Category Archives: China

Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell was determined to avenge the defeat that his American and Chinese forces had suffered during the withdrawal of 1942. His ostensible aim was to capture the aerodromes in far northern Burma, especially the one at Myitkyina …. There were two problems about this. The first was Stilwell’s aggressive and misanthropic character and, in particular, his contempt for his allies; the second was that neither move was particularly strategically desirable.

Stilwell was professional soldier who had spent much time in China, but his long service had not instilled in him any great respect for the Chinese. As commander-in-chief of Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist armies he carried on a running war with Chiang’s other commanders. His disagreements with Chiang over strategy soured relations between the two to the point where the continuation of Stilwell’s command was constantly in question. In Stilwell’s letters home, Chiang became ‘Peanut’, corrupt, obstinate and dominated by his wife, ‘Madame’, and later by his mistress, a nurse several decades his junior. Stilwell portrayed Chiang as hesitant and defensive, unwilling to commit his troops to an attack against the Japanese on the Burma front, afraid of both the Chinese communists and of his own generals. In fact, Chiang was a more astute general than might have appeared. He knew that the real danger to his government lay in a Japanese attack from the north against embattled Chungking. He did not want to send his best troops off to Myitkyina and was perfectly correct in his assessment of the communists, who were hoping to infiltrate into Nationalist China’s territories from the north in the rear of any Japanese advance. Chiang refused to do anything much in Burma until the Allies agreed to put in an amphibious expedition on its southern coast. This again was sensible….

Stilwell’s view of the British was scarcely better than his view of the Chinese. He regarded them as effete, defensive and disorganized. In a later visit to India he marked down [Viceroy] Wavell as a beaten man. The India of which the British were so proud was a pit of famished inefficiency, even more backward than China…. Mountbatten, who assumed the position of Supreme Commander Southeast Asia in the summer of 1943, was simply a ‘glamour boy’, a matinee idol with ‘nice eye-lashes’. This was ironic since Stilwell’s own reputation in America and outside was partly a media creation. He was the gritty American fighter struggling against Chink and Limey obstruction to take the war to the Japs, a poor man’s General MacArthur. The disdain was mutual. Alan Brooke recorded: ‘Except for the fact that he was a stout hearted fighter suitable to lead a brigade of Chinese scallywags, I could see no qualities in him.’ He was an inept tactician and ‘did a vast amount of harm by vitiating the relations between the Americans and British both in India and Burma’. The British high command were very dismissive of the Chinese, too. They suspected them, as Wavell had done in 1942, of having ‘imperial’ designs on north Burma.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 270-272

From the moment that the first bomb fell on Rangoon on 13 December 1941 there began an exodus from Burma of the Indian, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese population which was at the time the largest mass migration in history. By the autumn of 1942 in the region of 600,000 people had fled from Burma into India by land and sea. Of these as many as 80,000 may have perished of disease, exhaustion or malnutrition. These events have only paled into insignificance by comparison with the even greater horrors that were to be visited on South Asia over the next six years. They have been eclipsed by memories of the Bengal famine of 1943, by the riots, migrations and massacres that accompanied the partition of India in 1947 and by the Burmese civil war. Two conditions contributed to the scale of the disaster. First, the immigrant population of Burma was very large on the eve of the Japanese invasion because coolies, plantation workers and merchants were all anticipating the Burmese legislation which would restrict the number of new immigrants. People from all over India were desperate to get themselves and their families into Burma before the restrictive legislation was passed so that they would count as old rather than new immigrants. For so many families across India from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin, the few extra rupees earned by relatives working in the often appalling conditions of Burmese mines, factories and plantations made the difference between life and death.

The other condition was the vulnerability felt by the whole Indian population. When they fled from the cities, the Burmese could take shelter with relatives among the villages of the interior, or, if they were too far distant, in the hospices of the Buddhist monasteries. The civilian Chinese were on the whole a tightly organized and relatively egalitarian community of traders and skilled artisans. When the death knell of the British began to sound, many of them were systematically evacuated to Yunnan and China by their homeland associations, the regional and sectarian self-help organizations. Many undoubtedly perished in air raids and the nationalist soldiers had to endure appalling conditions, especially if they were wounded. Yet the Chinese devised an effective escape plan. Indians did not have this option. Shelter in India was far distant; with the collapse of industry and agriculture it was doubtful whether they could even find food, let alone a livelihood. They remembered the riots of 1930 and 1938 when large parts of the Burmese population turned on them with savage hostility. The British would not help them. More than one of the vaunted ma-baps, the ‘mothers and fathers’ of the people among the civil servants, had already precipitously fled in their motor cars ahead of the advancing Japanese. The only thing ordinary Indians could do, therefore, was to tie up their pathetic possessions in a bundle and get on the road or make for the ports where they might at least be able to squeeze on a boat as a deck-class passenger. For many, this decision was to prove fatal.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 167-168

Sunday’s Japan Times ran a two-part special report from China’s Xinjiang by Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus in Tokyo. Here’s an excerpt from his impressions of the oil boomtown of Kuche.

About 60 percent of Korla’s population is Han, and most of the unemployed and underemployed are Uighurs. The influx began in the 1970s, due to a major famine in inner China, and has gained pace since then with the development of the oil and gas sector.

Today, Korla exudes the air of a town that is going somewhere — a place where big deals are negotiated in high-rise office buildings. On the swish Han side of town, designer boutiques, mirror-glass malls and upmarket hotels and restaurants cater to a well-coiffed crowd in shop-to-drop mode.

Only Uighur buskers remind one that this is Xinjiang, their hypnotic drumming and haunting flute-like horn riffs cutting through the din of modern commerce. Playing at the entrance to an underground mall, close to a traditional crafts shop that’s also selling Barbie Dolls, their dark-hued clothes, beards and fingerless gloves set them off from the fashionable crowds studiously ignoring them.

Passersby also ignored the large street-side posters of self-sacrificing, quota-exceeding working-class heroes — anachronistic Stakhanovs for the 21st century — that nobody even pretends to emulate anymore.

Western news media and international human rights organizations regularly report about assimilation and migration policies that are marginalizing Uighurs in their homeland, and ethnic Han now constitute more than half the population. Chinese is the language of upward mobility, but even this is a limited option for locals, as Han-managed companies entice Han workers to relocate to Xinjiang with higher wages and better benefits.

Whether it is at the oil complexes or in the shopping malls, locals remain on the outside looking in.

The relative deprivation is one of the factors driving separatist political movements. There have been several uprisings and violent outbursts in Xinjiang over the past 50 years — all have been resolutely quashed. The government is vigilant about this resource-rich, strategically located region contiguous to Russia and Central Asian countries where cross-border ethnic and religious ties are strong.

Sunday’s Japan Times ran a two-part special report from China’s Xinjiang by Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus in Tokyo. Here’s an excerpt from his impressions of the dusty outback town of Kuche.

Pulling into the dusty, smoky-as-a-BBQ-pit town of Kuche, the hotels also sport a pachinko glitter, while along the main streets the now familiar fake palm tree fronds wink away garishly through the night.

My PDA-toting, wireless-networking, text-messaging, gizmo-maxed companion put our hotel search in perspective-mandatory broadband. Coming from Japan, where thin band is the rule in the boonies, I thought “dream on.”

As it turned out, our concrete Stalinesque mausoleum of a hotel served mediocre food and worse wine, did not deliver warm showers, and had a room temperature alternating between that of the Ar[c]tic and the Gobi Desert — but it miraculously had broadband. Gizmo-journalist heaven! The operator gave me the access number for a cheap dial-up international call service while the cashier matter-of-factly accepted credit cards — all eyebrow-raising events for one accustomed to traveling in Japan.

All this, mind you, in the outback, way closer to Central Asia than Shanghai.

Near Kuche we took a drive through China’s answer to Monument Valley and Cappadoccia, a stunning surreal landscape with Uighur shepherds tending their flocks, pristine rivers, monastic ruins and rainbow-hued, oddly shaped rock formations. Stealing a page from the Japanese, the canyon we visited is ranked in the official Chinese canyon top 10, and small Han Chinese tour groups were equipped with both flags and bullhorns.

But the weekly Friday market is where Uighur Kuche comes into its own. A bustling open-air zone of frenetic haggling, shopping and snacking, nary a word of Chinese can be heard. Donkey carts, taxis and trucks snake their way thought the teeming crowds. Sesame nan are piled high and the delicious odor of lamb kebab wafts through the smoky market.

Aside from a few burkas, many women don their best, flirt with the male hawkers for bargains and revel in the festival-like atmosphere. Swarthy, handsome men sport a stunning array of furry and woolly headgear and most have beards and mustaches. Young men seamlessly shift from menacing scowls to beguiling smiles, comparing notes on the local hotties at a distance.

Although nothing here seemed Chinese, all that is set to change as the government plans to close the market and relocate it to a charmless mall where rents and taxes can be collected.

Perhaps the most important impact of the American Civil War [on the global cotton industry] was the realization of cotton manufacturers everywhere of the dangers of depending on a single supplier of cotton. In consequence, manufacturers appealed to their respective national governments to open new and more reliable sources of cotton supply, most prominently among them the Manchester Cotton Supply Association, the British Cotton Growing Association, the Association Cotonnière Coloniale, the Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, and the Central Asian Trading Association. Reliability, by implication, usually meant the political control of the territory in which cotton could be grown, and it was in these last decades of the century that cotton manufacturers and imperial states favored colonial cotton production–the French in Mali, the Russians in central Asia, the Germans in Togo, and the British in Egypt, Sudan, and India.

Britain most forcefully pursued such a policy, but other governments followed suit. Germany, for example, diversified its suppliers after the war, with India and Egypt enjoying a significant share of what had become the continent’s most important cotton market. When in 1901 the nation’s cotton spinners, along with the imperial government, sent a “cotton expedition” to the German colony of Togo, they issued a “Mahnruf zum Baumwollbau auf eigener Scholle” because more than a million people in Germany, they argued, had come to depend on a regular supply of cotton. Relying on countries such as the United States, India, and Egypt was dangerous, they believed, not least because these nations used ever more of their own cotton in their own factories. The solution to these problems was to be the growing of cotton in German colonial possessions. Eventually, these cotton manufacturers also helped to hire a number of African American cotton farmers from Alabama to settle in Togo, all of them recent graduates of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. These farmers, chosen personally by none other than Booker T. Washington, did turn Togo into a cotton-exporting colony.

In Russia, efforts to grow cotton on native soil had begun during the Civil War but were vastly expanded after the solidification of Russian rule over Turkestan in the 1870s. During that decade, a group of cotton mill owners got together in Moscow, creating the Central Asian Trading Association to find ways to expand cotton production in central Asia, with the strong support of the imperial government. Over the ensuing years, large-scale infrastructure projects were undertaken, especially the building of railroads and irrigation projects. While at first cotton was transported on the backs of camels–which took three to four months to cover the 600 miles to the nearest railroad depot–the building of railroads cut transportation time to a few days. By 1890 so much cotton was grown in Turkestan (nearly one-quarter of the total amount of cotton used in Russian factories) that one historian has argued that the province had in effect become “the cotton colony of Russian capitalism.” By the end of the 1890s, thanks to these efforts, Russia had turned into one of the most important cotton-growing countries in the world, ranking fifth behind the United States, India, China, and Egypt.

In a major shift, the world cotton industry now came to be structured more by imperial states and their colonies and ever less by the workings of the markets organized by capitalists themselves. States intervened further by raising tariff barriers to the import of manufactured cotton goods. As a result, export markets in countries controlled by the imperial powers themselves increased dramatically in importance. Most significantly, whereas Great Britain had exported 73 percent of its cotton textiles in 1820 to Western Europe and the United States, by 1896 only 24 percent went to those areas and 76 percent was shipped to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

SOURCE: “Cotton: A Global History,” by Sven Beckert, in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, Anand Yang (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 56-57