A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

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During the colonial era the armed strength of the European nations had by and large subdued fac- tional and national struggles i ...

the struggle for independence after 1945, created new balances of power. Whenever independence was achieved by armed struggle, a ...

gles of south-east Asia. Millions suffered the cata- strophic consequences. The majority of the nations in south-east Asia were ...

the largest nation in southern Asia to have sur- vived internal strife as a democracy; Malaysia and Singapore have done likewise ...

a bloodless coup and abolished the constitution, convinced that only authoritarian socialism could save his country. He ruled Bu ...

islands, extending over 3,000 miles of ocean from east to west, that has captured the popular imag- ination is Bali. The great m ...

confrontation with Malaysia. He denounced the Malaysian Federation as a Western colonial outpost. For a time in 1963 and 1964, w ...

Throughout south-east Asia the economic crash of 1997 threatened political stability and authoritar- ian leaders. One of the wor ...

East Timor’s success in breaking away from Indonesia encouraged other independent move- ments. The longest running and most seri ...

seemed to have struck more deeply here than else- where in the region. With the Alliance Party in dis- array, Mahathir Mohamad, ...

eastern borders with Cambodia, both of which countries were threatened with communist insur- gencies in the 1960s. A communist ( ...

of the helpless urban population perished. A cam- paign of genocide was directed against all intel- lectuals and educated Cambod ...

Nowhere was human suffering greater in Asia than during the 1960s and 1970s in the lands of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Viet ...

Vietnamese allies had even less regard for the lives of those of their fellow countrymen who were assisting the Vietcong and Vie ...

have been killed, with total civilian and military casualties amounting to 30 million. Such statistics bring home to the West th ...

the South and to try to control the Vietcong, but although they needed the supplies from the North, which were passing through t ...

regime. The Vietminh henceforth played the major military role and so gained the upper hand in determining the future of Vietnam ...

where some spent months and others years, a Vietnamese Gulag. The communists now applied their Marxist, cen- trally directed eco ...

There was one aspect of Chinese life that did not change after the communist victory in 1949: China continued to be ruled autocr ...