Decolonization, East Asia and Pacific

In China the creation of foreign colonies and semicolonial territories dated from 1557, when Portugal established a settlement at Macau (Aomen) in the Pearl River estuary on the South China Sea. After the Sino-British Opium War of 1839 to 1842, the first of many "unequal treaties" was imposed upon China by the victorious British government, which forced China to cede territory, allow special trade advantages, and accept foreign courts in its major cities. Britain assumed sovereign control over Hong Kong, an undeveloped island off China's southern coast near Canton (Guangzhou). Following this precedent Germany, France, Russia, the United States, and Japan all gained privileges and "extraterritorial" legal concessions in China, creating informal empires based on commercial and legal control. China even formally ceded Macao to tiny Portugal in 1887. Unable to protect itself or its former tributary states, China permitted the colonial powers to seize control of Manchuria, Indochina, and Korea. Except for Macau, all of these territories were occupied by Japan during World War II, and the informal colonial structures were abruptly replaced by Japan's military occupation government.

Japan's surrender in 1945 allowed the Nationalist (Guomindang) government to resume its authority over China. A bitter civil war ensued between the Nationalists and the Chinese Communists, and Britain quickly reoccupied the colony of Hong Kong. When the Communists assumed control of China in 1949, inaugurating a new government, the People's Republic of China (PRC), they insisted that China recover all its traditional territories, including Macau, Hong Kong Island (ceded to Britain in 1842), the nearby Kowloon Peninsula (ceded in 1860), and the adjacent "New Territories," which had been leased to Britain for ninety-nine years under an 1898 agreement. China allowed the colony to remain, but in the 1980s the British government recognized that as expiration of the lease loomed, it could not sustain Hong Kong without the New Territories, which housed the colony's electricity, water, and waste management facilities. Sino-British negotiations resulted in the return of the entire colony to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Similar Sino-Portuguese talks led to the reversion of Macao to the PRC in 1999.

In August 1945, Japan's defeated colonial administrators in Korea transferred power to the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (CPKI), which was led by the nationalist Yo Un-hyong. Relying in part on the Allies' declaration at the 1943 Cairo Conference that postwar Korea would be independent, Yo called for Korean self-determination. Hundreds of anti-Japanese nationalists imprisoned during the war were released, and within weeks helped to create CPKI cells across the country. New mass-membership organizations composed of students, women, peasants, and industrial workers were also formed. At the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the United States had agreed to allow Soviet forces to occupy Korea, but Japan's sudden surrender provoked a policy change: U.S. forces were dispatched to occupy the southern half of the Korean peninsula. With Soviet and American troops advancing, the CPKI split into distinctly pro- and anti-communist factions and began to realign into northern and southern groups. Separate regimes quickly took shape: Communist North Korea, led by anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter Kim Il-sung and supported by the Soviet Union and the new mass membership organizations, and pro-Western South Korea, led by former exile Syngman Rhee and supported by the United States.

Japan's wartime military government surrendered in August 1945. Its civil structure was reorganized during the ensuing American military occupation, which lasted until 1952. Although Japan was never formally colonized by the United States, it did accept American control over its postwar economic and military development. The United States maintained military bases in Japan and directly administered the island of Okinawa until 1972, when it was formally returned to Japan.

In the Pacific, Germany's far-flung colonial empire had collapsed with its defeat in World War I. Australia and New Zealand assumed control of German territories south of the equator, while Japan appropriated those to the north. After Japan's defeat in 1945, its Pacific possessions either reverted to their pre-World War II European administrators or fell under U.S. military occupation. The American empire in the Pacific had been growing since the 1898 Spanish-American War, after which the victorious United States had seized control of the Philippines, Guam, and American Samoa. Hawaii was also annexed in 1898. After World War II the United States granted full independence to the Philippines, but incorporated Hawaii as a state in 1959, because of its strategic location in the central Pacific. In American Samoa, self-government measures were introduced in 1948, including creation of a legislative body. In 1978 the U.S. House of Representatives accepted a delegate from Samoa, which became an unincorporated territory of the United States. Guam's relationship with the United States paralleled that of American Samoa, although it has no legislative representative in Washington. During the 1980s both Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, which had been occupied by U.S. forces during the war, asserted their independence but entered into "Compacts of Free Association" with the United States: America guaranteed the defense of the islands, and in return secured access to island-based military facilities.

The end of World War II was a watershed for many other Pacific Island territories. Under United Nations auspices, Australia and New Zealand acquired control of Western Samoa, Nauru, the Cook Islands, Niue, Papua, and New Guinea, and oversaw the pace and political design of decolonization in each. Western Samoa was the first to achieve independence, in 1962, after New Zealand supported the early introduction of self-government institutions. The Cook Islands were self-governing by 1965, although they maintained close political ties with Wellington. Australia's charge, Nauru, became independent in 1968, while the new nation of Papua New Guinea, created under Australian supervision, became fully independent in 1975 and joined the British Commonwealth. The latter nation's territory includes the island of Bougainville, where an armed struggle for independence from the government of Papua New Guinea developed during the 1990s.

Britain's Pacific possessions, like those of Australia and New Zealand, experienced accelerated progress toward decolonization during the 1960s. Fiji and Tonga achieved independence in 1970, the Solomon Islands in 1978, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (as Tuvalu and Kiribati) in 1978 and 1979. The unique Anglo-French condominium over the New Hebrides, established in 1906, persisted through the decolonization process. New Hebridean nationalists launched protests over colonial control of traditionally common lands, and political discontent spread during the 1960s. France reluctantly agreed to allow formation of a local assembly in 1974, and independence was granted in 1980 to the archipelago, renamed the Republic of Vanuatu, making it the last of Britain's Pacific possessions to be decolonized.

By contrast, Vanuatu was the first French Pacific possession to achieve independence. French Polynesia, a group of islands in the central South Pacific that includes Tahiti, the Austral Islands, and the Marquesas chain, came under French control in the 1840s, and most of the islands were incorporated as a single colony, Oceania, in the 1880s. Maintained by France as an overseas territory throughout the twentieth century, Polynesia has a skeleton territorial government, but most administrative decisions emanate from Paris. Isolated atolls have been used since the early 1960s for French nuclear weapons development and testing. France has been equally unwilling to decolonize New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, which were occupied by France in 1853 and formally became a French overseas territory in 1946. Referenda held in 1958 and 1987 demonstrated firm local approval for continuing French rule. Some limited local autonomy has been introduced in New Caledonia, and a 1999 agreement provides for gradual progress toward independence, which is slated for perhaps as early as 2013.

see also Anticolonialism, East Asia and the Pacific; East Asia, American Presence in; East Asia, European Presence in; Empire, British, in Asia and Pacific; Occupations, the Pacific; Pacific, American Presence in; Pacific, European Presence in; Self-Determination, East Asia and the Pacific.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albertini, Rudolph von. Decolonization: The Administration and Future of the Colonies, 1919–1960. Translated by Francisca Garvie. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.

Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Keay, John. Empire's End: A History of the Far East from High Colonialism to Hong Kong. New York: Scribner, 1997.

MacClancy, Jeremy. "From New Hebrides to Vanuatu, 1979–1980." Journal of Pacific History 16, no. 2 (1981): 92-104.

Morris-Jones, W. H., and Georges Fischer, eds. Decolonisation and After: The British and French Experience. London: F. Cass, 1980.

Smith, Gary. Micronesia: Decolonisation and U.S. Military Interests in the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands. Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1991.

Van Trease, Howard. The Politics of Land in Vanuatu: From Colony to Independence. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1977.

Woolford, Don. Papua New Guinea: Initiation and Independence. Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1976.