After Tamerlane (67 page)

As so often before in Eurasian history, China's role was crucial. By the end of 1950 its mainland had been unified under Communist rule. Mao's remarkable victory may have owed much to the ‘peasant nationalism' of China's rural masses (kindled by hatred of Japan's
occupation),
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as well as to the appeal of the party's land reform programme. The proportions are still disputed.
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But there was no doubt that China had once more resumed a premier place in East Asia, with a huge battle-hardened army. Under certain conditions, this might have resulted in an inward-looking policy of domestic reform that left China's Asian neighbours to their own devices. In the actual climate of the early 1950s, such an outcome was unlikely. Instead, the newregime's leaders adopted the viewof their republican predecessors, and the Ch'ing before them, that their rule would be safe only if the landward approaches to China were in trustworthy hands. They forcefully reasserted Beijing's authority in Tibet. When it seemed likely that northern Korea might fall under non-Communist control, they intervened massively in the Korean War. Two million Chinese served in Korea, and more than 150,000 died there.
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Mao took a similar viewof China's frontier in the south. At the critical stage of the struggle between the Viet Minh and the French in northern Vietnam, Chinese military help and strategic ‘advice' played a crucial part in France's crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the prelude to the end of its colonial power in Indochina.
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Beijing's fear of encirclement sprang from the fact that its Kuomintang enemies had survived (on Taiwan) and with American help might resume the political struggle. For, despite the scale of their victory, Mao and his colleagues were all too aware that it had not been total. They faced the challenge of building a newindustrial state on China's agrarian base – which would have to pay the bill. They had to anchor their power in a new social order – which would have to be fashioned. They had to defend a revolution.

The sense of threat from without as well as within precluded retreat into the splendid seclusion favoured by newdynasts in previous eras. It was dramatically symbolized by the denial of membership of the United Nations, instigated by America and reversed only in 1971. At first Chinese policy mixed caution and hope. The obvious urgency of an industrial programme, as well as the need to balance American help to the Kuomintang foe, drove the People's Republic into alliance with Stalin. In Korea and Vietnam in 1953–4, Beijing accepted a compromise peace of partition. After France's defeat in the First Indochina War, Chou En-lai sought to disarm regional fears (and stifle
American influence) by soft-voiced diplomacy. But by the late 1950s Mao was convinced that harsher methods were needed. He mistrusted Moscow's call for coexistence with capitalism, and saw the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's summit diplomacy as a betrayal of China. Sino-Soviet solidarity lasted barely a decade. Faced with the hardening of American support for the Taiwan regime, Mao raised the military stakes by bombarding Quemoy, a close-in offshore island under Kuomintang rule. He countered the loss of momentum in China's transformation at home with an aggressive new strategy of rural collectivization, the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward'. The redistribution of land from landlords to peasants turned out (as in Russia) to be only the prelude to the state's taking control. And in 1960 he approved Hanoi's insistent demand to resume the armed struggle (suspended since 1954) for a Communist victory in South Vietnam.
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Mao's newcourse was to make China the sponsor of revolutionary violence against surviving colonial states, or those successor regimes that colluded with capitalism. His message was simple. Imperialism's overthrowwas far from complete. Decolonization must come – if it was to be real – by a great rural revolt of impoverished peasants: a global ‘people's war' against the world's bourgeoisie.
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Mao's drastic programme for a post-imperial world aroused wide enthusiasm, intellectual and political, not least among those who hoped to savour its victory from a comfortable distance. In the 1960s and '70s it offered a hopeful alternative to the failures and compromises of post-colonial regimes. It attracted those who still hoped to reverse capitalism's unexpected revival in the post-war world. As we shall see in a moment, it achieved its most striking success in the special conditions of South East Asia. But on a wider view it was the containment of China and Maoist anti-imperialism that was really significant. In part this arose from the disruptive effects of Mao's political doctrines – especially his ‘Cultural Revolution', a form of massive purge – on the Chinese economy. In part it reflected the revival of tension with China's great northern neighbour. But the most serious obstacle to Mao's ambitions grewout of the dramatic divergence between East Asia's two great states.

If China's turn towards Communism confounded most wartime predictions, no less surprising was the readiness of Japan (in John
Dower's striking phrase) to ‘embrace defeat'.
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At the end of the war, Japan had been occupied by a large American garrison, military and civilian, nearly a million strong.
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For more than six years, an American viceroy (for most of that time General Douglas MacArthur) held executive power, and his approval was needed for any major decision. Japan's sovereignty was suspended; Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad; no criticism was allowed of the occupation regime. A raft of reforms was designed to root out what were seen as the sources of Japan's militaristic imperialism. Women were enfranchised and the voting age was lowered, more than doubling the electorate. A new constitution prescribed by the occupiers barred the armed forces from a seat in the government and renounced war as an instrument of national policy. The great family-ruled business combines or
zaibatsu
were broken up. Land reform reduced the power of the landlords and doubled the proportion of those who farmed their own land to some 60 per cent.
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Trade unions were encouraged. New textbooks were written, and the educational syllabus was democratized.
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So fierce an assault upon the pre-war order might have provoked a hostile reaction, since the civilian elite with whom the Americans dealt remained deeply conservative. In fact it formed part of a remarkable bargain. When their fears about China led them to ‘reverse course', the Americans accepted the need for a strong Japanese state with an industrial economy. They made their peace with the powerful bureaucracy. They had the tacit support of the Japanese emperor, whose role as a figurehead had been carefully preserved. Amid the growing turmoil in mainland East Asia and the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in June 1950, Japan's conservative leaders also had little room for manoeuvre. They were anxious to end the American occupation and restore Japanese sovereignty. But an open challenge to Washington's policy might anger the American public and delay independence. It might encourage the Left, who commanded a third of Japanese votes, and induce more radical change.

The result was to give the Americans an extraordinary leverage over the shape and direction of the newJapanese state. The peace treaty signed in San Francisco in 1951 returned Japanese sovereignty, though neither the Soviet Union nor China was a signatory. America's terms were stiff. Japan was required to accept a mutual-security pact that
allowed American forces to use any part of the country and exempted their personnel from Japanese jurisdiction. The island of Okinawa, annexed by Japan in 1879 and the scene of an epic battle in the Pacific War, became a great American base, no longer administered as part of Japan. The Japanese economy was linked to America's through a fixed exchange rate, while its old market in China was closed in deference to America's trade embargo. At the critical stage of East Asia's post-war formation, Japan had become the indispensable bulwark of America's regional power, the great offshore platform from which its economic weight and military muscle could be used as a check on the resurgence of China. American influence was also strongly felt in Japanese popular culture. Ironically, in decolonized East Asia, the influence of the West (not merely of Europe) was asserted more forcefully than before the Second World War.

Asia's third great state was India. India enjoyed the prestige of being Asia's largest democracy. Under Nehru's leadership, it might have expected to play a prominent part in settling the shape of post-colonial Asia.
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Indeed, Nehru may have hoped to partner Beijing to exclude outside influence from the continent's politics – as he had urged at Bandung. But the odds were against it. India's influence was hobbled by its own post-colonial inheritance. Its independence had come with a traumatic partition and left an unresolved conflict to poison relations. It was a further misfortune that the question of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan but largely held by India) soon became linked to the highly charged issue of Tibetan autonomy. China's brutal suppression of Tibet's traditional government after 1950 was achieved in part by cutting its links through the Himalayas. The two main routes between India and Tibet lay through Sikkim to the south and Leh in Kashmir to the west.
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Military activity on an ill-defined border was a source of Sino-Indian tension, and eventually war.
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India's defeat (in 1962) was aptly symbolic of Nehru's grander ambitions. India's political system (which dispersed considerable power and resources to its state-level governments), the threat ‘at home' of war with Pakistan, and the lacklustre progress of the Indian economy (India's share of world trade fell by two-thirds in the 1950s and 1960s)
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conspired to frustrate India's claim, at this stage, to be an Asian ‘great power'.

In its widest sense, the course of Asia's decolonization was powerfully shaped by the limitations and weaknesses of its largest states. Neither singly nor in combination could they hope to resolve the succession disputes that arose from Asia's imperial past or the ideological conflicts of its revolutionary present. That left the door open for the outside powers whom Nehru had wanted to banish. It was China's subservience that let Stalin unleash the North Korean attack in June 1950.
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It was control of Japan that allowed the deployment of a huge American army to defend South Korea. But the main theatre of conflict where external power played a critical part was in South East Asia.

This was no coincidence. Here the end of colonialism was a much more ragged affair than in South Asia (where British rule had collapsed) or East Asia (where the Japanese empire was shattered by war). This was partly because of American help to both Britain and France (though not to the Dutch). But it was also a product of ethnic and religious division, a fragmented geography, and the limited progress that state-building had made in the colonial era. It had appeared at first as if wartime occupation by Japan had broken the back of European colonial rule across the whole of the region. It had given local political leaders just enough freedom (and just enough time) to build newpolitical loyalties and smash the old colonial machine. In Burma, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), new ‘national' governments appeared. When the Allied troops of South East Asia Command (mainly British and Indians) returned in the wake of the Japanese retreat, they found in place newclaimants to power. The result was a stand-off. The colonial powers' tactic was to co-opt the newleaders by promising the devolution of power but not real independence. But both local politics and the international scene were much too unstable for any bargain to hold. In Burma, the British were quickly forced out by the obvious cost of reimposing control and the negligible benefit of trying to do so.
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In Indonesia, Indochina and British Malaya the struggle was more protracted.

The Dutch hoped in Indonesia to exploit the fact that nationalism enjoyed only limited backing across much of the archipelago, where fear of Javanese domination and (in some cases) anti-Islamic feeling made Dutch colonial rule the lesser of two evils. But the reality was
that overall Dutch control, even under a Netherlands–Indonesia ‘commonwealth', could not be maintained without the backing of Java, the most developed part of the island complex, with five-eighths of its population. It was Dutch failure to achieve this, and the American refusal to back a prolonged guerrilla war in Sumatra and Java (which might have wrecked the Indonesian economy and widened support for Communism), that forced the Dutch out in 1949–50.
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In Indochina the outcome was different. Here the French were able to reinsert themselves in both the north (Tonkin) and the south (Cochin China). They faced a formidable movement, the Viet Minh, under Ho Chi Minh, based upon peasant support in the north and in Cochin China's plantation economy. What allowed the French to hang on for a time was a crucial advantage. Ho's brand of Vietnamese nationalism (Ho himself was a Marxist and a veteran of the inter-war Communist International) was disliked by large sections of Vietnamese society: the propertied classes, much of the urban population, Catholics (who formed up to 20 per cent of Tonkin's population), and followers of the sects Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, as well as some in the upland ethnic minorities.
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Many of these remained uncommitted, or backed the attempt of the Vietnamese monarch, Bao Dai, to gain Vietnamese autonomy within the ‘French Union'. This was the platform for France's military struggle to destroy the Viet Minh and for the massive American aid to keep Vietnam out of the hands of (in the graphic language of the US Secretary of State) ‘Chi commie hatchet men and armed forces'.
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By mid-1953, however, Bao Dai's credibility had come to depend overwhelmingly on French military prestige. When that was shattered at Dien Bien Phu the following year, his position, and France's, became untenable. Yet the result was not an easy triumph for Ho.