The Awakening of Asia

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 28, 1908

The Awakening of Asia

THIS is a peculiar time. Not only are the minds of the peoples of the West agitated by new and unusual problems in almost every sphere of intellectual activity, but the peoples of the East, some of whom were looked upon as being in the last stages of stagnation, are being stirred by new aspirations and are becoming the cause of serious fears in the minds of their political guardians. This is again revealed in a recent London dispatch:—

The unrest of Asia is arousing the gravest apprehension in the minds of all responsible statesmen of Europe. No day passes without bringing renewed evidence of it among all the older races, from the Bosphorus to Peking. It is a most alarming problem which faces the British government in its own dominions, but it is by no means confined to India. The Spectator succinctly summarizes the situation in an ominous article, in which it says:—

“The Western peoples will soon be compelled to revise their ideas of the Eastern world. For centuries past they have thought of Asia as a continent

whose inhabitants are lost in apathetic quietude. Now, however, one rarely sees a telegram from any country in Asia which does not record a disturbance, sometimes of the most dangerous kind.

“The rise of Japan, which within the last century was supposed to be voluntarily isolated from mankind, has shattered the old conception of Asia, and has restarted the idea of the yellow peril, which was thought to have been extinguished with the extinction of the Tartar ascendancy in Russia. There is supposed to be a revolution pending in Far Cathay, which Pushkin once described as lying in its dotage.

The dispatches every day record some new symptom of the unrest which is prevailing in India affecting not her soldiery, as in the mutiny, but the whole population in their uncountable millions. In Indo-China the French officials are haunted by the possibility of a vast popular insurrection. Afghanistan's warlike clans are evidently pondering upon the possibility of a new descent into the southern peninsula, and may yet compel their nominal sovereign either to let them loose or to take their lead in a war to which the discontented in India are said, on good authority, to be perpetually inciting him.

The fact is often disputed, but there undoubtedly is a comity of Asia which is at least as operative as the comity of Europe, or it is possible that there is an emotion akin to the one which produced the crusades and that, though not so directly connected with any religious impulse, still is fatal to quiescence, and is sweeping through Asia from Nagasaki to the Bosphorus, stirring up races which for ages have slept the sleep of content, but are now determined to advance upon some path, mental or physical, which they think open.

The Eastern question is not yet settled, and the far East will doubtless contribute to its solution. Amid all this unrest among the nations both civilized and uncivilized, the King of heaven is working out his own purposes and shaping things for the approaching consummation. The only permanent peace is found in harmony with his will.