Meantime, French imperialism spread through trade exploration, the establishment of protectorates and outright annexations. It established French supremacy in wide swathes of Southeast Asia by seizing the three provinces of Cochin China or the southernmost region of Vietnam, capturing Hanoi after a war with China and securing trade and religious privileges in the rest of Vietnam. By the beginning of the 20th century, France had created an empire in Indochina whose area was nearly 50 percent larger than France itself.
Unlike the traditional European colonial powers such as Great Britain, France or The Netherlands, Tsarist Russia, a landlocked country, expanded from the center outward by a process of accretion in its drive for access to warm water ports. Thus while the British were consolidating their hold on the Indian subcontinent, Russian expansion had moved eastward to the Pacific, then toward the Middle East, and finally to the frontiers of Persia and Afghanistan.
China’s imperial history had several dynasties ruling and expanding its territory with the Qin Dynasty establishing the first Chinese empire from 221–207 BC. The Qing dynasty (1644-1911), established by the Manchus, was the last imperial dynasty that ruled China which also was said to have expanded into Central Asia. In the 19th century, military campaigns, corruption, population pressures and disasters leading to the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) and the Taiping and Nian rebellions ended the dynasty and the abdication of the last emperor in 1912.
Internal weaknesses left China vulnerable to European including Russian, Japanese and U.S. imperialism, thereby leading it to suffer one of the most oppressive and humiliating colonial occupations in the world. From 1839 until 1900, China suffered defeats in wars with Great Britain and Japan forcing it to accede to treaties that led to its dismemberment and economic vassalage by European, Japanese and American imperialists. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and the Bogue (1843), forced China to cede Hong Kong to Great Britain and opened Shanghai and Guangzhou (Canton), Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou (Foochow), and Ningbo (Ningpo) ports to British trade and residence with extraterritoriality, that is, the right to try British citizens in China in British courts, and to promise to conduct foreign relations on the basis of equality. The other Western powers soon received similar privileges. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin opened 11more ports to European trade, allowed foreign envoys to reside in Beijing, admitted missionaries to China, legalized the importation of opium, and permitted foreigners to travel in the Chinese interior. The United States and Russia later obtained the same rights in separate treaties. These treaties gave the foreign colonialists extraterritoriality, customs regulation and the right to station foreign warships in Chinese waters.
Following its defeat by Japan in a war, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 giving up its suzerain rights over Korea and Taiwan to the Japanese imperialists and to allow the European powers and Japan to secure concessions. So weak was China at this time that two years later Germany demanded and was given exclusive mining and railroad rights in Shandong province. Russia did the same and obtained access to Dairen and Port Arthur and the right to build a railroad across Manchuria, allowing it to dominate a large part of northwestern China. Great Britain and France also obtained a number of concessions. At this stage, China was divided up into “spheres of influence”: Germany dominated Jiaozhou Bay, Shandong, and the Huang He valley; Russia controlled the Liaodong Peninsula and Manchuria; Great Britain dominated Weihaiwei and the Yangtze Valley; and France dominated the Guangzhou Bay and several other southern provinces.
Not to be left out, the U.S. in 1900 forced many of the colonial powers to support its “Open Door” policy, providing for freedom of commercial access and non-annexation of Chinese territory.
It was only toward the end of the 19th century when the U.S., egged on by a rising corporate elite and finance oligarchy in their quest for trade expansion and access to raw materials for their industries, set its eyes on East Asia and the rest of Asia and the Pacific. Echoing the Monroe Doctrine that established U.S. hegemony in South America in the early 19th century, a call was raised for the U.S. to fulfill its “Manifest Destiny” across the Pacific. American journalist W.T. Stead called for “the Americanization of the world.” As it became part of the inter-imperialist rivalry and consequent redivision of the world, the U.S. began to build up its sea power, with its own naval expenditures increasing from $22 million in 1890 or 6.9 percent of the total federal budget to $139 million in 1914 or 19 percent. The expansion began in 1867 with the occupation of Midway Islands and the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Next, it consolidated its control over Hawaii islands at the expense of European plantation companies through annexation in 1898 but not after the U.S. Marines engineered a “revolt” that deposed the Hawaiian queen and set up a puppet regime.
Using treachery and the Treaty of Paris, the U.S. annexed the Philippines and Guam from Spain in 1898 while, almost at the same time, taking control of Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Caribbean as well as the small Pacific outpost of Wake Island.
The economic depression of the 1890s followed by World War I led to the weakening of some empires in Europe with repercussions in East Asia and the rest of the world, showing how wars – particularly major wars – would strike at the heart of imperialism and cause major changes in the power equation. Germany lost all of its colonies in Asia: German New Guinea (a part of Papua New Guinea) which became administered by Australia; its possessions in China, including Qingdao, which were ceded to Japan with the support of the U.S. and UK.
Japan had earlier become an international power with its seizure of Korea and Taiwan toward the end of the 19th century and, following its spectacular defeat of Russia in 1905, took control of southern Sakhalin Island, the Liaodong Peninsula with Port Arthur and extensive rights in Manchuria.
In 1931, the Japanese military units based in Manchuria seized control of the region leading to a full-scale war with China in 1937 and drawing Japan toward an overambitious bid for Asian hegemony (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere). The rise of Japanese imperialism and its invasion and occupation of large portions of Eastern China and British, French, Dutch and U.S. territories in Southeast Asia shattered the preeminence of European and U.S. hegemony in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Japan, however, ended up defeated during World War II with the heroic guerilla war waged by various nationalist and socialist-led forces in these areas playing a decisive role. To prevent the USSR, an ally during the war, from marching onward to Japan, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 resulting in the death of more than 200,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings, which were actually aimed at pre-empting the entry of troops from the Soviet Union that had earlier declared war against Japan, expedited the unconditional surrender of Japan to the U.S. and its occupation by American forces. As a result, Japan lost all its overseas territories after this war.
The defeat of Japan and the weakening of the various western powers in East Asia emboldened patriotic and national liberation movements in the region particularly in Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia and South Asia, to call for an end to foreign colonialism. The recalcitrance of the imperialist powers precipitated civil wars while in some countries independence would be handed over but only after the imperialist rulers forced the signing of treaties establishing a post-war neo-colonial relationship.
De-colonization, just the same, was a slow process in some colonial territories. Portugal still clung to Macau and settled a new colony in Timor Island. Only in the 1960s and 1990s did Portugal begin to relinquish its colonies in Asia. Goa was invaded by India in 1962 while East Timor was abandoned in 1975 only to be invaded by Indonesia with the support of the U.S. Macau was returned to China in 1999. Two years before that, the UK handed Hong Kong back to China.
The second world war effectively caused the decline of western European imperialism after it was devastated by the war, aggravated by an economic crisis and the rise of independence and socialist struggles at home. However, the European and Japanese imperialists’ loss was U.S. imperialism’s gain as it became more assertive of its hegemonic ambition. Using Cold War rhetoric and the pretext of containing the spread of Soviet-inspired communism throughout the world, U.S. imperialism intervened in three major wars in East Asia right after World War II: in China during the late 1940s; Korea during the 1940s-early 1950s; and Indochina, from the mid-1950s to 1975. U.S. imperialism, however, suffered major defeats in China, with the victory of the Chinese liberation struggle in 1949, and in Indochina following its retreat in 1975. It could only muster a stalemate in the Korean War after it failed to force North Korea to its knees ending with the signing of an armistice treaty at Panmunjon in 1953. Technically, the war remained unsettled.
Note, however, that in these three major wars as well as in other civil wars and rebellions in the region, including the Philippines, U.S. imperialism was for a long period backed by its allies in Europe and Asia most especially the UK, France, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea as well as Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan and Indonesia through direct military intervention, aid and diplomacy. Support by allied or vassal states for the U.S. wars of aggression and intervention in East Asia was secured through defense treaties and military access agreements in exchange for trade and financial agreements, economic assistance as well as propping up dictatorships such as in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.
It was clear that even after the end of the second world war and until today, East Asia remained embedded in a world of economic, financial, and military system in which the imperialist powers compete for hegemony and influence. (Bulatlat.com)
*This is part of a paper discussed by the author at the conference of the International League of Peoples’ Struggles in East Asia and Oceania on Dec. 11, 2006. It will also be part of a forthcoming book on East Asia today.
U.S. and China: Harmony Today, Confrontation Tomorrow?
Second of four parts
The Korean Peninsula: U.S. Military Aggression and Pyongyang’s Response
Third of four parts
China vs Japan: FTAs, Oil and Taiwan
Last of four parts
