Lingering Ghosts: World War II and the Shaping of Modern Asia

August 15, 1945 – the day Japan initially announced its surrender to the allies; the day that signaled the final end of World War Two. For the 400 million people of the Chinese Republic, that day also marked the end of eight years of all-out war, beginning with the Japanese attack on northern China in July 1937. Within six months most of China, including the capital Nanjing, had been conquered. By early 1942, following Pearl Harbor, the vast majority of East and Southeast Asia (excepting a few neutral outposts, such as Macao) had come under Japanese control. Tokyo’s hegemonistic vision of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere stretched from the Pacific Islands to Burma. Japanese forces were poised to invade British-controlled India to the west, Soviet-controlled Siberia to the north, and launch bombing raids against Australia’s Northern Territories.

Years later, the end of World War Two in Asia was greeted by celebration, the withdrawal of Japanese occupying forces, and the collapse of their proxy administrations, whether imported from Tokyo or collaborationist. However, Asia was not to simply revert back to the prewar social order and political hierarchies. With the end of the Japanese bid for total regional power came new and substantial challenges to the prewar colonial order, from resistance movements in the Far East possessions of the British, Dutch and French Empires, and the ending of the Treaty Port system in China, to the rise of new ideologies, in the form of communism and Marxist-Leninist political parties, to more overtly indigenous liberation movements. None of these processes occurred with universal agreement, many were violent and became extremely bloody, the after-shocks of the war rumbled on for generations and do so into our own era. Many of the resistance movements pre-dated the war, though many had also been subtly encouraged by the Japanese in their quest to oust the European colonizers.       

The post-1945 regional regime changes have ramifications for today’s Asian geopolitical landscapes. These are the “lingering ghosts” of World War Two across Asia. Spanning the continent from India to the Kuril Islands, China down to Vietnam, new leaders, political forces and ideologies emerged and competed for space in the new postwar political order. This great sorting out was not just to affect Asians, but would reverberate as far away as London, Paris, The Hague, and Washington.

Colonialism and Communism

In the dying months of 1945 much of Asia turned its face away from its former colonial masters. In Malaya the British were seen to have been defeated, unable to defend the Federated States or the port of Singapore. It was deemed by many that their time had passed. In Indo-China the French were seen as the old masters, compromised now by the years of defeat, Vichy, and collaboration. That their time had passed was not always immediately apparent to the mandarins of London’s Foreign and Colonial Office or Paris’s Ministère des Colonies. Similarly, in the Dutch East Indies, where the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta declared Indonesian independence immediately following the Japanese surrender, the Ministry of Colonial Affairs in The Hague continued to resist the creation of Indonesia until 1949. But, as André Malraux wrote shortly after World War Two, observing Mao’s Red Army gaining the upper hand over Chiang Kai-shek’s exhausted Nationalist troops as the Chinese Civil War reached its final end-game: “Europe has ceased to count for anything in the Far East.”

To many in British Malaya, as in crumbling French Indo-China, the new Indonesia and, of course, in the People’s Republic of China, communism was a new force, one that had been apparent but lain largely dormant, repressed or marginalized before the war. It was in all cases a communism fuelled by anti-colonial nationalism, its popularity representing more often a creed of national self-reliance, rather than a strict adherence to European Marxism-Leninism. The old colonial masters had been shown to be weak and fallible while Japan, which had been a potential new savior to many, had ultimately failed too. Both strategies of colonial collaboration and Japanese collaboration had failed – neither form of subjugation was any longer to be admired or accepted. In China the collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei, the so-called “Nanjing Regime,” had been one of extreme collaboration, corruption, and poor governance with only a minority following. In Indo-China, it seems many were left with nothing to follow. The French essayist and literary critic Jean Guehenno, a résistant who survived the occupation of Paris by teaching French literature, remembered young Indo-Chinese students, sent from Vietnam to Paris for an elite education so as to return to Asia as loyal subjects of France’s Union Indochinoise, feeling adrift during the war. In his wartime diary Guehenno noted a student who: “…no longer knows where he stands. He told me what France meant for him and his friends in the Saigon lycée four years ago, how they loved her with a romantic love...” but then also confesses that, while initially admiring Japanese strength and culture, the barbarities of the Japanese has rendered them false gods too. Of these young students Guehenno wrote: “They would be generous indeed if they didn’t take some pleasure in seeing us humiliated by an occupier as they were by us.”

Lingering ghosts; false gods – during the war European imperialists morphed into Japanese militarists as the colonial possessions of Southeast Asia fell. In 1945 the imperial powers returned with their armies (including America now dominant across the Pacific) seeking to restore empires that could no longer be taken for granted. To many Asians the main legacy of the war was that they had nobody to rely on but themselves. And that lingering ghost of dependence – on colonial mother countries, on Tokyo, on the old elites who had collaborated but been unable to prevent disaster – informed the postwar liberation movements. Not just the national-communism of the Chinese Communist Party that collapsed into the obsessions with self-sufficiency that characterized the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, but also the obsessional self-reliance of Juche theory (Juche meaning essentially just that – self-reliance) that came to dominate the newly formed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) under Kim Il-sung. Both Mao and Kim positioned themselves as national liberators. Mao’s victory in 1949 was officially termed not a revolution but jiefang – liberation.

But neither China nor North Korea (liberated from over 30 years of Japanese rule) were ready to wholeheartedly swap old-style imperialist rule for unquestioning fealty to Stalin’s Soviet Union. At first Chinese were compelled to accept the “Big Brother-Little Brother” relationship between Beijing and Moscow, but once Stalin died in 1953 Mao preferred to be an only child and established himself as the beacon of national liberation. Likewise, Pyongyang initially accepted Soviet advisers and aid but soon baulked at the advice (though continued to accept the aid). The Sino-Soviet Split, as well as the (to the Kremlin anyway) annoying refusal of Kim Il-sung to follow Stalin’s orders, meant the now ruling communist parties in Asia never became satellites of Moscow in the same style as the vast bulk of Eastern Europe. Both China and North Korea refused to fully join the Soviet Union’s alternative to the Marshall Plan, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). The ghost of colonialist paternalism gave the lie to Stalin’s alternative offer of “Fraternal Aid.” Freed from the former there was no great desire to leap straight into the open, but demanding, arms of the latter.

The messy slide of de-colonization birthed many of these movements and their leaders. Of course the struggle for Indian Independence, like those in many countries, predated the war. Japan had used the long-standing calls for liberation from the yoke of the British Raj as a rallying cry to its Co-Prosperity Sphere. It met with some success – but the photograph of participants at the Greater East Asia Conference held in Tokyo in November 1943 shows virtually no men who were to play any role in shaping postwar Asia. Zhang Jinghui, erstwhile prime minister of Japanese-annexed Manchuria was to die in 1959 in a Chinese prison; Wang Jingwei died in Japan in 1944; Ba Maw, pro-Japanese leader of Burma never managed to consolidate his regime and spent the rest of his life in and out of prison at the whim of Rangoon’s postwar juntas; José P. Laurel, the head of the pro-Tokyo Second Philippine Republic, could find no base of support politically after 1945; Subhas Chandra Bose of the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army died in August 1945 in a plane crash around which a million conspiracy theories still swirl. Only Wan Waithayakon, a diplomat from Thailand (which co-operated with the Japanese) was to have any sort of postwar career. The inheritors of political power were largely to be men who had both resisted the Japanese and taken an anti-colonial stance – Mao, Kim, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Aung San...

A Bloody Break

The end of the war forced a bloody break with colonialism. In the ten years after 1945 there were to be four major conflicts in Asia (and countless minor). The immediately resumed Chinese Civil War lasted until 1949 with Mao’s ascendancy and Chiang’s flight to Taiwan. The Malayan Emergency dribbled on from 1948 to the summer of 1960 (rather cleverly dubbed an “Emergency,” rather than a war, as not calling it a war meant the British plantation owners qualified for their insurance payouts when they suffered lost assets!). Add to these the civil war in Korea from June 1950, which mired America in a boots-on-the-ground Asian conflict and provided the first test for a United Nations force, and the battles in Indo-China from 1946 that culminated in Dien Bien Phu and the final collapse of France’s Far East Empire. Alongside these, Sukarno resisted Dutch attempts to reinstate themselves in Indonesia, the Philippines government faced communist insurgents and Burmese factions fought long, and in some cases still, running skirmishes.

Of course the war also changed Europe: France had been defeated and occupied, Great Britain rendered impoverished. Empire was an expensive business in terms of cash and personnel, but the Europeans did try to reassert their rule. However, just how many military battles led to liberation is debatable. The British continued to resist Malayan insurgents until 1960 but Merdeka (“Independence”) was ultimately largely the result of a wider policy of British decolonization that had included India, Burma, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) by a cash-strapped Britain (a process that later also applied to Singapore and, in 1997, to the Hong Kong Handover). Similarly so the withdrawal of the Dutch from Indonesia in 1949. Europe was moving away from colonialism after the War and finding its colonies to be its own lingering ghosts.

Liberation movements might disagree, still, however you call it, 1945 ushered in the end of empire in the Far East. But not the end of nationalism and ethnic clashes; those were to remain far more stubborn lingering ghosts. In his study of the end of the French Indo-China empire, The Last Valley, historian Martin Windrow writes, “Dien Bien Phu (1954) was the only time a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organised and equipped army able to defeat a modern western occupier in pitched battle.” Invariably across Southeast Asia decolonization, and transition to new national governments, was, in most places, ultimately a negotiated retreat.

Territorial Appetite

Colonialism was ousted but territorial appetite wasn’t sated. China occupied Tibet, a dispute that still rumbles. The Soviet Union backed Uyghur separatists aiming to end Chinese rule and form the Second East Turkistan Republic from 1944 to 1949. They were unsuccessful and Xinjiang also remains problematic for Beijing. Elsewhere ethnic supremacy was contested – the rise of bumiputra nationalism in Malaysia, Hindu nationalism in India, the dominance of the Javanese in Indonesia – all still flare and cause rancor. In February 1947 Aung San, soon to be dubbed “The Father of Modern Day Burma,” met with national and ethnic leaders from across Burma at the Panglong Conference where he outlined his government's commitment to minority rights. The Agreement, signed by representatives of the Shan, Kachin, and Chin, stated that: “Citizens of the Frontier Areas shall enjoy rights and privileges which are regarded as fundamental in democratic countries.” The aim was to ensure ethnic minorities the same rights and treatment as ethnic Burman citizens, and that they be granted, “full autonomy.” But Aung San was assassinated in July 1947 and Burma’s subsequent civilian and military leaders, through to the current Rohingya crisis, have never honored the Panglong Agreement. The leaders of many ethnic minorities in Burma have said that fighting will never end unless another Panglong Agreement is signed and respected. A ghost from 1947 that lingers over the consolidation of a new post-junta Myanmar.

If you accept the argument (and you should) that the Cold War began in 1917, with the Russian Bolshevik Revolution then the ghosts linger longer with the involvement in China of the Communist International (Comintern) and that body’s influence throughout the nascent liberation movements of Southeast Asia. How many of those postwar liberation movement leaders were torn between colonialism and communism? After 1945 the countries of Asia were threatened with becoming little more than Great Power playthings. Before the war many of the men who were to become their postwar leaders had been subject to wooing by both sides. Ho Chi Minh received his political education as a nationalist and a socialist in France (between 1919 and 1923) before moving to Moscow to join the Comintern and study at the fantastically named Communist University of the Toilers of the East (or KUTV). Others followed similar multi-track paths through Moscow and the West before the war – Chang Ching-Kuo (son of Chiang Kai-shek and later President of Taiwan succeeding his father) also studied in Moscow, as did Deng Xiaoping, after being a worker-student in France (both were KUTV class of 1925) where the man who was to become Mao’s No. 2, Zhou Enlai, was also a student. Others flirted with both sides – Sukarno was educated at elite Dutch-run schools in Java before attending college in Bandung and immersing himself in European, American, Nationalist, communist, and religious political philosophy. The mix eventually formed his own political ideology of Indonesian-style socialist self-sufficiency - Pancasila. Gandhi of course became a barrister at London’s Inner Temple; Nehru at Trinity College, Cambridge and also at the Inner Temple. Aung San had studied at the British-run Rangoon University and then became a founder member and first General-Secretary of the Communist Party of Burma a year after leaving the college.

The roots and later ideological twists of these men (and it was really all men) engendered the lingering ghosts – Chang into exile in Taiwan in 1949 after his father lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao, while Deng (not known as China’s “Rubber Man” for nothing) was to suffer repeated ostracism and rehabilitation before eventually becoming the leader who both began China’s economic path out of Maoist isolation and also presided over the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Sukarno was to effectively create Indonesia, and then become increasingly autocratic. Ho was to lead several generations of Vietnamese nationalists through the struggle against France, then dragged America through a quagmire of protracted war until the Fall of Saigon (1975) and finally into an independent communist Vietnam (which Ho never got to see, having died in 1969). Gandhi and Nehru were to forge an independent India only to see it cleaved in two with Partition and the creation of Pakistan.

Lingering Dynasties

New Asian dynasties formed in the ashes of World War Two, whether family or institutional (or both), are still very much with us. Members of the extended Nehru-Gandhi family were in charge of India for forty of the first sixty years since independence; the Bhutto family and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) have remained a dominant force; Chiang Kai-shek’s son succeeded him in Taiwan and stayed in power until 1988. The Chiang family may not be politically prominent any more but Taiwan has seen the resurgence of the Kuomintang party that Chiang Kai-shek largely created and his son continued. In North Korea a “communist” monarchy is now entrenched; Kim Il-sung’s son (Kim Jong-il) and then grandson (Kim Jong-un) succeeded him in an unbroken line. In 2013, Park Geun-hye was elected the eleventh president of South Korea. She is the daughter of the ROK’s third president Park Chung-hee, who seized power through a coup d’etat in 1961. The postwar lineages are really quite remarkable – Sukarno’s daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was president of Indonesia between 2001 and 2004, while in 2004 Lee Hsieng Loong became the third prime minister of Singapore - his father, Lee Kwan Yew, having been the first after independence and the dominant figure in building the island nation. Aung San Suu Kyi (just two at the time of her father’s assassination), was to become one of the worlds most prominent political prisoners and then a key transitional figure for Burma in the twenty-first century. All these lineages have their origins in the dying days of World War Two. In Japan itself, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the grandson of prominent postwar leader Nobusuke Kishi.

In many Asian countries postwar personalities and new political dynasties counted for more than ideologies, whatever creeds new states claimed to embrace. The new political dynasties of the post-1945 continent – the guerrilla leaders and armies of postwar liberation - sought their spoils and rewards demanding a price for having been the hard men of nation building. Getting the armies that fought for liberation post-1945 out of business across the continent has proved a hard fought campaign that continues. In many countries it was not until the postwar nation builders exited the stage that any change proved possible; cautiously after Abdul Rahman and Abdul Razak in Malaysia, similarly so after Sukarno and Suharto in Indonesia, more rapidly in Taiwan and South Korea after military dictatorship evolved into democracy. Even where dynasties do not remain to hold on to their postwar legacies, the initial wave of nation builders had to pass. Dengist-style reforms in China were impossible while Mao lived. The batons of internal power must pass before reform can occur and where the baton passes uninterrupted within a dynasty it seems no reform occurs – Pyongyang is still on the “Arduous March”!

Most of Asia’s postwar leaders stayed in power past their sell-by date. Mao, Sukarno, Kim Il-sung… As well as social chaos, ethnic nationalism, and human rights abuses, their economies declined once the leaders refused to adjust immediate postwar policies that had, to be fair, often initially dug them out of destruction. The policies became linked to the leaders and so to reject the policy was to reject the leader. They became troublesome ghosts themselves that required exorcism by succeeding generations looking to evolve, mature and adapt their nations for a new era. That process is still ongoing in many countries.

Lingering Ghosts

But perhaps it is in China where the lingering ghosts rattle their chains loudest. The root of much internal politicking in the CCP is among the “Red Elite” that date their position back to China’s civil war and postwar revolution. We can trace an almost constant process, from the power struggles over the succession to Mao among those who had been senior officials during the Civil War (Lin Biao’s death in a 1971 plane crash while either – take your pick – escaping in fear of being purged during the Cultural Revolution or fleeing after a botched coup attempt) through to the Bo Xilai scandal – he being the son of Bo Yibo, a close confidante to Mao and Communist China's inaugural Minister of Finance. It is also China where the war itself is the most audible lingering ghost, both in terms of China’s diplomacy and the continuing animosity between Beijing and Tokyo over everything from Japanese leaders visiting the Yasakuni Shrine to the South China Seas Dispute.

Asia’s lingering postwar ghosts – ethnic hatred, distrust, fear of foreign domination, fear of success even in some cases – can’t be blamed exclusively on World War Two. Most predated the war, sometimes by centuries. But World War Two was a huge catalyst, one that brought down the old order across Asia. The colonialists in defeat were emperors with no clothes; Japan a false prophet. The catalyst of war coalesced anti-colonial and national liberation movements. They exploded into ethnically exclusive, communist, religious, or ultra-nationalist varieties. These are the issues still being worked out across the region’s geopolitics, diplomacy, societies and economies. It’s been seventy years, but in many places and in many arguments, it feels like just yesterday.