Category Archives: China

by | 9 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Early Chinese Emigration to Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 14-16:

Chinese contacts with the Indochina peninsula began in 1110 BC during the sixth year of the reign of King Cheng, the second ruler of the Zhou dynasty. During the third century BC the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221-225 BC), Shih Huang Ti conquered the area that is North Vietnam today. Thus began the long period of Chinese colonization and it also resulted in the first massive migration of Chinese into Vietnam. In 214 BC nearly half a million Chinese troops and fugitives were resettled in the north­ern part of Vietnam.

After the crushing of the Vietnamese uprising by the two Trung sisters (popularly referred to in Vietnam as Hai Ba Trung), the Western Han dynasty (140-87 BC), which ruled China at that time sent peasants and soldiers to resettle on land further to the south, where the Chinese prefecture of Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam were located. Among these mi­grants were Chinese scholars and government officials.

Throughout the period of Chinese colonization, which spanned ten centuries, Vietnam was to become one of the big receiving countries of Chinese migrants. Historical documents stated that Vietnam, after having regained independence from China in the tenth century AD, returned 87,000 Chinese nationals to China. A large number of other Chinese requested permanent resettlement in Vietnam and were granted permission to do so by the Vietnamese state. A large proportion of this group were registered into the Vietnamese head-tax book and were treated as Vietnamese.

From the tenth century on, when successive wars of aggression were waged against Vietnam by the Song (tenth and eleventh centuries), the Yuan (thirteenth century), the Ming (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and the Qing (eighteenth century), new waves of Chinese immigration took place. In AD 1279, for example, when the Song dynasty was about to be toppled by the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty, many civilian and military officials of the Chinese court fled to Vietnam with their families, relatives, and dependents. The Vietnamese Tran dynasty (AD 1226-1400) allowed them to settle permanently in Vietnam.

Then there was the Ming occupation (AD 1407-1427) and in the war of liberation against the Chinese court, large numbers of Chinese soldiers were captured and they chose to remain in Vietnam. They were placed under strict supervision, however, and were not allowed to change residence within Vietnamese territory. From that time on, the Dai Viet government (Great Vietnam, then the name of Vietnam) started to enforce an assimilation policy which went as far as making the Chinese adopt the Vietnamese way of dressing.

The next influx came after the Ming dynasty in China was usurped by the Manchus, who set up the Qing dynasty in AD 1644. According to the Dai Nam Chronicle, in AD 1679, about 3,000 Chinese officers, soldiers, and their families landed at Thuan An (today’s Thua Thien province near Hue) in central Vietnam and proceeded to ask the Vietnamese court at Hue for land to farm in return for which they would pay tax. The court was recep­tive and gave them land on what is today known as Dong Nai in newly acquired territory to the south, popularly known in Vietnamese as Nam Ky or Nam Bo.

The Dong Nai plain was then called Dong Pho and historical records show that by the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese merchants and artisans had cleared land and founded villages in this area, currently the districts of Binh Thach, Phu Nhuan, and Bien Hoa on the fringe of Ho Chi Minh City. These were known as Minh Huong villages, a term referring to descendants of Ming loyalists. More Chinese migrants were attracted to these villages by the bustling atmosphere and thriving business climate. They also attracted merchants from Japan, the Arabic countries, India, and even as far as Europe.

Another influx of Chinese refugees came at the end of the seventeenth century and they settled in what was then Cambodian territory in the south­ern tip of present-day Vietnam. Most significant among them were 400 military officers and soldiers led by Mac Cuu (Mo Jiu), who was given suzerainty in AD 1708 over the territory known as Ha Tien, in return for which Mac Cuu had to pay homage to the Vietnamese court at Hue. The Nguyen lords who then controlled the southern half of the country in the name of the Le dynasty appointed Mac Cuu as Lord of Ha Tien despite protests from Cambodia. Mac Cuu’s men settled in both Vietnamese and Cambodian territory. After his death in AD 1735, his son Mac Ti Tri continued to be recognized by the Nguyen lords as Lord of Ha Tien. Mac Tien Tri opened markets as well as encouraged the development of commerce and handicraft. He also founded schools to teach the Chinese language. Ha Tien thus gradually became a commercial port and a centre for the diffusion of Chinese culture into South Vietnam in the eighteenth century.

Thus by the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese settlements con­centrated in Nam Ky (south). Prior to this, Chinese migration was a gradual process and the migrants would tend to assimilate over the years. It was only from this time that there was a critical mass of Chinese migrants which together with steady inflows from China thereafter, hastened the formation of a distinct and relatively permanent Chinese community within Vietnam­ese society. Small Chinatowns sprouted in or close to almost every big city and major trading centre. The settlement patterns of the Chinese were also becoming more complex as the increasing numbers allowed them to con­gregate according to dialect groups or kinship or even the causes which led to their leaving China. Their growing economic sophistication also meant the creation of institutions to regulate business activities and some of these were in turn meshed with traditional Chinese allegiance according to kinship or birthplace. For instance, there existed in Vietnam’s Chinese popula­tion, the bang, which are communities based on dialect groups, clans, and secret societies. There were also respective Chambers of Commerce to regulate business practices.

It would be useful to know the proportion of the Chinese community within the larger Vietnamese population during that time but unfortunately no  definitive statistics are available as no census was ever conducted before the  colonial period. Nevertheless, a number of publications estimated the Chinese population in Vietnam in the first half of the nineteenth century to be in the tens of thousands or less than 100,000. In Tonkin (the French term for the northern part of Vietnam), there was said to be about 20,000-30,000 Chinese, the majority of whom worked in the mines.

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Filed under China, economics, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, Vietnam

by | 8 May 2024 · 4:50 am

Studies of Chinese in Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 1-7.

Close to twenty years have passed since South Vietnam was liberated in 1975. The economy of a re-unified Vietnam, however, is still poverty-ridden. One of the reasons for this is the lack of effectiveness in the use of private domestic resources. particularly that of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Before 1975, Chinese capital, entrepreneurship, and skilled manpower in South Vietnam played an important role in the development of domestic markets and international trade. After 1975, however, Chinese participation in the Vietnamese economy underwent a decline brought about by the socialist transformation of the South and an exodus of capital. However, the residual economic potential of the Chinese who have remained in Vietnam is still considerable.

Under doi moi, which is the programme of economic and political reforms in Vietnam, there is evidence that the Chinese are once again contributing significantly to the expansion of internal markets and capital accumulation for small-scale industrial development. Accordingly, the role which the Chinese have played in the past and are beginning to play again seems eminently worthy of study.

…

A survey of the literature on the role of the Chinese in Vietnam’ economy indicates that between 1964 and 1975, the Chinese community in South Vietnam flourished and prospered. Furthermore, during this period the Chinese community underwent important changes, both qualitatively and quantitatively: Chinese businesses, for instance, grew and became more diversified as reflected in the growth of Chinese-owned capital and in terms of the occupational structure of the community. After 1975, however, political changes in the South following the fall of Saigon resulted in a change in the fortunes of the ethnic Chinese and the part that they played in the economy of a unified Vietnam.

The situation of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975 and the economic ups and downs which they faced have been little researched. Nevertheless, the Chinese community has undoubtedly experienced considerable changes as a result of the political and economic changes that have taken place in Vietnam since 1975. There are no readily available Vietnamese documents, reference books, and research papers in libraries or even specific research centres inside and outside the country covering this period in any great detail, although this is, to some extent, now slowly changing with new governmental policies on access to hitherto restricted official sources of information. Where information exists, the data are not always comparable in the post-1975 period, and comparisons with data from the pre-1975 period are even more problematic because of gaps in the data, different methods of data gathering, and so on. Despite such difficulties, a study of the economic position of the Chinese in Vietnam especially after 1975 is much needed, precisely because so little is known about it.

The topic is large and complex, and it would not be possible, in a single study, to deal with all aspects of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975. Thus, the present study attempts to focus specifically on changing patterns of Chinese involvement in the economy of Vietnam as well as the impact of changes in the overall Vietnamese economy on the Chinese business system in the country. In dealing with this in the post-1975 period, it is necessary, however, to review the situation of the Chinese before 1975 so that the changes experienced by the Chinese in more recent times may be better understood.

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by | 2 February 2024 · 6:05 am

Japan’s Abdication Crisis, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was the first member of the Japanese imperial family to break ranks and say it publicly. On 27 February 1946 he told a journalist from the New York Times that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favour of his son and a regent be nominated until Crown Prince Akihito, then aged twelve, came of age. Higashikuni, the Emperor’s uncle by marriage, was one of the few members of Japan’s ruling circle in the 1930s to have opposed war in Asia and to have warned against embarking on a route bound to result in conflict with the United States. After Pearl Harbor he had continually sought ways to bring about peace. Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he became Prime Minister, charged with overseeing the cessation of hostilities and reassuring the people that the Japanese empire was secure, despite the defeat. After two months he retired voluntarily, but he remained one of the most influential members of the government. Now he admitted that in Tokyo court circles the idea of abdication had been discussed for months; just a few days earlier he had told the Emperor in a private audience that he should stand down. He had said the same thing at a Cabinet meeting. Hirohito, he declared, bore ‘moral responsibility’ for the nation’s defeat, ‘to the dead and to his bereaved subjects’.

These unprecedented comments caused a sensation. Japan was a strictly hierarchical society. The imperial family and leading aristocrats seldom spoke out of turn or manifested any sign of disloyalty. A few days later the Emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Misaka, declared that Hirohito should accept responsibility for defeat and graciously volunteered himself as the regent. Another brother, Takametsu [sic, Takamatsu], was also suggested. Despite hunger and extreme hardship being uppermost in most Japanese minds, much of the country was talking about the possible abdication. The censored press, however, barely mentioned the issue, although there was a huge stir when one of Japan’s foremost poets, Miyoshi Tatsuji, published an essay urging the Emperor to step down as he had been ‘extremely negligent in the performance of his duties…[and] was responsible for betraying the loyal soldiers who had laid down their lives for him in battle.’

But the most powerful man in the country had decided against abdication. General Douglas MacArthur, the proconsul in charge of America’s occupation of Japan, was insistent on Hirohito staying on the throne – and whatever MacArthur wanted in postwar Japan he got. America would remake Japan from the top down and turn it from semi-feudal despotism into a model twentieth-century democracy rooted in Western precepts of freedom. The Americans would impose democracy by fiat on Japan, whether the Japanese wanted and liked it or not, but they would do so using imperial institutions, including the existing civil service. They adopted as their principal ally and functionary in the task an Emperor who just weeks earlier had been regarded by his people, and by himself, as a descendant of the gods. Despite such obvious ironies, the creation of the new Japan was a remarkable achievement – practical, efficient, bloodless – and of lasting importance in re-ordering not just Japan but, by example, much of the Asian continent.

At the beginning of 1946 neither princes nor poets would have dared to question Emperor Hirohito’s right to rule, despite the humiliation of total defeat. But early in the New Year, the Emperor issued a statement proclaiming himself human. It was the first stage of a process that turned Hirohito from an absolute ruler, literally worshipped by his people, into a constitutional monarch.

This chapter is perhaps the weakest in the book. Many small typos indicate it was neither written nor proofread very carefully, or that he relied only on occupation-era English language reports. For instance, it spells Daiichi [第一 ‘No. 1’] Bank as ‘Daichi’ Bank, Prince Takamatsu [高松] as ‘Takematsu’; Atsugi [厚木] Naval Air Base as ‘Atsugii’.

But the most egregious error in his account of the war in northern China was relying on outdated (and false) Chinese Nationalist sources that blamed Japan for destroying the Yellow River dikes that flooded huge areas and killed millions of people, but allowed the Chinese Nationalists time to withdraw their armies and capital deeper into the interior.

Disasterhistory.org offers a more up-to-date corrective.

Many people drowned in the flooding; far more would succumb to illness or hunger in the difficult months and years that followed. To the east, however, the river’s diversion halted the invading Japanese, who abandoned their westward march. The vital railroad junction at Zhengzhou was held for the time. The city of Hankou, China’s provisional political center after the fall of Nanjing, won a temporary breathing spell.

Strategically, breaking the dikes may have bought the Nationalist army time to withdraw and regroup, bogging down Japanese tanks and mobile artillery in fields of mud as Chinese forces secured their defenses around Zhengzhou. By preventing the Japanese from taking the railway junction, some scholars argue, the river’s diversion postponed the seizure of Wuhan by several months, giving the Nationalist government time to relocate its capital to southwest China in the city of Chongqing. But the Japanese simply redirected their advance from a north–south land attack along the railways to an amphibious assault along the Yangzi River that combined naval and infantry forces. Wuhan fell in October 1938, after the Nationalist central government had withdrawn into China’s interior.

…

Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.

…

On shifting representations of the flood disaster see especially, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014), 447–469.

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by | 28 November 2023 · 11:27 am

Hiroshima Castle

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1850ff:

In 1589 Mori Terumoto began what would be an eight-year project: he built a castle on an island in the delta of the Ota River, calling this part of his domain “Hiroshima,” which means “wide island.” At the beginning of the 17th century, the Mori fief was given to the Asano Clan, who held the castle until 1871. During the Restoration all of the buildings were torn down except the keep.

The castle is noted for the fact that the Emperor Meiji resided there for seven months during the war with China (1894-95). When Japan became involved in the war of 1904-5 with Russia, the castle was used as a troop garrison.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Castle, along with a large portion of the city, was completely demolished in the historic first atomic attack. Reconstruction of the castle donjon was begun in 1958. It is built on the original foundation and is an exact replica of the former keep in exterior appearance. The structure is five stories, 117 feet high, and is in the style of the early Momoyama period. The donjon houses a museum and a lookout.

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by | 2 August 2023 · 3:15 am

Two Old Opium Smokers in Vietnam

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 162-164:

Grandpa Pham smelled of plum candy and Chinese medicine.

It was an odor that made me nauseous and hungry all at once.

His opium smoke.

I served as the footman of Grandpa’s opiate dreams. As his family went through the process of closing doors, shutting windows, keeping the confidence, I knelt at the door of Grandpa Pham’s study, a servant awaiting his wishes, witnessing the rite that came to be the center of his existence. In the seasons before Saigon fell, Grandpa was many years into his pipes, his grown children’s wages keeping him in the habit. I brought him the accoutrements of his ceremony and he arranged them on the straw mat: an oil lamp, matches, crisp unwrinkled newspaper, a bowl with a spoonful of steamed rice, a kettle of lotus tea, porcelain cups, a water-smoke pot, and old-fashioned Chinese brick pillows. He produced a cough-drop tin rattling with loose nuggets of black opium.

He smoked with an old friend, both of them Hanoi expatriates so wizened and emaciated it was difficult to tell them apart in the gloom of their conspiracy—hovering over their opium, their instrument of sedition from the world. Those Nationalist bastards, one cheroot figure said to the other, sold nine American bullets out of ten, no wonder we are still fighting this war. The other figure protested, though without much passion, It’s good for the economy, all the foreign money pouring in. Impotent to the world, they were still supreme patriarchs of their extended families. This, their War Room: two ancients sipping tea in cement air. Saigon is too hot, too corrupt, nothing but barbarians, said one. Yes, yes, Hanoi is the true soul of Vietnam, agreed the other. Shirtless in the heat, they sat on a handwoven straw mat, propping themselves with one arm locked at the elbow like a tent pole, a knee up near their chins. The room was bolted tight against ill winds. Their liver-spotted hide, the texture of week-old tofu-skin, did not sweat but drooped, flaccid on their chests and bellies, stretched taut over the ridges of their spines. The Americans are generous with their aid, but the French, they knew how to live well, one observed. True, the other nodded, true, they built the most beautiful mansions in Hanoi. The two jurors reached into a bowl, clawed a few grains of leftover rice, and wedged these between their gum and cheek like chewing tobacco. The newspaper was smoothed out, folded, and torn into two perfect squares. Starting with one corner, they rolled the papers into tapered pipes, overlapping the layers tightly. They took the moistened rice out of their mouths, pressed it into a paste, and glued the pipes. With tinker deftness, they fit the pipes to the water-smoke pot. Every practiced motion carried the serene precision of a ritual even as they talked. The Japanese were the true bastards, weren’t they? All that killing and the famines. Yes, yes, but that was war and so is this. No, for the Northerners, it is war. For the Americans, it is politics. For the Southerners, it is business. A precious opium nugget was placed on the pot they shared. Ah, but wasn’t Hanoi beautiful in winter? Yes, persimmon winters. They lay their bones down on the mat, on their sides facing each other, heads on brick pillows, the opium between them. Don’t you remember that one hot summer, so hot catfish died and floated in the creek? Yes, but wasn’t the monsoon wind blowing off Ha Long Bay magical? They worked themselves back through the years to the good memories, and when they were ready, they touched the flame to the opium and, with great sighs, began to feed from their paper pipes. They perfumed the air with opium sweetness, making it wet and soft, filling it with the watery gurgle of two old men drowning.

Once they slipped far into their refuge, a pair of goldfish dying on the floor, I moved the oil lamp out of the reach of their limbs and left them to their slumber. Their smoke swarmed the house, announcing that their spirits were temporarily on a journey, yet everyone tiptoed past the room as though fearful of waking a baby.

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by | 23 July 2023 · 6:20 am

Poland’s Election of 4 June 1989

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 188-191:

The election turned out to be a single-issue referendum: Do you want the Communist system to continue in Poland? This was hinted at when the opposition discovered it did not need to promote its previously unknown candidates to the public. It ran the same electoral poster throughout the entire country: a photograph of its local candidate, whoever that was, shaking hands with Wałęsa, over a Solidarity logo. As Kwaśniewski later said in mocking complaint, even a cow running on a Solidarity ticket would have won. Furthermore, the electoral law adopted for this election stipulated a winner-take-all system, rather than proportional representation; that is, only a candidate who received an absolute majority of the votes cast (at least 50 percent plus one vote) would be elected in a first round. Absent such a result, in a second round, two weeks later, the winner of a plurality of votes cast would get the mandate. Back in March, Prime Minister Rakowski had been warned by a wizened and wise colleague that under such an electoral procedure the party would not win a single Senate seat. But the clairvoyant only passed the memo along, without doing anything about it, because electoral law was not his bailiwick. In the first round, the opposition won 160 mandates out of the 161 it was allowed to contest in the Sejm and 92 of the 100 in the Senate. The ruling coalition, in the first round, took 3 seats in the Sejm—out of the 264 set aside for it—and zero Senate seats.

Two weeks after the debacle, Rakowski wrote in his Diaries that “to assume a candidate from the national list would get 50 percent plus one vote was a fundamental mistake. That the entire establishment of the state exposed itself to such a test is simply incomprehensible.” Indeed it was, Mr. Prime Minister. He added that “another mistake was the method for Senate elections. If the proportional system had been adopted, we would have gained thirty to forty seats in the Senate.” Most embarrassing of all, thirty-three out of the thirty-five candidates from the special “national list”—the top establishment figures—although running unopposed, had nonetheless been crossed off by a majority of voters. General Kiszczak was beside himself that in Polish embassies all over the world—except Albania—the national list had been voted down by the diplomatic corps and staff. “Somehow, in the depth of our brains, we were convinced that we would win the elections,” wrote Rakowski, a party member since 1946, “because, after all, we had always won elections.” In the races that Solidarity had not been allowed to contest, there was still the second round to ensure victories for the candidates of uncivil society by a mere plurality of votes, thereby securing the original plan of a regime-dominated parliament, which in turn would elect Jaruzelski to the presidency. But there were no provisions to recuperate the establishment figures’ completely unopposed thirty-five seats: against whom would they run in a second round? The opposition, wary of losing everything, left it to the party-state to fill these seats by post facto procedural sleight of hand. The generals still had command over the repressive apparatus, and while many people suspected (rightly) that Poland’s uncivil society had lost the stomach to shed blood, again, for such a ruinous system, the Chinese launched a crackdown in Tiananmen Square on the very day of the Polish elections.

In Poland, all the political figures who profoundly mistrusted one another and who worked doggedly to ensure they were not outfoxed by the other side were dumbfounded by the results of their joint labors. Together they had written a political script that neither side had anticipated. Would uncivil society accept its defeat, something it had always said it would never do? Would Solidarity seek to take power, something it had said it would never do? Amid the uncertainty, on July 3, Michnik—as was his style—raised a scandal. He wrote an editorial in the opposition newspaper he edited, Gazeta Wyborcza, entitled “Your President, our Prime Minister.” Michnik’s closest colleagues jumped on him for “prematurely” advocating a Solidarity government. One of his most eloquent critics was Tadeusz Mazowiecki. But it turned out that opportunists were opportunistic, for when Wałęsa approached the forgotten United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party—the “historical allies” of the ruling Communists-both eagerly accepted Solidarity’s offer of alliance against the Communists. Wałęsa then tapped his trusted adviser, General Kiszczak’s former detainee, to lead the governing coalition; Mazowiecki was duly confirmed as Poland’s prime minister. During his inaugural speech on September 12, 1989, the first postwar head of government in Poland not assigned to the office by the Communist regime fainted on the rostrum of the Sejm. Doctors took him for a short walk in the park, whence he returned to the parliament chamber. “Excuse me, but I have reached the same state as the Polish economy,” Mazowiecki quipped. “But I have recovered, and I hope the economy will recover too.” In the 1990s, half of Poland’s then $45 billion in foreign debt to Western governments and commercial banks was forgiven, in what at the time was the most generous treatment ever extended to a debtor country.

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by | 19 July 2023 · 6:17 am

Romania’s Ruling Elite Before 1989

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 117-120:

Ceauşescu (1918–89), the third of ten children, came from poor peasant stock, signed on as a shoemaker’s apprentice at age eleven, and joined the Communists as a teenager. As a “person dangerous to the public order,” he spent much of his youth in Romania’s Doftana Prison—the “Marxist University”—where he met [Gheorghe Gheorghiu]-Dej. Following the late-1947 Communist takeover, Ceauşescu was eventually put in charge of personnel. When he became general secretary at age fortyseven in 1965, he was not only the youngest Romanian Politburo member but the youngest party chieftain in Eastern Europe. Six years later, during the Sino-Soviet split, he provoked Soviet military maneuvers on Romania’s border by undertaking a bold state visit to China. Ceauşescu aimed to study what could be adapted from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to forestall “socialism with a human face” in Romania. On the same trip he visited Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, and liked what he saw there, too. Back in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s mini—cultural revolution and maximal cult unfolded, at least twenty-seven members of his extended clan got high posts. Most prominently, and unusually for Communist regimes, his wife, Elena (1916–89), who had dropped out of grade school but suddenly held a doctorate in chemistry, became coruler. Their debauched son Nicu (1951–1996), the minister of youth, became the heir apparent. The patriarch himself, who had completed only the four-year elementary school in his village, became a god. He bore the same title as had Antonescu (and Dej): Conducător.

Samizdat was virtually unknown in Communist Romania, and dissidents there always seemed fewer than even the small numbers elsewhere in the bloc. “Romanian dissent,” went the saying, “lives in Paris, and his name is Paul Goma” (the Romanian writer [1935—]). One reason was that unlike dissenters under other Communist regimes, those in Romania elicited indifference or even scorn from the West, where Ceauşescu was lauded as the great “maverick” willing to buck Moscow. As one analyst noted, “three presidents of the United States, three presidents of France, the Emperor of Japan, the Queen of England and a lot of other important people expressed their admiration” for Romania’s supposed “independent course.” In 1968, Ceauşescu, alone among East bloc leaders, refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, on August 23, a holiday in Romania commemorating the anniversary of the 1944 coup against the pro-Nazi regime, he publicly condemned the operation against the Prague Spring. The West was not alone in going bananas with approval: the overjoyed Goma joined the Romanian Communist party. In 1973, however, he was expelled from the party and in 1977 exiled for supporting the Czechoslovak Charter 77 human rights movement and writing two letters to Ceauşescu denouncing the Securitate, making Goma an international cause célèbre. Still, that such a nonparty critic could have joined the Romanian Communist party, even if only briefly, showed that many Romanians strongly identified with the regime’s gestures to distance Romanian communism from Soviet tutelage, while aiming for a special Romanian mission within the Communist world.

Leaving aside the few pro-Western critical types, such as Goma abroad and, at home, Doina Cornea (1929—), a professor of French literature at Cluj and advocate for human rights, the émigré historian Vladimir Tismăneanu has observed that “many Romanians despised, even hated Ceauşescu and his tyranny, but did not like liberal, Western-style democratic values either.” Communism drew upon and deepened this illiberal side of Romania’s political culture, while also spawning a new elite—Romania’s uncivil society. Around 10,000 made up the central establishment and 200,000 the regional one. This elite, largely provincial and undereducated, by design had become far more Romanian and far less Jewish, Hungarian, or German than any previous elite in Romania. Its grateful members shared career paths and life experiences—to a point. Officials “regularly attended party meetings and courses for ideological indoctrination and in this way were molded and shaped in a certain spirit and acquired a certain behavior in society,” explained Silviu Brucan (1916–2006), a onetime protégé of Dej. “The cohesion of this social group sprang from the status of its members and the special relations among them, from their position in the structure of power, from their high salaries, and particularly from their access to a wide range of restricted benefits and privileges.” Brucan—a Jew who had been born Saul Bruckner—was uncivil society’s ambassador to Washington (1956–9) and to the United Nations (1959–62), and then head of Romanian TV.

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by | 10 July 2023 · 5:19 am

How Long Did the Asian War Last?

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 283-284:

The question of how long the war in the Asia Pacific lasted can also be put to the historian. The conventional answer is that it spanned less than four years, the time that passed between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. A slightly more unconventional reply would argue that it began in 1937 with the onset of all-out conventional hostilities between China and Japan. Recently, the Chinese government and some Chinese historians have asserted that the actual beginning of the war with Japan was in 1931, with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Obviously, the further back in time the start of the war is pushed, the more central becomes the role of China.

There is less controversy about the end of the war, as most agree on 1945 as marking the natural conclusion. Still, the conflicts which harrowed the region for the next three decades could in many ways be seen as consequences of the larger conflagration of the early 1940s. The internecine war that would lay waste to Korea only five years into the future came about partly as a result of the division of the peninsula into a Soviet-backed north and a US-supported south after the end of the Japanese occupation. Likewise, the numerous struggles against the Western colonial masters might be seen as having been kindled by the examples set by the Japanese. It could, therefore, be argued that the Japanese-American war of 1941 to 1945 was part of a much larger half-century-long narrative stretching from the civil wars of China of the 1920s all the way until the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. Perhaps it will take another century of writing about the conflict, and the sobering effect of time passed, to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.

Whether now or in the distant future, one of the main objectives of history will be to learn from it. Some of the participants in the vast conflict began learning as soon as the weapons fell silent. On August 14, 1946, the first anniversary of Japan’s decision to accept unconditional surrender, emperor Hirohito met with Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru as well as Suzuki Kantarō, who had headed the government at the end of the war. The emperor expressed regret at the way the war had developed but pointed out this had not been the first time Japan has suffered abject defeat. Events had come full circle. In the battle of the Paekchon River in 663, Japan had met China in battle for the first time in history, and it had been beaten and forced to withdraw to the home islands. “After that, political reforms were pushed forward, and the result was a major turning point in the development of Japanese civilization,” Hirohito said. “If we bear this in mind, we can naturally understand the road that Japan needs to take after this new defeat.”

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by | 4 July 2023 · 6:23 am

Chinese Troops in Burma, 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 51-53:

General Tanaka Shin’ichi, commander of the Japanese Army’s 18th Division, was on a mission in northern Burma in early 1944 directly linked to the attempt at Imphal and Kohima to cut through the British lines and reach the Indian border. With his battle-hardened men, he was to cover the right flank of the Japanese forces engaged in the main offensive and tie down as many Allied forces as possible. At the same time, he was to pursue a separate and arguably more important objective, penetrating as deeply into enemy territory as possible. For him, too, the ultimate objective was to disrupt the supply lines between India and China.

Like the Japanese further south, Tanaka was up against a multinational enemy, but of a different kind. Facing him in the north Burmese hills and jungles were the products of one of the most precarious and unwieldy alliances of the entire war—that between China and America. He was an experienced officer who had taken part in most of Japan’s conflicts since the early 1930s, but he had never before confronted the Chinese in battle. When he finally had the opportunity in the spring of 1944 near the village of Yupang Ga, he was surprised. “The unexpected stubbornness of the Chinese troops in the fighting around Yupang Ga,” he wrote in post-war comments, “led the Japanese to believe the troops that faced them were far superior in both the quality of their fighting and in their equipment to the Chinese troops they had been fighting in China for years.”

The Chinese troops fighting at Yupang Ga were from the New 38th Division, the result of long months of Sino-American cooperation following the US entry into the war. The most visible sign of this cooperation was the trademark M1 helmet worn by the Chinese soldiers, as well as the many examples of state-of-the-art equipment and weaponry they were carrying into battle. More importantly, the soldiers had been through months of US-led training at camps in India and had been instructed in the methods of modern warfare. The hard work was not wasted and the Chinese pushed the Japanese back at Yupang Ga. To the young Chinese soldiers, it was an immense morale boost, and likewise to their officers, who still remembered the first humiliating battles with the technologically superior Japanese during the preceding decade. “The Chinese soldiers talked of it over and over again,” according to the official history. “The first victory is never forgotten.”

The Japanese, under pressure from the Chinese divisions, retreated back south. In this situation, General Joseph Stilwell, the senior US officer on the Asian mainland, decided to bring to bear what American forces were available to him, in the shape of the newly formed 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional). Dubbed “Merrill’s Marauders” after its commander, Brigadier General Frank Merrill, it was the first major US Army unit to go into combat in Stilwell’s area of responsibility. The Marauders represented an attempt to beat the Japanese at their own game, as its members were trained to infiltrate through enemy lines and roam deep inside hostile territory.

The British had pioneered this effort on the Allied side with their Long-Range Penetration Groups, known unofficially as the Chindits, under the command of the unorthodox Major General Orde Charles Wingate. The Chindits had first been placed into battle in 1943, and by 1944 they had built up enough skill and experience to arguably have an impact on the overall conduct of the war. Elements of two Japanese divisions were engaged in fighting the Chindits, and Japanese General Mutaguchi, who led the offensives against Imphal and Kohima, argued that if either division had been able to release just one regiment from these operations, it “would have turned the scales at Kohima.”

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Filed under Britain, Burma, China, Japan, military, nationalism, South Asia, U.S., war

by | 10 May 2023 · 6:16 am

Japanese Military Buddhist Chaplains

During one phase of his missionary career in Japan, my father worked with the pastor of Hiroshima Baptist Church, who had once been a Japanese military chaplain in Manchuria, a tidbit my father never revealed to me until much later in his life. It seemed highly unlikely that the pastor was a Christian at that time, and I had not been aware that Imperial Japan had Buddhist chaplains, but it certainly did, according to Brian Victoria in “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Buddhist Military Chaplaincy in Imperial Japan and Contemporary America,” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 2016(11):155-200. Here’s the abstract.

In twentieth century Japan, Buddhist military chaplains were present on the battlefield from as early as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and lasting up through the end of World War II. The focus of this article is less on the history of these chaplains than the manner in which they interpreted the Buddha Dharma so as to allow them and their sectarian sponsors to play this role. This is followed by a more detailed examination of the recent emergence of a Buddhist chaplaincy within the U.S. military, asking whether there are any similarities, especially doctrinally, between the military chaplaincy in the two nations.

The purpose of this examination is to identify issues related to those elements of Buddhist doctrine and practice that make the existence of a Buddhist chaplaincy both possible and, at the same time, problematic. Equally important, it reveals one facet or dimension of the manner in which institutional Buddhism has served the political and military interests of those countries in which it is present, and still does so.

The origins of the Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan go back to medieval times (pp. 160, 162):

As for actual Buddhist chaplains, one of the earliest progenitors of such figures is to be found in Japan. Japan is of particular significance because, as this article reveals, it was the Buddhist faith of Japanese-Americans that was primarily responsible for the creation of a Buddhist chaplaincy in the US military.

Japan’s Buddhist chaplains can be traced back to at least the fourteenth century. It was in 1333 that warriors loyal to Emperor Go-Daigo (1288-1339), whose political power had been usurped, revolted against the warrior-led government holding sway in Kamakura. As a result, itinerant Buddhist chaplains belonging to the Pure Land sect (J. Jōdo-shū) were assigned to warriors in the field in order to ensure that their patrons recited the name of Amida Buddha at least ten times at the time of death. In so doing, it was believed, the warrior’s rebirth in the Pure Land was assured.

As historian Sybil Thornton* notes, the activities of these chaplains quickly expanded beyond a purely religious function and they ended up burning, burying and praying for the dead, as well as caring for the sick and wounded. When their warrior patrons were not engaged in battle, the chaplains amused them with poetry and assumed a role close to that of a personal servant. Given that these chaplains appear to have been beholden to their patrons for food, clothing, and shelter, this latter role is hardly surprising.

* Sybil Thornton, “Buddhist Chaplains in the Field of Battle” in Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)

…

Given this historical background, it is not surprising that, in the modern era, Buddhist chaplains accompanied troops to the battlefield as early as the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5. The job was not only to give ‘morale-building’ talks to the soldiers, but also to conduct funerals for those who fell in battle, as well as notify relatives of the deceased in Japan itself. Even in times of peace, the need for chaplains was recognized, with the Nishi (West) Honganji branch of the True Pure Land Sect (Jōdo Shinshū), for example, dispatching forty-six priests to over forty military bases throughout Japan as early as 1902.

In the same year, Nishi Honganji produced a booklet entitled Bushidō as part of a series called “Lectures on Spirit” (Seishin Kōwa). The connection between the two events is clear in that Ōtani Kōen (1850-1903), an aristocrat and the branch’s administrative head, who both dispatched the military chaplains and contributed a forward to the booklet. Kōen explained that the booklet’s purpose was “to clarify the purpose of military evangelization.”

This little 豆知識 mame chishiki ‘bean of knowledge’ sprouted from the observation of a friend that the gravestones of early Korean immigrants to Hawai‘i seem rarely to show any religious insignia. The gravestones of Japanese immigrants, by contrast, often contain posthumous Buddhist names as well as occasional insignia that suggest what sect of Buddhism they adhered to. From what I can tell from online photos, South Korean military graves also contain no religious insignia, while some North Korean military graves contain red stars. However, the Korean Navy now has chaplains, presumably Buddhist as well as Christian.

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