Chapter 171, Summary Report on the World War (Part 2)
4. East Asia
In the ten years of war that just ended, East Asia, which has a large population and vast land, is obviously another main battlefield as much as Europe. However, when counting war losses in East Asia, the committee encountered a lot of troubles and controversies, the biggest of which was on the Chinese battlefield.
First of all, there are many debates about how to define the time when China entered a state of war. Because since the last feudal dynasty that ruled China collapsed in 1912, China has been plunged into continuous civil wars and famines. These civil wars continued until the outbreak of the Third World War and did not subside. Chinese comrades believe that the calculation should start from the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, but in the view of the committee, this is as absurd as counting casualties from the First World War into the next two world wars - when the Chinese Civil War began , the war hasn’t even broken out yet!
Finally, after mutual compromise between the two sides, the time for China to join the world war was determined to be September 18, 1931, which was the date when the Japanese army launched its attack on Manchuria. As a result, among all the countries in the world, China and Japan were the first to participate in the war.
Secondly, regarding China's population losses during the eighteen years of war, it is also an inconsistent and incredibly confusing account. According to Chinese comrades, before the war with Japan, China had a total population of about 400 million. Then, due to the war that lasted for so many years and the global famine during the abnormally low temperature climate, a population of 80 to 90 million was lost. die. The committee initially accepted the above statement. But the problem is that according to the first census completed by the new Chinese government in December 1949, China's current population is not the more than 300 million expected by the committee, but a staggering 530,000 Ten thousand - that is to say, if the previous data is not wrong, then This means that after China fought two world wars with bloody rivers and corpses everywhere, and experienced two "years without summer" with abnormally low temperatures and famines around the world, the total population not only did not decrease, but actually increased by a sufficient amount. One hundred and thirty million, equivalent to the total population of France three years before the war!
Regarding this absurd result, all the statisticians on the committee said they could not accept it at all. They claimed that humans are not mice and rabbits with super reproductive capabilities. It is absolutely impossible for humans to have such an exaggerated birth rate, even for the Chinese. No exceptions - so there's definitely something very wrong with these numbers. However, despite the above-mentioned disputes, until further investigation results are obtained, the committee can only temporarily adopt the existing preliminary conclusion, that is, China has lost between 80 million and 80 million in the war and famine that swept the world. Population of 90 million.
Then, in the early days of World War III, the two most prosperous port cities in China, Shanghai and Hong Kong, were successively destroyed by nuclear strikes by the US military. Then, the battle between Chinese comrades and their own reactionary government and border separatist rebels, The fight continued intermittently until 1949.
However, although China has been in war for a long time, in general, the intensity of the war is much lower than that on the European battlefield. During World War II, China only had a large-scale war with Japan, and the confrontation lasted far longer than the fierce fighting. As for the intensity of China's civil war, it is not worth mentioning in Europe. It is said that hundreds of thousands of troops often fight, and the winner can be decided with only a few hundred casualties. Next, except for the two nuclear strikes suffered in the early stages of World War III and the several months of small-scale intervention and invasion operations by tens of thousands of American and British motley crews, the Chinese Red Army did not actually participate in World War III. During the same period, the intensity of the battles with various rebel forces in the country's northwest and southwest regions was only equivalent to suppressing bandits, or the European army's suppression of colonial rebellions in the past. The sum of all these factors allowed China to finally preserve such a large population.
Therefore, starting from 1947, the new Chinese government, which had gained a firm foothold, had begun large-scale post-war reconstruction work. At present, it has basically repaired all the railways it owned before the war, and carried out nuclear inspections in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The blast ruins have been cleared. Even with the widespread famine caused by the abnormally low temperature in the world, it did not cause serious riots within China. Although China is still a backward agricultural country, among the 1.2 billion people in the post-war world, Chinese account for nearly half. The number of people speaking Chinese in the world exceeds any other language in the world. You can understand the pivotal position this country will have in the future world.
As the eastern source of the Second and Third World Wars, Japan achieved extremely brilliant results in the war. Although it lost North Korea and Taiwan that it had possessed before the war, and failed to secure Manchuria, China, it still It swallowed the entire Oceania in one breath, expanding its territory to an extent that can be compared with China! But as a price, Japan's Yamato nation also paid a horrific and horrific price during the war.
When the war ended, Tokyo, the capital of Japan, had been razed to the ground by the atomic bomb, and a series of large cities such as Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Sendai, Sapporo, and Nagasaki were also either destroyed by nuclear explosions or destroyed by nuclear bombs. The U.S. military's strategic bombing burned everything, and the new government once had no housing available and was forced to set up tents in the wilderness to work. Japan's domestic railways, roads, factories, and mines were completely destroyed during the war, and only less than one-fifth of them have been repaired so far. The industrial foundation accumulated over the past century has been wiped out. Also, the Kanto Plain, the most fertile agricultural area in Japan, was seriously contaminated by nuclear contamination during the war and will be forced to be abandoned and abandoned for a long time to come. Japan's population of 72 million before the war was reduced to only 36 million after the war. Due to the collapse of the local economy and the inability to support too many people, about half of the remaining 36 million Japanese, or 18 million people, were relocated to many islands in the South Pacific, and some Inhabited newly occupied Australia and New Zealand. What's worse is that among the 36 million surviving Japanese, there is still a serious gender imbalance problem. The ratio of healthy men and women of childbearing age is almost one to four! In other words, a man needs to marry four women to ensure that there are not too many leftover women.
Japan's new government had to amend the marriage law and announced that polygamy would be restored within twenty years. In addition, in order to increase the population as quickly as possible, the Japanese government even lowered the legal marriage age for Japanese women to an incredible nine years old, which caused great controversy.
Therefore, although Japan was the winner of the world war, Japan was already in a state of despair and dying after the war. In addition, because the new Japanese regime did not revolutionize thoroughly enough and retained too many residual forces from the old era, internal struggles and divisions in the future are likely to be very serious. Therefore, the committee believes that whether Japan can continue to maintain its strength after the war and become one of the major leaders in the new world remains to be observed and studied.
Before the outbreak of the world war, the Korean Peninsula, under the rule of the Japanese Imperial Government, had a population of approximately 24 million.
After the outbreak of World War II, Korea, as part of the Japanese Empire at the time, was thrown into the war, and three million Koreans were killed or moved overseas during the war. After the collapse of the old Japanese imperial regime, the Korean Peninsula immediately won freedom and independence, but soon a bloody civil war broke out between revolutionary forces and reactionary forces. At least a million North Koreans died during the Korean Civil War and subsequent purges.
Next, like all other countries in the world, the newly born Republic of Korea encountered an abnormally low temperature climate caused by the Icelandic volcanic eruption. Domestic food production, especially rice production, dropped sharply. During this period, a serious national crisis occurred. sex******.
In addition, the Republic of Korea has withstood nuclear explosions from the US Strategic Air Force four times. North Korea's capital Seoul, capital Pyongyang, North Korea's largest port Busan and North Korea's northern port Chongjin, a total of four important cities, were destroyed by nuclear explosions. were completely destroyed in the mushroom cloud, and the number of direct deaths in the nuclear explosion alone exceeded two million. At the same time, the bacterial bombs dropped by the US military on the Korean Peninsula led to the outbreak and spread of a nationwide plague on the Korean Peninsula. Under the repeated blows of so many disasters, the current population of North Korea is only about 15 million.
Because both Pyongyang and Seoul suffered nuclear explosions, the temporary capital of the Republic of Korea had to be temporarily moved to Gwangju in the southwest. As a result, most industrial and mining enterprises and railway transportation in North Korea have been paralyzed. Due to its weak foundation, North Korea has not yet fully restored railway operations.
However, the level of damage suffered by the Republic of Korea is an average level in Europe, and cannot be said to be very serious.
In general, East Asia lost about 120 million to 130 million people (including emigrated people) during the Second and Third World Wars, but the surviving East Asian yellow people The number still accounts for about half of the post-war global population.
Taking into account the outstanding performance of the Japanese navy and army in the world war, if no huge changes occur in the future, it is expected that the international status of the yellow race in the future world will inevitably improve to a considerable extent.
5. South Asia and Southeast Asia
In the world war that just ended, South Asia and Southeast Asia were also important battlefields in terms of global population losses. Especially when the President of the United States signed the surrender under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hindustan Civil War in South Asia was still raging.
In fact, when World War II first broke out, some Indian colonial troops came to the front lines of North Africa and Europe to participate in the war under the British Empire's flag. When the Japanese army swept through Malaya and captured Singapore, tens of thousands of Indian soldiers were killed or captured.
However, the real large-scale bloodshed in South Asia began when the Japanese troops landed on the island of Ceylon in 1942 and supported the former chairman of the Indian National Congress, Chandra Bose, to launch the Indian National Uprising. In the next three years, the Congress Party, the Muslim League, the feudal princes, the British colonial army, the invading Japanese army, and even part of the Chinese old reactionary government's expeditionary force stranded in India, fought against the entire South Asian subcontinent. Mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
In this vigorous melee in Hindustan, the division of the camps of the various forces is very confusing. It can no longer be divided by simple invasion and resistance, or colonial suppression and liberation uprising, nor can it be completely divided by faith, ethnicity and behind-the-scenes. supporters to divide.
In fact, for the leaders of any party on this battlefield, the battle situation in front of them and the situation behind them are dazzling: the roles of allies and enemies are changing at any time, and rebellions and usurpations within each force are also endless. . Sometimes, the victory of a battle is not good news for the leader, because it will lead to the betrayal and defection of some allies.
Although this war took place in the South Asian subcontinent, it was initially considered by many to be a dog-eat-dog struggle between the Japanese and British forces over the colonial struggle. But in fact, most of the time, it is still the Indians who stand on this war stage. Especially in recent years when the Japanese troops have long withdrawn and Britain has also collapsed, this war has turned into a complete civil war among the ethnic groups in Hindustan. All the conflicts, religious conflicts, class conflicts, conflicts between colonization and colonization, and conflicts between aggression and counter-aggression that had been accumulated for centuries in the entire Hindustan region broke out all at once in this war. So much so that it is almost impossible to analyze it, even from the perspective of a bystander.
However, despite the chaos of the Indian Civil War, one thing is clear. That is, the tragic civil war severely damaged India's agricultural production, created tens of millions of war refugees, and countless massacres and famines. Especially when the world's unusually low temperature weather came and India's food production dropped sharply again, the Indian civil war further intensified, causing the entire India to fall into a hell of hunger and death.
When the Third World War came to an end, there was a glimmer of hope to end the war and restore peace in the South Asian subcontinent: in the spring of 1949, the Muslim League troops from Punjab and the Indian Army led by Chandra Bose The National Army jointly invaded the Ganges River Basin from western India , achieved a series of brilliant victories in this traditional core hinterland of India, and invaded Calcutta in April, completing the grand march "from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal", successfully controlling more than half of India's land and population, and achieved a decisive advantage in the civil war.
But the problem is that next, with the death of Jinnah, the leader of the Indian Muslim League, in September 1949, and the death of the radical leader of the Indian National Congress, Chandra Bose, on November 1, 1949. Yue's assassination made this glimmer of hope dim again - the successors of both sides Immediately, violent conflicts arose. The successor of the Muslim League claimed to break away from India and establish a "Pakistani state" in Punjab and Bangladesh. The radicals of the Congress Party expressed fierce opposition to this and even broke out in bloody conflicts with the Muslim League's troops. The previous cooperation between the two parties It is already difficult to maintain it.
Nehru and the Indian princes allied with him, who had been pushed to the brink of despair, gained a precious respite. Nehru's army even took the opportunity to launch a large-scale counterattack in Bihar in the Ganges River Basin and achieved victory. Coupled with another rebellion by the Sikh army in the Punjab region, the situation in the Indian Civil War has once again become chaotic and unclear. There seems to be a trend of protracted war and division.
All in all, the entire South Asian subcontinent has lost about 160 million people in the unprecedentedly brutal wars, famines and plagues in the past few years, and the remaining more than 200 million people are still in the midst of fierce and chaotic fighting. , no one can know when the end will be.
At the same time, during the years of the World War, Southeast Asian countries also experienced changes, chaos, and war.
However, during World War II before the collapse of the old Japanese empire, the situation in Southeast Asia was barely stable. Because the Japanese army in the early Pacific took only a very short time to successfully seize the entire Southeast Asia from the British, Dutch and American colonists, the war damage during the period was relatively minor.
During the subsequent Japanese occupation, national uprisings and guerrilla wars broke out to a certain extent in the Philippines, Malaya and Indonesia, and resulted in encirclement and suppression by the Japanese army. There were also some local indigenous people who were forcibly recruited by the Japanese occupation forces as coolies and died of overwork at mining sites and military fortresses. But overall, the population deaths caused by all this are not particularly large. According to statistics provided by the Japanese wartime base camp, during the four years before and after the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, they only caused a total population loss of 1.5 million to 2 million at most.
After the collapse of the old Japanese Empire and the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Southeast Asia, Pandora's box called total war was officially opened in this land. Revolutionaries, warlords, princes and sultans, religious groups, tribal chiefs, and European and American colonists who returned to the East all appeared in a very short period of time, scrambling to fill the power vacuum created after the Japanese troops withdrew. . The atomic bombs dropped by the US Strategic Air Force on Hanoi and Jakarta, especially the latter, further aggravated the chaos in Southeast Asia. Before the nuclear explosion in Jakarta, all parties in Indonesia had basically recognized the central government led by Sukarno. , but as the entire Sukarno government turned into radioactive dust in the mushroom cloud in Jakarta, more than 20 revolutionary governments, nine sultanates, and unknown powers soon emerged on the original territory of Dutch Indonesia. How many emirates.
So far, in the entire Southeast Asia, only Vietnam and the Philippines have initially stabilized their domestic situations and established socialist regimes, but they still face extremely arduous counterinsurgency and banditry tasks. After Thailand expelled the king and completely withdrew from the world war, it once established a military government, but it collapsed in 1948 due to peasant uprisings and internal strife in the army. It is currently in the midst of a warlord war. As for Malaya and Indonesia, after these years of melee, the general trend is towards disintegration, and it is likely that they will eventually split into thirty to forty small countries.
As for how many people the entire Southeast Asia region has lost during these years of war and famine, and how many people are left, there is currently no relatively accurate data. The committee can only roughly estimate that approximately 120 million residents of Southeast Asian countries died during this period.
6. Oceania
In just the past eight years, Oceania has experienced another bloody racial change.
More than a hundred years ago, the British Anglo-Saxon people landed in Australia, wiped out the local indigenous people of color, and established the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. They washed this land tens of thousands of kilometers away from Europe white with blood and gunpowder smoke. . A hundred years later, the more ferocious Japanese troops landed in Australia from the north and launched an even more brutal and bloody massacre, once again dyeing the land yellow with blood.
According to the occupation policy of "leaving no land but no people" by the Japanese occupation forces in Australia, after the fall of Australia, all seven million white Australians, except for some young women, were massacred by the Japanese army. Next, as New Zealand changed hands, it seemed that two million white New Zealanders were about to suffer the same fate. However, compared to their Australian neighbors, white New Zealanders were slightly luckier. Because of the intervention of the Communist International, about one million white New Zealanders survived in the end. They were not directly massacred by the Japanese army, but were put on ships and deported. To the Union of South Africa, which was happy to accommodate them.
However, although the white residents of Australia and New Zealand were basically wiped out or expelled to South Africa. But expressed in numbers, it was only seven to eight million deaths. Compared with the devastating catastrophe that the entire world has just experienced, it is really not worth mentioning.
In addition, the Pacific War in the past few years also caused the deaths of 800,000 to 1 million indigenous people in Oceania. The largest one was the Soviet Strategic Air Force's carpet nuclear strike on the Hawaiian Islands. After that, the entire Hawaiian Islands basically became a no-man's land.
Therefore, the entire Oceania suffered a total loss of 8 million to 9 million people during the war. More precise figures need to be further verified.
However, at the same time, there were 18 million Japanese, as well as millions of Chinese and Koreans, totaling more than 20 million East Asian immigrants, who rapidly poured into Australia and New Zealand under the Japanese occupation in the past few years. settled in the South Pacific Islands and carried out large-scale development and construction. Therefore, after the war, instead of decreasing, the population of Oceania doubled. Oceania's agricultural and animal husbandry production, factories, mines, railways, highways, and port transportation have all been restored under the Japanese occupation. Large tracts of wilderness have been reclaimed into pastures and farms. Many cities in Australia and New Zealand have even It has become more prosperous than in the past, but the residents of the city are no longer the same as before.