This article examines two strands of post-Second World War Asianism in the same arena: how China and India in the late 1940s shaped the ideas of Asia’s economic revival through the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE). ECAFE was a regional commission established by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in March 1947, a body whose purpose was promoting ‘economic and social progress and development’.Footnote 1 Initially, ECAFE mainly facilitated post-war Asia’s reconstruction through collecting economic data and disseminating its findings.Footnote 2 Soon, it provided advice and assistance to the region’s member states, often in the form of technical aid. ECAFE would initially run for three years; a review in 1951 recommended that its work continue indefinitely. From the 1950s, its main task shifted from facilitating Asia’s reconstruction to development. In 1974 it adopted its present name, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
ECAFE has been overlooked in scholarship.Footnote 3 This might be because its achievements were limited, but also because it was deemed insignificant when post-war Asian history was dominated by several narratives. One overarching narrative deals with the global Cold War between Washington and Moscow that divided Asia.Footnote 4 Another focuses on the decolonization of Asian colonies and on Afro-Asian internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s (which peaked at the Bandung Conference in 1955).Footnote 5 Afro-Asian internationalism challenged imperialism and colonialism, and promoted solidarity among its participants – the newly decolonized nations in Asia and Africa.Footnote 6 Still another narrative considers the rise of developmental states in East and Southeast Asia, notably South Korea and Taiwan.Footnote 7
However, the revisionist literature on international organizations has demonstrated that these bodies were important as platforms and actors in, for example, challenging the legitimacy of colonial rule and rethinking the basis of the global economy.Footnote 8 This article builds on these works to consider what two emerging, non-Western countries thought an international organization should do for Asia.Footnote 9 The ascent of development was seen as originating from ‘the efforts of the European imperial powers to maintain their colonies, and the emergence of the United States’.Footnote 10 But ECAFE demonstrates that countries in the Global South also proactively promoted developmental projects rather than merely being aid recipients. Highlighting China’s ideas on regional reconstruction through ECAFE complements a growing literature that recasts late 1940s China as a period of post-war reconstruction rather than the prelude to Communist China (in a similar manner to the long-standing interest in India’s post-colonial planning).Footnote 11
ECAFE deserves more attention, because it was a concrete (albeit small) platform where countries like China and India, fresh from recovering or attaining sovereignty, could try to turn their ideas of Asia into reality. The organization’s establishment and work demonstrate that multiple futures were at play in Asia in the late 1940s.Footnote 12 Asian countries acted with some optimism for the future and without hindsight: a trial-and-error process to remake Asia and the world despite the odds. As Asian countries were not powerful enough, they tried to co-operate to make their voice count. ECAFE was one such attempt to shape a new Asia. (Other attempts included several trans-Asian conferences discussing Asia’s future, not least the Asian Relations Conference held by Indian nationalists in March–April 1947.Footnote 13) ECAFE was a trailblazer as one of the very first official Asian organizations, two decades older than the more famous Association of Southeast Asian Nations (which aimed to foster economic, social, and cultural development but had a much smaller geographical scope).
These attempts to shape Asia’s future have been overlooked examples of Asianism. Asianism was the idea that Asian nations should unite, often because of the threat of Western imperialism, and with the aim of overcoming that imperialism.Footnote 14 It assumed that there was one Asia despite internal differences.Footnote 15 Asianism was often an anti-imperial idea, but it was also used to justify leadership or even domination in Asia. The idea that Japan should lead Asia in defeating the West resulted in its invasion of China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote 16
In existing literature, several threads are significant. First, a well-known body of scholarship examines how Asian thinkers promoted Asia’s cultural heritage and civilizational strength, focusing on the ideas of intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore from India and Okakura Tenshin from Japan, as a counterbalance to the West’s perceived superiority.Footnote 17 Second, Asianism was usually thought to have faded away by 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allies at the end of the war.Footnote 18 There was once little discussion on how Asianism related to the subsequent rise of Afro-Asian internationalism. The budding scholarship on Afro-Asian internationalism contends that the spirit of Asianism inspired and evolved into it.Footnote 19 Third, discussions of Asianism emphasize how different individuals, groups, or nations attempted to reach unity (with some coverage of their quarrels).Footnote 20 Fourth, most studies have privileged Japanese versions of Asianism; studies of Chinese Asianism often detail its interaction with Japanese Asianism.Footnote 21
Notions about ECAFE’s aims and work were part of Asianist ideas. For Asian policymakers, the region’s economic difficulties had much to do with Western empires, and they became urgent after 1945. Most Asian nations suffered from poor economic growth because of the impediment of empire and war devastation. In addition, Asia’s economic troubles were overlooked by the early UN, which still focused on Europe. China and India therefore demanded co-ordinated solutions to tackle Asia’s economic ills, partly through ECAFE, and that Asia’s voices be respected in ECAFE.
This article makes three arguments. First, it argues that China and India pushed back against the Eurocentric ECOSOC in order to have ECAFE founded. Second, it demonstrates that China and India disagreed on what they thought ECAFE’s work should be. India demanded that the body tackle development issues quickly and achieve real progress. In contrast, China wanted to build upon ECAFE’s moderate remit and expected it to help Asian countries rehabilitate their economies. Yet Chinese and Indian leaders believed that ECAFE should help Asia ‘construct’ to a level much higher than before the war – even if results emerged slowly.
Third, the article will argue that the differing Chinese and Indian ideas on Asia’s economic recovery (combined with their separate intentions to lead the region) constitute two strands of post-war Asianism. Viewed together, however, they gave Asianist ideas a new focus – not just cultural unity but also economic development. Most Asian societies faced Western imperialism’s onslaught – political, economic, and cultural-racial – in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many Asian thinkers, like Tagore and Liang Qichao from China, regarded ‘Western’ materialism as arguably the key threat to Asian or ‘Eastern’ civilization. In response, they celebrated Asia’s shared cultural heritage or religious universalisms, which were partly inspired by Buddhism or Islam. By contrast, Asian nations gained or were fighting for independence in the late 1940s. Desiring economic and political freedom, their policymakers considered concrete ways to transform their countries from relative poverty to prosperity.
It is important to bring Asianism back into the early post-war period for two main reasons. First, it shows that the path from Asianism to Afro-Asian internationalism was less smooth than once thought. Multiple strands of Asianism continued into the late 1940s, rather than fading in 1945. Yet, despite the intention of unity, differences appeared when Asian representatives debated their Asianist ideas at ECAFE. Asia in the late 1940s was characterized by a lack of international solidarity. Afro-Asian internationalism arguably emerged from Asianism’s difficulties as much as its success. The possibility of co-operation in ECAFE foreshadowed Afro-Asian internationalism, while the disagreements within that body perhaps pushed India towards finding like-minded partners in Asia and the Arab world, rather than sticking only with fellow Asian nations. It is this trial-and-error process – both the possibilities and the limits of ECAFE – that indirectly helped turn Asianism into Afro-Asian internationalism.
Second, incorporating Asianism into the post-war era challenges the conventional wisdom that Nationalist China was simply a collapsing regime in the Chinese Civil War and beholden to American interests.Footnote 22 Except, perhaps, for the regime’s downfall and the ensuing refugee crisis, Nationalist China in 1947–9 has been severely understudied – and its efforts to spearhead its Asianism even more so.Footnote 23 Admittedly, the Americans had a strong presence in China. The US helped transport Nationalist troops to recapture Manchuria and major cities in east China after the Second World War ended, and some 900 US army and navy officers worked to ‘strengthen Nationalist military efficiency’.Footnote 24 The basis of Nationalist China’s post-war diplomacy had some of its roots in US support. China became a permanent member of the UN Security Council partly because of its contributions to the Allies’ victory and partly from being named one of the ‘four policemen’ in the post-war world – alongside the US, the Soviet Union, and Britain – by the then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Yet, post-war Chinese–American relations were poisoned by the conflict between the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his American chief of staff, Joseph Stilwell, which led to Stilwell’s recall in 1944. The US was disappointed by the Nationalist government’s failings in the latter stage of the war with Japan; it therefore became reluctant to support the Nationalists in the civil war.)
However, Nationalist China was far from simply America’s subordinate. Moving away from Japanese Asianism reveals that Nationalist China had its own ambition of leading post-war Asia;Footnote 25 ECAFE was precisely a means to achieve this ambition. This article shows how China sought to lead Asia through ECAFE, and how China was challenged by India. By 1949, as Nationalist China lost the civil war, India supplanted Chinese leadership of Asianism. India drew on the non-Western network that China had helped build at the founding of ECAFE and became perhaps the leading actor in Afro-Asian internationalism. Put another way, the rise of India and Afro-Asian internationalism was facilitated by the rapid decline of Nationalist China. Early ECAFE symbolizes Nationalist China’s broader influence in post-war Asia: it tried to lead but faded away.
The competition between the two nations brings us to the emerging scholarship on connections between China and India.Footnote 26 This literature suggests that, in the 1940s, the two countries wished to join forces to reshape Asia’s future, but that that intention was derailed by their border disputes and conflicting views of Tibet’s status. This article suggests a new perspective for considering the China–India conflict in the mid-twentieth century: it was a conflict of ideas as much as of borders or geopolitics. ECAFE shows that China and India already disagreed on how to rebuild Asia’s post-war economy.
The article will start with examining pre-1945 attitudes of China and India towards international organizations, and how China led the efforts that founded ECAFE. Next, it will delve into how China and India attempted to influence ECAFE’s overall goals, followed by the organization’s specific tasks. Finally, it will briefly discuss how Chinese and Indian officials assessed ECAFE’s performance.
I
To understand ECAFE’s birth, it is necessary to discuss how China (and India) pressed the UN to pay more attention to Asia’s post-war needs. Chinese and Indian policymakers had not been natural bedfellows with international organizations. The head of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai-shek, along with Chiang’s close friend Dai Jitao (a theorist in the ruling Nationalist Party) and many members of the educated Chinese public, thought that the League of Nations was impotent to confront wartime aggressors. When Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, Dai lamented that, because the League’s member states hoped to avoid war with Japan at almost any cost, it ‘cannot apply any effective sanctions’.Footnote 27 Likewise, the future first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in 1933 that the League was a ‘tool’ of great powers like Britain and France. It ‘failed completely’ in preserving peace or reducing the chances of war.Footnote 28
Given such resentment, one might wonder why China and India would support the UN, which was remarkably similar to the League.Footnote 29 One reason was the lack of choice: an imperfect UN seemed better than no international organization at all. In addition, China would become a permanent member of the Security Council and therefore have veto power. And Chinese and Indian policymakers had come to appreciate that the League had achieved something small but potentially valuable. The policy plan of China’s foreign ministry in 1943 observed that, while the League failed to maintain peace, ‘the technical co-operation under the auspices of the League offers many benefits’.Footnote 30 Preceding his harsh verdict on the League, Nehru wrote that it produced ‘good work in various byways of modern life’, perhaps referring to its attempts to provide economic and technical assistance.Footnote 31
That said, senior Chinese officials expected more from a new world organization. At the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944 that laid the foundation of the post-war international economic order, China (and India) strongly supported the idea that this order should offer international support for the development of developing countries.Footnote 32 Also in 1944, the US invited the Soviet Union, Britain, and China to meet at Dumbarton Oaks to discuss plans for a post-war international organization. Although the Big Three planned much of the blueprint of the UN, Chinese officials hastily drew up proposals.Footnote 33 At the time, Japan was tearing through Chinese territories with its Operation Ichigo, so Chinese plans unsurprisingly focused on how to sanction aggressors. Still, international economic co-operation was seen as crucial in maintaining peace. China’s foreign ministry proposed that, as a basis of the new organization, opportunities should be ‘equal’, promoting economic development. International trade should ‘not hinder the industrial construction of industrially backward countries’.Footnote 34 This demonstrates the belief that dealing with issues globally could tackle problems plaguing smaller regions.
Nor did Indian nationalist leaders neglect socio-economic progress. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who would head India’s UN delegation in the late 1940s, championed a post-war international organization, especially when her brother Jawaharlal Nehru was imprisoned between 1942 and 1945. In January 1945, the Institute of Pacific Relations, a multi-national thinktank, held a conference on the post-war order. Leading the Indian delegation to the conference, Pandit argued that economic development was a cornerstone of peace; India ‘wishes to have the peace proposals placed on a sound economic basis. … We agreed that economic expansion and full employment should be the goal of all peoples. India and China are anxious to create conditions for such an expansion.’Footnote 35 However, the lack of attention on economic issues outside Europe compelled China and other Asian countries to push for a new UN body that became ECAFE.
The Second World War devastated much of East and Southeast Asia. The war claimed the lives of some 24 million people in Japanese-occupied territories and 3 million Japanese. Rubber estates in Malaya and rice fields in Burma were largely destroyed; the loss of rice supply from Burma caused food shortage and disease in Southeast Asia. Blunders of the Chinese Nationalist and British Indian governments in maintaining food supply led to the respective famines in Henan and Bengal in 1943.Footnote 36 The standards of social services in China and some Southeast Asian regions – already poor before 1937 – worsened. Shortly before and after 1945, the main organization to offer aid such as healthcare and food in parts of Asia was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), part of the Allies effort and largely funded by the US. Yet UNRRA’s work in China ended in 1947, and elsewhere a year later. Asia needed something else to fill the void.
China’s ECOSOC delegate, P. C. Chang, was central to ECAFE’s birth. Chang was a philosopher and playwright with a PhD from Columbia University who later served the Nationalist government. He was China’s ambassador to Turkey and Chile during the war. He became an ECOSOC delegate likely because of his ‘deep engagement in social policy and welfare issues’. He was also the vice-chairman of ECOSOC’s Human Rights Commission and a leading contributor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated in 1948.Footnote 37 Yet China could not have established ECAFE alone. It needed the votes from Asian and other developing countries, indicating the budding Global South ties that would come of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, officials of China’s foreign ministry believed that China ‘initiated’ the idea that Asian representatives to the UN ‘maintain close contact’.Footnote 38 Nationalist China’s leadership of Asia and potentially the non-Western world was another pillar of its post-war foreign policy, as important as its new-found status as a great power.
In June 1946, ECOSOC established the Temporary Sub-Commission on the Economic Reconstruction of Devastated Areas to deal with post-war rehabilitation. The sub-commission focused on reconstruction in Europe. Of its twenty members, eleven were European countries, with France chairing.Footnote 39 The US and Canada, likely to sympathize with western Europe, were also members. Most of them felt that Europe’s problems were ‘more urgent’ than Asia’s.Footnote 40 Only three members were from Asia: China (vice-chair of the sub-commission), India, and the Philippines. The sub-commission set up two working groups, one for Europe and Africa, and one for Asia and the Far East. However, since it felt that the amount of work on Europe would already be significant, it decided that the working group for Asia and the Far East should only conduct ‘a preliminary discussion’ on how to produce a survey on Asia.Footnote 41
Chang and India’s delegate, B. P. Adarkar, a professor in economics who had been a councillor of British India, made little headway at the sub-commission or ECOSOC because they were in the minority.Footnote 42 Instead, Chang found greater support at the General Assembly’s Second Committee (known as the Economic and Financial Committee), where developing countries had a majority – thirty-two members out of fifty-four.Footnote 43 This turned the tide and challenged the ‘effective built-in American majority’.Footnote 44
When the Second Committee met in November 1946, the Philippines delegate Pedro Hernáez suggested that ‘an economic commission for Asia and the Far East should be established on the lines of the economic commission for Europe’, which the Ethiopian delegation supported. Immediately following Hernáez, Chang proposed an amendment to Norway’s draft resolution, asking ECOSOC to ‘give careful consideration’ to ‘an economic commission for Asia’ as well as one for Europe. Poland and Norway feared that this would hugely delay the establishment of the commission for Europe. By contrast, Hernáez and Fausto Soto, a Chilean delegate, defended Chang. Hernáez asked whether it was better to add ‘Far East’ after ‘Asia’ to clarify the geographical scope. Personal connections may have mattered: Soto noted that he worked with Chang at ECOSOC and, as a former ambassador to Chile, Chang was probably acquainted with the Chilean delegates.Footnote 45 Backed by other developing countries, Chang’s amendment carried the day. The Second Committee asked the General Assembly to recommend that ECOSOC consider establishing an economic commission for Europe and another for Asia and the Far East.Footnote 46 The General Assembly duly passed a resolution on it.
Before ECOSOC formally established ECAFE, the working group for Asia and the Far East under the temporary sub-commission finally met in February 1947. Chang chaired the working group, while Adarkar represented India. Its report likewise recommended setting up an economic commission for Asia and the Far East.Footnote 47 The new commission would ‘make recommendations’ to UN bodies, the UN’s specialized agencies, and the relevant governments, and set up ‘subsidiary machinery’ to carry out its functions.Footnote 48 It would even be permanent.Footnote 49 However, ECAFE, with a fixed term of three years, was initially confined to being an investigative body. Many working group members sat on ECOSOC as well, and they may have concealed their reservations in the working group, only revealing them when ECOSOC had to decide ECAFE’s remit. The early UN was still dominated by concerns over Europe, not least fuelled by the Cold War.
As ECAFE materialized, then, many of its details remained contentious. One example was its headquarters’ location. This demonstrates the competition between China and India (and sometimes with other Asian countries) for leadership in Asia, a factor leading to their mistrust in the early post-war period.Footnote 50 In early March 1947, Chang asked China’s foreign ministry whether ECAFE should be based in Shanghai.Footnote 51 The ministry agreed: China was one of the Big Five, ‘the only great country in the Far East’, and ‘the most devastated by the war’.Footnote 52 When Chang proposed Shanghai, Britain opposed it because this might favour Shanghai to be the future Far Eastern UN headquarters. The US nominated New York. Other countries hesitated because of the British and American stances.Footnote 53 The Chinese delegation negotiated with its counterparts, won the support of Latin America, and convinced the Netherlands and France not to oppose China’s suggestion. Eventually it was decided that Shanghai would host ECAFE’s temporary headquarters.Footnote 54 This incident, though minor, is symbolic: China wanted to lead the region and not necessarily follow the US in international affairs.
Shanghai fought off other Asian competitors. When hosting the second ECAFE session in Baguio in November–December 1947, the Philippines suggested that the organization’s headquarters should be based in that country.Footnote 55 Likewise, India extended an invitation when hosting the third session in Ootacamund in June 1948.Footnote 56 Pakistan nominated Karachi; Malaya proposed Singapore.Footnote 57 The race to host ECAFE suggests that international solidarity in the region was limited because different Asian nations held their own post-war visions, which were not always compatible. Shanghai was confirmed as the temporary headquarters in the third session, pending the decision on a permanent location. Intriguingly, ECAFE’s executive secretary P. S. Lokanathan, an Indian economist, also preferred Shanghai. Having hosted the temporary offices, and its diplomatic connections with other ECAFE members, helped the city’s case.Footnote 58 However, the stay in Shanghai was short-lived. Because of the communist advance in China, ECAFE’s secretariat was forced to relocate in December 1948: first briefly to Singapore, then in 1949 to Bangkok, where it has since remained.Footnote 59
II
Having reconstructed ECAFE’s birth, the article now turns to showing how Chinese and Indian diplomats disagreed on ECAFE’s overall aims. Why is ECAFE’s work relevant to Asianism? If we accept that Asian ideas on creating an economically more equal world and making Asia’s voices more audible are part of Asianism, then ECAFE’s goals and its specific tasks (discussed in the next section) would be a means to achieving these ends.
To start with, ECOSOC assigned a limited remit to ECAFE. ECAFE would:
(a) Initiate and participate in measures for facilitating concerted action for the economic reconstruction of Asia and the Far East …
(b) Make or sponsor such investigations and studies of economic and technological problems and developments …
(c) Undertake or sponsor the collection, evaluation and dissemination of such economic, technological and statistical information.Footnote 60
Immediately before the first ECAFE session was held in Shanghai in June 1947, Jiang Tingfu, China’s head delegate at the first two sessions, doubted its capacity. A historian with, like P. C. Chiang, a PhD from Columbia, Jiang became China’s ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1936–8, served in senior positions of the Nationalist government during the war, and was director of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Organization, the Chinese partner to UNRRA. Anti-imperialist and a liberal, he became increasingly anti-communist and appreciated democratic politics in the US and Britain.Footnote 61
In May 1947, Jiang was told by Wu Daye, professor of economics at Zhongshan University, who worked for P. C. Chang in fighting for ECAFE, that ECAFE stemmed from ‘a desire to have Far East on an equity with Europe and to have China on the map’. Tellingly, neither Chang nor the foreign ministry expected to gain any specific advantage. Jiang then noted that ECAFE was, for China, ‘a good case of diplomatic infantilism’.Footnote 62 He thought poorly of ECAFE, but attempted to make it useful for Asian economies.
Chinese delegates stressed that an important goal of ECAFE was to save ordinary people from basic livelihood problems. Jiang suggested at its first session that the cause of political conflicts was economic difficulties.Footnote 63 This remark was undoubtedly informed by the fact that the communists had capitalized on poverty and war destruction to expand their territories in the Chinese Civil War. Jiang claimed that ‘ordinary Asians were not much concerned about political thoughts and ideologies’; their ‘main real-life problem was “clothes, food, housing”’.Footnote 64 Li Gan, Jiang’s deputy, who became head delegate when Jiang was elected chair of the session, said that the Chinese (and Asians more generally) expected ECAFE to help them more efficiently organize ‘productive activities and better distribution’.Footnote 65
Jiang noted that China ‘refrain[ed] from asking anything impractical’, ‘winning the confidence’ of Western delegates, and demonstrated ‘considerateness to everybody’.Footnote 66 This pragmatism avoided the hardline attitude that Indian delegates at times displayed. Jiang’s and Li’s avoidance of politics drew on the technocratic approach championed by the League of Nations and inherited by the UN and UNRRA, with which Jiang was familiar. What he and Li did not articulate, but was likely a major motivation for both of them, was the urgent need to achieve economic reconstruction to resist the communist advance in China and Asia, in a similar vein to Nehru’s rationale when he helped initiate the Colombo Plan in January 1950.Footnote 67 Yet this might have downplayed Asians’ aspirations in forming their own national governments.
To their credit, the Nationalists recognized that solving only basic livelihood problems was inadequate. They believed that ECAFE should assist Asia’s ‘industrial revolution’ and promote ‘modernized production methods’. Asian economies could not merely stay at the pre-war level. Although national governments could promote industrial progress in their countries, ECAFE’s assistance would ‘accelerate’ it.Footnote 68 At the second session, Li Gan argued that ECAFE should immediately draft recommendations on economic development and establish a ‘construction committee’.Footnote 69 This indicates China’s desire for more substantial growth.
If China attempted to balance reconstruction and development, India emphasized development and downplayed the problem of war devastation. In Shanghai, India’s delegate R. K. Nehru argued that reconstruction must be geared towards ‘vital long-term objectives’.Footnote 70 Nehru was the chairman of India’s Central Board of Revenue and the son of Jawaharlal Nehru’s cousin Mohanlal Nehru. He stressed that ECAFE must promote measures specific to Asian countries. In Asia, ‘where grinding poverty, disease and ignorance are the general rule’, it was necessary to take ‘a larger view and a longer view’ and foster long-term development while offering immediate aid.Footnote 71 The insistence of R. K. Nehru on economic development reflects the fact that, although India was almost stretched to the limit in its enforced war mobilization for the British empire, little of the war was fought on Indian soil.Footnote 72 His point of departure was Asia’s low productivity, which preceded the war. Yet India’s neglect of war destruction irritated Chinese delegates. The Chinese delegation responded bluntly that Nehru ‘was “contemptuous” of China’s sufferings’.Footnote 73
On the other hand, the US and Britain believed that Asian countries should simply focus on the early stages of industrialization such as investigations. This again shows that Nationalist China did not necessarily follow the US on international issues. Only at the Committee of the Whole meeting in Bangkok in early 1949 did they accept a committee on industry and trade and a subcommittee on iron and steel, a small first step towards meeting China’s and India’s wishes. Lokanathan recommended the creation of the Committee on Industry and Trade. This had strong Asian backing, forcing the Western economies to accept that opposition would only backfire.Footnote 74 Ironically for the Nationalists, their loss in the civil war probably made the US and Britain realize that communism would march on ‘unless the economic problems of this region were satisfactorily resolved’. The Western powers therefore became much more anxious to contribute to Asia’s economic progress.Footnote 75
The disagreement between China and India on ECAFE’s aims demonstrates their divergent views on post-war Asia’s economic future. To explain why the Chinese–Indian relations deteriorated, the border conflicts and Tibet were commonly mentioned.Footnote 76 A significant portion of the Chinese–Indian borders had been ill-defined since the late eighteenth century, when the Qing and British empires encountered one another along the Himalayas. Along the western sector of the borders, by the early twentieth century the Raj claimed Ladakh and Aksai Chin as its land, but the Chinese states claimed that Aksai Chin was Chinese territory. On the eastern sector, Henry McMahon, foreign secretary of British India, concluded a set of notes in 1914 with the Tibetan representative Lonchen Shatra. This defined the eastern sector by what would be called the McMahon Line and put today’s Arunachal Pradesh – which China has claimed as its own – under India.Footnote 77 Such disputes were sidestepped when China and Britain were allies in the Second World War, but re-emerged after the war.
Meanwhile, before the Qing collapsed in 1912, the British empire had already encouraged Tibet to be autonomous, so that Tibet could be India’s buffer against the Russian empire. The British recognized only Chinese suzerainty (short of sovereignty) over Tibet. This meant that the British had direct diplomatic relations with the Tibetans and acquired special trading rights in Tibet. Yet the Qing and successive Chinese governments claimed Tibet to be part of China. Officials from post-colonial India and Nationalist China each suspected the other side of their intentions on Tibet and the borders.Footnote 78
However, Chinese and Indian ideas for post-war Asia in general had already diverged, beyond the conflicts on borders and Tibet. The fault lines between Chinese and Indian visions went deeper than simply geopolitical concerns. Ruptures emerged in ECAFE between its major players: between China and India on the body’s overall directions and specific tasks, and between India and the US on providing funds to aid Asia’s economic development. This does not mean that the conflicting Chinese and Indian ideas predetermined a war in 1962, but it does indicate the immense difficulty of bridging the gap between the two powers, and the limits of cultural exchanges in the early post-war period.Footnote 79
III
This section examines how Indian diplomats proposed a wider to-do list for ECAFE than China did, showing that their ideas of Asia diverged in the finer details as well as broader aims. It also considers some of the obstacles against ECAFE’s work from the Western powers and the organization’s own structural limits.
The ‘lack of basic data’ was one of Asia’s major challenges at the time.Footnote 80 The key task of ECAFE’s first session, set by ECOSOC, was therefore to devise an urgent investigation scheme.Footnote 81 To meet this framework, Chinese officials focused on specific surveys. This was also because Li Gan agreed with David Owen, the UN assistant general-secretary, that the UN could allocate few resources to ECAFE.Footnote 82 Li suggested that ECAFE study:
(1) Possibility in increase in agricultural, especially food, production…
(2) Promotion of a better balanced economy through industrization [sic];
(3) Improvement in transportation; and
(4) Promotion of inter- and intra-regional trade.Footnote 83
This view echoed that of the British and American delegations.Footnote 84 Li and Owen’s stance was probably influenced by the practice of the League of Nations: ‘a pattern of Secretariat studies, an annual economic survey, and, as the big occasion, a formal Commission session’.Footnote 85
By contrast, the Indian delegation demanded a wide-ranging investigation. R. K. Nehru insisted that ECAFE conduct a ‘comprehensive enquiry’ and asked that the UN provide enough staff to its secretariat.Footnote 86 ECAFE plans should proceed ‘on the broadest basis’ and not avoid the problems that Asia faced.Footnote 87 This reflects the Indian government’s desire to produce speedy, substantial development in the region.
As delegates ran into a deadlock, Nehru, a British delegate, and an American delegate had a ‘long private discussion’. At the next meeting, Nehru softened his stance.Footnote 88 Choosing between the British and the Indian draft resolutions on the investigation programme, delegates voted for the Indian draft. The investigation would range quite widely – roughly along the lines that Nehru had proposed – but other delegates managed to highlight ‘topics of primary importance’, for example food, fuel, and equipment.Footnote 89 Unfortunately, the limits on resources hampered the survey work. The first annual Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East was ‘rushed out’ just before the third session because of a sore lack of data and personnel.Footnote 90
Beyond producing economic surveys, what was ECAFE expected to do? Nehru criticized the body’s terms of reference for being too narrow. He asked the secretariat to model ECAFE upon the Economic Commission for Europe, which had the authority to make recommendations and set up subsidiary bodies.Footnote 91 Meeting India’s requests, in July 1947 ECOSOC permitted ECAFE to expand its power. Now it could make recommendations to its full or associate members and to UN specialized agencies. Moreover, after consulting other specialized agencies, and with ECOSOC’s approval, it could establish subsidiary institutions to implement its work.Footnote 92
What Nehru wanted from ECAFE was real and fast progress. Investigations ‘should be carried out as quickly as possible’ in order to initiate rehabilitation schemes.Footnote 93 Similarly, the Chinese wanted ECAFE to promote new measures and offer assistance. Li Gan urged that it must not become only a ‘research organization’. ECAFE’s recommendations to ECOSOC, other UN agencies, and UN member states could help tackle Asia’s economic needs as a priority.Footnote 94 Other Asian delegates shared this view; the Philippines delegate Miguel Guarderno called on ECAFE to act immediately.Footnote 95
Lokanathan used his position to push ECAFE beyond research work. He urged member states to outline their specific difficulties and seek advice, while ECAFE would help resolve these problems on a regional scale.Footnote 96 At around the start of 1949, he observed that ECAFE’s priority should be in this order: ‘(i) Economic Survey; (ii) Industrial Development; (iii) Trade Promotion; (iv) Technical Assistance; and (v) Agricultural Requisites’.Footnote 97 Surveys still took priority, but practical work was not far behind.
ECAFE’s discussions on industrialization illustrate the visions for the body and its difficulties. The second ECAFE session passed a resolution to establish the Working Party on Industrial Development. Chaired by China and composed of India, Thailand, and the Philippines, the working party produced an interim report, observing that the most crucial need of the region was the import of ‘capital goods and basic materials’ from more developed countries. This interim report formed the basis of a resolution on industrial development.Footnote 98 India and China were in effect calling for an Asian Marshall Plan, hoping that the US would aid Asia on a scale similar to that in Europe.
This became explicit in the fourth session (held in Lapstone, Australia, in November–December 1948), when the working party’s full report introduced a five-year plan for Asia’s reconstruction, billed at 13.6 billion US dollars. Of this, $6.4 billion would be raised in Asia, while the other $7.2 billion would come from non-Asian countries, chiefly the US. The US, however, was uninterested.Footnote 99 At the 1949 Bangkok meeting, India again proposed that Asian countries took loans to finance their industrial sector.Footnote 100 Only then did the Western powers agree to the Committee on Industry and Trade as a compromise.
Though it is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate the Indian–American relations in this period, the ECAFE discussions highlight from a new angle that India and the US had drastically different views on the post-war world order, even if their actual connections remained strong. Conventional wisdom argues that India and the US were no friends in the Cold War.Footnote 101 This fits the usual understanding that early post-colonial India’s foreign policy was guided by non-alignment, which kept both the US and the Soviet Union at arm’s length. Yet a growing revisionist scholarship contends that India was much closer with the US than with the Soviet Union in the first two decades after 1947. For example, the US provided $6.3 billion of aid to India between 1947 and 1965, some six times higher than the Soviet figure (just above $1 billion).Footnote 102 Jawaharlal Nehru privately reassured American and British diplomats that, should a general war broke out between the West and the Soviet Union, India would side with the West.Footnote 103
However, India’s economic visions on ECAFE were overlooked by the US, which did not prioritize Asia in its Cold War conceptions. Indian elites advocated a different position from the US on the post-war order, fighting for a more equal world. International organizations like ECAFE were for India a key platform for making its case. While Indian elites largely retained an amicable relationship with the British as India declared independence, they redirected their criticism of Western imperialism towards the US.Footnote 104
Chinese and especially Indian ideas on economic development through ECAFE came to little by the end of the decade; they were well ahead of their time. At ECAFE’s request, specifically from Lokanathan, ECOSOC modified its terms of reference in 1951 to substitute rehabilitation for development.Footnote 105 ECAFE fell under the radar but recorded small progress, starting in the 1950s. On iron and steel, for example, it organized study tours of Asian experts to Japan, France, and Germany to learn new production techniques, and it arranged tests and research capacity for countries that could not afford an investigation of their raw materials.Footnote 106 ECAFE listed a range of its activities on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1972; these included the Asian Industrial Development Council and the Asian Development Bank.Footnote 107
Low-key and non-headline-stealing, ECAFE stood in stark contrast with its famous sibling born in 1948, the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL in Spanish or Portuguese acronyms; now the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean). The economist Raúl Prebisch, executive secretary of CEPAL from 1950 to 1963, was prominent in leading a group of economists known as cepalinos to promote an economic theory of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Chiefly the producer of primary goods, Latin America (and the world’s other ‘peripheries’) suffered from those goods’ low and volatile prices relative to manufactured goods produced in ‘centres’ such as the US and western Europe. The ‘periphery’ countries lagged further behind, unable to accumulate their own wealth. To combat this problem, cepalinos argued for regional co-operation, foreign aid, and fairer terms of international trade, alongside national industrialization, and for integrating Global South countries into the global economy more equally.Footnote 108
Why did ECAFE and CEPAL fare so differently? First, CEPAL’s terms of reference include a distinct instruction absent in ECAFE’s: studying the solutions of ‘problems arising in Latin America from world economic maladjustment and towards other problems connected with the world economy’.Footnote 109 This gave Presbich and cepalinos the licence to theorize the economic ills of Latin America and offer solutions in grand, global terms.
Second, Latin America emerged from the Second World War relatively intact. The attention of cepalinos was more ‘post-colonial’: they challenged the informal imperialism of Western countries (especially America). By contrast, ECAFE had to tackle both war devastation and (often empire-induced) low productivity. Tellingly, Lokanathan argued in late 1947 that the key to reconstructing Asian economies was political and economic stability. Thereafter, Asian economies should focus on ‘removing bottlenecks that impeded production’, not least through modernizing agricultural and industrial production. Asia could enlist technical support from American experts, which Lokanathan believed would cost the US little and be effective.Footnote 110
Third, Presbich towered over other delegates at CEPAL, and four-fifths of CEPAL’s founding members were Latin American countries, ensuring a unity of purpose.Footnote 111 By contrast, ECAFE’s member states were far from united and the organization had no one like Presbich. Asian economies had their own national priorities and economic plans, reflected in various ECAFE committees that catered to different needs. That the US and Britain led the efforts in denting Asian members’ developmental aspirations did not help.Footnote 112
That said, like Presbich’s ideas in CEPAL, India (and China) aimed to not only carve out a limited space for Asia or the Global South but also change the global order from within.Footnote 113 ECAFE was a means for Asian nations to attain economic modernity on their own terms, and major roles in world affairs. This would make the world economy more equal. India’s participation in ECAFE was thus part of its broader efforts to ‘champion new principles of international justice and global governance’, so that all states would thrive economically and politically.Footnote 114 In this process, India was more assertive than China, which preferred a slow evolution to a quiet revolution.
IV
How did Chinese and Indian policymakers evaluate ECAFE? Publicly, Chinese officials were satisfied. At the General Assembly in 1948, China’s foreign minister, Wang Shijie, said that in the past year problems in Asia had ‘received a fair amount of attention’ from the UN. One of the three examples Wang cited was ECAFE, in which ‘good work has been done’.Footnote 115 His words should be read with a pinch of salt: he was speaking at a major public event, and in 1948 the other two examples he cited – Korea’s and Indonesia’s independence – showed little progress. Wang did cite an initial if small achievement of ECAFE: it established a Bureau of Flood Control in mid-1948 on a resolution drafted by China, India, and France.Footnote 116
Privately, Chinese delegates doubted ECAFE’s effectiveness. Jiang Tingfu wrote after the first session that China achieved what it wanted, but ‘one wondered what it was about: much ado about nothing!?’Footnote 117 Chen Guangfu, an industrialist and a member of China’s delegation at the Bangkok meeting, noted that many ECAFE members discussed industrialization without their own capital. He bemoaned that ECAFE was only a discussion forum and where ‘ordinary international civil servants’ could ‘receive salaries’.Footnote 118 This negative feeling is unsurprising. ECAFE was largely an advisory body with limited operational functions. Its resolutions were non-binding, and it could not offer capital in the way that the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, founded at Bretton Woods, did. Moreover, it took time for ECAFE to organize the commission, staff it, and gather the information on rehabilitation.Footnote 119
On India’s side, some disappointment with ECAFE can be detected. Jawaharlal Nehru asked shortly after opening the third session whether ECAFE would ‘lead to tangible results’.Footnote 120 Judging by this criterion, the early ECAFE would have likely disappointed him and those who shared his expectations. Perhaps this helped explain why Nehru did not fully rely on the UN system in his search for a more equal post-colonial world: he organized an Arab–Asian conference in January 1949 supporting Indonesia’s independence and was a proponent of the Colombo Plan.
Despite its shortcomings, ECAFE was able to continue its work. Its potential was appreciated outside the ranks of top leaders – for instance, by some Indian officials. The Indian delegation’s report on the fifth session (held in Singapore in October 1949) acknowledged that the impact of ECAFE was ‘seriously circumscribed’. However, it observed that Asia was ‘overladen with age-long difficulties’, which ECAFE could not do much about in a few short years.Footnote 121 Even when ECAFE’s budget rose significantly between 1950 and 1951, as its secretariat hired more staff,Footnote 122 it took up a mere 2 per cent of the whole UN budget.Footnote 123 Unsurprisingly, in the late 1940s ECAFE could go little further than producing surveys.
The Indian delegation’s report briefly noted what ECAFE had achieved, claiming that the fifth session was better than previous sessions as it got down to ‘concrete work’.Footnote 124 This probably referred to the establishment of the Industry and Trade Committee. One brief encounter in this committee shows that India defended the case of Asian countries. Britain and the US announced that, because they would soon have ‘considerable’ amounts of exportable surplus steel, Asian countries need not expand their steel industry. India challenged this, arguing that Asian countries wanted to be ‘self sufficient [sic] as soon as possible’. Britain and the US ‘immediately corrected their position’.Footnote 125 Moreover, the report noted that ECAFE had even greater political value. It was ‘the only platform available for ventilating the political and economic grievances of the Asian countries’.Footnote 126 These small strengths perhaps explain why ECAFE had its term extended indefinitely in 1951. An ECAFE with limited power was still better than no ECAFE at all.
V
ECAFE was a forum in which Chinese and Indian ideas on post-war economic Asianism competed with one another, though there was also some agreement. Both countries intended to lead the region. P. C. Chang’s crucial role in establishing ECAFE signalled Nationalist China’s potential for shaping UN proceedings. That Shanghai hosted ECAFE’s headquarters (not without competition from Indian and other contenders) was also supposed to demonstrate China’s prime position in Asia. But once ECAFE was founded, China and India switched positions. Now Indian delegates took the lead, pressing to expand the organization’s remit and focusing on development. By contrast, Chinese delegates accepted that, with limited resources, ECAFE would proceed slowly and cater to both reconstruction and development. China and India agreed that post-war Asia should ultimately be independent and economically developed, but India’s approach was tougher and more radical than China’s. India was relatively less troubled by war devastation and could focus more on long-term development. Moreover, it had suffered more directly from colonial rule than China had. Therefore, Indian elites were keener to challenge the economic imbalance between Asia and the West, which was considered part of the Western imperial hierarchy. But Nationalist China, officially allied with the US and Britain in the war after Pearl Harbor, became both a beneficiary (if uncertain) and a victim of that hierarchy, thus finding it more difficult to mount a full-throttled challenge against it.
ECAFE was part of a much longer arc in which non-Western countries used international organizations to promote economic development for Asia and make the world economy more equitable. This makes it comparable with more prominent bodies such as the World Health Organization (which Nationalist China also helped establish).Footnote 127 Yet ECAFE’s immediate results were limited because of a lack of resources, and disagreements among its members. Chinese and Indian desires for a developmental agenda materialized slowly, too late to save the Nationalist regime in China.
Chinese and Indian contributions to ECAFE helped widen the spectrum of Asianism after the war. As Asian activists became powerholders, dealing with regional economic ills that stemmed at least partly from Western imperialism became a major theme of Asianism. China and India disagreed with one another in ECAFE, but their strands of Asianism were not simply anti-Western. They worked with non-Asian developing countries such as those from Latin America, and even with some Western economies selectively (though the latter were indifferent). This suggests an Asianism open to broader internationalism and to some co-operation with the West. This openness contrasted with the exclusivity and aggression of wartime Japanese Asianism. But the competing strands of post-war Asianism were also a reason for its decline: Asian nations themselves could not agree on how the region should move forward after war and empire. In response, some Asian countries like India and Indonesia looked for like-minded partners in the Global South, resulting in broader initiatives such as Afro-Asian internationalism.
Disagreements between China and India at ECAFE indicate a deeper rift between these two powers than once thought, spanning not only the disputes on the borders and Tibet but also conflicting visions for a post-war, post-colonial world. Furthermore, once New Delhi decided to recognize the People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong, any remaining sense of affinity between Indian and Nationalist Chinese officials (who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949) faded away.
In the context of the history of world governance, the fact that China led the establishment of ECAFE, only for India to surpass it in initiating radical proposals, symbolizes the ebb and flow of China’s and India’s influences in international organizations in the post-war decades. China was the leading Asian country after 1945. P. C. Chang’s advocacy for ECAFE symbolized a moment when China was garnering support from the wider non-Western world to assert its own interests and what it saw as Asia’s – a theme that has had much resonance in recent decades. But as the Nationalist government lost the civil war, China was quickly overshadowed at the UN by India. While in the 1950s Nationalist China aligned more closely with the US, India was a leading member of the Afro-Asian group that sought to ‘promote anticolonial causes from within’ the UN.Footnote 128 Indian diplomats built on the loose network of Asian UN members that Nationalist China had helped initiate.
Acknowledgements
I started the research that led to this article while at the University of Oxford, and revised the manuscript significantly while at the University of Manchester. Different versions of this article were presented at the Oxford Global and Imperial History Research Seminar, the Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies, and the Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. I thank the organizers and audience members for their questions and suggestions, in particular Henrietta Harrison, Andrew Thompson, James Belich, and Helena Lopes. I would like to thank Rana Mitter, Barak Kushner, Jennifer Altehenger, and Peter Cunich for their feedback on earlier versions of the article. I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the former editor Rachel Leow for their detailed comments.
Funding statement
Research for this article was funded by an Oxford–Hong Kong Jockey Club Scholarship.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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