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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 33, 17 August 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The British retreat in Asia is taking on the semblance of a rout. On August 8 the British Viceroy of India announced a new and slightly mere precise promise of dominion status for India ... after the war. On Aug. 9, the War Office in London announced withdrawal of all British forces from Peking, Tientsin, and Shanghai. The entrenched positions of a century and more are being given up. The power of imperial Britain, so long in decline, is visibly dissolving.
The new promise to India is no less empty than all those that have gone before. But it is clearly tinged with the desperation of an imperial regime that knows its end is drawing near. Lord Linlithgow’s statement was clearly an appeal to the native ruling classes of India, promising “free partnership” in the British Commonwealth in return for support against the threat of complete submersion of British power implicit in the German march of conquest. As a gage of this “partnership”, the Viceroy graciously offers to accept “representative Indians” as members of his Advisory Council and to establish in addition a “War Advisory Council” which is to comprise representatives of the Indian states and “other interests” in Indian national life. Finally, he promised that after the war the Indians would themselves be permitted to draw up their own constitution.
That these pitifully meager offers should be regarded in London as substantial “concessions” on Britain’s part is an indication of the wholly dictatorial and autocratic nature of Britain’s present rule over the 350,000,000 people of India. As the pressure on the British Empire increases and draws closer to India itself, we may expect still broader promises, wider concessions. Britain, after all, has nothing to lose but the chains with which it has held India bound.
In China the retreat is necessarily more precipitate. There Japanese pressure has increased in proportion to the scope and immediacy of the German threat to Britain. The British were first compelled to close the Burma Road and now, aware of their total inability to resist further incursions, are pulling out of North and Central China altogether.
The actual forces involved are small – a few battalions. But they represent the entrenched power of more than a century, measured in investments totalling about one billion dollars. This power was asserted in the course of a series of bloody wars waged against the almost totally defenseless Chinese. The withdrawal from Shanghai ends the British reign jn the Yangtze Delta established by the Opium War of 1842 and “legalized” by the Treaty of 1843, signed, symbolically enough, aboard a British warship at Nanking. The withdrawal from Peking and Tientsin terminates the period ushered in by the bloody Anglo-French invasion of North China in 1858 and 1860, and again in 1900.
It is not the passing of British power in China that is to be mourned, but the manner of it. Thirteen years ago the Chinese peoples rose in their scores of millions in a movement that threatened for a time to drive the British and their imperialist rivals together into the Pacific whence they came. It was then, in 1927, that the Powers rushed troops to Shanghai to defend the wealth of the International Settlement against the threat of Chinese nationalism. That’s how 1,200 U.S. marines happen to be there. The Communist International of Stalin allowed that great movement of the Chinese workers and peasants to be yoked to the landlords and capitalists, represented by Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. For crumbs from the imperialist table, Chiang beheaded the movement and established an imperialist puppet regime over the dead bodies of thousands of slaughtered militants.
The Kuomintang regime naturally could do nothing to release China from the imperialist stranglehold. It served only to deepen the chaos in Chinese economic life and laid the country open to the depredations of the Japanese imperialists which were renewed on a large scale in 1931.
Now the turns in the wheel of imperialist politics have placed Japan in a position to attempt to displace the British Empire as prime power in Asia. The British are going down, not before the overwhelming onslaught of slaves in revolt but under the blows of rival slavemasters. Britain’s passing in this way from the scene is no augury for a freer China. It becomes rather an episode in a new stage of Chinese enslavement.
Hongkong, French Indo-China, Singapore, the Dutch Indies all lie now at approaching stations on the Japanese march of conquest. Up until the collapse of France it had been generally understood that U.S. imperialism stood ready to challenge these advances and to fight for its own “right” to succeed to the mastery in Asia. Now instead the lords of Wall Street and Washington have to look to their holdings in the Americas. The 1,200 U.S. marines in Shanghai must soon follow the British in retreat. There may not be much of a future in it, but the present belongs to Japan in Asia.
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