Overview of Asia in the Twentieth Century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Asia was a region that had been profoundly impacted by Western Imperialism, with many countries in Asia being part of European empires. This was the case with India which was the "Jewel of the Crown" of the British Empire and ruled directly from London. China was still technically ruled by the Qing Emperor, but, after the Boxer Rebellion, was really divided into regions directly controlled by Western powers. It was only the American imposed Open Door Policy that kept China as one united territory. Japan was the only Asian country that was able to both resist European Imperialism and also match European military power. It did this by imitating the European powers and transforming itself into an industrial power with a modern military that it used to defeat the Russians in the Russo -Japanese War. Similar to the Europeans, the Japanese used this power to build an empire in Asia by taking over Korea and participating in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.
The long and violent process of turning China into a modern country began with Chinese Revolution in 1912 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. The revolutionary forces in China were unable to organize a new government and the country descended into warlordism in which the country was divided into regions controlled by private armies. In these condition, the leader Sun Yat-sen organized the Koumintang (KMT) to take over China and turn it into a modern republic following the Western model based on individual rights, democracy and capitalism. However, in 1919, the Versailles Treaty gave Japan control of the parts of China that had been run by Germany. This set off a set of protests in China called the Fourth of May Movement in which Chinese reformists turned away from the Western Democratic model because it was viewed as imperialistic. Instead, Sun turned to the newly established Soviet Union for assistance in building the KMT army in return for allowing a communist movement to begin organizing in China. The Soviet support helped the KMT build a strong army and take over China in 1927. However, by this time, Sun was dead and his successor Chiang Kai-shek opposed communism and massacred the Chinese communists. The Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong survived the massacre by hiding in the rural countryside where he began to build a peasant communist army. In 1933, Chiang tried to destroy the Mao's communist army, but Mao was able to save it by retreating to the far north of China in an event called the Long March.
In contrast to China, Japan emerged from World War One being very interested in Western culture and becoming more liberal. However, Japan was confronted by the difficulty it had in building it modern industrial economy with limited natural resources, like oil, coal and iron. This lead to a struggle in Japan as its liberal government came into conflict with Japanese military and industry that looked to the rest of Asia as a source of natural resources for its economy. This conflict resulted in the military and industry taking over the country so as to build a larger Asian empire to secure resources for the Japanese economy. After this, Japan began to expand into northern China. Chiang Kai-shek ignored Japanese expansion to focus on destroying Mao's communists. Similar to Nazi aggression in Europe, Chiang's inaction to Japanese aggression had the effect of further encouraging Japanese expansion.
World War Two in Asia began in 1937 when Japan invaded and conquered all of coastal China, pushing Chiang's KMT government into the interior of China. After capturing coastal China, in 1941, the Japanese continued to expand southward to conquer the European colonies in South East Asia and Indonesia. At this point, the Japanese attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor because it was the only power that could challenge Japan's ambitions for building a Pacific Empire. This event brought the United States into World War Two. While Japan portrayed itself as fighting Western Imperialism, in reality it treated the conquered people in its empire similar to way its Nazi allies treated the conquered people in Europe. The brutality of the Japanese occupation of China resulted in Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong forming an uneasy alliance of the KMT and communist forces against the Japanese.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States and Japan fought a naval war across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of the war, the United States began to move island by island across the Pacific closer to Japan while at the same time bombing the cities of Japan. As the United States closed in on Japan, the Japanese soldiers and civilians put up a suicidal defense against the American forces. At the same time, the United States tested the first atomic bomb and made the decision to drop it on Japan as a way of ending the war. In August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and Japan surrendered unconditionally to the United States.
Following the war, the United States took over Japan and turned it into a democracy that would be a pacifist country defended by the United States military, which built permanent military bases in Japan. Japan rebuilt itself as an export oriented economy in which they would import raw materials and manufacture these into finished goods for export to the rest of the world. In contrast to American and European governments, the Japanese government took a leading role in financing Japanese companies and assisting them in developing their export markets. The Japanese started to work in heavy industry but shifted to making cars and electronics. 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 model and develop their economies 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. At the end of World War Two in Asia neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had much direct control over the region. American and Soviet influence came into the region because the Europeans were unable to reassert their imperial influence in the region, Japanese had to surrender control over Korea (which was divided into two countries) and internal conflicts within the countries of Asia made the region a Cold War battleground. 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 40 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 Tiananmen 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.
The development of India over the twentieth century has followed a very different path from Japan and China. At the beginning of the twentieth century India was fully controlled by England and was considered the "Jewel of the Crown" of the British Empire. However, many Indians resented British rule and following World War One, Indian nationalists lead by Mohandas Gandhi began to push for Indian independence. Gandhi adopted a policy of passive nonviolent resistance to British rule that slowly eroded the moral authority of the British government and made it more costly for the British to deny India self-rule. By the mid-1930's, the protests of the Indians had worn down the British and the British were willing to grant the Indians self-governance as long as they remained part of the British Empire. However, by this time, Gandhi and the other Indian nationalist leaders sought full independence for India. Yet, when World War Two began, the Indians put their demands for independence on hold and supported Britain in the war.
Following the war, the combination of British exhaustion from fighting the war and the determination of Indian nationalists resulted in Britain granting India independence. When the British granted India independence in 1947, they allowed the Indian colony to be divided into the countries of India and Pakistan. While this was intended to prevent conflict between Hindu and Muslim populations in the colony, it had the opposite effect and resulted in horrific inter-religious and the forced migration of millions of people from one country to the other. Gandhi was a victim of this violence when he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist. The legacy of this violence continues to poison the relationship between India and Pakistan to the present day.
After becoming independent, India became a one-party state that was dominated by the Congress Party. The Congress Party was the political organization most closely connected with Gandhi. As a result, while India was a democracy, the leadership of the Congress Party effectively ruled the country for the first several decades of independence. India chose to be neutral in the Cold War and to become self-sufficient in its economic development. While it was not communist, it adopted the Soviet model of centrally planned five year plans to build up its heavy industry. The combination of economic inefficiency and mismanagement and rampant corruption meant that India remained a poor country. In the 1990's, the government of India made a radical shift and moved way from trying to control the economy and opened itself up to global trade. However, unlike Japan, the Asian Tigers and China, India did not turn itself into an export oriented economy based on manufacturing and inexpensive labor. Instead, India used its large educated English speaking population to make the country a center of computer and communications systems. The result has been a rapid development that has improved the lives of millions of Indians. Unfortunately, this development has been very uneven and has left millions more Indians living in desperate poverty. This large economic inequality poses a significant challenge to India's democracy and continuing economic development.