World History

Unit 6: World War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 26: New Political Forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

55. Thu, Mar 27, 2014

The story in the Far East is much different. Here we are dealing with many very old cultures which, though they had been roughed up (for want of a more precise term) by Western economic interests, still they remained independent nations. Especially China and Japan were becoming world powers, but on a level and in a way that was not well understood by the West. Many of these are rooted in the distant history of the regions in question.

Japan, which had long been closed to the West, was forcibly opened, but had begun to re-establish its own national identity on the world stage. It had quietly begun to build a world-class navy and when Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, the Russians were stunned and caught completely off guard. They felt that they had been the victims of a sneak attack and that on a level "playing field" things would be different, but the remainder of the Sino-Russian war (1905) they were proven to be simply unprepared. Virtually the entire Russian fleet was destroyed in the process.

Japan also began to flex its military muscle throughout Asia. In the period leading up to World War II, Japanese incursions into Korea and China — including some amazingly savage treatment of the city of Nanjing (Nanking) — left long-lasting consequences. China's long-established xenophobia was substantially reinforced, and it was suspicious of Japan ever afterward; moreover, the fact that the Nationalist party expended so much effort and military might against the Communists when there were foreign invaders on the scene hardened resistance to their message and their cause, ultimately probalby enabling the final consolidation of Communist power.

China, which had felt similar economic incursions from the West in terms of trade, had always retained a more cohesive national identity, but it was racked by the same insecurities and re-evaluations that had afflicted Europe during the nineteenth century. Various elements of society were able to gain partial power. The vast majority seemed to agree that it was time to dissolve the ancient monarchy; the last emperor was the merest puppet for as long as he was useful, and afterward was branded a war criminal and discarded. The resulting struggle between the original Nationalist party (led by Sun Yixian [Yat-Sen]) and his successor Chiang Kai-Shek. Meanwhile, the Communists won a sequence of stunning victories and were able to establish effective control of the mainland by 1949 (slightly after the period discussed here), with the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The division in China remains to this day, with the Nationalist party and adherents effectively exiled to the island of Taiwan (Formosa). Both claim to be the only legitimate governments of all of China, and the Nationalist claim was defended by the United States and most of the non-Communist western powers until well into the twentieth century.

The Chinese were forced to form a modern state, a player on the world stage, out of a political and cultural landscape characterized by vastly divergent forces. When the Guomindang (Nationalist) party first appeared, it had to deal both with the internal legacy of the waning imperial regime and a system of more or less feudal warlords on the one hand, and modern pressures from without — modern foreign powers with industrial capacity, and modern dogmatic schools framed up far from China, including Marxism, which managed to capture the imagination of many in China. While there is probably no way to map the various ways in which all of this could conceivably have played out, it certainly is to the point to remain mindful of all these forces, and to see their legacies even in the state as it continues to evolve to this day. In very few other place in the world can one find the capacity and civil will to create huge and powerful fiat cities like Shenzhen from almost nothing within a decade — Brasilia is probably the only other example that is equivalent.

The withdrawal of India from the British Commonwealth and its establishment as a nation — or, more properly, several nations including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma — is a complex story in which all the varied features, good and bad, of colonialism are woven together. It is also worth remembering the vast and multi-layered history of the Indian subcontinent. It is now the one nation in the world that has not one or two but many different official languages, many contending religious cultures (coexisting for the most part peacefully, but never entirely so), and the strong vestiges of very tribal cultures as well.

All in all, these are all very complex issues with enduring and extremely tangled legacies, with which we are still dealing to this day, in some very immediate ways.

• What were the intellectual forces and impulses that entered into the unification of China following the fall of the Imperial monarchy and the period in which China was dominated by warlords? How did foreign entanglements of one sort or another help to sift those out?
• To what extent did the "opening" of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century set the stage for the emergence of the militant Empire of the Rising Sun that we find in the period from 1900 to 1945? Is this a case of Western blundering coming back to roost, or something else entirely?
• The decolonialization of India was costly and not without its violent episodes, but it occurred without as much violence as one might have expected. What enabled that? What are the strands that contributed to it, and what are the legacies of it to this day? Some of it doubtless lies in the breakup of the former Indian domains into several modern states — two of which (India and Pakistan) are now nuclear powers without a great deal of love for one another. Was the violence averted, or has it merely been deferred?
• The book says here almost nothing about Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. They were ancient cultures, however, and were not silent throughout this period. Certainly they created significant issues later in the twentieth century. How do we sort that out?

Contents of this page © Copyright 2011, 2012 by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.