Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

By 1939 there was only one independent state in southeast Asia: Siam (Thailand), left as a buffer between the British areas of Burma and the Malay States to the west and French Indochina in the eastern portion of the Malay Peninsula. Southward of the peninsula, in a great sweep eastward to New Guinea, were the multitudinous islands of Indonesia, ruled by the Netherlands from Batavia on the island of Java. To the north of these islands were the Philippines, still under American administration in 1939. Between Java and the Philippines, the great mass of the island of Borneo had a fringe of British dependencies (Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo) along its northern coast, while, far to the east, the eastern half of Timor was under Portuguese administration. Thus all Southeast Asia, except Thailand, was under the colonial domination of five Western states in 1939.

The interest of these imperial Powers in Southeast Asia was chiefly strategic and economic. Strategically, these lands lay athwart the waters joining the Pacific with the Indian Ocean, a situation symbolized by the great British naval base of Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, between Sumatra and Borneo. Economically these areas produced substantial qualities of tin, rubber, petroleum, bauxite, and other products. More significant, perhaps, from the Chinese point of view, many parts of the Malay Peninsula were fertile, were substantially underpopulated, and exported great quantities of rice (especially from Burma).

Western prestige in Malaysia was irretrievably damaged by the Japanese conquests of the Philippines, the Dutch Indies, and Malaya in 1942, so that the reestablishment of the colonial Powers after the Japanese collapse in 1945 was very difficult. Burma and the Philippines were granted their independence by Great Britain and the United States, respectively, soon after the war’s end. French Indochina emerged from the Japanese occupation as the three states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, each claiming independence, while Java claimed sovereignty over the whole Netherlands East Indies as a newly independent state of Indonesia. Efforts by the European Powers to restore their prewar rule led to violent clashes with the supporters of independence. These struggles were brief and successful in Burma and Indonesia, but were very protracted in Indochina. Burma became an independent state in 1948, followed by Indochina in 1949, by Malaya in 1957, and by Singapore (under a special relationship) in 1959. Controversy and intermittent fighting between Indonesia and the Dutch over western New Guinea continued until 1962, when American pressure persuaded the Netherlands to yield, but left Indonesia, led by Achmed Sukarno, unfriendly to the West.

In all these areas, native nationalists were inclined to the political Left, if for no other reason than the fact that the difficulties of capital accumulation and investment to finance economic improvements could be achieved only under state control. But such independent Socialism merged into other points of view which were clearly Communist. In some cases, such Communism may have been ideological, but in most cases it involved little more than the desire to play off the Soviet Union or Red China against the Western imperialist Powers.

The Communists of Southeast Asia were thus Communists of convenience and tactical maneuver, and originally received little support from the Soviet Union because of Stalin’s well-known reluctance to engage in political adventures in areas where he could not dominate the armed forces. But in February 1948, the new Cominform sponsored a Southeast Asia youth conference at Calcutta where armed resistance to colonialism was demanded. A Communist revolt in the Philippines had already begun and was joined, in the course of 1948, by similar uprisings in Burma, Indonesia, and Malaya. Most of these revolts took the form of agrarian agitations and armed raids by Communist guerrilla jungle fighters. Since these guerrillas operated on a hit-and-run basis and had to live off the local peasantry, their exploitation of peasant life eventually made them decreasingly welcome to this very group for whom they pretended to be fighting. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap rebels were smashed in 1953 by the energetic and efficient government of President Ramon Magsaysay. In Indonesia, Sukarno repressed the insurrection and executed its leaders. In Malaya, where the Communists were almost entirely from the Chinese minority, these rebels were systematically hunted down and destroyed by British troops in long-drawn jungle combat. In Burma, the long Chinese frontier provided a refuge for the rebels, and they were not eliminated until 1960.

The real problem was Indochina. There the situation was complex, the French Army was uncompromising, and Communist leadership was skillful. As a result, the struggle there became part of the Cold War and contributed to a world crisis. The Malay Peninsula as a whole is dominated by a series of mountain ranges, with their intervening rivers, running southward from Chinese Yunnan. These rivers fan out, in the south, into fertile alluvial deltas which have attracted invaders of Mongolian type from the less-hospitable north throughout history. Even today they produce surplus food for undemanding peoples. From west to east the chief rivers are the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Menam, the Mekong, and the Red River. Following this geographical pattern, political units have tended to fall into similar north-south strips with Burma and south-thrusting Malaya in the west, Thailand in the center, Laos and Cambodia in the Mekong drainage, and Tonkin with Annam in the east.

Indochina brought considerable wealth to France, so that in the late 1930’s the Banque de l’lndochine spawned in France an influential political group, who played a major role in the defeatism of 1940 and the subsequent collaboration. After the Japanese withdrawal in 1945, the Paris government was reluctant to see this wealth, chiefly from the tin mines, fall into the hands of Japanese-sponsored native groups, and, by 1949, decided to use force to recover the area.

Opposed to the French effort was Ho Chi Minh, a member of the French Communist Party since its founding in 1920, who had subsequently studied in Moscow and had been leader of the anticolonial agitations of the Indochinese Communist Party since 1931. Ho had set up a coalition government under his Viet Minh Party and proclaimed independence for Vietnam (chiefly Tonkin and Annam) in 1945, while French troops, in a surprise coup, seized Saigon in the south. Unfortunately for Ho, he obtained no support from the Kremlin. The French Communist Party was at that time a major element in the French coalition government, with its leader, Maurice Thorez, holding the office of vice-premier. Stalin had no wish to jeopardize the Communist chances to take over France by his support for a remote and minor Communist like Ho Chi Minh. In fact, Thorez signed the order for military action against Ho’s Republic of Vietnam. At first Ho sought support from the United States and from Chiang Kai-shek, but, after the establishment of Red China in 1949, he turned to that new Communist state for help. Mao’s government was the first state to give Vietnam diplomatic recognition (January 1950), and at once began to send military supplies and guidance to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United States was granting extensive aid to France, the struggle in Vietnam thus became a struggle, through surrogates, between the United States and Red China. In world opinion this made the United States a defender of European imperialism against anticolonial native nationalism.

During this turmoil, independent neutralist governments came into existence in the interior, with Laos to the north and Cambodia to the south. Both states accepted aid from whoever would give it, and both were ruled by an unstable balance of pro-Communists, neutralists, and pro-Westerners. The balance was doubly unstable because all three groups had armed supporters. On the whole, the neutralist group was the largest, and the pro-Western was the smallest, but the latter could obtain support from America’s wealth. The decisive influence in the 1950’s, however, was that the Communists, following the death of Stalin, were prepared to accept and support neutralism years before Dulles could get himself to condone it, a situation which gave considerable advantages to the extreme Left.