In “Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia,” Hans van de Ven, a professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge University, provides a much-needed Asia-centric focus on World War II.

While Western histories of the global conflict center the European theater, and typically mark the war’s beginning with with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, van de Ven starts with the reordering of Asia under European colonialism in the 19th century, the awakening of new political movements across the region in response, and Japan’s 1937 invasion of China. 

World War II remade Asia, and the consequences thereof linger to this day.

“Many of today’s flashpoints – capable of sparking global conflict – are unresolved hangovers from this war,” van de Ven told The Diplomat’s Managing Editor Catherine Putz. From Kashmir and the India-Pakistan rivalry, to the status of Taiwan and the division of the Korean Peninsula, Asia’s flashpoints have their roots in the legacies of World War II.

“Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia” will be published on September 8, 2026.

What changes in our understanding of World War II when we shift focus from the European theater to the Pacific?

The Second World War in Asia marked the end of British, French, and Dutch imperial rule and birthed a new Asia structured around the modern nation-state. In that sense, the transformations wrought by the war in Asia were as profound as those caused by the First World War in Europe.

The Asian theater was never just about defeating Japan – it was also about dismantling European imperialism and creating new national futures. Regional independence movements exploited Japan’s attempt to build an empire that rivaled Britain’s. Some built large followings and armies – like the Chinese Communists – while others sought independence by collaborating with the Japanese, as Sukarno did in Indonesia. 

Another crucial shift was that the contest between Japan and the United States for control of the Pacific ended decisively in America’s favor. Following the Versailles Peace Treaty [that ended World War I], Japan gained control of the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. During the war, the United States expended immense blood and treasure to conquer them. Today’s geopolitical contest between the U.S. and China is, in part, a continuation of this struggle for Pacific dominance. As an emerging superpower, China naturally wants to secure its vulnerable coastline – through which the British invaded in the 19th century and the Japanese in the 20th.

To what extent did the colonization of Asia by European powers set the stage for World War II in the region?

In three distinct ways.

First, prior to Europe’s colonization of Asia, the region was ruled by historic dynasties: the Mughals in India, the Manchus in China, the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, the Joseon dynasty in Korea, and the Nguyễn dynasty in Vietnam. None survived the colonial regimes the Europeans built in the first part of the 19th century, and their collapses proved deeply destabilizing.

Second, Western military, technical, and scientific dominance created a severe crisis of confidence among Asian elites, who concluded that their own cultural and political traditions were backward. In the late 19th century, nationalist movements emerged that demanded radical political, cultural, and social change. Initially confined to elites, they gained mass followings in the 1920s after the Great Powers at Versailles rejected Asian demands for self-determination. Meanwhile, the 1917 October Revolution in Russia offered an inspiring new model of revolution. Communism provided an organizational framework for anti-imperialism and suggested that a backward country did not need decades of gradual development and industrialization but could through revolution jump to the forefront of history. In orthodox communism, feudalism is followed by capitalism before it finally reaches communism. 

Finally, there was Japan. Before World War I, Japanese elites hoped to gain Western acceptance by “leaving” Asia and adopting Western models. However, the Western powers’ refusal to include a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant, combined with naval restrictions imposed on Japan at the Washington Conference, convinced Japanese leaders that Japan had to free Asia from European imperialism to achieve equal footing.

Many peg the start of World War II in Asia as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, two years before the war kicked off in Europe. What is most important to understand about that incident?

Chiang Kai-shek transformed a minor military clash near Beijing into an existential crisis involving the survival of China as a nation and civilization. Similar skirmishes had occurred before and were settled locally. However, Chiang insisted that any resolution be approved by China’s central government and demanded a full Japanese withdrawal from northern China.

When Japan refused, Chiang threw his elite troops against Japanese forces in Shanghai, stationed there by virtue of an earlier truce agreement. Chiang’s decision, which lacked unanimous support, ensured that the conflict threatened Western financial interests and received heavy global media coverage. China was quickly framed as a plucky underdog standing up to brutal Japanese militarism.

Equally important was the creation of a United Front between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, who had been fighting each other since the mid-1920s. Chiang agreed to take on Japan partly because Joseph Stalin offered massive Soviet military aid and pressured Mao to join the alliance. Chiang hoped this United Front would absorb the Communists into the nationalist political order and end their efforts to overthrow him – a hope that ultimately proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation.

How did the twin forces of nationalism and anti-imperialism interact in World War II in Asia?

A really good question. We often equate Asia’s anti-imperialism with nationalism, but that oversimplifies reality. It was far from guaranteed that the nations of post-war Asia would be unitary states led by secular nationalists. For instance, there was massive support in Indonesia for establishing an Islamic state, which did not come to fruition largely through Sukarno’s personal charisma. Alternative visionaries imagined a Confucian East Asia or a vast federation of Islamic states spanning from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. Gandhi was a nationalist, of course, but he wanted a new Indian polity based on village councils. The Confucian leader Qian Mu wanted the same in China. 

One core question driving my research was why China, India, and Indonesia rejected federalism, which, one could argue, would have suited their enormous internal diversity and for which there was support. First, federal structures were strongly associated with European “divide-and-rule” colonial tactics. Second, the war made it starkly obvious that only large, centralized powers possessed the strength to determine their own futures and to matter geopolitically. 

“Blood Dawn” emphasizes how contingent these post-war outcomes really were. The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan is a prime example; neither Jawaharlal Nehru nor Muhammad Ali Jinnah originally desired a hard partition, but they exhausted each other and the British through endless negotiations. Similarly, as Mao Zedong later acknowledged to Japanese visitors in the 1950s, the Chinese Communists might never have emerged out of the hills of northwest Chia without the catalyst of WWII. Their ultimate victory was far from guaranteed until 1947 at the earliest.

Russia – at the time the Soviet Union – bridges all of Eurasia. How did Soviet leaders approach the conflict in East Asia at first and how did their approach evolve?

For Stalin, the ultimate nightmare was a two-front war requiring the USSR to fight Germany and Japan simultaneously across vast distances. To counter the rise of Hitler, Stalin advocated Popular Front alliances starting in 1932, encouraging communists to ally with all anti-fascists. This strategy shaped Léon Blum’s government in France, Manuel Azaña’s in Spain, and China’s United Front.

In 1939, Stalin reversed course. Japanese forces had become bogged down in China, and Soviet forces dealt a decisive blow to Japan’s Kwantung Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. While that battle raged, Stalin negotiated simultaneously with Hitler’s Germany, which stood at the brink of invading Poland, as well as with Britain and France, who had guaranteed Poland’s security. Stalin ultimately chose a pact with Hitler. That and an armistice agreed with Japan meant that the Soviet Union did not have to fight either of its enemies for some time. To explain this awkward change, which left socialists and communists the world over confounded, Stalin declared that the new world war was not against fascism after all, but merely a contest between empires who could be left to slaughter each other. 

Only in the summer of 1945, after Germany’s defeat, did Stalin enter the war against Japan by invading occupied Manchuria. Although Soviet troops eventually withdrew, the operation secured the USSR a major voice in post-war Asian affairs.

Finally, why do you think it is important to continue to revisit and reexamine the past – such as World War II writ large and in Asia, specifically?

For Asia, World War II was an axial moment. The modern states of Asia trace their origins directly to this period; the leaders of its independence movements remain central heroic figures, and wartime narratives still dominate national identity.

Furthermore, many of today’s flashpoints – capable of sparking global conflict – are unresolved hangovers from this war. These include Kashmir, the India-Pakistan rivalry, the status of Taiwan, and the standoff on the Korean Peninsula.

In the immediate post-war decades, Western observers often ignored Asia due to its poverty. That luxury is gone. China is now an emergent superpower, and Asia’s economies are driving global growth. Yet Western audiences remain strikingly ignorant of Asian history. While some Americans know a bit about China and some British know about India, very few people pay attention to Indonesia – which features prominently in “Blood Dawn.” 

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