Sri Lanka, the former Ceylon, fell to the Portuguese in 1505, was taken over by the Dutch in 1658 and came into British possession in 1796. In 1948 the former crown colony was given independence. From the 1950s onwards there were repeated bloody conflicts between the Sinhala and Tamil population groups. In 1972 Ceylon became a republic under the name Sri Lanka. The longstanding ethnic conflicts between Tamils and Sinhalese culminated in a civil war in 1983 that only ended in 2009. Like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Malaysia, Sri Lanka is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose community of sovereign states from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and former colonies.
Myanmar, formerly Burma, fell to British India in 1886 and Japan in 1942 before gaining independence in 1948. Officially a socialist republic, Myanmar has been ruled by a military dictatorship since the 1962 coup. The 2007 protest rallies, led by Buddhist monks and nuns, were crushed by the government. Only since 2011 has the country had a constitution and a civil head of state.
NEW ECONOMIC POWER PR CHINA
In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s government was overthrown in 1949 after a long guerrilla war. With around two million of his followers, he fled to the island of Taiwan, where he proclaimed the National Republic of China in 1950. Until 1971 this had the Chinese right to sole representation in the UN, which however was lost in the course of the rapprochement of the USA with the People’s Republic of China to the People’s Republic. To this day, Taiwan is viewed by China as a breakaway province and is not recognized as a sovereign state by most of the member states of the United Nations (cf. 282.1). For more information about the continent of Asia, please check aristmarketing.com.
