly thereafter,
encouraged the overthrow of its incompetent puppet in South Korea,
Syngman Rhee. The connection between these two
events becomes clear when it is remembered that ever Since the makmg
of the 1951 bilateral military pact with Japan, Rhee's anti-Japanese
policy had prevented the consolidation of a northeast Asian
frontier. By supporting the removal of Rhee and then supporting Pak
Chung Hee's military coup which destroyed the fruits of the "April
Revolution," Washington opened the way for South
incorporation into the Japan sphere of its empire, a move which
ultimately widened the area for private American in\1estment in
Japanese industry.
83. New York Times (May 8,1972),55.
. 84. Tile compatibility of the two mercantilisms was reflected in a
US trade balance of "plus $4.3 billion yearly from 1955 through 1959.
E. Ray Canterbery, Economics on a New Frontier (Belmont, Calif.:
Wadsworth, 1968), 198.
85. Keidanren Review, No. 15 (Summer 1970),2-3.
86. Moreover, it is conceivable, though highly improbable, that
the LOP would even go so far as to alter japan's population control
policy in order to bring wages back to their traditional condition of
plasticity. For example, Prime Minister Sato in a speech to newspaper
editors in the summer of 1969 is alleged to have publicly advocated an
increase in japan's birth rate-this despite a population density in 1968
of 1333 inhabitants per square kilometer. In May 1971, less than two
years after Sato's straw-in-the-wind suggestion, the Diet passed a law
introducing for the first time "family allowances" into the social
security system. While these two pieces of evidence certainly do not
support any clear-cut official policy in favor of increased population, it
is important to remember that should such a change occur, it would
represent, when viewed historically, no real turnabout in the political
perspective informing official population policy. The rationale behind
it in fact, would be entirely consistent with the japanese government's
o;iginal decision to curb population growth: to have done in
the late forties and fifties would have decreased the proportion of
capital resources available for economic recovery and
investment. Now that their "population problem" has come full Circle,
producing a rising wage and consumption pattern among Japanese
workers. Japanese capitalists seem willing to try anything. [Sources:
Science, Vo. 167, No. 3920 (February 13, 1970),960; Toshinobu Kato
and Takeshi Takashi, "Family Planning in Industry," in International
Labour Review, Vol. 104, No.3 (September 1971), 179; John Walsh,
"Population Control and Organized Capital-The Case of Japan" in
Science for the People, Vol. II, No.4 (December 1970)
87. Japan Quarterly, Vol. XVII, NO.3 (july-September 1971).
John M. Lee, New York Times (April 9, 1972); Edwin L. Dale, jr., New
York Times (June 4,1972).
88. The Oriental Economist (July 1971), 12.
89. Far c'astern Economic Review (March 1971).
90. Forbes (May I, 1971),15.
91. Kihara, 26.
92. New Times, March 24,1971,24.
93. Halliday and McCormack, 6.
94. Hayashi, 250.
95. Pacific Basin Reports, Custom House, Box 26581, San
Francisco, California 94126. Report of April I, 1971, 83-85. I am
indebted to Jim Peck for this source.
96. Ibid., 87.
97. Herman Kahn. The Emerging Japanese Superstate-Challenge
and Response (Prism Paperback edition, 1971), 108.
98. Mainichi Shimbunsha, ed. Ampo to boei seisan {The Security
Treaty and Defense Production} (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1969),
167.
99. On this last point see Meir Merhav, Technological
Dependence, Monopoly and Growth (London: Pergamon Press, Ltd.,
1969).
100. Ronald Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), 372-374; American land reform policies in
Japan and other Asian countries arc ably discussed by AI McCoy in
"Land Reform as Counter-Revolution-U.S. Foreign Policy and the
Tenant Farmers of Asia," Rulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,
Winter-Spring 1971, Vol. 3, No. I, 14-49.
101. For a fascinating reflection on early Japanese mercantilism
sec E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence As A Modem
State-Political and Economic Problems of the Meiji Period, (New
York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 108-111. Norman observes
that "In [Tokugawa) japan the prevailing type of mercantilism ...
exemplifies the metropolis-colony relationship between the city
(metropolis) and surrounding countryside (colony) characteristic of
primitive European mercantilism." (p. 108)
lOla. Though no fundamental change in policy line was made in
this period, the government did try, following the signing of the. San
Francisco Peace Treaty, to raise agricultural prices above the exceSSively
low ceiling imposed by the Dodge line. This adoption of a seemingly
more equitable farm pricing policy through the elimination of some
controls on food prices should be grasped in connection with (1) the
conservative parties' efforts to protect and to strengthen their electoral
base in the countryside and (2) the effort to raise agricultural
production to meet the new food needs generated the
Sec, for example, Kato Ichiro and Sakamoto Kusuhlko, Nrhon nose,,,o
tenkai katei [The Development Process of Japan's Agricultural Policy)
(Tokyo: To kyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1971), 144ff.
102. Chitoshi Vanaga, Big RIISillcss in Japanese Politics (New
Haven: Vale University Press, 1968),262.
103. Shirota, Yamamura, Shironishi, 110-111.
104. Kihara, 37 note 26.
105. Arisawa Hiromi and Inaba Shuzo, cds, Shiryo sengo niju nen
sbi [Historical Materials on Twenty Years of Postwar History), Vol. 2,
Keizai {Economicsl (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1966), 146; Vanaga,
261,265,267.
106. Kurokawa, 220.
107. Nishida Yoshiaki, "!>engo nosei no kicho to rono domei
ron" [Thc Kcynote of Postwar Agricultural Policy and the Farm Labor
Coalition), Rekishi hyoron [Historical Review), No. 255 (October
1971),34. _
108. Kaichi Maekawa, "Changes of Government Employment
Policy in the Face of Economic Growth Since World War II," Kyoto
University t.:conomic Review, Vol. XL, No.2 (October 1970),48.
In the early postwar period an estimated 16 million persons (as
distinguished from farm households) were engaged (full-time or
part-time) in agriculture and forestry; "in 1965 the number had been
reduced to about million...." By 1969 the number gainfully
employed in agriculture and forestry had fallen to approximately
8,990,000 persons. (Sources: G.C. Allen, Japan As a Market and Source
of Supply, 13; Economic Picture of Japan 1970-1971. Published by
Keidanren, 128.)
109. The Oriental lico no mist, September 1965, 517.
110. Hsinhua (Peking), February 17, 1971, as cited in
I'BIS-Chi-71-32, A-30.
111. Between 1965 and 1971 the U.S. accounted for at least 70%
of Japan's total agricultural imports; other countries furnishing Japan
with agricultural imports were Australia (14%), Canada (5%), Mexico
and Thailand (4% each), and the People's Republic of China (5%).
[Source: Louise Perkens, "Soybeans Spearhead Record U.S. Farm Sales
to Japan," Foreign Agriculture (August 30, 1971),5-6.1
112. Herman M. Southworth and Bruce F. Johnson, cd.,
Agricultural Development and Economic Growth (Ithaca, N.V.: Cornell
University Press, 1967),287.
113. The I'arm Index. Published by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, March 1971, 20.
29
114. On June 10, 1971, The Korea Times reported that "The
government is seeking the import of an additional 200,000 tons of rice
from Japan this year to meet a possible shortage ... The additional
import will bring Korea's total imports from Japan, contracted since
II(St December, to 600,000 tOIJ5." (p. 4)
115. The Oriental EcollOmist, a Keidanren publication which
often publishes discussions of the new farm policy being advocated by
the LOP, noted in its July 1970 issue (p. 12) that:
Modernization of agriculture ... cannot be acbieved merely by
abolition or revision of tbe Food Control Law ... it will be
necessary to revise the Agricultural Land Use Law which severely
restricts buying and seUi1tg of farm land for promotion of
owner-operation with exceptional zeal ... it will be further
necessary to permit easier consolidation offragmented fields, and to
promote bigger participati_ in large-scale farming. It will also be
necessary at this juncture to ease tbe tight restrictions imposed on
importation of agricultural produce tbrough lowering of tariff rates
and tbrougb abolition of tbe import quota system . .. Another basic
objective of tbe 'comprebeasit1e farm policy' is enlargement of the
scale of farm operations tlnougb facilitation of change of ownership
lind tenancy rigbts. But flit' successful achievement of this goal, it
will be necessary to establish an effective system for absorption of
farm workers seeking new jobs. Tbis leads to tbe tbird objective of
tbe new approacb. Instead of tbe disorderly migration of farm
workers to city and otber jobs during tbe 'off' season, tbe proposal is
that factories be established in tbe rural areas for properly orgam.ied
utilization of surplus farm labor.
116. On the Sanrizuka struggles see AMPO-A Report From tbe
Japanese New Left, No. 11, 1971.
The China Quarterly
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October-December 1972
Issue No. 52:
China's Cellular Economy: Some Economic Trends Since the Cultural Revolution Audrey f)vllllitbome,
Serving the People and Continuing the Revolution Ricbard At Pfcff"t>r
Aircraft and Anti-Communists: C.A.T. in Action, t 9+9-52 William ,11. LC(l1Y J'
Mao's Road and Sino-Soviet Relations:
A View From Washington, 1953 Pbi/ip Bridglhl1n, Artbur Cobcn, Lconard jaffe
How Did the Korean War Begin? KdYlll1akclr GUphl
The Shenyang Transformer Factory - A Profile i'\,1itcb Meisner
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Vietna:mese Poetry
MOTHER SUOT (November 4, 1965)
-by To Huu
In the burning noonday sunshine on the sand dunes of Quang Binh
I listen quietly as mother talks about the old days
She says: In my native village of Bao Ninh
The sampans sailed along the streams and on the sea
Morning and afternoon the tide rose and fell
Suffering came to me from the age of nine or ten
And I grew up to serve four families
Twelve years or more, as the springtime of my life passed by
I married and suffered in labor
Giving birth eight times, with some miscarriages, alas!
To think of this makes me love my own parents
My husband, and children, but it also hurts.
Now the river is ours again
The boats go down to the coast and return
Now in the open sea under the wide sky
Even the fish are happy - whose heart is not in spring?
My husband has followed his friends into the army
And I too have taken up a position of readiness
With one hand steering the ferry
At the landing-stage on the Nhat-Le river, the men cross over day and night
Why be afraid of the storm or the airplanes?
We beat off the French, the Americans will not defeat us!
Why should I mention myoid age?
Let me go on fighting with my boat to the end.!
Looking up, her hair shook
In the wind, like foam on the sea shore
How is it you are so brave, Mother Suot?
She says: Why wait to save our country?
I am not the equal of boys and girls
But at sixty I can still row the ferry
The planes shoot from morning till night
But I take the boat out whether it rains or shines
Leaning closer, I ask curiously
And does your husband let you go down to the river?
She laughs: I spoke firmly and persuaded him
He dares to go out on the sea, I don't take risks like that
Hearing me out, he was glad after all
But when I left, he still came running after me to the river and said
"Be careful of the big waves and the rough winds
And take this blanket to wrap yourself up warm!"
31
MISSING THE FIELDS (July 1939)
-by To Huu
What is as deep as an afternoon's memory
Stirred by an old song when you're alone?
Where are the island winds rich with earth's fragrance
The cool bamboo grove where we sat calm and happy
The patches of tender green rice
And the fields of sweet potato and manioc?
Where are the curved roads trod by ten thousand
The low thatched huts sleeping and still
Adrift on the current of dark days
Which flows on and on without changing?
What is as deep as a lonely afternoon
Missing the village ricefields I love?
Where are the backs bent over plowed furrows
The dizzy fragrance of the mud of hope
And all those old familiar hands
Tossing seeds to the wind in the early morning?
Where are the evenings when mist covered the fields
And supple rice rustled along the river bank?
Mixed with the sound of a waterwheel
Was a voice singing a sad song
What is as deep as an afternoon's memory
Stirred by an old song when you're alone?
Where are the old figures, where have they all gone
Why are we separated by so many miles?
Oh how I miss them all
And myoid mother faraway on her own
Where are the dear souls from times past
Who stood in the wind and got soaked in the rain
As innocent and harmless as the earth itself
Their country life as simple as the sweet potato and manioc?
Where are the old days when I thought myself
Perplexed and looking for reasons to love life
Wandering around in circles
Wanting to escape but unable to step away?
Then one day I found myself
As light and nimble as a lark
Drunk on the field's scent and the sun's glad song
Up in the vastness of the sky
And now
I've dreamed through the prison window for so long
Gathering everything into the silence
Like a sad bird missing the wind and the clouds
What is as deep as a lonely afternoon
Missing the village ricefields I love?
NJTE: To Huu is generally acknowledged to be the greatest
living Vietnamese poet. Born in 1920 in the ancient royal city
of Hue, Central Vietnam, he has played a very active role in
the Vietnamese resistance and revolution. His work is praised
for synthesizing the old, elaborate traditions of Vietnamese
poetry with popular spontaneity and revolutionary content.
At present he lives in Hanoi, where he is a leading figure in the
Vietnamese Workers Party.
[Translated by Norman Peagan, who is working with Nguyen
Hoi Chan on a volume of translated modern Vietnamese
poetry.]
32
I
SONG OF TilE PEI{FUME I{lVEI{ (August 1931')
hy '/'() 1/1111
On the river of Perfumc
1 let go my oar
The sky is dcar
And the water is dear
1 let go my oar
On the river of Perfume
The moon rises stands fades
My life dings to the bamboo boat sailing downstream
My boat is torn to pieces
And I am not yet married
I'm riding an empty lJoat
When can I enter harlJor and leave this stream of lust?
I don't know when
My body will no longer lJe trodden and shamed every night
Life oh deceitful life
My boat is torn to pieces, can it still be mended?
Why not, river girl
Tomorrow from the inside out
You'll be as fragrant as a jasmine
As clear as morning spring-water in the forest
Tomorrow new winds from a thousand directions
Will lead you to a garden full of spring
Tomorrow crystal pure
You'll leave behind the abject life of prostitution
Tomorrow the layers of your soiled life
Will melt like tonight'S dark clouds
The months are wide and the days are long
Open your heart to greet a radiant tomorrow
On the river of Perfume....
NOTE: The Perfume River runs through Hue, former royal
capital of Vietnam and To Huu's birthplace. Tbis poem
contains some puns impossible to render in translation. For
example, "vo ben" (here translated "enter harbor") also means
"to get married." "giang ho" (here translated "prostitution ")
literally means "river lake," which by extension means
"travel" and "adventure" in Vietnamese.
BIG STON E (1942)
by I/o elli Minb
Big stone
Heavy stone
One man alone
C.an't lift you
Ileavy stone
Firm stone
A few alone
Can't carry you
Big stone
Heavy stone
If many lift
They'll carry you
Join strength
Join hearts
The hardest job
We'll finish
Fight France, Japan
To save freedom
That's a hard job
And a heavy job
But if we
Join hearts
Then that job
Surely will succeed
33
THE SOUND OF BAMBOO BROOMS (June 1960)
-by To Huu
On summer nights
When the cicadas
Are asleep
I try to listen
To the sound of bamboo brooms
On Tran Phu street
Rustling
Under the tamarind trees
The sound of bamboo brooms
Sweeping rubbish ....
On winter nights
When the rainstorm
Has just passed
I stand looking
On the empty street
At girl workers
Like iron
Like bronze
Girl workers
On winter nights
Sweeping rubbish ....
A PEDDLER'S NIGHT CRY (November 1941)
-by To Huu
Anyone want rice cake?
The peddler's shout turns the heart damp, cold, and numb!
It's not the voice of a middle-aged woman
High-pitched or hoarse from the wind and dust
But the sound of a very young throat
Still vibrating with a trace of innocence
From thin lips still smelling of their mother's milk
The feeble cry of a little girl
Not carrying far, just enough to invite,
So that midway "cake" turns into some other word
But never mind, it's now in tune,
So shout before it gets too late....
NOTE: In 1939, at tbe age of 19, To Huu was arrested by
the Frencb for his revolutionary activities and imprisoned.
He remained in various prisons for three years.
When morning comes
Flowers are carried
To market
Flowers from Ngoc Ha
Blooming along the road
Their fragrance flies far
Perfuming
our streets
Remember, flowers,
The people sweeping rubbish
Last night
Remember
They swept
On summer nights
And winter nights in the cold wind
Morning and night
Coming and going
Keeping the paths clean
And beautiful
Remember
I lie down and hear far off through the prison window
Your soft step on the road at night
But that's enough for my heart to hear clearly
And I can see your body slightly leaning in the wind
Like a young willow whose leaves are not yet trimmed
A torn jacket not quite covering your chest
No hat and a powdered mist quietly dampening
Your seven or eight years old long hair
Those feet of yours climb the road of life
Day after day with a few dozen cakes in a basket
A few thin pennies are all your inheritance
Heaven knows when you can be happy!
For who takes pity on a little girl in the street
Perhaps a couple might carelessly
Pay a few pennies, pat your cheeks, and say sweetly
"What a good little girl
That age and already in business!"
And when you've left, the love just settled
Without warming the customer's heart has faded
Like your figure disappearing in the mist and your diminishing c
34
A PROMISE (1970)
-by Truong Quoc Khanh
If I were a bird, I would be a white dove
If I were a flower, I would be a sunflower
If I were a cloud, I would be a summer cloud
If I were a man, I would die for my country
As a bird, I'd lift high my soft wings
From the south to the north announcing reunification
As a flower, I'd blossom with love in the early morning
Making every heart drunk with peace
As a cloud, I'd follow the wind everywhere
Passing on the word of ten thousand years bravey
As a man, I hope once before I die to see my brothers stand up and pitch high the flag.
THE MOTHER OF BAN CO (1970)
-by Nguyen Kim Ngan
There is a mo ther in Ban Co
With lean hands and silver hair
Passing rice through wooden planks
While the rains pours down outside
There is an elder sister in Ban Co
When soldiers sit on watch outside the gate
She claims a student as her husband
To get him out of the alley
There is a younger sister in Ban Co
Busily carrying messages to and fro
Leading each person through the lanes
Then watching them leave, all alone
The roads of Vietnam are like Ban Co
The love of Vietnam is like silk thread
The fields of Vietnam are turned to mud
The enemy is waiting to die by the hour
NOTE: Both the above were written by students in Saigon,
and are popular among South Vietnamese students, both as
poems and as songs . .. because, like all Vietnamese poetry,
ancient and modern, every poem is a potential song.
Ban Co is a poor, overcrowded district in Saigon with
many narrow streets and alleys. The name literally means
"checker-board." In mid-1970, after the Cambodian invasion,
a number of students went into hiding in Ban Co, with the
help of the inhabitants, to escape the Saigon regime's police
and soldiers. This poem celebrates that incident.
35
DAWN WATCH
-by Ly Phuong Lien
I work on the third watch
When night fills the streets
Hanoi sounds asleep as a child
When r walk down the middle of the street
Singing softly ...
(Girls usually do)
We are all young on the third watch
And the night is long
Most are eighteen and twenty
Like me, eating well and sleeping soundly
My friends have many strange ideas
When they talk of the third watch
On summer nights it blossoms with stars
On winter nights there's a crackling bonfire
And I, with my small joy,
Call it the dawn watch
The idea came to me by chance
One night as I walked along the street of the South
Waving goodbye to the trains leaving Hang Co station
Taking soldiers on their way
They will ride all through the third watch straight to the front
To greet the dawn of our nation
Another night on the third watch
My neighbor had labor pains with her first child
She was clutching her stomach and writhing in pain
Muttering with fright
So I led her to the maternity home
And next morning, a high wind in the blue sky,
She greeted me with the cries of a baby
We all want each day of our life to be good
The night cannot sleep for thinking of tomorrow
Today I am going on the third watch, the third watch
I have seen the dawn before my eyes
NOTE: Ly PhUQrlg Lien is a young girl factory worker in
North Vietnam.
LULLABY
-by ToHuu
The bee which makes honey loves flowers
The fish which swims loves the water
The bird which sings loves the sky
The man who wants to live, hey my child,
Must love his fellow men and his brothers
One star cannot light up the night
One stalk of ripe rice cannot make up a harvest
One man is by no means the world
Hardly more than a dying ember
The mountain is built on the earth
If it scorns the earth's lowliness, where will it sit?
The deep sea drinks up every stream
If it scorns the small streams, there'll be no water left
The old bamboo loves the shoot
With tenderness day after day
When you are grown bigger than father
You'll take the round earth in your arms
36
Letter froIn the Philippines
Manila
October 3, 1972
Dear X:
I am writing this letter on a borrowed typewriter with a
very bad black ribbon, after eleven days of life in the
underground. A friend who can get out of the country will
mail this in T --- next Monday, for all mail coming or going
to the United States is scrupulously censored ever since Marcos
seized power in the fascist grand manner at midnight on
September 22.
A couple of days before, I was about to write you, for
we seem to have lost touch since Xmas. In fact, an addressed
air mail letter to you was still on my desk in my office when
the Marcos storm troopers raided it the next morning, so I
hope you won't be bothered by strange persons asking
whether it is true I am now in the United States. One wild
rumor is that I escaped on the last plane before the coup - for
coup it was, a total seizure of power in one fell swoop, and
with the customary brutality. The one-newspaper, one-TV
channel, one-radio network [of] Marcos' Department of
Public Information is very busy trying to project the idea of
"democratic and humanitarian martial law...." They may
even succeed for a few who snored soundly through the whole
dreadful eighteen hour period. But not for long.
Certainly it will not succeed for Vice-President Fernando
Lopez, who is under house arrest, nor the opposition leader
Sen. Roxas, who is also under house arrest, nor thousands of
students, top intellectuals, writers, priests, and press people
who are either actually under arrest or are afraid to sleep in
their own houses tonight for fear of arrest.
Most people here still do not know what really
happened: that the State University was sacked and decimated
and people rounded up in the middle of the night. Nor has the
Marcos press allowed the people to know that 24 radical
priests and nuns were arrested in Mindanao alone, and many
more are in hiding, and few of these are "Maoists."
The Marcos Red Herring simply won't do, although
perhaps the Pentagon bought that explanation easily enough,
for its complicity with the Marcos coup is the same as its
complicity with Suharto and Nguyen Van Thieu. And may be
as bloody before it is all over. Because this may be my last
opportunity to write so frankly for some time, I want you to
know how it really was to some of the thousands of us who
are now political refugees, since midnight September 22. More
than anything else at this time, for it's going to be very
difficult for us in the next weeks, we need to feel that there
are people throughout the world who are in solidarity with us
and will do what they can to counteract the lies of the
Pentagon-backed Marcos regime.
As you know from my past letters. we have been in a
state of undeclared martial law for some time. But it escalated
so alarmingly the last month, with undeclared curfew, bus
checks complete with frisking, lightning-like surprise raids on
the headquarters of organizations which the government has
blacklisted as "subversive," mass arrests without search
warrants or right of counsel until after several days, that we
University "subversives" have had packed overnight bags in
readiness for weeks.
We had had other false tip-offs that the univen,ity was
going to be raided in the last three weeks, in which we spent
laborious half-days packing off all the "subversive" books in
our offices which might be hauled off, never to be returned, or
resold by the military. These "subversive" books can be I
bought in any bookstore anywhere except in Athens,
!
Salisbury, Capetown, Saigon and Taipei. i
So on Friday afternoon, the day before the coup, when i
a Faculty Center janitor whispered that there was a bomb
scare in the College of Arts and Sciences and classes had been
suspended, neither I nor the students were particularly upset.
Mysterious bombs and unsigned bomb threats had become
commonplace in the greater Manila area since the middle of
August. Marcos was, of course, quite positive that they were
the work of "communist terrorists," although the prime
suspects in several such bombings wore the uniform of the
Philippine Constabulary.
That day we were less afraid of a bomb exploding under
the stairs or in the ladies' room than that the bomb threat
would be used as an excuse for a crackdown and mass arrests
the State University. It was the last day of our week-long
all-university week of Solidarity Against Fascism. Only the day
before, thirty busloads of University of the Philippines
students had joined the last mammoth civil liberties rally of
thirty thousand people of all sectors in the Plaza Miranda.
Unknown to us, Marcos had signed the martial law order
during that rally, possibly enraged that so many people in the
greater Manila area still dared to stand up and be counted
(hundreds of thousands do not dare to show their support
openly, because so many rallies in the last two years have
37
ended in massacres}. That Friday night in which the sulo
(torch) had been kept burning, tended day and night by
student-faculty-employee teams as the symbol of our
resistance and our committment to the struggle for national
liberation, in which so many U.P. students have already died.
There was to be a final bonfire in front of Kamias Residence
Hall that night after which the symbolic torch would be
allowed to burn out.
That the death of the University came at this moment
and in this way has an eloquence all its own. The week-long
resistance against fascism ended when the Marcos storm'
troopers (Metrocom) began the sacking of the campus at two
o'clock Saturday morning. It was they, not the students, who
permanently snuffed out the sulo.
A few blocks away from this scene, about ten minutes
later I was awakened from dead sleep by the sound of people
speaking in strange hissing noises and suppressed whispers. The
familiar form of a political science professor from our group
was standing in the doorway of our bedroom and behind him
were many students, all whispering at the same time. It was
like a surrealist dream that refused to stop after being jerked
from sleep.
"Listen carefully." He gestured. "The Metrocom is
raiding the campus. They have already broken up the vigil in
Kamias and they are in the Faculty Center now. You must
leave immediately, But do not try to get off the campus now.
You will only get shot trying to make it through the cordon. I
must hurry now to A's bouse to get him out in time...." And
he was off. Running like the wind in the darkness, in spite of
the fact that he himself was in grave danger.
"Quick!" the students crowding the hall in
unison. "Your bags and your books. They must go out
immediately," A profusion of hands reached for them,
ferrying them out into the darkest part of the yard, brigade
fashion. While one student looked for some deep shrubbery a
sufficient distance away to hide them in until morning,
another hurried off a block away to see if Prof. Flora Lansang
(of the School of Social Work) had been warned. He was back
in a flash.
''The troopers came and took her away. There were six
carloads of them. An officer said they were only going to
'invite her to Camp Aguinaldo for a few questions and that she
would be back in time for breakfast.' " (As I write this letter,
she is still there.)
In spite of all our whispered admonitions not to panic, I
was shaking like an acute case of malaria. Dressing was some
kind of special torture and my shoes simply refused to go over
my heels. Later my wise daughter reproached me with: "Only
a college professor would be so stupid as to put his shoes on at
a time like that. Anyone else would carry them and run
barefoot. "
After lumbering over several high back hedges, fearful of
walking in the road where snipers could be lurking, we reached
another faculty cottage at what we thought was a safe
distance.
We rapped timidly on the screen of a bedroom window
in embarrassed, but genuine terror. Fortunately, someone was
awake on one of these strange hunches that something was
wrong.
"Don't turn on any light," we hissed at our friend as the
students had earlier. No sooner had he stashed us away safely
than armalite [automatic weapon] fire broke out down the
hill. Volley after volley of it ricocheted through the starlight,
and it seemed, over the darkened house. We shuddered, fearing
that students trying to escape in the direction of the athletic
field were being massacred. Later we learned that the skirmish
was just outside the University wall where a religious sect
called the Iglesia Ni Cristo has a radio station. Metrocom
troopers were trying to destroy their transmitter tower, and
thinking they were hoodlums, the Iglesia guards resisted. At
this same moment, still another group of state troopers were
smashing their way through the University's own radio station,
DZUP. They sacked the studios in one wanton orgy,
destroying everything down to the last reel of tape, and
breaking everything that could be smashed, down to the last
phonograph record. They went to the College of Engineering
where they axed the main cable of the transmitter tower so
that it could never be "liberated" by the students.
The next day they descended on the U.P. Press and did
the same thing there.
It was only fifteen minutes after we had evacuated our
house and turned off the last light that we heard them. The
sounds of the skirmish had died down and in the nervous quiet
it began like a faint tap-tapping sound which grew successively
louder. At first we thought it was coming from the screen
porch of the refuge. Our protector went out to investigate, and
began signalling us to come out in some dumbfoundment.
"That sound is not coming from my house. Listen! It is
an echo. It is coming from your house, your door! You can see
the flashlights all over your yard now. Good God! They have
really come to get you! ..."
The rhythmical knocking grew louder and louder,
assaulting the doors in about seven waves, each more insistent
than the former. We stared in disbelief in the direction of our
darkened house. Suddenly light blazed from every room in the
house, from the back bedroom to the porch. They had broken
in and in the distance we could hear the sound of closets being
opened and banged shut. Now we could see the movement of
many uniformed figures on the porch. Neighbors who saw the
operation from fifty yards described the phalanx of troopers
as so thick that they could not see what the troopers were
doing inside the cordon, and they could not even tell at that
time that they had arrested no one.
"This kind of thing only happens in the movies, you
know," said our friend, suddenly becoming articulate, and
mopping his brow. "I never really believed that this could
happen here. That the University could be violated like this.
That ordinary college professors, even a middle-aged widow
like Flora, could be taken away like this by a whole convoy of
men pointing armalites ... at three o'clock in the morning
while everyone is asleep...."
We heard them move away in heavy cars after twenty
minutes, but the house lights were left blazing away in the
darkness. Next they were on their way to the house of Prof.
Petronilo Bn. Daroy, one of the country's top critics, and a
staff writer of Graphic. Thanks to our heroic vigilantes team of
faculty and students, he was not in his house either.
Our first suspicion that this was not just another
weekend crackdown came when we tried to turn on radio
patrol and every band on the transistor was totally dead. Both
Marcos and the Secretary of National Defense had assured us
only thirty-six hours ago that "Martial law was out of the
38
question."
We soon had our answer. At sunrise the troopers came
back again to arrest a student leader who lived close by. I was
about to venture out on the screened porch and see if it was
safe to go home when I almost jumped out of my skin. An
armed trooper with a cocked armalite was prowling across the
front lawn, his eyes riveted on the kitchen door of the next
house. We dived into the study and bolted the door.
When it was clear that he had no intention of coming
into any other house, one of the girls who boarded there
thought it would be better if we bluffed a little, so she
pretended she had clothes to hang on the line and struck up a
conversation with the trooper.
"Why do you come so far away from your home base? Is
there martial law already?
"Yes. Since midnight."
"Only in the greater Manila area or the University?"
"Allover the Philippines."
So the well-kept secret was out. Marcos himself toyed
with the entire nation for thirteen more hours, keeping them
glued to their one channel TV sets for an "important
announcement" which he promised to make in one hour;
when the hour was up the time was continuously advanced
and people admonished that there was "no cause for alarm."
I left the University for the last time about an hour after
this discovery. Some University student councilors with a car
came to collect and ferry out all the political refugees.
"Hurry. It's temporarily safe. A short wave station says
that we are under martial law. Vice President Lopez is under
house arrest. So is Senator Roxas and Doy Laurel and many
others. Senator Aquino, Mitra and Diokno have been arrested
and are in the stockade." They recounted how the anti-Marcos
radio-TV empire of ABS-CBN had been padlocked at
midnight. How publisher Chino Roces had been arrested with
some of his staff writers and all of his newspapers padlocked.
As I climbed into the car with my one briefcase, I found W.R.,
Speech and Drama professor, and one of the country's top
stage directors, in sandals and tee shirt also leaving the campus
for the last time.
There was not a newspaper on any newsstand and the
little newsboys milled about forlornly in intersections. Later
there was an announcement that anyone caught with a
shortwave radio set would be shot.
But I am not writing this account to tell you how I
escaped, or even, more significantly, to describe the death of a
University - which it was.
The State University is a ghost town now and they say it
will be closed for one year. I am writing this because what
happened to me is what has happened and has been happening
for the last three years to millions of people in the Philippines
in one way or another.
What is our common crime that we are to be hunted
down and put behind barbed wire? Mine was writing certain
articles and teaching my students that it is a crime to be
educated and let someone else take all the risks to achieve
change; I personally led them out on picket lines, as did Pete
and W., and Flora and the throngs who are in hiding
somewhere tonight, never sleeping more than two successive
nights in the same house, until the first dreadful weeks are
over. Our ranks are an honor roll of the most distinguished
minds in the country, the most incorruptible statesmen, the
most selfless students, and of course millions of the
long-suffering valiant peasantry. There are people like loveable
Mang Temio, a janitor at the University who goes with the
progressive laborers association and lets students sleep in his
house when they have no place to go. They raided his house
too, a few minutes before mine, and hauled him off to the
stockade. Because he was no one of national importance or a
known student leader, his name was never listed. He was kept
without food, beaten up with a rifle butt and released the
second day. There are people like Fr. Ed. de la Torre, our Fr.
Thomas Melville, whom they hunted down by raiding two
theological seminaries, who has now gone underground. There
are distinguished essayists like Renato Constantino, poets like
Eric Torres and Domingo Landicho; economists like Alejandro
Lichauco who is behind bars; and internationally known
relativity physicists like Dr. Roger Posadas who can never
enter a classroom again under the present regime.
There are thousands of nameless people who have been
beaten up, blacklisted, hunted down and many of them
liquidated without a trace. Only last week we are informed
that at least a busload of students was massacred while
escaping from the city to the provinces. While more than a
hundred prominent national figures have been given showcase
treatment inside the stockade since martial law and every
detail, from what brand of TV they listen to to what they eat
for breakfast, made known to the public, approximately four
hundred anonymous arrested student nationalists were holed
up in the Camp Aguinaldo gym without food for almost
forty-eight hours. These people, still unlisted, are being
dispersed to unknown prison camps and, it is believed, many
of them shot. The most extensive bloodbath in the country is
in Mindanao where Moslems have been machine-gunned inside
their own mosques. We understand that the Moslem
Independence Movement openly declared war on the Armed
Forces of the Philippines a few days ago, although it is not in
!
the news reports. From this, you can see what our collective
crime is: we have raised the clenched fist against a selfish and
i
f
~
violent regime. Now that regime accuses us of violence!
One of the most contemptible things Marcos has done in !
the last week is to mask his fascist timetable with the image of
public defender and racket buster. He has arrested several
I
notorious smugglers and gun-runners, anyone of whom he
!
J
could have arrested years ago, but he was collaborating with
them. The naive public, many of whom still do not know what
happened, are applauding the arrests of goon-governors. But
on closer inspection we find that most of them are only under !
t
house arrest: Roque Ablan, for example, although supposedly
apprehended, is still seen walking about in his old haunts.
Nor has a single one of them been shot by "the military
firing squad" which nightly TV announcements now openly
admit will administer the death penalty to anyone found with
an unauthorized weapon, either manufactured or home-made.
At the moment, Marcos is one of the most powerful
dictators in the world. All protests of any kind including
boycotts, mass meetings and labor strikes are forbidden. A
meeting of more than three people is suspect. A few days after
the declaration of Martial Law, there was a spontaneous
attempt to hold a rally in the Plaza Miranda. Two people were
shot down like wild pigs in a few minutes.
Marcos has seized all communications, all transportation,
closed all schools except elementary, and padlocked every
39
press in the country except his own. He now passes acts of
o.mgress and then signs them. His first decree was to make it
clear that the Supreme Court would have no jurisdiction over
the constitutionality of any of his decrees or of the
constitutionality of martial law itself.
Nor will the courts have any jurisdiction over those
arrested for "subversion." They are to be tried by special
military courts. Which has suddenly come up with special
"military firing squads." His prime bit of gimmickry is his
term, "The New Society," which is an old blend of Greek
fascism and Chiang Kai-shek's New Life Movement. Yards
must be neater and male hair shorter. The New Society is
headlined in the Marcos Press and constantly paid lip service
on our one-channel TV sets. No one at this moment, not even
we who are victims, know the full cost of his New Society in
round figures of mayhem and terror.
What I fear most at this stage is that the American
people will be bamboozled into a monetary and military
support of the Marcos regime; that Manila will become the
next Saigon. I am equally convinced that the American people,
who are never consulted on such matters, would never want
this to happen. I know that average Amercans would never
tolerate American complicity in Manila. They wouldn't want
their taxes to finance the sophisticated weapons that even now
are destroying entire barrios in the Bicol region any more than
they wanted the murder of 350,000 Vietnamese, the
decimation of Laos or the now-secret bombings by American
pilots of national liberation forces in Thailand. The American
people are not the enemy of the Filipino people, of people like
me and my colleagues at the University, four of whom are
behind bars, and the armies of political refugees who
constitute the most vigorous and creative minds in Philippine
society. But the American people are generally lied to until it
is a fait accompli.
A Moslem colleague, who has a price on his head, tells
me that he has seen "American advisors" in Mindanao, where
bacteriological warfare is already being used. At the battle of
Buldun in Cotabato a few months ago, the Moslems had their
first taste of napalm fire bombs.
In the North, in lsabela, where the New People's Army
has the largest mass base, one platoon of tow-heads,
presumably from the U.S. 13th Air Force base at Clark Field
in Angeles, Pampanga, has been photographed. That the Nixon
Doctrine is being as thoroughly implemented in the Philippines
as in Vietnam was openly admitted about six weeks ago when
an army general ordered the use of napalm against the national
liberation forces in Isabela.
Thus you can see why, while I have this one opportunity
to get a letter out of the country uncensored, I am frantically
writing so that these things can be known in time.
But all these dreadful things are only one side of the
coin. My initiation into the world of the underground
resistance movement is the other. Since the day of the coup I
have never been back to the house in which I lived for
seventeen years, nor do I expect to for a long time. Our
domestic life is a bit weird, with everyone sleeping in different
houses with only an occasional communication by telephone;
but we must speak in riddles, for every phone in the city is
tapped. At first it was as if we were in limbo, and everyone I
know who was suddenly pushed into this experience testifies
that the first few days were wretched. We were frankly
suffering from shock, we couldn't find our friends and our
misery and disorientation were acute.
The nights were particularly bad: tossing on some cot in
some upstairs back room and forever hearing those knocks on
the door in the middle of the night. We were too conscious of
the fact that everything our old life symbolized was dead and
buried. And slow in discovering that what had actually
happened was a kind of rebirth. This remarkable discovery
came to me fairly early on my fifth day underground when I
passed the night in a house with a good library. Sandwiched
between a couple of educational tomes was Ho Chi Minh's
Prison Diary, that remarkable poetic record of the struggle of
the Vietnamese people. I knew the book well, for I have even
given it as gifts in the past. This time it was as if I was
discovering it for the first time in my entire life and the impact
was excruciating.
It was the blow of total insight that must come rather
early in one's underground life, or you are indeed lost: that
what has taken place here is in reality not the triumph of the
fascist State but the upsurge of revolutionary consciousness in
its most pure and sacrificial form. And against the latter, the
former is helpless in the context of time. At that moment
one's own experience ceases to be some kind of a punishment
and becomes, instead, a privilege; part of the unquenchable
flame sweeping through Southeast Asia where the bondage of
centuries is being cast aside, the crucible that produced the
marvelous poems of Uncle Ho, written on the solitary
dunghills that were the Kuomintang jails.
After this moment of insight one's rebirth begins to take
place hourly: nourished by the unboundless generosity of
humble strangers, who may never have attended a political
mass meeting in their lives, but who know WHY they are
protecting you from arrest because they have already chosen
to help the national liberation struggle continue; the students
who helped us escape at the risk of their lives, because they
want people like us to go on writing; and one of the most
significant stories I have yet heard-how some high school
students in a convent school, of all places, when they heard
that martial law had been declared and that people like
Senator Diokno had been arrested, they rose spontaneously to
sing the national anthem with clenched raised fists and asked
the teacher to allow them to go into the elementary school
and conduct teach-ins.
Perhaps you understand why schools, except on the
elementary level, will be closed indefinitely.
It is the people who are the decisive factor in our
national liberation struggle and the last eleven days convinced
me in a thousand touching ways how genuine is their
commitment to a free society and the forces fighting for
national liberation from Isabela to Cotabato.
History is irreversible. We cannot be crushed'
* * *
(This letter was smuggled out of the Philippines by the
underground network of the resistance movement against the
U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship.)
40
Co:m:ment on Eqbal Ah:mad's
'Notes on South Asia in Crisis'
Usha Mahajani
Dr. Eqbal Ahmad's intellectual stature and moral
courage have become almost legendary. At a considerable
personal risk he, together with his late brother, was among the
flfst ones to denounce Yahya Khan's brutal suppression in
Bangladesh. In several ways he has emerged as a man of all
nations and whatever he says and writes carries weight among
concerned people. It should be realized that these Notes were
written when the author was under great pressure having to
face the gruelling Harrisburg trial and one would hope that had
he had more time to edit them some of the statements would
have been omitted. But since they are made and are in print I
am moved to offer comments on the Notes.
Political sophistication today is reflected in a nonchalant
lack of concern for human considerations. Massacres of
political opponents whether by hundreds or millions are
glossed over as a negligible side effect of momentous
occ;urrences in the game of power. Dr. Ahmad is to be
commended for drawing our attention to the human tragedy
by referring to the killings of Communists and Leftists and
Chinese residents of Indonesia (p. 23) and of the Biharis in
Bangladesh (p. 2S). As someone who has lost no opportunity
to denounce these massacres in public and in the classrooms,
and as someone who has written extensively on the human
tragedy in Indochina, I share Dr. Ahmad's righteous
indignation over the neglect of these massacres and genocide in
Indochina by the Western "humanitarians." It should be
mentioned for the record that the Soviet Union recently
distributed 74 collies of clothes, food and medicines to the
Indonesian Red Cross for distribution among several thousands
of Indonesian political detainees.
Dr. Ahmad's concern for the Biharis is legitimate and
understandable but his account is "tilted." He refers to them
as having escaped the massacres in India since 1946 (p. 25). In
1947-48 there was a holocaust of mutual massacres between
Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent which began
with the Direct Action of the Muslim League in the Punjab
and Sind where Hindus and Sikhs were liquidated. There was
no one-sided "massacre" of Bihari Muslims. The partition
period was a dark year for the Indian subcontinent, but there
is no need to sublimate the killings into martyrdom of any
particular community. And whatever the past, the Biharis in
Bangladesh have openly expressed their wish to return to
India, rather than go to Pakistan-an eloquent testimony to
the situation in India where 60 million Muslims have chosen to
continue to live.
The massacre of 10,000 Biharis by Bengali vigilantes was
deplorable. But it was not entirely a one-sided affair. Peggy
Durdin in an eye witness account reported (New York Times
Magazine, May 2, 1971, p. 88) thatthere were pitched battles
between Bengalis and Biharis with heavy casualties on both
sides. Mujibur Rahman immediately demanded an official
enquiry into the killings. It is arguable that the Awami League
was not so much "irresponsible" as alleged by Dr. Ahmad (p.
2S) but helpless and incompetent to prevent these killings and
clashes. Now that the Awami League is firmly in control in
independent .Bangladesh it has shown a remarkable capacity to
prevent large scale revenge killings of the Biharis.
Dr. Ahmad's reference to the moral authority of world
opinion as expressed through the U.N. General Assembly (p.
26) is curious. The Assembly did not condemn India but
merely asked for a cease-fife. Actually, several delegates were
unhappy over the U.S. haste in returning the question of
Bangladesh to the Security Council on 13 December. Moreover
does Dr. Ahmad forget that the General Assembly had
branded China as aggressor in the Korean War instead of the
United States? That it kept out China for several years at the
behest of the United States? And that, finally, it is this very
Assembly that unanimously elected as its President the
Foreign Minister representing the military government of
Indonesia that caused the massacre of over half a million
Indonesians? Is this the world body whom Dr. Ahmad invests
with "moral authority"?
As for Dr. Ahmad's reference to Nagaland (pp. 26-27),
India did not annex the territory; at the most she inherited it.
His claim that India is resorting to "violence" in Nagaland
which is "little publicized but more prolonged and not less
brutal than that of Pakistan junta in Bengal" is, to say the
least, extraordinary. Evidently even after volumes of evidence
have come to light about Pakistani atrocities Dr. Ahmad has
still not guaged their real depth. That is why he can be bold
enough to compare India in Nagaland with Pakistan in
Bangladesh. Moreover his accusations against India's
"violence" are of such gravity that he should either document
them from his own observations and eye witness accounts, if
he has any, or cite reputable, impartial authorities (not Peking
Review) who have presented or can present convincing
evidence on that charge. One can legitimately ask: If there is
Indian brutality in Nagaland why does it remain unpublicized
41
after so many years? Is there a global press conspiracy to keep
it that way? Or could it be that there is not much of a
brutality to report?
Every observor retains the right to pronounce a moral
judgment about the quality and legitimacy of the authority of
a particular government. Dr. Ahmad asserts his in expressing a
poor opinion of the Awami League in Bangladesh which is
merely "bourgeois"-an ultimate crime it seems. He even sets
out to portrliY Sheikh Mujib as having been connected with an
apparatus that had links with the CIA (p. 25). If this is indeed
so, then he must stand out as the only man aided by the CIA
machine who also turned out to be an extraordinarily popular
leader. For once the CIA may be said to have shown sound
judgment about the potential popular leadership of a political
figure.
Dr. Ahmad's contemptuously taunting reference to the
Awami League leaders who took shelter in India (p: 26) is
most puzzling. A military dictatorship that whisked away
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who by legitimacy of electoral
authority should have been prime minister, and subjected him
to a humiliating, secret military trial under constant threat of
death would certainly have killed several second level Awami
League leaders. They were indeed the special targets of the
Pakistani Artny. To quote from Durdin (op cit. ,po 88):
"Selecting Awami League supporters as their targets, the
troops unloosed a terrible orgy of killing and destruction ...
Hindu areas and workers' concentration in the old section of
the city were heavily attacked." The World Bank mission in its
report also draws a sombre picture of the massacre. In
Khushtia "it was like the morning after a nuclear attack" (New
York Times, July 13, 1971). It is this suppression which
Durdin called "brutal in the tradition of the Moghuls and their
bloody 15 and 16th century conquests" (p. 96) from which
the Awami League Leaders and 10 million Bengali Hindus and
Muslims, leaving everything behind, fled to the shelter and
security in India. What would Dr. Ahmad say about Ho Chi
Minh who, for over 30 years, escaped from the French rulers
in Vietnam and carried on the struggle for his country's
liberation from safe havens of France, China, Hong Kong and
the USSR? Or about Giap, Pham Van Dong and other
communist leaders who too escaped from the French
crackdown in 1939 to seek shelter in China? Would Dr.
Ahmad hold them in contempt?
It is difficult to understand why and how Dr. Ahmad
can make so Iowan estimate of the dead in Bangladesh as
250,000 (p. 28)? Even Time and Newsweek, no protagonists
of India, concede that the figure may approximate one
million. It is a large number, granted, but the capacity of a
well-equipped modernized army to unleash horrendous death
on a population of teeming millions, whether by medieval
methods or modern electronic warfare, is tremendous. When a
holocaust of death is let loose the precise number of those
exterminated is difficult to ascertain. The scorched earth
policy and evidence of summary massacres by the Pakistani
army should bring the number of those who perished to closer
to one million or at least considerably higher than Dr.
A h m a d ' ~ conservative estimate. But the fundamental point is
entirely different. The killing of even one person by the
governmental forces without a due process of law detracts
from the moral authority of that government. When killing is
done by the thousands that authority is almost completely
destroyed. From this viewpoint whether the Pakistani army
killed one innocent person or three million as charged by
Mujibur Rahman-the gravity of Pakistan's crimes is the same.
Then there is that nagging question: Had India
exhausted all peaceful means for a settlement before resorting
to war as a means to attain the freedom of Bangladesh? That
the only available justification of Mr. Nixon's discredited policy
obstructing American and Pakistani moves towards a political
settlement through negotiations is understandable. That was
the only available justification Mr. Nixon's discredited policy
in Bangladesh. Less understandable is Dr Ahmad's acceptance
of that argument (p. 27). Yahya Khan is said to have been
ready to negotiate with "responsible" political leaders in
Bangladesh. But the one, most responsible, leader was Mujibur
Rahman, the leader of the Awami League which had won 167
out of 169 seats allotted to East Bengal and thus
unquestionably the leader of the East Bengali people. He was
languishing in Yahya Khan's military jail, with even his
whereabouts unknown. The Pakistani dictator was doggedly
refusing to release and negotiate with Rahman. The Awarni
League had been banned and then as the piece de resistance in
this burlesque of brutality Yahya Khan had set out to hold
new "elections" to fill in the seats vacated by the Awami
League leaders who had been either arrested or had escaped to
India. If Yahya Khan was serious about a settlement, all he
had to do was to have the military court acquit Rahman and
then proceed to talk to him. In such a move there could have
been no loss of face for Yahya Khan who, by capturing
Rahman, was holding the trump card. Pakistani generals were
certainly not behaving as if they favoured a settlement. Theirs
was a mood, publicly and repeatedly displayed to foreign
observors, of supreme confidence about winning a war with
India, confidence fed by illusions of historical grandeur and a
pathological contempt for "Hindu cowardice."
Dr. Ahmad, echoing Mr. Nixon, claims that "important
Bengali leaders were initially interested but-abjecdy
dependent on Delhi-began refusing discussions on any terms
except immediate and total independence." Who were these
"important" leaders, one may ask? And if they were
"interested," what was to prevent them from accepting
Pakistan's offer of negotiations? Surely they were not captives
of India. They could have been easily flown out of India to
Washington D.C. where talks could have been held? Or, if
India was the obstructionist element, they could have taken
asylum in the American consulate thus embarrassing India and
exposing her to be the "obstructionist villain." Does Dr.
Ahmad really believe that any Bangladesh leader with an
ounce of decency would have or should have negotiated with
Yahya Khan so long as Mujibur Rahman languished in jail?
And while the Pakistani army continued to let loose an orgy of
bloodletting? Then one must sadly conclude that Dr. Ahmad
has failed to appreciate the strength of nationalism and the
bond of loyalty that prevails between the leader and the led.
The truth of the matter is that Yahya Khan was applying a
military solution to an explosive political situation of
nationalism of Bangladesh. Like the United States in Vietnam,
he discivered the painful truth: military pacification does not
snuff out but only stokes the fires of people's determination
to carry the struggle for national liberation to the finish. To
attribute Bangladesh leaders' demand for independence to
India's prodding is to credit India with far greater capabilities
than she has. If Pakistan has been dismembered the axe that
gave the blow was wielded by Yahya Khan. Incidentally the
42
"Anderson papers" have firmly disputed Mr. Nixon's claims
about his active search for a negotiated settlement in
Bangladesh. By October, it should have been clear to anyone
with the meanest intelligence that the people of Bangladesh
would settle for nothing less than complete independence.
Negotiations, to be meaningful, had to be along the same lines
as those between the Indian leaders and the British rulers
during 1946-47 for a safe and honourable withdrawal of
Pakistan from Bangladesh as that of Britain from India.
The United Nations machinery should be certainly used
as far as possible to resolve conflict and evolve settlement. But
U Thant's proposal for the stationing of UN observers on both
sides of the Indo-Pakistani border could not have worked. UN
observors could have neither "observed" nor prevented large
scale suppression of the people of Bangladesh by the
70,OOo-odd Pakistani armed forces which was the root cause
of the crisis. As for the refugees in India hundreds of foreign
observers, including those from the UN High Commissioner for
the Refugees' office, U.S. Senators and Congressmen and
foreign reporters, were able to freely visit the refugee's camps.
Had there been a war between I ndia and Pakistan as in
Kashmir the role of the UN observers stationed along the
border would have been quite effective in at least reporting
border violations.
Now the war is over. Pakistan has emerged shaken but
confident under a new leadership of President Bhutto. One can
only wish him good luck in rejuvenating his country and
promoting its welfare. One would wish it were possible to
regard Bhutto as being untainted by the stigma of
participation in Yahya's Khan's policies in Bangladesh. Such
unfortunately is not the case. Dr. Ahmad has carefully chosen
to gloss over Bhutto's own role in precipitating the crisis of
Bangladesh. Having won 60% of the seats in the western sector
for his newly formed People's Party whose planks included "a
thousand year war" with India, Bhutto was unwilling to let the
fruits of the electoral victory go rightfully to Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman whose Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats
allotted to East Bengal. It was Bhutto's threat to boycott the
sessions of the Constituent Assembly to be convened on March
3 unless Rahman met his prior demands that precipitated the
constitutional crisis and worse, a political crisis of confidence.
Bhutto's blackmail played into the hands of Yahya Khan who
postponed the convening of the Assembly indefinitely-a
decision that set into motion the process of disintegration of
Pakistan. Dr. Ahmad is not certain whether President Bhutto
would cut the umbilical cord of continued dependence on the
United States (p. 25). It should be noted that Bhutto has
publicly expressed a desire for greater military aid from the
United States and Mr. Nixon in his message of February 9 to
the Congress has laid the groundwork for that. One wonders
how Dr. Ahmad views Bhutto's appointment of General Tikka
Khan, the "butcher" of Baluchistan and Bangladesh as David
Loshak called him, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistani
army.
There remains the question of the legitimacy of
Bangladesh and its nationalism as well as the legitimacy of its
government. The former sprang from that intangible,
undefinable quality of nationalist revolutionary aspirations of
the people which produce leaders, mass followers and the
national liberation struggle, and finally, as in China and
Vietnam, the victorious revolutionary government. But the
present government of Bangladesh has an added legitimacy of
a popular mandate, overwhelmingly expressed, in Pakistan's
first, free, unrigged, nation elections.
Dr. Ahmad is quite right that "the power of the East
Bengali people cannot flow out of the barrel of Indian guns"
(p. 26). It was actually the other way round. India's swift
victory stemmed as much from the power of Bangladesh's
determination to overthrow Pakistani rule as from its own
military strategy and the valor of its soldiers. The main
weakness of the Pakistani army lay in the fact that like the
American army in Vietnam it was fighting on a hostile soil, on
which the brutalized Bengalis were waiting like Pirranhas for a
brutal revenge. No wonder Pakistani officers and commanders
insisted that they be taken prisoners by the Indians rather than
be left to the tender mercy of Bangladesh's Mukti Bahini. It
may be a hard thing for Dr. Ahmad to accept but unless all the
western television and press reporters were considered to be in
conspiracy with India and all the extensive TV and Press
coverage in films and photos fictional, it cannot be disputed
even by him that the Indian forces were overwhelmingly
welcomed by the Bangladesh people as liberators. And as
liberators they withdrew even before the agreed date of March
25,1972.
The new reality in South Asia is not a defeated Pakistan
nor a victorious India nor a triumphant Bangladesh. The
reality is the need for peaceful coexistence between three close
neighbors, all of whom have a legitimate right to be where
they are and who have much to gain by building a common
future among them instead of destroying the common heritage
they all share.
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43
CUMULATIVE INDEX, 1969-1972 [I:3-IV:4]
.\d:lllls. N., "Self..Censorship" 1II:2, [Feb. 19711
.\h111;I<I. r
i
., "Theories of Counterinsurgency" 1II:2, [Feb.
19711
---'-, "N,lIc's 011 South Asia in Crisis" IV; 1 [Spring 1972]
.\Iml:\d. S .. "Peasant Classes in Pakistan" IV: 1 (Spring 1972]
.\ll1l1,d. F .. "The Struggle in Bangladesh" IV: 1 [Spring 1972]
.\Ikn. "Is Academic Freedom Still a Viable Concept?" 111:2
(Feh.19711
Bald\\'in, "Patrolling the Empire: Reflections on thc USS
Pueblo" IV:2 (Summer 1972]
Bastid, "A Triptych in Honour of the Cultural Revolution"
11:3 (April ..july 1970]
Rerrigan, D., "Por Saghir Ahmad" (poem) IV:1 [Spring 1972}
Bix, "Some Long..Term Effects of U.S. Control Over the
Philippines" 1:3 [March 1969)
- ........ -, "The Security Treaty System and the japanese
Military.. lndustrial Complex" 11;2 (J an. 1970]
--.. , "Report on Japan 1972-Part In IV:2 [Summer 1972}
_ .. , "Report on Japan 1972-Part II" IVA [December
1972)
Branfman, "Laos: No Place to Hide" 11:4 [Fall 1970]
Buchanan, "The Geography of Empire" (portfolio of maps)
IV:2 [Summer 1972]
Chesneaux, "Approaches to the Study of China" 1:4 (no. 4)
(May 1969)
Chin, "Confessions of the Chinatown Cowboy" IV: 3 [Fall
1972]
--, Chan, Inada, and Wong, "Aiiieeee! An Introduction to
Asian..American Writing" IV: 3 [Fall 1972]
Chomsky, "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the
Backgrounds of the Pacific War" 1:3 (no. 3) [March
1969)
----, "The Asian Scholar and the American Crisis" 1:4 (no. 4)
[May 1969)
Clubb. "McCarthyism and our Asian Policy" 1:4 (no. 4) [May
19691
CCAS, Columbia chapter, "The American Asian Studies
Establishment" 111:3-4 [Summer .. Fall 1971)
CCAS, Friendship Delegation to China, "Interview with Chou
En..lai" III: 3-4 [Summer .. Fall1971)
DeCamp, "The G.1. Movement in Asia" IV:1 [Spring 1972]
Decornoy, "Laos: The Forgotten War" 11:3 [Apr...july 1970]
Dore, "On the Possibility and Desirability of a Theory of
Modernization" 1:3 (no. 3) [March 1969]
Dowd, "What Must the University Be?" m:2 [Feb. 1971]
Dower, "The Eye of the Beholder: Background Notes on the
U.S.-japan Military Relationship" 11:1 [Oct. 1969]
Engelhardt, "Ambush at Kamikaze Pass" (racism in the
movies) III: 1 [Winter ..Spring 1971)
Esherick, "Harvard on China: The Apologetics of Imperialism"
IV:4 [December 1972]
Fairbank, "An Exchange" (with ] im Peck) II: 3 [Apr.-july
1970]
---, "A Reply" (letter) 11:4 [Fall 1970]
---.., "Comment" 111:3..4 [Summer.. Fa1l1971]
-_.. , letter IV:1 [Spring 1972]
Feuerwerker,letter IV:2 [Summer 1972]
"Pinal Proposal for AID Institutional Grant Support (for
Southern Illinois University Center for Vietnamese
Studies)" document 111:2 [Feb. 1971]
Fredrick, "Cambodia: 'Operation Total Victory No. 43' " 11:3
[Apr.-july 1970}
"The Vietnamization of Saigon Politics" III: 1
[Winter-Spring 1971]
Friedman, "The Nixon..Mao Pact" I: 3 (no. 3) [March 1969]
-"-, "Extremists are Extremely Extreme" 11:2 (Jan. 1970]
--, "China, Pakistan, Bangladesh" IV: 1 [Spring 19721
Gardiner, "Academic Incompetence" 111:2 [Feb. 1971]
Gough, "Anthropology and the Third World" 1:4 (no. 4) [May
1969)
--, "An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver" III: 3-4
[Summer..Fa1l1971 J
-_.. , "The South Asian Revolutionary Potential" IV:1
[Spring 1972]
Gurley, "Capitalist and Maoist Economic Development" 11:3
[April-July 19701
Halliday, ''The Korean Communist Movement" 11:4 [Fall
1970)
Horowitz, D., "Politics and Knowledge: An Unorthodox
History of Modern China Studies" 111:3-4 [Summer.. Fali
1971)
Ienaga, "The Historical Significance of the Japanese Textbook
Lawsuit" 11:4 [Fall 1970]
Inada, "Night Song in Asian America" (poem) IV: 3 [Fall
1972)
"Joint Statement of Two Peoples (the American and Japanese)
Across the Pacific" 11:2 (Jan. 1970)
Kagan, "McCarran's Legacy: The Association for Asian
Studies" 1:4 (no. 4) [May 19691
Kerkvliet, "Additional Source Materials on Philippine Radical
Movements" 111:3..4 [Summer-Fall 1971)
Khanh, "You Have Planned Enough!" 111:2 [Feb. 1971]
Koen, "Two Postscripts to the McCarran Hearings" 1:4 (no. 4)
[May 1969)
Kolko, ''The Political Significance of the Center for
Vietnamese Studies and Programs" 111:2 [Feb. 1971)
Kung, "A New May Fourth Movement?" (Tiao..yii Tai Islands
issue) III :3 ..4 [Summer..Fali 1971)
Lai, "A Historical Survey of Organizations of the Left Among
the Chinese in America" IV: 3 [Fall 19721
Larcom, "The Diplomacy of 'Disregard' " II: 1 [Oct. 1969]
Layer, "Reforming the Center" 111:2 [Feb. 1971]
Leiserson, "Comments on Dore (on Modernization)" 1:3 (no.
3) [March 1969)
Lippit, "Economic Development and Welfare in China" IV:2
[Summer 1972]
Long, "'Leaf Abcission'?" 11:2 (Jan. 1970]
--, "Vietnamese Students and the (S.I.U.) Center" 111:2
[Feb. 1971)
---, "Land Reform?" 111:2 [Feb. 19711
--, "The Weaknesses of Vietnamization" IV:2 [Summer
1972]
Lum, "Grateful Here" (poem) IV: 3 [Fall 1972]
MacEwen, "Pakistan, Economic Change, and Social Scientists"
44
1:4 (no. 4) [May 1969)
McCoy, "Land Reform as Counter-Revolution" III: 1
[Winter-Spring 1971)
---, "Subcontracting Counterinsurgency: Academics in
Thailand, 1954-1970" III:2 [Feb.. 1971)
-- and McDonald, "Pan Am Makes the Going Great?" 11:2
(Jan. 1970)
McDonald, "The Historian's Quest: Joseph R. Levenson" 11:3
[Apr.-July 1970)
--- and McCoy, "Pan Am Makes the Going Great?" 11:2
(Jan. 1970)
Mahajani, "Comment on Eqbal Ahmad's 'Notes on South Asia
in Crisis'" IV:4 [December 1972)
Mark, "Stepping Across, Being a Sister" (poem) IV:3 [Fall
1972)
Marr, "Intellectual Functionaries?" 111:2 [Feb. 1971)
--, "Vietnamese Sources on Vietnam" IV: 1 [Spring 1972]
Martin, "A Child of Son My" III:2 [Feb. 1971J
Minear, "Douglas Pike and the NLF" 11:1 [Oct. 1969)
Mirsky, "The Carbondale Caper" 11:4 [Fall 1970]
Morrell, The Carbondale Caper: A Sequel" 11:4 [Fall 1970)
Nathan, "Imperialism's Effect on China" IV:4 [December
1972)
Nee, B. and V. "Longtime Californ'" IV:3 [Fall 1972)
Payer, "Review of The Spirit of Chinese Politics by Lucien
Pye" 1:3 (no. 3) [March 1969)
Pearson and Smilowitz, "Biting the Fishhook" (Cambodia)
11:4 [Fall 1970)
Peck, The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of
America's China Watchers" 11:1 [Oct. 1969]
--, with J.K. Fairbank, "An Exchange" 11:3 [Apr.-July
1970)
pfeffer, "Revolution and Rule: Where Do We Go From Here?"
(review of Vogel, Canton Under Communism) 11:3
[Apr.-July 1970)
Pomeroy, "Source Material on Philippine Revolutionary
Movements" III: 3-4 [Summer-Fall 1971]
Ram, "The Communist Movement in India" IV: 1 [Spring
1971)
Riskin, "China's Economic Growth: Leap or Creep?" 11:2
(Jan. 1970)
Roberts, "The Structure and Direction of Contemporary
China Studies" III: 3-4 [Summer-Fall 1971]
Sanford, "America and the Peacetalks" 1:3 (no. 3) [March
1969]
Schell, "Melby: The Mandate of Heaven" 11:2 (Jan. 1970)
Selden, "The National Liberation Front and the
Transformation of Vietnamese Society" 11:1 [Oct.
1969)
, "Okinawa and American Colonialism" I11:1
Shalom, "Revolution and the RAND Corporation" 111:1
Sheinbaum, "The Michigan State-CIA Experience in Vietnam"
1II:2 [Feb. 1971)
Shivaraman, "Thanjavur: Rumblings in Tamil Nadu" IV: 1
[Spring 1972]
"State ofthe City" (from Trek. 1942) IV: 3 [Fall 1972)
Tagatac, "Starfighter" (poem) IV: 3 [Fall 1972)
Toyama, "The Meiji Restoration and the Present Day" II: 1
[Oct. 1969)
Trung. "Why Do I Want Peace? 1:3 (no. 3) [March 1969]
Waskow, "Domestic Counterinsurgency" III:2 [Feb. 1971)
White, C., "McAlister's Vietnam" 11:3 [April-July 1970]
Wiens, "Seeds of Revolution" I1:3 [Apr.-July 1970]
Wilson, "Leathernecks in North China, 1945" IV:2 [Summer
1972]
Wong, "Review of Bitter Strength by Gunther Barth" IV: 3
[Fall 1972]
----, "City Letter" (poem) IV: 3 [Fall 1972)
--- and Yu, "Introduction to Trek" IV:3 [FaI11972)
Woodside, "Some Southern Vietnamese Writers Look at the
War" 11:1 [Oct. 1969]
Wray, "Reflections on Chomsky and Revisionist Views of
Pre-War Japan" 1:3 (no. 3) [March 1969)
Young, "Why I Chose Imperialism: An Open Letter to
'Imperialists' " (letter) 11:4 [Fall 1970)
Yu, "The Chinese in American Courts" IV: 3 [Fall 1972)
Note: This index begins with issue 1:3, then called "CCAS
Newsletter" and labelled 'No.3.' The next issue, 1:4 (labelled
'No.4') adopted the present name. The first two issues-Nos. 1
and 2 of the "CCAS Newsletter-are not included here, and
Vol. I is thus incomplete. Beginning with Vol. III, the four
issues in each volume fall within the calendar year,
January-December, in the sequence Spring, Summer, Fall,
Winter. Issue III:3-4 in 1971 was a combined, double-length
issue.
Com.m.unication
Vancouver
November 23, 1972
Dear Concerned Asian Scholars,
We are both para-medical health workers from the
Berkeley Community Clinic. For the past few months we have
been living in Vancouver and intensively studying Chinese
medical philosophy and principles of traditional diagnosis. We
have also spent several months studying Chinese language and
have been reading and attempting partial translation of current
Chinese medical texts.
In this work we have noticed that none of the major, or
even minor, modern medical works have been translated into
English. Also, we have failed to locate a Chinese-English
dictionary of medical terms and assume that one has never
been comp leted .
Many health workers such as ourselves are trying to learn
as much as we can about Chinese medicine but are hampered
in this work by the lack of the above-mentioned resources and
reference works.
We would like to encourage Chinese scholars to tackle
this necessary task.
Sincerely yours,
Harvey Smith &
Marti Smith
4801 Francis St.
Burnaby 2, B.C., Canada
45
Prospects for Vietnam.
After the Agreel1lent is Signed
Fred Branfman
As this is being written - on December 4,1972 - there
is little public activity around the potential peace agreement.
This appears due to a general feeling of confusion and
frustration over actual events; and a supposition that the
agreement will be signed no matter what. In addition, what
remains of the anti-war movement, which has traditionally
been the source of anti-war pressure on the government, has
had little enthusiasm for the agreement, interpreting it
somewhat sadly as a "defeat" for the Vietnamese.
This is unfortunate_ Unfortunate because the Nixon
Administration through delaying the agreement is playing with
Vietnamese lives as never before. Because thousands of tons of
bombs continue to kill and maim hundreds of Indochinese
every day that the agreement is not signed. Because 40,000
new political prisoners were picked up by Thieu in the first
two weeks alone after the agreement was revealed (Washington
Post, November 10, 1972) and reports pour in of the torture
and even execution of political prisoners. And it is unfortunate
because both the Vietnamese and American people have
everything to gain and nothing to lose by the signing of the
agreement, and the only conceivable losers will be General
Thieu and a Richard Nixon committed to keeping him in
office. Of course, this is precisely the reason why only the
Nixon and Thieu regimes are delaying the signing of the
agreement.)
Two realities stand out in the present period: (1)
American leaders have used their vast capacity for
technological destruction for a longer period of time and in
greater quantity than ever before in history. Their physical
strength is handicapped, however, mainly by their lack of
moral and spiritual force, and by pressing problems flowing
directly or indirectly from the war effort. The Vietnamese
have, on their part, compensated for their relative lack of
physical force by drawing upon unprecedented resources of
the human spirit. The result has been military stalemate. U.S.
leaders have been unable to exhaust the Indochinese
spiritually, the Indochinese have not been able to deplete U.S.
physical resources sufficiently. It is now clear that neither side
can obtain a purely military victory. This leads to the second
reality. (2) Therefore, the war can only end through some sort
of political settlement. Given the battlefield realities,. such a
political settlement will have to result in concessions by both
sides. Contrary, therefore, to widespread beliefs assiduously
reinforced by the U.S. Government, the present agreement is
not just a military settlement, but a political settlement.
Its contours are tbe only ones that both sides can
reasonably be expected to accept. Whether the war now
continues for a few more months and thousands die, or
wbether it continues for four more years and hundreds of
thousands are killed, when the war finally ends it will have to
be through such a political settlement.
The question, then, is not whether it is a "good"
settlement - for the Vietnamese are the only ones who should
make that decision. Nor is it appropriate to sit back and
wonder what Nixon and Kissinger are up to. The time has
come to act to see that this peace agreement is signed and
honored, by educating the American people and Congress to
what the Nixon Administration has agreed to do in signing it.
Let us be clear: the choice now is not between this peace
agreement and a better one for either side. The choice is
between this peace agreement or no agreement.
Until the peace agreement is signed
During a visit by a group of Americans to Hanoi and
Paris between November 4 and November 11, the North
Vietnamese made it clear that the Nixon Administration was
attempting to renege on its. promises to sign the agreement.
Two major points were made:
(1) The reason the peace agreement has not been signed
is that Nixon is delaying. The North Vietnamese remain ready
to sign, as agreed.
(2) Nixon had in fact agreed to sign, taking the
unprecedented step of sending an official Presidential message
to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong on October 20. The
Vietnamese pointed out Minister Xuan Thuy's quote from the
message, i.e., that "The United States side appreciates the
good will and serious attitude of the DRVN. The text of the
agreement can now be considered complete," (New York
Times, November 5, 1972), has never been denied by the
White House.
Nixon's explanations that the reason for the delay is
Thieu's surprising obduracy or minor "technical" problems are
not to be taken seriously. The Nixon Administration knew all
along what Thieu's position would be and has ample resources
to force his concurrence. Xuan Thuy, chief North Vietnamese
delegate to the Paris Peace Talks, has categorically stated that
all "minor" matters raised by Mr. Kissinger - such as the
question of the international supervisory team going to work
immediately, and the Councils of Reconciliation and Concord
not being coalition government structures - had already been
agreed to by the North Vietnamese.
The North Vietnamese do not pose concrete hypotheses
for Mr. Nixon's delay in signing but two obvious explanations
come to mind:
46
I
(1) Nixon's greatest fear before the election was another
Tet-style offensive in Saigon which could conceivably have
greatly reduced his margin of victory. His agreement to sign
could have been largely motivated by an attempt to stall
military initiatives by the NLF until after the election. In
Hanoi, for example, it is said by diplomatic sources that
Newsweek editor Arnaud de Borchgrave made a point of
speaking for Kissinger during his visit there, and he went out
of his way to threaten that if there was an offensive in Saigon,
"We will B-52 Hanoi." Under this hypothesis, Nixon is at this
point intending to stall as long as possible, perhaps even
finding a pretext at some point to refuse to sign at all.
(2) Nixon will eventually sign, but only after trying to
force every last concession out of the North Vietnamese and
giving pro-American forces as much time as possible in Saigon
to build up their military forces and eliminate their political
opposition. He may also try to sign without Thieu's
concurrence, thus violating the agreement even more.
It is still too early, of course, to know which of these
hypotheses is correct. We do know, however, that on October
26 Henry Kissinger stated categorically that "Peace is at hand
. .. what remains to be done can be settled in one more
negotiating session with the North Vietnamese negotiators,
lasting, I would think, no more than three or four days." Mr.
Kissinger then had one more session, lasting six days, from
November 20-26, and the agreement was further away from
being signed than before. And on December 4, the South
Vietnamese stated categorically that they would not sign, thus
throwing the settlement into even greater jeopardy.
The first priority until the agreement is signed,
therefore, must be to work as never before to see that the
Nixon Administration signs it. Its actions since October 26
have made it clear than unless pressured after the agreement, it
has no intention of actually allowing the Indochinese to settle
their own affairs.
After the agreement is signed
If the agreement is signed, we must also be clear about
its nature. Both sides have made serious concessions. The U.s.
has above all accepted the principle that North Vietnamese can
remain in South Vietnam, explicitly accepting the concept of
one nation of Vietnam as established in the 1954 Geneva
Accords. In addition, the U.S. has recognized the PRG as. a
legitimate political administration, legally permitted to
compete for power with the Thieu regime. And, most
importantly, the U.S. has agreed to withdraw its military
personnel and equipment totally from Indochina, and to
interfere neither politically nor militarly in Indochinese affairs
after a ceasefire.
The Vietnamese have also made concessions, adding up
to the very "peace with honor" that Nixon has claimed to
wish. Most importantly, they have agreed to the Thieu
regime's remaining in power in areas inhabited by a majority
of the population during the period between the ceasefire and
the elections. In addition, they have agreed to begin returning
U.S. POWs before all political prisoners are released in the
South. And they have permitted the U.S. to continue sending
to the Thieu regime military equipment, and to allow U.S.
"economic" aid, personnel, and "non-military advisors" to
stay in South Vietnam.
The clear implication of General Thieu's reluctance to
sign this eminently fair agreement is that he feels unable to
compete politically with the NLF. He need not fear any
greater military competition from the North Vietnamese after
ceasefire than he has right now, for example. But the
ambiguity that lies in explaining the differences between a
violation of the ceasefire and "legitimate" maintenance of
"law and order" is precisely that which would allow Thieu to
continue jailing, torturing, murdering his political opponents.
Therefore, if Nixon intends to keep Thieu or a similar regime
in power after a ceasefire, it is a foregone conclusion that they
will proceed to violate the agreement through covert warfare
in the name of "law and order."
The most convincing evidence so far is the proposed
increase in the number of "civilian" advisors in South Vietnam
from 5,000 to 10,000 persons. The one thing we can be sure
of is that these "civilian advisors" will not be engaged in
humanitarian, non-political aid, for if there is anyone constant
thread of Nixon's policy towards Indochina, it is a decrease in
emphasis on humanitarian, non-political aid and an increase in
highly political security assistance. Medical aid to Vietnam has
dropped from $27.6 million to $12.4 million while the
number of civilian hospital admissions rose from 456,972 to
597,423 due to increased levels of bombing in populated areas.
Aid to police, however, has increased from $20.9 million in
1970 to $30 million in 1971. Similarly in Cambodia, which
Nixon has called "the purest form of the Nixon Doctrine,"
there has been no aid given to the more than 2,000,000
refugees created by Nixon's policies.
It is clear that the 10,000 "civilian" advisors scheduled
for South Vietnam will be military and para-military personnel
dressed in civilian clothing.
The pattern will be similar to that followed by American
leaders in Laos after 1962, a country they have largely
destroyed and in which they have spent over $10 billion since
they signed the 1962 Geneva Accords agreeing to respect Lao
neutrality. If Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William
Sullivan is appointed Ambassador to Saigon to replace Bunker,
as is rumored in Washington, this covert war can be further
expected to escalate since Sullivan is the architect of the
covert war in Laos. The probable forms this will take in
Vietnam are as follows:
1. Military advisors, under contract to civilian companies
which are in turn contracted to the CIA, will continue
advising, supplying and directing both the ARVN mercenaries
under direct control of the CIA.
2. Air America, Co ntinental Air Services, and other
CIA-directed airlines will begin supplying the ground armies,
spotting for bombers, inserting and withdrawing American-led
teams carrying out espionage and assassinations In
guerrilla -controlled zones.
3. U.S. Air Force-directed personnel, again in civilian
clothes and under aliases, will continue attempting to hold the
Air Force together. While pro-Saigon Vietnamese
have proven to be adequate if not particularly talented pilots,
they have proven unable to carry out the far more complex
tasks required to supply, load bombs, repair aircraft, provide
photo reconnaissance, and spot for bombing raids. The great
increase (to 2,000 planes) of the VNAF, making it the third
largest in the world, demands a tremendous American presence
just to keep it flying.
4. Under the Phoenix program, direct-hire and contract
CIA personnel will continue assassinating and jailing
47
Vietnamese deemed to be working for the PRG, and US prison
advisors will continue to oversee the vast GVN jail system
(over 1,000 prisons with an estimated 100,000-300,000
political prisoners).
It is even conceivable that faced with the prospect of the
failure of Thieu - or a more malleable pro-American successor
- that Nixon could again resume all-out U.S. bombing.
The signing of the agreement, therefore, will not mean
an end of the war. Indeed, it will be even more important after
the agreement is signed that as much pressure as possible be
brought to bear upon Mr. Nixon to honor the agreement.
This will in some ways be more difficult than at present,
principally because press coverage will decrease drastically if
the agreement is signed. US advisors, using the pretext that all
press matters are now up to the South Vietnmaese - as they
now claim in Thailartd with the result that American reporters
are not allowed on US airbases in that country - will prevent
reporters from visiting contested areas and observing US
military activity. As Vietnam decreases in news value, news
bureaus will have far fewer reporters, and those that remain
will tend to be less talented than those present in the
mid-sixties when Vietnam was the top story. The Thieu
government can be expected to prevent many top-notch
reporters from entering Vietnam, such as the presently
prohibited Gloria Emerson of the New York Times, and the
lack of foreigners from humanitarian and voluntary
organizations who speak Vietnamese will mean an important
decrease in news leaks for those reporters left.
On the other hand, pressuring American leaders to sign
the agreement will in some ways be easier. By signing the
agreement, the U.S. government publicly admits that Vietnam
is one country and that the U.S. has no right to interfere in its
internal affairs. Their continued involvement will be perceived
throughout the world as an even more blatant violation of
international law and common decency than it is at present.
Contributors
Andrew Nathan is a professor of history at Columbia
University.
Joseph Esherick teaches history at the University of Oregon.
Herbert P. Bix teaches Japanese history at the University of
Massachusetts. Boston.
The author of the "Letter from the Philippines" was until
recently a professor at the University of the Philippines. After
the Marcos coup of September 22 she went into hiding in
Manila.
Usha Mahajani teaches political science at Washington State
University, Ellensburg.
Fred Branfman heads Project Airwar In Washington and re
turned from Hanoi in November.
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