Power and Primacy: A History of Western Intervention in the Asia-Pacific

Abbreviations

Introduction

Since the expansion of the Portuguese Empire in the early sixteenth century the dominance of Western empires has been the primary factor shaping regional order in East Asia. By the beginning of the Second World War the entire region outside the Japanese Empire was comprised of territories either subservient to Western interests or, in most cases, under direct Western rule. Much of Indonesia was known as the Dutch East Indies, while Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were known as French Indochina. Malaya, Singapore, Borneo and Hong Kong were among Britain’s possessions, alongside Oceania which had been almost entirely depopulated and repopulated with European settlers. Thailand was divided between British and French spheres of influence, while China was long subjected to unequal treaties with and forced to grant extensive territorial concessions to Western powers. The Americans ruled the Philippines and Guam as colonies, as the Portuguese ruled Macau, the Maluku Islands and East Timor, while Germany and Spain had also formerly held colonies of their own. Asian self-determination was thus suppressed by the imposition of Western authority, and the region governed in line with Western interests.

Western empires seeking for centuries to assert military dominance over East Asia consistently depicted their motivations as altruistic, ranging from civilizing missions and spreading the word of God to protecting freedom of trade, democratization and the overthrow of ‘Asiatic despots.’ When Britain and France waged war against China in the 1850s, British press reported at the time: “Thus it has been the destiny of England to break down a government fabric... to uncover to its own subjects its hollowness and its evils.”¹ Other reports from British papers highlighted that the Chinese government’s “mysterious and exclusive barbarism” could only be dismantled, for the good of its own people, by “the force of active and intrusive Western Civilization.”² The language of a moral crusade was used to justify a war fought to ensure that the British Empire would maintain ←1 | 2→the rights to sell narcotics to China, and led to possibly the very darkest period in the country’s millennia-long history as widespread drug addiction paved the way for Western powers to extract substantial economic, territorial and legal concessions. Altruistic pretexts for centuries masked Western imperial projects across East Asia despite the disastrous impacts they had for local populations, and they remained consistent after the colonial era when ‘democratic values’ replaced the ‘civilising influence’ and ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘communism’ replaced ‘mysterious barbarism.’

Western dominance in East Asia began to be seriously challenged only in the twentieth century when Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union modernized and industrialized their economies, the former from the 1890s and the latter from the 1930s. This ended the Western monopoly on modern industrial and military capabilities. Tokyo and Moscow, both long seen as working towards “the elimination of white influence in the East,”3 provided arms, ideologies and inspiration key to allowing East Asian peoples to challenge Western empires and strive for independence. Although both were eventually defeated under tremendous Western pressure, a legacy of their efforts was a shift in East Asian order and the emergence from the mid-twentieth century of more independent countries outside Western control capable of opposing Western interests.

This book explores the history of Western intervention in East Asia beginning with the pivotal Japanese challenge to Western control in the 1930s and ending in the twenty-first century when the ability of the United States and its allies to perpetuate their hegemony was brought to serious question. Despite covering a period of over eighty years, an analysis of efforts to sustain Western dominance shows very strong consistencies over time in the means used, the objectives prioritized and the consequences endured by East Asian populations. These are seen across interventions as different as the British, French, American and Dutch military campaigns to re-assert their colonial rule in the mid-late 1940s following Japan's defeat, and the U.S.-led Pivot to Asia initiative in the 2010s, with the central commonality between them being their purpose of sustaining a regional order based on Western control.

Underlying these conflicts is a fundamental clash of visions for the region: Western interests pursuing a framework of international relations under which order is centred on Western dominance, allowing Western powers to influence the affairs of all other states and retain indefinite dominion, versus ←2 | 3→regional actors pursuing an order comprised of states equal in their rights to sovereignty including self-defence and self-determination. The latter is the same order enshrined in the United Nations Charter. This essential clash, which largely dates back to the 1940s when the popular slogan ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ was seen as a fundamental threat to the status quo of Western empire, has continued in various forms ever since from Indonesia and Vietnam’s wars of independence to the Sino-U.S. conflict in the twenty-first century.

As U.S. President Barack Obama declared in May 2016 regarding the future the United States intended for the wider Pacific region: “America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.”4 Whether this vision will be attained, and the primary means used by actors on all sides to either sustain Western-dominated order or to end it, is assessed in the following chapters. This book provides background both historical and contemporary key to understanding the nature and goals of major state actors in the ongoing and decades-long conflict for the future of East Asia – the outcome of which will largely determine the future of global order due to the region’s central geopolitical and economic importance.

Notes

1 Pagani, Catherine, Objects and the Press. Images of China in Nineteenth Century Britain in: Codell, Julie F., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British Colonial Press, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 (p. 160).

Frankopan, Peter, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London, Bloomsbury, 2015 (p. 301).

2 Ibid.

3 Horne, Gerald, Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, New York, New York University Press, 2005 (p. 187).

4 Obama, Barack, ‘President Obama: The TPP would let America, not China, lead the way on global trade,’ The Washington Post, May 2, 2016.

Terms

East Asia: Collective term for East and Southeast Asia.

China: Will from 1949 refer to the Beijing-based People’s Republic of China rather than the Taipei-based Republic of China. The Republic of China will from 1949 be referred to as Taiwan.

Northeast Asia: The region encompassing China, the Koreas and Japan.

Southeast Asia: The region encompassing Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Countries which by 2002 were all members or observers of ASEAN.

Western Bloc: Power bloc of leading Western powers established in the early Cold War and led by the United States and also including Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Portugal. All but Canada, Luxemburg and Norway were major colonial powers, with these three having spent extended periods incorporated into larger European empires.

CHAPTER 1

Destroying the Japanese Empire: How Asia’s First Industrial Power Undermined Western Control

Imperial Japan: An Outlier in the Western-Dominated Colonial Order

Following the expansion of European empires to impose their rule across most of the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the perpetuation of Western global hegemony increasingly came to rely on the imperial powers’ effective monopoly of modern industrial economies. ←9 | 10→The industrial revolution in the eighteenth century which quickly spread across Western Europe provided economic and military power far superior to those of non-industrialized countries, with the resulting industrial disparity between the Western empires and the rest of the world leaving Western dominance effectively unassailable. This remained the case until the early 20^th century when Japan emerged as the first non-Western military industrial power, with profound consequences for East Asia and the wider world.

Japan initiated deep reforms of its society, education and economy which helped facilitate industrialisation largely along Western lines, and did so as a defensive response after the United States Navy forced its opening to trade in 1854 under the Treaty of Kanagawa.4 Its unique successes came to be widely admired across the non-Western world with states as diverse as Qing China, the first Philippine Republic and the Ottoman Empire looking to the country as a possible model for their own development. Japan’s industrial status made it an exception among non-Western countries where underdevelopment and either colonization or vassalage to Western empires were the prevailing norms.

In parallel to industrialization, adoption of Western cultural practices from ballroom dancing to Western clothing was seen as vital to gaining the status of an equal nation under the Western-dominated global order - and to negotiating revisions to its Unequal Treaties with Western powers. The treaties had relegated Japan to the status of an inferior nation alongside the rest of East Asia, granted Western citizens extra territorial rights above the jurisdiction of Japanese courts, and imposed terms of trade strongly favouring Western interests. They were signed with the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Prussia and Spain from 1858 to 1868, and would only be revised decades later.

Under the colonial order of the time empire building conferred a unique prestige, respect and great power status which were all things Japan strove to gain in order to have full equality with the Western powers. The importance of overseas empire to gaining Western respect was perhaps best summarized by renowned historian and philosopher Okakura Kakuzo who wrote: “The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea-ceremony but another instance of the thousand-and-one oddities ←10 | 11→which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.”5 Japan’s armed forces, closely modelled on those of the Western powers from the weapons used and uniforms worn to its command structures, were thus quickly put to use for empire building, and the country’s industrialization and military modernization facilitated victories over China in 1894-95, and subsequently over the Russian Empire in 1904-05. Russia was considered a leading Western imperial power at the time with one of the world’s largest economies, albeit largely by virtue of its size and with only limited industrial development, and its defeat by a relatively small East Asian country caused shock that reverberated across the West and beyond.

Since the sixteenth century when Western empires began to expand into East Asia widespread portrayals and perceptions among Westerners of Asiatic races and civilizations as inferiors profoundly influenced the Asian regional order. The unprecedented defeat of a Christian and ethnically predominantly European nation provided Japan with unparalleled prestige across the non-Western world, but also led Western populations to increasingly perceive Japanese power as a potential threat. Fears of a ‘Yellow Peril’ – under which Japan would lead East Asia to end centuries of Western hegemony – were widely used by European scholars and political leaders to encourage a heavier hand and more interventionist policies in the region. Such calls frequently emphasized the need for a complete subjugation and partitioning of the region’s largest country China to eliminate the potential for an Asian power bloc forming that could challenge Western primacy.⁶

With the United States having recently colonized the Philippines in part to provide a staging ground for power projection to draw China into its sphere of influence,⁷ Japan’s newfound power and potential to challenge such designs sparked concern in Washington. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt thus requested that the Navy draft plans to fight Japan if necessary. These plans evolved considerably over time, stipulating in 1906 the United States enforce “final and complete commercial isolation,” and later emphasizing “impoverishment and exhaustion” and “in the end... economic ←11 | 12→ruin.” Bombing of industry and transportation came to form a central role in these plans as technological development facilitated such options.8

As its population grew increasingly affluent, Japan’s intellectual and political elite increasingly perceived the plight of their neighbours across the region subjugated by Western empires empathetically. This fuelled the emergence of a pan-Asian nationalist ideology as calls grew for support to be given to other Asian nations to strive for the same independence and modernization that Japan itself enjoyed. One of the most prominent pan-Asian thinkers was Duke Konoe Atsumaro who established the East Asian Common Culture Society and sought to support China’s economic development through mutually beneficial education and cultural ties. He played a central role in the emergence of pan-Asian thought at the turn of the century, although European occupation of almost all neighbouring countries and instability in China meant early efforts were met with only limited success.

The Kyoto School, founded by philosopher Kitaro Nishida and supported by many renowned associated historians such as Naito Konan, emerged as the leading centre of pan-Asian thought. Seeking to challenge the West’s Eurocentric historical narratives and definitions of modernity, the Kyoto School constructed a Sinocentric East Asian region as a historical universe with unique dynamics of modernity. Its scholars sought to determine the social and cultural characteristics of an ‘East Asian modern age,’ and to define modernity themselves – competing with rather than acquiescing to Western definitions which tied westernization inextricably with modernization. This was seen as critical for the region’s future. As Chinese civilization long predated that of Japan, and with Chinese thought and history having profoundly influenced Japan over centuries, placing China at the centre of pan-Asian narratives was seen as a natural choice.⁹ With China itself at the time in a state of chaos as part of its ‘century of humiliation' that followed the Opium Wars, many in Japan perceived their own country as better able to carry forward its civilisation legacy.

Pan-Asian thinkers advocated intra-regional co-operation to end subjugation to extra-regional Western powers which had been ongoing for over three centuries. Leading pan-Asian figure Naniwa Kawashima described common perceptions of Japan’s responsibility as the only modern ←12 | 13→and free East Asian country: “We will liberate various Asian peoples from their enslaved state, placing them under the management of first-class national governments. Rallying them all into a unified bloc, we will free them from the unjust, aggressive chokehold... we will curb the unjust, inhumane, thoroughly evil actions, which have been undertaken by the Europeans.”10

Pan-Asian thought deeply influenced both individuals and the Japanese government itself to support various anti-colonial movements throughout the region. In Indonesia nationalists were sponsored to visit Japan and discuss the future of their country’s independence after centuries of Dutch and British occupation.¹¹ Notable individuals included Captain Hara Tei of the Imperial Army who ended his service to fight alongside the First Philippine Republic against an American invasion in 1899, and Yoshida Yamada who, after working for the School of Sino-Japanese Trade Study in Shanghai, joined Sun Yat-sen’s anti-imperialist revolutionary movement in China and was lost in action.¹² Many Japanese educators such as Kawahara Misako also endured considerable hardship to teach a new generation of Chinese leadership throughout the country at the behest of the Chinese government, aiming to support China’s emergence as a modern economic partner.¹³

Philosopher and scholar Kiyoshi Miki, a prominent member of the Kyoto School and esteemed student of its founder Kitaro Nishida, had first conceptualized an Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of interdependent economies under which the wider region would follow Japan to modernize and gain freedom from Western domination. Miki had developed a substantial influence over Japanese workers’ movement and engaged closely with Marxist thought, but saw the path to freedom for all East Asian peoples being through Japanese solidarity and support. The idea of a Co-Prosperity Sphere built on the concept the New Order in East Asia, an idea of Atsumaro Konoe’s son Prince Fumimaro Konoe, although this previous design had been limited to Northeast Asia alone. While the idea of a Co-Prosperity Sphere was officially adopted,¹⁴ Miki himself would strongly disapprove of the methods used to bring about its creation – namely the imperialistic tendencies which emerged in Japanese conduct towards other East Asian peoples who they were supposedly emancipating. While to some the idea of liberating East Asia held strong appeal, to others ←13 | 14→allegiances lay not in pan-Asian solidarity but in Japanese interests alone – with the Co-Prosperity Sphere and liberation being convenient pretexts for an imperial project.

Kawashima emphasized the dangers of the Japanese perceiving themselves as a conquerors rather than liberators in the region, stating: “Our military authorities now stationed in Manchuria must ease up on the excessively interventionist approach they have assumed in the affairs of Manchukuo and restore cooperation as the operating mode in Japanese-Manchurian relations.” He warned: “If in our zeal to capitalize on patriotic passions to effect an immediate territorial settlement we turn our backs on the enduring ideals of Imperial Japan and do nothing more than re-enact the evil deeds of the European and American powers, there will be repercussions. We will not see the day when we can make definitely clear to Asians and other peoples of the world Japan’s true spirit and gain their heartfelt allegiance and trust.”15

Thus although many in the Japanese elite and political leadership continued to emphasize fraternity and solidarity against Western empire, others increasingly emulated Western conduct and adopted similar paradigms for viewing other Asian peoples to those through which Europeans had for centuries viewed the non-Western world. Pan-Asianism and Japanese supremacism resulted in sharply contrasting conduct towards local populations, the former winning Japan support across Asia and the latter, which emerged later on, alienating it.¹⁶ Strong divisions between the two paradigms for viewing Japan’s place in the region remained until the country’s final defeat, which explained the discrepancy in conduct towards East Asian populations under different commanders in the Imperial Army.

In its modernization Japan learned from Western medicine, arts, industry but also thought and paradigms for viewing the world and European theories of racial superiority. Germany in particular, as a country which like Japan was a latecomer to modern industry and had little empire to enrich it, was seen by many in Japan from the early twentieth century as a model. When Germany, alongside Belgium, France, Britain, Italy and others committed holocausts and genocides in Africa, the wealth of which played a vital role in enriching Europe, this too was observed. In southern Africa German forces exterminated the indigenous peoples,¹⁷ with imperial ←14 | 15→authorities condoning widespread sexual violence against African women.18 In German occupied Namibia sexual slavery was widespread and much of the male population were massacred as land fell under German control.¹⁹ Africans were also shipped to Europe for experimentation to prove European racial superiority, with medical experiments on live prisoners carried out on a considerable scale.²⁰

Such atrocities were common to all European empires, and appeared to be an inherent part of the colonial projects which enriched the West at the expense of the world. British imperial forces, for example, committed acts of genocide in Australia and according to a British Central Independent Television report, “hunted and raped and massacred, and few doubted at the time that genocide was the official policy.” Babies’ heads were kicked off in contests between colonizers, who raped and sexually tortured women to death, commonly “by sticking sharp things like spears up their vaginas until they died.” Native men were commonly castrated and left to die.²¹ In East Asia the Bandanese Massacre carried out by the Dutch Empire²² and the conduct of U.S. forces during the conquest of the Philippines,²³ (see Chapters 4 and 5) were further examples of Western atrocities widely termed acts of genocide. It was in this manner that the populations and civilizations of three of the world’s six inhabited continents were effectively erased by European conquest – those of the Americas and Oceania – which were repopulated by European settlers. So long as the West served as a model for Japan’s rise to gain great power status, it boded ill for the country’s wartime conduct.

During the Russo-Japanese War and First World War Japanese forces conducted themselves with distinction, with conduct towards prisoners making a very strong impression on Russian medical officers in particular. Japanese authorities were described as having “bent over backwards to accommodate the large appetites of the Russian prisoners by providing a much larger budget of sixty sen per day for officers, and thirty sen per day for the lower ranks, as opposed to the figure of seventeen sen normally allocated for the Japanese lower ranks.” This meant Russian prisoners were better fed that Japanese soldiers themselves at Tokyo’s expense, all while Japanese prisoners and wounded in Russian hands were not only mistreated but often slaughtered. The Japanese where thus referred to as “one ←15 | 16→sided humanitarians,” with the Russian Red Cross among other sources reporting excellent treatment and provision of medical attention.24 Cassell's History of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-5 thus observed: “In concluding this article [on the treatment of prisoners of war] one cannot refrain from paying a tribute to Japan for the way in which she has observed the rules of International Law in her present conflict, her chivalrous treatment of her wounded and prisoner enemies, and her strict compliance with all the laws and uses of neutrality.”²⁵ In their co-occupation of Beijing alongside Western nations in 1900 Japanese forces were unanimously seen to conduct themselves to a far higher standard, with British and American sources stressing the contrast between the restraint of Japanese soldiers far from the excesses and “splendid looting” of the Western nations.²⁶

It was only from the late 1930s that Japanese forces began to commit considerable atrocities, albeit ones still falling far short of those of the European powers. Having suffered from successive economic downturns, and faced with a fast-growing population and highly limited resources in the early 1930s, the Japanese leadership saw the need for a larger empire of their own to emulate those of the West which had for so long empowered and supported high living standards in Europe. Japanese atrocities primarily against Chinese civilians, which included human experimentation, sexual torture and mass rapes, closely resembled the prior conduct of the Western empires that had been committed in all corners of the non-Western world for centuries on a much larger scale. While Western influence did not extol Japan of responsibility for its crimes, nor did it necessarily mean war crimes would not have been committed otherwise, it was always an important factor in the way Japan conducted itself with war crimes being no exception. The severity of the crimes committed and the techniques used both to dehumanize the enemy and to torture civilians, particularly women, closely mirrored those long used by the Western empires. These influences and the pressure exerted on Japan for over a century to conduct itself as Western powers did to gain recognition as a civilized equal, which led to the remaking of the country, were largely responsible for Japanese atrocities when they did occur.

Perhaps most significant discrepancy setting Japanese conduct towards its overseas imperial subjects apart from the Western empires was ←16 | 17→its very considerable investment in improving their economic output and raising living standards. This contrasted sharply with the ‘development of underdevelopment’ pursued by Western powers that resulted in growing impoverishment, reduced literacy rates and continued heavy dependence on industry in Europe and North America as colonies were relegated to an indefinite state of backwardness. Japanese controlled territories saw extensive industrialization and infrastructure development such as in Taiwan, where agricultural development was also substantial,27 and in northern Korea. Korean economic output increased tenfold in thirty years of Japanese rule, with the second largest dam in the world the Sui Ho being part of a widespread hydroelectric network that provided power to major industrial projects.²⁸ Japanese-occupied Manchuria, which previously had negligible industry, saw manufacturing so heavily concentrated there that it exceeded the steel output of Japan itself, with an industrial base far exceeding that of the remainder of China. The discrepancy in industrial development between Japanese and Western controlled territories in East Asia was thus tremendous.

Japan’s industrialization of the wider East Asian region posed an imminent threat to Western interests, threatening to undermine the longstanding cornerstone of Western primacy by ending the vast disparity between the industrialized West and the underdeveloped non-Western world. The possibility that Japan would expand its empire further into China and Southeast Asia threatened not only to reduce its reliance on imports of key industrial inputs such as oil and rubber from Western controlled territories, but also raised the possibility of it rapidly modernizing economies across the region as it had Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan. Small and resource poor Japan had alone been able to challenge leading Western powers economically and militarily, and had it implemented an industrialization and modernization program across East Asia the military and economic clout of a resulting Japanese led Asian power bloc would pose an unacceptable challenge to Western primacy. While the Manchurians, Koreans and other subjects were not the primary beneficiaries of this industrial development, the modernization and industrialisation of East Asia under a united Asian-led empire was an imminent threat to the West’s position.