Why Asia is not a sideshow

In Europe the Cold War stayed cold. In Asia it was hot, repeatedly, and on an enormous scale.

• Both major shooting wars fought by the superpowers — Korea and Vietnam — were in Asia. So were the wars in Cambodia and Afghanistan.
• The Cold War in Asia was tangled up with decolonisation and nationalism. The Vietnamese fought the Japanese, then the French, then the Americans, then the Chinese. Reading that solely as a superpower contest is a category error.
• And the Asian Cold War produced the Sino-Soviet split — the fracture that turned a bipolar contest into a triangle, and eventually let the United States play one communist power against the other.

The analytical habit to build now: for every conflict, ask who wanted what — Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and the local actors. Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were not puppets. Treating them as such is the commonest weakness in essays on this unit.

China turns red

The single most consequential event in the Asian Cold War happened without a superpower firing a shot.

• Civil war (1946–49): Mao's Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists despite massive American aid to the latter — a defeat rooted in Nationalist corruption, hyperinflation, and the CCP's land reform and rural organisation.
• 1 October 1949: the People's Republic of China was proclaimed. Chiang withdrew to Taiwan. In the United States the question 'who lost China?' poisoned domestic politics and fed McCarthyism.
• February 1950: the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship — an alliance, though Mao found Stalin's terms grudging and humiliating. The seeds of the later split were planted in the negotiation itself.
• Japan meanwhile was being rebuilt by the American occupation as an anti-communist bulwark: a new constitution, land reform, and — after 1949 — a 'reverse course' that rehabilitated conservatives and industry. The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and the US–Japan Security Treaty made Japan the anchor of American power in the Pacific.

Why the Nationalists lost

The first hot war of the Cold War

Korea, divided at the 38th parallel in 1945, became the first test of containment by force.

• 25 June 1950: North Korea invaded the South. Kim Il Sung had pressed Stalin repeatedly for permission, and Stalin approved only after China had gone communist and the USSR had tested an atomic bomb. Note the direction of causation: the local actor drove it.
• UN intervention was possible only because the Soviet delegate was boycotting the Security Council. MacArthur's landing at Inchon (September 1950) reversed the war — and then the decision to cross the 38th parallel and drive to the Yalu brought China into the war in October–November 1950, with hundreds of thousands of troops.
• Stalemate along roughly the original line; MacArthur was dismissed in 1951 for publicly demanding escalation; the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. There has never been a peace treaty.

The consequences ran everywhere: American defence spending roughly tripled; NATO was militarised; Japan's economy was rebuilt on war orders; the US committed to defending Taiwan; and Sino-American hostility was locked in for twenty years. Korea is where the Cold War became global and militarised.

Which theatre?

Tap an event, then the Asian theatre it belongs to.

From Dien Bien Phu to the fall of Saigon

The American war in Vietnam is best understood as the third war in a long anti-colonial struggle.

• The French war ended in catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu (May 1954). The Geneva Accords (July 1954) temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel and promised elections in 1956. They were never held — because, as American officials privately conceded, Ho Chi Minh would have won them.
• American escalation: support for Ngo Dinh Diem; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 1964), obtained on a contested account of an attack on US destroyers; sustained bombing and the commitment of ground troops from 1965, rising to over half a million.
• The Tet Offensive (January 1968) was a military defeat for the Viet Cong and a political catastrophe for Washington: it destroyed the credibility of official claims that the war was being won. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in March 1968.
• Withdrawal: Vietnamisation under Nixon; the widening of the war into Cambodia (1970); the Paris Peace Accords (January 1973); and the fall of Saigon in April 1975.
• Cambodia: the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975 and murdered a large proportion of the Cambodian population. They were driven out in 1979 — by communist Vietnam, which was then attacked by communist China in the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979).

Read that last bullet again. Communist Vietnam invaded communist Cambodia and was attacked by communist China. Any model of a monolithic communist bloc dies here — and saying so is a powerful line in an essay.

The meaning of Tet

When the communist bloc broke

The Sino-Soviet split is the hinge of the whole unit.

• Causes: ideological rivalry after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin (1956) and his advocacy of peaceful coexistence, which Mao read as betrayal; Soviet refusal to back China fully over Taiwan; disputes over aid and nuclear technology; and Mao's determination to lead the world revolution himself.
• Rupture: Soviet advisers and blueprints were withdrawn in 1960. By 1969 Soviet and Chinese troops were shooting at each other on the Ussuri River, and Moscow considered a nuclear strike on Chinese facilities.
• The triangle: Nixon and Kissinger exploited the split brilliantly. Nixon visited China in February 1972 — an astonishing reversal for a career anti-communist — and the resulting triangular diplomacy gave Washington leverage over Moscow that it had not had in twenty years.
• Consequences in Asia: China's turn towards the West, its assault on Vietnam in 1979, and its slow opening under Deng Xiaoping from 1978.

Interpretation: the split is the strongest evidence against the orthodox Cold War model of a directed, monolithic communist conspiracy. It is also the strongest evidence for the new Cold War history of Chen Jian and Odd Arne Westad: communist states pursued national and ideological interests of their own, and the Cold War in Asia was shaped as much in Beijing, Hanoi and Pyongyang as in Washington or Moscow.

How the Cold War ended in Asia

It did not end tidily, and it did not end the same way it ended in Europe.

• Afghanistan: the Soviet invasion of December 1979 began a decade-long war against US- and Pakistani-backed mujahideen. Withdrawal was completed in 1989 — a strategic and financial disaster that contributed materially to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• China: Deng's economic reforms produced growth without political liberalisation. The suppression of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square (June 1989) was the decisive proof — and the sharpest possible contrast with Eastern Europe in the same year.
• Normalisation: Gorbachev visited Beijing in 1989, ending the Sino-Soviet split. The USSR dissolved in December 1991. The Cambodian conflict was settled by the Paris agreements (1991).
• What survived: a divided Korea, a communist China and a communist Vietnam. In Asia the Cold War's structures outlived the Cold War — which is precisely why the unit ends in 1993 rather than 1989.

The comparative judgement: in Europe, 1989 swept communism away. In Asia, the communist regimes that reformed economically while refusing to reform politically survived. That contrast is the best possible conclusion to an essay on the end of the Cold War in Asia.

Build the Asian Cold War spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.

Placing an interpretation

The non-British period study

OCR Unit Group 2: 1 hour, 30 marks, 15% of the A-level — assessed by essay. No sources; your knowledge and your argument only.

• Refuse superpower tunnel vision. The examiner has read a hundred essays in which Asians are scenery. Foreground Mao, Kim, Ho, Deng and Pol Pot as decision-makers with their own aims — the evidence supports it, and almost nobody does it.
• Connect the theatres. Korea explains the American commitment to Vietnam; the Sino-Soviet split explains Nixon in China; Afghanistan explains part of the Soviet collapse. Causal chains across the unit are what lift an essay into the top band.
• Be precise. Dates, treaties, numbers of troops where you actually know them. Vagueness is fatal in a one-hour essay paper.

Why Nixon went to China

The other American project in Asia

Japan is the strand students skip — and it is the American Cold War's greatest success in Asia.

• The occupation (1945–52) under MacArthur imposed a new constitution (1947), including the famous Article 9 renouncing war; land reform destroyed the landlord class; and the zaibatsu were, briefly, targeted for break-up.
• The 'reverse course': after the communist victory in China and the outbreak of the Korean War, American policy switched from reform to reconstruction. Purged conservatives returned; the left was suppressed; industry was rebuilt on Korean War procurement orders.
• Anchoring: the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951) restored Japanese sovereignty, and the US–Japan Security Treaty kept American bases. Japan became the unsinkable base of American power in the Pacific — and, under the American security umbrella, was free to pour its resources into economic growth.

The comparison that scores: in Japan the United States built a prosperous, stable, allied democracy. In Vietnam it failed catastrophically. Explaining why — an intact state and bureaucracy, no anti-colonial war to fight, a defeated population, and no communist alternative with nationalist credentials — is one of the best essays available in this unit.

Japan versus Vietnam

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of OCR's Cold War in Asia unit — and a way of arguing about it that most candidates never find. Press Finish to see your score.