Considering the former issue, then, it would appear that virtually all the peninsulas and archipelagoes lying between China and Australia offer attractive fields for yellow, particularly Chinese, race-expansion. Ethnically they are all colored men's lands; politically they are all, save Siam, under white control; Britain, France, Holland, and the United States being the titular owners of these extensive territories. So far as the native races are concerned, none of them seem to possess the vitality and economic efficiency needed to maintain themselves against unrestricted Chinese immigration. Whether in the British Straits Settlements and North Borneo, French Indo-China, the Dutch Indies, the American Philippines, or independent Siam, the Chinaman, so far as he has been allowed, has displayed his practical superiority, and in places where, like the Straits Settlements, he has been allowed a free hand, he has virtually supplanted the native stock, reducing the latter to an impotent and vanishing minority. The chief barriers to Chinese race-expansion in these regions are legal hindrances or prohibitions of immigration, and of course such barriers are in their essence artificial and liable to removal under any shift of circumstances. Many observers predict that most of these lands will ultimately become Chinese. Says Alleyne Ireland, a recognized authority on these regions: "There is every reason to suppose that, throughout the tropics, possibly excepting India, the Chinaman, even though he should continue to emigrate in no greater force than hitherto, will gradually supersede all the native races."[30] Certainly, if this be true, China has here a vast outlet for her surplus population. It has been estimated that the undeveloped portions of the Dutch Indies alone are capable of supporting 100,000,000 people living on the frugal Chinese plane. Their present population is 8,000,000 semi-savages. China's possibilities of race-expansion in the colored regions of the Far East are thus excellent. The same cannot be said, however, for Japan. The Japanese, bred in a distinctively temperate, island environment, have not the Chinese adaptability to climatic variation. The Japanese, like the white man, does not thrive in tropic heat, nor does he possess the white man's ability to resist sub-Arctic cold. Formosa is not in the real tropics, yet Japanese colonists have not done well there. On the other hand, even the far-from-Arctic winters of Hokkaido (part of the Japanese archipelago) seem too chilly for the Japanese taste.