When the architect Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to design a new district of the city of Delhi as the seat of government in British India, he chose to align the central vista of what was to become New Delhi with a crumbling red sandstone fort called the Purana Qila. The symbolism of the design was deliberate. Construction of the Purana Qila was begun in the sixteenth century during the reign of the second Mughal emperor Humayun, and finished by his vanquisher, the Afghan king Sher Shah Suri. It was fabled to have been built on the ruins of an older palace, the Indraprastha, the seat of government of the Pandavas, a royal family that features in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The Purana Qila was known to Lutyens as the oldest standing building in Delhi: its massive 18-metre red sandstone walls and soaring domed turrets were a classic example of early Indo-Persian architecture and referenced in Lutyens’s design of the new government buildings; its site recalling the ancient civilisation of India.1
The historical and cultural symbolism of Purana Qila was the main reason that Jawaharlal Nehru, the vice-president of the Executive Council of India, decided to hold an Asian Relations Conference in its grounds in March and April 1947. A more prosaic reason was its size: Purana Qila’s 1.5-kilometre-long walls would enclose some 200,000 Muslim refugees only months later during India’s blood-drenched partition from Pakistan. The fact that India was not yet independent – and nor were most of the Asian nations invited to attend – was partly the point; in a tour of Southeast Asia in March 1946, Nehru had discussed with several independence leaders the need for a conference to promote mutual understanding among Asian peoples who would be soon in charge of their own destinies.2 Invitations were sent to political and cultural leaders from 27 countries in North, Southeast, Central, South and West Asia. Australia, the Arab League, Britain, the United Nations and the United States were invited to send observers. The invitations stated that the object of the conference was to promote ‘a cultural and political revival, and social progress in Asia, independent of all questions of internal as well as international politics’.3
The opening ceremony, on the evening of 23 March 1947, featured a solemn procession of 242 delegates and was attended by some 15,000 people. Standing in front of a huge illuminated map of Asia, Nehru gave the welcoming address, in which he said:
In this Conference and in this work there are no leaders and no followers. All countries of Asia have to meet together on an equal basis in a common task and equal endeavor. It is fitting that India should play her part in this new phase of Asian development. Apart from the fact that India itself is emerging into freedom and independence, she is the natural centre and focal point of the many forces at work in Asia.4
As Nehru warmed to his theme, a frisson of disquiet rippled through the delegates. He began to speak of the broader role of Indian culture in Asia:
streams of culture have flowed from India to distant parts of Asia. If you would know India you would have to go to Afghanistan and Western Asia, to Central Asia, to China and Japan and to the countries of Southeast Asia. There you will find magnificent evidence of the vitality of India’s culture which spread out and influenced vast numbers of people.5
Nehru’s opening speech was not an isolated excursion in Indian cultural chauvinism. When delegates visited the Inter-Asian Art Exhibition held to accompany the conference, they were handed a guide that spoke of an Indian ‘cultural empire that once embraced these distant lands for centuries’, pointing to Burma, Malaya, Siam, Cambodia, Champa (in modern-day Vietnam) and Indonesia. These unsubtle references called forth a competitive response from the Chinese delegation, represented by members of the beleaguered nationalist Kuomintang government. Soon delegates were being forced to listen to a matching narrative about China’s extensive cultural influence across Asia. When, at the end of the conference, the Chinese delegation requested and was awarded the right to host the next Asian Relations Conference, some of the Southeast Asian delegates began to discuss the need for greater subregional solidarity as a way of resisting worrying signs of historical and cultural imperialism on the part of their huge neighbours.6
Few remember the Asian Relations Conference, which was completely overshadowed by the Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, eight years later – perhaps because so few of those who attended regarded it as a significant event in Asia’s postcolonial history. But the further the conference at Purana Qila recedes into the past, the more its cultural tensions and undercurrents seem to have prefigured the contemporary dynamics of confrontation and competition in Asia. For all Asia’s diversity, there is a remarkable commonality among its societies, which makes Asia’s international relations different from those of any other continent. This is the role of history and culture in Asia’s contemporary politics. What the great cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote of pre-colonial Balinese society can equally be said of most of Asia’s contemporary societies: ‘the Balinese search the past not so much for the causes of the present as for the standard by which to judge it’.7 The growing role of civilisational rivalries, and their varied manifestations, is an integral part of interdependence and competition in Asia today. This means that the west’s standard ways of thinking about Asia’s international relations, which draw exclusively on European history and philosophies, are almost certainly wide of the mark: Asia’s future will look nothing like Europe’s past. And if we are to understand Asian states and their increasing influence on global affairs, we need to comprehend the roles of hierarchy, history and cultural rivalry that drive and shape the patterns of conflict and competition in Asia.
One thing shared by all societies in Asia is hierarchy. Hierarchy forms the essential structure of Asian societies: it is embedded in relations, in language, in religious cosmology, in moral frameworks, in cultural and social patterns of privilege and deference. Western societies are unequal, but they are founded on norms and expectations of equality; legal systems and democratic politics entrench a presumption of equality of treatment and voice. But however equal or unequal Asian societies are, or at what stage of technological development, or whatever political system they have adopted, hierarchic social structures and mindsets are constantly reproduced. In many cultures there are well-established procedures for working out relative positions in the social hierarchy when strangers first meet; without such a negotiation, appropriate forms of address and communication can’t be established. So basic is hierarchy to Asian societies that it dictates how they think about relations within and beyond their own boundaries. Hierarchy forms a moral framework for understanding the world and making it predictable; it is a common logic for ordering and judging relations with compatriots and foreigners alike.
From the earliest recorded history in Asia, hierarchy was the principle used by societies to distinguish themselves from the peoples surrounding them and to tell their own histories. The very concept of ‘Chinese-ness’ emerged as a sense of cultural superiority to the surrounding ‘barbarian’ peoples. A sense of cultural uniqueness and superiority is the thread that animates thousands of years of Chinese history; proficiency in Chinese culture was the quality that defined how the Chinese empire classified a people and interacted with it.8 Hierarchy was established in South and Southeast Asia through the Hindu concept of the mandala – an intricate system of interlocking structures of political and religious authority, all suspended in dynamic relationships of superiority and submission.9 Thai history, for example, is a chronicle of relations between Thai kings and their neighbours, who are never seen as equals but as either enemies or dependencies.10 Burma and Vietnam show similar patterns. A strong cosmology underpinned these hierarchical relations: superiority was taken to reflect cultural and moral prestige in a world in which the terrestrial order paralleled the hierarchical divine order. Asia’s civilisational hierarchies were exceptionalist and expansionist at the same time: the adoption of religious and political concepts by surrounding societies was taken as evidence of the superiority of one’s own culture and religion.
Naturally, a profusion of societies, each believing in its own civilisational superiority, produced dynamism and tension in pre-colonial Asia’s international relations. Pragmatism sometimes dictated that a kingdom should defer to a larger neighbour, either in acknowledgement of its greater military power or as a way of legitimising its own claims to authority – or as a way of gaining the right to trade with the larger society. Deference was made easier because its rituals were symbolic, encapsulated in the highly codified practices of paying and acknowledging tribute.11 Within these rituals, however, was latitude for each side to interpret the relationship in a way that best preserved its own sense of honour and cultural prestige. Larger societies emphasised their civilisational influence on their neighbours, accepting tribute as an acknowledgement of their cultural and moral superiority. Smaller societies often told a very different story, portraying the tributary relationship as one between equals; what appeared to the Chinese emperor as acknowledgement of his superiority was portrayed by the Vietnamese emperor as the mutual acknowledgement of two supreme emperors, each surrounded by a collection of subordinate societies and rulers.12 Instead of taking cultural borrowings from larger neighbours as evidence of their own inferiority, smaller societies emphasised how these had been adapted and improved in the borrowing. Tension and warfare frequently arose when expectations of deference were not met; failure to properly acknowledge a larger society’s superiority was imbued with strong moral judgements, and often followed by wars of punishment designed not to grab territory or gold but to re-establish the appropriate level of deference.
The constant negotiation of international hierarchy and prestige produced much of the dynamism and conflict in pre-colonial Asia. Centuries of contestation produced strong ethnic and cultural stereotypes among neighbouring kingdoms and societies, and out of the struggle for self-respect and prestige within a hierarchical international order emerged strong traditions of national distinctiveness. Vietnam and Korea – despite borrowing heavily from Chinese culture, writing, philosophy and government forms – developed a strong sense of national identity from not being Chinese and from their determined resistance to becoming another province of the Chinese empire.13 Japan, blessed by its physical separation from the Asian mainland, chose to withdraw itself from the Sinic tributary system, focusing on developing what it saw as its own superior culture and in turn creating its own Japan-centred hierarchical order. Across Southeast Asia and the subcontinent also, a repeated cycle of prestige, resistance, punishment and defiance produced dynamic and ever-changing subsystems of international relations.
When Europeans began to appear from the sea in ever-greater numbers in the sixteenth century, they too were allotted an inferior position in the hierarchies of the societies they encountered. The Europeans appeared uncultured and wanted what Asian societies produced; in return they could offer little that interested the local people other than silver. But two qualities made the Europeans disruptive to Asian hierarchies: their avarice and their military prowess. They were never satisfied with being granted conditional access to Asian economies, and they were brutal and uncompromising in making additional demands. When it was granted, the access was never enough and the coercive diplomacy soon returned. The kingdoms of the subcontinent were the first to make the mistake of thinking that they could harness the savage greed of these interlopers for their own realpolitik purposes; those who started out as allies soon became rapacious and brutal competitors. The kings of the Southeast Asian archipelagos learned the same lesson, but, once again, too late. Over time, the Europeans’ coercive avarice became headlong competition to secure exclusive control over and access to the wealth and markets of Asia.
The Europeans who were sent to administer these huge, teeming empires had themselves escaped class-bound hierarchies at home. They, who had suffered the condescension and prejudice of aristocrats, suddenly found themselves all-powerful within Asia’s hierarchical societies. The colonialists justified their sudden change in status by developing their own narrative of the cultural and moral superiority of their societies, religion and culture to those of the locals.14 Overlaying this was a new notion of racial hierarchy, an alchemy of the ancient preoccupation with bloodlines and the newer fascination with biological evolution and the ascent of man. In place of Asia’s jostling hierarchies there settled a uniform, suffocating dominance – undeniable in coercive material fact and constantly asserted as the racial, moral and cultural superiority of European over Asian societies. This narrative of racial and cultural superiority, rather than material or coercive preponderance, allowed a handful of Europeans to administer vastly greater numbers of Asians.
To societies that had long considered material and military prowess as evidence of civilisational and moral superiority, the prolonged domination of the Europeans came as a profound psychic shock, one from which Asian societies are yet to recover. Those last to feel the weight of western dominance and condescension – the Japanese, the Koreans and the Chinese – reacted with alarm at the fate of other societies on the continent. Their response to the Europeans’ blanket denigration of ‘Asians’ as an inferior ‘race’ was to adopt the Europeans’ race logic as a way of distinguishing themselves from other subjugated and therefore inferior races.15 China soon ceased to be the ‘significant other’ against which Korea and Japan defined their distinctiveness; all three societies became preoccupied with asserting their non-inferiority to the west. But an aspect of pre-colonial Asia’s competitive hierarchy remained: in asserting their non-inferiority to the west, many of Asia’s subjugated societies continued to distinguish themselves as superior to surrounding societies and cultures.
For those cultures never completely colonised by the west, the newly racialised hierarchy of the colonial system caused a rapid re-evaluation of long-held tributary relationships. What had once been a series of ceremonial and loosely interpreted nominal rankings quickly became relationships of extreme sensitivity to assumptions of superiority and expectations of deference. In 1868, in one of his last decrees, the Thai king Mongkut declared the centuries-old practice of paying tribute to China to be shameful and therefore ordered it abolished.16 In Japan, a new nativist movement called kokugaku, dedicated to denigrating Confucianism and asserting the superiority of Japanese culture and philosophy, gained new momentum in the nineteenth century. Any shoguns of the past, such as Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who had briefly sent tribute to the Ming emperor’s court in return for trading privileges, were denounced.17 By later in the nineteenth century, Korean reformers denounced as humiliating the practice of sadae (‘serving the great’), which had long justified Korea’s tributary relationship with China. Even today, anti-sadaeism provides a highly emotive charge to protests against perceived domination of Korea by the Americans, Chinese or Japanese.
The Europeans and Americans who established dominance over Asia had meanwhile established a system of formal sovereign equality among themselves. But the badge of equality, sovereign statehood, was denied to their colonies. Even those Asian countries that had avoided formal colonisation were denied membership of this club, ostensibly because they failed to meet the required ‘standard of civilisation’. It was a standard that rankled with the Japanese, the Thais and the Chinese, all of whom resented being forced to sign treaties imbued with unequal status by various European countries and the United States. The very sovereignty the Europeans and Americans so judiciously accorded each other was cavalierly denied to Asians, whether colonised or not.18 And in these double standards began to germinate both the intellectual and physical resistance to colonial hierarchy and its justifications – a resistance that made the rule over the many by the few increasingly untenable.
The intellectual and moral justifications of colonialism were shredded by the Nazis’ bestial ideology of racial hierarchy and their brutal quest for lebensraum in Europe. Condescending racial stereotypes and standards of civilisation became untenable among the coalition of countries resisting Nazism and Japanese militarism. When decolonisation came, it came with a rush, dismantling the colonial order in Asia in just two decades following the end of the Second World War. Complementing the demands of Asians for independence was the intense competition between two anti-colonial superpowers, each vying with the other to present compelling alternative visions of modernity and justice for the postwar world. The ideological competition of the Cold War was total: the United States and the Soviet Union contended for the allegiance of every newly independent or proto-independent state. Every state in Asia – however small, new or impoverished – gained equal sovereign rights, and was treated as such by the competing superpowers and their allies. And so, within decades, Asia’s states vaulted from positions of domination and presumed civilisational inadequacy to a situation of radical sovereign equality in which each state, irrespective of size, wealth or internal coherence, became equally important in the ideological rivalry of the superpowers.19
Ironically, the new states that had been suddenly pronounced the sovereign equals of their former colonisers were much less certain of their legitimacy within their borders. Most new states simply inherited the boundary demarcations of the colonial era or accepted the hurriedly concocted subdivisions of departing colonial authorities in South Asia, Indochina and West Asia. Many of these new states had not existed as unified political units before the age of colonialism, and within their arbitrary borders were collected random and often antagonistic arrays of ethnicities and religious communities. Sometimes borders divided coherent communities between two or more states. The challenge for Asia’s new governments was therefore threefold. They needed to justify their new states as natural expressions of self-determination, rather than the illogical result of some hastily negotiated postcolonial compromise. They had to subsume the great diversities of their populations under an overriding principle of unity, a national essence that drew all communities and confessions together in loyalty to the new state. And they had to conjure a sense of pride and worthiness in their new sovereign status after decades or centuries of material, political and moral subjugation by Europeans.20
The response of new state after new state in Asia was to bring the ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of their population within a broad concept of the civilisational essence that had united the peoples within the state’s borders before the Europeans had arrived. India’s independence leaders conjured and promoted pride in an Indian civilisation, grounded in Sanskrit cultural traditions and evoked in ancient empires such as that of the Mauryas (322–185 BCE). Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, evoked the great pre-colonial empires of Majapahit (1293–1500 CE) and Srivijaya (seventh–eleventh century CE) to justify the unity of a vast archipelago stretching from Aceh to Papua.21 The new Cambodian state chose to put on its flag a picture of the huge temple complex of Angkor Wat, a monument to the glory of the Khmer empire during the twelfth century. In China, the unity of the state was never in doubt, but the urge to assert civilisational greatness and privileges beyond its borders proved strong. After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, China’s nationalists reacted to China’s humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers by referring to former tributary relationships with Laos, Vietnam, Burma and Korea as ‘lost colonies’.22 But these societies conjuring pre-colonial civilisational greatness held on with equal passion to a conviction that was very much a product of the colonial age: that deference and subjugation are shameful.
The result has been a gradual re-emergence into Asia’s postcolonial international relations of many of the hierarchical pretensions and resistances of Asia’s pre-colonial times. Across Asia resonate concentric and overlapping expectations of deference and sensitivities to hierarchy, forming a constant undercurrent of regional relations all the more profound for regional leaders’ attempts to conceal them behind displays of bonhomie. Over decades, prejudices and antagonisms have only been heightened by the bursts of economic development that temporarily distinguish countries from their neighbours, and by the political capital that becomes invested in these differential growth rates. The length of tenure of many of the region’s leaders, and the deep investment of elites in the state’s economic fortunes, tends only to further personalise judgements of success and superiority.
A complex set of jealousies underlies relations between Singapore and its neighbours. As a small Chinese-majority state that enjoyed spectacular economic success before any of its larger Malay-majority neighbours, Singapore is the constant focus of suspicion. Malaysia, the country that expelled Singapore from its body politic in 1965, is particularly thin-skinned when it comes to any sense of superiority or condescension. Singapore reciprocates with its own great sensitivity to any sign of being treated by Malaysia on adang–aduk (big brother–little brother) lines.23 Some of these jealousies began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Malaysian economy began to develop rapidly. But they returned abruptly as the Asian financial crisis ripped great holes in the Malaysian economy. Prime Minister Mahathir accused Singapore of manipulating the value of the Malaysian ringgit and disrupting the stock exchange with the intent of keeping Malaysia poor and subservient.
Kuala Lumpur, meanwhile, fears being forced to play the aduk to a neighbouring adang – Indonesia. Despite regular protestations of Malay fraternity, relations between Indonesia and Malaysia are pervaded with mutual negative stereotypes. Suffusing Indonesia’s sense of self is an awareness of size and historical greatness, of being the greatest representative of the Malay peoples, and pride in its violent struggle for independence. To Malaysians these self-perceptions are presumptuous and condescending, particularly given that their country, while it never struggled for independence, has preserved its Malay royalty and nobility in continuity with pre-colonial Malay society. Indonesians living in Malaysia confront everyday prejudices that cast them as the source of crime and disease. Relations between Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur become particularly strained at times when Malaysia becomes assertive regionally and internationally. Indonesia reacted angrily when Dr Mahathir proposed a new regional grouping, the East Asian Economic Group (EAEG), in 1990. Indonesia’s elites interpreted the scheme as a usurpation of Indonesia’s regional leadership role and muttered that Mahathir’s combative style was simply not the way things were done in Southeast Asia. The Malaysian media, in response, interpreted Indonesia’s opposition to the EAEG as the manifestation of a deeper drive to dominate Malaysia and all of Southeast Asia.24
Indonesia, a country that assumes a natural leadership in Southeast Asia and reacts defensively to any perceived challenge, is itself highly sensitive to any presumption of superiority by larger Asian states. Foreign Minister Ali Alatas was at great pains to assert the equality of Indonesia and China at the time of the normalisation of their relations in 1990:
China, no matter what, is a big country. It is big in terms of its population; it plays a big role as a developing country. So is Indonesia. We live in the same region. And, this region is experiencing turbulence, in the process of rapid change. Indonesia and China are two most active and important actors.25
China’s rapid rise, from a marginalised small economy to the largest and most central economy in the region, has led to heightened attentiveness among a range of countries to any assertions of superiority from Beijing. When Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi exploded in frustration at ASEAN states’ criticism of Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea, telling Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo, ‘China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact’,26 the remark echoed around the region. Concerns voiced in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia sound remarkably similar: the rise of ‘great Han nationalism’ in China aims to use wealth and power to place other countries in a deferential relationship.27
The highly politicised and sensitive place of culture and history in Asia means that ‘soft power’, the use of moral and cultural attraction to advance foreign policy outcomes, is stillborn among Asian states. Societies fear that cultural admiration will be taken as an acknowledgement of cultural inferiority. For many years, Seoul blocked the broadcasting of Japanese pop culture in South Korea out of fear that it would undermine Korean cultural traditions and subordinate the country to Japan. A growing number of Vietnamese worry about China’s expanding economic, political and cultural influence over their country. The media and popular culture are increasingly playing roles in the assertion of their societies’ intrinsic value and authenticity, and in their defence against other societies’ pretensions of superiority.
In the steamy July of 2004, South Korea’s bustling capital, Seoul, ignited in a burst of collective anger. Bemused visitors watched television news channels covering widespread protests: young South Koreans dressed in historical costumes chanting slogans at the Chinese embassy; internet activists calling themselves euibyong, after ancient Korean guerrillas who fought Chinese and Japanese invaders, demanding boycotts of Chinese goods and tourism; a young demonstrator tearing up a Chinese flag with his teeth and spitting it on the ground. A poll published by the Korea Herald the following month showed that the proportion of South Korean National Assembly members who believed China to be South Korea’s most important diplomatic partner in Asia had fallen to 6 per cent from 63 per cent four months previously.28
To most observers, South Korea’s plummeting regard for China came as an abrupt reversal. In the decade after the normalisation of Sino-South Korean relations, bilateral trade had expanded tenfold and China had become South Korea’s largest trading partner.Some of South Korea’s industrial chaebols were well on their way to becoming the largest single investors in the Chinese economy. Chinese people had become eager consumers of the ‘Korean wave’ of popular culture, while young South Koreans studying in China had topped 30,000 and were rising. Some in Washington had begun to ask whether South Korea was slowly abandoning its commitment to its American alliance and drifting gradually into China’s orbit.
The cause of South Korean anger was a story in China’s People’s Daily reporting UNESCO’s listing of Koguryo (37 BCE – 688 CE) as a World Heritage site in which it was referred to the ‘ancient Koguryo kingdom of China’. To South Koreans, such a claim struck at the core of their national identity: their national and ethnic name was derived from Koguryo and all South Koreans had been raised on stories of bold Koguryo warriors fighting off Chinese invaders. Now, a new ‘Northeast History Project’ launched by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claimed Koguryo as a regional province of the Chinese empire.29 Among its historians were those promoting a legend that Korea was founded by a Chinese prince called Jizi and that most of the Koguryo kingdom, including its capital for 460 of its 725 years, lay in modern-day China. Even more galling for South Koreans, the Chinese Foreign Ministry had removed all mention of Koguryo from the summary of Korean history on the Republic of Korea page of its website.
Despite the visit of Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Dawei to Seoul in August 2004 to calm the dispute, it was clear that China was not resiling from its claim. In December, it issued postage stamps commemorating the UNESCO World Heritage listing of Koguryo sites. The excision of Koguryo from the Foreign Ministry website wasn’t reversed – instead all references to Korean history were removed. Anger and suspicion among South Koreans continued. Historical dramas set in a clearly Korean Koguryo began to dominate South Korean television. The government in Seoul launched its own Koguryo Research Foundation, to be renamed the Northeast Asian History Foundation in 2006. In 2005, North and South Korean archaeologists launched a joint project to study Koguryo-era burial mounds near Pyongyang – the first-ever joint research project between two countries still formally at war.
The South Korean newspapers competed to editorialise about Beijing’s motives for stealing their history. For some, it was a strategy to perpetuate Korea’s division into north and south. By appropriating Koguryo, the Chinese were denying the essential historical unity of the Korean Peninsula, conceding that only kingdoms that occupied the peninsula’s south were authentically Korean. Others discerned an even more imperialist intent. South Koreans of all walks of life bristled at the underlying implication that their country’s long and proud history was derivative of China’s. Some editorials warned of a campaign by Beijing to subject Korea to a new subordinate relationship in which an increasingly tributary economic relationship would shade into an assumption that the Korean Peninsula was simply one of China’s provinces. Some commentators pointed out that China’s claim to Koguryo history might have been a defensive reaction to Beijing’s fears that its heavily ethnic-Korean-populated northeastern provinces could begin agitating for separation from the People’s Republic.30 But this interpretation did little to assuage the resentment and suspicion of most South Koreans.
To westerners, the Koguryo controversy is hard to understand. The equivalent dispute in the west would be tension between Italy and Greece over whether the early Byzantine empire was Latin or Greek. That this is unimaginable shows that, for westerners, history is an ever-receding sequence of events of contemporary interest that give the lineage of current affairs or provide a source of compelling narratives or moral lessons. Rarely is such ancient history the cause of public passions or national antagonisms, or interpreted as central to contemporary international relations.
Such disputes over history, ancient and modern, are strewn across Asia. Koreans and Japanese argue passionately over whether the martial art kendo and the traditional tea ceremony originated in Korea or Japan.31 Indonesians and Malaysians disagree over where batik and wayang puppetry originated. Chinese anger at Japanese textbook interpretations of history goes back to 1910 – and continues to colour bilateral relations over a century later.32 For almost as long, Koreans have taken exception to the claims in the same textbooks that Japan has exercised influence over Korea since ancient times.
Across Asia, national histories are never allowed to recede. They are regularly invoked as talismans of national pride and authenticity. Asian histories glower over the present, imposing lenses for interpreting current affairs, holding aloft ideals of political power and cultural glory towards which peoples aspire, constantly throwing up causes to be defended against the claims of others. This is not new. Before the colonial era, the writing of history was central to the practice of foreign policy; Thai kings and Vietnamese emperors alike were as attentive to the interpretation of events in their official histories as they were to the actual conduct of affairs with foreign kingdoms.33 Today, the standards of history are no less demanding. What one scholar observes of China could equally be said of other elites in Asia:
Chinese governments have, for at least 2000 years, taken history much too seriously to allow the future to make its own unguided judgements about them … The religion of the Chinese ruling classes is the Chinese state, and it is through history that the object of devotion is to be understood.34
Asian states’ historical consciousness provides complex sets of stereotypes and narrative structures for interpreting the present. The court histories of past Thai kings inform contemporary Thai stereotypes about neighbouring societies and form a moral framework for Bangkok’s contemporary regional relations. Despite the recent warming of bilateral relations, the Thai stereotype of Myanmar is that of a wicked and implacable enemy; its colonisation by Britain is interpreted as punishment for its wickedness, while Thailand’s freedom from colonisation is taken to attest to its virtue and wisdom. Laos and Cambodia were seen by Thailand as inferior, untrustworthy and ungrateful for Thailand’s benevolence; Phnom Penh’s claiming of Angkor Wat as a totem of a great Cambodian past is a source of irritation to Thais. The Malay states to the south were seen as sources of tribute, to be watched closely and treated harshly if they misbehaved. Vietnam is to be watched as a potential threat, forgetful of Thailand’s support in its struggle against China and covetous of Thailand’s natural sphere of influence over Laos and Cambodia.35
Historical scripts heavily influence how contemporary events are interpreted. China’s launching of punitive attacks on India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979 were widely seen in the region as a return to old patterns of behaviour, when the Chinese empire would launch wars of punishment against kingdoms believed to be insufficiently deferential. After invading Cambodia in late 1978, Vietnam reverted to pre-colonial patterns of administering conquered neighbours, instituting a suzerain relationship rather than directly annexing Cambodian territory. Indonesia and Thailand interpreted the developing Sino-Vietnamese confrontation in mainland Southeast Asia according to their own histories of resisting China’s domination; Jakarta was to remain sympathetic to Hanoi’s position, which it saw as an entirely understandable assertion of independence from China’s influence.36 Thailand saw the same events very differently – its historical scripts conjured memories of an ungrateful and covetous Vietnam ever willing to encroach on Thailand’s natural sphere of influence.37 Bangkok became the most vigorous opponent of Vietnam’s suzerainty over Cambodia.
In today’s world, multicultural societies are the norm. It is quicker to list ethnically or religiously homogeneous societies than heterogeneous societies, and even these lists have to be qualified. In Asia, Korea, Mongolia and Japan stand out as ethnically homogeneous, even though contemporary South Korea and Japan host growing minorities from elsewhere in Asia. The other states of Asia are shot through with ethnic and religious diversity. While many modern states view their diversity as source of strength and enrichment, ethnic and religious diversity in Asia is more often than not a cause of antagonism and anxiety. In most Asian states, heterogeneity is seen as a potential source of fragility, and, for many, fears about internal minorities run parallel with and play into fears about external aggression and domination.
Asia’s complex ethnic and religious mosaics are the result of centuries of social sedimentation left behind by the tides of conflict, commerce and colonialism. The political map of pre-colonial Asia was shaped and reshaped by the sequential rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. Unlike in Europe, these had no defined and mutually exclusive boundaries – Asia’s kingdoms were more like circular force fields in which power, authority and submission radiated outwards from the court, becoming gradually weaker the further one travelled from the capital. When one kingdom invaded another in mainland Southeast Asia, it tended to seize people rather than territory, marching thousands of captured slaves back to its own territories. Rarely did a political order last long; surrounding tribes were, in Clifford Geertz’s words, ‘only reluctantly subservient … loyal when necessary, rebellious when possible’.38 As a result, outside the more permanent empires lay large tracts of political marchlands, inhabited by peoples rarely subject to political authority, occasionally acknowledging a distant court but largely left alone to nurture local traditions, bloodlines, languages and beliefs.
The exceptions, of course, were the great empires of China and the Mughals. The boundaries of the Chinese empire pressed outwards over thousands of years from its beginnings in the Yellow River valley, in the process subjecting a large array of ethnic groups and religions to imperial rule. But imperial China was never able to impose ethnic or linguistic unity on its new subjects. Despite their acculturation to the Chinese writing system, Confucian moral concepts and Chinese literary traditions, populations outside the heartland maintained mutually incomprehensible languages and held firm to distinctive ethnic identities and cultural traditions.39 Some – such as the Vietnamese, Koreans and Burmese – defined their identity against an ethnic and cultural Chinese-ness and fought for their independence despite repeated invasions and incursions. The great conquests of the Qing Dynasty in the eighteenth century, which nearly doubled the size of the Chinese empire, absorbed peoples with fierce pride in their ethnic history, strong memories of their own empire-building and deep commitment to strong transnational religions.
In the subcontinent, the Mughal Empire presided over an even more complex patchwork of ethnic groups, languages and religions. Despite being the South Asian front of Islam’s conquests across the known world, the early Mughal conquerors were remarkably tolerant of the religious diversity they found south of the Himalayas. Emperor Akbar took a deep interest in the religions of the subcontinent and promulgated a synthesis between Islam and Hindu theologies and traditions.40 His much more doctrinaire great-grandson Aurangzeb took the Mughal Empire’s borders to their greatest limits, subjecting all of modern India save its southern tip to Mughal rule, but his more uncompromising approach of imposing Muslim orthodoxy on his subjects was no more successful than Akbar’s approach in bringing homogeneity to India.
Adding to all these social complexities were the powerful veins of commerce that connected and coursed through pre-colonial Asian societies. As historian Anthony Reid has shown, maritime Asia was a commercial domain every bit as vigorous as the Mediterranean before the Europeans arrived.41 The result was the establishment over centuries of trading communities drawn from across Asia in the major entrepot ports: Indians and Arabs on the China coast; Indians, Chinese and Arabs through the Indonesian archipelago; Chinese and Arabs around the coasts of the subcontinent. Some societies absorbed these minorities over time through intermarriage and acculturation; in others, no amount of intermarriage and acculturation would convince the locals to assimilate these trading communities.
On the winds of trade came the seeds of new religions: Buddhism, Islam and eventually Christianity. Some grew strongly in the local soil, gaining followers rapidly, especially if the king converted, and often being modified to accommodate local religious traditions. In other places the religions stuck in some communities but not others, occasionally even provoking the resurgence of local beliefs. Sometimes, confessional roots grew deeply where they spoke to a spiritual, social or political need; elsewhere, the roots were shallow, going no further than prescribing rituals and proprieties necessary to gain certain commercial privileges.
It was onto these complex mandalas that the European colonialists imposed the mutually exclusive territorial boundaries they had pioneered in Europe. Suddenly, Asia’s extensive marchland communities were subject to constant and enduring rule, often dragooned into alien extraction and production systems, and harangued by judgemental and uncompromising missionaries. Boundaries between colonies reflected not any natural discontinuities among societies, religions and ethnicities, but the place where one avaricious power urge fought or negotiated another to a standstill.
Onto this arbitrary division and conglomeration of languages, beliefs and peoples, the colonial age gave rise to new flows of people between societies in Asia. The wobbling Qing empire bled thousands of impoverished people from southern China into Southeast Asia, while the increasingly assertive British Empire emboldened thousands of South Asians to fan out across the Bay of Bengal.42 The beliefs and demands of imperialism led to further migrations. The ideology of race hierarchy convinced colonial administrators not only of their own superiority to all Asians, but also of a rough hierarchy among Asians as well. While some ethnic groups were stereotyped as enterprising and efficient, others were seen as indolent and untrustworthy. Plantations and mines needed hardworking coolies; commercial hubs needed entrepreneurial merchants; colonial administration needed conscientious mandarins.43 New migrations of ‘favoured’ groups – Vietnamese into Cambodia and Laos, Chinese into the Dutch East Indies, Chinese and Indians into British Malaya and Burma – were sponsored by the colonial authorities, their implicit critique of the locals and favoured treatment by the Europeans planting the seeds of long-term resentments.
The waning of the colonial empires in Asia left this social complexity in its backwash.44 Imperialism’s racial categories had given inter-ethnic relations a judgemental edge that they have never lost, and the ideal of the nation-state they inherited made postcolonial governments deeply anxious about the heterogeneous societies they had to forge into coherent states. The response of many was to try to impose a uniformity around a core ethnic identity: Khin in Vietnam, Malay in Malaysia, Burman in Myanmar, Thai, Cambodian and Lao. Their answer was to tie the identity of the state firmly to the language and religion of the core ethnicity, either imposing these on minority communities or excluding them from economic and political power – ultimately only deepening intercommunal resentments.45 Some, such as Indonesia and India, opted for an ideology of diversity, but soon found themselves under trenchant critique from dominant religious communities, who often vented their frustrations on minorities.
Within a generation, most of Asia’s states had succumbed to serious communal violence. The embers of the holocaust of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting that accompanied partition in India in 1947 continued to burst aflame, horrifying the world with the shocking cruelty of the Gujarat riots of 2002. Chinese communities fled Hanoi’s conquest of all of Vietnam, and Vietnamese minorities fled the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. A military coup targeting the Indonesian Communist Party unleashed a pogrom against the Chinese minority that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Increasingly ethnically polarised voting in Malaysia exploded into deadly communal riots.46 Sri Lanka plunged into a brutal civil war that devoured thousands of lives over decades, only to be ended by even greater heights of brutality. Tibet and Xinjiang were regularly convulsed with violent protests over Beijing’s rule and the growing influx of Han Chinese migrants.
The legacy of this suspicion and unrest has been an enduring anxiety about internal fragility among most states in Asia. In the aftermath of its coup, Indonesia banned the use of Chinese language or writing and suppressed all Chinese festivals. Thailand forced its Chinese and Muslim minorities to adopt Thai names and learn the Thai language. Post-riot Malaysia installed a new political compact designed to deflate all hope of political power for its Chinese and Indian minorities, while providing a generous system of affirmative action for ethnic Malays.47 Singapore developed immigration policies designed to maintain the Chinese community as the overwhelming majority. Both Malaysia and Singapore enacted draconian internal security laws to guard against dissent. For much of their first half century, Asia’s new militaries – and paramilitaries – trained their guns inwards, ready to quash any new round of ethnic unrest. Indonesia’s army codified its role as dwifungsi – dual-functioned – explicitly linking the tasks of national defence and internal stabilisation.48 The Thai and Philippine militaries periodically carried out brutal operations against their southern Muslim minorities. Myanmar has fought almost non-stop against its internal ethnic minorities.
But while the guns may have been trained inwards, ethnic suspicion linked internal mistrust with external anxieties. Although Asia’s diasporas had travelled and settled in different countries, they maintained strong emotional attachments to their homelands. Foremost were ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. China’s 1895 defeat by Japan galvanised the communities into agitating for the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in China as the best way of meeting the challenge of Meiji Japan.49 Familial and business networks turned easily into political secret societies, and Sun Yat-sen and other republican reformers were funded, nurtured and protected by the Chinese diaspora. This new activism, combined with the often close working relationships between Chinese minorities and colonial administrations, led to deep suspicions of minorities among local populations. It meant that when the Japanese army swept through Southeast Asia in 1942, local populations were both eager and passive supporters of the occupying army’s mistreatment of ethnic Chinese communities.
With the defeat of Japan in 1945, Chinese minorities in Asia continued to be politically active. The beleaguered Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek reactivated its links with Southeast Asian Chinese communities, many of whom contributed financially to Chiang’s struggle against the communists. With Mao’s victory in China in 1949, the new People’s Republic bent its energies towards reorienting Chinese diasporas away from Chiang’s nationalists and towards support for the new government of China. Beijing chose for its ambassador to Jakarta the Indonesian Chinese Wang Renshu, who energetically engaged with Chinese communities across Indonesia.50 In Malaya in the 1950s, many in the Chinese community were grateful for Beijing’s support in the increasingly bitter tussle with the Malay community over the shape of an independent Malaya. Consequently, many of the Communist guerillas fighting the Malayan insurgency were ethnically Chinese. In the febrile atmosphere of the early–Cold War and postcolonial state-building, pointed questions began to be asked about whether ethnic minorities were loyal to the new state or to some external power with nefarious designs on the fledgling state.
External anxieties and domestic antagonisms fed into each other. In Indonesia, President Sukarno’s growing closeness to Beijing in the early 1960s made his opponents in the military increasingly paranoid about the Indonesian Communist Party and its predominantly Chinese membership. Indonesia and Malaysia, both deeply anxious about the Chinese within, often focused their animosity on the Chinese outside: Singapore in their own region and China further afield.51 Singapore mirrored their fears, its unease about its two larger Malay neighbours often translating into a distrust of its Malay minority internally. Singapore continues to tread carefully in formulating its policy towards Beijing for fear of stirring up the paranoia of Indonesia and Malaysia. Further north, as recent anxiety grows in Vietnam about China’s assertiveness and growing regional influence, a new round of ‘othering’ and persecution has begun against Vietnam’s remaining ethnic Chinese minority.52
Internal–external ethnic anxieties are not only concentrated on the Chinese. Often Jakarta’s worries about the cohesion of the Indonesian state feed into suspicions of both Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore’s entrepot economy, which for centuries has animated trading networks into Sumatra, is seen by many in Jakarta as a parasitic, centrifugal influence on the cohesion of the Indonesian economy.53 For decades, Indonesia has watered down or opposed ASEAN plans for greater regional integration because of its deep anxieties about its own cohesion and coherence in the face of transnational economic forces. Sumatra also lies at the heart of Indonesia’s suspicions of Malaysia. The separation of Sumatra from peninsular Malaysia by an 1824 colonial subdivision and then a sovereign border has not diluted the close cultural and ethnic ties between Malay communities on both sides of the Strait of Malacca. Many in Jakarta worry that Kuala Lumpur manipulates these links and fans resentment against Javanese domination as a way of weakening Indonesia and drawing Sumatra towards Malaysia. Indonesians with long memories recall Malaysia’s sympathy for internal rebellions in Indonesia in the late 1950s and its ambivalence over Indonesia’s claims to West Irian.54
Such patterns of internal–external anxieties lead to different levels of paranoia about encirclement by hostile forces in many Asian countries. Indonesia’s President Sukarno reacted with alarm to the establishment of a unified Malaya when the British withdrew in 1957. In launching military action against the new state, Sukarno believed Indonesia needed to prevent the consolidation of a surrounding, smothering, western-leaning entity hostile to Indonesia.55 His successor, Suharto, became nervous when Malaysia and Singapore signed the Five Power Defence Arrangements with Britain, Australia and New Zealand: once again Indonesia was being surrounded by a potentially hostile coalition. In its recent disputes with China over the South China Sea, Vietnam fears it is being enveloped and isolated by its northern neighbour. Not only do Chinese claims threaten Vietnam’s access to the sea, but China’s growing sway over Hanoi’s landward neighbours Cambodia and Laos also appears to many Vietnamese to portend a threatening encirclement.56 While Indonesia and Malaysia often draw close together at times of heightened fear of China, Singapore looks to external partners – such as Taiwan and Australia – as a source of ‘strategic depth’ against a possible encircling coalition of its two neighbours.
For its part, China worries constantly about ‘containment’ by hostile neighbours backed by the United States, eyeing increasingly cordial relations among Japan, India, Vietnam and Australia with concern. India has its own encirclement fears. Long paranoid about the Sino-Pakistani alignment, it watches closely how its neighbours to the north and east – Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan – manage their relations with Beijing.57 Meanwhile, the belief that China is constructing a maritime ‘string of pearls’ consisting of naval bases across the Indian Ocean has great currency in New Dehli. Japan and South Korea also have their own isolation anxieties: Tokyo worries about being left alone to face an ascendant China; Seoul about its own friendless neighbourhood.
History, hierarchy and culture, mixed with rapid economic development, combine to make Asia’s states restless souls. The never-healing wounds of western subjugation, plus the need to build cohesion among and attachment of diverse societies to their new states, drive them to be culturally and politically assertive and often prickly about what they perceive to be others’ presumptions. But this plays badly with their neighbours, prompting an assertive and prickly response in turn. It means that the sedimentation of distrust and rivalry continues to build within and between Asia’s states. It means that no amount of regionalism will wipe away long-held stereotypes, and that even minor issues – a World Heritage listing here, a cultural festival there – can excite animosities and suspicions remarkably quickly.