Book Description
A comprehensive assessment of the contours of maritime East Asia and its importance on the world stage.
Author : Kuan-Jen Chen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 41,83 MB
Release : 2024-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1009418750
A comprehensive assessment of the contours of maritime East Asia and its importance on the world stage.
Author : Kuan-Jen Chen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 35,26 MB
Release : 2024-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1009418742
Shifting the focus from land to sea when considering the Cold War in East Asia, Kuan-Jen Chen sheds light on the importance of the 'oceanic' lens as a structural imperative in grand strategic thinking. Despite extensive scholarship on postwar US-East Asia relations, questions about the relationship between maritime space, national sovereignty, and geopolitics have not been fully explored. Drawing on archives in Chinese, English, and Japanese, Chen uses the western Pacific as a historical platform, illustrating the relationship between the geopolitical value of the sea and the strategic deliberations of American and East-Asian decision making. The recent deterioration of US-China relations has turned maritime East Asia into a powder keg, with no country in the region able to remain neutral. By anchoring today's maritime East Asia in the past, this book traces the evolution of historical factors that led to the current status quo in the western Pacific, and shows the origins of controversial issues in the region.
Author : Richard L Leaver
Publisher : Westview Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 21,91 MB
Release : 1993
Category : History
ISBN :
Author : Xiaobing Li
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 31,54 MB
Release : 2017-09-13
Category : History
ISBN : 1317229479
This textbook provides a survey of East Asia during the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. Focusing on the persistence and flexibility of its culture and tradition when confronted by the West and the US, this book investigates how they intermesh to establish the nations that have entered the modern world. Through the use of newly declassified Communist sources, the narrative helps students form a better understanding of the origins and development of post-WWII East Asia. The analysis demonstrates how East Asia’s position in the Cold War was not peripheral but, in many key senses, central. The active role that East Asia played, ultimately, turned this main Cold War battlefield into a "buffer" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Covering a range of countries, this textbook explores numerous events, which took place in East Asia during the Cold War, including: The occupation of Japan, Civil war in China and the establishment of Taiwan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, China’s Reforming Movement. Moving away from Euro-American centric approaches and illuminating the larger themes and patterns in the development of East Asian modernity, The Cold War in East Asia is an essential resource for students of Asian History, the Cold War and World History.
Author : Bryce Harland
Publisher : Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 35,88 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9813055375
America is drifting towards another collision with Asian countries. This book sets the situation in perspective by tracing the development of relations between them during the last two centuries. No longer needing allies as it did during the Cold War, the United States is now using its economic power to force them to open their markets to its exports and to move towards Western democracy. American pressure is making Asians appreciate what they have in common, and helping to overcome the divisions that have kept them dependent on outside powers. But collision is not inevitable. America has played a critical part in the transformation of East Asia. It still has much to teach, and it now has much to learn as well. By studying Asian experience, Americans can re-learn the importance of self-discipline, and face Asian competition without relying on their power and resorting to protectionism. APEC shows the way for the United States and other Western countries to benefit from the fast growth of Asian economies, and make the whole of the Pacific area more prosperous.
Author : Malcolm H. Murfett
Publisher : Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 42,60 MB
Release : 2012-07-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9814382981
As World War II came to an end, a period of distrust settled over the world. Southeast Asia was no different. The spectre of Communism stalked the stage. The threat of a global nuclear war hung thick in the air. The struggle for domination between the Americans and the Russians came up against the burgeoning nationalism of the liberated states. In this highly combustible climate, what was to emerge? This book reveals in fascinating detail, country by country, how the Cold War shaped the destiny of Southeast Asia. The competition among the world powers – the USA, USSR, Britain, China – led to dramatically differing fates for the region. Vietnam was to be the worst affected, effectively destroyed in the clash between superpowers, at tremendous cost to all sides. In Malaya and Singapore, the British fought a long-drawn-out Communist insurgency that broke out in 1948 – an insurgency they saw as part of a consolidated Cold War movement inspired by Moscow or Beijing. But was it? As this volume shows, the states of Southeast Asia were never mere pawns in an international war of ideology. Many local players in fact strategically manipulated Cold War doctrines to their own political advantage – chief among them Indonesia’s Suharto, who played the anti-Communist card with aplomb. Till now, no book has examined this watershed era across the entire region. Cold War Southeast Asia in doing so not only offers a panoramic account of a turning point in SEA history, but also illuminates the global ramifications of the Cold War, and the makings of the world order as we know it today.
Author : Matthew Foley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 525 pages
File Size : 25,13 MB
Release : 2009-12-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1135180822
This book charts British and American approaches to Burma between the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. It analyses the fundamental drivers of Anglo-American policy-making during this crucial period – assumptions, expectations and apprehensions that would, eventually, lead America into the disaster of Vietnam. The book suggests the key to understanding British and American approaches to Southeast Asia is to see them in terms of a search for order and stability in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world. Such order had previously been provided by the colonial regimes of the European powers. With those regimes gone or going, British and American planners faced a region beset with new uncertainties, led by a set of nationalist politicians driven by very different, and often competing, goals and aspirations. A detailed case study of post-colonial transition in Asia in the context of the emerging Cold War, this book focuses on the retraction of European colonial power in Southeast Asia, the concomitant expansion of US engagement in the region and the broad processes underpinning these changes. It draws on unique, previously unpublished British and American archival material relating to the Burmese case and fills an important gap in historical understanding of Western engagement in Southeast Asia.
Author : Robert Haddick
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 30,98 MB
Release : 2014-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0870210602
The main theme of Fire on the Water is that conventional measures of military balance, employed by both the general public and many policy experts, underestimate the threat that China’s military modernization poses to the U.S. position in the Asia-Pacific region. Within a decade, China’s leaders will have the military power to hold at risk U.S. interest in East Asia. The U.S. needs to fashion a new and competitive strategy, one that better matches the strengths of the U.S. and its allies against China’s vulnerabilities, in order to maintain a balance of power in the region and convince China’s leaders to pursue a cooperative course. It is not obvious to many observers why a conflict in the region is plausible, or why the U.S. should bear the responsibility for maintaining a forward military presence in the region. China has rapidly emerged as a great power and by doing so, has acquired many vital interests around the world. Following the pattern set by other such episodes in history, China is also acquiring the military means to protect its new interests, a development that puts at risk the interests of China’s neighbors and the United States. The U.S. forward military presence in the region is an increasingly difficult burden to sustain. But in the long run, this approach will be less costly and less risky than encouraging China’s neighbors to balance China by themselves, an alternative that will very likely result in an unstable arms race and a conflict that will damage America’s interests. While it will be in America’s interest to maintain its position in the Asia-Pacific region, China’s military modernization is making it much more difficult for the U.S. to do so. China’s military strategy, centered on its rapidly-expanding land-based and anti-ship missile forces, is exploiting weaknesses in long-standing U.S. force structure and doctrine. Due to a variety of institutional barriers, the U.S. has been slow to adapt to China’s military modernization. Current efforts to respond are impractical, in that they expend U.S. resources against China’s strengths rather than its vulnerabilities. The U.S. needs a new and competitive strategy that will strengthen its alliances in the region and convince China’s leaders that cooperation, rather than military expansion and an attempt at regional hegemony, will be China’s best course. Fire on the Water proposes reforms to U.S. diplomacy, military programs, and strategy that will offer a better chance at preserving stability. The goal of these reforms is to thwart China’s well-designed military modernization plan, bolster the confidence and credibility of U.S. alliances in the region, and thus persuade China’s leaders that China’s best course is cooperation rather than conflict, the outcome that has usually occurred in history when a new great power has rapidly emerged.
Author : Yangwen Zheng
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 39,33 MB
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 9004175377
The Cold War stayed cold in Europe but it was hot in Asia. Its legacy lives on in the region. In none of the three dominant historiographical paradigms: orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist, does Asia, or the rest of the Third World, figure with much significance. What happens to these narratives if we put them to the test in Asia? This volume argues that attention to what has been conventionally considered the periphery is essential to a full understanding of the global Cold War. Foregrounding Asia necessarily leads to a re-assessment of the dominant narratives. This volume also argues for a shift in focus from diplomacy and high politics alone towards research into the culture of the Cold War era and its public diplomacy. "As a whole, the essays contribute to enriching our understanding of what was really happening in an era that is too often understood in the catch-all framework of the Cold War." - Akira Iriye, "Harvard University"
Author : Peter Lowe
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 34,57 MB
Release : 1997
Category : China
ISBN : 9780719025082
Examines the transitional years during which Britain's vital role in the formulation of Western policies declined markedly, and that simultaneously marked the take-off period of the Cold War. Covers the communist victory in China, the conclusion of the allied occupation of Japan with the restoration of sovereignty to the Japanese state, and the Korean War. Addresses Anglo-American relations and the strains caused by the differing attitudes of the two countries towards East Asia, suggesting that while Great Britain did not determine Western policies in East Asia, it did exert moderating influence on the US on significant occasions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR