Another Justice

Britain likes to remember its war in Asia as a story of endurance: the Burma Railway, the long march back through the jungle, the gallant Fourteenth Army. The story tends to skip 15 February 1942. That was the day Singapore fell. The "Gibraltar of the East," the fortress that was supposed to make the empire permanent, surrendered after a week of fighting on the island, and some 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops went into captivity. Churchill called it the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. For once he was not exaggerating.

Within weeks the Dutch had surrendered Java. French Indochina was already taking orders from Tokyo. British forces were retreating out of Burma towards India. Whatever else Japan's war was, and it was a great deal else, it did something no petition or nationalist congress had managed in a century: it showed millions of Asians, quickly and in public, that the white colonial master could be beaten. The myth never recovered.

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The inheritance

Japan also left armies behind. In Java it trained PETA, the Defenders of the Homeland, a volunteer force of Indonesians whose officers became the backbone of the army that fought the Dutch return from 1945 to 1949. In Burma, Aung San and the "Thirty Comrades" were trained by Japanese officers and founded the Burma Independence Army. Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army marched with Japanese forces towards India. Some Japanese soldiers refused to go home in 1945 and died fighting for Indonesian independence.

When the Europeans came back, they found subjects who had stopped believing in them. Indonesia declared independence two days after Japan surrendered. Burma was independent by 1948, Malaya by 1957. Britain, to its modest credit, eventually left. The Netherlands had to be fought and shamed out.

This is the Pan-Asian inheritance: not a flag, but a conviction that Asians do not need a foreign master.

The new master

Then a new candidate for master appeared. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, Beijing presented itself to Asia and Africa as a fellow victim of imperialism. At the same time it was arming and funding the region's communist parties.

The Malayan Communist Party, whose insurgency began in 1948, later ran its radio station, the Voice of the Malayan Revolution, from Chinese soil. The Communist Party of Thailand broadcast from Yunnan. After 1967 Beijing poured weapons, money and "volunteers" into the Communist Party of Burma's war against Rangoon. When the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities, China was their main foreign patron.

This was colonialism under a red flag. The parties took money and instructions from a foreign capital, and their victory would have produced states that answered to it. Beijing has never stopped using anti-colonial language. It simply wanted to be the next colonial power.

The refusal

Southeast Asia refused. Malaya defeated the communist insurgency in a twelve-year Emergency. Thailand broke its insurgency by the early 1980s, largely by offering amnesty to those who came out of the jungle. In 1967 five countries founded ASEAN, in part as a common front against subversion.

Where Beijing's client did win, in Cambodia, the result was the Khmer Rouge and the death of perhaps a quarter of the population.

But the overall result held. Not one of the countries Beijing tried to capture through proxy parties became the lasting satellite it wanted. Even the Khmer Rouge lasted less than four years.

Another justice

Japan lost its war. The conviction it left behind outlived it. Southeast Asians applied it to Britain, the Netherlands and France. Then they applied it to Beijing. They are still applying it today, from the Philippines' 2016 arbitration victory in the South China Sea to Vietnamese fishermen who keep sailing into contested waters.

That is another kind of justice. No tribunal handed it down. It was carried by peoples who learned in 1942 that masters can fall, and who have never forgotten it.

Britain still prefers to remember 1942 as a tragedy for Britain. For a great many Asians, it was the day the future started.