by Parag Khanna
By 1914, escalating tensions between European empires and their proxies exploded into war. With the promise of having Shandong returned to its possession, China sided with the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States). But after Germany’s defeat in 1917, the Allies handed China’s territories to Japan at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Bewildered at this betrayal—and inspired by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in which Vladimir Lenin dismantled the czarist regime in favor of the interests of workers and peasants—Chinese nationalism surged. Chinese blamed themselves for allowing their own victimization at foreign hands. Seeking to avoid a repetition of the prior century of humiliation, Chinese.officials studied Japan’s rapid late-nineteenth-century industrialization and invited many Western scholars to tour China in the early twentieth century. In 1921, intellectuals including Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the Chinese Communist Party. Still, it was the Nationalists under Sun Yat-sen’s ally General Chiang Kai-shek who united China in 1926, establishing a government at Nanjing in 1928. Meanwhile, with Russia’s postrevolutionary civil war finally ended, the newly created Soviet Union’s socialist empire undertook agricultural collectivization and industrial modernization. Agreements with China secured Russia’s vast eastern Siberian flank.
The end of the great European war of 1914–1917 also brought about the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, with the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, forced to abdicate in 1922. Within a year, the Ottoman military commander and secular modernizer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established a new Turkish Republic with its capital at Ankara. The partitioning of the Eastern Ottoman Empire through the Sykes-Picot Agreement created a French mandate over Syria and Lebanon and a British mandate in Palestine and Iraq, which became independent in 1932 with the nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister. Saudi Arabia annexed Ottoman possessions in the Arabian Peninsula, with the exception of small British protectorates such as Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.
Lethargic and strife-ridden Persia also reinvigorated itself in the wake of the Ottoman collapse. In 1925, Reza Khan was formally appointed Iran’s new monarch, crowning himself Reza Shah of the Pahlavi Dynasty. He oversaw a major modernization program of infrastructure and schools. He also declared Iran (the country’s name in Persian) neutral among Europe’s hardening alliances, though he elevated trade ties with Germany, which had no colonial history in the region, and canceled the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s exclusive concessions, for which Iran received only a minimal profit share. Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, sought to expand the country’s territories for settlement by German populations (Lebensraum) and reneged on his secret pact with the Soviet Union to carve up Eastern Europe, instead invading the Soviet Union in 1941. British fears that Germany might conquer the Soviet Union and proceed to take control of Iran’s oil refineries prompted a joint Anglo-Soviet invasion that created a corridor for US supplies to the Soviets. The British conscripted hundreds of thousands of troops from India, while the Soviets utilized Central Asian cotton and tank production to overwhelm Iranian forces and hold off the Nazis.
In the early 1930s, Japan, which had an anti-Communist alliance with Germany, seized on the ongoing conflict between China’s Communists and Nationalists to invade Manchuria again. Appropriating the same language of regional unity it had used to rally pan-Asianism, Japan conjured up an imperialist vision of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” While the Allies (Great Britain, France, and the United States) focused on confronting the Nazis in Europe and Iran, Japan unleashed devastating attacks on the Allies’ interests in Pacific Asia, beginning with air strikes against Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and Guam in 1941. Japan’s army then marched across French Indochina, Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, taking more than 80,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers as prisoners in Singapore alone. British prime minister Winston Churchill mourned the fall of Singapore in early 1942 as the “greatest capitulation” in British history. Japan’s conquest of Asia spelled the end of European empires in Asia.
Warfare in Europe and Asia was equally devastating. Japan’s pillaging of China caused more than 14 million deaths, displaced more than 100 million people, and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans. The United States’ economic embargo and naval onslaught between 1942 and 1945 then battered Japan across the Pacific islands. While liberating Burma, the Allies also supported the Chinese resistance and the Korean Liberation Army, which retook southern China and the Korean Peninsula. The Soviet Union entered the Pacific war as well, crushing the Japanese army in Manchuria. In August 1945, US forces dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which Japan surrendered.
Asia in the Cold War
The defeat of Japan, combined with the crippling of the European empires, created a power vacuum in East Asia that was rapidly filled by the United States. Under the guise of Allied occupation, the United States, under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, imposed a new democratic constitution and barred Japan from any offensive rearmament. The occupation ended only in 1950. Determined to counteract US influence in East Asia, Soviet forces poured into Manchuria and onto the Korean Peninsula, whose southern half the United States had occupied after liberating it from Japan. While the United States and USSR negotiated at the newly founded United Nations to manage Korea as a trusteeship for a period of five years, both the Soviet-influenced Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south agitated for full independence. As Communist forces moved south across the 38th Parallel, MacArthur’s army pushed back, sparking a full-scale war involving China.
China’s civil war, which erupted after Japan’s surrender, had just ended in 1949 with victory for the disciplined Communist forces led by Mao Zedong over the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang retreated from the mainland onto Taiwan, which had been returned to China after the Japanese occupation. There the Kuomintang established the Republic of China. In 1950, Mao’s forces pressed across the Yalu River to aid their brethren in North Korea. In 1951, Chinese Communist forces absorbed Tibet. And in 1955, Mao’s forces attacked and seized the Yijangshan and Tachen islands from Taiwan, halting only due to the presence of the US Seventh Fleet and the threat of nuclear reprisal against further Chinese advances.
Mao’s victory in China prompted many US lawmakers to urge President Harry Truman to adopt an “Asia First” strategy aimed at containing the advance of communism in East Asia. The United States committed to stationing more troops in Japan and South Korea, continued to deploy its navy to deter mainland aggression against Taiwan, and established the ANZUS Treaty with Australia and New Zealand in 1951. The United States’ “hub-and-spoke” alliance system became the scaffolding of Asian order.
The US military also surged into Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, the United States had provided covert support for the nationalist Ho Chi Minh’s forces to oust the Japanese from the country’s north. Upon declaring independence from France in 1945, Ho Chi Minh had hoped for continued US support, but the United States instead assisted the colonial French army in the south, which sought to preserve the Indochinese Federation. By 1954, France had to evacuate South Vietnam and grant independence to the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. US forces deployed into the country to prop up the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem against the North Vietnamese Communists, whose Vietcong guerrillas the Soviet Union and China backed.
In other major Asian states, independence also came at a high price. The immediate postwar years brought full independence for India, which in 1947 was partitioned along religious (Hindu and Muslim) lines into India and Pakistan, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, respectively. Nearly 15 million people crossed in each direction between the newly created states, with an estimated 1 million perishing along the way. Independence for Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948. But borders remained unsettled: India and Pakistan entered into a conflict over the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, which h
ad been ceded to India. In Indonesia, the anticolonial leader Sukarno declared independence from the Dutch almost immediately upon Japan’s surrender, but nationalists had to fight several more years until Indonesia won full independence in 1949. The Malay Peninsula, North Borneo, and Singapore were granted independence as Malaysia in 1963, but racial and economic tensions flared between ethnic Malays and the majority-Chinese-populated port of Singapore, which the Malaysian parliament expelled from the federation in 1965. On the whole, whether by liberation or partition, independence brought triumphant moments for Asians even though it meant adopting a new form of rigidly bordered, and contested, statehood.
During the numerous Cold War proxy struggles across the region, US, Soviet, and Chinese factions competed for influence. The United States supported anti-Communist authoritarian regimes such as that of Indonesia’s Sukarno and helped suppress the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency in the Philippines. It also led the formation in 1954 of the region’s primary security pact, known as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—meant to be an Asian version of the NATO alliance—that included disparate regional states such as Australia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Great-power meddling also encouraged authoritarian dictatorships across Southeast Asia. In Burma, the failure of Prime Minister U Nu’s democratic government to quell Communist insurgencies led to a military caretaker government in 1958; by 1962, a coup led by General Ne Win had established a formal military government. Likewise in Thailand, a brief experiment with democracy was followed by a succession of military dictatorships that coexisted with the respected monarchy of King Bhumibol. In the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos took office in 1965 and soon declared martial law in the country, citing unrest caused by a Communist insurgency. The United States supported these anti-Communist, military-backed regimes in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, which together with Malaysia and Singapore in 1967 formed the anti-Communist Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
In Southwest Asia, British and French dominions—Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—gained (or regained) independence by the late 1940s. The Arab League was founded in 1945 to give voice to pan-Arab nationalism. Arab interests clashed with the Zionist movement, led by the Jewish diaspora, that claimed Jerusalem and Palestine as its homeland. Despite the recommendation of a UN commission to create separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, the expiration of the British Mandate in 1948 brought both civil war and a regional Arab war against the newly declared state of Israel. Israel repulsed Arab armies and took much of the territory that had been intended for Arabs under the defunct partition plan. An influx of Jews from Europe and neighboring Arab states fortified Israel’s strength, while more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs became refugees.
The United States became a more intrusive power across Southwest Asia as well, especially as the region’s hydrocarbon wealth expanded. After the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, Great Britain and the Soviet Union divided and occupied the country, deposing Reza Shah in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and not withdrawing until 1946. The Soviets then backed a separatist Azeri state in northern Iran with its capital at Tabriz and an independent Kurdish republic (both of which were short lived) and created Iran’s Communist Tudeh Party. The United States got involved as well. In 1953, US and British intelligence services sponsored a coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran’s petroleum industry, and restored to power Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Competition for influence spread across the region. While the United States protected Israel and secured its energy interests in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union appealed to the Arab world, aligning itself with anti-Israel nations such as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (whose monarchy was overthrown in 1958).
Many strong Asian states refused to be Cold War pawns. Rather than accept subordinate status to the Soviet Union in a Communist bloc, China under Mao insisted on an independent agrarian socialism. More than 40 million people perished during his late-1950s “Great Leap Forward.” Mao also claimed the mantle of leadership against imperialism and capitalism, competing with the Soviets for influence. Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Kim Il Sung in North Korea also played great-power politics to their advantage, enlisting the United States and China, respectively, to strengthen their national modernization goals. Under Nehru, India actively worked with Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Egypt, and other nations to forge a Non-Aligned Movement that sought to achieve collective security without choosing sides between the United States and the Soviet Union.
India’s nonaligned status helped keep the United States and the Soviet Union mostly out of South Asia, while India forged a close partnership with Iraq, its largest oil supplier. But tensions with China flared as Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India, where he was granted asylum in 1959. Subsequent border disputes culminated in the two-front war of 1962 in which China cemented its de facto control over the strategic Aksai Chin territory linking Tibet with Xinjiang. India and Pakistan’s dispute over Kashmir continued with a 1965 war that resulted in a United Nations–supervised stalemate, after which India drifted closer to the Soviets while Pakistan received greater aid from China. In 1971, India’s aid to Bengali nationalist forces helped East Pakistan secure independence as independent Bangladesh.
With Northeast Asia stabilized, economic modernization became the pathway to geopolitical clout, especially for Japan. The country’s nexus of government regulators, especially the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and business groups (keiretsu) together engineered a liftoff of the country’s electronics and automative sectors, propelling the country’s growth by an average rate of 10 percent per year between 1958 and 1965. By the mid-1970s, just three decades after its surrender, Japan had become the world’s second largest economy. The “Four Asian Tigers” of South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, Hong Kong under British administration, and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew also experienced rapid economic growth as they followed Japan’s model of state-guided capitalism focused on export-led growth while also welcoming foreign investment.
But Asia’s two most populous societies either remained stuck or went backward. India was in a quasi-socialist stasis due to the government’s 1950s nationalization campaign, heavy regulation of private enterprise, and imposition of tariffs to discourage trade. China also continued to subject itself to radical Communist experiments, particularly Mao’s decade-long “Cultural Revolution” between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Mao sought to rid China of old ideas, customs, habits, and culture by destroying historical artifacts and eradicating the intellectual class.
The 1970s witnessed significant regional geopolitical realignments. The rift between Mao’s China (which became a nuclear power in 1964) and the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev escalated into clashes in 1969 at the border region of Xinjiang and the Soviet Tajik republic, but negotiations between Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai prevented escalation. China began to reconsider its hostility toward the United States and through secret negotiations with President Richard Nixon’s administration cleared the way for the US president to visit China in 1972. Though the United States hoped to use its new direct relationship with China to restrain North Vietnam, instead it had to withdraw from Vietnam in defeat in 1973, followed by the unification of the country in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, which was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. That same year, Pol Pot’s revolutionary forces captured Phnom Penh and took over Cambodia, establishing the Communist Khmer Rouge regime in the newly declared Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot’s commitment to autarky and social uniformity led to widespread famine and genocide until Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer regime in 1979. Vietnam and China fought a brief border war as well in 1979, but China withdrew its forces once satisfied that the Soviets would not assist Vietnam.
Starting in 1978, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, sought to blend socialism with the opportunities of the global economy. He decollectivized agri
culture, allowed private enterprise, and opened the country to foreign trade and investment as the “tiger” economies had done in the preceding decade. In May 1980, Shenzhen in the Pearl River delta became the first Chinese Special Economic Zone, luring foreign capital with tax exemptions and light regulation. It rapidly achieved a 30 percent annual growth rate and mushroomed from a village with a population of 30,000 to a bustling city of 10 million. While making China the leading developing-country destination for foreign investment, Deng also signed a landmark Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Japan and improved ties with both the US and USSR.
While the Cold War froze relations between the West and the Soviet Union, Turkey joined the Council of Europe (1949) and NATO (1952). It later applied for associate and then full membership in the European Economic Community, a diplomatic process that kicked off in 1959. Elsewhere in West Asia, instability mounted. Several wars erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s between Egypt and Israel over the Sinai Peninsula and between Syria-led Arab forces and Israel over the Golan Heights. In the midst of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the Saudi Arabian–led oil cartel known as the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC, later OPEC) imposed an embargo against major Western states, shocking the global economy. The Gulf countries used this oil windfall to kick off massive infrastructural modernization powered by millions of South Asian laborers and white-collar workers. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, 1 million Koreans also went to the Gulf states to complete megaengineering projects.
