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Asia is speeding towards State Socialism.
By Gareth Jones,
Bangkok, Siam, May 1935
Asia is speeding towards State Socialism. Throughout the East the
rulers are watching Sta1in, Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt and they are
trying to make the State all-powerful. They wish to build factories and
dig mines controlled by the State. They are battling against private
enterprise and are creating all-mighty Government machines to dominate
economic life. They are saying good-bye to the Nineteenth Century era
of capitalism and opening the doors to State control, just as President
Roosevelt is putting business under the watchful eye of the Government.
The countries of Asia are working out their New Deal.
They are curious, these Eastern Rulers. They drive the Communists with
troops into the mountains and execute those whom they find. They send
secret police agents to worm into the plans of the Socialists. They
fill their cells with followers of Karl Marx. They brand left wing
thinkers as purveyors of “dangerous thoughts” and even put some to vile
forms of torture. Yet they adopt some of the very ideas whose champions
they condemn to death.
The ideas of Hitler varied with the ideas of Stalin are
finding a fertile soil in the countries of Asia. A fiery nationalism is
wedded with Socialistic ideas. Militarism rampant marches side by side
with hatred of capitalism. That is what I have found in travelling in
Japan, Philippines, Java, Siam and even in old individualistic China.
Let me give text and word for this declaration that Asia is speeding
towards State Socialism.
Beneath the surface in Japan there is going on a fierce
strugg1e against the big bankers. The hatred of’ the ordinary Japanese
for the Financiers is much greater than the America’s Westerner’s
loathing for Wall Street. The Army in Japan is frankly an enemy of the
capita1istic interests and wants the State to be all-powerful. There
are thousands of young officers who curse the commercial spirit of the
big businessman and who say that lust for money is ruining the country.
They condemn such vast concerns as the Mitsuis and the Mitsubishis (who
are the Rockefellers and the Mellons and the J. P. Morgans of Nippon)
and. say “down with capitalism! Down with profit making!” There is the
same spirit of antagonism to capitalism in Japan as there is among to
followers of Upton Sinclair, of Huey Long, of Father Coughlin and of’
the La Follettes. The difference lies, however, in this, that in
America the anti-capitalists are the unemployed and the impoverished
midd1e class, whereas in Japan they are the Army, virile, powerful, self
satisfying, burning with nationalist passion and willing to die for the
Emperor
While the Japanese hunt down the Socialists, therefore, they
have many radical ideas and the soldiers are proud of these radical
ideas. They have a dream of a Japan where industry will be run by the
State and where inequality of wealth will disappear. They want the new
State, Manchukuo, to be the field where they will experiment. Watch
Manchukuo, therefore, it is going to be the greatest State Socialistic
country after Soviet Russia. The soldiers there are determined that
their new territory which once belonged to China, shall not be the happy
hunting ground of private capitalists, but shall be developed along
State Socialistic methods. Already there is a State railway, the South
Manchuria Railway, with steelworks and factories and coalmines. There is
a State monopoly in oil which makes Standard Oil and Shell furious.
There is a State monopoly in opium, which is doing a vast business and
the salt is a State business. Who knows? Perhaps before long North
China will be that strange political creature, State Socialistic Empire
under Emperor Kang Te, and Peking may be the capital of an Imperial
Socialism or, if you like, a Socialist Imperialism.
If we move from Japan to the Philippines we will see there
in the new Commonwealth the germs of a State Socialistic Dictatorship.
Read the Constitution and there you find that the Philippines will be
able to adopt Socialism gradually. It puts vast powers into the hands
of the Government. It can confiscate land by paying compensation. It
declares that the land and the mines belong to the State. It foresees a
period when the State will run industry. It makes it possible for the
Government to take factories and mines out of private businessmen’s and
be run by the State. It claims a. right over the gold and the chromium,
the iron ore and the whole wealth of the Philippines. It fights against
large estates and limits the holding of newly acquired land to something
over a one thousand hectare. Before we know it the Philippines will
have become a country where the Government rules business.
Let us go to the Dutch East Indies and we see there a few germs of
State Socialism. Although the Communists have been crushed and their
leaders banished to far-off islands, where their only audiences are the
cocoanut trees, which may sway and nod but can do little else. The
Government is trying to get a grip aver business lire. No new
enterprise can be set up without the permission of the Governor General.
Goods must be imported through certain importers only. Private
capitalism, however, still reigns supreme in the Dutch East Indies,
where Royal Dutch Shell, the rival of Standard Oil, is powerful with its
rich oil fields in Borneo.
Our next country is Siam. No one would expect to find that
this land of Buddhist Priests in their yellow robes, of white elephants
which are no more white than the waters of the Mississippi in flood, and
of rites thousands of years old, would have ideas of Socialism. It is
only three years since Siam (like England in the middle Ages) was an
absolute Kingdom where the Kings ruled over the life and death of each
of her ten million subjects; where gorgeous robes, dazzling golden
thrones and brilliant royal umbrellas made Bangkok, the Capitol, the
most fantastically g1ittoring City in the world, and where a few hundred
Princes dominated the country. Who would link Socialism with the simple
country folk of Siam, who believe in the spirits of trees and of flowers
and. of mountains? Yet listen to what one of the great politicians of
Siam clad in brilliant blue satin robes, told me: “We are moving towards
a moderate type of State Socialism. We do not want State ownership but
we want State control of industry. One reason why we want state control
is to prevent out industrial life being dominated by the Japanese and
the Chinese.”
The Siamese want with the help of the State to push forward
the building of industry. Just as every nation in Asia now wants to buy
less from America and Europe and produce all themselves. The Siamese
want to see smoke stacks and factory walls rearing proudly above the
shacks of Bangkok.
From Siam I travelled to China, the most individualist of
countries, where all are for the family and none are for the State,
where the Government is so corrupt and changeable that the idea of state
control seems ludicrous. Even in China, however, I found that State
Socialism was attracting the minds of some rulers. In the stubborn
South the Cantonese leaders are playing with ideas of setting up State
factories. They hope that State will produce all that the people need
and they have already a cement monopoly. But to quote a foreign
observer: “They are taxing the people so much in order to set up State
industries that the people will have no money to buy the products of the
State Socia1istic factories.”
These attempts will probably fail in China. The politicians
are too beset by the vices of putting the State’s money into their own
pockets, of placing their families in the best positions and of failing
to create order. They will regard State factories as a wonderful means
of making money, before they retire to live in opulence under the
protection of the British in Hong Kong or guarded by foreign bayonets in
Shanghai.
In every country I have visited in the Far East the rulers are toying
with a nationalistic, militaristic State control. Will the twentieth
century see a Socialistic Asia, which will be able by its industry and
discipline to conquer the Markets of Europe and America?
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