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A Cultural Approach to the Postwar Problems of Southeast Asia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

H. G. Quaritch Wales
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Extract

My intention is to discuss a particular approach to these problems rather than the problems themselves. This question of approach does seem of basic importance at a time when so many Americans are about to develop their wartime interest in Southeast Asia. Naturally this first interest has largely been focussed on political and economic issues. Now I think it is time that we bring to the fore the concept that in the longer view it is the matter of our cultural contacts with the East that is of most penetrating significance. I am going to show why I think that we must rid ourselves of the common impression that these contacts are going to be ruled by westernization, or acculturation, and that hence we absolutely must try to build our future relations with the East on a basis of sympathetic understanding.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , May 1945 , pp. 217 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1945

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References

1 This fact, owing to the much publicized influence of such men as the Tagores, Iqbal and Gandhi, is more usually recognized with regard to India than in the case of China about which country there is so much wishful thinking. But while it may be easy for some to decide that Chiang Kai-shek's New Life Movement lacks real significance, it is more difficult to dismiss the words of that experienced missionary Le P. S.J., Léon Wieger In his Textes philosophiquts, Confuciisme, Taoïsme, Budd-hisme (Hien-hien, 1930)Google Scholar he writes: “The physiognomy of ancient China has certainly changed since it became a republic: that is a visible fact. But what of its ideas? Well, it is also a fact that beneath the American ‘feelings’ with which certain of the young people have sprinkled it … it is a fact, I say, that fundamentally the Chinese people still think as they thought for millenniums since their remote origin. Confucius is no longer the author studied by scholars; he is more, for he is recognized as the moralist, the economist, the politician of China. Taoism, which had fallen to the level of a despised and dreaded superstition, is now considered by certain scholars to be the real national philosophy. Buddhism, whose good old legends once only raised a smile, is rising again in China, winning minds by the loftiness of its idealism, and winning hearts by the sweetness of its charity.”

2 But a step in the right direction is now foreshadowed in the White Paper which provides that a constitution for Burma is to be drawn up by the people of Burma themselves and should “take in account not only the British but the other various types of constitution in democratically governed countries.”

3 It is noteworthy too that Lord Hailey in a recent address to the East India Association in London deplored the indifference to the study of Indian culture that has prevailed since 1857 (the Indian Mutiny). He suggested not only that the London School of Oriental Studies and other institutions develop and recast their courses of study, but also that the British take other measures to acquire an intimate knowledge of Indian culture with a view to appreciating what is dear to the Indian people.