LABOUR Monthly, December 1942
Source: LABOUR Monthly, December 1942, p. 387-388, book review by R. Page Arnot;
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.
Inside Asia by John Gunther: 1942 war edition (Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.).
Russia, Japan and Mongolia by G.D.R. Phillips (Frederick Muller, cloth 4s., paper 2s. 6d.).
Japan and the Pacific Theatre of War by Jack Chen (Lawrence & Wishart, is.).
Inside Asia is a light-weight book, but (with a caution) thoroughly worth reading. John Gunther is a lively American journalist who travels country after country, interviews personages, reads up the recent books, keeps his eyes open and snaps up unconsidered trifles. The result is that almost every chapter could be published as a newspaper despatch, whilst as a whole it is informative, interesting and far superior either to the usual formal study or the literary man’s musings abroad. Gunther is another example of the new species, the journalist become author, of which the United States has given several, such as Edgar Snow or Anna Louisa Strong on this same subject of Asia. A man who begins a chapter with the sentence: “Mr. Gandhi, who is an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father, is the greatest Indian since Buddha” has obviously been trained in American newspaper technique.
The defects of his method and outlook show themselves, particularly in his treatment of India, while of all relating to the U.S.S.R. in Asia he shows no grasp, and occasional prejudice. But on the personages and customs of Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and China (where his new edition oddly omits any treatment of Mao-tse-Tung) he provides an interesting Who’s Who, together with just as much historical and other background as he considers his wide public can digest. Finally, he is a man who hates Fascism, wherever he finds it – in Europe or in Asia. In this new edition he has added much about Shintoist Japan, continued his story of China’s heroic resistance, and has given an account of the first three months after Pearl Harbour of the war in the Far East, up to the fall of Singapore and the capture of Java.
The book by G.D.R. Phillips has a more limited scope and is really concerned with the Mongolian People’s Republic where a small population, mainly of cattle-breeders, inhabit the vast space marked as Outer Mongolia in maps of Asia or China and are building up in those last few years both a new life for themselves and a bulwark against Japanese aggression. It is a strange story: how the Mongol horsemen of Jenghiz Khan and Kublai Khan, who conquered China, invaded India and swept across Europe to the Danube had by the eighteenth century become an exploited nomadic peasantry, oppressed by their priestly rulers and Chinese overlords; how in the twentieth century Tsarist Russia extended rapacious hands over Mongolia, and how from 1918 onwards became a place d'armes of the Japanese puppets, the Ataman Semenoff and the Baltic Baron Ungern, against the Soviets, until the rise of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party won them their independence. Since then, in the last twenty years, with the steady help and assistance of the U.S.S.R., a new life has built up for the Mongols, who showed themselves capable of solving their most pressing internal problems and of repelling, along with the Red Army, attacks of the Japanese on the Mongol-Manchurian border in summer, 1939. This story, together with the methods and designs of Japan in relation both to Mongolia and the U.S.S.R. recently and at the present time, is set forth clearly in a book which should be read widely now. In any subsequent edition an index would be desirable and maps indispensable.
Jack Chen’s book is a manual for the Pacific theatre of war. Equipped with map, chronology, figures of resources, etc., it covers in seventy-five pages the Pacific panorama, the rise of Japan from feudalism to capitalism, in Fascist imperialism, the class forces within and the drive to war. Following the lines laid down in the 1927 Tanaka Memorandum (which is more fully excerpted in Phillips), it describes the continental expansion of Japanese Imperialism, and then deals with the South Sea expansion into Indo-China, Thailand, Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies. It ends with the argument for the democratic offensive against Axis slavery being organised by freedom to India and the peoples on the shores of the Pacific: in this way the lessons of Malaya and Burma can be learned and the mode of Chinese resistance copied effectively.
Concise, well arranged and politically clear.
R. PAGE ARNOT.