A Short History of Asia

A Short

History of Asia

Second Edition

Colin Mason

A Short History of Asia

Related titles from Palgrave Macmillan

D. G. E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia

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M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, 3rd edition

Peter Robb, A History of India

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Frank B. Tipton, The Rise of Asia

Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia,

2nd edition

A Short

History of Asia

Second Edition

Colin Mason

© Colin Mason 2000, 2005

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.

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issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road,

London W1T 4LP.

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publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil

claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author

of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

First edition published 2000

Second edition published 2005 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the

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ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–3611–0 hardback

ISBN 10: 1–4039–3611–0 hardback

ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–3612–7 paperback

ISBN 10: 1–4039–3612–9 paperback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully

managed and sustained forest sources.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mason, Colin, 1926–

A short history of Asia / Colin Mason.—2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 1–4039–3611–0—ISBN 1–4039–3612–9 (pbk.)

1. Asia—History. I. Title

DS33.M29 2005

950—dc22 2005050865

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

Printed in China

Contents

List of Maps vii

List of Figures viii

1 Introduction 1

Part I Before Imperialism

2 Prehistory and the First Indian Civilizations 13

3 The Development of Indian Culture: Hinduism and Buddhism 22

4 Early South-east Asia: the Ships from India 33

5 China: the Eternal Nation 45

6 Early Japan and the Tang Dynasty in China 61

7 The Awakening of Europe and the Challenge of Islam 72

8 Flood Tide in China: the Song, Mongol and Ming Dynasties 77

9 China: Ebb Tide 88

10 The Three Makers of Japan and the Tokugawa Period 97

Part II The ‘White Man’s Burden’

11 The Dominators and the Dominated 111

12 South-east Asia: the European and Chinese Incursions and

the Later History of the Mainland Peoples 117

13 The Malay World: Majapahit and Malacca 129

14 Indonesia: the Last Independent Kingdoms and the Extension

of Dutch Rule 134

15 India under Two Masters: the Grand Moguls and the East

India Company 143

16 Gandhi’s India: the Struggle for Liberty 156

v

Part III The Modern Nations

17 The Second World War and the End of Empire 167

18 The South Asian Nations: Freedom, Partition and Tragedy 173

19 Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan 183

20 China: Two Revolutions 192

21 Modern China: the Communist State 198

22 Indonesia: Sukarno and After 216

23 Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei 232

24 Japan: the Iron Triangle 244

25 Thailand: Two Hats – the Struggle for Democracy 254

26 The Philippines: Trouble in Paradise 261

27 Korea: Divided Nation 270

28 Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia 281

29 Burma: Rule by the Gun 293

30 Asia – Today and Tomorrow 301

Suggested Further Reading 308

Index 313

vi Contents

List of Maps

1 Asia 14

2 China and Korea 46

3 Japan 98

4 South-east Asia 118

5 Indonesia 135

6 South Asia 144

vii

List of Figures

1 Traditional housing, common to many parts of the Indian plain 23

2 Thatched houses are much the same as those going back

many thousands of years throughout tropical Asia 35

3 Borobadur temple, Indonesia 40

4 Handweaving silk 49

5 Detail from a Dutch fortress gate in Malaysia 75

6 The Golden Pavilion, near Kyoto, in Japan 103

7 Woodcarvers in Indonesia 122

8 Balinese temple dancing 137

9 Silver is an important source of wealth and art in Asia 140

10 Traditional markets, similar to those throughout Asia 160

11 Beijing, China 209

12 Coastal trader under construction, China 210

13 Balinese dancers 224

14 Rubber, one of the main labour-intensive crops during the

colonial phase in Asia, is still a cash crop today 234

15 Houses, built out over the sea on stilts, common to many

parts of south-east and south Asia 256

16 Duck herder with ducks 283

The author has taken and supplied all the photographs used in this book.

viii

History is a mirror for the future.

Jiang Zemin

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1 Introduction

Asia, making up more than half of all humans, is rapidly becoming more

productive and influential. In 2003 China achieved its fastest rate of growth

in six years with a gross domestic product increase of 9.6 per cent. Its devel￾opment of new infrastructure, probably the largest and fastest in world

history, consumed in that year more than half of total global cement

production and one-third of the world’s steel. Some economists claim that

in real terms China can be considered the world’s second economy after the

United States. In 2003 five Asian central banks, in Japan, China, Hong

Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, held almost half the world’s financial

reserves, around $1.3 trillion, most of these in United States dollars.

This movement of Asia away from vestigial ‘colonial’ economies is now

a major current of history, which ‘the West’ might ignore at its peril. The

most developed of the Asian nations now have levels of prosperity and

industry that strongly challenge those of the West. China’s steady growth

and wealth and Japan’s affluence are the most obvious, but India, South

Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore all have educated and relatively

well-off middle classes, and market their products and expertise world￾wide. Already multinational corporations are shifting expert work to Asian

countries to take advantage of generally lower wages there – the fast-grow￾ing information technology sector in India is an example. As electronic

technology, especially the Internet, becomes universal, this participation of

Asians in world business must increase. Quite apart from the economic

effect, rapid means of global communication will bring greater numbers of

Asians and non-Asians into a close working relationship.

A second major element in almost all the Asian societies is the economic

gulf between their islands of the educated and modestly affluent and the

surrounding sea of the poor, the disease-afflicted and uneducated. If one

considers the region as a whole, as many as three-quarters of its people are

disadvantaged in at least one of these ways. Can at least a modest level of

prosperity be extended to this huge segment – almost one-half – of the

human race? At present Japan and Singapore are the only Asian countries

that provide most of their people with standards of living and affluence at

1

high levels. China, South Korea and Taiwan have made considerable

progress. But in the nations of south Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri

Lanka, Afghanistan – and south-east Asia, especially Indonesia, the

Philippines, Burma, Cambodia and Laos, poverty and ignorance are, if

anything, increasing.

And these poor and ignorant are the most vulnerable – they made up the

large majority of the 280,000 (conservatively estimated) killed by the

December 2004 tsunami in south and south-east Asia. More than perhaps

a quarter of a million of those dead were from the beachfront regions of

west Sumatra and Sri Lanka, and of these almost half were children too

small and weak to struggle with the huge waves that came up from the sea.

There are, of course, reasons for the continuance of poverty in the world. A

billion dollars a day given as subsidies to agriculture in the developed world

is effectively money taken from farmers in the undeveloped world.

Unsubsidized agriculture cannot compete on the export market nor, often

even more disastrously, in its own. And Asian governments since indepen￾dence have persistently favoured urban elites. Typically, the average income

in an Asian capital is as much as three times that in the surrounding coun￾tryside. Natural resources like forests are exploited without regard to the

people living in them; smallholdings are compounded into large agribusi￾nesses as peasants are driven off their land by compulsion or by debt. In

some cases unjustifiably high taxes are levied on farmers, such as the 25 per

cent export tax on rice imposed in Thailand in 1955. The Philippines, Java

and Thailand lost more than half their forests in the first two decades after

the end of the Second World War, and with a few exceptions, that depreda￾tion continues unchecked today. This poverty of the undeveloped world is,

of course, so horrendous in its consequences as to be of importance not

only to the Asian region but to the world at large. If it continues it must be

associated with growing populations, global pollution, lawlessness and

‘terror’. The developed nations might then be hard put to insulate them￾selves from the consequences.

A third major thread in this pattern is occidentalism – in the words of Ian

Buruma and Avishai Margalit, the authors of a 2004 book with that name –

a view of the West, and especially the United States, as ‘a mass of soulless,

decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites’. This is

the background to what Western leaders call ‘terrorism’, the response to

which by late 2004 had caused fear, foreboding and the expenditure of many

billions of dollars in counter-measures. The authors’ arguments relate

mainly to the social and economic reasons for Islamic extremist terrorism.

They conclude that the West’s worst mistake would be to simply try and

protect itself, rather than making active efforts to understand the economic

2 A Short History of Asia

and social reasons for occidentalism. In this context it is worth noting that

the large majority of Muslims live not in the Middle East, but in Asia.

A struggle between traditional and modern values compounds this

problem. The large peasant majority are not unaware of the way they are

being exploited by their rulers – this leads to a general mistrust of the

machinery of government, especially evident in today’s Indonesia. Modern

education is often seen as eroding traditional values. However, the avail￾ability and use of cheap radios and television sets does mean that the under￾privileged of Asia are only too aware of the differences between their lives

and those of affluent Westerners. It would be naïve indeed not to see that

this must drive discontent at the very least – at worst terrorism and war.

Finally, a new pattern of politics, which might best be described as

‘controlled democracy’, is emerging in many nations of Asia. The govern￾ment of Singapore was perhaps the earliest experiment along these lines.

Controlled democracy amounts to retention of the forms of representative

government – general elections, houses of parliament – but restriction of

their powers, as well as the political and human rights of the population, so

that not only is government effectively exercised by an elite, but its actions

and its right to rule are asserted as beyond question.

Controlled democracy is almost always associated with a strong charis￾matic leader, as Lee Kuan Yew has been in Singapore, and Mohamad

Mahathir was in Malaysia. Thailand under Prime Minister Thaksin is

following a similar path, with indications that Indonesia may also take it.

The Communist states of the former French Indo-China, Vietnam, Laos

and Cambodia, are effectively run by elites. It is significant that the

Association of South-east Asian States has recently become more tolerant

of direct and enforced military rule in Burma, which also has economic

support from China.

Possibly because of the persistence of this elitism of the wealthy, and in

spite of the abject poverty of millions, Asia has built and is building an

extraordinary array of multi-storey skyscrapers, presenting a bizarre

contrast to the villages and urban slums. Expensive to build and requiring

huge amounts of energy to maintain, this proliferation of more than

20,000 commercial towers seems the result more of a desire to compete in

sheer ‘face’ terms than of intrinsic value to the communities in which they

are built. Hong Kong, with more than 7000 buildings over 12 storeys high,

now has more skyscrapers than New York. Twelve of the 15 tallest buildings

in the world are in Asia. Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, from 1998 the

highest building in the world, gave place in 2004 to a dramatic 101-storey

pagoda-like structure in Taipei, while this will be outstripped in 2007 by

the even taller World Trade Centre in Shanghai.

Introduction 3

Most Western people, even those who consider themselves educated,

seem largely uninformed about Asia’s history, especially that before the colo￾nial era, and often have inaccurate perceptions even at the most fundamental

levels, views coloured by the opinions of the colonial period, with assump￾tions of white supremacy, and vague, shocking concepts like the well at

Cawnpore and ‘the black hole of Calcutta’. Others visualize a picture of ‘Asian

tigers’, vast communities almost magically transforming themselves into

clones of Western consumerist societies, or, equally mysteriously, visited by

economic catastrophe. These Asian people sometimes say and do things

which seem not to make sense. Just what are the influences on them of reli￾gion, most frequently categorized as violent and fundamentalist? Many of

them seem ‘westernized’, but are they really? All this, like anything else not

understood, prompts disquiet and, unhappily, often ill-judged action.

Most inappropriate of all is to visualize ‘Asia’ as a homogeneous unit,

when in fact it is a term of convenience embracing widely varying peoples

and cultures. But it is also necessary to recognize a certain commonality of

problems and social and economic attitudes which is increasingly coming

to overlie that variety. Many of these problems – underdevelopment,

extreme poverty, ugly and unhealthy urbanization, difficulties of govern￾ment, internal civil war and overpopulation among them – can be traced

back to the colonial era.

Greater economic co-operation between the Asian nations is a third

major trend. China, early in the third millennium, will probably lead a loose

zonal union of developing nations in Asia, which were former colonies of

European, Japanese and American imperialists, into enhanced power and

world status, in spite of – and possibly because of – the region’s economic

downturn from 1997. The increasing difficulty smaller nations, such as

South Korea, are finding in competing with Chinese manufacture must

eventually prompt them into greater economic accommodation with

China. Chinese influence in mainland south-east Asia is increasing steadily

in places like Laos and Cambodia. The Asian mainland states, in the past

largely isolated from each other and the West, are building one of the

world’s most ambitious and expensive engineering projects – the 80,000

mile network of roads, bridges and ferries which will make up the Asian

super-highway. Co-ordinated by the UN Economic and Social Commission

for Asia and the Pacific, this immense project will involve 31 countries. One

of the first routes will be Asian Highway One, the modern equivalent of the

ancient Silk Road, linking Tokyo and Istanbul. The Asian Development

Bank and China are lending Laos $900 million to build its section of a high￾way between Kunming and Bangkok that will permit major overland trade

between China and mainland south-east Asia for the first time.

4 A Short History of Asia