Brief History of Tripartite Alliance Earth
"It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs."
les quarantes glorieuses (1945-1981)
The immediate causes of the Third World War lay in the violently anti-Chinese policies of post-colonial Southeast Asia. Under European rule, the Chinese immigrant minorities attracted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the rapid economic growth in Southeast Asia. In independent Thailand, despite massive Chinese immigration, the Thai monarchy allowed Chinese immigrants to assimilate into the general Thai population, forming the nucleus of an urban bourgeoisie and working class, eventually intermarrying with even the Thai royal family. In European-run Southeast Asia, though -- even in British Malaya, where by the 1930's Malays were outnumbered by Chinese -- the Chinese were deprived of political power but allowed to develop a powerful mercantile class. This economic strength and political weakness proved incredibly dangerous; native nationalists in Southeast Asia came to identify Chinese immigrants as a class of people that eagerly collaborated with European colonialists at the same time that it exploited the colonized populations. Worse, the attraction of many educated Chinese to Communism appalled many conservative nationalists, particularly after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1947.
In retrospect, the pogroms against Chinese minorities in Indonesia following that country's independence in 1947 after the Pacific War may have been inevitable. Under the conservative Sukarno regime, more concerned with economic modernization than with nationalistic adventures, Chinese living in Indonesia after 1947 were usually safe provided they paid special head taxes to the Indonesian government and invested in the burgeoning industries of Java. In the neighbouring Philippines, though, after independence in 1953 Filipino Chinese were subjected to official discrimination and to occasional pogroms by Filipino peasants. Much the same prevailed in the Indochinese Union before independence from the French Community in 1969, but particularly after the French retroceded to the People's Republic the island of Hainan and certain northern districts acquired in the Sino-French War of 1884-1885. By far the most dramatic manifestation of anti-Chinese sentiments in post-colonial Southeast Asia was the Indonesian invasion of Malaya in early 1971, when Indonesia prevented the partition of Malaya into Malay and non-Malay halves by annexing the entire country with the consent of traditional monarchs, incidentally massacring a half-million Chinese and expelling another million. By the 1970's, it had become clear that all post-colonial Southeast Asia, from industrializing Indonesia to the agricultural Philippines, had adopted virulently anti-Chinese and anti-Communist policies, best symbolized by the creation of the Manila Pact in 1976, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Indochina, and Burma as founding members.
Though the People's Republic denounced post-colonial Southeast Asia's anti-Chinese bigotry and resettle d some expelled Chinese in China proper, China and the Manila Pact would likely not have come into conflict had it not been for the involvement of external powers. In the 1970's, a United States torn apart by domestic terrorism and (from 1976 on) governed by the authoritarian Democratic President Richard Nixon, known more for his FBI death squads and anti-Communism than anything else, came to see the Manila Pact as a worthwhile ally outside of the "suffocating" framework of the League of Nations. At roughly the same time, a Siberian Federative Republic that had managed to recover from the Soviet Civil War had entered into an alliance with China and urged the People's Republic to adopt a more assertive approach towards Indochinese "reactionaries."
A violent Sino-Vietnamese border clash in 1977 incited a regional arms race in eastern Asia, as the bottomless resources of the United States and Siberia financed the acquisition of all manner of advanced weaponries by their regional partners. Most notoriously, Indonesia in 1979 found itself the newest nuclear power, following the sale of almost one hundred intermediate-range missiles armed with fusion weapons to Indonesia by the United States. Less spectacularly, China and the Manila Pact member-states acquired advanced military aircraft fighters and bombers, late-model tanks more suited to combat on the Eurasian plains than in hilly Southeast Asia, and the newest generations of land mines and personal weapons.
On to: World Review: 1981