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  • External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952 by Ja Ian Chong
  • Richard S. Horowitz (bio)
External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952. By Ja Ian Chong (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Hardcover: 293pp.

From the 1950s through to the 1970s, political scientists and historians working on Asia were often in conversation. They worked on related topics and utilized approaches and methods that were, if not the same, mutually understandable. In recent decades a chasm has emerged between the fields: historians have stepped away from political topics, and methodological developments have drawn political science ever further from the kinds of research that interest historians. Ja Ian Chong’s External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation marks a welcome return of political science to Asian history.

Chong uses a comparative approach to explore the question of how sovereign states came into being in East and Southeast Asia in the middle of the twentieth century. His theory is that strong states tend to intervene in weaker states to secure exclusive access, and to prevent competitors from gaining access. He argues “Sovereign statehood develops in a weak polity when foreign actors uniformly expect high costs to intervention and settle on a next best alternative to their worst fear, domination of that state by a rival” (p. 2). The decisions of foreign states to support or accept the establishment of strong government — rather than nationalist movements, military competition, or norms of self-determination — were vital in the establishment of sovereign states in Asia in the middle of the twentieth century. Chong uses China between 1893 and 1952 as his primary example, and then adds a chapter each on Indonesia and Thailand.

At the core of his book are the four chapters on China. Utilizing the language fashionable in political science (independent variables and dependent variables, avoiding statements about causality), but often annoying to those in other disciplines, Chong avoids the emotive language of imperialism and domination that is so common in the historical literature. He shows quite convincingly that the actions of foreign powers to support local proxies and claim exclusive rights in certain regions contributed to the weakening of the Chinese state from 1893–1922. Between 1923 and 1953 foreign powers except for Japan made choices not to intervene in China, and that generally speaking they acted in ways that supported the assertion of power by a central government. He asserts that the [End Page 135] common interpretations of the establishment of a strong central government under the Chinese Communist Party — nationalism, norms of self-determination, the alliance of the Communist Party and the peasant class, or the “bellicist” model whereby states are created out of military competition and the extraction of resources — are flawed. “Available evidence indicates that the case for the interventionist claim about the establishment of sovereign statehood in the Chinese polity between 1923 and 1952 seems much stronger than the alternatives” (p. 171). In the conclusion, the author elaborates: “Instead of some wellspring of popular backing, what gave nationalist groups the financial, military and political wherewithal to persist against the challenges they faced was often patronage by foreign powers” (p. 231). He tempers his argument slightly, suggesting that while the role of nationalism was of limited importance in state formation it “was especially important for state-building after the creation of sovereign statehood” (p. 232).

Chong deserves credit for bringing a fresh perspective to state formation in modern China, and particularly bringing much needed attention to the role of foreign intervention. His four chapters on China are an impressive synthesis of a wide ranging literature on foreign intervention in China, as well as some use of published primary documents (mostly in Chinese). Historians since the early 1980s have tended to ignore the impact of foreign intervention. Chong makes a convincing case that foreign involvement in China needs to be taken much more seriously as a factor in the formation of a unified sovereign state in mid-twentieth-century China.

Chong’s willingness to place China in a broader comparison with both Thailand and Indonesia is also welcome. While differences abound, Thailand...

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