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What were the consequences of World War II for the colonized people of Asia ?

The eventual consequence of World War II for the colonized people of Asia was that they stopped being colonized.  WWII caused the colonial powers to give up their colonies, with most of them giving the colonies up rather quickly.


WWII freed the people of Japanese colonies from colonization immediately.  Japan was ejected from Korea and Taiwan, ending colonialism in those lands.  Also gaining their freedom rather quickly were the people of the large British colonies in Asia.  The British had been so weakened by WWII that they knew that they could no longer resist large colonial movements for independence.  For this reason, they freed all of the Indian subcontinent as well as Burma.  France was also severely weakened by the war both in terms of its economic and military power and in terms of its prestige.  It had lost to Germany so quickly that its colonial subjects were certainly no longer in awe of it.  This helped lead relatively quickly to the loss of France’s colonies in what was then called French Indochina.  The same thing happened with the Dutch, who lost what is now Indonesia rather immediately after the war.


There were some colonies, mostly smaller, that continued to remain in European hands for a long time after the war.  The British held onto Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong for at least a decade (and in the case of Hong Kong, five decades) after the war.  However, these were smaller colonies whose circumstances were different from those of the colonies that gained independence quickly.  In general, WWII led to the decolonization of Asia.

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