The Penguin History of the World

The weight of the past – for good or bad – was evident in Chinese foreign policies, too. Although it came to patronize revolution all over the world, China’s main concern was with East Asia and, in particular, with Korea and Indochina, once tributary countries. In the latter, too, Soviet and Chinese policy had diverged. Even before the Korean War the Chinese had begun to supply arms to the Communist guerrilla forces in Vietnam for what was less a struggle against colonialism – that had been decided already – than about what should follow it. In 1953 the French had given up both Cambodia and Laos. In 1954 they lost at a base called Dien Bien Phu a battle decisive both for French prestige and for the French electorate’s will to fight. After this, it was impossible for the French to maintain themselves in the Red River delta. A conference at Geneva was attended by representatives from China, which thus formally re-entered the arena of international diplomacy, working with the Soviets. It was agreed to partition Vietnam between a South Vietnamese government and the Communists who had come to dominate the north, pending elections that might reunite the country. The elections never took place. Instead, there soon opened in Indochina what was to become the fiercest phase since 1945 of an Asian war against the West begun in 1941.

The western contenders were no longer the former colonial powers, but the Americans; the French had gone home and the British had problems enough elsewhere. On the other side was a mixture of Indochinese Communists, nationalists and reformers, supported by the Chinese and Soviets, who first jointly supported radicals in Indochina and then from 1960 competed for influence there. American anti-colonialism and the belief that the United States should support indigenous governments led it to back the anti-Communist South Vietnamese as it backed South Korean and Filipino governments. Unfortunately, neither in Laos nor in South Vietnam, nor, in the end, in Cambodia, did there emerge regimes of unquestioned legitimacy in the eyes of those they ruled; American patronage merely identified governments with the western enemy so disliked in East Asia. American support also tended to remove the incentive to carry out reforms that would have united people behind these regimes, above all in Vietnam, where de facto partition did not produce good or stable government in the south. While Buddhists and Roman Catholics quarrelled bitterly and the peasants were more and more alienated from the regime by the failure of land reform, an apparently corrupt ruling class seemed able to survive government after government. This benefited the Communists. They sought reunification on their own terms and maintained from the north support for the Communist underground movement in the south, the Vietcong.

By 1960 the Vietcong had won control of much of the south. This was the background to a momentous decision taken by the American president, John Kennedy, in 1962; to send not only financial and material help but also 4,000 American ‘advisers’ to help the South Vietnam government put its military house in order. It was the first step towards what Truman had been determined to avoid, the involvement of the United States in a major war on the mainland of Asia, and in the end led to the loss of more than 50,000 American lives.

Another of Washington’s responses to Cold War in Asia had been to safeguard as long as possible the special position arising from the American occupation of Japan. This was virtually a monopoly, although there was token participation by British Commonwealth forces. It had been possible because of the Soviet delay in declaring war on Japan, for the speed of Japan’s surrender had taken Stalin by surprise. The Americans firmly rejected later Soviet requests for a share in an occupation Soviet power had done nothing to bring about. The outcome was the last great example of western paternalism in Asia and a new demonstration of the Japanese people’s astonishing gift for learning from others only what they wished to learn, while safeguarding their own society against unsettling change.