Why “Cold War in Asia”
The United States and Soviet Union carved out their respective spheres of influence at the end of the Second World War. The contest of these two super powers was a matter of ideological conflict, intermittent with arms race and economic embargo, rather than direct military confrontation. The ‘Third World’ of ex-colonies, which arose after the Bandung Conference in 1955, became the main theatre of competition between these superpowers. In Europe the Cold War was intense but fundamentally stable, and it ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In Asia it ensured the continuation of wartime instability through the 1970s, breaking into ‘hot wars’ in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Communism was militarily defeated in Malaya and Burma, bloodily suppressed in Indonesia, but victorious in Vietnam, Laos and for some time Cambodia. As Chen Jian has argued, Asia, and specifically China, was the centre of the Cold War. The Cold War complicated and often distorted the process of decolonisation, divided China, Korea and Vietnam, overturned ancient civilizations, and made it impossible to achieve the kind of stability and peace in Asia that was achieved in Europe.
Foreign to Asia, communism nevertheless offered hope to many Asians for an end to their weakness and humiliation. It thrived as an extreme form of nationalism, even while it theoretically rejected nationalism. Its millenarian potential combined with indigenous traditions to produce the catastrophic extremes of the cultural revolution and the Khmer Rouge. For the Middle Kingdom its triumph was especially portentious, driving the historic imperial power into isolation and cultural iconoclasm and postponing the normalisation of post-war relations with its neighbours. Revolutionaries throughout Asia were inspired by the communist victory, while elites were alarmed by the ‘yellow peril’. Chinese Southeast Asians were torn between rival nationalisms.
While the Cold War in Asia has not ended as decisively as it did in Europe, it has retreated sufficiently to make research on it both possible and necessary. Old revolutionaries are writing memoirs and attempting to establish their legacy and legitimacy in the national narrative before they die off. Old wounds, like 1965-6 in Indonesia and 1975-8 in Cambodia, are in need of healing. Hitherto closed archives at last offer some light on the underground activities of both revolutionaries and their enemies. Radically different national interpretations of the period enquire to be brought into dialogue. This period which shaped the cleavages of contemporary Asia in 1948-80 must be soberly and collegially examined before those cleavages can be overcome.
Studies of the Cold War in the West flourished as Soviet and East European archives opened and historians on both sides of the former divide sat down together. But scholars in Asia have just begun to explore its variations in the region as archives have slowly become available. Since Akira Iriye pioneered the field in the 1960s, too few scholars have explored the Cold War from any Asian perspective, let alone from the needed multilateral perspective
The Roundtable
The goal of this Roundtable is to explore the potential for a Cold War in Asia project. It will bring specialists on communist parties and movement from the region to discuss the accessibility of different archives, the possibilities of documenting key participants, witnesses and events as they disappear, and the feasibility of collaborative research across the old cold war divides. It will help us consider and draft a proposal for a more extended project involving regional and global partners, aimed at documentation, translation and publication of key documents and sources, collaborative conferences, and eventual analytical synthesis. The initial focus will be on the strategies and personnel of Southeast Asian leftist parties and movements, their international links with China (especially), the USSR and each other, and the tactics of their opponents.
Key elements would be:
1) Collecting, expanding and where necessary translating the fast-disappearing memories of key members of MCP and Sarawak Communist Party, analogous figures in the labour movement and various fronts, and of the key figures involved in their suppression. Looking particularly for hitherto obscure evidence of connections between Southeast Asia and China, and among SE Asian peoples. International relations between parties will also be of key interest
2) Ditto for communist and united front movements in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia and Burma and perhaps the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam
3) Accessing the newly-opening archives of Beijing, and those of Taiwan, on the relations of the two China's to Southeast Asian movements on both sides of the cold war. Providing guidance to these records and where possible digitalising and translating key items for posterity.
4) Documenting the cultural expressions of both the political left and the right in the 1950s-1970s, including the Southeast Asian expressions of socialist realism and cultural revolution, and the invasion of US popular culture and its local adaptations.
5) The battle for history, in terms of the textbook constructions of the new states on both sides of the bamboo curtain of their respective histories and identities.
6) Analysis, through some conferences, articles and books, of the way in which the Cold War affected the longer-term adjustments of Asian states to modernity, including the international diplomatic and security systems, national integration and majority-minority relations, national culture, and the viability of the new states in themselves.
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