1. Southeast Asia: colonialism and nationalism
Feb. 12, 2015

2. Review
Which southeast Asian nations did not have the shape they have today until they were colonies?
Which country colonized Indonesia?
Which country colonized Burma?
Which country colonized Indochina?
Which country colonized Malaya?
Where do we find nationalism in Southeast Asia in the 19th century?

3. Colonial Southeast Asia

4. the Philippines
The US made an agreement with the landowning elite of the Philippines to allow them a voice in running the Philippines if they would keep the majority of the population quiet and cooperative. The elite agreed and were gradually granted a limited degree of local self-rule. In 1933 the US promised total independence for the Philippines on July 4, 1946, making it the first colony in Asia to be promised independence.
The US promoted mass education. (p. 131) A national language (Tagalog) was selected and became known later as Filipino.
However, since the US worked with the landowning elite of the Philippines, it did not promote industrialization there.
Some Filipinos expressed their resentment at Spanish control of the Catholic Church there by establishing independent churches, such as the Iglesia ni Christo, which has a church in in Burnaby.

5. Indonesia
The Dutch began allowing a few of the local people to obtain a modern education. The Dutch showed little concern for mass education or industrialization. It is out of that educated elite that the first nationalists appeared.
That group includes the daughter of a Javanese aristocrat, Kartini, who promoted modern education for women. (p )
In the last decades of colonial rule, a Muslim League and an Indonesian Communist Party appeared, but the lead in the nationalist movement was taken by Sukarno’s Indonesian Nationalist Party.
A national language (Bahasa Indonesian) was selected.

6. Other Malays under Colonialism
The British controlled Malaya through a federation of sultanates and directly controlled trading ports. The British were never able to create a truly national government in Malaya. Nor were the Malays, Chinese, and South Asian there able to coalesce into one national community.
A Communist Party was established in colonial Malaya, but it was primarily for Chinese. Very few Malays or South Asian joined.
Very little done in the way of promoting education or industrialization in British colonies.

7. Burma (Myanmar)
For the Burmese, just as with the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Buddhism became a vehicle for asserting a distinctive national identity. (The Young Men’s Buddhist Association was an important nationalist organization, starting in 1906.)
Burmese nationalism also manifested itself through anti-Indian riots in the 1930s (and some anti-Chinese feeling).
Educated Burmese formed a nationalist group in which they addressed themselves as “master,” a term the British had tried to reserve for themselves.
In 1930 a Buddhist monk led a rebellion against the British and against landlords, many of whom were immigrants from India. (p. 126) This was inspired by the global depression.

8. Siam (Thailand from 1939)
Not a colony, but nationalism arose anyway after 1900.
Was able to escape from the restrictions of unequal treaties after World War I. (It had joined the winning side.)
The modernizing Thai government used Buddhism to unify the country, creating a national Buddhist hierarchy. It also build modern schools to teach Thai identity. That eventually (in the 20th century) created mass nationalism in Siam.
The military seized control of the country in 1932 and created a constitutional monarchy. Why did the army do that? Often in a modernizing society, the military is the best organized, best equipped, most modern, and most nationalistic institution.

9. Indochina
The French showed little concern for mass education or industrialization.
Vietnamese nationalists formed a Vietnamese Nationalist Party modeled after the Guomindang (KMT) in China. It was crushed when it rose up in revolt in 1930.
Then a new nationalist party arose: the Indochinese Communist Party, led by Ho Chi Minh. (Why did he find Communist appealing?)
There was also religious resistance to the French: a new Buddhist denomination emerged---Hoa Hao
and a new Vietnamese religion-Cao Dai.(p. 126)

10. What is Communism?
We will define in in more detail later, but for now let us just say that it called for communal ownership of the means of production, ending the inequality between colonizers and colonized, between landlord and tenant, and between capitalist and worker.
It appealed to those who were moved by the suffering of peasants and workers in the early modern era (peasants and workers had to accept less pay than the value of what they produced so that a surplus could be accumulated to pay for industrialization). It also appealed to some nationalists because, first of all, it condemned colonialism and imperialism and it also claimed to offer a scientific methodology which would allow less-developed nations to skip the capitalist stage of development and move immediately into the modern advanced stage of socialism.     The appeal of Communism was enhanced by organizational and financial support from the Soviet Union for anti-imperialist nationalist movements. 

11. Communism and conflicts of interest
We haven’t defined Fascism and Democracy yet, but we will before too long. For now, let’s point out that those three political ideologies have different ways of dealing with conflicts of interest.
Communism recognizes that there are conflicts of interests between capitalists and workers and between landlords and peasants. It tries to end such conflicts by siding with the majority (workers and peasants) and eliminating those they are in conflict with (capitalists and landlords). This usually requires a violent revolution. (The non-violent approach to resolving such class conflicts is usually called socialism.)

12. Changes under Colonialism
New nations where none existed before (Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaya)
shattered village isolation by introducing commercial agriculture. Rubber in Malaya and Vietnam, tin mining in Malaya, sugar and coffee in Indonesia.(pp )
Promoted a linguistic unity where, in some cases, it had not existed before.
Stimulated nationalism
Created greater ethnic diversity, with millions of Chinese and South Asians moving to Southeast Asia.

13. overseas Chinese
At first, the various Chinese communities didn’t think of themselves as Chinese as much as they thought of themselves as coming from a particular village speaking a particular dialect. (Most of them were illiterate.)
However, the rise of nationalism in China stimulated Chinese overseas to think of themselves as Chinese.
Mandarin-language schools and Chinese religious institutions helped create a pan-Chinese identity
Chinese assimilated better in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand than they did in Indonesia and Malaysia (probably because of the conflict between their polytheism and the monotheism of Islam. In the Philippines, they converted to Catholicism and assimilated ).

14. Islam and ethnic minorities
South Asians tended to settle in British colonies, such as Singapore Malaya, and Burma. They tended to be Hindus from the south rather than Muslims.
Chinese settled all over Southeast Asia, as they had been doing for centuries, only now it was much larger numbers of Chinese immigrants.
In Malaya and Indonesia, Chinese had difficult assimilating and remained a people apart even after several generations.
In non-Islamic societies, such as Thailand, the Philippines and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Chinese often intermarried with the local people. In fact, people of mixed Chinese and non-Chinese heritage often had the greatest economic and social success in those societies.

15. Nationalism and Collaboration
Collaboration is a pejorative term for cooperation with an occupying power by members of the occupied people.
Colonial powers could not have governed the large populations they governed without the help of “collaborators.” They used the help of local people to modernize the countries they colonized. By the early 20th century, that might mean introducing modern schools, modern public health facilities, modern industry, etc.
Why did people collaborate? Sometimes they felt they had to choose between modernization (better schools, better public health facilities, etc) and their own traditional governing elite, who had been predatory.