East Asia’s Security – Historical Legacies and Concepts
Bernd Martin – University of Freiburg / Germany
Three schools of security thinking
Considering these varying national perceptions, contemporary historians and political scientists have developed three schools of thinking about security that are applicable to East Asia. The school of Realism focuses on power-politics, a derivative of Bismarck’s ‘realpolitik’, to achieve security. The school of Liberalism, however, sees security achieved by interdependencies created by economic exchange and diplomatic institution-building at regional and international levels. This is a very modern conception. In contrast, a third school is of older provenance. It may be termed Culturalism, and it emphasizes the deep differences between cultures, religions and historical experiences, and therefore the need for bridges of mutual understanding as prerequisites to international security.
1. The Setting: Forced Opening, Unequal Treaties and early Colonialism
The legacy of colonial rule in Asia, especially in the tropical regions, still has a strong influence on the security policies of the new Asian nations. Even in countries not colonized like China and Japan, the former encroachments by the West haves left deep traces in the political culture of the two nations. Notable is an undercurrent of rebellion against all things Western, which for example in Imperial Japan led to the Pacific War and in China led to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Attempts to westernize the two traditional monarchies of East Asia by force resulted in destabilizing the whole region and eventually in war. Colonizing the peoples of Southeast Asia living in smaller feudalist political regions resulted in upheavals and the triggering of national movements, often supported by Japan until 1945 and afterwards by Communist China.
It all started with the forced opening of China for Western trade by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and Japan by the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1858. Formerly private colonial rule was replaced by state-controlled colonialism by Britain in the Opium War with China (1842). The contracts imposed on China and Japan provided for a new form of indirect commercial dominance by the Western powers. The provisions of these “unequal treaties” also included extra-territorial rights, like consular jurisdiction for foreigners and, more important, in the long run the loss of tariff autonomy. The Chinese markets, and fifteen years later those of Japan, lay open to cheap Western industrial products.
Japan, on the other hand, was forced by an American naval squadron in 1853 to accept the United States as liberator from the feudal past and protector against the colonial ambitions of the European powers. The special relationship between the United States and Japan is not so much the result of the Pacific War but rather stems from the days of the opening the country. For more than 150 years the United States has claimed a kind of patronage over Japan. This self-assumed role evoked strong opposition in Japan and eventually led to the clash of the two countries in World War Two.
America’s colonial concept in the Philippines did not differ much from the one carried out in Japan. In 1898 the Philippine islands were to be liberated from European colonial rule.
French colonial rule entered Southeast Asia in the guise of protecting the Catholic missions in Annam in 1858 and soon spread to the local monarchies. Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos officially became French protectorates where the Catholic religion and French-European culture would be spread unhampered. The Dutch had exploited their East India possessions by monopolizing the export trade of spices and other raw materials like rubber since about 1600. Tolerating the religious beliefs of the native Muslim population, aligning themselves with local rulers, and crushing local rebellions ruthlessly, they ruled the islands pragmatically for two centuries before they conquered the last autonomous states and took possession of the entire archipelago in the second half of the 19th century.
Despite different colonial concepts and different attitudes towards the semi-colonial domination of China, and, in the beginning, Japan as well, the legacy of Western intrusion or Western rule may be summed up in the following points:
· Traditional trade was disrupted. Indigenous political leaders and merchants were co-opted, or were eliminated or forced to adapt to Western hegemony.
· The economy changed from subsistence production to a market economy based on exports and imports, which had been non-existent or unimportant previously.
· Te local elite, bereft of their economic basis, lost political power and acted as puppets of Western interests. Only Japan managed to avoid this further restraint of national sovereignty by a radical anti-Western reform program, the Meiji Restoration. The kings of Siam did likewise, but less radically.
· Alien ethnic groups, mainly Chinese and Indians, were imported by the colonial administration, for example in Singapore, to control the local populations or perform economic roles. Christian missionaries, as in China, played pacifying and educating roles. Ethnic diversity and religious variety in many East Asian countries, therefore, result from colonial times.
· The educational system, especially higher learning, was opened to Western concepts. British traces can still be found in its former colonies while the French system prevailed in former Indochina despite communist rule. American and German influence in China can be seen during the inter-war period and again during the period of communist reforms. Japan was strongly influenced by the Prussian educational system but was forced after 1945 to turn to American models.
· The political values of the West forced upon the Asian countries reflected their European or American origins and were resisted by the traditional elite, most strongly in Japan, thus fostering anti-Western nationalist movements.
· The colonial powers maintained peace only as long as they did not fight each other, but their colonial practices destabilized the local economic and political units and led ultimately to disorder.
2. The Framework: Great Powers during the Age of Imperialism
In the era of imperialism the traditional European colonial powers and the new missionary nation, the United States, were joined by Tsarist Russia, itself for the largest part of its territory an Asian nation, and by the two imperialist late comers, Japan and Germany. The common object of all the powers involved in East Asia was to exploit China, now unprotected by its crumbling monarchy.
Japan took its first steps as an expansionist power first in Taiwan (1895) then in Korea (1910), where it opened markets, settled Japanese, and tried to impose liberation and modernization. Since the kingdom of Korea lay within the Chinese tributary system, the Japanese moves antagonized the Manchu government in Beijing. The traditional rivalry between China (the big brother) and Japan (the little brother) reached a new dimension with the struggle over Korea which ended in the first modern war between the two neighboring nations in 1894/5.
Before a new conflict could emerge, the Boxer movement in China threatened all imperialist powers and finally united them in their first joint military intervention against the Chinese rebels and the government of the Emperor that supporting them. The crushing defeat of ill-equipped and poorly trained Boxer soldiers and regular units was a humiliating blow to the old monarchy. Modern nationalist thought spread among Western-trained Chinese scholars who soon turned, like Dr. Sun Yat-sen, to become revolutionaries.
However, only four years later Western imperialism in China was halted. The Russo-Japanese war, fought over who would influence Manchuria and Korea, was actually a struggle for regional leadership and, the Japanese believed, for the liberation and self determination of the East Asian countries. The total defeat of Russia, one of the leading military powers of the world, by a non-white race and a country which had been modernizing for only one generation, dealt a decisive blow to Western superiority. Imperial Japan claimed to be the “light of Asia” bringing a bright future to all Asians under direct or indirect Western rule.
Thus the legacy of the age of imperialism up to the outbreak of the First World War consists of the following main points:
· A permanent conflict arose between Japan and Russia over their border and spheres of interest. For almost a hundred years the struggle over a mutually recognized frontier-line could not be resolved. The issue of the Kurile Islands lingers on and still destabilizes the region of the North Pacific.
· The cultural and ideological rivalry between China and Japan became a political issue with the question of leadership unresolved up to our time, for even as the centre of East Asia seems to be gradually shifting back to Beijing.
· China’s decline and revolution in 1911 produced a period of turmoil after the First World War. By actively fomenting Chinese disorder Japan gradually replaced Great Britain as China’s arch enemy.
· The traditional European colonial powers started to retreat, joined by Germany and Russia. But Japan stepped in, closely observed and soon followed by the United States, each with its own liberation mission in the new slogan of ‘open door’ in China.
3. The Vision: The Failure of the Wilsonian Order in East Asia
World War One deeply affected East Asia, not so much on the military field but rather in the political arena. Allied to Britain, Japan immediately joined the Entente powers. The siege of the German leasehold of Tsingtao was to win Japan permanent access to Central China. The German model colony was compelled to surrender to an overwhelming Japanese siege force. Japan took over the German possessions which, like Tsingtao, were valuable for extending trade with China or, like the Pacific islands, could be used as naval bases. After military victory Japan strove for political hegemony over China and in January 1915 confronted the weak Chinese central government with the notorious “Twenty-one Demands”. In the shadow of the bloody trench war in Europe Japan tried to subjugate China as a semi-colony. Only when America’s support stiffened Chinese resistance did the Tokyo government eventually drop its demands for political surveillance and police control in China.
The return of Tsingtao to China and the abrogation of the unequal treaties were the two most important Chinese war aims. When the provisions of the Versailles Treaty became known in China, the first nation-wide protest campaign erupted. The May 4th movement shook and changed the whole country. In what is regarded as the first Cultural Revolution, Chinese intellectuals with students of Beijing University in the vanguard turned away from the Western powers as their counterparts in Japan had done before. China was thrown back on its own feet and forced to find its own way, which proved to be a revolutionary one. The rise of the Kuomintang, the national revolutionary movement under the guidance of Sun Yat-sen and the founding of the Communist party soon to be led by Mao Tse-tung, were the results of the betrayal of the Versailles peace treaty.
China refused to sign the Western document and strove for a separate treaty with Germany which might serve as a substitute and a model for ending all foreigners’ special rights. The German Reich was the first Western power to give up all its former privileges. For the first time modern China signed a treaty on equal terms with a former colonial power. No longer an imperialist power, the Reich gained tremendous influence in Nationalist China. Germany’s special role did not end with the Pacific War but was rather revived by the Communist regime when defending China against American or Japanese economic threats. To this day there still is some stabilizing effect of Germany acting as the mediator concerning Western influence in China, as can be seen by the communiqué issued after Chancellor Schroeder’s visit in China in 2002. On the occasion of the opening of the German-built Transrapid railway line in Shanghai, both sides stressed the point of having no political differences at all.
While China was accepted at least by the German Reich as an equal, Japan was pushed back to the rank of a regional power at the Washington Conference in 1921-22. American leadership and the Americanization of Japan manifested themselves in a Western life style and democracy in the Taisho period (1912-1925), but they stirred strong opposition in traditional ruling circles like the military and the court. The national ideology of the Japanese (kokutai), the Tenno (Emperor) system and the traditional agrarian-based social order seemed to be endangered by America. The Japanese felt threatened and further humiliated by American immigration laws excluding all Asian people.
The first step on this way was the incident staged by the Imperial Army at Mukden on 18 September 1931 and the subsequent occupation of Manchuria. This action became a turning point both in Japanese domestic and international politics. With the military in power, all attempts to transform Japan into a democratic Western state came to an end.
4. The Alternative: Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
The origins of the Pacific War can’t be understood without taking into account cultural or ideological aspects. The American-propagated order based on individualism, political liberalism and capitalism was rejected, not only by Japan but also by all emerging nationalist movements in China as well as in the colonies of the region. Instead of Western concepts, Asian people strove for a New Order based on the traditional values of collective harmony, spirituality and economic partnership. Japan’s proclamation of a New Order on 22 December 1938, after the Munich conference, certainly aimed at regaining the leadership in Northeast Asia which Tokyo was forced to give up in 1922. The New Order slogan was also a propaganda tool to win over the Chinese who then were bitterly fighting the Japanese. Open war had broken out in July 1937, and severe fighting and bloody atrocities committed by the Japanese troops – like the rape of Nanjing – had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Brutal warfare, therefore, was covered up by a visionary phrase about a bright future for Asia under Japan.
This lofty aim did not attract the Chinese people suffering under brutal Japanese rule but it did attract the liberation movements all over Southeast Asia and also the Indian Congress movement. The enlarged version of the New Order, the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” proclaimed by the Konoye government at the end of July 1940, underlined Japan’s aim of controlling all East and Southeast Asia.
The declaration of the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in November 1943 about the liberation of Asia was intended as a counter-proclamation to the Western allies’ Atlantic Charter. It provided not a parliamentarian system but a paternalistic order in East Asia with benevolent rulers, and was modeled on the Japanese Empire. The semi-divine Japanese Emperor was bound to rule the family of nations. All exploitation and racial discrimination should cease, and Western norms replaced by indigenous ones. Above all, the rule of the white man should once and for all come to an end. Despite its shortcomings this liberation concept did not fail completely. Japan granted independence to Burma, the Philippines and to the Free Indian Government led by Subhas Chandra Bose and encouraged national liberation movements in the formerly Dutch and British possessions, notably Indonesia. With the surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942, which Churchill called the greatest military defeat in British history, British colonial rule was shattered. The slow process of de-colonization of prior decades was speeded up by the Japanese military victories and the accompanying concept of Co-Prosperity.
The foundations of the neo-traditionalist political systems of present day Southeast Asia were laid by the Japanese. The new national leaders, Aung San in Burma, Sukarno in Indonesia, Bose in India, Phibul Songkhram in Thailand and Laurel in the Philippines, all rejected the political order of their former colonial masters, thus refuting Western democratic ideas. Asian nationalists like their counterparts in the Arabian world favored “fascist” ideas about national unity and, like their models had done, tried to combine nationalism with socialism. Fascist Italy under Mussolini served as a European model and, racial discrimination conveniently ignored, so did Hitler’s national-socialist Germany. In the view of civilian nationalists, developmental dictatorships were to be established in order to lead the colonies to independence and to cope with the colonial legacy and the turmoil brought about not only by colonial forces but also by brutal Japanese occupation forces.
The destruction of the plantation economy in the Dutch East Indies and in the Philippines had a devastating effect on the whole economy of these colonies. International trade was totally disrupted because the Japanese were unable to ship stock-piled raw materials to Japan or other destinations within the new sphere because of non-military shipping shortages and US submarine warfare. Subsistence economy could neither feed the local population nor the greedy Japanese occupation force. Unemployment, mass migration to the urban districts and finally starvation marked Japanese occupation policy and thus encouraged, as in badly devastated China, communist movements striving for a radically different third way to shaping the political-economic order.
Because of the unfavorable military situation, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere had no chance. But it left its mark. The rise of nationalist liberation movements and of communist ideas was Japan’s war heritage to Asia. The return of the West and the pacifying of the region in accordance with Western democratic and liberal norms seemed almost impossible despite Japan’s unconditional surrender on 2 September 1945.
5. The Vision Renewed: Allied War Time Planning and its Results
At the Cairo conference in November 1943, the future order of East Asia was decided upon by Roosevelt and Churchill without consulting Stalin. All unequal treaties or Western privileges in China would be abrogated by the Western powers. After a hundred years of humiliation China got back its full sovereignty. But in a concession to the British, Hong Kong would remain a Crown Colony. Japan would be limited to its original borders, returning to China all conquered territories such as Manchuria and Formosa (...
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