The New Penguin History of the World (183 page)

In 1945 the Labour Party, which had long had the independence of India and Burma as part of its programme, came to power at Westminster. On 14 March 1946, while India was torn with Hindu–Muslim rioting and its politicians were squabbling over the future, the British government offered full independence. Nearly a year later, it put a pistol to the head of the Indians by announcing that it would hand over power not later than June 1948. The tangle of communal rivalries was cut, and the partition of the subcontinent followed, the greatest degree of governmental unity it had ever enjoyed coming to an end. On 15 August 1947 two new Dominions appeared within it, Pakistan and India. The first was Muslim and was itself divided into two slabs of land at the extremities of northern India; the second was officially secular but was overwhelmingly Hindu in composition and inspiration.

Perhaps partition was inevitable. India had never been ruled as one entity, even by the British, and Hindu and Muslim had been increasingly divided since the Mutiny. Nevertheless, its cost was tragic. The psychic wound to many nationalists was symbolized when Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic for his part in it. Huge massacres occurred in areas where there were minorities. Something like two million people fled to where their co-religionists were in control. Almost the only clear political gain on the morrow of independence was the solution, a bloody one, of the communal problem for the immediate future. Apart from this, the assets of the new states were the goodwill (arising from very mixed motives) shown to them by great powers, the inheritance of a civil service already largely native before independence, and an important infrastructure of institutions and services. These inheritances were not, however, equally shared, with India tending to enjoy more of them than Pakistan.

Such advantages could not do much to deal with the subcontinent’s economic and social backwardness. The worst problem was demographic. A steady rise in population had begun under British rule. Sometimes it was briefly mitigated by Malthusian disasters like the great influenza epidemic at the end of the First World War, which struck down five million Indians, or a famine in Bengal during the Second World War which carried off millions more. But in 1951 there was famine again in India, and in 1953 in Pakistan. The spectre of it lingered into the 1970s.

The subcontinent’s industrialization, although it had made important strides in the twentieth century (notably in the Second World War), did not offset this danger. It could not provide new jobs and earnings fast
enough for a growing population. Though the new India had most of what industry there was, her problems were graver in this respect than those of Pakistan. Outside her huge cities, most Indians were landless peasants, living in villages where, for all the egalitarian aspirations of some of the leaders of the new republic, inequality remained as great as ever. The landlords who provided the funds for the ruling Congress party and dominated its councils stood in the way of any land reform which could have dealt with this. In many ways, the past lay heavy on a new state proclaiming the western ideals of democracy, nationalism, secularism and material progress, and it was to encumber the road of reform and development.

China had for a long time been engaged in fighting off a different imperialism. Success against the Japanese and completion of its long revolution was made possible by the Second World War. The political phase of this transformation began in 1941, when the Sino-Japanese War merged in a world conflict. This gave China powerful allies and a new international standing. Significantly, the last vestiges of the ‘unequal treaties’ with Great Britain, France and the United States were then swept away. This was more important than the military help the Allies could give; for a long time they were too busy extricating themselves from the disasters of early 1942 to do much for China. A Chinese army, indeed, came instead to help to defend Burma and the land route to China from the Japanese. Still hemmed in to the west, though supported by American aircraft, the Chinese had for a long time to hold out as best they could, in touch with their allies only by air or the Burma Road. None the less a decisive change had begun.

China had at first responded to Japanese attacks with a sense of national unity long desired but never hitherto forthcoming except, perhaps, in the May 4th Movement. In spite of friction between the communists and the nationalists, sometimes breaking out into open conflict, this unity survived, broadly speaking, until 1941. Then, the new fact that the United States was now Japan’s major enemy, and would eventually destroy her, subtly began to transform the attitude of the nationalist government. It came to feel that as ultimate victory was certain, there was no point in using up men and resources in fighting the Japanese when they might be husbanded for the struggle against the communists after the peace. Some of its members went further. Soon the KMT was fighting the communists again.

Two Chinas were emerging. Nationalist China increasingly displayed the lethargy, self-seeking and corruption which had from the early 1930s tainted the KMT because of the nature of the support on which it drew.

The regime was repressive and stifled criticism. It alienated the intellectuals. Its soldiers, sometimes badly officered and undisciplined, terrorized the peasant as much as did the Japanese. Communist China was different. In large areas controlled by the communists (often behind the Japanese lines) a deliberate attempt was being made to ensure the support of as wide a spectrum of interests as possible by moderate but unambiguous reform and disciplined behaviour. Outright attacks on landlords were usually avoided, but peasant goodwill was cultivated by enforcing lower rents and abolishing usury. Meanwhile, Mao published a series of theoretical writings designed to prepare the new communist cadres for the task that lay ahead. There was a need for political education as the party and the army grew steadily in numbers; when the Japanese collapsed in 1945 there were about a million Chinese communist soldiers.

The suddenness of victory was the second factor that shaped the last stage of the Chinese Revolution. Huge areas of China had suddenly to be reoccupied and reincorporated in the Chinese state. But many of them were already under communist control before 1945 and others could not possibly be reached by nationalist forces before the communists dug themselves in there. The Americans did what they could by sending soldiers to hold some of the ports until the nationalists could take them over. In some places the Japanese were told to hold on until the Chinese government could re-establish its authority. But when the final and military phase of the Revolution opened, the communists held more territory than they had ever done before and held it in the main with the support of a population who had found that communist rule was by no means as bad as they had heard.

Albeit unwittingly, the Japanese, by launching their attack on the KMT regime, had in the end brought about the very triumph of the Chinese Revolution they had long striven to avoid. It is at least possible that if the nationalists had been undistracted by foreign invasion and had not suffered the crippling damage it inflicted, they might have been able to master Chinese communism in the short run. In 1937 the KMT could still draw heavily on patriotic goodwill; many Chinese believed that it was the authentic carrier of the Revolution. The war destroyed the chance of exploiting this, if it were true, but also enabled China to resume at last her long march towards world power from which she had been deflected first by Europeans and then by fellow Asians. The long frustration of Chinese nationalism was about to end, and the beneficiaries would be the communists.

The defeat of the KMT in the civil war took three years. Although the Japanese usually sought to surrender to the KMT or Americans, the communists had acquired authority in new areas and with it large stocks
of arms from them. The Russians, who had invaded Manchuria in the last days before the Japanese surrender, helped them by giving them access to the Japanese arms there. Mao made deliberately moderate policy pronouncements and continued to push forward with land reform. This conferred a further great advantage on the communists in the civil war, which continued until 1949; victory in that war was essentially a victory of the countryside over a city-based regime.

American policy was increasingly disillusioned by the revealed inadequacy and corruption of the Chiang K’ai-shek government. In 1947 American forces were withdrawn from China and the United States abandoned the efforts it had hitherto made to mediate between the two Chinas. In the following year, with most of the north in communist hands, the Americans began to cut down the amount of financial and military aid given to the KMT. From this time on, the nationalist government ran militarily and politically downhill; as this became obvious, more and more employees of government and local authorities sought to make terms with the communists while they might still do so. The conviction spread that a new era was dawning. By the beginning of December, no important nationalist military force remained intact on the mainland and Chiang withdrew to Formosa (Taiwan). The Americans cut off their aid while this withdrawal was under way and publicly blamed the inadequacies of the nationalist regime for the débâcle. Meanwhile, on 1 October 1949, the People’s Republic of China was officially inaugurated at Peking and the most populous communist state in the world had come into existence. Once again, the Mandate of Heaven had passed.

In south-east Asia and Indonesia the Second World War was as decisive as elsewhere in ending colonial rule, although the pace was bloodier and faster in Dutch and French colonies than British. The grant of representative institutions by the Dutch in Indonesia before 1939 had not checked the growth of a nationalist party, and a flourishing communist movement had appeared by then, too. Some nationalist leaders, among them one Achmed Sukarno, collaborated with the Japanese when they occupied the islands in 1942. They were in a favourable position to seize power when the Japanese surrendered, and proclaimed an independent Indonesian republic before the Dutch could return. Fighting and negotiation followed for nearly two years until agreement was reached for an Indonesian republic still under the Dutch Crown; this did not work. Fighting went on again, the Dutch pressing forward vainly with their ‘police operations’ in one of the first campaigns by a former colonial power to attract the full blast of communist and anti-colonial stricture at the United Nations. Both India and Australia (which had concluded that the Dutch would be wise to
conciliate the independent Indonesia which must eventually emerge) took the matter to the Security Council. Finally the Dutch gave in. The story begun by the East India Company of Amsterdam three and a half centuries before thus came to an end in 1949 with the creation of the United States of Indonesia, a mixture of more than a hundred million people scattered over hundreds of islands, of scores of races and religions. A vague union with the Netherlands under the Dutch Crown survived, but was dissolved five years later. Three hundred thousand Dutch citizens, white and brown, arrived in the Netherlands from Indonesia in the early 1950s.

For a time the French in Indo-China seemed to be holding on better than the Dutch. That area’s wartime history had been somewhat different from that of Malaysia or Indonesia, because although the Japanese had exercised complete military control there since 1941 French sovereignty was not formally displaced until March 1945. The Japanese then amalgamated Annam, Cochin-China and Tongking to form a new state of Vietnam under the Emperor of Annam. As soon as the Japanese surrendered, though, the chief of the local communist party, the Viet Minh, installed himself in the government palace at Hanoi and proclaimed the Vietnam republic. This was Ho Chi Minh, a man with long experience in the communist party and also in Europe. He had already received American aid and support and believed he had the backing of the Chinese, too. The revolutionary movement quickly spread while Chinese forces entered north Vietnam and British were sent to the south. It was soon evident that if the French wished to re-establish themselves it would not be easy. The British co-operated with them, but the Chinese did not, and dragged their feet over re-imposing French authority. A large expeditionary force was sent to Indo-China and a concession was made in that the French recognized the republic of Vietnam as an autonomous state within the French Union. But now there arose the question of giving Cochin, a major rice-producing area, separate status and on this all attempts to agree broke down. Meanwhile, French soldiers were sniped at and their convoys were attacked. At the end of 1946 there was an attack on residents in Hanoi and many deaths. Hanoi was bombarded (6000 were killed) and reoccupied by French troops and Ho Chi Minh fled.

Thus began a war which was to last thirty years, in which the communists were to struggle essentially for the nationalist aim of a united country, while the French tried to retain a diminished Vietnam which, with the other Indo-Chinese states, would remain inside the French Union. By 1949 they had come round to including Cochin-China in Vietnam and recognizing Cambodia and Laos as ‘associate states’. But new outsiders were now becoming interested and the Cold War had come to Indo-China. The government of
Ho Chi Minh was recognized in Moscow and Peking, that of the Annamese emperor, whom the French had set up, by the British and Americans.

Thus in Asia decolonialization quickly burst out of the simplicities Roosevelt had envisaged. As the British began to liquidate their recovered heritage, this further complicated things. Burma and Ceylon became independent in 1947. In the following year, communist-supported guerrilla war began in Malaya; though it was to be unsuccessful and not to impede steady progress towards independence in 1957, it was one of the first of the many post-colonial problems which were to torment American policy. Growing antagonism with the communist world soon cut across visceral anti-colonialism.

Only in the Middle East did things go on seeming clear-cut. In May 1948, a new state, Israel, came into existence in Palestine. This marked the end of forty years during which only two great powers had needed to agree in order to manage the area. France and Great Britain had not found this too difficult. In 1939 the French still held League of Nations mandates in Syria and the Lebanon (their original mandate had been divided into two), and the British retained theirs in Palestine. Elsewhere in the Arab lands the British exercised varying degrees of influence or power over the new Arab rulers of individual states. The most important were Iraq, where a small British force, mainly of air force units, was maintained, and Egypt, where a substantial garrison still protected the Suez Canal. The latter had become more and more important in the 1930s as Italy showed increasing hostility to Great Britain.