BENITO MUSSOLINI'S PRACTICES OF FASCISM AND DICTATORSHIPS

NATIONALISM, REVOLUTION, AND DICTATORSHIP: ASIA, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND LATIN AMERICA FROM 1919 TO 1939  ON CHRISTMAS DAY IN 1920, a young Asian man in an ill-fitting rented suit stood up nervously to  address the several hundred delegates of the French Socialist Party (FSP) who had gathered in the  French city of Tours. The speaker called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Nguyen the Patriot, and was a  Vietnamese subject of the French colony of Indochina. The delegates had assembled to decide  whether the FSP would follow the path of violent revolution recommended by the new Bolshevik  regime in Soviet Russia. Among those voting in favor of the proposal was Nguyen Ai Quoc, who had  decided that only the path of Karl Marx and Lenin could lead to national independence for his  compatriots. Later he would become the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party and become  known to the world by the pseudonym Ho Chi Minh. The meeting in Tours was held at a time when  resistance to colonial rule was on the rise, and the decision that Nguyen Ai Quoc faced of whether to  opt for violent revolution was one that would be faced by colonial peoples throughout the world. As  Europeans devastated their own civilization on the battlefields of Europe, the subject peoples of their  vast colonial empires were quick to recognize the opportunity to shake free of foreign domination. In  those areas, movements for national independence began to take shape. Some were inspired by the  nationalist and liberal movements of the West, while others looked to the new Marxist model  provided by the victory of the Communists in Soviet Russia, who soon worked to spread their  revolutionary vision to African and Asian societies. In the Middle East, World War I ended the rule of  the Ottoman Empire and led to the creation of new states, many of which were placed under Western  domination. The societies of Latin America were no longer under direct colonial rule and thus, for the  most part, did not face the same types of challenges as their counterparts in Asia and Africa.  Nevertheless, in some cases the economies of the Latin American countries were virtually controlled  by foreign interests. A similar situation prevailed in China and Japan, which had managed with some  difficulty to retain a degree of political independence, despite severe pressure from the West. But the  political flux and economic disruption that characterized much of the world during the two decades  following World War I had affected Latin America, China, and Japan as well, leading many in these  regions to heed the siren call of fascist dictatorship or social revolution. For all the peoples of Asia,  the Middle East, and Latin America, the end of the Great War had not created a world safe for  democracy, as Woodrow Wilson had hoped, but an age of great peril and uncertainty.Although the  West had emerged from World War I relatively intact, its political and social foundations and its  self-confidence had been severely undermined by the experience. Within Europe, doubts about the  future viability of Western civilization were widespread, especially among the intellectual elite. These  doubts were quick to reach the attention of perceptive observers elsewhere and contributed to a  rising tide of unrest against Western political domination throughout the colonial and semi-colonial  world. That unrest took a variety of forms but was most notably displayed in increasing worker  activism, rural protest, and a rising sense of national fervor among anticolonialist intellectuals. In  Japan and Latin America, where independent states sought to evade the Western onslaught, the  discontent fostered by the war and later by the Great Depression led to a loss of confidence in  democratic institutions and the rise of political dictatorships. As we have seen (see Chapter 1),  nationalism refers to a state of mind rising out of an awareness of being part of a community that  possesses common institutions, traditions, language, and customs. Unfortunately, even today few 

nations in the world meet such criteria. Most modern states contain a variety of ethnic, religious, and  linguistic communities, each with its own sense of cultural and national identity. How does  nationalism differ from tribal, religious, linguistic, or other forms of affiliation? Should every group  that resists assimilation into a larger cultural unity be called nationalist? Such questions complicate  the study of nationalism and make agreement on a definition elusive. They create a particular  dilemma in discussing Asia and Africa, where most societies are deeply divided by ethnic, linguistic,  and religious differences and the very concept of nationalism is a foreign phenomenon imported  from the West. Prior to the colonial era, most traditional societies in such regions were unified on the  basis of religious beliefs, community loyalties, or devotion to hereditary monarchies. Individuals in  some countries identified themselves as members of a particular national group, while others  viewed themselves as subjects of a king, members of a caste, or adherents of a particular religion.  The advent of European colonialism brought the consciousness of modern nationhood to many  societies outside the West. The creation of colonies with defined borders and a powerful central  government weakened local ties and reoriented individuals' sense of political identity. The  introduction of Western ideas of citizenship and representative government engendered a new  sense of participation in the affairs of government. At the same time, the appearance of a new elite  class based not on hereditary privilege or religious sanction but on alleged racial or cultural  superiority aroused a shared sense of resentment among the subject peoples who felt a common  commitment to the creation of an independent society. By the first quarter of the twentieth century,  political movements dedicated to the overthrow of colonial rule had arisen throughout much of the  non-Western world. Nationalist movements in Asia and Africa, then, were a product of colonialism  and, in a sense, a reaction to it. But a sense of nationhood does not emerge full-blown in a society. It  begins among a few members of the educated elite (most commonly among articulate  professionals such as lawyers, teachers, journalists, and doctors) and spreads gradually to the mass  of the population. Only then has a true sense of nationhood been created. Traditional Resistance: A  Precursor to Nationalism If we view the concept of nationalism as a process by which people in a  given society gradually become aware of themselves as members of a particular nation, with its own  culture and aspirations, then it is reasonable to seek the beginnings of modern nationalism in Asia  and Africa in the initial resistance by the indigenous peoples to the colonial conquest itself. Although  essentially motivated by the desire to defend traditional institutions, such movements reflected an  early awareness of nationhood in that they sought to protect the homeland from the invader. Thus,  traditional resistance to colonial conquest may logically be viewed as the first stage in the  development of modern nationalism. Such resistance took various forms. For the most part, it was  led by the existing ruling class. In the Ashanti kingdom in West Africa and in Burma and Vietnam in  Southeast Asia, the resistance to Western domination was initially directed by the imperial courts. In  some cases, however, traditionalist elements continued to oppose foreign conquest even after  resistance had collapsed at the center. In Japan, conservative elites opposed the decision of the  Tokugawa shogunate in Tokyo to accommodate the Western presence and launched an abortive  movement to defeat the foreigners and restore Japan to its previous policy of isolation (see Chapter  3). In India, Tipu Sultan resisted the British in the Deccan plateau region of central India after the  collapse of the Mughal dynasty. Similarly, after the decrepit monarchy in Vietnam had bowed to  French pressure and agreed to the concession of territory in the south and the establishment of a  French protectorate over the remainder of the country, a number of civilian and military officials set  up an organization called Can Vuong (literally, “Save the King”) and continued their resistance  without imperial sanction. THE SEPOY REBELLION Sometimes traditional resistance had a religious 

basis, as in the Sudan, where a revolt against the growing British presence in the Nile River valley had  strong Islamic overtones, although it was initially provoked by Turkish misrule in Egypt. More  significant was the famous Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India. The sepoys (derived from the Turkish  word for “horseman” or “soldier”) were Indian troops hired by the East India Company to protect  British interests in the region. Unrest within Indian units of the colonial army had been common  since early in the century, when it had been sparked by economic issues, religious sensitivities, or  nascent anticolonial sentiment. Such attitudes intensified in the mid-1850s when the British  instituted a new policy of shipping Indian troops abroad—a practice that exposed Hindus to pollution  by foreign cultures. In 1857, tension erupted when the British adopted the new Enfield rifle for use by  sepoy infantrymen. The new weapon was a muzzleloader that used paper cartridges covered with  animal fat and lard; the cartridge had to be bitten off, but doing so violated strictures against  high-caste Hindus' eating animal products and Muslim prohibitions against eating pork. Protests  among sepoy units in northern India turned into a full-scale rebellion, supported by uprisings in rural  districts in various parts of the country. But the revolt lacked clear goals, and rivalries between  Hindus and Muslims and discord among leaders within each community prevented coordination of  operations. Although Indian troops often fought bravely and outnumbered the British by 240,000 to  40,000, they were poorly organized, and the British forces (supplemented in many cases by sepoy  troops) suppressed the rebellion. Still, the revolt frightened the British and led to a number of major  reforms. The proportion of Indian troops in the army was reduced, and precedence was given to  ethnic groups likely to be loyal to the British, such as the Sikhs of Punjab and the Gurkhas, an upland  people from Nepal in the Himalaya Mountains. To avoid religious conflicts, ethnic groups were  spread throughout the service rather than assigned to special units. The British also decided to  suppress the final remnants of the hapless Mughal dynasty, which had supported the rebellion, and  place the governance of India directly under the British Crown. As noted earlier, such forms of  resistance cannot properly be called nationalist because they were essentially attempts to protect or  restore traditional society and its institutions and were not motivated by the desire to create a nation  in the modern sense of the word. In any event, such movements rarely met with success. Peasants  armed with pikes and spears were no match for Western armies possessing the most terrifying  weapons then known to human society, including the Gatling gun, the first rapid-fire weapon and the  precursor of the modern machine gun.The first stage of resistance to the West in Asia and Africa  must have confirmed many Westerners' conviction that colonial peoples lacked both the strength  and the know-how to create modern states and govern their own destinies. In fact, however, the  process was just beginning. The next phase began to take shape at the beginning of the twentieth  century and was the product of the convergence of several factors. The most vocal sources of  anticolonialist sentiment were found in a new class of Westernized intellectuals in the urban centers  created by colonial rule. In many cases, this new urban middle class, composed of merchants, petty  functionaries, clerks, students, and professionals, had been educated in Western-style schools. A  few had spent time in the West. In either case, they were the first generation of Asians and Africans  to possess more than a rudimentary understanding of the institutions and values of the modern  West. THE PARADOX OF NATIONALISM The results were paradoxical. On the one hand, this new  class admired Western culture and sometimes harbored a deep sense of contempt for traditional  ways (see the box on p. 97). On the other hand, many strongly resented the gap between ideal and  reality, theory and practice, in colonial policy. Although Western political thought exalted democracy,  equality, and individual freedom, these values were generally not applied in the colonies. Democratic  institutions were primitive or nonexistent, and colonial subjects usually had access to only the most 

menial positions in the colonial bureaucracy. Equally important, the economic prosperity of the West  was only imperfectly reflected in the colonies. Normally, middle-class Asians did not suffer in the  same manner as impoverished peasants or menial workers in coal mines or on sugar or rubber  plantations, but they, too, had complaints. They usually qualified only for menial jobs in the  government or business. Even when employed, their salaries were normally lower than those of  Europeans in similar occupations. The superiority of the Europeans was expressed in a variety of  ways, including “whites only” clubs and the use of the familiar form of the language (normally used  by adults to children) when addressing members of the local population. The Dilemma of the  Intellectual Sutan Sjahrir (1909–1966) was a prominent leader of the Indonesian nationalist  movement who briefly served as prime minister of the Republic of Indonesia in the 1950s. Like many  Western-educated Asian intellectuals, he was tortured by the realization that by education and  outlook he was closer to his colonial masters—in his case, the Dutch—than to his own people. He  wrote the following passage in a letter to his wife in 1935 and later included it in his book Out of  Exile. Sutan Sjahrir, Out of Exile Am I perhaps estranged from my people? … Why are the things that  contain beauty for them and arouse their gentler emotions only senseless and displeasing for me? In  reality, the spiritual gap between my people and me is certainly no greater than that between an  intellectual in Holland … and the undeveloped people of Holland…. The difference is rather … that the  intellectual in Holland does not feel this gap because there is a portion—even a fairly large  portion—of his own people on approximately the same intellectual level as himself…. This is what we  lack here. Not only is the number of intellectuals in this country smaller in proportion to the total  population—in fact, very much smaller—but in addition, the few who are here do not constitute any  single entity in spiritual outlook, or in any spiritual life or single culture whatsoever…. It is for them so  much more difficult than for the intellectuals in Holland. In Holland they build—both consciously and  unconsciously—on what is already there…. Even if they oppose it, they do so as a method of  application or as a starting point. In our country this is not the case. Here there has been no spiritual  or cultural life, and no intellectual progress for centuries. There are the much-praised Eastern art  forms but what are these except bare rudiments from a feudal culture that cannot possibly provide a  dynamic fulcrum for people of the twentieth century? … Our spiritual needs are needs of the  twentieth century; our problems and our views are of the twentieth century. Our inclination is no  longer toward the mystical, but toward reality, clarity, and objectivity…. We intellectuals here are  much closer to Europe or America than we are to the Borobudur or Mahabharata or to the primitive  Islamic culture of Java and Sumatra…. So, it seems, the problem stands in principle. It is seldom put  forth by us in this light, and instead most of us search unconsciously for a synthesis that will leave  us internally tranquil. We want to have both Western science and Eastern philosophy, the Eastern  “spirit,” in the culture. But what is this Eastern spirit? It is, they say, the sense of the higher, of  spirituality, of the eternal and religious, as opposed to the materialism of the West. I have heard this  countless times, but it has never convinced me.Why did Sutan Sjahrir feel estranged from his own  culture? What was his answer to the challenges faced by his country in coming to terms with the  modern world? SOURCE: From The World of Southeast Asia: Selected Historical Readings, Harry J.  Benda and John A. Larkin, eds. Copyright © 1967 by Harper & Row, Publishers. Out of this mixture of  hopes and resentments emerged the first stirrings of modern nationalism in Asia and Africa. During  the first quarter of the twentieth century, in colonial and semicolonial societies across the entire arc  of Asia from the Suez Canal to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, educated indigenous peoples began  to organize political parties and movements seeking reforms or the end of foreign rule and the  restoration of independence. At first, many of the leaders of these movements did not focus clearly 

on the idea of nationhood but tried to defend the economic interests or religious beliefs of the  indigenous population. In Burma, for example, the first expression of modern nationalism came from  students at the University of Rangoon, who formed an organization to protest against official  persecution of the Buddhist religion and British failure to observe local customs in Buddhist temples,  such not removing their footwear. Calling themselves Thakin (a polite term in the Burmese language  meaning “lord” or “master,” thereby emphasizing their demand for the right to rule themselves), the  students began by protesting against British arrogance and lack of respect for local religious  traditions. Eventually, however, they began to focus specifically on the issue of national  independence. A similar movement arose in the Dutch East Indies, where the first quasi-political  organization dedicated to the creation of a modern Indonesia, the Sarekat Islam (Islamic  Association), began as a self-help society among Muslim merchants to fight against domination of  the local economy by Chinese interests. Eventually, activist elements began to realize that the  source of the problem was not the Chinese merchants but the colonial presence, and in the 1920s,  Sarekat Islam was transformed into a new organization—the Nationalist Party of Indonesia  (PNI)—that focused on the issue of national independence. Like the Thakins in Burma, this party  would eventually lead the country to independence after World War II. INDEPENDENCE OR  MODERNIZATION? THE NATIONALIST QUANDARY Building a new nation, however, requires more  than a shared sense of grievances against the foreign invader. By what means was independence to  be achieved? Should independence or modernization be the first priority? What kind of political and  economic system should be adopted once colonial rule had been overthrown? What national or  cultural concept should be adopted as the symbol of the new nation, and which institutions and  values should be preserved from the past? Questions such as these triggered lively and sometimes  acrimonious debates among patriotic elements throughout the colonial world. If national  independence was the desired end, how could it be achieved? Could the Westerners be persuaded to  leave by nonviolent measures, or would force be required? If the Western presence could be  beneficial by introducing much-needed reforms in traditional societies, then a gradualist approach  made sense. On the other hand, if the colonial regime was viewed as an impediment to social and  political change, then the first priority, in the minds of many, was to bring it to an end. Another  problem was how to adopt modern Western ideas and institutions while preserving the essential  values that defined the indigenous culture. One of the reasons for using traditional values was to  provide ideological symbols that the common people could understand. If the desired end was  national independence, then the new political parties needed to enlist the mass of the population in  the common struggle. But how could peasants, plantation workers, fishermen, and shepherds be  made to understand complicated and unfamiliar concepts like democracy, industrialization, and  nationhood? The problem was often one of communication, for most urban intellectuals had little in  common with the teeming population in the countryside. As the Indonesian intellectual Sutan Sjahrir  lamented, many Westernized intellectuals had more in common with their colonial rulers than with  the local population in the rural villages (see the box on p. 97). Gandhi and the Indian National  Congress Nowhere in the colonial world were these issues debated more vigorously than in India.  Before the Sepoy Rebellion, Indian consciousness had focused primarily on the question of religious  identity. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a stronger sense of national consciousness  began to arise, provoked by the conservative policies and racial arrogance of the British colonial  authorities. The first Indian nationalists were almost invariably upper class and educated. Many of  them were from urban areas such as Bombay (now Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), and Calcutta  (Kolkata). Some were trained in law and were members of the civil service. At first, many tended to 

prefer reform to revolution and believed that India needed modernization before it could handle the  problems of independence. An exponent of this view was Gopal Gokhale (1866–1915), a moderate  nationalist who hoped that he could convince the British to bring about needed reforms in Indian  society. Gokhale and other like-minded reformists did have some effect. In the 1880s, the  government launched a series of reforms introducing a measure of self-government for the first  time. All too often, however, such efforts were sabotaged by local British officials.THE INDIAN  NATIONAL CONGRESS The slow pace of reform convinced many Indian nationalists that relying on  British benevolence was futile. In 1885, a small group of Indians met in Bombay to form the Indian  National Congress (INC). They hoped to speak for all India, but most were high-caste English-trained  Hindus. Like their reformist predecessors, members of the INC did not demand immediate  independence and accepted the need for reforms to end traditional abuses like child marriage and  sati (see Chapter 2). At the same time, they called for an Indian share in the governing process and  more spending on economic development and less on military campaigns along the frontier. The  British responded with a few concessions, such as accepting the principle of elective Indian  participation on government councils, but in general, change was glacially slow. As impatient  members of the INC became disillusioned, radical leaders such as Balwantrao Tilak (1856–1920)  openly criticized the British while defending traditional customs like child marriage to solicit support  from conservative elements within the local population. Tilak's activities split the INC between  moderates and radicals, and he and his followers formed the New Party, which called for the use of  terrorism and violence to achieve national independence. Tilak was eventually convicted of sedition.  The INC also had difficulty reconciling religious differences within its ranks. The stated goal of the  INC was to seek self-determination for all Indians regardless of class or religious affiliation, but  many of its leaders were Hindu and inevitably reflected Hindu concerns. By the first decade of the  twentieth century, Muslims began to call for the creation of a separate Muslim League to represent  the interests of the millions of Muslims in Indian society. INDIA'S “GREAT SOUL,” MOHANDAS  GANDHI In 1915, the return of a young Hindu lawyer from South Africa transformed the movement  and galvanized India's struggle for independence and identity. Mohandas Gandhi was born in 1869 in  Gujarat, in western India, the son of a government minister. In the late nineteenth century, he studied  in London and became a lawyer. In 1893, he went to South Africa to work in a law firm serving Indian  émigrés working as laborers there. He soon became aware of the racial prejudice and exploitation  experienced by Indians living in the territory and tried to organize them to protest their living  conditions. NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE On his return to India, Gandhi immediately became active in  the independence movement. Using his experience in South Africa, he set up a movement based on  nonviolent resistance (the Indian term was satyagraha, “hold fast to the truth”) to try to force the  British to improve the lot of the poor and grant independence to India. Gandhi was particularly  concerned about the plight of the millions of “untouchables” (the lowest social class in traditional  India), whom he called harijans, or “children of God.” When the British attempted to suppress dissent,  he called on his followers to refuse to obey British regulations. He began to manufacture his own  clothes (dressing in a simple dhoti made of coarse homespun cotton) and adopted the spinning  wheel as a symbol of Indian resistance to imports of British textiles. Gandhi, now increasingly known  as India's “Great Soul” (Mahatma), organized mass protests to achieve his aims, but in 1919, they  got out of hand and led to British reprisals. British troops killed hundreds of unarmed protesters in  the enclosed square in the city of Amritsar in northwestern India. When the protests spread, Gandhi  was horrified at the violence and briefly retreated from active politics. Nevertheless, he was arrested  for his role in the protests and spent several years in prison. Gandhi combined his anticolonial 

activities with an appeal to the spiritual instincts of all Indians (see the Film & History feature on p.  100). Though born and raised a Hindu, he possessed a universalist approach to the idea of God that  transcended individual religion, although it was shaped by the historical themes of Hindu religious  belief. At a speech given in London in September 1931, he expressed his view of the nature of God  as “an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything …, an unseen power which makes  itself felt and yet defies all proof.” In 1921, the British passed the Government of India Act to expand  the role of Indians in the governing process and transform the heretofore advisory Legislative  Council into a bicameral parliament, two-thirds of whose members would be elected. Similar bodies  were created at the provincial level. In a stroke, 5 million Indians were enfranchised. But such  reforms were no longer enough for many members of the INC, who wanted to follow the new INC  leader, Motilal Nehru, in pushing aggressively for full independence. The British exacerbated the  situation by increasing the salt tax and prohibiting the Indian people from manufacturing or  harvesting their own salt. In 1930, Gandhi, now released from prison, resumed his policy of civil  disobedience by openly joining several dozen supporters in a 240-mile walk to the sea, where he  picked up a lump of salt and urged Indians to ignore the law. Gandhi and many other members of the  INC were arrested.NEW LEADERS, NEW PROBLEMS In the 1930s, a new figure entered the  movement in the person of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), son of the INC leader Motilal Nehru.  Educated in the law in Great Britain and a brahmin (member of the highest social class) by birth,  Nehru personified the new Anglo-Indian politician: secular, rational, upper class, and intellectual. In  fact, he appeared to be everything that Gandhi was not. With his emergence, the independence  movement embarked on dual paths: religious and secular, Indian and Western, traditional and  modern. The dichotomous character of the INC leadership may well have strengthened the  movement by bringing together the two primary impulses behind the desire for independence: elite  nationalism and the primal force of Indian traditionalism. But it portended trouble for the nation's  new leadership in defining India's future path in the contemporary world. In the meantime, Muslim  discontent with Hindu dominance over the INC was increasing. In 1940, the Muslim League called  for the creation of a separate Muslim state in the northwest, to be known as Pakistan (“Land of the  Pure”). As communal strife between Hindus and Muslims increased, many Indians came to realize  with sorrow (and some British colonialists with satisfaction) that British rule was all that stood  between peace and civil war. FILM & HISTORY Gandhi (1982) To many of his contemporaries,  Mohandas Gandhi—the Mahatma, or “great soul”—was the conscience of India. Son of a senior  Indian official from the state of Gujarat, he trained as a lawyer at University College in London.  Gandhi first dealt with racial discrimination when he sought to provide legal assistance to Indian  laborers living under the apartheid regime in South Africa. On his return to India in 1915, he rapidly  emerged as a fierce critic of British colonial rule over his country. His message of  satyagraha—embodying the idea of a steadfast but nonviolent resistance to the injustice and  inhumanity inherent in the colonial enterprise—inspired millions of his compatriots in their long  struggle for national independence. It also earned the admiration and praise of sympathetic  observers around the world. His death by assassination at the hands of a Hindu fanatic in 1948  shocked the world. Time, however, has somewhat dimmed his message. Gandhi's vision of a future  India was symbolized by the spinning wheel—he rejected the industrial age and material pursuits in  favor of the simple pleasures of the traditional Indian village. Since achieving independence,  however, India has followed the path of national wealth and power laid out by Gandhi's friend and  colleague Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi's appeal for religious tolerance and mutual respect at home  rapidly gave way to a bloody conflict between Hindus and Muslims that still persists today. On the 

global stage, his vision of world peace and brotherly love has been similarly ignored, first during the  Cold War and more recently by the “clash of civilizations” between Western countries and the forces  of militant Islam.t was at least partly in an effort to revive and perpetuate the message of the  Mahatma that British filmmaker Richard Attenborough directed the film Gandhi. Epic in its length  and scope, the film seeks to present a faithful rendition of the life of its subject, from his introduction  to apartheid in South Africa at the turn of the century to his tragic death after World War II. Actor Ben  Kingsley, son of an Indian father and an English mother, plays the title role with intensity and  conviction. The film was widely praised and earned eight Academy Awards, including one for  Kingsley as Best Actor. ■ Nationalist Ferment in the Middle East In the Middle East, as in Europe,  World War I hastened the collapse of old empires. The Ottoman Empire, which had dominated the  eastern Mediterranean since the seizure of Constantinople in 1453, had been growing steadily  weaker since the end of the eighteenth century, troubled by rising governmental corruption, a decline  in the effectiveness of the sultans, and the loss of considerable territory in the Balkans and  southwestern Russia. In North Africa, Ottoman authority, tenuous at best, had disintegrated in the  nineteenth century, enabling the French to seize Algeria and Tunisia and the British to establish a  protectorate over the Nile River valley. THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN TRANSITION Reformist elements  in Istanbul (as Constantinople was officially renamed in 1930), to be sure, had tried to resist the  decline. The first efforts had taken place in the eighteenth century, when Westernizing forces,  concerned at the shrinkage of the empire, had tried to modernize the army. One energetic sultan,  Selim III (r. 1789–1807), tried to establish a “new order” that would streamline both the civilian and  military bureaucracies, but conservative elements in the emperor's private guard, alarmed at the  potential loss of their power, revolted and brought the experiment to an end. Further efforts during  the first half of the nineteenth century were somewhat more successful and resulted in a series of  bureaucratic, military, and educational reforms. New roads were built, the power of local landlords  was reduced, and an Imperial Rescript issued in 1856 granted equal rights to all subjects of the  empire, whatever their religious preference. In the 1870s, a new generation of reformers seized  power in Istanbul and pushed through a constitution aimed at forming a legislative assembly that  would represent all the peoples in the state. But the sultan they placed on the throne, Abdulhamid (r.  1876–1909), suspended the new charter and attempted to rule by traditional authoritarian means.  THE “YOUNG TURKS” By the end of the nineteenth century, the defunct 1876 constitution had  become a symbol of change for reformist elements, now grouped together under the common name  Young Turks. In 1908, Young Turk elements forced the sultan to restore the constitution, and he was  removed from power the following year. But the Young Turks had appeared at a moment of extreme  fragility for the empire. Internal rebellions, combined with Austrian annexations of Ottoman  territories in the Balkans, undermined support for the new government and provoked the army to  step in. With most minorities from the old empire now removed from Turkish authority, many ethnic  Turks began to embrace a new concept of a Turkish state based on all residents of Turkish  nationality. The final blow to the old empire came in World War I, when the Ottoman government  allied with Germany in the hope of driving the British from Egypt and restoring Ottoman rule over the  Nile valley. In response, the British declared an official protectorate over Egypt and, aided by the  efforts of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), sought to undermine Ottoman rule in the Arabian  peninsula by encouraging Arab nationalists there. In 1916, the local governor of Mecca, encouraged  by the British, declared Arabia independent from Ottoman rule, while British troops, advancing from  Egypt, seized Palestine. In October 1918, having suffered more than 300,000 casualties during the  war, the Ottoman Empire negotiated an armistice with the Allied Powers. During the next two years, 

Allied diplomats wrestled with how to deal with the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. In  1916, the British and the French had reached a secret agreement to divide up the non-Turkish areas  of the empire between themselves. This did not sit well with Woodrow Wilson, who opposed the  outright annexation of colonial territories by the victorious Allies. Ultimately, the latter agreed to  establish these territories as mandates under the new League of Nations. Mesopotamia and  Palestine were assigned to the British, while Syria was given to the French. The Arabian peninsula  was dealt with separately, and eventually received its independence as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia  in 1932 (see “The Rise of Arab Nationalism” later in the chapter). The Middle East in 1923 Other  aspects of the Treaty of Sevres, signed in 1920, were even more controversial. Western portions of  the Anatolian peninsula were to be occupied by the Greeks in preparation for a future plebiscite to  determine the future of the area. Armenia—where the local Christian population had been brutally  mistreated by the Turks—was to receive its independence. A proposal for an independent Kurdistan  (the Kurds were a non-Arab Muslim people living in mountainous areas throughout the region) was  left unresolved. MUSTAFA KEMAL AND THE MODERNIZATION OF TURKEY The impending collapse  of the Ottoman Empire energized key elements in Turkey under the leadership of war hero Colonel  Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), who had commanded Turkish forces in their heroic defense of the  Dardanelles against a British invasion during World War I. Now he resigned from the army and  convoked a national congress that called for the creation of an elected government and the  preservation of the remaining territories of the old empire in a new republic of Turkey. Establishing  the new capital at Ankara, Kemal's forces drove the Greeks from the Anatolian peninsula and seized  Kurdish lands to the east, thus bringing an end to the dream of an independent Kurdistan. The Allies  agreed to sign a new Treaty of Lausanne, incorporating these changes. Armenian leaders, still bitter  at their mistreatment at the hands of the Turks, decided to join the Soviet Union. In 1923, the last of  the Ottoman sultans fled the country, which was now declared a Turkish republic. The Ottoman  Empire had finally come to an end. During the next few years, President Mustafa Kemal (now  popularly known as Atatürk, or “Father Turk”) attempted to transform Turkey into a modern secular  republic. The trappings of a democratic system were put in place, centered on the elected Grand  National Assembly, but the president was relatively intolerant of opposition and harshly suppressed  critics of his rule. Turkish nationalism was emphasized, and the Turkish language, now written in the  Roman alphabet, was shorn of many of its Arabic elements. Popular education was emphasized, old  aristocratic titles like pasha and bey were abolished, and all Turkish citizens were given family  names in the European style. Atatürk also took steps to modernize the economy, overseeing the  establishment of a light industrial sector producing textiles, glass, paper, and cement and instituting  a five-year plan on the Soviet model to provide for state direction over the economy. Atatürk was no  admirer of Soviet communism, however, and the Turkish economy can be better described as a form  of state capitalism. He also encouraged the modernization of the agricultural sector through the  establishment of training institutions and model farms, but such reforms had relatively little effect  on the nation's predominantly conservative rural population. Hagia Sophia. Nothing more vividly  symbolizes the secular character of Kemal Atatürk's Turkish republic than Istanbul's most historic  building—the Hagia Sophia. Built as a Christian church at the order of the Byzantine emperor  Justinian in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom” in Greek), became a mosque after the  seizure of the city by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. In the 1930s, however, it was transformed into a  museum. Today the ecumenical character of the building is readily visible to the eye of the visitor, as  Christian mosaics vie with massive gold and black placards in the Arabic script listing the names of  Allah, Muhammad, and the early Muslim caliphs.Perhaps the most significant aspect of Atatürk's 

reform program was his attempt to limit the power of the Islamic religion and transform Turkey into  a secular state. The caliphate (according to which the Ottoman sultan was recognized as the  temporal leader of the global Islamic community) was formally abolished in 1924, and the Shari'a  (Islamic law) was replaced by a revised version of the Swiss law code (see the box on p. 104). The  fez (the brimless cap worn by Turkish Muslims) was abolished as a form of headdress, and women  were discouraged from wearing the traditional Islamic veil. Women received the right to vote in 1934  and were legally guaranteed equal rights with men in all aspects of marriage and inheritance.  Education and the professions were now open to both men and women, and some women even  began to take part in politics. All citizens were given the right to convert to another religion at will.  The legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was enormous. Although not all of his reforms were widely  accepted in practice, especially by devout Muslims, most of the changes that he introduced were  retained after his death in 1938. In virtually every respect, the Turkish republic was the product of his  determined efforts to create a modern nation, a Turkish version of the “revolution from above” in  Meiji Japan. MODERNIZATION IN IRAN In the meantime, a similar process was under way in Persia.  Under the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925), the country had not been very successful in resisting Russian  advances in the Caucasus or a growing European presence farther south. To secure themselves  from foreign influence, the Qajars moved the capital from Tabriz to Tehran, in a mountainous area  just south of the Caspian Sea. During the mid-nineteenth century, one modernizing shah attempted  to introduce political and economic reforms but faced resistance from tribal and religious forces.  The majority of Persians were Shi'ites, one of the two main branches of Islam (as opposed to Sunni  Muslims, who predominated in most of the Muslim world). Both Sunnis and Shi'ites adhered to the  fundamental principles of Islam, including the “Five Pillars of Islam”: belief in Allah and Muhammad  as his prophet; prayer five times a day and public prayer on Friday at midday to worship Allah;  observation of the holy month of Ramadan, including fasting from dawn to sunset; making a  pilgrimage, if possible, to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime; and giving alms (zakat) to the poor  and unfortunate. The Shi'ites, however, had broken with the mainstream Sunni form of Islam over  leadership issues not long after the death of Muhammad and adopted a more strict interpretation of  the Muslim faith. Eventually, the growing foreign presence led to the rise of an indigenous nationalist  movement. Its efforts were largely directed against Russian advances in the northwest and growing  European influence in the small modern industrial sector, the profits from which left the country or  disappeared into the hands of the dynasty's ruling elite. Supported actively by Shi'ite religious  leaders, opposition to the regime rose steadily among both peasants and merchants in the cities,  and in 1906, popular pressures forced the reigning shah to grant a constitution on the Western  model. As in the Ottoman Empire and Qing China, however, the modernizers had moved before their  power base was secure. With the support of the Russians and the British, the shah was able to retain  control, and the two foreign powers began to divide the country into separate spheres of influence.  One reason for the growing foreign presence in Persia was the discovery of oil reserves in the  southern part of the country in 1908. Within a few years, oil exports increased rapidly, with the bulk  of the profits going into the pockets of British investors. In 1921, a Persian army officer by the name  of Reza Khan (1878–1944) led a mutiny that seized power in Tehran. The new ruler had originally  intended to establish a republic, but resistance from traditional forces impeded his efforts, and in  1925, the new Pahlavi dynasty, with Reza Khan as shah, replaced the now defunct Qajar dynasty.  During the next few years, Reza Khan attempted to follow the example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in  Turkey, introducing a number of reforms to strengthen the central government, modernize the  civilian and military bureaucracy, and establish a modern economic infrastructure. Unlike Atatürk, 

Reza Khan did not attempt to destroy the power of Islamic beliefs, but he did encourage the  establishment of a Western-style educational system and forbade women to wear the veil in public.  To strengthen the sense of nationalism and reduce the power of Islam, he restored the country's  ancient name, Iran, in 1935 and attempted to popularize the symbols and beliefs of pre-Islamic  times. Like his Qajar predecessors, however, Reza Khan was hindered by strong foreign influence.  When the Soviet Union and Great Britain decided to send troops into the country during World War II,  he resigned in protest and died three years later. OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS Islam in the Modern  World: Two Views As part of his plan to transform Turkey into a modern society, Mustafa Kemal  Atatürk sought to free his country from what he considered to be outdated practices imposed by  traditional beliefs. The first selection is from a speech in which he proposed bringing an end to the  caliphate, which had been in the hands of Ottoman sultans since the formation of the empire. But  not all Muslims wished to move in the direction of a more secular society. Mohammed Iqbal, a  well-known Muslim poet in colonial India, was a prominent advocate of the creation of a separate  state for Muslims in South Asia. The second selection is from an address he presented to the  All-India Muslim League in December 1930, explaining the rationale for his proposal. Atatürk, Speech  to the Assembly (October 1924) The sovereign entitled Caliph was to maintain justice among the  three hundred million Muslims on the terrestrial globe, to safeguard the rights of these peoples, to  prevent any event that could encroach upon order and security, and confront every attack which the  Muslims would be called upon to encounter from the side of other nations. It was to be part of his  attributes to preserve by all means the welfare and spiritual development of Islam…. If the Caliph and  Caliphate, as they maintained, were to be invested with a dignity embracing the whole of Islam,  ought they not to have realized in all justice that a crushing burden would be imposed on Turkey, on  her existence; her entire resources and all her forces would be placed at the disposal of the Caliph?  … For centuries our nation was guided under the influence of these erroneous ideas. But what has  been the result of it? Everywhere they have lost millions of men. “Do you know,” I asked, “how many  sons of Anatolia have perished in the scorching deserts of the Yemen? Do you know the losses we  have suffered in holding Syria and Egypt and in maintaining our position in Africa? And do you see  what has come out of it? Do you know? “Those who favor the idea of placing the means at the  disposal of the Caliph to brave the whole world and the power to administer the affairs of the whole  of Islam must not appeal to the population of Anatolia alone but to the great Muslim agglomerations  which are eight or ten times as rich in men. “New Turkey, the people of New Turkey, have no reason  to think of anything else but their own existence and their own welfare. She has nothing more to give  away to others.” Mohammed Iqbal, Speech to the All-India Muslim League (1930) It cannot be denied  that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity … has been the chief formative  factor in the life history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties  which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups and finally transform them into a well-defined  people. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where  Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best. In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam  as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical  ideal…. Communalism in its higher aspect, then, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious  whole in a country like India. The units of Indian society are not territorial as in European countries.  India is a continent of human groups belonging to different religions. Their behavior is not at all  determined by a common race consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogeneous group.  The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognizing the fact of  communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, 

perfectly justified…. I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best  interests of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance  of power; for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to  give it, to mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own  original spirit and with the spirit of modern times. Why did Mustafa Kemal believe that the caliphate  no longer met the needs of the Turkish people? Why did Mohammed Iqbal believe that a separate  state for Muslims in India would be required? How did he attempt to persuade non-Muslims that this  would be to their benefit as well? SOURCES: From Atatürk's Speech to the Assembly, pp. 432–433. A  speech delivered by Ghazi Mustafa Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1924;  Mohammed Iqbal, Speech to the All-India Muslim League, 1930. NATION BUILDING IN IRAQ One  consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was the emergence of a new political entity  along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, once the heartland of ancient empires. Lacking defensible  borders and sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines—a Shi'ite majority in rural areas was  balanced by a vocal Sunni minority in the cities and a largely Kurdish population in the northern  mountains—the region had been under Ottoman rule since the seventeenth century. With the advent  of World War I, the lowland area from Baghdad southward to the Persian Gulf was occupied by  British forces, who hoped to protect oil-producing regions in neighboring Iran from a German  takeover. In 1920, the country was placed under British control as the mandate of Iraq under the  League of Nations. Civil unrest and growing anti-Western sentiment rapidly dispelled any possible  plans for the emergence of an independent government, and in 1921, after the suppression of  resistance forces, the country became a monarchy under the titular authority of King Faisal, a  resistance leader during World War I and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Faisal relied for  support primarily on the politically more sophisticated urban Sunni population, although they  represented less than a quarter of the population. The discovery of oil near Kirkuk in 1927 increased  the value of the area to the British, who granted formal independence to the country in 1932,  although British advisers retained a strong influence over the fragile government. THE RISE OF ARAB  NATIONALISM As we have seen, the Arab uprising during World War I helped bring about the demise  of the Ottoman Empire. Actually, unrest against Ottoman rule had existed in the Arabian peninsula  since the eighteenth century, when the Wahhabi revolt attempted to expel the outside influences and  cleanse Islam of corrupt practices that had developed in past centuries. The revolt was eventually  suppressed, but the influence of the Wahhabi movement persisted, revitalized in part by resistance  to the centralizing and modernizing efforts of reformist elements in the nineteenth century. World  War I offered an opportunity for the Arabs to throw off the shackles of Ottoman rule—but what would  replace them? The Arabs were not a nation but an idea, a loose collection of peoples who often did  not see eye to eye on what constituted their community. Disagreement over what it means to be an  Arab has plagued generations of political leaders who have sought unsuccessfully to knit together  the disparate peoples of the region into a single Arab nation. When the Arab leaders in Mecca  declared their independence from Ottoman rule in 1916, they had hoped for British support, but they  were sorely disappointed when the British and French assumed control of much of the area as  mandates of the League of Nations. To add salt to the wound, the French created a new state of  Lebanon along the coastal regions of their mandate of Syria so that the Christian peoples there  could be under a Christian administration. In the early 1920s, a leader of the Wahhabi movement, Ibn  Saud (1880–1953), united Arab tribes in the northern part of the Arabian peninsula and drove out the  remnants of Ottoman rule. Ibn Saud was a descendant of the family that had led the Wahhabi revolt  in the eighteenth century. Devout and gifted, he won broad support among Arab tribal peoples and 

established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia throughout much of the peninsula in 1932. At first, his new  kingdom, consisting essentially of the vast wastes of central Arabia, was desperately poor. Its  financial resources were limited to the income from Muslim pilgrims visiting the holy sites in Mecca  and Medina. But during the 1930s, American companies began to explore for oil, and in 1938,  Standard Oil made a successful strike at Dahran, on the Persian Gulf. Soon an Arabian-American oil  conglomerate, popularly called Aramco, was established, and the isolated kingdom was suddenly  inundated by Western oilmen and untold wealth. THE ISSUE OF PALESTINE The land of  Palestine—once the home of the Jews but now inhabited primarily by Muslim Arabs and a few  thousand Christians—became a separate mandate and immediately became a thorny problem for  the British. In 1897, the Austrian-born journalist Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) had convened an  international conference in Basel, Switzerland, which led to the creation of the World Zionist  Organization (WZO). Its aim was to create a homeland for the Jewish people—long dispersed widely  throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—in Palestine, which was then under Ottoman  rule. Over the next decade, Jewish immigration into Palestine increased with WZO support. By the  outbreak of World War I, about 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine, representing about 15 percent of the  total population. In 1917, responding to appeals from the British chemist Chaim Weizmann, British  Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour issued a declaration saying Palestine was to be a national  home for the Jews. The Balfour Declaration, which was later confirmed by the League of Nations,  was ambiguous on the legal status of the territory and promised that the decision would not  undermine the rights of the non-Jewish peoples currently living in the area. But Arab nationalists  were incensed. How could a national home for the Jewish people be established in a territory where  the majority of the population was Muslim? After World War I, more Jewish settlers began to arrive  in Palestine in response to the promises made in the Balfour Declaration. As tensions between the  new arrivals and existing Muslim residents began to escalate, the British tried to restrict Jewish  immigration into the territory while Arab voices rejected the concept of a separate state. In a bid to  relieve Arab sensitivities, Great Britain created the separate emirate of Trans-Jordan out of the  eastern portion of Palestine. After World War II, it would become the independent kingdom of  Jordan. The stage was set for the conflicts that would take place in the region after World War II.  THE BRITISH IN EGYPT Great Britain had maintained a loose protectorate over Egypt since the  middle of the nineteenth century, although the area remained nominally under Ottoman rule. London  formalized its protectorate in 1914 to protect the Suez Canal and the Nile River valley from possible  seizure by the Central Powers. After the war, however, nationalist elements became restive and  formed the Wafd Party, a secular organization dedicated to the creation of an independent Egypt  based on the principles of representative government. The Wafd received the support of many  middle-class Egyptians who, like Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, hoped to meld Islamic practices with the  secular tradition of the modern West. This modernist form of Islam did not have broad appeal  outside the cosmopolitan centers, however, and in 1928 the Muslim cleric Hasan al-Bana organized  the Muslim Brotherhood, which demanded strict adherence to the traditional teachings of the  Prophet, as set forth in the Qur'an. The Brotherhood rejected Western ways and sought to create a  new Egypt based firmly on the precepts of the Shari'a. By the 1930s, the organization had as many  as a million members. Nationalism and Revolution Before the Russian Revolution, to most observers  in Asia, “Westernization” meant the capitalist democratic civilization of western Europe and the  United States, not the doctrine of social revolution developed by Karl Marx. Until 1917, Marxism was  regarded as a utopian idea rather than a concrete system of government. Moreover, Marxism  appeared to have little relevance to conditions in Asia. Marxist doctrine, after all, declared that a 

communist society could arise only from the ashes of an advanced capitalism that had already  passed through the stage of industrial revolution. From the perspective of Marxist historical analysis,  most societies in Asia were still at the feudal stage of development; they lacked the economic  conditions and political awareness to achieve a socialist revolution that would bring the working  class to power. Finally, the Marxist view of nationalism and religion had little appeal to many  patriotic intellectuals in the non-Western world. Marx believed that nationhood and religion were  essentially false ideas that diverted the attention of the oppressed masses from the critical issues of  class struggle and, in his phrase, the exploitation of one person by another. Instead, Marx stressed  the importance of an “internationalist” outlook based on class consciousness and the eventual  creation of a classless society with no artificial divisions based on culture, nation, or religion. LENIN  AND THE EAST The situation began to change after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The rise to  power of Lenin's Bolsheviks demonstrated that a revolutionary party espousing Marxist principles  could overturn a corrupt, outdated system and launch a new experiment dedicated to ending human  inequality and achieving a paradise on earth. In 1920, Lenin proposed a new revolutionary strategy  designed to relate Marxist doctrine and practice to non-Western societies. His reasons were not  entirely altruistic. Soviet Russia, surrounded by capitalist powers, desperately needed allies in its  struggle to survive in a hostile world. To Lenin, the anticolonial movements emerging in North Africa,  Asia, and the Middle East after World War I were natural allies of the beleaguered new regime in  Moscow. Lenin was convinced that only the ability of the imperialist powers to find markets, raw  materials, and sources of capital investment in the non-Western world kept capitalism alive. If the  tentacles of capitalist influence in Asia and Africa could be severed, imperialism itself would  ultimately weaken and collapse. Establishing such an alliance was not easy, however. Most  nationalist leaders in colonial countries belonged to the urban middle class, and many abhorred the  idea of a comprehensive revolution to create a totally egalitarian society. In addition, others still  adhered to traditional religious beliefs and were opposed to the atheistic principles of classical  Marxism. Since it was unrealistic to expect bourgeois support for social revolution, Lenin sought a  compromise by which Communist parties could be organized among the working classes in the  preindustrial societies of Asia and Africa. These parties would then forge informal alliances with  existing middle-class nationalist parties to struggle against the remnants of the traditional ruling  class and Western imperialism. Such an alliance, of course, could not be permanent because many  bourgeois nationalists in Asia and Africa would reject an egalitarian, classless society. Once the  imperialists had been overthrown, therefore, the Communist parties would turn against their  erstwhile nationalist partners to seize power on their own and carry out the socialist revolution.  Lenin thus proposed a two-stage revolution: an initial “national democratic” stage followed by a  “proletarian socialist” stage.Lenin's strategy became a major element in Soviet foreign policy in the  1920s. Soviet agents fanned out across the world to carry Marxism beyond the boundaries of  industrial Europe. The primary instrument of this effort was the Communist International, or  Comintern for short. Formed in 1919 at Lenin's prodding, the Comintern was a worldwide  organization of Communist parties dedicated to the advancement of world revolution. At its  headquarters in Moscow, agents from around the world were trained in the precepts of world  communism and then sent back to their own countries to form Marxist parties and promote the  cause of social revolution. By the end of the 1920s, almost every colonial or semicolonial society in  Asia had a party based on Marxist principles. The Soviets had less success in the Middle East, where  Marxist ideology appealed mainly to minorities such as Jews and Armenians in the cities, or in  sub-Saharan Africa, where Soviet strategists in any case felt that conditions were not sufficiently 

advanced for the creation of Communist organizations. THE APPEAL OF COMMUNISM According to  Marxist doctrine, the rank and file of Communist parties should be urban workers alienated from  capitalist society by inhumane working conditions. In practice, many of the leading elements even in  European Communist parties tended to be intellectuals or members of the lower middle class (in  Marxist parlance, the “petty bourgeoisie”). That phenomenon was even more apparent in the  non-Western world. Some were probably drawn into the movement for patriotic reasons and saw  Marxist doctrine as a new and more effective means of modernizing their societies and removing  the power of exploitative colonialism. Others were attracted by the utopian dream of a classless  society. For those who had lost their faith in traditional religion, communism often served as a new  secular ideology, dealing not with the hereafter but with the here and now. All who joined found a  stirring message of release from oppression and a practical strategy for the liberation of their  society from colonial rule. The young Ho Chi Minh, later to become the founder of the Vietnamese  Communist Party, was quick to see the importance of Lenin's revolutionary strategy for his own  country: There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it  again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm,  clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled in me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in  my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: “Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we  need, this is the path to our liberation!”1 Of course, the new doctrine's appeal was not the same in all  non-Western societies. In Confucian societies such as China and Vietnam, where traditional belief  systems had been badly discredited by their failure to counter the Western challenge, communism  had an immediate impact and rapidly became a major factor in the anticolonial movement. In  Buddhist and Muslim societies, where traditional religion remained strong and actually became a  cohesive factor within the resistance movement, communism had less success and was forced to  adapt to local conditions to survive. Sometimes, as in Malaya (where the sense of nationhood was  weak) or Thailand (which, alone in Southeast Asia, had not fallen under colonial rule), support for the  local Communist Party came from minority groups such as the overseas Chinese community. To  maximize their appeal and minimize potential conflict with traditional ideas, Communist parties  frequently attempted to adjust Marxist doctrine to indigenous values and institutions. In the Middle  East, for example, the Ba'ath Party in Syria adopted a hybrid socialism combining Marxism with Arab  nationalism. In Africa, radical intellectuals talked vaguely of a uniquely “African road to socialism.”  The degree to which these parties were successful in establishing alliances with existing nationalist  parties also varied from place to place. In some instances, the local Communists were briefly able to  establish a cooperative relationship with bourgeois parties in the struggle against Western  imperialism. In the Dutch East Indies, the Indonesian Communist Party (known as the PKI) allied with  the middle-class nationalist group Sarekat Islam but later broke loose in an effort to organize its own  mass movement among the poor peasants. Similar problems were encountered in French Indochina,  where Vietnamese Communists organized by the Moscow-trained revolutionary Ho Chi Minh sought  to cooperate with bourgeois nationalist parties against the colonial regime. In 1928, all such efforts  were abandoned when the Comintern, reacting to Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal of the alliance with the  Chinese Communist Party (see the next section), declared that Communist parties should restrict  their recruiting efforts to the most revolutionary elements in society—notably, the urban intellectuals  and the working class. Harassed by colonial authorities and saddled with strategic directions from  Moscow that often had little relevance to local conditions, Communist parties in most colonial  societies had little success in the 1930s and failed to build a secure base of support among the  mass of the population. Revolution in China Overall, revolutionary Marxism had its greatest impact in 

China, where a group of young radicals, including several faculty and staff members from the  prestigious Beijing University, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. The rise of the  CCP was a consequence of the failed revolution of 1911. When political forces are too weak or  divided to consolidate their power during a period of instability, the military usually steps in to fill the  vacuum. In China, Sun Yat-sen and his colleagues had accepted General Yuan Shikai as president of  the new Chinese republic in 1911 because they lacked the military force to compete with his control  over the army. Moreover, many feared, perhaps rightly, that if the revolt lapsed into chaos, the  Western powers would intervene and the last shreds of Chinese sovereignty would be lost. But some  had misgivings about Yuan's intentions. As one remarked in a letter to a friend, “We don't know  whether he will be a George Washington or a Napoleon.” As it turned out, he was neither. Showing  little comprehension of the new ideas sweeping into China from the West, Yuan ruled in a traditional  manner, reviving Confucian rituals and institutions and eventually trying to found a new imperial  dynasty. Yuan's dictatorial inclinations led to clashes with Sun's party, now renamed the  Guomindang, or Nationalist Party. When Yuan dissolved the new parliament, the Nationalists  launched a rebellion. When it failed, Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan. Yuan was strong enough to brush off  the challenge from the revolutionary forces but not to turn back the clock of history. He died in 1916  (apparently of natural causes) and was succeeded by one of his military subordinates. For the next  several years, China slipped into anarchy as the power of the central government disintegrated and  military warlords seized power in the provinces.Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy: The New Culture  Movement Although the failure of the 1911 revolution was a clear sign that China was not yet ready  for dramatic change, discontent with existing conditions continued to rise in various sectors of  Chinese society. The most vocal protests came from radical elements who opposed Yuan Shikai's  conservative agenda but were now convinced that political change could not take place until the  Chinese people were more familiar with trends in the outside world. Braving the displeasure of Yuan  Shikai and his successors, progressive intellectuals at Beijing University launched the New Culture  Movement, aimed at abolishing the remnants of the old system and introducing Western values and  institutions into China. Using the classrooms of China's most prestigious university as well as the  pages of newly established progressive magazines and newspapers, they presented the Chinese  people with a heady mix of new ideas, from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand  Russell to the educational views of the American John Dewey and the feminist plays of Henrik Ibsen.  As such ideas flooded into China, they stirred up a new generation of educated Chinese youth, who  chanted “Down with Confucius and sons” and talked of a new era dominated by “Mr. Sai” (Mr.  Science) and “Mr. De” (Mr. Democracy). No one was a greater defender of free thought and speech  than the chancellor of Beijing University, Cai Yuanpei: So far as theoretical ideas are concerned, I  follow the principles of “freedom of thought” and an attitude of broad tolerance in accordance with  the practice of universities the world over…. Regardless of what school of thought a person may  adhere to, so long as that person's ideas are justified and conform to reason and have not been  passed by through the process of natural selection, although there may be controversy, such ideas  have a right to be presentedThe problem was that appeals for American-style democracy and  women's liberation had little relevance to Chinese peasants, most of whom were still illiterate and  concerned above all with survival. Consequently, the New Culture Movement did not win widespread  support outside the urban areas. It certainly earned the distrust of conservative military officers, one  of whom threatened to lob artillery shells into Beijing University to destroy the poisonous new ideas  and their advocates. Discontent among intellectuals, however, was soon joined by the rising chorus  of public protest against Japan's efforts to expand its influence on the mainland. During the first 

decade of the twentieth century, Japan had taken advantage of the Qing's decline to extend its  domination over Manchuria and Korea (see Chapter 3). In 1915, the Japanese government insisted  that Yuan Shikai accept a series of twenty-one demands that would have given Japan a virtual  protectorate over the Chinese government and economy. Yuan was able to fend off the most  far-reaching Japanese demands by arousing popular outrage in China, but at the Paris Peace  Conference four years later, Japan received Germany's sphere of influence in Shandong Province as  a reward for its support of the Allied cause in World War I. On hearing that the Chinese government  had accepted the decision, on May 4, 1919, patriotic students, supported by other sectors of the  urban population, demonstrated in Beijing and other major cities of the country. Although this “May  Fourth Movement,” as it came to be called, did not lead to the restoration of Shandong to China, it  did alert a substantial part of the politically literate population to the threat to national survival and  the incompetence of the warlord government. A sense of Chinese national identity, long suppressed  under Manchu rule, was on the rise in the young republic. By 1920, central authority had almost  ceased to exist in China. Two competing political forces now began to emerge from the chaos. One  was Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party. Driven from the political arena seven years earlier by Yuan  Shikai, the party now reestablished itself on the mainland by making an alliance with the warlord  ruler of Guangdong Province in South China. From Canton, Sun sought international assistance to  carry out his national revolution. The other was the Chinese Communist Party. Following Lenin's  strategy, the CCP sought to link up with the more experienced Nationalists. Sun Yat-sen needed the  expertise and the diplomatic support that the Soviet Union could provide because his anti-imperialist  rhetoric had alienated many Western powers. In 1923, the two parties formed an alliance to oppose  the warlords and drive the imperialist powers out of China. For three years, with the assistance of a  Comintern mission in Canton, the two parties submerged their mutual suspicions and mobilized and  trained a revolutionary army to march north and seize control of China. The so-called Northern  Expedition began in the summer of 1926 (see Map 5.1). By the following spring, revolutionary forces  were in control of all Chinese territory south of the Yangtze River, including the major river ports of  Wuhan and Shanghai. But tensions between the two parties now surfaced. Sun Yat-sen had died of  cancer in 1925 and was succeeded as head of the Nationalist Party by his military subordinate,  Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975). Chiang feigned support for the alliance with the Communists but  actually planned to destroy them. In April 1927, he struck against the Communists and their  supporters in Shanghai, killing thousands. The CCP responded by encouraging revolts in central  China and Canton, but the uprisings were defeated and their leaders were killed or forced into hiding.  Masters and Disciples. When the founders of nationalist movements passed leadership over to their  successors, the result was often a change in the strategy and tactics of the organizations. In India,  when Jawaharlal Nehru replaced Mahatma Gandhi as leader of the Indian National Congress, the  movement adopted a more secular posture. In China, Chiang Kai-shek took Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist  Party in a more conservative direction after Sun's death in 1925. Here Chiang (standing) is shown  with Sun Yat-sen.In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek founded a new Republic of China at Nanjing, and over the  next three years, he managed to reunify China by a combination of military operations and  inducements (known as “silver bullets”) to various northern warlords to join his movement. One of  his key targets was the warlord Zhang Zuolin, who controlled Manchuria under the tutelage of Japan.  When Zhang allegedly agreed to throw in his lot with the Nationalists, the Japanese had him  assassinated by placing a bomb under his train as he was returning to Manchuria in 1928. The  Japanese hoped that Zhang Zuolin's son and successor, Zhang Xueliang, would be more  cooperative, but they had miscalculated. Promised a major role in Chiang Kai-shek's government, 

Zhang began instead to integrate Manchuria politically and economically into the Nanjing republic.  Chiang Kai-shek saw the Japanese as a serious threat to Chinese national aspirations but  considered them less dangerous than the Communists. (He once remarked to an American reporter  that “the Japanese are a disease of the skin, but the Communists are a disease of the heart.”) After  the Shanghai massacre of April 1927, most of the Communist leaders went into hiding in the city,  where they attempted to revive the movement in its traditional base among the urban working class.  Shanghai was a rich recruiting ground for the party. A city of millionaires, paupers, prostitutes,  gamblers, and adventurers, it had led one pious Christian missionary to comment, “If God lets  Shanghai endure, He owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.”3 Some party members, however,  led by the young Communist organizer Mao Zedong (1893–1976), fled to the hilly areas south of the  Yangtze River. Unlike most other CCP leaders, Mao was convinced that the Chinese revolution must  be based on the impoverished peasants in the countryside, not on workers in the big cities. The son  of a prosperous farmer, Mao had helped organize a peasant movement in South China during the  early 1920s and then served as an agitator in rural villages in his home province of Hunan during the  Northern Expedition in the fall of 1926. At that time, he wrote a famous report to the party leadership  suggesting that the CCP support peasant demands for a land revolution. But his superiors refused,  fearing that such radical policies would destroy the alliance with the Nationalists (see the box on p.  111). After the spring of 1927, the CCP-Nationalist alliance ceased to exist. Chiang Kai-shek  attempted to root the Communists out of their urban base in Shanghai. He succeeded in 1931, when  most party leaders were forced to flee Shanghai for Mao's rural redoubt in the rugged hills of Jiangxi  Province. Three years later, using their superior military strength, Chiang's troops surrounded the  Communist base, inducing Mao's young People's Liberation Army (PLA) to abandon its guerrilla lair  and embark on the famous Long March, an arduous journey of thousands of miles on foot through  mountains, marshes, and deserts to the small provincial town of Yan'an 200 miles north of the  modern-day city of Xian in the dusty hills of North China. Of the 90,000 who embarked on the journey  in October 1934, only 10,000 arrived in Yan'an a year later. Contemporary observers must have  thought that the Communist threat to the Nanjing regime had been averted forever. Meanwhile,  Chiang Kai-shek was trying to build a new nation. When the Nanjing republic was established in  1928, Chiang publicly declared his commitment to Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles. In a  program announced in 1918, Sun had written about the all-important second stage of “political  tutelage”: As a schoolboy must have good teachers and helpful friends, so the Chinese people, being  for the first time under republican rule, must have a farsighted revolutionary government for their  training. This calls for the period of political tutelage, which is a necessary transitional stage from  monarchy to republicanism. Without this, disorder will be unavoidable.4 A Call for Revolt In the fall of  1926, Nationalist and Communist forces moved north from Canton on their Northern Expedition in  an effort to defeat the warlords. The young Communist Mao Zedong accompanied revolutionary  troops into his home province of Hunan, where he submitted a report to the CCP Central Committee  calling for a massive peasant revolt against the ruling order. The report shows his confidence that  peasants could play an active role in the Chinese revolution despite the skepticism of many of his  colleagues. Mao Zedong, “The Peasant Movement in Hunan” During my recent visit to Hunan I made  a firsthand investigation of conditions…. In a very short time, … several hundred million peasants will  rise like a mighty storm, … a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to  hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to  liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants, and evil  gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the 

test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head  and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and  oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.  The main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless  landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the  corrupt officials in the cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas…. As a result,  the privileges which the feudal landlords enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to  pieces…. With the collapse of the power of the landlords, the peasant associations have now  become the sole organs of authority, and the popular slogan “All power to the peasant associations”  has become a reality. The peasants' revolt disturbed the gentry's sweet dreams. When the news  from the countryside reached the cities, it caused immediate uproar among the gentry…. From the  middle social strata upwards to the Kuomintang [Nationalist] right-wingers, there was not a single  person who did not sum up the whole business in the phrase, “It's terrible!” … Even quite progressive  people said, “Though terrible, it is inevitable in a revolution.” In short, nobody could altogether deny  the word “terrible.” But … the fact is that the great peasant masses have risen to fulfill their historic  mission…. What the peasants are doing is absolutely right; what they are doing is fine! “It's fine!” is  the theory of the peasants and of all other revolutionaries. Every revolutionary comrade should know  that the national revolution requires a great change in the countryside. The Revolution of 1911 did  not bring about this change, hence its failure. This change is now taking place, and it is an important  factor for the completion of the revolution. Every revolutionary comrade must support it, or he will be  taking the stand of counterrevolution. Why did Mao Zedong believe that rural peasants could help  bring about a social revolution in China? How does his vision compare with the reality of the  Bolshevik Revolution in Russia? SOURCE: From Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (London: Lawrence  and Wishart, Ltd., 1954), vol. 1, pp. 21–23. In keeping with Sun's program, Chiang announced a  period of political indoctrination to prepare the Chinese people for a final stage of constitutional  government. In the meantime, the Nationalists would use their dictatorial power to carry out a land  reform program and modernize the urban industrial sector. But it would take more than paper plans  to create a new China. Years of neglect and civil war had severely frayed the political, economic, and  social fabric of the nation. There were faint signs of an impending industrial revolution in the major  urban centers, but most of the people in the countryside, drained by warlord exactions and civil strife,  were still grindingly poor and overwhelmingly illiterate. A Westernized middle class had begun to  emerge in the cities and formed much of the natural constituency of the Nanjing government. But  this new Westernized elite, preoccupied with bourgeois values of individual advancement and  material accumulation, had few links with the peasants in the countryside or the rickshaw drivers  “running in this world of suffering,” in the poignant words of a Chinese poet. In an expressive phrase,  some critics dismissed Chiang Kai-shek and his chief followers as “banana Chinese”—yellow on the  outside, white on the inside. Mao Zedong on the Long March. In 1934, the Communist leader Mao  Zedong led his bedraggled forces on the famous Long March from southern China to a new location  at Yan'an, in the hills just south of the Gobi Desert. The epic journey has ever since been celebrated  as a symbol of the party's willingness to sacrifice for the revolutionary cause. In this photograph,  Mao sits astride a white horse as he accompanies his followers on the march. Reportedly, he was  the only participant allowed to ride a horse en route to Yan'an.BLENDING EAST AND WEST Chiang  was aware of the difficulty of introducing exotic foreign ideas into a society still culturally  conservative. While building a modern industrial sector and rejecting what he considered the  excessive individualism and material greed of Western capitalism, Chiang sought to propagate 

traditional Confucian values of hard work, obedience, and moral integrity through the officially  promoted New Life Movement, sponsored by his Wellesley-educated wife, Mei-ling Soong.  Unfortunately for Chiang, Confucian ideas—at least in their institutional form—had been widely  discredited by the failure of the traditional system to solve China's growing problems. Critics also  noted that Chiang's government did not practice what it preached. Much of the national wealth was  in the hands of the so-called four families, composed of senior officials and close subordinates of  the ruling elite. Lacking the political sensitivity of Sun Yatsen and fearing Communist influence,  Chiang repressed all opposition and censored free expression, thereby alienating many intellectuals  and political moderates. PROMOTING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT With only a tenuous hold over the  vast countryside (the Nanjing republic had total control over just a handful of provinces in the  Yangtze valley), Chiang Kai-shek's government had little more success in promoting economic  development. Although mechanization was gradually beginning to replace manual labor in a number  of traditional industries (notably in the manufacture of textile goods), about 75 percent of all  industrial production was still craft produced in the mid-1930s. In addition, traditional Chinese  exports, such as silk and tea, were hard-hit by the Great Depression. With military expenses  consuming about half the national budget, distressingly little was devoted to economic  development. During the decade of precarious peace following the Northern Expedition, industrial  growth averaged only about 1 percent annually. Whether overall per capita consumption declined  during the early decades of the century is unclear, but there is no doubt that Chinese farmers were  often victimized by high taxes imposed by local warlords and the endemic political and social  conflict that marked the period. One of Sun Yat-sen's most prominent proposals had been the  redistribution of land to poor peasants in the countryside. A land reform program was enacted in  1930, but it had little effect. Since the urban middle class and the landed gentry were Chiang  Kai-shek's natural political constituency, he shunned programs that would lead to a radical  redistribution of wealth. Social Change in Republican China The transformation of the old order that  had commenced at the end of the Qing era continued into the period of the early Chinese republic.  By 1915, the assault on the old system and values by educated youth was intense. The main focus  of the attack was the Confucian concept of the family—in particular, filial piety and the subordination  of women. Young people called for the right to choose their own mates and their own careers.  Women began to demand rights and opportunities equal to those enjoyed by men. More broadly,  progressives called for an end to the concept of duty to the community and praised the Western  individualist ethos. The prime spokesman for such views was the popular writer Lu Xun, whose short  stories criticized the Confucian concept of family as a “man-eating” system that degraded humanity.  In a famous short story titled “Diary of a Madman,” the protagonist remarks: I remember when I was  four or five years old, sitting in the cool of the hall, my brother told me that if a man's parents were ill,  he should cut off a piece of his flesh and boil it for them if he wanted to be considered a good son. I  have only just realized that I have been living all these years in a place where for four thousand years  they have been eating human flesh.5 Such criticisms did have some beneficial results. During the  early republic, the tyranny of the old family system began to decline, at least in urban areas, under  the impact of economic changes and the urgings of the New Culture intellectuals. Women, long  consigned to an inferior place in the Confucian world order, began to escape their cloistered  existence and seek education and employment alongside their male contemporaries. Free choice in  marriage and a more relaxed attitude toward sex became commonplace among affluent families in  the cities, where the teenage children of Westernized elites aped the clothing, social habits, and  musical tastes of their contemporaries in Europe and the United States. But as a rule, the new 

consciousness of individualism and women's rights that marked the early republican era in the major  cities did not penetrate the villages, where traditional attitudes and customs held sway. Arranged  marriages continued to be the rule rather than the exception, and concubinage remained common.  According to a survey taken in the 1930s, well over two-thirds of the marriages, even among urban  couples, had been arranged by their parents; in one rural area, only 3 of 170 villagers interviewed had  heard of the idea of “modern marriage.” Even the tradition of binding the feet of female children  continued despite efforts by the Nationalist government to eradicate the practice.6 DOWN WITH  CONFUCIUS AND SONS Nowhere was the struggle between traditional and modern more visible than  in the field of culture. Beginning with the New Culture era during the early years of the first Chinese  republic, radical reformists criticized traditional culture as the symbol and instrument of feudal  oppression that must be entirely eradicated to create a new China that could stand on its feet with  dignity in the modern world. For many reformers, that new culture must be based on that of the  modern West. During the 1920s and 1930s, Western literature and art became popular in China,  especially among the urban middle class. Traditional culture continued to prevail among more  conservative elements of the population, and some intellectuals argued for the creation of a new art  that would synthesize the best of Chinese and foreign culture. But the most creative artists were  interested in imitating foreign trends, whereas traditionalists were more concerned with  preservation. Literature in particular was influenced by foreign ideas as Western genres like the  novel and the short story attracted a growing audience. Although most Chinese novels written after  World War I dealt with Chinese subjects, they reflected the Western tendency toward social realism  and often dealt with the new Westernized middle class (Mao Dun's Midnight, for example, described  the changing mores of Shanghai's urban elites) or the disintegration of the traditional Confucian  family. Most of China's modern authors displayed a clear contempt for the past. Japan Between the  Wars By the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan had made steady progress toward the  creation of an advanced society on the Western model. Economic and social reforms launched  during the Meiji era led to increasing prosperity and the development of a modern industrial and  commercial sector. Although the political system still retained many authoritarian characteristics,  optimists had reason to hope that Japan was on the road to becoming a full-fledged democracy.  Experiment in Democracy During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Japanese political  system appeared to evolve significantly toward the Western democratic model. Political parties  expanded their popular following and became increasingly competitive, while individual pressure  groups such as labor unions began to appear in Japanese society, along with an independent press  and a bill of rights. The influence of the old ruling oligarchy, the genro, had not yet been significantly  challenged, however, nor had that of its ideological foundation, which focused on national wealth  and power. The fragile flower of democratic institutions was able to survive throughout the 1920s.  During that period, the military budget was reduced, and a suffrage bill enacted in 1925 granted the  vote to all adult Japanese males. Women remained disenfranchised, but women's associations  became increasingly visible during the 1920s, and women were active in the labor movement and in  campaigns for various social reforms. But the era was also marked by growing social turmoil, and  two opposing forces within the system were gearing up to challenge the prevailing wisdom. On the  left, a Marxist labor movement, which reflected the tensions within the working class and the  increasing radicalism among the rural poor, began to take shape in the early 1920s in response to  growing economic difficulties. Government suppression of labor disturbances led to further  radicalization. On the right, ultranationalist groups called for a rejection of Western models of  development and a more militant approach to realizing national objectives. In 1919, radical 

nationalist Kita Ikki called for a military takeover and the establishment of a new system bearing a  strong resemblance to what would later be called fascism in Europe (see Chapter 6). This cultural  conflict between old and new, indigenous and foreign, was reflected in literature. The restoration of  Japanese self-confidence after the victories over China and Russia launched an age of cultural  creativity in the early twentieth century. Fascination with Western literature gave birth to a striking  new genre called the “I novel.” Defying traditional Japanese reticence, some authors reveled in  self-exposure with confessions of their innermost thoughts. Others found release in the “proletarian  literature” movement of the early 1920s. Inspired by Soviet literary examples, these authors wanted  literature to serve socialist goals and improve the lives of the working class. Finally, some Japanese  writers blended Western psychology with Japanese sensibility in exquisite novels reeking of  nostalgia for the old Japan. One well-known example is Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles  (1929), which delicately juxtaposes the positive aspects of traditional and modern Japan. By the  early 1930s, however, military censorship increasingly inhibited literary expression. A Zaibatsu  Economy Japan also continued to make impressive progress in economic development. Spurred by  rising domestic demand as well as a continued high rate of government investment in the economy,  the production of raw materials tripled between 1900 and 1930, and industrial production increased  more than twelvefold. Much of the increase went into the export market, and Western manufacturers  began to complain about the rising competition for markets from the Japanese. As often happens,  rapid industrialization was accompanied by some hardship and rising social tensions. A  characteristic of the Meiji model was the concentration of various manufacturing processes within a  single enterprise, the zaibatsu, or financial clique. Some of these firms were existing merchant  companies that had the capital and the foresight to move into new areas of opportunity. Others were  formed by enterprising samurai, who used their status and experience in management to good  account in a new environment. Whatever their origins, these firms gradually developed, often with  official encouragement, into large conglomerates that controlled a major segment of the Japanese  industrial sector. According to one source, by 1937, the four largest zaibatsu (Mitsui, Mitsubishi,  Sumitomo, and Yasuda) controlled 21 percent of the banking industry, 26 percent of mining, 35  percent of shipbuilding, 38 percent of commercial shipping, and more than 60 percent of paper  manufacturing and insurance. This concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few major  industrial combines resulted in the emergence of a form of dual economy: on the one hand, a  modern industry characterized by up-to-date methods and massive government subsidies, and on  the other, a traditional manufacturing sector characterized by conservative methods and small-scale  production techniques. Concentration of wealth also led to growing economic inequalities. As we  have seen, economic growth had been achieved at the expense of the peasants, many of whom fled  to the cities to escape rural poverty. That labor surplus benefited the industrial sector, but the urban  proletariat was still poorly paid and ill-housed. Rampant inflation in the price of rice led to food riots  shortly after World War I. A rapid increase in population (the total population of the Japanese islands  increased from an estimated 43 million in 1900 to 73 million in 1940) led to food shortages and the  threat of rising unemployment. Intense competition and the global recession in the early 1920s led  to a greater concentration of industry and a perceptible rise in urban radicalism. In the meantime,  those left on the farm continued to suffer. As late as the beginning of World War II, an estimated half  of all Japanese farmers were tenants. Shidehara Diplomacy A final problem for Japanese leaders in  the post-Meiji era was the familiar capitalist dilemma of finding sources of raw materials and foreign  markets for the nation's manufactured goods. Until World War I, Japan had dealt with the problem by  seizing territories such as Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria and transforming them into 

colonies or protectorates of the growing Japanese empire. That policy had succeeded brilliantly, but  it had also begun to arouse the concern and, in some cases, the hostility of the Western nations.  China was also becoming apprehensive; as we have seen, Japanese demands for Shandong  Province at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 aroused massive protests in major Chinese cities.  The United States was especially concerned about Japanese aggressiveness. Although the United  States had been less active than some European states in pursuing colonies in the Pacific, it had a  strong interest in keeping the area open for U.S. commercial activities. American anxiety about  Tokyo's twenty-one demands on China in 1915 led to a new agreement with Japan in 1917, which  essentially repeated the compromise provisions of the agreement reached nine years earlier. In  1922, in Washington, D.C., the United States convened a major conference of nations with interests  in the Pacific to discuss problems of regional security. The Washington Conference led to  agreements on several issues, but the major accomplishment was the conclusion of a nine-power  treaty recognizing the territorial integrity of China and the Open Door. The other participants induced  Japan to accept these provisions by accepting its special position in Manchuria. During the  remainder of the 1920s, Japanese governments attempted to play by the rules laid down at the  Washington Conference. Known as Shidehara diplomacy, after the foreign minister (and later prime  minister) who attempted to carry it out, this policy sought to use diplomatic and economic means to  realize Japanese interests in Asia. But this approach came under severe pressure as Japanese  industrialists began to move into new areas of opportunity, such as heavy industry, chemicals,  mining, and the manufacturing of appliances and automobiles. Because such industries desperately  needed resources not found in abundance locally, the Japanese government came under increasing  pressure to find new sources abroad.THE RISE OF MILITANT NATIONALISM In the early 1930s, with  the onset of the Great Depression and growing tensions in the international arena, nationalist forces  rose to dominance in the Japanese government. These elements, a mixture of military officers and  ultranationalist politicians, were convinced that the diplomacy of the 1920s had failed and  advocated a more aggressive approach to protecting national interests in a brutal and competitive  world. We shall discuss the factors involved and the impact of these developments on the  international scene in the next chapter. Nationalism and Dictatorship in Latin America Because most  of Latin America had won its independence from European control during the nineteenth century,  nationalism and political change took different forms in this area in the years following World War I  than they did in Asia and the Middle East. But the region was by no means isolated from the trends  occurring throughout the rest of the world. National sentiment in opposition to foreign political and  economic influence—and especially U.S. influence—was sometimes intense. And when the Great  Depression struck in the late 1920s, the political equation in Latin America was affected in profound  ways. A Changing Economy At the beginning of the twentieth century, the economy of Latin America  was based largely on the export of foodstuffs and raw materials. Some countries relied on the  export earnings of only one or two products. Argentina, for example, depended heavily on the sale of  beef and wheat; Chile, on nitrates and copper; Brazil and the Caribbean nations, on sugar; and the  Central American states, on bananas. Such exports brought large profits to a few, but for the  majority of the population, the returns were meager. During World War I, exports of some products,  such as Chilean nitrates (used to produce explosives), increased dramatically. In general, however,  the war led to a decline in European investment in Latin America and a rise in the U.S. role in the  local economies. The United States had already begun to intervene in Latin American politics in the  early years of the twentieth century during its construction of the Panama Canal, which dramatically  reduced the time and distance needed for ships to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. 

THE ROLE OF THE YANKEE DOLLAR By the late 1920s, the United States had replaced Great Britain  as the foremost source of foreign investment in Latin America. Unlike the British, however, U.S.  investors put their funds directly into production enterprises, causing large segments of the area's  export industry to fall into American hands. A number of Central American states, for example, were  popularly labeled “banana republics” because of the power and influence of the U.S.-owned United  Fruit Company. American firms also dominated the copper mining industry in Chile and Peru and the  oil industry in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Increasing economic power served to reinforce the  traditionally high level of U.S. political influence in Latin America, especially in Central America, a  region that many Americans considered vital to U.S. national security. American troops occupied  parts of both Nicaragua and Honduras to put down unrest or protect U.S. interests there. The  growing U.S. presence in the region aroused hostility among Latin Americans, who resented their  dependent relationship on the United States, which they viewed as an aggressive imperialist power.  Some charged that Washington worked, sometimes through U.S. military intervention, to keep  ruthless dictators, such as Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela and Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, in  power to preserve U.S. economic influence. In a bid to improve relations with Latin American  countries, in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt promulgated the Good Neighbor policy, which  rejected the use of U.S. military force in the region. To underscore his sincerity, Roosevelt ordered  the withdrawal of U.S. marines from the island nation of Haiti in 1936. For the first time in thirty  years, there were no U.S. occupation troops in Latin America. Because so many Latin American  nations depended for their livelihood on the export of raw materials and food products, the Great  Depression of the 1930s was a disaster for the region. In 1930, the value of Latin American exports  fell to only half the amount that had been exported in each of the previous five years. Spurred by the  decline in foreign revenues, Latin American governments began to encourage the development of  new industries to reduce dependence on imports. In some cases—the steel industry in Chile and  Brazil, the oil industry in Argentina and Mexico—government investment made up for the absence of  local sources of capital. The Effects of Dependency During the late nineteenth century, most  governments in Latin America had been dominated by landed or military elites, who governed by the  blatant use of military force. This trend continued during the 1930s as domestic instability caused by  the effects of the Great Depression led to the creation of military dictatorships throughout the  region, especially in Argentina and Brazil and, to a lesser degree, in Mexico—three countries that  together possessed more than half of the land and wealth of Latin America (see Map 5.2).  ARGENTINA By no means were all of Latin America's problems the product of foreign influence.  Some were self-imposed. In Argentina, autocratic rule by an elite minority had disastrous effects.  The government of Argentina, controlled by landowners who had benefited from the export of beef  and wheat, was slow to recognize the need to establish a local industrial base. In 1916, Hipólito  Irigoyen (1852–1933), head of the Radical Party, was elected president on a program to improve  conditions for the middle and lower classes. Little was achieved, however, as the party became  increasingly corrupt and identified with the interests of the large landowners. In 1930, the army  overthrew Irigoyen's government, but its effort to return to the past and suppress the growing  influence of labor unions failed, and in 1946, General Juan Perón—claiming the support of the  descamisados (“shirtless ones”)—seized sole power (see Chapter 8). BRAZIL Brazil followed a  similar path. In 1889, the army overthrew the Brazilian monarchy, installed by Portugal decades  before, and established a republic. But it was dominated by landed elites, many of whom had grown  wealthy through their ownership of coffee plantations. By 1900, three-quarters of the world's coffee  was grown in Brazil. As in Argentina, the ruling oligarchy ignored the importance of establishing an 

urban industrial base. When the Great Depression ravaged profits from coffee exports, a wealthy  rancher, Getúlio Vargas (1883–1954), seized power and served as president from 1930 to 1945. At  first, Vargas sought to appease the workers by instituting an eight-hour workday and a minimum  wage, but influenced by the apparent success of fascist regimes in Europe, he ruled by increasingly  autocratic means and relied on a police force that used torture to silence his opponents. His  industrial policy was successful, however, and by the end of World War II, Brazil had become Latin  America's major industrial power. In 1945, the army, concerned that Vargas was turning increasingly  to leftist elements for support, forced him to resign. MEXICO In the early years of the twentieth  century, Mexico was in a state of turbulence. Under the rule of the longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz  (see Chapter 1), the real wages of the working class had declined. Moreover, 95 percent of the rural  population owned no land, and about a thousand families ruled almost all of Mexico. Much of the  manufacturing sector, and most of the important export industries, was in the hands of foreign  owners. The first rumblings of discontent appeared among members of the intellectual elite, who in  the early years of the century began to agitate for political reforms to introduce representative  government. They also favored the adoption of measures to improve the lot of the urban and rural  poor. In the meantime, violent protests erupted in the countryside. In the poverty-stricken state of  Chiapas, the rebel leader Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) aroused landless peasants, who began  seizing the haciendas of wealthy landowners. Eventually, Zapata (later made famous to U.S.  audiences by the 1952 film Viva Zapata, starring Marlon Brando) was able to set up a local  revolutionary regime under his own leadership. In the state of Chihuahua, farther to the north, the  bandit leader Pancho Villa (1878–1923) terrorized the local power structure and on occasion even  crossed the border to launch raids on small towns in the United States.The growing specter of rural  revolt caused great concern among the Mexican power elite, and in 1910 Díaz was forced to resign  in favor of the reformist politician Francisco Madero (1873–1913). The latter sought to carry out a  program of political reform, but he was unable to keep pace with the rapid change taking place  throughout the country. In 1913, Madero was deposed and assassinated by one of Díaz's military  subordinates. For the next several years, Zapata and Pancho Villa continued to be important political  forces in Mexico, publicly advocating measures to redress the economic grievances of the poor. But  neither had a broad grasp of the challenges facing the country, and power eventually gravitated to a  more moderate group of reformists around the Constitutionalist Party. The latter were intent on  breaking the power of the great landed families and powerful U.S. corporations, but without  engaging in radical land reform or the nationalization of property. After a bloody conflict that cost  the lives of thousands, the moderates were able to consolidate power, and in 1917 the party  promulgated a new constitution that established a strong presidency, initiated land reform policies,  established limits on foreign investment, and set an agenda for social welfare programs. The United  States had resisted many of these measures but eventually saw the wisdom of recognizing a  government that had successfully avoided the hazards of a vast social revolution, such as had  occurred in Russia. In 1920, the Constitutionalist Party leader Alvaro Obregión assumed the  presidency and began to carry out a reform program. But real change did not take place until the  presidency of General Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970) in 1934. Cárdenas won wide popularity among  the peasants by ordering the redistribution of 44 million acres of land controlled by landed elites. He  also seized control of the oil industry, which had hitherto been dominated by major U.S. oil  companies. Alluding to the Good Neighbor policy, President Roosevelt refused to intervene, and  eventually Mexico agreed to compensate the U.S. oil companies for their lost property. It then set up  PEMEX, a governmental organization, to run the oil industry. By now, the revolution was democratic 

in name only, as the ruling political party, known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),  controlled the levers of power throughout society. Every six years, for more than half a century, PRI  presidential candidates automatically succeeded each other in office. Latin American Culture The  first half of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic increase in literary activity in Latin America, a  result in part of its ambivalent relationship with Europe and the United States. Many authors, while  experimenting with imported modernist styles, felt compelled to proclaim their region's unique  identity through the adoption of Latin American themes and social issues. In The Underdogs (1915),  for example, Mariano Azuela (1873–1952) presented a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the  Mexican Revolution as his country entered an era of unsettling change. In their determination to  express Latin America's distinctive characteristics, some writers focused on the promise of the  region's vast virgin lands and the diversity of its peoples. In Don Segundo Sombra, published in 1926,  Ricardo Guiraldes (1886–1927) celebrated the life of the ideal gaucho (cowboy), defining Argentina's  hope and strength through the enlightened management of its fertile earth. Likewise, in Dona  Barbara, Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) wrote in a similar vein about his native Venezuela. Other  authors pursued the theme of solitude and detachment, a product of the region's physical separation  from the rest of the world. Latin American artists followed their literary counterparts in joining the  Modernist movement in Europe, yet they too were eager to promote the emergence of a new  regional and national essence. In Mexico, where the government provided financial support for  painting murals on public buildings, the artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) began to produce a  monumental style of mural art that served two purposes: to illustrate the national past by portraying  Aztec legends and folk customs and to popularize a political message in favor of realizing the social  goals of the Mexican Revolution. His wife, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), incorporated Surrealist whimsy  in her own paintings, many of which were portraits of herself and her family. Struggle for the Banner.  Like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) decorated public buildings with large murals  that celebrated the Mexican Revolution and the workers' and peasants' struggle for freedom.  Beginning in the 1930s, Siqueiros expressed sympathy for the exploited and downtrodden peoples of  Mexico in dramatic frescoes such as this one. He painted similar murals in Uruguay, Argentina, and  Brazil and was once expelled from the United States, where his political art and views were  considered too radical. CONCLUSION THE TURMOIL BROUGHT ABOUT by World War I not only  resulted in the destruction of several of the major Western empires and a redrawing of the map of  Europe but also opened the door to political and social upheavals elsewhere in the world. In the  Middle East, the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of the secular republic of  Turkey and several other new states carved out of the carcass of the old empire. Other parts of Asia  also witnessed the rise of movements for national independence. In India, Gandhi and his campaign  of civil disobedience played a crucial role in his country's bid to be free of British rule. China waged  its own dramatic struggle to establish a modern nation as two dynamic political organizations—the  Nationalists and the Communists—competed for legitimacy as the rightful heirs of the old order.  Japan continued to follow its own path to modernization, which, although successful from an  economic point of view, took a menacing turn during the 1930s. The nations of Latin America faced  their own economic problems because of their dependence on exports. Increasing U.S. investments  in Latin America contributed to growing hostility against the powerful neighbor to the north. The  Great Depression forced the region to begin developing new industries, but it also led to the rise of  authoritarian governments, some of them modeled after the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.  By demolishing the remnants of their old civilization on the battlefields of World War I, Europeans  had inadvertently encouraged the subject peoples of their vast colonial empires to begin their own 

movements for national independence. The process was by no means completed in the two  decades following the Treaty of Versailles, but the bonds of imperial rule had been severely strained.  Once Europeans began to weaken themselves in the even more destructive conflict of World War II,  the hopes of colonial peoples for national independence and freedom could at last be realized. It is  to that devastating world conflict that we now turn.