The political systems are diverse: Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand are all robust democracies, while China is decidedly authoritarian and North Korea (more formally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is governed by arguably the most closed, repressive regime in the world. There are also a handful of countries in between: the Philippines is a democracy but is backsliding into authoritarianism, Thailand was once a democracy but is now governed by its military, and Myanmar (Burma) recently made progress toward democracy but seems to have stalled.
Wars between Asian countries have been rare—the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1979 limited conflict between China and Vietnam being exceptions—as in much of the rest of the world. What makes this remarkable is that the region is home to more territorial disputes than any other. Instability within countries is also rare, in large part because of strong national identities. Many countries are close to being ethnically homogeneous.
The region’s economic performance has steadily improved, and it has become a manufacturing powerhouse that accounts for just under one-third of global output. There are several strong regional political and economic institutions, principally the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group that provides a forum for its twenty-one members to discuss ways to promote trade.
The region consists principally of East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan); Southeast Asia (eleven countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam that have a combined population nearly twice that of the United States and a combined GDP on par with France, the United Kingdom, and India); and Australia, New Zealand, and the small Pacific Island nations. Its politics, economics, and security, though, are all heavily influenced by other countries that border Asia, the Pacific, or both, including the United States, Russia, and India. Indeed, more than any other region, Asia is where this era’s major powers come into regular, direct contact with one another.
HISTORY
After the tumult of the twentieth century, Asia’s present-day success was by no means inevitable. Much of the region suffered a great deal under brutal Japanese occupation before and during World War II. As for Japan, by mid-August 1945 it was a defeated and occupied country. After World War II, China was in the throes of civil war between Nationalists—who were essentially anti-Communist and politically authoritarian and favored economic policies that benefited a wealthy elite—led by Chiang Kai-shek, and Communists—who were politically repressive and opposed to private ownership—led by Mao Zedong. The conflict would continue for four more years, by which time the Communists prevailed and asserted control over mainland China. The Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa, known today as Taiwan.
The region was also one of the first venues where the Cold War was waged. Following the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided, somewhat arbitrarily, along the 38th parallel. North Korea, backed by both the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea in June 1950 and quickly overran much of the country. The United States, acting with the backing of the newly created United Nations (the resolution was able to pass in the Security Council because the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN to protest the Republic of China (Taiwan) occupying China’s seat) and joined by a number of other countries, undertook an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon, regained the strategic momentum, and within months liberated all the territory south of the 38th parallel.
President Harry Truman and the general in charge, Douglas MacArthur, then made the fateful decision to try to unify the peninsula by force. Marching north toward the border between North Korea and China, they were met by Chinese “volunteers,” who in actuality were soldiers, and were forced to retreat. After three years of intense fighting, matters settled to where they had stood before the war, with the peninsula divided into two countries along the 38th parallel. The economic costs of the war were enormous, running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The human costs were even higher: some 37,000 American troops were killed, and 3.5 million Koreans were either killed or wounded. A formal peace treaty was never signed—an armistice took its place that remains in effect—and the two countries have been in an uneasy and heavily armed standoff ever since. American soldiers have been stationed in South Korea since the war, and nearly thirty thousand remain in the country to this day, with the goal of deterring North Korea from trying to unify the peninsula by force.
Asia went on to experience a number of other conflicts, none more costly and prolonged than the war in Vietnam. Vietnam had been a French colony before World War II but became occupied by Japan during the war. After the Japanese defeat, France moved to reassert control. What ensued was a war for independence, ultimately won by the Viet Minh (the Vietnamese nationalist movement) led by Ho Chi Minh. At the Geneva Peace Conference that followed the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Cold War considerations took precedence over local ones, and the country was divided into a Communist north and a non-Communist south. The United States came to see the survival of South Vietnam as critical, fearing that if the country were to be unified under Communist-led North Vietnam it would lead to other countries in the region suffering the same fate, like a row of dominoes.
What ensued beginning in the early 1960s was more than a decade of war, one that simultaneously had the characteristics of a civil war in the South (between U.S.-backed South Vietnam government forces and Communist guerrillas known as the Viet Cong backed by North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China) and a more traditional war involving North Vietnamese troops (again backed by the Soviet Union and China) and U.S. forces. American involvement came to entail the provision of massive amounts of economic and military aid to the South, military advisers, and ultimately American combat forces, at the peak numbering some 550,000. The United States also carried out direct attacks from the air on North Vietnamese targets and on routes in neighboring countries used to supply the Viet Cong fighting in the South.
The high human and economic costs of the war, a military draft, the corrupt and often authoritarian nature of the South Vietnamese regime, and poor prospects for success made the war increasingly unpopular in the United States, triggering widespread opposition to the war throughout the country. For many in my generation, it was a defining issue. My first involvement in politics involved traveling in May 1970 from Oberlin, Ohio (where I was in college), to march on Washington to protest the war, along with hundreds of thousands of others, after four students were killed at Kent State University following demonstrations opposed to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the expansion of the war effort.
Against this backdrop, the United States, under the leadership of President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, turned to diplomacy, and American and North Vietnamese diplomats met to negotiate an end to the conflict. The resulting Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973. The agreement did not end the conflict so much as provide a face-saving way for the United States to extricate itself from the conflict. By 1975, following a congressional cutoff of all aid to South Vietnam, its government crumbled and the country was unified quickly and brutally under the Communist government in the North.
As in Korea, the costs of war were horrific by any and every measure. Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers lost their lives; more than one million Vietnamese combatants and civilians lost theirs. The economic cost is impossible to calculate but nearly reaches $1 trillion (if the current value of the dollar is used). One irony is hard to resist: decades later, the United States and a united Vietnam, which is still ruled by the Communist Party, have an increasingly close relationship, a reflection of Vietnam’s embrace of a more market-oriented economy and shared concerns over China’s intentions.
THE ASIAN ECONOMIC MIRACLE
Yet even with these two conflicts and a number of lesser ones, what took place in Asia since World War II surely
qualifies as a miracle. Life expectancy across the region rose from forty-eight years in 1960 to seventy-five half a century later. Robust democracies took root over time in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Arguably the greatest miracle, though, was economic. Many of the region’s countries experienced high levels of economic growth over extended periods. The four “Asian Tigers”—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—experienced average annual economic growth of more than 6 percent from the early 1960s through the 1990s, considerably higher than the world average. For the region as a whole, real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (in constant 2010 dollars) has risen from roughly $1,300 in 1960 to over $10,000 in 2018.
There are many reasons for this economic success, and there are of course differences that account for what happened in each country. That said, what tended to be common was significant political stability, a culture of hard work, and investment in education. This was complemented by an external order that promoted free trade and for the last half a century mostly avoided conflict.
ECONOMIC GROWTH: ASIAN TIGERS
Real GDP per capita, in 2011 U.S. dollars
Source: Maddison Project Database, version 2018. Bolt, Jutta, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2018), “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development,” Maddison Project Working paper 10.
The contribution of the United States to this economic boom is worth pointing out. The Asian miracle is in no small part due to American involvement and commitment. U.S. aid to its allies following World War II was significant and helped set the conditions for their future economic success. The U.S. alliance system, which includes Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand, deterred another war on the Korean Peninsula as well as Chinese use of force against Taiwan, discouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and helped bring about professional militaries prepared to accept civilian primacy. U.S. support for free trade and its openness to foreign products provided a mechanism for export-led development and growth for many countries, allowing them to substantially increase the standard of living for their people. U.S. support for democracy and human rights—and pressure on its allies to implement political reform and open their societies—contributed to an evolution of many societies.
Several countries deserve special mention here. The first is Japan, if only because it was the first of the region’s success stories. In just two generations, Japan evolved from a defeated imperial militarist country to a functioning democracy, ultimately moving beyond prolonged one-party domination. It became a manufacturing powerhouse, for a long time the world’s second-largest economy and now its third largest. Japan also embraced a constitution that limited its military’s role in society. Similarly, South Korea evolved from an authoritarian system into a true democracy. Its economy is now the tenth largest in the world.
China followed a fundamentally different path but with no less extraordinary results. It has been some seventy years since China’s Communists gained control, and in that time the country’s annual economic output has grown from under $100 million to more than $13 trillion. Under Mao Zedong, China was an economic basket case, having experienced the worst human-made famine in modern history, the so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962. This was a coerced, flawed, and overwhelmingly failed effort to ban private farms and collectivize Chinese agriculture that triggered widespread famine and caused an estimated thirty to fifty-five million deaths. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), an effort to purge Chinese society of many of its traditional values, followed the Great Leap Forward and had the effect of ruining countless lives and disrupting broad elements of the economy and society by forcing tens of millions of people to leave their homes and jobs in cities, suffer a complete loss of economic and political freedom, and experience a harsh rural existence. It was only after Deng Xiaoping took the helm in the late 1970s, following Mao’s death, and began implementing limited market reforms that China was able to right its course. As a result of these changes, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been lifted out of poverty.
GEOPOLITICS
None of this is meant to suggest Asia is without its challenges. The most obvious are geopolitical, with the most pronounced ones relating to the rise of China. China is so large, wealthy (on an aggregate basis), and powerful that it is, in many ways, too much for any other regional country to handle on its own. China is a principal trading partner for many of its neighbors, including Japan, South Korea, and Australia, which also happen to be allies of the United States. The question for them is how to balance these two relationships, and when it comes to security, the question is to what extent they should rely on the United States, become more self-sufficient, or move closer to China.
Meanwhile, it is unclear how China will use its power and how other countries will react. It is acting unilaterally and assertively to increase its military strength in the South China Sea on behalf of territorial claims that many of its neighbors dispute and that some countries (such as the United States) view as a threat to their ability to move their own military forces into and out of the region. China is also using its economic strength, through its “Belt and Road” development initiative that provides loans to countries throughout the region to finance large infrastructure projects, to increase its leverage and access.
There are other disputes in the region worth highlighting. Russia and Japan have yet to sign a formal end to World War II because of competing claims to islands that form the northern part of the Japanese island chain. More seriously, Japan and China cannot agree on who has title to islands in the East China Sea. They cannot even agree on what the islands are called: Japan knows them as the Senkaku Islands, China as the Diaoyu Islands. What makes this particularly perilous is that the competing claims are both a reflection and a cause of larger tensions between the region’s two most powerful countries. Should Japan become engaged in a conflict over these islands, the United States would likely become involved; if Japan came to doubt American support, it would increase its military might and possibly develop nuclear weapons.
There is also an uneasy relationship between China and India. Their twenty-five-hundred-mile border is unresolved, and it was a major cause of their 1962 war. But the friction transcends the border dispute and reflects their strategic competition. An important motive for India’s acquiring nuclear weapons was the fact that China already had them. China is close to Pakistan, India’s archrival, in part because China sees an interest in tying India down so it can focus its energies on its south and east. If it all sounds like classic power politics, that’s because it is.
Taiwan is a separate matter. Ever since the Chinese Communists gained control of the mainland in 1949 and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan both sides and most outsiders have maintained that there is but one China, while differing on how to define what China is. Fewer than two dozen countries maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan (still formally known as the Republic of China), with the rest of the world either recognizing China’s claim to Taiwan or asserting that the question remains to be settled. While the United States broke formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1979, it has assumed unique responsibilities to the island, in particular to provide it with defensive weapons and to maintain the ability to come to its defense (without being actually obligated to do so). At the same time, Taiwan is an autonomous political and economic entity and has most of the characteristics of an independent country. The mainland is committed to unification with Taiwan and has stated on multiple occasions that force is an option to bring this about. Other countries are neutral on whether Taiwan becomes definitively a part of China but care about the process by which it comes about. They want whatever happens to be peacefully resolved and entered into voluntarily and therefore on terms acceptable to Taiwan. The question is whether a peaceful settlement on terms both sides can live with is feasible or whether events—for example, Taiwan declarin
g independence, an economic crisis on the mainland that leads its government to force the pace of unification or steps taken by the United States to upgrade Taiwan’s status—will trigger a crisis that could involve the use of force.
A final potential source of geopolitical instability in the region is the Korean Peninsula. As already noted, the Korean Peninsula has been divided along the 38th parallel since after World War II. Aside from small incidents, deterrence has held. Both sides are heavily armed, and there is always the chance North Korea will be tempted to attack given the proximity and vulnerability of Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Adding to the stakes in recent years is North Korea’s steady development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, making it a threat not just to South Korea and Japan but to the world, including the United States. It is an open question whether some mixture of diplomacy and deterrence can continue to prevent war between the two Koreas as well as between North Korea and the United States. It is just as much a question as to whether the United States is prepared to live with a North Korea that can threaten it directly and accept a negotiated outcome under which North Korea agrees to limit but not eliminate its nuclear and missile capabilities. There is also the question of how stable North Korea really is; it has been ruled dynastically for its entire existence and is one of the poorest and most closed countries on earth. And finally there is the question of whether China would be willing to allow the two Koreas to reunify on terms that favored the United States and would result in a U.S. ally on its border.
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