It is a tragic legacy of long western colonialism and modern imperialism that a large part of what is traditionally called Far East including South Asia and Southeast Asia remains in the developing stage even as major capitalist countries led by the U.S., Japan and even the EU countries still treat this region as a neo-colonial enclave. U.S. and Japanese imperialism, whether in collaboration or separately, generate the main contradictions in the region and consigns other countries to a neo-colonial relationship and underdevelopment often aggravated by civil wars and armed conflicts.
A brief historical overview will help amplify this.
Before modern imperialism of the late 19th century led to the ascendance of U.S. imperialist hegemony in East Asia and the rest of Asia Pacific, most countries in the region were subjugated for nearly four centuries or shorter by various European powers placing these to be under an exploitative and oppressive, European-dominated mercantilist colonial system and later under a modern world capitalist economy. From the late 15th century to 19th century, European colonialists engaged in intense competition in the region marked by bloody inter-European wars for raw materials, trade, spheres of influence, colonial territories and military outposts.
Among these colonialist powers, Portugal was the first to establish trade monopoly between Asia and Europe by preventing rival powers from using sea routes between Europe and the Indian Ocean in the 16th century. The following century, Portugal gradually lost its maritime supremacy as the Dutch East India Company established independent bases in the East and later seized Malacca, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), most southern Indian ports and Japan from the Portuguese. The English rivaled the Dutch in a global struggle over empire in Asia that lasted until the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. After the Seven Years’ War, the British eliminated French influence in India and established the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent.
The Industrial Revolution in the mid- to -late 19th century increased European demand for Asian raw materials and the severe Long Depression of the 1870s provoked a scramble for new markets for European industrial products and financial services in Asia and other continents. Except for some countries in Southeast Asia that came under colonial rule from the 16th to mid-19th century, the onset of modern imperialism generally saw a shift in focus of imperialist objectives in this vast region from just merely trade and indirect rule to formal colonial control of vast overseas territories, particularly South Asia. These areas came under the rule of European imperialist countries particularly Great Britain, France and The Netherlands. Emerging as new imperialist powers in East Asia and in the Pacific were Japan, following the Meiji Restoration; Germany, following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; Tsarist Russia; and the United States, following the Spanish-American War in 1898.
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.
