Modern China and Japan

Following the war, the United States took over Japan and turned it into a democracy. The United States military built permanent military bases in Japan. Japan turned its economy so that it focused on importing raw materials that it would use to manufacture finished goods, like cars and electronics, for export to the rest of the world. Japan rebuilt its economy in a process that is described as the "authoritarian development" model. This was different from the capitalistic approach of America and Europe where the government does not work closely with business. In the Japanese "authoritarian development" model was based on the government directly helping Japanese companies to develop products for export and dominate foreign markets. This collaboration of private companies and government helped Japan become the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. The success of Japan caused many other Asian countries, like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, to imitate the Japanese "authoritarian development" model and become wealthy by becoming export oriented economies. The success of these countries in developing their economies resulted in them becoming known as the Asian Tiger Economies.

After World War Two, the Cold War became a dominant issue in Asia. The start of the Cold War in Asia was different from how it started in Europe. In Europe, World War Two ended with the American and Soviet militaries confronting each other in occupied Germany and the control of the continent was clearly divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. In Europe, the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union never resulted in a war. In contrast to Europe, the Cold War in Asia involved several proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union as the super powers divided the region. The Cold War began in Asia with the Chinese Civil War between Chiang Kia-shek's KMT and Mao Zedong's communists in the wake of the defeat of Japan. Mao's communist army emerged from World War Two stronger than Chiang's KMT and in 1949, the communists were able to drive the KMT out of mainland China (the KMT took over Taiwan) and Mao declared it to be the People's Republic of China. After China became communist, the United States became determined to block the further expansion of communism in Asia with military force - this expanded the policy of Containment to Asia. The United States fought both the Korean and Vietnam wars to prevent the expansion of communism. The United States was successful in protecting South Korea (which went on to become one of the Asia Tiger Economies) but lost the Vietnam War, which ended with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos becoming communist countries.

The Cold War in Asia took a different shape than the conflict in Europe against the Soviet Union because of an ideological split between Mao's ideas of Communism and that of the Soviet Union. This division went back to the 1930's and was based in the doctrine of the Soviet Union being that communism was a movement of urban industrial workers and Mao's idea of organizing a peasant communist movement. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Mao and the Soviet government came into conflict over the legacy of Stalin which caused the Soviet Union to withdraw all of its support for China. After this, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a radical program to turn China into a modern industrial country by having farmers over plant their fields and make steel in backyard furnaces. This resulted in a massive famine that killed upwards of 50 million people. In the wake of the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao empowered Deng Xiaoping to fix the economy. Unlike Mao, who was a committed communist idealist, Deng was much more pragmatic in his approach to reforming China. Mao was threatened by Deng's success and rejected it because it was not sufficiently communist. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution that sought to overturn Chinese society and make it a purely communist society. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao supported radical communist students, called the Red Guard, in destroying traditional parts of Chinese society and attacking any person in authority who did not seem idealistic enough. Deng lost power in this event and was persecuted by the Red Guard. After a few years, Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution had gone too far and the country was on the verge of chaos. He recalled Deng and returned him to power. As Mao's health failed in the early 1970's, Deng and other pragmatic reformers fought Mao's idealistic supporters for control of China. Deng prevailed in this struggle.

In the midst of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and America's failing war in Vietnam, the United States and the People's Republic of China began to build diplomatic ties, which culminated in the visit of American president Richard Nixon to China in 1972. The United States reached out to China as a Cold War tactic of exploiting the division between the Soviet Union and China. The opening up of relations between the United States and China paved the way for Deng's reform of the Chinese economy from one focused on building an peasant communist society to becoming a global economic power. Violating all communist ideals, Deng created Special Economic Zones in coastal China in which Western companies could build factories to take advantage of employing inexpensive Chinese workers. This set in motion a process of economic growth in China that over the course of forty years would lift hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty and make China the second largest economy in the world (by 2020 it will be the largest economy in the world).

In many ways the process of economic development begun by Deng was an imitation of the Japanese model that was used by the Asia Tigers, only on a much larger scale. One significant question is whether this process of economic development would bring democracy and human rights to China. The Asian Tiger economies, similar to China under Deng, began the process of economic reform as authoritarian governments. It was the process of economic development that raised people's standard of living which turned them into democracies. In contrast, Deng and the Chinese government opposed any reforms that would change China into democracy. For example, Deng used military power to violently crush the pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in 1989. As a result, unlike the Soviet Union where the process of economic reform resulted in the collapse of communism (and the Soviet Union), the Chinese communist government has firmly controlled the orderly transformation of China's economy from a centrally planned economy to a market oriented economy. While this has allowed China to grow its economy at a rapid pace for almost forty years, it is clear that this growth has come at the expense of significant human rights violations.

Source # 1 - Infographic Comparing the Economies of China and the United States