China
The Japanese military’s aggression in South-east Asia and the Pacific was an extension of their earlier invasion of China, itself torn apart by ongoing civil war. In 1937, when the Japanese resumed their attempts to conquer China from the northern Manchurian bastion they had seized in 1931–2, the KMT and Communists only briefly stopped fighting each other. Even as the Japanese occupied most of the coastal areas, the two rival Chinese camps fought the invaders as competitors rather than allies. Nor were all Chinese opposed to the Japanese invasion. Wang Jingwei, a left-wing Nationalist politician who had fallen out with KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, set up a collaborationist regime in Nanjing based on what he deemed the true principles of Sun Yat-sen, the godfather of the Chinese Revolution that deposed the Manchu Qing dynasty in 1910. Sun had modernized the surface of Chinese life, with men cutting off their long pigtail queues and adopting collarless Sun Yat-sen suits, the prototype for the garb of Mao. He also met with the Comintern in 1923, which resulted in the United Front pact with the Communists.13
In the mid-1920s the future Communist leader Mao Zedong had been one of Wang’s political clients, a relationship subsequently obscured.14 Born in landlocked Hunan in 1893, Mao was given a name (Zedong) that meant ‘shine on the East’. His peasant-cum-soldier father made enough money dealing in grain to subsidize Mao’s peripatetic student idleness, which consisted less of formal study than of whiling away entire days in university libraries, much like Lenin in Zurich before 1917. Mao was a shabbily dressed, long-haired layabout with a big fleshy face, but he had already decided that peace and prosperity only suited little folk: ‘People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better?’15
Mao was also a poet, composing more than competently, often about nature, in the Chinese classical style. Yet he believed that much of traditional Chinese culture should be destroyed, while Confucianism did not appeal to one who defined morality as whatever suited his interests. After a spell in Beijing he returned to Hunan, where he eked out a modest living as a teacher, with a sideline in journalism, having rejected the opportunity to study in France because he did not want to learn the language. In June 1920 the twenty-seven-year-old radical was asked to open a bookshop by one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. Soviet Comintern agents provided him with subsidies to become a full-time professional revolutionary, which meant sleeping most of the day and reading and plotting through the night. His total loyalty to the Soviets meant that he was given a key role in infiltrating the KMT. Encouraged by the Soviets to take an interest in peasant themes that he had hitherto ignored, Mao realized that only the peasantry had sufficient numbers for a revolution in a vast country where the industrial proletariat made up only 5 per cent of the population. The history of Chinese peasant uprisings – notably the genocidal Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century – led him to the view that the Party and People’s Liberation Army needed to win over the peasantry, while the prospect of another bloodbath appealed to him.
The Nationalists were appalled by the systematic violence unleashed by the Communists, and in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the military section at the Soviet-inspired Whampoa Academy, moved against them, with an arrest list that included Mao’s name. The Communists reverted to the defence of ‘Soviet areas’ in which their appetites for bloodthirsty purges of real and imagined opponents were indulged to the hilt and with indescribable cruelty. In 1934 Mao embarked on the 6,000-mile Long March, a year-long extraction of 82,000 Communist fighters from encirclement and destruction in the south, with 8,000 resurfacing as survivors in the remote north. There the Communists could pose as liberators and reformers without fear of attack by either the KMT or the Japanese. Mao gradually emerged as primus inter pares of a statelet that harked back to Plato, with the Party cadres being the philosopher kings while the guardians were the Red Army commanders and soldiers, below whom were the drones whose labour supported them. Since the majority of those who flocked to the remote Yenan redoubt did so merely from a patriotic desire to fight the Japanese, ‘rectification’ campaigns based on confessions and indoctrination were used to re-engineer their personalities, submerging the individual self in the collective as embodied by Mao himself.16
The KMT could not mobilize sufficient military power to defeat the Communists as well as resisting Japanese invasion. As elsewhere in East Asia, wealthy figures in cities such as Shanghai rallied to the Japanese cause.17 But so did many collaborators who were also covert Communist agents, with instructions to direct the Japanese against their Nationalist rivals. While Chiang’s armies fought the Japanese, Mao’s Communists avoided main-force encounters, even when urged to fight them by Stalin, who feared that the Soviet Union could be crushed between the Japanese and German onslaughts. Mao’s caution and evasiveness rankled with the Soviet leader and the only ‘battle’ against the Japanese, at Pingxingguan in September 1937, hardly features in the annals of warfare.18
Communist guerrillas did have an impact in Manchuria, historically a lawless place which contained the world’s densest concentration of villages run by outlaws. But it was also the most industrialized region in China, which was why the Japanese had conquered it. The guerrillas who fought the Japanese in this wild, grey-brown place were ethnic Koreans, who also made up 90 per cent of the local ‘Chinese’ Communist Party. The ethnic Chinese Communists claimed to be fighting the Japanese as they husbanded their resources in their northern regional redoubt of Yenan for the anticipated showdown with Chiang.19
Mao’s forces were sustained by subsidies from Stalin as well as by a revived opium industry, which they wisely kept secret from the ‘Dixie Mission’ sent to Yenan by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in July 1944 out of frustration with KMT military incompetence and venality and in order to glean actionable intelligence on Japanese strength in northern China from POWs taken by the Communists.20 While a large pool of 2,000 American advisers stationed in Chongqing by turns publicly lauded and privately denounced Chiang Kai-shek, some of the Yenan Americans became admirers of the iron discipline of the Communists.21
Korea
Japan’s ‘backyard’ was Korea, which it had ruled since 1910. There, geography arguably played a greater role than politics in the long sequence of events that was to result in one of the most intractably divided nations of the world. The north of the peninsula was bleak and mountainous, and it was among the million or so Koreans who migrated to Manchuria in search of industrial jobs that the Korean Communist Party was born. Among them was Kim Il Sung, the future Great Leader of the People’s Republic of North Korea and grandfather of Kim Eun, the third generation of Kims who assumed power in 2012. Born in a village near Pyongyang in 1912, Kim migrated with his family to Manchuria in 1919. From 1932 onwards, he led a small but lethal guerrilla force against the Japanese, striking at Japanese police bases across the Korean border. The Japanese murdered his first wife; his middle brother died at their hands; and an uncle spent thirteen years in Japanese prisons. Like Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung was steeled by conflict and struggle, another way of saying that his capacity for human sympathy was severely diminished, though for a rare photograph he managed a wide smile as he bounced his unsmiling son and successor Kim Il Jong on his knee.22 In October 1939 the Japanese launched a huge punitive operation against the North-east Anti-Japanese Army, of which Kim’s group was a part, forcing the latter to flee into Soviet Siberia.23
In the more agrarian south, many members of the Korean elite, including businessmen, landowners and soldiers, collaborated with the Japanese colonial regime, which in the late 1930s banned the Korean language entirely.24 A different path was taken by Syngman Rhee, who had been an advocate of Korean independence since the late nineteenth century, while becoming a Christian in a Japanese prison. After release he travelled to the USA and he took a BA at George Washington University, an MA at Harvard and a PhD at Princeton, where he became a p
rotégé of Woodrow Wilson. Although the ‘Fourteen Points’ expounded by President Wilson at Versailles after the First World War were not extended to the Far East, the principle of self-determination was the theme of a 1919 conference of Korean independence movements in Shanghai. Syngman Rhee was elected president of the provisional government of the Republic of Korea, a post he held until 1925, when he was impeached for behaving in a dictatorial manner. In a prefiguring of their attempt to foist the supposedly safe (because US-educated) Ahmed Chalabi on Iraq in 2003, Syngman Rhee was the obvious candidate when the Americans needed a sympathetic strongman to govern South Korea in the late 1940s.
As we shall see, the US preference for charismatic individuals (who spoke fluent English) over mass political movements was to colour policy far beyond Korea, and in the process betrayed a profound lack of faith that their grand declarations of principle were a useful guide to the exigencies of war and the post-war settlement in the Far East that mobilized immense numbers of ordinary people.
India
With considerable high-handedness the liberal imperialist Viceroy John Hope, Marquess of Linlithgow, announced in 1939 that India was at war. When he refused the majority Indian National Congress party any role in the central direction of the Indian war effort, its members resigned en masse from provincial governments, and British governors assumed direct rule. The interruption of what the British had hoped would be orderly (for which read as slow as possible) progress towards representative government made little difference while the war was far away, but the Japanese came close enough to induce widespread panic. In April 1942 they raided the Ceylonese capital of Colombo, killing 800 British sailors in two successive attacks on the naval base at Trincomalee. They struck next at southern Indian ports as well as coastal Madras, causing many British administrators to flee to the interior hills. Japanese agents were especially active in Calcutta, capital of Bengal, where Subhas Chandra Bose envisaged a nationalist army on the lines of the Irish Republican Army of the 1920s.
The fact that the US would undertake the main burden of reversing Japanese expansion in South Asia meant that Washington baulked at Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s insistence that the affairs of India were none of their business. Large numbers of American servicemen were stationed in India, where, oblivious of their own racially segregated society, they criticized British racism.25 However, both American meddling and Churchillian obduracy were irrelevant – India was well on its way to independence before the war, and its massive contribution to the war effort made the case for prompt post-war independence overwhelming. Two million sub-continentals, the largest volunteer army in history, served with the British armed forces, many of them in North Africa or Italy. London agreed to underwrite the costs of Indians serving abroad, the result being that Britain owed India £1,321 million by the end of the war, an often overlooked 40 per cent of its colossal £3,355 million post-war debt. Sixty-five per cent of the Indian Army troops were Punjabi Muslims from the north of the sub-continent, which in turn was to make a compelling case for a Muslim-dominated area in the north of a loose, secular Indian federation. Events moved so swiftly and violently that the result was an independent Pakistan.
Indian nationalist politicians had long ago discovered the advantages of alternating constitutional politics with passive-aggressive non-violent protest. They knew the British close up, and saw their weaknesses. Such a strategy had enabled them to occupy the moral high ground, with the British cast in the role of clumsy and violent oppressors.26 Once war with Japan began, Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi – who knew Linlithgow well and judged him to be weak and out of his depth – launched a renewed wave of resistance, demanding immediate independence and neutrality, encapsulated in the slogan that the British should ‘Quit India’. It was a tactical error that split the Congress and damaged Gandhi’s prestige, not only because it was foolish to expect the Japanese to respect Indian neutrality but also because it gave Linlithgow no choice but to invoke emergency powers. British rule became an occupation, deploying more troops – fifty battalions – to quell Indian unrest than were being used to fight the Japanese.27
Beginning on 9 August 1942 the British rounded up 60,000 Congress supporters, including the leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, the radical lawyer and nationalist politician, was comfortably installed in the old Mughal fort at Ahmednagar, but Gandhi was locked up in the Aga Khan’s insalubrious prison at Pune. While Nehru read, gardened and wrote, Gandhi embarked on one of his carefully calibrated fasts. The ‘Quit India’ campaign degenerated rapidly from non-violent strikes into mass riots and acts of sabotage. A hundred police stations were burned down, and there were attacks on 250 railway stations. Track was dismantled and telegraph wires cut. The British response was robust, with 900 people killed and 600 flogged by their own estimate. In and around Patna, the capital of Bihar, RAF fighters were used to strafe Congress supporters who under the cover of lying down on the tracks were tearing them up.
The disparity between how India’s two major religious groups responded to metropolitan Britain’s existential crisis enhanced the claims of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League to an independent Pakistan following the war, drowning out the voices of Muslim members of the Congress party who disputed Jinnah’s claims to speak for all of India’s Muslims. Of course the Western-educated lawyers who dominated Congress did not speak for all Hindus either. British emissaries and viceroys vainly endeavoured to retain an all-Indian framework as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs slid towards an inter-communal bloodbath. In addition the 562 independent feudal princes, some ruling enormous territories such as Hyderabad, represented a further layer of complexity because Britain acknowledged their autocracies through the doctrine of paramountcy.
In the course of 1943 these political problems were joined by a humanitarian one, as some two million Bengalis starved to death when a combination of hoarding-induced inflation and bureaucratic bungling by mainly Indian civil servants resulted in famine. Six million tons of wheat, reserved for military use, bobbed on ships in the Indian Ocean, while other shipping capacity was reserved for the planned D-Day landings in Normandy.28 Churchill insisted that Indians should ‘feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done’. If humiliating military defeat stripped away the illusion of British power, and emergency laws revealed the mere force that underpinned it, the Bengal famine revealed the supposed efficiency of British administration to be a sham.29
India was, of course, the jewel not only in the crown of the British Empire but also by an order of magnitude (with nearly 400 million people) the most intrinsically powerful possession of any of the colonial powers. As such it was able to defend its own frontiers and so buy time for the British to make a swift exit in 1947, once they realized that more was to be gained from a free India within the Commonwealth than from trying to hang on in a situation where the balance of effective power had already tipped to the native population, whether in provincial politics or in the composition of the Indian Civil Service. Unfortunately, in the phrase employed by Field Marshal Lord Wavell, who replaced the hapless Linlithgow as viceroy in 1943, the momentum of past prestige prevented the imperial boat from slowing before it hit the rocks.
Other minds turned from the Raj to an independent future, although much of that future would retain the DNA of the Raj. The key problem, as Nehru acknowledged, was how to create a secular state in a religious country. The future Prime Minister was a Harrow- and Cambridge-educated leftist lawyer. He was well travelled, including Russia in his peregrinations, and well imprisoned, since he spent nine years of his adult life in the Raj’s jails. How on earth, he asked, was he to deal with a society in which the questions whether cow dung should be left piled up in the streets or rabid sacred monkeys should not be shot were regarded as issues of fundamental import, and for which human life could be lost in instantly combusting riots.30 Although many of his Congress party colleagues resented it, the British valued Nehru’s dispassionate approach, shari
ng his concern that Partition would lead to the wholesale Balkanization of the sub-continent as micro-communities descended into religiously inspired anarchy and violence.
The British withdrew in 1947 amid scenes of horror in which a million people were slaughtered and another fifteen million physically displaced, with many women subjected to rape. One Sunday in September 1947 the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, took Nehru in his Dakota to get a close look at the mass exodus of refugees fleeing communal violence. They swooped down to 200 feet above one such column, of Muslims heading north to Lahore. It took a quarter of an hour at 180mph to fly along the forty-five-mile length of the column.31
Unsurprisingly, the British retreat from India bulks large in many British accounts, but other Asian empires were more directly victims of Imperial Japan’s rampage. European authority in the lesser Far Eastern colonies was irretrievably destroyed by the ease with which the Japanese had conquered them. However, as with the Nazis in Eastern Europe, Japanese assumptions of racial supremacy caused them to behave in most respects worse than the Europeans they had defeated.
The Philippines
The US conquest of the Philippines in 1898 had been followed by a decade-long counter-insurgency against Filipino nationalists. Having previously and piously denounced the use of ‘reconcentration camps’ by the Spanish in Cuba and the British in South Africa, the Americans adopted them in the Philippines, along with the routine employment of torture including the ‘water cure’ of drowning and reviving guerrilla suspects, a practice they had learned from the Apaches. US imperialists regarded the Philippines as the key to the door of China and an unsatisfactory post-conquest settlement resulted, with local Hispanic elites utterly dependent on US patronage using the rhetoric of nationalism. As always the Americans talked the talk about democracy, but deferred independence while ensuring that the tame and corrupt native elites remained in power. In the mid-1930s the Tydings–McDuffie Act promised the so-called Commonwealth of the Philippines independence, but with its external relations controlled by the US. The archipelago’s defences were entrusted to the ambitious General Douglas MacArthur, son of a former US military governor, who was loaned to Manila to organize a Swiss-style citizens’ army.32
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