Hegemony or
Cooperation: Major Contradictions in East Asia Today*
First of four parts
Developing vibrant trade and investment ties with
countries in Southeast Asia would open prospects for China to use this
new economic relationship particularly with the U.S.’ military allies as
a means of scaling down their security commitments with the U.S. that
include the military encirclement of China.
BY BOBBY TUAZON
Bulatlat
The Cold War
period, 1947-1991, saw the assertion of U.S. imperialism’s economic and
military hegemony in East Asia and the rest of Asia Pacific in its bid
to develop an unhampered access into the vast region’s resources and
subject it under a new global economy headed by the U.S. U.S.
imperialism was constrained, however, by the emergence of China as a
socialist power and the Soviet Union’s early attempts to check U.S.
imperialist inroads into the region. U.S. imperialism, along with
British and French imperialism, tried to construct a system of
neo-colonialism as colonized countries struggled for independence and
self-determination, giving rise to three major wars: the Chinese
liberation struggle that ended in independence in 1949 and the defeat of
the U.S.-backed Kuomintang forces; the Korean War, which resulted in a
stalemate in 1953 between the U.S.-backed South Korea and the
Chinese-backed North Korea; and the Vietnam War, that ended in a
humiliating defeat of the U.S.-South Vietnam forces in 1975 by the
Vietnamese liberation forces. Japan, meantime, rose from the second
world war as the U.S.’ junior imperialist partner in East Asia and as
its conduit in asserting U.S. economic hegemony in this region.
The transformation
of China after the death of Mao Ze-dong into a market economy and the
abandonment of socialist-internationalist principles in 1978, followed
by the collapse of Soviet revisionism in 1990, gave U.S. imperialism a
free rein in economic hegemonism and militarism in East Asia,
ideologically-promoted no less by its “anti-terrorism” rhetoric.
Rightist and neo-conservative ideologues in the U.S. are using the
jingoist rhetoric of Chinese economic and military power ambitions to
fuel current contradictions between the two countries. This essential
carry-over of Cold War belligerency by the U.S. and Japan is also
fueling secondary contradictions involving North Korea, South Korea,
Taiwan and other countries in the region.
I. Brief
Historical Overview Related to the Current Major Contradictions
A great part of the
world’s economic, political and military tensions today insofar as these
involve the major power contenders centers on East Asia. U.S.
imperialism has established its foothold here for more than a century
and, since the collapse of Soviet socialist revisionism in the late
1980s and the transformation of China from a socialist into a
market-oriented, pro-globalization economy in 1979, its hegemony has
remained uncontested. Some of the major flashpoints here – such as the
Korean Peninsula (North Korea vs the U.S., North Korea vs Japan, North
Korea vs South Korea), the continuing frictions springing from China’s
irredentist claim over Taiwan, the territorial claims on the Spratly
islands and others – draw the intense involvement of the United States,
China, Japan and even Russia. The world’s so-called 9-member nuclear
club has two countries coming from this region – China and North Korea;
or six, if the United States and Russia, traditional geopolitical and
geoeconomic stakeholders here, as well as India and Pakistan from South
Asia, are included. The political-economic and military fault lines in
the region affect other parts of the world – or are symptoms of the
ongoing crisis of global capitalism.
What gives this
region a historical distinction is that: First, it is one region that
has undergone long colonialism and imperialist aggression – more than
five centuries. Second, it has also suffered many wars or armed
conflicts during such period, owing to trade rivalries and scramble for
colonies and spheres of influences between European, U.S. and Japanese
colonial powers as a result of which vast populations in this region
died. It is in this region where the first-ever atomic bombings took
place – in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945. Third, this is
one region that affected the rise and fall of European empires and the
Japanese empire, to be replaced in an all-sided way by the American
Empire.
In the region,
despite their points of convergence the U.S. imperialism and China
represent the major contradiction, with the latter often seen – to a
fault - as a rising economic and military power. Their contradiction
centers on trade disputes but the U.S., as promoted by neo-conservative
policy makers and defense authorities, is also engaged in a military
brinkmanship with China. Over the past 60 years and especially most
recently, the U.S. has been encircling China militarily in order to
prevent it from being a military power that, it claims, would challenge
the U.S. military preeminence which has been traditionally securing the
region and the rest of Asia and Pacific as an exclusive domain of U.S.
imperialism. Other thorns in U.S.-China relations are the Taiwan issue
and Beijing’s perceived military build-up. China desires to regain its
sovereignty over Taiwan – especially because of the latter’s goal to
declare its own independence - but is constrained by U.S. economic and
military support for the Taipei government.
Next to this is the
immediate flashpoint in East Asia today – between the U.S. and North
Korea. This contradiction, which takes its roots in the Korean War of
the early 1950s, draws also the involvement of Japan and South Korea
(due to its being a Cold War and post-Cold War ally of the U.S.), on the
side of the U.S., and China and Russia, on the side of North Korea. For
more than 50 years, socialist North Korea has been threatened with a
“rogue regime” change highlighted by brutal economic and military
sanctions by the U.S. but the latter has failed to force this socialist
country to its knees owing to Pyongyang’s strong intransigence and the
Korean people’s resistance and adherence to self-reliance and
independence as well as the economic and diplomatic support extended by
China and Russia.
Yet another
contradiction is between the U.S. and Japan itself, given the increase
in trade frictions between these two traditional allies. The
contradiction between China and Japan especially over Taiwan, the East
China Sea gas resources and other territorial disputes is heating up,
with each country now deploying naval forces.
All these
contradictions are not confined to the main protagonists only but have
wide-ranging impacts not only in the region but also throughout the
world. Economic globalization and the intensification of U.S.
imperialist militarism and wars of aggression in the guise of
“counter-terrorism” have the effect of intensifying these
contradictions, thus making the whole region replete with potential
major confrontations, civil wars and other armed conflicts.
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.
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
*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
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