Topic Essay Question on East Asia 3 pages

Southeast Asia If I asked you to point to one geographical realm that suffered most from the Western imperialism, which would you choose? I am probably right to assume that most of you would say Africa. That is not a bad answer. Certainly Africa was at one point colonized and

thoroughly exploited by the Western imperialists. However, Southeast Asia has a significant chance to claim that position. Indeed, each and every one of Southeast Asian countries were victimized by the Western powers until the second half of the 20th century. Let us turn to de Blij’s map titled “Colonial Spheres in Southeast Asia.” As shown here, Myanmar (Burma), Malaysia, and Singapore were British colonies. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were French colonies. Down south, that large chain of islands, the Indonesian archipelago was a Dutch (the Netherlands) possession. Towards the west, we come to the Philippines, which de Blij identifies as Spanish sphere. This is misleading. It was a Spanish colony before 1898 but became a U.S. colony after America's victory in the Spanish-American War. The only country that I have not

mentioned here is Thailand. Well, it was not a formal colony but a protectorate of Great Britain. So, there it is; a geographical realm that was entirely controlled and exploited by the western powers. Do you now agree that Southeast Asia could share with Africa the painful title of the most severely exploited victim of Western imperialism? Southeast Asia’s attractiveness to the Western imperialist power stemmed from agricultural and mineral resources. Southeast Asia is well known for high level of moisture and temperature, which allows plentiful harvests of many different kinds of crops. Also, the region has significant deposits of precious metals, natural gas, and crude oil. ((Pictures in this lecture show richness in agriculture and natural resource in Southeast Asia. The Mekong Delta, especially, is known for its diverse agricultural products. This is the reason why Southeast Asian cuisine is famous for use of wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables.) Let me sidetrack here a bit and give you an example of the legacies of the Western imperialism both in Southeast Asia and Africa. The tallest mountain in Myanmar is called “Mount Victoria” after Queen Victory of Great Britain. The largest lake in Africa is named “Lake Victoria.” Let us think. Don’t you think there must be a name given to this mountain and lake by the people of that land many centuries ago? The fact that modern maps still use these western names given by the colonizers forces us to confront the legacies of the Western imperialism that are still with us.

In any event, our task as geographers is not to rank the victims of Western imperialism by the degree to which they were exploited. Rather, we have to analyze the reasons behind this historical development. (The picture here is of undersea oil drilling in Vietnam.) You know I am forever in search of titles for my future (or should I say imaginary) textbook on world geography. I found a good one for Southeast Asia and want to know how you feel: “Blight of Natural Bounties.” In other words, Southeast Asia suffered because of its rich natural endowments. The following is the list of resources that Western imperialists extracted from Southeast Asia: crude oil, rubber, tin, hemp, sugar, palm oil, tea and tobacco. I do not have to elaborate how important and lucrative these resources are. For example, is it really difficult to imagine the value of having cheap and plentiful source of natural rubber in an age when there was no synthetic rubber? The French colonialists were notorious for their "disciplining" and exploitation of the Vietnamese who worked on their rubber plantations. It would be silly of me to remind you of the value of crude oil to industrialization. Southeast Asia also produces a variety of spices that enhances our culinary enjoyment. The Dutch profited so much from trade in spices produced in Indonesia, which was called “spice islands,” the Netherlands enjoyed a “Golden Age” of commerce. (By the way, Indonesia is the largest country in the region with population over 200 million. Also it is the largest Muslim country in the world.) The primary form of colonial exploitation of the region by European powers was commercial agriculture. Europeans developed

large-scale corporate plantations that produced crops that were intended as raw materials for the controlling countries, which used the proceeds to finance their colonial administration. It was not only the European-owned plantations that produced cash crops. The Western colonial powers frequently forced the peasant farmers to dedicate a portion of their traditional paddy land to the cultivation of export crops. Because of the emphasis on cash crops, Southeast Asian agriculture could not produce enough grain to feed its large population. Eventually, expansion of cash crop production, combined with population growth, forced Southeast Asia to import a vast quantity of foodstuff. Talk about irony. A region that for centuries had enjoyed food sufficiency could not fee itself because of Western imperialism. Western imperialists’ emphasis on cash crop led to another form of

exploitation of the local population. Let me quote from a geography textbook: “Using local labor, the British in Burma and the French in Indochina purposefully drained much of the Irrawady and Mekong deltas, respectively, for the purpose of creating ‘rice bowls’ for Southeast Asia.” In other words, the Western imperialism, relying on the cheap local labor, altered the environment to grow more crops for export.

Southeast Asia suffers from other legacies of Western colonialism. One of them is disparity in the level of development between the core and periphery. The regions that attracted colonial commercial agriculture were well developed in terms of infrastructure, public administration, and commerce. However, the periphery remained poor and undeveloped. Such disparities have caused population explosions in urban-core areas in Southeast Asia. Yet its rural-periphery areas remain horrendously backward. For example, Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, is an exploding metropolis. But Thailand's rural countryside is notorious for its poverty and backwardness. To escape the drudgery of rural life, young girls from the countryside move to urban centers such as Bangkok where they find themselves in the notorious Thai sex trade that draws a large number of foreign visitors to the region (right). With this background in mind, we must now analyze, probably, one of the most tragic events in Southeast Asia, as well as America's past, the Vietnam War. America’s intervention in Indochina began in the 1950s when it provided material assistance to France that tried to hold onto its Southeast Asian colonies. In 1954, France was defeated by the Vietnamese nationalist guerrilla forces led by Ho Chi Minh and forced to leave Vietnam. With the departure of France, Vietnam was divided into North and South Vietnam. This is when the U.S. decided to intervene more directly in the Vietnamese conflict. The U.S. allies with the south where

communist guerillas (Viet Cong) were trying to topple the government of South Vietnam. In 1965, the U.S. essentially took over the war against the Communist insurgents who were supported by North Vietnam. In 1968, the U.S. military commitment in South Vietnam climbed to 500,000. In total, the U.S. committed 3 million soldiers throughout the war years. Of these, 58,000 would not come home. More than 100,000 were wounded. On the Vietnamese side, millions were killed throughout the American intervention that lasted until 1975. The U.S. reliance on air power in the Vietnam War contributed to rise in the civilian casualties. Why was South Vietnam, smaller than half of California, so important that it had to remain on the side of the West at all cost? What

explains this obsession to hold onto South Vietnam as a pro-Western capitalist country therefore willingness to fight the Communist guerrillas? The rationale is known as the Domino Theory. This theory, which is well explained in de Blij, states that if South Vietnam fell victim to the communism, then, the rest of Southeast Asia would fallen by the same force.

I want to ask you this. Is there a correlation between the America’s obsession with the Domino Theory and Southeast Asia’s colonial past? It is rather absurd to be deny the fact that communism offered one possible way out of imperialistic exploitation that made Southeast Asians' lives miserable for centuries. Southeast Asia was like a time bomb to ready to explode because of the Western imperialism and its legacies. A successful Communist revolution would have caused a chain reaction of explosions, thought American policy makers. We now know

that not every victim of imperialism wanted to embrace Communism. Therefore, the Domino Theory turned out to be an unreasonable and unreasonable fear on the part of the U.S.

However, because of this obsession of halting the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, unspeakable suffering had to be inflicted on the Vietnamese as well as on the American society. It is only fair to mention that the westerners were not the only people who sought to dominate Southeast Asia. Historically, and up until the 19th century, China held political and cultural sway in this region. (In this paragraph, you will find one the most poignant images of the Vietnam War. Children are running away from their village struck with napalm bombs.)

Another point that I would like to raise is the legacies of America’s intervention in the Vietnam War. During and after the war, because of the overwhelming needs to secure the support of the American policies by other Southeast Asian countries, Washington groomed and backed anti-Communist right-wing leaders in the region such as Marcos in the Philippines and Sukarno of Indonesia. Both leaders were dictators that pilfered the government funds to bankruptcy. In Cambodia, (which was used by the Communists as infiltration route and sanctuary) the U.S. backed a military dictator (Lon Nol) friendly to America who toppled the royal authority and destabilize that nation. After the end of the Vietnam War and American withdrawal, the U.S.-backed military government was overran by a radical Communists who called themselves Khmer Rouge. Under the rule of Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, as many as two million out of eight million Cambodians were killed for such an absurd reason as wearing a pair of eye glasses, which the Khmer Rouge equated with being a non-laboring parasitic intellectual. This historical tragedy is also popularly known as the "Killing Fields" after the movie of the same name. (The picture to the left shows U.S. aircraft spraying Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War to kill plant life. Agent Orange turned out to be highly carcinogenic to humans.)

Thus far I have talked about the past. What about the present and future of Southeast Asian countries? Looking into our developmental data, Southeast Asian countries are not doing very well. The GNP per capita of these countries are surprisingly low: What is Vietnam's GNP per capita? $350. The lowest is Cambodia's $260. The Philippines’ GNP per capita is $1,050. An exception to

the region's relative underdevelopment is Singapore, which is a city state with population of little over 4 million. A main entrepột of Southeast Asia, Singapore (picture) is most well developed and organized society in the region with GNP per capita of $30,170. Singapore, however, has the reputation of being too obsessive with maintaining clean and orderly.

Such a low level of economic development engenders many social and environmental problems. For example, in Thailand, whose GNP per capita is $2,160, has the infamous sex-tour industry has been developed to attract foreign tourist, therefore, hard currency. Another problem is environmental destruction caused by excessive logging and shifting cultivation, or slash and burn farming. “The counties with greatest losses of tropical forests between 1970 and 1990 were Vietnam, whose proportion of land covered by forests declined from 55 to 17 percent; the Philippines, where the drop was from 50 to 22 percent; and Thailand, where forests declined from 50 to 24 percent of the land area.” As I have already mentioned, poverty, especially in the rural areas forces people to move to urban areas that are not equipped to deal with rapid influxes of people. It is agreed among geographers that

the city of Bangkok has “almost intolerable levels of air pollution.” Just like all of the geographical realms that we have visited, the ultimate question is how to utilize and benefit from physiographical endowments without destroying them. That is the key to the well-being of the people. There are some promising signs of a better future for the people of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian countries in general offer cheap and disciplined labor force for foreign industrial manufacturers. Therefore, region has been successful in attracting electronic goods and computer manufacturers from countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan who have setup assembly lines there. Southeast Asia’s access to the Pacific Ocean, which means cheaper transportation cost, is a significant advantage. In addition, the rising local middle class provides a boost to economic development. One good example is Thailand, where nearly three quarters of its export is of manufactured goods. Southeast Asia still contains a large quantity of natural resources, including the vast oil deposits in the South China Sea, whose exploration could spur economic development in the region. (To the right is what Malaysia claims as the world's tallest building.) Yet, there are some serious problems as well. One of the fundamental weaknesses is the region's overwhelming dependence on the foreign capital and companies. When foreigners slowdown or halt their investments or lending to the region, the region immediately suffers economic crises (or collapse is a better word) as happened in the late 1990s.

Before I end this lecture, let me bring up one interesting legacy of the Western imperialism in Southeast Asia. The European imperialists’ placed Chinese immigrants to the region, who were a minority, in the position of responsibility, political and commercial. In doing so, they transformed the Chinese minority into the elite of the society. These overseas Chinese in turn helped the Europeans to administer their colonies. Even today, the overseas Chinese in the region -- more than 30 million -- enjoy disproportionate amount of economic and political power. In Indonesia the overseas Chinese that is only two percent of the population control roughly half of the country's total private asset. As de Blij warns "success

entails risks." Indeed, resentment against Chinese prosperity and business practices led to discriminatory legislation in Malaysia. When Indonesia's economy collapsed in 1998, “police stood by as gangs looted, burned, murdered, and raped at will in Chinese commercial districts.” In Vietnam, in the 1980s, the communist regime expelled tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese as boat people for their capitalist tendencies. (The picture above shows angry Indonesians protesting against economic predominance of the overseas Chinese in Indonesia.)

Recently, Indonesia has been experiencing rise of Islamic militancy. Why? You got it. Many believe that Western imperialism (in the form of American cultural and financial influence) still affect their lives.

Despite the challenges, Southeast Asia’s future is not bright due to the fact that region still offers cheap labor, abundant resources, and a population that seeks to move beyond its painful past. In other words, Southeast Asians are trying to duplicate many a Singapore (right), which represents the possibility of modernity and prosperity as well as ethnic harmony. Let us now move to South Asia.