How Did World War II Create Modern Asia? With Professor Hans van de Ven

**Mia Serendy** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Serendy. When we think of the Second World War, why do we so often look to Europe? And what if some of the conflict's most profound consequences unfolded not in the West, but across Asia? On today's episode, Professor Hans van de Ven, historian of modern China and professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Cambridge, joins Hannah Lucinda Smith to challenge the Eurocentric understanding of the Second World War and showing how the conflict laid the foundations of Asia as we know it today.
Let's join our host, Hannah Lucinda Smith, now with more.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (0:38)
The Second World War was, of course, a global war, but it is generally studied and understood through a European and American lens.
One of its major arenas was Asia, and in his new book, Blood Dawn, historian Hans van de Ven offers a radically different interpretation, framing the war on that continent as the spark for nationalist movements that would lead to the formation of today's modern Asian states. Hans, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

**Hans van de Ven** (1:07)
Hannah, thank you very much, and thank you so much for having me on. I'm looking forward to our discussion.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (1:13)
Thank you. Well, first of all, when did you first start thinking about this approach to World War II in Asia, and why do you think that the overwhelming majority of scholarship on that war focused on the Western experience?

**Hans van de Ven** (1:26)
I started thinking about this book some time ago, really during Brexit, when the Second World War was a major sort of, it was a lens through which so much was seen that had to do with Britain's position in the world, Europe's position in the world, and so on. We had all the Churchill movies and so on. And I've been working on China's war with Japan for many decades. And of course, I kept thinking, well, actually, the Second World War is a much more, is a much broader theme.
And we need to know the Asian perspective on the Second World War. Really, in order to understand the direction that the world is taking with Asia becoming a hugely important part of the world. I mean, as we put it this way, I think in the aftermath of the Second World War for decades, it was quite reasonable for Europeans and Americans to sort of ignore Asia.
It was populous, but it was largely agricultural and very poor and it didn't matter geopolitically. We now live in a very, very different world. Asia is developing very quickly, has developed very quickly. China has become a superpower. Japan, in many ways, is a big power. India is moving in that direction. Indonesia is moving in that direction. And unless we deal with that reemergence in some ways of Asia, I don't think we're going to understand our own times very much. So that was one reason. The other reason is, as I said, I've been working on the Second World War in China for a long time.
And more and more, I came to realize that to understand that particular theme, which is very much a very big theme in China, now with rising nationalism and so on, actually you can't really exclude the rest of Asia. You can't exclude, you have to rethink what Japan was trying to do. It builds its empire. And so all these things are interconnected. And I think we still, it's not just British and American, the victor countries, so to speak, but also European countries, the Dutch, the French, the Germans, who still think right about the Second World War, sort of national wars. It is France and it's the Dutch and, I think, well, actually, it is a global war. It was a global war, and we need to have a global perspective on this war in order to understand its significance and to sort of get us out of thinking about the Second World War in highly solidified ways, where we are sort of trapped and thinking about it in certain ways. I think to open up that discussion, open up that debate, to think about Asia more generally, and to take seriously that Japan was trying to build an empire, and was actually, you know, it was not stupid in doing so, it was often very clever in doing so. So it's from that background, it's sort of the politics in Europe itself, it's the transformation in the world we are facing today with the rise, re-emergence of Asia generally, and then the sort of the more historiographical point of, well, all these wars were actually really interconnected. And the makers of that war, the leaders at the time thought globally, they didn't think nationally, well, they also thought nationally, but they had a global perspective.