Chapter 14
Asian Tigers
In This Chapter
Witnessing the incredible rise of Japan
Building up America’s Asian allies
Understanding the Vietnam War
Building economies and losing human rights
This chapter looks at the independent states of Asia after the Europeans had pulled down their flags and sailed home. It deals with India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the states of south-east Asia like Vietnam and Thailand. It also covers Australia and New Zealand, which might surprise you, though in fact the continent of Australasia is essentially an extension of Asia. One rather big Asian country – China – isn’t dealt with in detail here. Communist China was such an important power that it gets separate treatment in Chapter 16.
Before the Second World War, Asia was dominated by the Western powers. By the end of the century, the ‘Asian tiger’ economies dominated the world. How did the continent make this amazing change? And just how far did the people of Asia share in the new wealth their leaders enjoyed? Asia changed in the twentieth century more than any other part of the world, but change and prosperity sometimes came at a terrible price.
A Quick Rundown of Key Events in Asia
Like the rest of the world, Asia started the second half of the century recovering from the devastating effects of the Second World War and adjusting to the Cold War. Some Asian countries tried to set up a ‘non-aligned’ movement free of either American or Soviet influence, but keeping Asia free from Cold War conflict proved to be an impossible task. By the last decades of the century, some Asian countries had established themselves as economic powerhouses, but all too often economic prosperity came at the price of human rights.
The terrible price of the Second World War
The Second World War was a disaster for Asia. In fact, strictly speaking, the Second World War began in Asia, when the Japanese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 and the rest of China six years later. The Chinese kept up a fierce resistance movement which meant the Japanese were bogged down in a war they could see no chance of winning. For that reason they decided to attack the rest of Asia and seize all the raw materials they could lay their hands on. The idea was to pretend the war was about liberating Asia from imperialism; in fact the Japanese just imposed their own brutal imperial rule on their fellow Asians.
Ordinary people in Asia suffered terribly during the war:
Starvation: In many of the areas they conquered, and especially in China, the Japanese confiscated food for their own use and left the people to starve.
Rape: The Japanese used a policy of rape to enforce their rule. The worst example was at Nankin in China, where thousands of Chinese women were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers. The Japanese also forced women to become ‘comfort women’ – prostitutes – for their soldiers.
Fighting and bombing: The Pacific islands that the Japanese and Americans fought over were virtually destroyed and the inhabitants’ homes with them. Tokyo suffered appalling firestorms from American bombing that actually killed more people than the atomic bomb raids. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki paid a terrible price when their cities were destroyed by American atom bombs and thousands died later from radiation sickness.
Communist take-over in China
In 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party seized control in Peking (see the Introduction for info about how Chinese names are rendered in English) and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Result: Crisis, because the United States said the old government, which had fled to the island of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan), was the only true Chinese government and Mao’s regime was illegal. Not that Mao worried: He just got on with sending help to every Asian communist movement he could find. You can read more about what Mao was up to in China in Chapter 16.
The Korean War
Korea was split in two at the end of the war, with communists controlling the north and a pro-Western government in the south, both of them claiming the right to rule the whole country. In 1950 the North Koreans invaded the south and nearly conquered it, but the United States persuaded the United Nations to send help. The UN forces defeated the North Koreans, but then they invaded North Korea, which was just what Mao had warned them not to do. A huge Chinese army invaded and drove the UN forces back to the original border. The Korean War committed the United States to resisting the advance of communism throughout Asia. (Chapter 10 has more on the Korean War.)
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was one of the defining conflicts of the twentieth century, partly because it pitched a superpower against a tiny country that the Americans should’ve been able to crush before lunch, and partly because of the fierce controversy generated by American tactics and their effects on the people of Vietnam. Yet by the end of the century Washington had established friendly relations, and even a trade agreement, with communist Vietnam. So what was the Vietnam War really about? To answer this question, go to the later section, ‘Apocalypse Now – Vietnam’.
Tigers or pussy cats?
By the 1990s the Asian countries seemed to be dominating the world economy, particularly as they specialised in producing the sort of hi-tech equipment on which the modern world has come to depend. But much of this success was an image: A few people were making a lot of money but behind the computers and fast cars the people of Asia still lived in utter poverty. Many of these ‘Asian tiger’ economies depended heavily on foreign loans and investment and in 1997 the cracks suddenly opened. Thailand found itself heading into bankruptcy and as its currency went into freefall, the market began to lose faith in the other Asian economies. South Korea and Indonesia virtually collapsed and others, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines, were badly hit. Some governments were actually brought down by the crisis, such as that of General Suharto in Indonesia. By the twenty-first century it was clear that the real Asian tigers were the two giants who’d survived the 1997 crash almost unscathed: India and the rapidly changing China (to find out why it was rapidly changing, see Chapter 16).
Japan – the Rise of the Rising Sun
Probably the most remarkable success story in post-Second World War Asia was Japan. No one expected that defeated, humiliated Japan would become an economic superpower, but it did.
Before the war Japan was a strange mixture of ancient and ultra-modern. The country had state-of-the art industry and military technology, but was still governed according to the medieval samurai code. The Japanese believed the emperor was a god and that they owed him absolute loyalty. This sense of loyalty was why the Japanese fought so fiercely, even against overwhelming odds. Some Japanese soldiers, cut off from news from the outside world, carried on fighting the war for years, still true to their oath of loyalty to the emperor. Even after the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government still talked about carrying on the war until the emperor finally intervened and went on the radio to announce to his people that these new weapons meant the war had taken a turn which was not necessarily to Japan’s advantage – which must be the understatement of the century.
The Court of King MacArthur
Japan began the post-war era under American occupation. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) was General Douglas MacArthur, who had made his name defending the Philippines against the Japanese in 1942. MacArthur soon showed he could be just as imperious as any emperor. When people asked if he would visit Emperor Hirohito, MacArthur replied that the emperor should visit him, and he did too. Japan had serious food shortages, so MacArthur arranged for American food aid. In return, he brought in some big changes:
The emperor was no longer a god. Instead he became a British-style constitutional monarch, with an elected parliament running the country.
The army and the secret police were disbanded. Japan was allowed to have a small army but for defensive purposes only. Japan declared it would no longer send troops abroad, not even for peacekeeping missions.
Large landed estates were broken up into small farms that peasants could buy. This policy was to create a class of landowners – small landowners but landowners all the same – who wouldn’t want communists trying to take their land off them. MacArthur’s policy worked: The Japanese peasants became strongly anti-communist.
Old-style nationalists and fascists were sacked. This included civil servants, lecturers, and teachers. As a result, Japanese students became very left-wing, which wasn’t quite what MacArthur had intended.
The Allies held a series of war crime trials, like the Nuremberg Trials in Germany. Japan’s wartime leaders, including the infamous General Tojo, were hanged. Japan also made an important decision. As it faced up to the terrible after-effects of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government decided to have nothing whatever to do with making, deploying, using, or even holding nuclear weapons, and they stuck to it.
Making a killing from killing
At first the Americans wanted to keep Japan as a rather backward, rural country, an nice easy market for American business. But in 1950 the Korean War broke out. The Americans needed lots of military equipment and they needed it fast. The Japanese knew how to grab an opportunity when they saw one: They could produce the hardware and get it to the front line more quickly than American firms. Soon American GIs were heading into battle in Toyota trucks and Japanese firms were revising their economic forecasts upwards.
What was the Japanese secret? Discipline. The working day in a Japanese factory began with physical jerks and the company song. Trade unions were weak and strictly controlled and workers committed their lives to the company just as soldiers had sworn loyalty to the emperor during the war. By the 1980s Japanese companies were even setting up factories in the West.
The country that came in from the cold
Japan finally emerged from the shadow of the war in the 1960s. Japanese goods won a reputation for being cheap and reliable. In 1964 Japan became the first Asian country to host the Olympic Games and they proved a triumph, especially the state-of-the art gymnasium building. Four years later the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1970 Japan hosted the phenomenally successful Expo ‘70, the world exhibition of technology and trade, which showcased just what a hi-tech success story modern Japan had become.
Japan became a vital American ally in the Cold War and began to adopt elements of American culture. Japanese schools were remodelled on American lines and some even took up baseball. Rocky periods did occur: Major anti-American riots broke out in the 1950s after Japanese fishing catches were contaminated by radiation from American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, and left-wing students were often very anti-American. But most Japanese enjoyed the benefits of their close relationship with their old wartime enemy.
Korea – One Country, Two States
When the Korean War ended (see Chapter 10 for the details), the country was still divided into two states near the 38th parallel. These two states developed in very different ways.
North Korea – there ain’t nothin’ wrong with me
North Korea kept true to its hardline communist principles. In 1958 Kim Il-Sung took control and set about industrialising the country in a series of seven-year plans. He needed to borrow heavily to finance this industrialisation, so North Korea ended up deeply in debt. That Kim spent lavishly on the military and on a huge personality cult based on himself didn’t help. He cut North Korea off from contact with the outside world so that by the time he died in 1994, it was an island of old-style communist dictatorship under an all-powerful leader. After Kim’s death, his son Kim Jong-Il seized power and carried on the way his father had ruled. By now Korea was deep in economic crisis and famine – some experts reckon that two million people may have starved. The Chinese persuaded Kim to go and meet the South Koreans and accept food aid from them. He did, but he made it clear that doing so didn’t mean North Korea would be changing anything else.
South Korea – nor me
South Korea was a big economic success story, like Japan (see the preceding section). Thanks to American aid it became a major financial centre and one of the world’s leading producers of computers and information technology. The trouble was that South Korea’s idea of human rights and democracy took time to catch up.
Until 1960 the country was led by Syngman Rhee, who hated communists and thought the Korean War should never have stopped. He had no time for that democracy lark and banned protest and free speech and sent troops in to break up demonstrations. That he and Kim Il-Sung were such enemies was rather ironic, because they had a lot in common. Finally, in 1960 his electoral fraud was so blatant that South Korean students rose up and toppled his government, but the military seized power the following year under General Park Chung Hee. South Korea stayed rich but repressive until General Park was assassinated in 1979. In the chaos that followed, South Korea finally had to bow to international pressure and start introducing a few basic democratic freedoms because they were afraid that otherwise they might lose the right to host the 1988 Olympic Games. Since then South Korea has become more democratic, though the threat of military rule is never far away.
Apocalypse Now – Vietnam
Vietnam had been part of the French colony of Indo-China, which also included Cambodia and Laos. The Japanese overran Indo-China during World War II but ran into fierce Vietnamese resistance, especially from the communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. After the war the French thought they could simply move back in and carry on ruling as if nothing had happened, but they’d reckoned without Ho. The Viet Minh dominated the north of the country, so in 1946 Ho declared North Vietnam an independent state. The French reckoned this was all part of Ho’s plan to take over the whole of the country, and they were right. But when the French rushed troops to crush North Vietnam, the Viet Minh proved just as effective against the French as they had been against the Japanese. In 1954 they finally surrounded the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and forced them to surrender.
After they lost at Dien Bien Phu the French finally pulled out of Vietnam (see Chapter 11), which left South Vietnam vulnerable to a communist take-over. The Americans, fearing that if South Vietnam fell other countries in Indo-China would be bound to follow, decided to send help to South Vietnam. Sending help soon came to mean sending troops. Okay, officially they were ‘military advisers’, but their advice basically consisted of launching an attack on enemy positions and saying ‘See? And that’s how you take out an entrenched position. Next week: House clearance with hand grenades.’ Without quite realising what was happening, America had drifted into a war.
The South Vietnamese government at the time, led by President Diem, was repressive and corrupt – not a good advertisement for Western democratic values. Diem was very intolerant of Buddhism, which was a bit tricky in a largely Buddhist country. Some Buddhist monks set themselves on fire in protest against the repression, until by 1963 even the Americans agreed that Diem would have to go. They stood by while Diem was toppled and murdered in a coup.
Then in 1964 the USS Maddox reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese jets in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress immediately passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, formally authorising President Johnson to commit troops to Vietnam. This was war: Official.
The battle for hearts and minds
The Americans soon found that this war wasn’t a straightforward South v. North affair:
The North Vietnamese Army (NVA): Highly professional and led by General Giap, who had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.
The Viet Cong
(VC):
South Vietnamese communists who had fought against Diem’s government and were just as happy fighting the Americans. The VC wore black pyjamas and hid out in the villages of the South Vietnamese countryside, operating from a network of underground tunnels, which made it almost impossible for the Americans to find them except by getting information out of the locals. Usually by force.
The Khmer Rouge (Cambodia) and Pathet Lao (Laos): These were communist guerrilla forces in the neighbouring countries. They helped the Viet Cong by keeping open a supply line from North Vietnam which ran through their countries and was known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Americans could bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, but doing so meant spreading the war beyond Vietnam.
The South Vietnamese Army (SVA): The SVA was never as well equipped as the American army, which didn’t matter as long as the Americans were there, but it mattered a great deal when US President Nixon announced his policy of Vietnamisation – handing the fighting over to the South Vietnamese. Or, to put it another way, you’re on your own now, buddy.
The Americans bombed enemy bases in North Vietnam but they couldn’t bomb Viet Cong bases without killing large numbers of South Vietnamese civilians. Using chemical weapons was the solution, especially napalm, a sort of inflammable jelly used in flamethrowers, and agent orange, a poison that destroyed the jungle cover to reveal the Viet Cong bases. Unfortunately, both chemicals caused horrific injuries among South Vietnamese civilians, which didn’t do much for the Americans’ image in South Vietnam.
Two events in 1968 highlighted the Americans’ difficulties:
Tet (Chinese New Year) Offensive: The Viet Cong launch attacks all over South Vietnam, including in the capital, Saigon. The Americans are caught off guard at first but soon recover and defeat the attackers. But the TV coverage seems to show the Americans pinned down and losing, so many people still think the Tet Offensive was an American defeat.
My Lai massacre: An American patrol led by Lieutenant William Calley kills all the inhabitants of a South Vietnamese village called My Lai. Calley was court martialled and pleaded that he and his men were suffering from the strains of conflict. Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment but later had his sentence cut.
In 1968 Republican Richard Nixon won the presidential election and set about planning to pull American troops out. He started handing responsibility for the war over to the South Vietnamese, and in 1970 he opened peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. In 1973 the Americans finally pulled out. But Nixon had a bit of unfinished business to deal with first: Cambodia.
Cambodia’s terrifying Year Zero
Cambodia was ruled by Prince Sihanouk, who managed to be both king and prime minister. Sihanouk was facing a communist rising led by the Khmer Rouge, so to win the communists over he allowed the NVA and the VC to operate from inside Cambodia. President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, decided to teach Sihanouk a lesson. In 1969 they launched massive bombing raids on Cambodia, and the following year they backed a coup that replaced Sihanouk with a pro-American government that promptly declared war on North Vietnam. So much, thought Nixon, for Cambodia.
Not so fast. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge toppled the Cambodian government and seized the capital, Phnom Penh. The Khmer leader, Pol Pot, announced ‘Year Zero’: The country would return to the sort of rural peasant society it used to be. Pol Pot forced the entire population of the cities out into the countryside to work. He had thousands of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals shot, and whole villages were massacred. You can gain an idea of the sort of madness that gripped the country in the film The Killing Fields. Today we reckon that some 1.7 million people were murdered under Pol Pot’s appalling regime. Ironically, the country that finally stopped him wasn’t America but communist Vietnam.
Vietnam: The endgame
In 1975, two years after the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, the NVA invaded the south again and reached Saigon. Panic-stricken South Vietnamese, especially those of Chinese origins (the Vietnamese hated the Chinese), fought desperately to get onto the last helicopters evacuating US embassy staff or set out in small home-made boats for Hong Kong or anywhere else that would take them. Some of these ‘boat people’ made it to the West, but many died before they could get there.
The new Vietnamese regime unified the country, renamed Saigon after Ho Chi Minh (who had died in 1969), and locked up its opponents. Vietnam soon quarrelled over territory with China, which launched a short invasion in 1979 to put the upstart little country in its place. After that event Vietnam turned to China’s enemy, the Soviet Union, which probably wasn’t such a great idea as the Soviet economy was getting into deep trouble by the 1980s.
However, the Vietnamese were able to strut their stuff in Cambodia. In 1978 they invaded, overthrew Pol Pot’s disgusting regime, and set up a puppet government of their own. Unfortunately, the United Nations said that, appalling though it had been, the Khmer Rouge government was the legitimate government of Cambodia and the situation wasn’t resolved until 1991, when the two sides agreed that Prince Sihanouk should come back as king and the Vietnamese would go home. Pol Pot was sentenced to death in absentia (meaning he wasn’t there) but he died in exile and his Khmer Rouge killers got an amnesty. Sadly, history doesn’t always have a neat ending.
In 1992 Vietnam developed a new constitution which allowed a lot more freedom. The Americans lifted their trade embargo in 1994, restored diplomatic ties, and in 2000 President Clinton arrived for an official visit. As the two countries signed a trade agreement in 2001 they must have wondered what all the fighting had been for.
India and Pakistan: After the Raj
Gandhi had great hopes of a proud, independent India that would set a new and higher moral example to the rest of the world. But Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu who was furious that the country had been partitioned, and many of Gandhi’s dreams for India seemed to die with him. (Chapter 11 explains why India was partitioned into India and Pakistan.)
India: Voting and violence
India’s first prime minister was Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Congress Party, which had led the country to independence. Nehru experimented with turning India into a democratic socialist state, and he even flirted with the idea of an alliance with the Soviet Union. He certainly needed friends, given these skirmishes India found itself in:
War with Pakistan over Kashmir (1948–9). UN intervenes and partitions Kashmir between India (which gets most of it) and Pakistan (which gets a bit of it). India and Pakistan both claim all of it.
Border war with China (1962). India loses and has to give up part of Kashmir to China.
Second war with Pakistan over Kashmir (1965). Deadlock.
Nehru died in 1964 and in 1966 his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma Gandhi, though it didn’t do her any harm for people to think so) became prime minister. She was a tough cookie: When war broke out between the two halves of Pakistan in 1971, she joined in to help East Pakistan break away to become Bangladesh. When people accused her of electoral fraud in 1975, she simply declared a state of emergency – which from her point of view it was, I suppose – and locked all her critics up.
These developments made Mrs Gandhi unpopular, and in 1977 the unthinkable happened: Congress lost the election. Three years later, though, she was back, as tough as ever. By now, different ethnic groups in India were trying to set up their own states, and she used strong-arm tactics to put them down. In 1984 she sent troops in to attack Sikh extremists who had seized the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion. Shortly afterwards she was assassinated by her own bodyguards. Who were Sikhs.
After Mrs Gandhi, Congress was never able to regain the hold it had once held on Indian public life:
1984: Mrs Gandhi is succeeded by her son, Rajiv.
1987: Rajiv Gandhi sends troops to Sri Lanka to help put down the Tamil Tiger rebels.
1991: Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated by a Tamil Tiger sympathiser.
The 1990s saw the rise of extreme Hindu nationalists, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who steadily won more votes until, in 1998, they took office. The BJP has tried to eradicate memories of the colonial past, renaming cities (Bombay became Mumbai, Calcutta became Kolkata, and so on) and rewriting the history books, but it has also encouraged violent attacks on Muslims. In 2002 Hindus massacred Muslims in the state of Gujarat, the BJP heartland. Shock at the violence helped Congress win the 2004 election, which installed Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh prime minister.
The tragedy of Bhopal
On 3 December 1984 poisonous gases leaked out of the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal. Some 2,500 people died that day and another 50,000 suffered terrible lung disease as a direct result. The gas leak was one of the worst non-political disasters of modern Indian history, but getting proper compensation for the victims through the American courts proved almost impossible. Welcome to the post-colonial, neo-colonial corporate world.
Pakistan: A model military Muslim state
Despite all its troubles, India was still a democracy (see the preceding section); Pakistan has been ruled by a succession of generals with a few periods of democratic rule in-between the military coups. In 1973 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was elected Pakistan’s first civilian prime minister, but even he depended on army support, and although he did much to modernise the country, he didn’t have widespread support. He resorted to such blatant vote rigging to win the 1977 elections that protests erupted on the streets and the army decided to get rid of him.
General Zia ul-Huq took control and two years later Bhutto was hanged. His daughter Benazir entered politics determined to avenge her father’s death and bring down Pakistan’s military rule. She was twice elected prime minister, in 1988 and 1993, and each time she was accused of corruption and dismissed. She went into exile to campaign for a return of democracy in Pakistan. This, however, was not going to be easy:
Pakistan is an Islamic state, which in 1991 introduced Islamic (shariah) law. Shariah law lays down a set of religiously-based precepts and penalties, including stoning or beheading for adultery and amputation for theft, so its introduction didn’t help the task of reinstating democracy.
Pakistan became a front-line US ally when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980 and again after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The situation in Afghanistan, with Muslim fighters slipping back and forth across the border, kept Pakistan in a permanent state of tension which didn’t encourage the holding of multi-party elections.
In 1999 General Pervez Musharaf launched yet another military coup in Pakistan. He became a key supporter of the US war on terror, which made him vulnerable to attack from the Islamic militants in his own country. His response was to suspend the constitution, hold on to power, and crack down on opponents and critics. Like any other military dictator, in fact.
Other South Asian countries
India and Pakistan had no monopoly on political problems in the South Asian region. Some of their smaller neighbours could give them a good run for their money in the violence and military dictatorship stakes.
Bangladesh
Bangladesh was originally East Pakistan, but it had little in common with the western half of the country a thousand miles away on the other side of India. In 1971 East Pakistan declared independence and with Indian help it was able to defeat the West Pakistani forces and set itself up as the independent state of Bangladesh. However, Bangladesh has suffered badly from natural disasters and famine: Severe floods in 1974 led to a state of emergency and a military coup. Since then Bangladesh has lived with a combination of military rule, poverty, and hunger.
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka was the old British colony of Ceylon, which became independent in 1948. The people are divided between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, and they don’t like each other. The Sinhalese pursued a policy of nationalism, keeping the Tamils down, until in 1976 the Tamils formed the Tamil Tiger guerrillas to fight back. The fighting with the Sinhalese has been very brutal. They signed a ceasefire in 2002 but the fighting began again only two years later.
Nepal
Nepal doesn’t actually exist just to supply sherpas for mountaineers and Gurkhas for the British army. It was a feudal kingdom which gave its people few human rights except the right to live in poverty. In 1959 the Nepalese tried to set up a multi-party constitution, but King Mahendra staged a coup the following year and took power back into his own hands. Opposition to the king was led by the Nepalese Congress Party, which won the election King Birendra felt obliged to call in 1990. By then, however, more and more Nepalese were turning to the Nepalese Maoists, who were running a guerrilla campaign to overturn the monarchy. Later, in 2001, it seemed as if Crown Prince Dipendra might have saved them the trouble when he burst in on his family and shot them all with a machine gun, including himself. But his uncle Prince Gyanendra succeeded and set about the family tradition of suppressing all critics and opposition.
Burma
The Japanese set up a puppet government in Burma but it was soon clear that they intended to rule the country entirely for their own benefit. Aung San U served in that puppet government but he quickly turned against the Japanese and formed the government that oversaw the end of the Japanese occupation and negotiated independence for Burma. Unfortunately he didn’t live to see Independence Day because he was killed in a violent coup led by his rival U Saw. In 1962 the Burmese military seized control and they have held it ever since. Aung San U’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, formed the National League for Democracy which won the 1990 elections, but the military government took no notice: They put her under house arrest and have kept her there ever since. Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize and has become an international symbol of protest against military rule, not just in Burma but around the world, but so far the Burmese government has shown no sign whatever of bending to international – or Burmese – opinion and reintroducing democracy.
South East Asia
South East Asia is the area which comprises Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This region witnessed some of post-war Asia’s worst warfare and internal repression.
The King and I – Thailand
Until 1939 Thailand was the ancient kingdom of Siam. The country was never colonised by the Europeans, but they controlled it nonetheless, mainly by dominating the Siamese king.
Some Siamese wanted the country to become more democratic, but the army wanted a dictatorship and in 1932 seized power and set one up. In 1939 the anti-Western Marshal Phibun took over, changed the country’s name to Thailand (‘land of the free’ – nice irony, Marshal), and joined in the Second World War on the Japanese side. Not such a good idea: Phibun was overthrown at the end of the war, but he came back in 1947 and seized power again; Thailand remained a military dictatorship until 1973. The Americans turned a blind eye because Thailand supported them in Vietnam and even sent troops to fight alongside the US forces. The Thais have toppled their military governments a couple of times, in 1973 and in 1991, but the military have always been able to seize control again.
United we stand! Er, I said United we stand . . .
The Americans’ big success in the Cold War in the 1950s was NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, an anti-communist alliance of European and American states. Washington thought doing something similar in Asia would be a good idea, so in 1955 SEATO was born: The South East Asia Treaty Organisation. SEATO had eight members, only two of whom, Thailand and the Philippines, were actually in South East Asia; the others were Australia and New Zealand (okay, they were near South East Asia), Pakistan, Britain, France, and the USA. The alliance looked strong, especially as the British and French were busy testing their atomic weapons in the region, but when the Americans went to war in Vietnam and called on SEATO to help, most of the members suddenly remembered something really urgent they had to go and do. Which did not involve getting embroiled in Vietnam. Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand sent a few troops, but SEATO had proved a broken reed. It folded in 1975.
Meanwhile the actual South East Asian nations had been getting their own organisation going, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN was a trading organisation rather than a military alliance, and it had its ups and downs according to changes in the world economy in the 1980s and 1990s, but by the end of the century it was still going and it included all the nations of the region. Which was more than could be said for SEATO.
People power in the Philippines
The Philippines began the century as a US colony (see Chapter 2) and the whole country was geared towards growing goods for the American market. America finally granted the Philippines their independence in 1946, but the Philippines had to sign a free trade deal with Washington, let the US keep its naval bases on the islands, and give American citizens the same economic rights as Filipinos. In 1965 Ferdinand Marcos was elected president on a Philippines-for-the-Filipinos ticket, but being a staunch anti-communist, he soon changed his tune and kept in with Washington. Unfortunately Marcos was a lot better at spending money on his cronies than he was at running the economy: His wife Imelda spent a fortune on a massive collection of designer shoes. By the 1970s the country was heading deep into debt and people were protesting on the streets. Marcos’s solution was to call in the army, declare martial law, round up opposition leaders, and send them into exile.
By the 1980s even Marcos couldn’t ignore the economic crisis: He turned to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for a loan but they demanded big economic reforms. By now even the Americans were keeping their distance from Marcos, but he still didn’t get the message.
When the opposition leader Benigno Aquino came back from exile to stand for election, Marcos had him murdered as he came off the plane. Filipinos were outraged, and Benigno’s widow, Corazon, became the leader of all the groups opposed to Marcos’s tyranny. Marcos tried to catch his opponents out in 1986 by suddenly announcing an election (on American prime time television, would you believe!) and rigging the result; unfortunately Mrs Aquino declared that she had won, and most foreign observers agreed with her. Marcos said no, he won and he had himself installed as president to prove it. So Mrs Aquino had herself installed as president too. So there.
In the end US President Ronald Reagan offered Marcos safe haven in the US if he conceded defeat. Marcos took Reagan’s offer, though he looked like he was chewing a wasp, and the Filipino people burst into the presidential palace to celebrate – ‘people power’ they called this historic moment.
Corazon Aquino was a popular leader but she wasn’t very experienced. She got the Americans to close their naval bases, but couldn’t solve the country’s economic problems, nor could she put down the breakaway independence movement by the Muslim Moro rebels. Her successor Fidel Ramos signed a deal with the rebels but it broke down, and his successor, a former film star called Joseph Estrada, was forced out of office on charges of corruption.
Malaysia: The rubber band
Malaysia was a federation made up of former British colonies, including Malaya, Sarawak, and Singapore. The native Malays despised the country’s large Chinese and Indian communities, especially after China became communist in 1949 and it had looked as if Malaya’s Chinese would try to force the country to do the same. The British and Malays had fought a long campaign against the Malay Chinese communists before independence, and after independence the Malays still tried to keep the Chinese and Indians under strict control by a policy of blatant racial discrimination. Tensions grew and the situation became so dangerous that in 1969 the government declared a state of emergency.
Meanwhile, Malaysia was rapidly becoming one of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies on the strength of its tin and rubber production. Under President Mahathir Bin Mohamad, Malaysia became one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, but at a price: Mahathir didn’t believe in free speech and had the Malaysian opposition leader imprisoned. Even Mahathir couldn’t stop the growth of the fundamentalist Pan Islamic Party, however. By the end of the century, Malaysia and Indonesia were both important centres of Islamic fundamentalism.
Singapore: Going it alone
The great port of Singapore had been a centre of British power in the East until it fell rather humiliatingly to the Japanese in 1942. Singapore joined the Malaysian federation in 1963 but the anti-Chinese discrimination laws were so severe that Singapore, three-quarters of whose population was Chinese, decided it would be better off going it alone, so it became an independent state in 1965. Singapore has been a big economic success story, another of the ‘Asian tigers’, especially when it managed to win some of the Western investment that had previously gone to Hong Kong, after it reverted to Chinese possession in 1997.
Live dangerously: Live in Indonesia!
From 1949 to 1968, Indonesia was led by the somewhat eccentric Achmed Sukarno. Sukarno had led Indonesian resistance against the Japanese during the war and he then forced the Dutch to go home. His favourite hobbies were military parades and locking people up. He decided democratic government was boring – all those fiddly elections – so he had a much better idea: It was called ‘guided democracy’ and to play you just did whatever Sukarno said. Personal dictatorship is another name for this idea.
Thanks to Sukarno’s incompetent handling of the economy, the people of Indonesia were going hungry, but he just had protestors arrested and declared a new campaign to take people’s minds off their problems. In 1963 he picked a fight (officially a ‘confrontation’) with Malaysia and sent guerrilla troops over the border into Sarawak, but since Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all sent help to Malaysia, the Indonesian army found itself bogged down in a war it couldn’t win. Not to worry: 1964, Sukarno declared, was to be ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’, when Indonesia would challenge the power of the West. That challenge meant locking even more people up (for demanding nasty Western things such as democracy and food supplies, you see).
Sukarno certainly did live dangerously: He survived one assassination attempt because a man fired the whole magazine of a pistol at him. And missed.
Thank you, Mr Sukarno, we’ll let you know
By the middle of the 1960s the different parts of the federation had decided it was time to get out: Sukarno stopped the Moluccans and Javans from getting away but the people of Aceh and Iryan Jaya (the western half of Papua New Guinea which the Dutch transferred to Indonesia in 1962) kept up a guerrilla campaign for years. In 1965 the Communist Party tried to stage a coup, even mutilating and killing six high-ranking generals, but they didn’t unseat Sukarno. He then launched a terrifying counter-attack, shooting hundreds of thousands of ‘red sympathisers’: It was one of the worst outbreaks of indiscriminate slaughter of the twentieth century. Sukarno was completely out of control. In 1966 the army forced him to hand over his power to General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for the next thirty-two years.
Beware strangers in paradise
Indonesia is one of the biggest Islamic countries in the world, and was bound to be caught up in the conflicts that followed the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. In October 2002 Islamist terrorists blew up a night club on the holiday island of Bali, killing 202 people, many of them Australian tourists. This event was a sign that Indonesia was right up there with Pakistan and Afghanistan on the front line of President Bush’s War on Terror.
East Timor
East Timor was a Portuguese colony until 1975 when the Portuguese withdraw. Hardly had the islanders taken down the bunting, however, than General Suharto of Indonesia ordered an invasion. He said he wanted to stop a communist take-over; the people of East Timor reckoned he just wanted their land. The Indonesians set up a brutal regime, shooting or imprisoning anyone who opposed them, especially East Timor’s large Christian population. The people responded with a guerrilla campaign, which just brought even more savage reprisals. The rest of the world called on Suharto to pull his men out of East Timor but he took no notice. After he was overthrown in 1998 Indonesia and Portugal agreed to let the people of East Timor decide on their own future and guess what? They voted to become independent. This obviously came as a great surprise to the Indonesians, who responded with another round of savage repression until the United Nations stepped in, sent a peacekeeping force, and organised free elections. Which voted in the East Timor nationalist party known as Fretilin, which wanted – have you guessed yet? – independence. East Timor finally won its independence in 2002, only twenty-seven years after it was first granted by the Portuguese.
The Wizards of Oz and the Orcs of New Zealand
Australia and New Zealand emerged from Britain’s colonial shadow in the post-war years and came forward as independent states on the world stage. They had to work out their relationship with that other ex-British colony, the United States, and with their South East Asian neighbours. They also had to decide whether or not they still wanted to be ruled by a British monarch living on the other side of the world.
Fair Australia advances
Australia had always been as British as tea and toast until relations with the mother country came under increasing strain in the two world wars. The Australians blamed British commanders for their heavy losses at Gallipoli in the First World War, although more British and French troops lost their lives there than Australians, and in Singapore in the Second (see Chapter 3 to find out about Gallipoli and Chapter 9 for details on Singapore).
After the Second World War, Australia began to make friends with the Americans, signing defence agreements and even dropping the pound sterling in favour of the dollar. The British queen was still the Australian Head of State, however, and after prime minister Gough Whitlam failed to get his budget approved by the Australian Senate in 1975, the Governor General exercised his royal authority and sacked him, which even pro-British Australians thought was going too far. Britain had already turned its back on its Commonwealth trading partners by joining the European Economic Community in 1973, forcing Australia to start developing trading links with its neighbours in South East Asia. Perhaps it was time to drop the royal link: Australia certainly dropped ‘God Save the Queen’ for ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Even prime ministers like Bob Hawke and Paul Keating began talking of setting up an independent republic, though no one could agree on what this should actually look like, so when Australia held a referendum about it, the people voted to keep the Queen. Strewth.
Monarchy or no monarchy, Australia was becoming less British, in fact less white. Since 1901 the government had denied full citizenship rights to Aborigines and had operated a White Australia policy to keep out undesirable (non-white) immigrants. Even white people were barred if the government didn’t like their politics; in one famous case, a Czech communist was refused entry because he failed the language test – in Scots gaelic! Under Sir Robert Menzies, however, Australia developed a modern system of education and social security and dropped its racist citizenship rules. By the end of the century, more immigrants were arriving from Asia and eastern Europe – some of them even made it into Australia’s, er, gritty and realistic soap operas like Neighbours – and an anti-immigrant party led by Pauline Hanson made headlines by calling for a return to traditional Australian values. Australians were having to decide what sort of a nation they wanted to be.
New Zealand
New Zealand is not Australia. Twentieth-century Kiwis were less keen than the Australians to dump Britain and take up with America. For most of the post-war period, New Zealand politics was dominated by conservative parties. Even when radical prime ministers Jim Bolger and David Lange started to talk about dropping the monarchy, they still kept their distance from US policy.
New Zealand adopted an anti-nuclear stance and refused to let nuclear warships into its ports. The government was furious when Greenpeace’s ship Rainbow Warrior, which had been monitoring Western nuclear tests in the Pacific, was destroyed in Auckland harbour by the French secret service in 1985. By the end of the century, New Zealand had adopted a system of proportional representation which made it difficult for any political group to dominate. By then, however, the rest of the world had discovered the extraordinary beauty of New Zealand’s spectacular landscape, thanks mainly to Peter Jackson’s epic films of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.