ABSTRACT
By the early twenty-first century, East Asian socialist (or “communist”) regimes that had been established some 50 years earlier still survive. In a retrospective view, this is one of the most intriguing phenomena of the post-World War II world, for at that time-and to a certain extent even today-continental East Asia did not have the fully developed infrastructures needed according to Marx to build socialism. These include urbanization, industrialization, advanced capitalism, and a sophisticated bourgeois society, not to mention an exploited proletariat-all typical of Western Europe as early as the nineteenth century. Soviet and East European socialist regimes that had been built on less advanced socio-economic foundations (supposed to be more solid and stable) collapsed by the early 1990s. On the other hand, East Asian socialism, which has diverged from the Marxist model and even contradicted it both in theory and in practice, has still managed to survive and to preserve-albeit with many modifications-communist party rule. The reasons for the initial absorption of socialism in East Asia, the later consolidation of Marxism-Leninism (communism), and its heretofore survivability are diverse and complex, and fall beyond the scope of this chapter-save one. It relates to the role of Japan and to the implications of its 1905 victory over Russia. This victory has ended the era of moderation and reformism in East Asian political activism and paved the way for radical and revolutionary modes of thinking and acting. This is true of the main East Asian countries that were later to become communist, namely Vietnam and China, as well as of Russia and-primarily and paradoxically-of Japan, though it has never become communist.
