Asia [individual assignment]
ASIA
MILITARISM AND REVOLUTION IN EAST ASIA
China
The Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912 swept away the Qing regime.
The revolution’s leading figure was Sun Yat-sen, who spent the 1890s and early 1900s promoting Western-style modernization and constitutional rule based on three “people’s principles”: nationalism (opposition to Manchu rule and Western imperialism), democracy (including universal suffrage for women as well as men), and livelihood (a semi-socialist concern for people’s welfare).
His movement was known as the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT).
Sun’s political idealism was no match for the civil war and anarchy that followed. In 1912, the authoritarian general Yuan Shikai seized power, which remained in his hands until his death in 1916, and then passed to other right-wing officers until 1928. Opposed to this military regime were warlords and bandits, who controlled large areas, pro-western intellectuals and students (against the regime’s attempts to revive traditional Confucian values).
On May 4, 1919, thousands of students gathered in Tiananmen Square. Also clashing with the military regime were the Kuomintang, led by Sun and now running a revolutionary efforts in the south, based in Canton, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921. In the mid-1920s, both cooperated to combat unruly warlords and to unseat the military government.
In 1925, Sun died of cancer, passing the KMT leadership to Chiang Kai-shek, a Western-educated officer. In 1927, Chiang turned against the communists. In 1928, Chiang took Beijin and founded a Kuomintant regime that professed allegiance to Sun’s principles and attempted modernization but soon grew corrupt, inefficient and authoritarian.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921. In the mid-1920s, KMT (Kuomintang) and CCP cooperated to combat unruly warlords and to unseat the military government.
In 1925, Sun died of cancer, passing the KMT leadership to Chiang Kai-shek, a Western-educated officer who leaned farther to the right than Sun had. By early 1927, the KMT-CCP alliance had won control of all China south of the Yangtze River—then, in April, Chiang suddenly turned against the communists, murdering thousands in Shanghai and driving the rest far to the north.
In 1928, Chiang took Beijing and founded a Kuomintang regime that professed allegiance to Sun’s principles and attempted a certain degree of modernization but soon grew corrupt, inefficient, and authoritarian. Chiang governed China until 1949, but faced two deadly threats.
First was Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), who led the CCP to its new-northern base of Yenan during the arduous Long March of 1934-1935 and, from there, continued the anti-KMT struggle.
Second was Japanese expansion, which began in 1931 (with the result of Manchuria captured), worsened after 1937 (invasion and Rape of Nanjing that December 1937), and never ceased until the end of World War II.
Japan
After World War I, in which Japan fought on the side of the Allies and was therefore one of the victors, Japan’s economy and military really started to thrive.
Japan began the interwar period with democratizing potential but veered in the end toward authoritarian militarism. Through the late 1920s, the powers of the Diet increased, freedom of the press expanded, and a 1925 bill of rights granted universal male suffrage and other civil liberties.
On the other hand, Japan continued its policy of state-directed industrialization, with a small number of powerful corporations, or zaibatsu, benefiting from government favouritism. Not only did this system concentrate wealth in a tiny oligarchy of influential industrialists, it kept trade unions weak and did little to improve working conditions. Even before the Depression, strikes and riots were common, and social stress was building to a dangerous level.
Japan was densely populated. As the world economy collapsed, Japan had more and more problems with necessities like food and fuel.
Nationalism was bolstered by the ideology of State Shinto, which propagandistically perverted Japan’s indigenous faith to foster a sense of racial superiority and unquestioninig loyalty to the state. Anti-Western feelings sharpened, and the slogan “Asia for the Asians” called for the expulsion of colonizing powers like Britain and France.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression and Japan’s foreign-policy aggression derailed further liberalization in Japan. The Depression caused Japanese exports to plummet more than 50 percent. The resulting economic stress gave rise to left-wing extremism, including communist agitation, and this was met by conservative backlash. Two prime ministers were assassinated, one in 1930 by leftists, the other in 1932 by radical rightists.
A steady political crackdown resulted in military control of the government by 1937, climaxing with the 1941 elevation of Hideki Tojo, head of Japan’s army, to the prime ministership. At the same time, militaristic nationalism skyrocketed.
Starting in 1931, the Japanese put their nationalistic feelings into action, seizing Manchuria from China and withdrawing from the League of Nations. They resumed their war against China in 1937, committing dreadful atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing that December, when Japanese troops butchered 200,000 to 300,000 noncombatants, including thousands of women who were first sexually assaulted.
Before the end of World War II, the Japanese would spread this campaign of xenophobic imperialism throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, euphemistically naming their sphere of influence the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
National liberation movements became increasingly influential. Anti-colonial agitation escalated in Indonesia, Burma, and Indochina (especially among the Vietnamese). Such efforts were typically led by Western-educated elites and middle-class intellectuals and students.
The most successful of these movements appeared in India, spearheaded by the Indian National Congress. Because they had supported Britain so loyally during the WW I, Indians hoped for greater autonomy after the war.
Aggrieved by the lack of change, they began staging mass protests, one of which, at Amritsar in 1919, resulted in the killing of wounding of more than 1400 unarmed demonstrators by British troops.
The bloody Revolution did not happen due to the guidance of Mohandas Gandhi, a leading figure in the Congress movement since 1915, known to his followers as Mahatma, or “great soul”. Imprisoned several times by the British, Gandhi combined political activism and Hindu religious principle to devise the policy of nonviolent resistance, which he called satyagraha (“hold to the truth”). An example of satyagraha in action came in 1930, after the British imposed a punitively high tax on salt. Rather than protest violently, Gandhi led 5000 people on a 200-mile march to the seashore, where they began to make salt illegally by drying out seawater. When the British arrived, Gandhi allowed himself to be arrested peacefully.
From 1930 to 1931, Gandhi was in prison. Freed he continued to work with the Congress, but more as a spiritual leader than a political one. That role fell to the lawyer Jawaharlal Nehru, a secular modernizer.
Gandhi and Nehru now pressed for full independence, and even after Britain granted a constitution in 1935 that promised eventual self-rule, Congress responded with its “Quit India” campaign. Britain realized that it would have to accelerate its plans for withdrawal—although these were delayed until 1947 by the advent of World War II.
The Congress, which chiefly represented Hindu interests, was not the only force agitating for Indian freedom. In 1930, Muhammad Ali Jinnah ended many years of cooperation with the Congress and founded the All-India Muslim League, which aimed not just for independence but also for the creation of a separate Islamic state. The failure of the Muslim League and the Congress to resolve their differences peacefully led to great bloodshed and decades of ongoing Indo-Pakistani rivalry.
Questions for experts
1. What were the most significant events in the region? Why have you chosen them?
2. What factors influenced on the development of the given Asian countries?
3. What distinguishes Asia from other regions and countries considered in this topic? (Before answering read about other region in the topic 12).