Page:China in Revolt (1926).pdf/34

 The struggle in China, which raged for decades before the world war, 1914–1918, was a struggle for the partition of Asia, Here there met the imperialist paths of czarist Russia, Japan and Great Britain, In 1904 and 1905 the struggle between czarist Russia and Japan took place here, and from it Japan emerged firmly entrenched. Until recently, China was one of the objects of the struggle on the Pacific. By China's appearance as the subject of an active national revolutionary policy in Asia, it completely overturns "all analysis" and prophecies which military and Pacific experts have made concerning the probable grouping of forces. All these people proceeded from the premise of a split-up China, rendered powerless by internal conflicts, a country whose inescapable fate it is to be divided up into spheres of influence. They took as their starting point the ratio system between the United States, Japan and Great Britain, established by the Washington conference, without taking into consideration the new, potentially powerful factor of future Chinese policy.

The Chinese revolution can under certain conditions, first, hasten the armed clash of Big Powers on the a Pacific—"a possibility that bourgeois experts on the Pacific problem" put off for a number of years; second, it will exert a revolutionizing influence on the movement of all Asia, especially India, whose national-revolutionary movement seems to have been ebbing somewhat in recent years. This is likewise a point in the sharpening of antagonisms on the Pacific. That this view of the role of the Chinese Revolution is entirely justified is proven by the Indonesian uprising. This uprising also (side by side with the Chinese Revolution) moves the Pacific problem into the foreground.

There is ferment also in the Philippines. This summer Calvin Coolidge, the president of the United States, sent a certain Colonel Thompson on an