A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022
"Marvelous.…Spector’s gripping book.…[helps] us to understand why the legacy of these conflicts is still with us today." —Sheila Miyoshi Jager, New York Times Book Review
The end of World War II led to the United States’ emergence as a global superpower. For war-ravaged Western Europe it marked the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and prosperity that one historian has labeled “the long peace.” Yet half a world away, in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, and Malaya—the fighting never really stopped, as these regions sought to completely sever the yoke of imperialism and colonialism with all-too-violent consequences.
East and Southeast Asia quickly became the most turbulent regions of the globe. Within weeks of the famous surrender ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, civil war, communal clashes, and insurgency engulfed the continent, from Southeast Asia to the Soviet border. By early 1947, full-scale wars were raging in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, with growing guerrilla conflicts in Korea and Malaya. Within a decade after the Japanese surrender, almost all of the countries of South, East, and Southeast Asia that had formerly been conquests of the Japanese or colonies of the European powers experienced wars and upheavals that resulted in the deaths of at least 2.5 million combatants and millions of civilians.
With A Continent Erupts, acclaimed military historian Ronald H. Spector draws on letters, diaries, and international archives to provide, for the first time, a comprehensive military history and analysis of these little-known but decisive events. Far from being simply offshoots of the Cold War, as they have often been portrayed, these shockingly violent conflicts forever changed the shape of Asia, and the world as we know it today.
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Historian Spector (In the Ruins of Empire) examines in this authoritative and often enthralling account how East and Southeast Asia became "by far the most violent region of the globe" in the decade after WWII. Drawing on multilingual sources from China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, Spector details how Allied leaders sought to reassert control over their prewar territories in massive military campaigns that were animated by Cold War rivalries and often devolved into savage civil wars between indigenous groups "who held vastly different visions of their nation's postcolonial future." This process began in September 1945, just weeks after Japan's surrender, with the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in China, and the Americans in Korea confronting local insurgencies empowered by the humiliating collapse of colonial regimes under Japanese attack. Spector provides comprehensive and captivating accounts of clashes less familiar to American readers, including the "Dutch Dien Bien Phu" in Java and the Chinese civil war's Huaihai Campaign, which Mao Zedong called "China's Gettysburg." Vivid profiles of military and political leaders and luminous accounts of the French Foreign Legion versus the Viet Minh in Indochina and U.S. Marines against Chinese "volunteers" in Korea keep the pages turning, despite the wealth of detail. This sweeping survey of the bloody wages of decolonization astounds.
