Britain's Imperial Retreat From China, 1900-1931 by Chow Phoebe

Author:Chow, Phoebe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Bolshevik threat and the Yellow Peril

British policy towards China between 1919 and 1924 was marked by caution and passivity. This was due on the one hand to Britain’s financial and military weakness after the Great War and on the other to the complexities of China’s internal troubles. Other than pronouncements of willingness to discuss treaty revision at the Washington Conference, there were no obvious steps taken toward imperial retreat. But fears of growing Soviet influence in China caused the British public to urge its government to find a way to influence China and gain Chinese goodwill.

At Washington, it seemed that Britain had neutralised the Japanese threat, or at least delayed trouble. While discussing the building of the Singapore naval base in 1925, the Cabinet maintained that Japan would not be a threat within the next ten years and thus that there would be no need to provide a battle fleet at Singapore.70 However, one power continued to operate outside the international order arranged at Washington. The Soviet Union, in keeping with the revolutionary impulse of its foreign policy in the early 1920s, was intent upon upsetting the order in East Asia and Comintern efforts to export the October Revolution and seemed to find fertile ground in China. By co-opting Chinese nationalism into the cause of world revolution, the Comintern glossed over the inherent contradictions in this marriage of convenience.71 But at the second Comintern Congress in 1920 Lenin argued that communists should join nationalists in their war for liberation and work together with them until the proletarian class had developed and was ready for proletarian revolution. In 1921 the Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet (Maring) went to China to develop the First United Front of the GMD and the CCP.72 The USSR’s embrace of the nationalist cause seemed to trump the United States’ championing of Chinese self-determination and also threatened to stir up unwanted trouble in Britain’s imperial holdings. By 1925 the Cabinet was worrying that Russia would also encroach on Persia and Afghanistan.73 As Antony Best has said about this period, ‘the idea that the Soviet Union and communist ideology posed a serious menace to British interests in Europe and the Empire was a constant that never disappeared from the minds of the many politicians and civil servants in Whitehall.’74

Moscow-sponsored Chinese nationalism seemed to many like another iteration of the Yellow Peril. The tide of nationalism, 400 million strong, if successfully directed to the Soviet cause, would radically alter the balance of power in East Asia. And the tide seemed unstoppable. Sir Charles Eliot, the ambassador to Japan, told Austen Chamberlain, the foreign secretary, that not only were socialism and communism prevalent among Japanese university students but that the lower ranks of the army may have been ‘infected’ by Bolshevism.75 Indeed, Bolshevism was commonly considered ‘a disease, not a normal state’.76 Furthermore, Eliot, continued, Soviet influence in Peking, Canton and the large Chinese cities could become a ‘serious menace’.77

Operating in the contemporary context were popular Yellow Peril fears, which were the subject of a number of popular books and newspaper articles.

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