Three Roads:
Transformations in Asia
China:
• In 1911, the Qing Dynasty had been overthrown
• A Republic was established and governed by the
Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party
• Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian) became president
• But the Republic quickly disintegrated and military
officers began to govern Beijing but by the early 1920s,
there was anarchy in the land
The May Fourth Movement:
• On May 4, 1919, thousands of students came to
Tiananmen Square to protest against the military
government
• Causes of protest: Government’s willingness to allow
Japan to annex Shantung Province, Germany’s former
concession in China (Remember Treaty of Versailles)
•
After the death of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek
(Jiang Jieshi) became leader of the Kuomintang
(Guomindang)
•
Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists from the
Nationalist Party and a civil war ensued
• Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed allegiance
to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of
the People (nationalism, democracy,
people’s livelihood or socialism) but not
fully
• Chiang Kai-shek was further to the right
of Sun
• And Mao Zedong kept the CCP alive by
leading it on a Long March (1934-1935) to
the north to avoid total annihilation at the
hands of the nationalist forces
• While the civil war temporarily stopped during the
Japanese invasion, it immediately resumed upon
Japan’s surrender
• Mao’s strategy had succeeded: making communism
appealing to China’s vast peasant masses rather than
concentrating on the small industrial working class in
cities
• In 1949, the communist People’s Republic of China was
formed while the nationalist leaders fled to Taiwan
Japan:
• In the 1920s, the power of the Diet (Japanese
Parliament) increased
• Universal male suffrage and a bill of rights was granted
in 1925
• But Japan’s upper-class retained its oligarchical
outlook and nationalism ran high
Most of Japan’s industrial might was concentrated in
hands of a small number of corporate conglomerates
called zaibatsu
But imperial aggression and the Great Depression
derailed Japan’s democratization
Kita Ikki, a right-wing nationalist
Asia for
the
Asians!
• In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria from China, turning
it into puppet kingdom, Manchukuo, ruled by Henry
Pu-yi, China’s last emperor before 1911
• Shortly afterward, Japan withdrew from the League of
Nations
• By 1941, Hideki Tojo, had gained control of the
parliamentary government
• The military was able to dominate the young emperor,
Hirohito
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere:
The Rape of Nanjing:
December 1937 included the massacre of 200,000 to
300,000 noncombatants, including women and children
• But Japan was eventually defeated in the Second
World War (atomic bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
• The U.S.A. occupied Japan from 1945-1952 a
democratic constitution and women’s suffrage
India:
• The Indian National Congress (later the Congress
Party) was founded in 1885
And then the Amritsar Massacre:
• In 1919, at Amritsar, British troops fired on unarmed
Indian protestors, killing 379 and wounding 1,137
• Mohandas K. Gandhi
(called Mahatma or “Great
Soul) preached a policy of
nonviolent resistance to
British authority
- Based partly on Hindu
religious principles, this policy
was called satyagraha, or “hold
to truth”
The Boycott of British Cloth: 1920s
• When the British imposed a tax on salt in India, Gandhi
led 50,000 people on a 200-mile march to sea and began
to make salt illegally by drying out seawater
- Civil disobedience is the breaking of an unjust law
and the willingness to face consequences
• In 1937, Gandhi and Nehru began “Quit India”
campaign, trying to convince the British to leave
altogether
- The advent of World War II delayed the British
withdrawal, but India would gain its freedom in 1947, soon
after the war
• During World War I, with the Lucknow Pact of 1916,
Muslims and Hindus pledged to work together for
greater autonomy from the British
• However, they began to go separate ways during the
1920s
By 1930, a Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
had formed
- The Muslim League called for the creation of a
separate Muslim state called Pakistan, or “land of the
pure”
• The British agreed to partition the subcontinent into a
Muslim-dominated Pakistan in the subcontinent’s
northwest corner and a Hindu-dominated India
- But rioting and violence often ensued