By Eric Vandebroeck and
co-workers
The importance of South and
East East Asia today
In the turbulent
2010s, a perspective from East Asian history that might have been useful was about
the fragility of democracy. The story of post-war Europe, as told in most
histories, has become one of inevitable democratization. In some ways this was
a story read backward; the long debate about whether Germany’s Sonderweg
(‘special path’) was responsible for its descent into dictatorship was fuelled in part by the
idea that Germany’s lack of democratic commitment before 1945 was in some
way anomalous in the European context. The story of Eastern Europe after 1989
also fitted neatly into this model, along with the intellectual framing of Francis Fukuyama and others who argued that
liberal democracy was the ultimate norm in politics. India’s
history became relatively more familiar than that of other Asian countries,
in part because so much of that story took place in English, and was easily
accessible.
However, this
concentration on India concealed an anomaly in understanding Asia as a whole:
in the post-war era, India has been the only consistent democracy in the region
apart from Japan (and for two years in 1975–7, even that democracy was
suspended under Emergency legislation). This made the Indian experience seem in
some way familiar, a democratic offshoot of the favorable parts of the European
legacy (liberalism), while politely ignoring the less palatable parts (colonial
domination).
The case of Nazi
Germany, the European descent into
dictatorship most studied in Western schools, is in some ways so egregious,
ending with racial genocide, that it serves to illustrate little beyond its own
case (even the most abstruse arguments about European fascism do not equate the
Italian or Austrian Dollfuss versions with Hitlerism).
Japan’s pre-1945
path, somewhat like that of Germany, involved imperialism
and dictatorship that created a form of modernization, but at a terrible price.
Like Germany, Japan’s post-war reconstruction was in stark contrast to what had
gone before, as the country became a global citizen contributing to a peaceful
and democratic world. China’s traumas on the
path to modernization were greater even than Japan’s. Up to the
mid-twentieth century, China was a country as much a victim of global forces as
it was a shaper of them. Yet in the early twentieth century, its republican,
pre-communist governments still sought to create a modern state. After a world
war and a civil war, in the mid-twentieth century, China modernized further, not under a pluralist democracy like Japan,
but under a radical experiment in communism that challenged
the Soviet Union as much as it did the United States. That modernization
has been underpinned by a range of themes that speak to wider themes in modern
history: the impact of war, the power of globalization, and the legacy of colonialism.
War and the shaping of Japan
The Second World War,
three-quarters of a century after it ended, still remains central to the way
that the West defines itself. This is also true for many other societies;
Russia recently made it illegal to insult the memory of the ‘Great
Patriotic War’. The dominant narratives about the ‘meaning’ of the war in
Europe share certain characteristics: what can be called a ‘circuit of memory’, meaning a shared set of ideas and assumptions that
define the perceived meaning of a historical event. For most of Western Europe
and North America, there has been a circuit of memory since 1945 that projects
the war as a conflict against fascism, concentrated
in Europe and with the Nazis at the center, which ultimately led to the defeat
of evil and the establishment of stable democracy in the West. Historical
detail differs, but in Washington, Paris, London, or Berlin, few would deny the
key elements of that framework; the defeated Germans shared it just as much as the victorious Americans.
Yet a Western
understanding of the Second World War, perhaps the historical framework most
widely understood and engaged within the West today (at least judging by
television documentaries, popular histories, and school curricula), needs to
incorporate the very different frameworks and assumptions surrounding that same
conflict in East Asia, not least because those historical assumptions continue
to shape the two most powerful Asian states, China and Japan.
Unlike in Europe, a
shared circuit of memory around the Second World War in Asia, with mutually
understood assumptions and narratives, never developed in East Asia, largely because of the Cold War and the Chinese Civil War.
In the short years after the end of the war with Japan in 1945, the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek
made tentative moves to create a new friendship with post-war Japan, on the
basis that China would be a key shaper of a new order in Asia. In this
scenario, post-war China and Japan would have both been oriented toward the US.
As in France and Germany in the same era, this context might have provided the
opportunity for two former enemies to form a shared understanding of their past
trauma. Also as in Europe, wider support from the US could have meant that both
Asian powers were able to create a favorable atmosphere for a shared circuit of
memory.
Instead, the Chinese Civil War of 1946–9 took China decisively out
of the fledgling pro-American order forming in East Asia. Because of the
Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) victory, China allied instead with the USSR.
The Korean War followed shortly afterward and caused
a further rift that meant that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US
remained isolated from each other diplomatically until 1978.
Japan
remained under US occupation from 1945 to 1952, with little contact with
China after 1949. This political separation of the two major Second World War
belligerents in Asia led to a clear divergence in their circuits of memory. In
Japan, the legacy of the war in Asia shaped historiography inexorably in the
decades that followed. In China, the desire to burnish the revolution of 1949
became the dominant historical narrative, but the story of the war against
Japan disappeared and reappeared over time in the public consciousness,
becoming (ironically) much more important in the years since the 1980s, rather
than in the immediate post-war decades.
In Japan,
modernization became a key theme of the post-war settlement. The dominant
political narrative implied that Japan was an almost purely economic actor,
which had essentially started from zero in 1945 and was now making immense
strides as its GDP grew. The historical narrative changed to reflect this: the Meiji Restoration of the 1880s, when Japan’s first
modernization began, became the starting point of the story, and the turn to
dictatorship in the 1930s became characterized as a kurai
tanima (‘dark valley’) that was, overall, an anomaly
in the rise of Japan to economic dominance (the second-biggest economy in the world by
the 1980s).
Yet in practice, this
bland, economistic story of modernization with
hiccups inevitably became intertwined with the unresolved trauma of the war
and the end of the Japanese Empire. Unlike France and Britain, which saw their
empires unwind over two decades after 1945, Japan’s period as a colonizer came
to a sudden end in August 1945 as its ‘Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ crashed into ruins. Japanese historians would spend
the next few decades debating the causes of the disastrous war, with historians
on the left, such as Ienaga Saburo, spending much of that time battling the
conservative government with demands that Japan does more to face up to its war
guilt (for instance, in the way that the war was described in school
textbooks). Yet a caricature sometimes heard from outside – that Japan simply
refused point-blank to acknowledge its war guilt – was never simplistically
true; for instance, one of the most appalling war crimes, the Nanjing Massacre
(‘Rape of Nanking’) of 1937–8, was actually forced into public attention by
Japanese journalists such as Honda Katsuichi in the
1970s. In contrast, it was a decade or more before the subject was openly
discussed in China: prior to the 1980s, the Beijing government had felt that
excessive attention to Japanese war crimes would not help in the task of
re-establishing diplomatic relations with Japan (which finally happened in
1972).
Even now, in the
2010s and 2020s, the legacy of the devastating war in Asia has continued to
shape Japanese politics, education, and culture. Films about the wartime years
are still popular, but they tend to hew to very particular sorts of
interpretation. Notably, very few such films deal with the China war that broke
out in 1937; the ‘real’ war, it is implied, only
seems to begin at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the US, a Western enemy,
joined the conflict. Much of the popular culture in Japan surrounding the war
deals with experience on the home front, rather than the invasion by Japan of
other countries. The hit
manga movie by Sunao Katabuchi, In this Corner of the
World (2016), is a story of great power about a young woman who enters
married life during the war years in a small village near Hiroshima (giving a
clue to the eventual plot outcome). The story is a moving one and shows the
real suffering of the Japanese population in the final years of the war, but it
stands as an example of a wide range of films in which the Japanese army in
China, South East Asia, or in other places invaded by Japan do not figure in
any very explicit onscreen discussion.
Contemporary Japan
faces a thorny series of difficulties, most of which are disturbingly similar
to (the by us earlier described) Japan’s late-nineteenth-century concerns. What
Japan cares about are in two regions the Western Hemisphere and Southeast Asia,
with only one itty-bitty problem: Japans dealing with China.
China
and war
In the Mao era,
China’s historians were heavily constrained as to what they could write about.
It is worthwhile if limited work was done in the first decade of Mao’s rule,
mostly seeking cherry-picked history to underpin the narrative of an inexorable
rise to power by the CCP. Then, the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) made it
impossible for any intellectuals, including historians, to carry out any kind
of meaningful writing. Only with the beginning of the reform era in 1978 did it
become possible for historians to widen the scope of their research. One area
which became much more widely visible was research on the period of the War of
Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as the China Theatre of the Second
World War has become known. For decades, discussion of the topic was limited to
Chinese historical scholarship. This was largely because such a major part of
the resistance to the Japanese was undertaken by the Nationalists (Guomindang
or Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek, with the Communists playing an important
but essentially secondary role. After the Communist victory on the mainland in
1949, it became near-impossible for the CCP to give
any sort of positive assessment of the anti-Japanese record of the enemies
they had recently defeated in the civil war.
However, from the
1980s, a variety of factors changed the relative invisibility of the history of
the war in China. In particular, historians pushed for a more nuanced approach
to understanding the positive as well as the negative contributions that the Nationalists
had made to defeat the Japanese, and succeeded in doing so with the perhaps
surprising assistance of senior figures within the CCP such as the hardline
‘conservative’ former personal secretary to Mao, Hu Qiaomu.
There were reasons for the Party’s willingness to widen the angle of
interpretation. Pragmatically, the CCP wanted to improve relations with Taiwan
and felt that being more complimentary about the Nationalists’ wartime
contribution would help that cause. In a wider sense, the 1980s saw China still
recovering from the Cultural Revolution. The ideological rubble left behind at
the end of those events had soured the population on the idea of class
struggle. Leaders sought a more unifying narrative, and the shared struggle of
the Chinese against the invaders during the Second World War fitted the bill
well. (Wartime collaboration with the enemy, which was extensive, was not
mentioned in this version of events.)
Over the past four
decades, the narrative of the Second World War as a shaping event in Chinese
history has become much more prominent. The analogy can be confrontational. The
Chinese government declared that it would launch a ‘people’s war’ against the COVID-19
virus at the start of the pandemic in early 2020; later that year, State
Counsellor Yang Jiechi declared that the PRC would
have to follow a ‘protracted war’ to create connections in its foreign policy.
Both expressions are taken directly from Mao’s writing on fighting the Japanese
in the 1930s. Other uses of the period were more cooperative-sounding,
including frequent reminders by Chinese leaders and diplomats that China had
been the first signatory to the UN Charter in 1945 (at the San Francisco
Conference of that year). By making this point, China was arguing that it was
‘present at the creation’ of the 1945 world order and that just as the US has
used its status as a maker of the post-war world to make claims in the present
era, so China should be entitled to do so as well. The plausibility of this
claim can certainly be contested. But to understand it, Westerners need to know
something about the place that China’s wartime experience has had in its
consciousness of its own recent history (just as one would do for Britain,
Poland, Russia, and other countries that still draw from the well of that
long-ago conflict). It is widely known that China is one of the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council, and a good number of people are aware that
Beijing was only able to regain the China seat at the UN from Taiwan as late as
1971. However, without some awareness of the Chinese contribution to the war,
and the significance that President Roosevelt placed on incorporating
(Nationalist) China into the post-war global order, it is hard to make sense of
the seemingly sudden appearance of China at the very highest levels of
international society. In fact, the rise of China to global status is a
narrative that has been underway since at least 1945, but via a path much more
circuitous than that of, say, the United States.
Global narratives
China’s more remote
history has also been put to work in recent years, making claims to bolster a
contemporary phenomenon, the increasingly global nature of China’s overseas
presence. Among the more extraordinary events of the voyages happened when the
sailors were presented with
a giraffe, which they brought back to China. The version of this story
approved by the CCP tends to be saccharine: a core idea is that China’s
expeditions, unlike those of the Western powers in Africa and Asia, were purely
about trade and not conquest or violence. The analogy is meant to be obvious:
that just as it was the West, not China, that committed major violence in the
early modern era, so the world today should be less fearful of China than of
the West.
It is, however, true
that China did not use its imperial power to
establish major overseas possessions as the European empires did (although
it was happy to expand its land borders on many occasions). Chinese navigation
techniques were sophisticated and extensive long before his voyages and, in the
centuries that followed, we know that Chinese and South East Asian societies
were engaged in complex trading relationships with each other.
Yet when it comes to
global issues, the European imperial presence has shaped the modern era,
and that was true also for East and South East Asia. For some states in the
region, such as Singapore, the long-standing British connection is still evident
in many ways. Singapore still sends many of its elites to Britain’s top
universities, when they don’t go to the Ivy League, and the city-state is
likely to play a larger role in British engagement with South East Asia in the
Brexit era. However, the long history of this outpost, with its complex tale of
trade, opium processing, economic exploitation, and (failed) defense is little
known in Britain, even in comparison with the story of Indian
independence.
Yet China provides an
even better example of a long-standing relationship with Britain that has
almost no visibility in general histories. Trade is a topic much in the news
these days, including the idea that Brexit Britain should trade more with East
Asia. This should surely be a cue to find out more about the Imperial Maritime
Customs Service, an extraordinary institution that lasted for a century. The
Service was an agency staffed by Britons to collect taxes on behalf of the
Chinese government. Although it was a product of imperialism, established in
the aftermath of the Opium Wars, its first inspector-general, the Ulsterman Sir
Robert Hart, always made it clear that he saw himself in the service of the
Chinese government, rather than an agent of the British Empire. The institution
– one in which China gave up parts of its sovereignty on tariffs to achieve a
more effective and lucrative tax regime – has both parallels and profound
differences with Britain’s half-century in the EU. There are also British connections
to the story of China’s rise. When people write about the cities of the empire,
they frequently have Calcutta or Cape Town in mind. It’s far less common for
them to think of Shanghai. Yet the city was also one of the major creations of
settler colonialism, with its heart in a British-dominated International
Settlement for a century from 1843 until Pearl
Harbor.
Today, the former
Settlement area has an ambiguous relationship with that era. Chinese
historiography condemns British imperialism as a violation of sovereignty.
Nonetheless, the heritage of the colonial era, in particular the Art Deco
buildings that mark the famous Bund, or waterfront, is lovingly preserved and
thought of as a cultural treasure in its own right. Yet if the impact of the
foreign on Shanghai is regarded as an ambiguous legacy in today’s entirely
Chinese Shanghai, it is essentially absent from any Western historical
consideration: outside a coterie of specialists, the significance of Shanghai’s
British heritage in shaping the modern city is hardly considered in the wider
story of empire.
The story of Hong Kong has perhaps been more visible in recent years,
because one of the most profoundly important stories of our own era is the
erosion of the freedoms of residents of Hong Kong, in particular after the
imposition of a draconian National Security Law
by Beijing in July 2020. For the historically informed, however, what is
intriguing and disturbing is the combination of English common law – the right
to habeas corpus and applications for bail, along with barristers in horsehair
wigs – with Chinese Communist authoritarianism in the way that the authorities
in the city have cracked down on its democrats. Of course, this combination is
not unique to Hong Kong: Singapore, Kenya, and South Africa have historically
been three states which combined the practice of English common law with highly
repressive domestic politics. But Hong Kong’s case is unique in terms of the
direct clash and combination of two systems with profoundly different
historical roots at the same time. Understanding how the city came to be in
such a position in the 2020s can only come with an understanding of its unique
history.
We use the term
‘freedom’ rather than just ‘democracy’ because, while the destruction of
democratic norms in Hong Kong by its own rulers in 2020 is important, it is the
product of a relatively short period of democracy in the colony. India was
given elements of self-government from the early twentieth century onward. Hong
Kong’s first moves toward a very limited democracy took place only in 1952,
although they were accelerated in later years. The Hong Kong of the 1960s and
1970s still suffered from major police corruption. The British period, in other
words, was not one of unalloyed progress. However, many of the elements that
made Hong Kong distinctive - judicial independence, economic freedom, and press
and academic freedom - were also very much products of the British
presence.
A more significant
and more nuanced understanding of Hong Kong’s history would inform the
discussion in two different areas. In Britain, and the West more generally, the
discourse on the city’s freedoms rightly concentrates on the loss of freedoms
in the 2010s and 2020s, but is based on very little understanding of the
complexities of Hong Kong’s past. China, in turn, seeks to impose a new
‘patriotic’ history curriculum on the city, approved by Beijing, in which Hong
Kong’s history is made purely part of a wider Chinese history and, furthermore,
a history in which the rise to power of the CCP is the most important and
transformative element. Both narratives omit a profoundly important story about
the relationship between imperial power and domination and equal treatment of
sovereign states.
Why does it matter?
History in East Asia is not just the past; it’s very
much current affairs. Yet the lack of attention to East Asian history in
the Western, and specifically British, perception is causing an increasingly
problematic distortion in British and Western understandings of the
contemporary world. Because of its economic and geopolitical weight and the
dangerous tensions inherent within it, East Asia will matter to the world in
the 2020s more than it has for perhaps two hundred years. Today, some of the
world’s most dangerous potential clashes are in the Asia–Pacific region: the nuclear
threat from North Korea, maritime conflicts in the South and East China
Seas, the possibility of a war over Chinese
reunification with Taiwan, the China–India
clash in the Himalayas, or the military
coup of 2021 in Myanmar. Every single one of these very contemporary
flashpoints has its origins in modern East Asian history. Understanding the
region’s history, both where it interacts with that of the West and where it
does not is an urgent task.
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