This book, first published in 1969, casts a critical eye over the problem of insurgency. The author sees insurgency not just as a matter of technique – military tactics or organizational skill – nor as the result of ‘force and fraud’, but as ‘people’s war’: the conditions in which the mass of the people become involved, voluntarily or otherwise, on either side. He quotes Nasution’s statement, ‘The guerrilla movement is only the result, not the cause of the problem’. People’s war brings the peasantry, hitherto ignorant, apathetic or rejected, into the political process. For ‘war is ... the continuation of politics by other means’. In Asia this was essentially a peasant’s war, arising when peasant grievances, interests or demands cannot be met under the existing ‘legitimate’ but urban or landowner-orientated system of rule. It shows little understanding to blame outside intervention when peasant – and nationalist – unrest leads to revolt. The Chinese Communists did not owe success to Soviet aid, the Vietminh to Chinese assistance or the Vietcong to North Vietnamese intervention. The conclusion applies to governments as to insurgents: no amount of outside aid can win the war for them if they themselves are incapable and the people – on whom they depend for support – have no will to fight. This book, based on first-hand experience of the area and on study of original sources, offers (1) an analysis of ‘people’s war’ in China, Indochina and Vietnam, (2) a critique of US policy in Laos and Vietnam and (3) a comparison with counter-measures in Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia. It is both original and constructive.

The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University

The Imjin War (1592–1598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Chosôn Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge. Meant to inspire civilians to rise up against the Japanese army, this potent rhetoric conjured a unified Korea and intensified after the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636. By documenting this phenomenon, JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. She instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Chosôn Dynasty, which had transfigured the geopolitics of East Asia and introduced a national narrative key to Korea's survival. Re-creating the cultural and political passions that bound Chosôn society together during this period, Haboush reclaims the root story of solidarity that helped Korea thrive well into the modern era.

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Will national independence bring to the peoples of South East Asia liberty and democracy? Or will it mean corrupt government, factional strife and insolvency? Or will it mean eventual absorption by totalitarian communism? In this book, first published in 1950, the author analyses these questions, using the case history of Indonesia since 1940, in which he played a leading role, to illustrate his points. He gives an outline of the history of South East Asia, its domination by the West and its convulsion by war and nationalism. The seven nations of South East Asia – Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Indo-China, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines – have a great deal in common: except for Siam, they are all struggling through the formative years of nationhood; except for Ceylon, they were all occupied and pillaged by Japan during the War. They are of great value to other nations as a source of raw materials and foodstuffs. Their political and economic structure is of vital importance, both to themselves and to us and unless their new nationalism can be strengthened, the free world may lose a valuable asset to its economy and an ally against totalitarianism in Asia.

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress—or lack thereof—toward Western-style liberal democracy at the center of Thailand’s narrative, but that view underestimates the importance of the colonial context. In particular, a long-standing relationship with China and the existence of a large and important Chinese diaspora within Thailand have shaped development at every stage. As the emerging nation struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were neither a colonial force against whom Thainess was identified, nor had they been able to fully assimilate into Thai society. Wasana Wongsurawat demonstrates that the Kingdom of Thailand’s transformation into a modern nation-state required the creation of a national identity that justified not only the hegemonic rule of monarchy but also the involvement of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class upon whom it depended. Her revisionist view traces the evolution of this codependent relationship through the twentieth century, as Thailand struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, found itself an ally of Japan in World War II, and reconsidered its relationship with China in the postwar era.