10.2: The New Nations of Asia

The Philippines

The Republic of the Philippines was one of the first new nations to join the United Nations. The Philippine Islands had never been united into a single state yet a shared history under Spanish, American, and Japanese rule had by the 20th century forged a sense of peoplehood across this Pacific archipelago. Representing the Philippines at the United Nations founding, future President of the UN General Assembly Carlos Romulo clashed fiercely with the colonial powers, contested issues such as the Security Council veto and became dubbed the “big voice of the small nations.” Despite differences of ethnicity, language, and religion across their islands, the Filipino representatives were unified behind Romulo as he argued for and won the inclusion of one word in the UN Charter: independence. At the time the Philippines was still a dependent of the United States and while even after independence American military bases and economic influence remained on the islands this “dependent” Philippines found the UN a means from which to browbeat great powers and shape world affairs. In time Romulo came to see the UN as a tool for the betterment of humanity and gained a respect for those he profoundly disagreed with. Yet foremost Romulo always believed the United Nations was a means to promote self-determination and the independence of nations across the world and by “speaking for the Philippines I was also speaking for all the other small nations that had been for so many centuries voiceless.”

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The San Francisco Conference, United Nations Photo Archive, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 (The Philippines, represented by Carlos Romulo (center, seated) signs the UN Charter.)

Primary Source: Audio Interview with Carlos P. Romulo/by William Powell and Rebecca Akao

Discussion Questions

• In the first listed interview (0:45) why does Carlos Romulo believe small nations were genuinely included in creating the United Nations?  
• In the same interview (11:50) why did the United Nation decide on the "one nation, one vote" approach?
• Why does Carlos Romulo insist (21:00) the United Nations can be of service to all nations?

Interview with General Carlos P. Romulo/by William Powell and Rebecca Akao

Carlos Romulo (Philippines, 1901 - 1985) was Head of the Philippine delegation to the San Francisco Conference in 1945. He was President of the fourth session of the General Assembly (1949-50) and later served as President of the Security Council on four different occasions when the Philippines was elected to the Council. During the first interview, 30 October 1982, he discusses his role in the initial drafting of the Charter of the United Nations, including such issues as the veto and the role of the Secretary-General, the decision to locate the United Nations in New York and views of the first five Secretaries-General. The second interview, 20 November 1982, contains further discussions about the Charter of the United Nations and the "Uniting for Peace" resolution and other reminiscences of his time at the United Nations.

 

India

During World War II the All-India Congress wished for both an Allied victory and a new world of free peoples declaring “by the freedom of India will Britain and the United Nations be judged, and the people of Asia and Africa be filled with hope and enthusiasm.” India had always been the pride and prize of the British Empire – an imperial treasure chest and model of colonial rule – yet by the early 20th century Indians increasingly gained self-rule and dreamed of an independent India. For decades a grass-roots movement led by Mohandas Gandhi and two political parties, the Indian National Congress and Muslim League, had petitioned, protested, and boycotted against colonial rule yet World War II proved the tipping point. By the end of the war in 1945, British rule in India seemed irreparably damaged. In addition to the continuing independence movement, the wartime Bengali famine had shown British officials woefully inept in managing the country. With Britain bankrupt and open unrest amongst British troops in India, few believed Britain had the strength or moral right to rule India anymore.

In 1946 British officials arrived in India ready to negotiate independence. After elections were held across the country, Indian politicians joined the British to write India’s first constitution. Yet the two major Indian political parties were unable to compromise on what a united independent India should be. The Indian National Congress led by Gandhi’s ally Jawaharal Nehru insisted India must stay united and have a strong central state. By contrast, the head of the Muslim League Mohammad Ali Jinnah would only agree to a loose federal state or partition. For centuries Hindus and Muslims had lived side by side across the subcontinent. Yet with the arrival of mass democracy and independence, Jinnah and the Muslim League feared Muslims, as the smaller population, would be perpetually sidelined in a Hindu-majority India. Partition or dividing India into separate Hindu and Muslim states would guarantee Muslims could determine their own future.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Jinnah and Gandhi, in the Public Domain (Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League (left) and Gandhi (right) having a difference of opinion. Note Jinnah’s cigarette in hand and attire. Despite Islamic discouragement of smoking, Jinnah embraced a modern Muslim identity.)

With no compromise found, the political tensions filtered down to the local level. Riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in the northeast provinces and support for partition grew stronger. Gandhi’s pleas for unity and tolerance fell on deaf ears and he vowed to starve himself until the violence stopped. While Gandhi’s threat worked, as the bloodletting came to a pause, a sullen mood hung over the country. With law and order breaking down and colonial authority fading, the British took decisive action. They accelerated their withdrawal plan and brokered an end to the deadlock between Nehru and Jinnah, with Nehru and Indian National Congress agreeing to partition; a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan it would be. When independence arrived for two whole days, August 14-15, 1947, exuberant crowds and euphoria swept across the land as the old British Raj became two new countries: India and Pakistan.

Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): Partition of India, in the Public Domain  (The Partition of British India created both India and Pakistan. Some Princely States (Hyderabad, center) sought independence but were forcefully annexed by India. Rival claims over Kashmir by Pakistan and India continue to this day. )

Independence proved bittersweet. Even before the celebrations began, communal violence exploded along the still unclear borders. Members of one faith attacked members of the other seeking to ensure their local region would join either Pakistan or India. When the borders were declared, a tidal wave of refugees took to dirt roads by foot or crammed onto overflowing railroad trains going in opposite directions; Hindus fleeing Pakistan to India and Muslims fleeing from India to Pakistan. Amid the chaos and violence of this population exchange a half-million would die, including Gandhi by political assassination, with some 15 million people abandoning their homes never to return.  

After independence, India inherited both a skilled civil service and an impartial court system. More impressive is what India built for itself in the years to follow, a successful electoral process. Organizing free and fair elections in a country where most voters were poor, rural, and only 30% of the population literate proved a challenge India overcame in part by assigning each candidate or party a symbol and voters placing their paper ballots into boxes marked with the same symbol. Language too proved a tension India sought to alleviate by redrawing of state boundaries to better align with regional ethnic groups. Notably Prime Minister Nehru framed the public debate arguing the major political challenge India faced was not between political parties but national unity vs. sectarianism, whether ethnic, caste-based, or religious stating, “we stand till death for a secular State”. Hs message of state impartiality helped his Congress Party win steady majorities throughout the 1950’s and 60’s.

With a stable government in place Nehru sought to develop India into a modern nation through science and technology. India adopted a mixed-economy, with a free market tightly regulated by a large state bureaucracy with government-managed infrastructure projects. State-run dams, coal mines, steel mills, and electrical plants would industrialize the country to raise the standard of living and the introduction of GMO crops led to bumper crop yields. Across India infant mortality rates fell, life spans rose and access to modern medicine grew thanks to India’s top-tier pharmaceutical industry. These successes caused a population boom, yet the emerging Indian economy could not keep up with population growth. Landlords more than tenant farmers profited from better harvests by simply increasing rates, and rather than promoting efficiency state-run industries and the Indian bureaucracy became renowned for their cumbersome regulations and bloat. India found it easier to feed, educate, and medicate its burgeoning population than to clothe, employ, and enrich it.

Pakistan

Pakistan took a different path. War with India broke out in the months after independence in the disputed region of Kashmir. Stalemate and a United Nations brokered ceasefire did little to lessen Muslim fears of Hindu domination and the conflict stunted Pakistan’s young democracy which had been left leaderless since Jinnah’s premature death a year after independence. When the country fell under military rule, the new military government discovered that geography and language profoundly divided the people, and the state had few established institutions and little infrastructure to create a sense of unity. Despite or because of these challenges, devout faith and a sense of Islamic identity grew as Pakistan declared itself an Islamic Republic. In the 1960’s Pakistan attempted once more to seize Kashmir but the military invasion ended again in deadlock. In 1970 Pakistan held its first national elections since independence and the result split the country. When a party from East Pakistan, today Bangladesh, won the most votes the military and West Pakistan politicians who had dominated the republic since inception refused to accept the result and instead launched a bloody crackdown which evolved into a civil war ending with an Indian intervention and an independent Bangladesh. The humiliation of defeat was salved somewhat by the restoration of democratic rule and a new constitution – which declared Islam the state religion, alignment of all laws with the faith, and that the President must be a Muslim – but this brief calm disappeared in 1974 when India detonated its first nuclear bomb. To many in the world, India’s detonation made its advocacy of peaceful nonalignment and Nehru’s proclamation that the bomb was “a symbol of evil” ring hollow. For Pakistan, a nuclear-armed archrival posed an existential threat and the country began a furious dash to build its own, eventually successful, nuclear weapons program.

 

Primary Source: Nonalignment Speech of Prime Minister Nehru of India at Bandung Conference Excerpt (1955)

Discussion Questions

• What reasons does Nehru give to encourage countries to remain nonaligned during the Cold War?
• What type of force does Nehru stress the countries of Asia and Africa should use to shape the world?
• Despite the danger of atomic bombs, why might have Nehru supported a secret atomic project for India?

My country [India] has made mistakes. Every country makes mistakes. I have no doubt we will make mistakes; we will stumble and fall and get up. The mistakes of my country and perhaps the mistakes of other countries here do not make a difference; but the mistakes the Great Powers make do make a difference to the world and may well bring about a terrible catastrophe. I speak with the greatest respect of these Great Powers because they are not only great in military might but in development, in culture, in civilization. But I do submit that greatness sometimes brings quite false values, false standards. When they begin to think in terms of military strength - whether it be the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, or the U.S.A. - then they are going away from the right track and the result of that will be that the overwhelming might of one country will conquer the world.

So far as I am concerned, it does not matter what war takes place; we will not take part in it unless we have to defend ourselves. If I join any of these big groups, I lose my identity…. If all the world were to be divided up between these two big blocs what would be the result? The inevitable result would be war. Therefore, every step that takes place in reducing that area in the world which may be called the unaligned area is a dangerous step and leads to war. It reduces that objective, that balance, that outlook which other countries without military might can perhaps exercise.

Honorable Members laid great stress on moral force. It is with military force that we are dealing now, but I submit that moral force counts and the moral force of Asia and Africa must, in spite of the atomic and hydrogen bombs of Russia, the U.S.A. or another country, count.

I submit to you; every pact has brought insecurity and not security to the countries which have entered into them. They have brought the danger of atomic bombs and the rest of it nearer to them than would have been the case otherwise. They have not added to the strength of any country, I submit, which it had singly. It may have produced some idea of security, but it is a false security. It is a bad thing for any country thus to be lulled into security.

Today in the world because of the coming of the atomic and hydrogen-bomb age, the whole concept of war, of peace, of politics, has changed. We are thinking and acting in terms of a past age. No matter what generals and soldiers learned in the past, it is useless in this atomic age. They do not understand its implications or its use. As an eminent military critic said: 'The whole conception of War is changed. There is no precedent.' It may be so. Now it does not matter if one country is more powerful than the other in the use of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. One is more powerful in its ruin than the other. Annihilation will result not only in the countries engaged in war but owing to the radioactive waves which go thousands and thousands of miles it will destroy everything. That is the position. It is not an academic position; it is not a position of discussing ideologies; nor is it a position of discussing history. It is looking at the world as it is today.

Internet History Sourcebooks Project, in the Public Domain

The People's Republic of China

After World War II, the Nationalists and Communists restarted their civil war, which had been interrupted in 1937 by the Japanese invasion. Mao’s armies were victorious over the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek. By the end, entire divisions of the Nationalist army were going over to the Communists, and Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan, which had been relinquished to China after being a part of the Japanese Empire for fifty years. There, the Kuomintang continued the Republic of China, which was formally recognized as “China” by the United Nations and the U.S. until the 1970s. Cold War politics was the reason for this diplomatic decision, but even after its end Taiwan’s autonomy from mainland China is still guaranteed by the U.S.

Internally, Mao’s own totalitarian style had disastrous consequences for the Chinese. The communists had already begun land reform around 1946 in the parts of China they controlled, well before their final victory; the policy had gained them widespread support among the vast peasant population. With the nationalists out of the way, Mao’s policy became more aggressive. He called for the elimination of the landlord class of peasants and redistribution of the land more evenly. Unfortunately, when Mao said elimination, he meant it. Class-motivated mass killings of landlords continued for the next 30 years and estimates of the death tolls range from 14 million to 28 million.

The purge of landlords was followed by the Great Leap Forward, an economic and social plan from 1958 to 1962 that collectivized agriculture and promoted industry. Mao set up 25,000 “people’s communes” of 5,000 families each, which would be responsible for not only feeding themselves and their fellow Chinese citizens, but for providing surpluses to export. Mao insisted on keeping grain exports high in spite of poor harvests. The famine that resulted, known as the Great Chinese Famine, killed 55 million people, although a few million were apparently beaten to death and millions more committed suicide. In some regions of China, people resorted to cannibalism.

This disaster caused some prominent communist party members to question Mao’s leadership, but he maintained support in the army and blamed the famine on a lack of socialist commitment among the Chinese. Mao initiated his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, leading the military to recruit young people to reinforce Maoist ideology and purge remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. Schools and universities were closed, and Red Guard troops were encouraged to harass and even murder intellectuals. Educated people were beaten, terrorized, and banished to the countryside to be “reeducated” by the peasants. The death toll of the cultural revolution is debated, but estimates range from 3 to 10 million. 

Review Questions

• Upon independence why did British India split into Pakistan, India, and later Bangladesh?
• How did India organize early elections across its large and often illiterate population?
• Why did Pakistan struggle to establish a democratic form of government?