The Japanese army invaded Burma in December 1941. It began only a few days after the surprise bomb attack at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii devastated the US fleet and signaled the expansion of the conflict across the Pacific and through Southeast Asia.
Depleted by the need to fight on fronts closer to home during World War II, few British and Indian army units had been left to defend the colony. They were, however, later joined by Chinese forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
Rangoon, then the capital of Burma, fell to the Japanese in March 1942. Thailand had entered into an alliance with Japan and its troops supported the invasion.
The retreating British and Indian soldiers managed to break out to the north and in May, after the failure to halt the Japanese onslaught, a general evacuation of Burma was ordered.
“We got a hell of a beating,” General Joseph Stilwell, the US lieutenant general and chief of staff of allied armies in that region, told a press conference in Delhi on May 26, 1942, just days after he had marched out of Burma on foot, through the jungle, with his staff of 117 men and women. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out why it happened and go back and retake it.”
It was just months since he assumed command.
The Japanese army, which had launched attacks across the border into India but were heavily defeated by British and Indian forces at the Battles of Imphal and Kohima, close to the border with Burma, in 1944, was finally driven out of Burma in 1945.
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
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As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
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