Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xii, 306 pp. US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7257-1.
The Cold War was anything but “cold” in Asia, let alone Southeast Asia. President Richard Nixon once remarked that the “Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat.” Hot wars were commonplace in Asia during this time; from conflict in former French Indochina to insurgencies in the Coral Triangle, Southeast Asia was a theatre for some of the twentieth century’s most defining conflicts. As is too common, the three superpowers of the period—the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—have tended to receive the most attention from historians. Big power politics, détente, rapprochement, and triangulation are all infamous Cold War buzzwords that evoke memories of the period and enforce the notion that superpowers dictated the era-defining events. Long overdue, however, is an analysis of the Cold War wherein light is thrown on Southeast Asian actors. Enter Ang Cheng Guan’s Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History, which represents “the first book by a single author to study the subject based on a synthesis of secondary as well as primary sources” (1–2). In providing a contemporary account of Southeast Asia’s Cold War using “forgotten and the latest research findings,” Ang aims to reconceptualize the era as “an intercontinental synchronization in which Asian actors shared equal responsibilities with the superpowers in the spread of the conflict” (2). In the footsteps of Wang Gungwu, Ang’s ultimate goal is to provide a methodical history of Cold War Southeast Asia by exploring the “mindsets” of the actors themselves, and how their worldviews were molded by the “cultural ideals that reflect their own traditions and their response to universalist and international aspirations” (3).
The book contains six comprehensive chapters with each proceeding chronologically from the first salvoes in the appropriately titled “Antecedents” to the period’s denouement in “Ending the Cold War Chasm.” Despite the absence of scholarly consensus on when the Cold War began, Ang starts his study in the immediate post-WWII era. He draws primarily from the most recent secondary English-language scholarship to compose a readable analysis of how hollow the word “cold” is in describing the epoch in the region. While highly accessible, clear, and broad in scope, which is laudable, one is left wondering what is actually new here. Ang is correct: no other study exists that focuses on Southeast Asian actors in the Cold War. Besides that, the book depends on English scholarship almost exclusively. If “Southeast Asian actors” are to take centre stage in this diplomatic history of the Cold War, then relevant sources by the actors themselves, from major players Zhou Enlai and U Nu to Norodom Sihanouk and Ho Chi Minh, should be listed, if not referenced. Some make the cut, such as Lee Kuan Yew, but not others. Why is this the case? The decision to sidestep the history of decolonization and globalization—and colonial records for that matter—which the author states is “more suitable for a website than a book,” was surprising given the ties to so many of the book’s themes and the richness of resources, respectively (10). The absence of the breadth of scholarship from David Chandler (Ang lists only the survey A History of Cambodia) and Ben Kiernan also constitutes a missed opportunity on the author’s part to compose a more robust assessment of Cold War Cambodia.
The “orthodox view” of Southeast Asia’s Cold War, Ang notes, was that it “started in 1948 with the abandonment of the broad united front strategy following directives from Moscow issued at the Southeast Asian Youth and Student Conference … and the Second Congress of the Indian Communist Party” (12). Is this “orthodoxy” still true? French re-armament in Indochina in 1945 (Operation Masterdom), nationalist groups filling the void that the evacuating Japanese imperialists left in Southeast Asia, and the subsequent rise of communist parties, leave one to contemplate why the years before the “orthodoxy” of 1948 do not serve as Ang’s point of departure. “Antecedents” does well in tracing Cold War developments to 1919, but in far too brief a compass. Equally intriguing is the author’s “narrative form,” which might engage Immanuel Wallerstein’s argument that “Cold War” is itself a narrative that summarizes how we understand a geopolitical reality of the period between 1945 and 1991. Ang’s claim that “the almost simultaneous communist uprisings that occurred in Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia soon after those two gatherings [1948 Calcutta Conference and Indian Communist Party Second Congress] was a direct outcome of a calculated Soviet policy to extend the Cold War from Europe to Southeast Asia” is debatable (12). Japan’s role in spurring anti-imperialist sentiment that was the direct precursor to communist uprisings does not receive due attention. This gives the impression that organized and sophisticated communist parties formed ex nihilo or by dint of the Kremlin’s deus ex machina. Mention of how Japanese occupation, Japanese-sponsored nationalist organizations, and the coup de force contributed to the formation and reconstitution of anti-imperialist communist parties across Southeast Asia, would have added a necessary link to the chain. Instead, we get passing glimpses of connections between early Communist International (Comintern) involvement in Asia vis-à-vis official visits to Asia in the interwar years and later Soviet designs for the region. Those later efforts relied on the collapse of European empires, for sure, but the emergence of Japanese hegemony in Southeast Asia, and its sponsorship of anti-imperialist organizations during and near the end of its occupation of Southeast Asia, is an omission worth noting.
Aside from these particular criticisms, Ang Cheng Guan has produced a superb introductory volume for anyone interested in Southeast Asia’s Cold War. The author’s regional take on the era is certainly commendable. Long overdue, Southeast Asia’s Cold War succeeds in taking the extant secondary literature and condensing it into a clearly written volume that, some criticisms notwithstanding, achieves what he sets out to accomplish.
Matthew Galway
University of California, Berkeley, USA