Fighting for Health: Medicine in Cold War Southeast Asia, edited by Michele Thompson, Kathryn Sweet, and Michitake Aso

Whereas scholars have debated the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia – when it started and how it spread – and its key defining moments, less attention has been paid to its impact and legacy on the various countries in the region, and on the region itself – or to its intrinsic texture in relation to other theatres of conflict.1 To what extent were the changes that Southeast Asia underwent during the Cold War unique to the temper of its regional milieu and a direct or indirect result of the conflict itself as opposed to being a continuation of indigenous processes set in motion earlier? Indeed, indigenous actors had been depicted as little more than ‘pawns’ or ‘victims’ of the superpowers during the Cold War,2 and an examination of the latter’s impact was considered largely within the confines of the nation-state, with less discussion of its bearing on intra-regional linkages, the relations between Southeast Asian countries, and its contributions to regional organization and Southeast Asian regionalism. Research on the Cold War in Southeast Asia has also tended to focus on the conflict in Indochina, particularly Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Laos and Cambodia, to the ‘relative scholarly neglect of nearly all parts of the region outside Indochina’.3 The southernmost states in the region have not received as much attention. This volume of papers from the inaugural Nicholas Tarling conference on Southeast Asian studies held in Singapore in November 2009 seeks to contribute to the historiography of the Cold War in Southeast Asia by examining not only how the conflict shaped the milieu in which national and regional change unfolded but also how the context influenced the course and tenor of the Cold War in the region, and the usefulness or limitations of using the Cold War as an interpretative framework for understanding change in Southeast Asia. Taken together the papers showed that the Cold War had a varied but notable impact on the countries in Southeast Asia – not primarily, as was commonly presumed, on only the mainland countries belonging to what the British Foreign Office called the ‘upper arc’, especially Indochina, but also on those situated on its maritime ‘lower arc’ – and showed clearly that what happened in the north affected what happened in the south.4

The questions of how and when the Cold War manifested itself in Southeast Asia are here examined through the perceptions of Britain and Australia to regional and global events from 1945 to 1950. Both had major stakes in the eventual results of the local contentions in Southeast Asia, as well as in the global effects of great power rivalry. Yet even for these powers, determining when they believed the Cold War came to Southeast Asia is dependent on the definition adopted. By 1946, there was already recognition of entrenched ideological conflict in Southeast Asia, and that this threatened Western interests. In 1947, there was recognition of connections between the local communist parties and the ‘global designs’ of the Soviet Union. In 1948, there was the outbreak of armed violence in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, though there was no evidence of direct Soviet involvement in these. Ultimately, however, it was the establishment of the PRC in 1949 (as a major regional communist power), in tandem with plans by non-communist states to coordinate policy against communism, which was seen as marking the arrival of fully-fledged Cold War in Southeast Asia.

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia are most often located in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the late 1940s. Historians sometimes trace its origins to Japan's expansionist phase in the 1930s, which accelerated the decline of the European and American colonial order in this part of Asia. However, the necessity of the fight against communism appeared very clearly in the minds of the leaders of the major colonial powers well before the 1930s. Focused on the case of Siam, this article aims to show that the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia dated back to as early as the 1920s with the emergence of international cooperation in the fight against communism and the Thai elite's manipulation of imperialist powers to further their own political agenda and support their dominance in the domestic political arena. The Cold War in Southeast Asia was not only about the postwar fight against the spread of communism, but also closely intertwined with the decolonisation and nation-building efforts of every country in the region — including of the so-called un-colonised Thailand.

Introduction Southeast Asia was a significantly important area of conflict in the extension of the Cold War1 outside Europe in the early post-Second World War period. These proxy confrontations had a considerable impact in shaping the process of decolonization and, invariably, state-formation in the region. Most research on the Cold War in Southeast Asia in recent years has, however, tended to focus on the conflict in Indochina, especially Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Cambodia and Laos. The southernmost states in Southeast Asia have not received adequate attention in this context. The Federation of Malaya and, later, the Federation of Malaysia, for example, have not been given sufficient attention in the context of the Cold War and the extent to which these related developments have shaped the modern contours of the emerging nation-state. This essay examines the impact and influence of the Cold War on two formative stages in the modern history of Malaysia. The first part of the essay examines the impact of the Cold War in the context of the decolonization in Malaya in the 1950s. The second, examines the impact of the Cold War on the formation of the broader federation incorporating Singapore, North Borneo (Sabah), Sarawak and Brunei: a project that was called ‘Greater Malaysia’ in the early 1960s. This essay argues that developments related to the Cold War in Southeast Asia considerably shaped the politics of Malaya’s independence in the 1950s and the creation of the larger Federation of Malaysia in 1963.

Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia draws on newly available archival documentation from both Western and Asian countries to explore decolonization, the Cold War, and the establishment of a new international order in post-World War II Southeast Asia. Major historical forces intersected here-of power, politics, economics, and culture-on trajectories East to West, North to South, across the South itself, and along less defined tracks. Especially important, democratic-communist competitions sought the loyalties of Southeast Asian nationalists, even as some colonial powers sought to resume their prewar dominance. These intersections are the focus of the contributions to this book, which use new sources and approaches to examine some of the most important historical trajectories of the twentieth century in Burma, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a number of other countries.

Three important films reveal changing American attitudes toward the Cold War in Southeast Asia in the years of growing U.S. involvement there: Joseph Mankiewicz's The Quiet American (1958), George Englund's The Ugly American (1963), and John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968). All three feature idealistic American heroes fighting communism in Vietnam – and, in the later two films, fighting American ignorance and apathy as well. Using some two dozen reviews in a wide range of periodicals, including daily newspapers outside of New York and Los Angeles, this article finds a growing skepticism about the mythology of the Cold War in Vietnam. Critics in 1958 supported the mission of fighting communism and the methods outlined in the film, but knew little about Vietnam. In 1963, critics were more pessimistic about America's methods and prospects in Vietnam but still overwhelmingly supported the mission. By 1968, a collapse of America's Cold War consensus became obvious as critics panned The Green Berets, a remarkable box-office success, deriding the filmmaking but also rejecting the film's ideology and even questioning the struggle against communism. We thus see a fundamental erosion of American belief in its own Cold War mythology just as the country was venturing deeper into war in Southeast Asia.

This chapter examines the history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. It explains that the onset of the Cold War coincided with nationalist struggles and decolonization, and explains why Southeast Asians should appreciate that the Cold War is a historical event which has significantly affected the development of their countries, particularly in terms of the role of the Cold War in shaping the political development of the nation-states and interstate relations in the region, and the growing interest in rewriting the history of the Cold War.

The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia’s Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia’s leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.

The rise of South East Asia as a region is inextricably linked to the birth of the Cold War. In no other region did the Cold War feel quite so ‘hot’. After decolonization, South East Asian nation-states forming new national identities each found allegiances with one or other of the two Cold War powers: whilst on one hand, nationalist-communist parties fuelled by rejectionist fervour against previous European colonial powers were supported by the 'progressive' Soviet philosophy and politics, on the other, pro-democratic capitalist states had their national economic and social development engineered by the CIA and implemented under the guise of American philanthropy. This paper looks at the concomitant rise of the ostensible search for national culture and the accretion of cosmopolitan and global cultural practices in Cold War South East Asia. Borrowing Pascale Casanova’s concept of the ‘world republic of letters’ and extending this to the practice of theatre and dance in the period of the Cold War, we propose a theoretical logic as to how theatre and dance artists bestrode the concomitant rise of national culture-building and of a growing ‘world dance space’. We will place particular focus on the dance and theatre scene in the Philippines from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The term “overseas Chinese” refers to people who left the Qing Empire (and later on, the Republic of China or ROC) for a better life in Southeast Asia. Some of them arrived in Southeast Asia as merchants. They were either involved in retail or wholesale trade, or importing and exporting goods between the Qing Empire/ROC and Southeast Asia. With the decolonization of Southeast Asia from the end of World War II in 1945, overseas Chinese commerce was targeted by nationalists because the merchants were seen to have been working together with the colonial authorities and to have enriched themselves at the expense of locals. New nationalist regimes in Southeast Asia introduced anti-Chinese legislation in order to reduce the overseas Chinese presence in economic activities. Chinese merchants were banned from certain trades and trade monopolies were broken down. Several Southeast Asian states also attempted to assimilate the overseas Chinese by forcing them to adopt local-sounding names. However, the overseas Chinese continued to be dominant in the economies of Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore. Malaysia introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which has an anti-Chinese agenda, in 1970. The decolonization process also occurred during the Cold War, and Chinese merchants sought to continue trade with China at a time when governments in Southeast Asia were suspicious of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Attempts by merchants from Malaya and Singapore to trade with the PRC in 1956 were considered to have failed, as the PRC had other political concerns. By the time Singapore had gained independence in 1965, the door to investment and trade with the PRC was shut, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia turned their backs on China by taking on citizenship in their countries of residence.

In Asia, and in Southeast Asia in particular, the Cold War was far from cold, witnessing the most deadly conflicts and political massacres of the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the clash of ideologies there did not follow a binary logic but included a third force, nationalism, which was rooted in the anticolonialist movements of the interwar years and played a significant role even in countries that decolonised peacefully after the end of the Second World War. The Cold War thus overlapped with the twin process of decolonisation and nation-building, which had its founding moment at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955, where the non-aligned camp, which advocated a neutral position vis-à-vis the two rival blocs, coalesced (one year ealier, the anticommunist Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had been established). Postcolonial aspirations to national progress that tied socioeconomic development to the civic and cultural elevation of the citizenry were widely shared among newly decolonised countries. By the mid-1960s, however, the utopian ‘Bandung Spirit’ had lost ground to Cold War realpolitik; intra-Asian and communal conflicts fomented by Cold War enmities (the Sino–Indian War of 1962, the Indo–Pakistani War of 1965, Indonesia's anticommunist purges of 1965–66) along with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the consequent exacerbation of regional divisions, belied governments’ earlier commitment to human rights, Third World solidarity and world peace. The authoritarian involution of several Asian countries that were often American allies, redoubled by the opening of their economies to multinational corporations, led many artists and intellectuals to embrace political activism. The conception of art as a revolutionary instrument in the service of the masses had been famously articulated by Mao Zedong at the Yan'an Forum in 1942. In China, Mao's prescriptions on art were sidelined, though never officially repudiated, only in the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the adoption of a socialist market economy, by acknowledging the necessity ‘to respect and guarantee the creativity of individuals’.

The end of the Pacific War in Southeast Asia exposed the war’s defining characteristic: that neither Imperial Japan nor the Western Allies ever resolved how to relate that struggle to Japan’s wider war with China. By the second half of 1944, the Japanese lost control of communications between Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. While they dominated Southeast Asia before December 1941, they saw the region through national policy silos rather than as a connected space. As a result, while the principal Allies involved – the United States, Britain, China, Australia, and the Netherlands – saw the region as vital to waging war against Japan, they all did so for different reasons. And by mid-1944, Allied grand strategy threatened to relegate Southeast Asia to a strategic backwater. The results, by October 1944, were striking. This chapter considers how the last phase of war in Southeast Asia affected both the end of the conflict overall and what came next. To do this, it will engage four themes: grand strategy, strategic geography, coalition politics and command decisions, and the final campaigns in Southeast Asia.

This essay examines how the history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia has shaped, and will likely continue to shape, the current Sino-US rivalry in the region. Expert commentary today typically focuses on the agendas and actions of the two big powers, the United States and China, which actually risks missing the bigger picture. During the Cold War, leaders of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) played a critical role in containing Chinese influence, shaping the terms of Sino-US competition and rapprochement, and deepening the US presence in Southeast Asia. The legacy of ASEAN’s foreign relations during and since the Cold War imposes constraints on Chinese regional ambitions today, which militates against the popular notion that Chinese hegemony in East and Southeast Asia is inevitable. This essay underscores that current analyses of the brewing crisis in and around the South China Sea must routinely look beyond the two superpowers to the under-appreciated agency of small- and middle-sized ASEAN actors who, in reality, are the ones who hold the fate of the region in their hands.

Here I react to an article published in Volume 53 of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion by Ian Barter and Zatkin‐Osburn. My principal disagreement with Barter and Zatkin‐Osburn concerns their operational and methodological critiques of my work. However, the exchange also speaks to larger questions of how to conceptualize and measure religious dimensions of armed conflicts. It also highlights the importance of methodological pluralism in the study of religion and conflict.

The relationship between Islam and war has been the focus of lively debates. While terrorism experts might find a holy war wherever they look, others deny the role of faith in motivating violence. While no conflict is entirely inspired by faith, nor is any conflict entirely without it, the degree of religious motivation matters a great deal. How does one gauge the religiosity of a given conflict? We identify three dominant approaches: citing scripture, citing militant leaders, and quantifying religious divisions. While each approach makes valuable contributions, none help us to understand the degree to which a given struggle is understood by Muslim communities to be sacred. Based on rural fieldwork in three Southeast Asian secessionist conflicts, this article provides a series of empirical indicators of religious conflict: the religious credentials of rebel leaders, recruitment networks, public discourse, and burial practices. Burial practices for fallen rebels provide especially novel insights into how conflicts are understood by local religious officials and Muslim communities, offering a new window into understanding religiosity as perceived by internal audiences.