The Penguin History of the World

The Cold War made Japan important as a base and galvanized its economy. The index of industrial production gradually went back up to the level of the 1930s. The United States promoted Japanese interests abroad through diplomacy. Finally, protected by the American nuclear umbrella, Japan at first had no defence costs, since it was forbidden to have any armed forces. In 1960 protests in the streets against the renewal of the American–Japanese treaty prevented the governing Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP; to begin with neither very liberal nor democratic) from further challenging the Left, the trade unions and the student movement. They got the treaty renewal through, but the LDP prime minister, Kishi, who had been imprisoned after the war as a suspected Class A war criminal, had to resign, and his successors turned away from revision of the constitution and confronting the trade unions towards plans for economic growth. Their mix of state incentives, technology imports, labour co-optation, production efficiency and vast foreign markets (thanks to the Americans) led Japan’s per capita GDP to grow from 16.2 per cent of that of the United States in 1960 to 105.8 per cent in 1990. It was a remarkable transformation.

Japan’s close connection with the United States, its proximity to the Communist world, and its advanced and stable economy and society, all made it natural that it should eventually take its place in the security system built up by the United States in Asia and the Pacific. Its foundations were treaties with Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines (which had become independent in 1946). Others followed with Pakistan and Thailand; these were the Americans’ only Asian allies other than Taiwan. Indonesia and (much more importantly) India remained aloof. These alliances reflected, in part, the new conditions of Pacific and Asian international relations after the British withdrawal from India. For a little longer there would still be British forces east of Suez, but Australia and New Zealand had discovered during the Second World War that the United Kingdom could not defend them and that the United States could. The fall of Singapore in 1942 had been decisive. Although British forces had sustained the Malaysians against the Indonesians in the 1950s and 1960s, the colony of Hong Kong survived, it was clear, only because it suited the Chinese that it should. On the other hand, there was no question of sorting out the complexities of the new Pacific by simply lining up states in the teams of the Cold War. The peace treaty with Japan itself caused great difficulty, because United States policy saw Japan as a potential anti-Communist force while others – notably in Australia and New Zealand – remembered 1941 and feared a revival of Japanese power.

Thus American policy was not created only by ideology. None the less, it was long misled by what was believed to be the disaster of the Communist success in China and by Chinese patronage of revolutionaries as far away as Africa and South America. There had certainly been a transformation in China’s international position and it would go further. Yet the crucial fact was China’s re-emergence as a unified power. In the end this did not reinforce the dualist, Cold War system, but began to make nonsense of it. Although at first only within the former Chinese sphere, it was bound to bring about a big change in relative power relationships; the first sign of this was seen in Korea, where the United Nations’ armies were stopped and it was felt necessary to consider bombing China. But the rise of China was also of crucial importance to the Soviet Union. After being one lead element of a bipolarized system, Moscow from the 1960s always had to look over its shoulder to see what its Chinese rivals were doing.

The Chinese revolution was the rejection and the confirmation of the Europeanization of Asia rolled into one. China was ruled by a Communist party which proclaimed ideas that were all European in origin. But its public confrontations first with the United States and then with the Soviet Union spoke volumes about China’s restless rejection of all forms of western domination. And Chinese society, hammered by the CCP’s political campaigns, sought to find new forms of organization that combined ancient values and forms of thinking with new ideas and perceptions. China, like much of Asia, was breaking with the European-dominated past, but it was doing so influenced by borrowings from the West itself, whether they were those of industrial capitalism, political participation, nationalism or Marxism.