UCLA Asia Institute
Today in Asian History
February19
1942 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 providing military authorities with the power to declare exclusion zones and to relocate persons of Japanese ancestry. Some 110,000 people were moved, without being charged with any crime, to detention centers scattered across the western United States.
Many California politicians and newspapers endorsed the implementation of the order. Compton mayor Roy W. Tarleton called for the deportation of all Japanese. On February 19, 1942, the Santa Cruz Sentinel-News editorialized,
"Efficient prosecution of this war demands that we recognize certain facts which make every Japanese in our midst a potential threat to our security, regardless of how admirable he might have been in time of peace. It is a mistake to think that we can clear up the dangers by process of elimination; that is, by depending entirely upon the FBI to ferret out all the treacherous acts and incriminating documents among the 100,000 Japanese living in areas where they could be of greatest service to an invading horde."
The University of Arizona Library has prepared an interesting site on the camps established in Arizona. The U.S. Army's website includes information about the relocation decision.
In several cases (e.g. Hirabayashi v. United States, 1943 and Endo, 1944), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld challenges to the curfew and the relocation imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry. More than four decades after the U.S. government incarcerated these people, Congress enacted the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Jay Brown has prepared a secondary school curriculum unit on the relocation.
1942 Bali, in the Dutch Indies (Indonesia), and Port Darwin, Australia came under attack by Japanese forces.
1945 Start of the Iwo Jima campaign, completed March 26. Read the New York Times report on the effort.
1997 Deng Xiaoping
, Chinese Communist leader and economic reformer, died, at 92. Deng's most famous comment came during a period in the early 1960s when the state lightened its control over agriculture and restored private vegetable plots:
"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."
Deng is credited with initiating a series of wide-ranging economic reforms and much more limited political and social ones. Among these was the opening of the country to foreign investment and other exchanges. In 1984 he explained that it had been a mistake to cut the country off from the non-socialist world after 1949 saying, "we in fact continued to pursue a degree of autarchy, and this caused some difficulties. In addition, slightly 'leftist' policies gave rise to some calamities. Certainly this is true of the "Great Cultural Revolution."... It is impossible to build the country behind a closed door. (It is) impossible to develop."
By 1989, however, popular frustration over rising inflation and unemployment and rampant corruption among officials and the privileges enjoyed by the children of the Communist Party elite began to boil over after students initiated protests in Beijing. University of California, San Diego historian Joseph Esherick reported that in the north central city of Xi'an, a rhyming jingle scrawled on a wall illustrated this anger:
"Mao Zedong's son went to the front.
Zhao Ziyang's son speculates in color TVs.
Deng Xiaoping's son demands money from everyone."As head of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, Deng was instrumental in ordering the People's Liberation Army into Beijing to suppress the demonstrations. On June 9, 1989, he congratulated the military on its work. In 1990, Deng resigned the last of his official positions. Still, he remained the supreme leader, forcefully restarting economic reform through a dramatic and well-publicized tour of southern China in 1992. During the tour he criticized those who advocated a slower pace of reform:
"We should be bolder than before in conducting reform and opening to the outside and have the courage to experiment. We must not act like women with bound feet."
Click here to see an annotated list of web resources on Deng Xiaoping.
The AI "Today in Asian History" page was compiled by Clayton Dube. He welcomes your comments and suggestions. Send them to <cdube@isop.ucla.edu>.
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