Ronald H. Spector - A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955

A

CONTINENT

ERUPTS

DECOLONIZATION,

CIVIL WAR, AND

MASSACRE IN

POSTWAR ASIA,

19451955

RONALD H. SPECTOR

To my grandchildren, Noah, Maisie, and Hannah

CONTENTS

The well-known essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra recently declared decolonization to be the central event of the twentieth century. During the decade following the Japanese surrender almost all of the countries of South, East, and Southeast Asia that formerly had been colonies of the European powers or conquests of the Japanese became independent nations.

Whether or not this process constituted the central event of the twentieth century, it was certainly among the bloodiest. Two years after the end of World War II, Harold Isaacs, an American journalist in Asia, reported, from one end of the vast continent to the other it has seldom been possible since Japans collapse to avoid the sound of continuing gunfire. There has been civil war in China, nationalist war in Indochina and Indonesia, rioting and mutiny in India, political collisions in Korea and the Philippines.

Historian Priya Satia has observed that in explaining the origins and growth of the British Empire, it is impossible to factor the violence out. Similarly, in telling the story of the end of empire in Asia, it is also impossible to factor the violence out. East and Southeast Asia was, in fact, the most violent region of the globe during the decade following the end of World War II.

In the course of their emancipation, the peoples of the former colonies and foreign-dominated areas split into rival factions and movements, all with claims to leadership and legitimacy in their new nations. A prolonged civil war engulfed China, a country still reeling from the wounds of its seven-year struggle against the Japanese. Similarly, Koreas liberation from four decades of Japanese rule was soon followed by a civil war that became an international conflict in 1950, marked by campaigns, weapons, and casualty rates comparable to those of World War II. The anticolonial wars waged in Indochina and Indonesia also had many of the characteristics of civil wars and, in some areas, resulted in a far larger number of deaths, particularly among the civilian population, than those experienced during the Second World War.

No one can say with certainty how many died in these wars, but two respected demographers concluded in 2005 that the greatest battle violence of the past fifty years took place in China, Korea and the Indochinese peninsula.

Except for the War in Korea, these conflicts are little known to American readers. History textbooks often treat them as an aspect of the Cold War. Other authors see them as a chapter in the long narrative of decolonization or, as Pankaj Mishra calls it, the interconnected struggles against white supremacy.A Continent Erupts aims to complicate those narratives by examining the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the military operations and other forms of mass violence during the decade following World War II in China, Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam. While these wars have often been seen in terms of black and white, Communists vs. anticommunists, colonial powers vs. anticolonialists, and US clients and allies vs. Soviet clients and allies, this book suggests that these apparently black-and-white struggles may be more accurately viewed in various shades of Technicolor.

Instead of being simply wars of liberation or ideological contests, most of the conflicts in postwar Asia soon took on the character of civil wars, contests between and among the peoples of former colonial or foreign-dominated territories who held vastly different visions of their nations postcolonial future. The character of these conflicts as civil wars also helps to explain the savagery of much of the fighting during this unsettled decade. In a conventional war the opposing forces could be viewed simply as the enemys army, but in a civil war the opposing forces are often viewed as betrayers and oppressors of their nation. Such traitors had to be converted to the true cause or annihilated; crushed, not merely defeated.

Far from being simply part of the struggle against white supremacy, the protagonists in this first decade of decolonization drew recruits from diverse racial and ethnic communities. In Indochina, for example, where French colonial authorities confronted Ho Chi Minhs Democratic Republic of Vietnam, often referred to as the Viet Minh, about 30 percent of the French Expeditionary Corps was made up of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian troops. Another 30 percent were colonial troops from West Africa and the Maghreb. Former Japanese Army soldiers were active on all sides of the Chinese Civil War and the wars in Indochina and Indonesia.

Similarly, although most of the wars of decolonization coincided with the years during which growing Soviet-US tensions hardened into the Cold War, none of these conflicts had their primary origin in Cold War rivalries. Instead, one or often both of the warring sides in Asia actively recruited the worlds two five-hundred-pound gorillas, America and Russia, to intervene on behalf of their cause. As with any five-hundred-pound gorilla, their entrance inspired awe and fear. They thrashed about and caused a great deal of damage but were seldom able to completely control the course of events.

A Continent Erupts is primarily, though not entirely, a military history. It examines the nature and composition of the warring forces, their leadership, military effectiveness, strategy, and operational methods in the context of the political, social, and ideological forces influencing their behavior. It argues that whatever the larger historical significance of decolonization, its nature and duration was largely shaped by events on the battlefield, whether that battlefield was a clearly defined area of operations as in the Huahai Campaign, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, or the Inchon Landing, or was characterized by patterns of irregular warfare, terrorism, and massacre spread over entire provinces and regions.

In his book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder analyzes the mass killings in certain areas of Eastern Europe where Hitlers racist expansionism met Stalins own deadly ambitions during World War II. Snyder points out that the highest number of civilian deaths often took place in areas such as Poland and the Baltic states where cities and regions changed hands more than once in the course of political maneuvering or military operations.