The Road to War

Abstract

During the first half of 1949, the Manchester Guardian told its readers that the Communist success in China was ‘speeding up all the revolutionary movements in Asia’. Changes were rapidly taking place and it was now ‘a race between the West and the Communists to see who will have most hand in shaping them’. The Sunday Observer argued that a Communist victory in China would be a blow similar to that struck by the Japanese in 1941–2 and was astonished by the lack of a Western response, compared to the reaction after the Czechoslovakian coup in February 1948. As with the war against Japan, the Observer noted that events in the Far East were seen as far off local events that meant little to the ‘man in the street’. But the Cold War was no less global than the Second World War, especially when Dutch and French armies were tied up in Southeast Asia draining the military strength of Western Europe. Both newspapers argued that it was therefore of paramount importance to put an end to the struggles for independence in Indonesia and French Indo-China. The Manchester Guardian claimed that the French and the Dutch, with their ‘out-of-date [colonial] policies’, were ruining the whole cause of the West in the Far East. It was for Britain, the United States, Australia and India to produce a social and economic plan for Southeast Asia. Collaboration was vital.1 KeywordsChinese Communist PartyPeace TreatyNorth Atlantic Treaty OrganBritish CommunityBritish PolicyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.