IB History Paper 3 Past Papers & Drilling: Six Original Regional Essays with Model Answers

Question 1

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the location of power changed completely, the distribution of power only partly – the old samurai class lost its power to the state, while rural landlords and the new financial cliques kept local and economic power.
(1) What changed, 1871-1889: the abolition of the domains in 1871 replaced more than two hundred han with prefectures and moved the former lords to Tokyo on bonds; the conscription ordinance of 1873 turned military service into a national levy; the land tax reform of the same year replaced the fluctuating harvest levy with a fixed cash tax tied to registered land; the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and the Imperial Diet of 1890 wrote power into a legal form granted by the throne.
(2) What did not change: the civil code of 1898 entrenched the ie household system, the authority of the head of house and primogeniture; local notables – landlords and former domain officials – kept control of prefectural and village finance and schooling; after 1881 the state sold its model enterprises cheaply to Mitsui, Mitsubishi and their peers, concentrating economic power in new zaibatsu hands.
(3) The excluded: the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, from the 1874 petition for a national assembly, demanded wider political participation, yet the 1889 electoral law gave votes only to men above a tax threshold; peasant protest against the land tax and deflation in the 1880s shows power did not move downwards.
(4) Judgement: the shift from status to property and office as the basis of power was a structural break; but calling it a social revolution overstates it – low-ranking samurai drove it, and it ended with the state, landlords and zaibatsu sharing the proceeds.

Question 2

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: largely agree, provided “dealing with the countryside” is read as two things – cutting the real burden and building grassroots organisation; land policy alone, without the war and the inflation, cannot explain the outcome of 1946-1949.
(1) The Communist method: after 1927 the soviets mobilised peasants by redistributing land; after the Long March of 1934-1935 the emphasis moved to resistance against Japan and to the 1942 policy of reducing rent and interest, which cut rent without immediate confiscation and so was tolerable to landlord and tenant alike; from 1947 land reform handed land directly to the landless and organised peasants through associations, militia and village government.
(2) The Nationalist weakness: 1930s rural reconstruction – cooperatives, rural building movements – was executed through local gentry, so the tax burden stayed on the tenant; during the war against Japan, requisitions in grain and inflation financed the army, and the gold yuan reform of 1947-1949 collapsed, destroying monetary confidence in town and country at once.
(3) Counter-argument – not only the countryside: military factors mattered: after 1946 Nationalist elites dispersed crack units to hold cities while the Communists destroyed them in mobile campaigns, and both the Soviet position in the northeast and the failure of American mediation in 1946-1947 shaped the field.
(4) Judgement: the countryside was the contest over who could mobilise the majority; the Communists won because policy became everyday organisation, the Nationalists lost because policy stayed on paper while the burden landed on real households. Agree with “mainly”, but only alongside the front line and the urban economy.

Question 3

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: economic and strategic interest dominated 1931-1937; after 1938 ideology – anti-communism, pan-Asianism, imperial mission – became the language of mobilisation, and the two always reinforced each other.
(1) Economic and strategic drivers, 1931-1937: after the Manchurian incident of 1931 the puppet state of 1932 gave Japan coal, iron and food through the South Manchuria Railway and heavy industry, and a buffer against the Soviet Union; tariff walls and the Depression squeezed Japanese exports, arguing for a closed bloc; rural poverty and population pressure made emigration to Manchuria and Mongolia a slogan.
(2) The ideological turn, 1938-1945: after full-scale war from 1937, the “new order in East Asia” and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of 1940 recast conquest as liberation from Western colonialism; the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Tripartite Pact of 1940 supplied the diplomatic frame; state Shinto and the imperial institution mobilised soldiers and peasants for a long war.
(3) Evidence that resists a purely economic reading: the decision to move south in 1941 was about oil and rubber, yet it was taken in the knowledge that it meant war with the United States – a pure cost calculation would have avoided that; massacres and forced labour in occupied territory, from Nanjing to Manila, returned no economic profit and are explicable only ideologically and militarily.
(4) Judgement: economics decided where Japan went, ideology decided with what justification and how far. Setting them against each other is a false choice; total war after 1941 is explained by the union of economic impasse and ideological mobilisation.

Question 4

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the British timetable turned partition into a decision that had to be taken within months, but the content of partition – a line drawn along religious identity – came from communal politics. Neither explains it alone.
(1) The British element: the Government of India Act of 1935 widened the franchise and provincial autonomy while institutionalising separate electorates; after the Quit India movement of 1942 London negotiated on the premise of post-war withdrawal; the naval mutiny of 1946 and the killings in Calcutta and Noakhali pushed the Labour government to leave quickly; the Mountbatten plan of 1947 compressed the deadline to August 1947 and pushed the partition question to provincial assembly votes.
(2) The communal element: the Muslim League, founded in 1906, adopted the Lahore Resolution of 1940 demanding separate states on a two-nation basis; the Congress claim to speak for all India could not be reconciled with League demands for safeguards inside a single federation; the provincial elections of 1937 and 1946 fixed political mobilisation on religious identity.
(3) Interaction: without the compressed British timetable a federal arrangement might have dragged on for years; without the two-nation demand there would have been nothing for the British to write into a plan. The Radcliffe line and the movement of millions are the sum of the two.
(4) Judgement: the claim that British strategy was the main cause does not hold; communal politics supplied the content of division, British withdrawal supplied its timing and form, and the violence of 1946-1947 closed the negotiating space to nothing.

Question 5

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the difference lay less in the strength of nationalism than in the political will of the colonial power and in how the Cold War intervened.
(1) Similarities: both declared independence as soon as Japan surrendered in 1945 – the Indonesian proclamation of August 1945 and the Vietnamese August Revolution – both rested on guerrilla warfare and mass mobilisation, and both faced metropolitan attempts to restore colonial rule.
(2) Indonesia: negotiation won out. Dutch “police actions” in 1946-1948 failed to destroy the republic; Washington, prioritising European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, would not fund a long Dutch campaign; the Round Table conference of 1949 transferred sovereignty, with a federal transition and Dutch economic interests retained, and the New Guinea question left open until 1963.
(3) Vietnam: war won out. France treated Indochina as part of the union and as a symbol of great-power status, and full war followed the collapse of negotiation in 1946; after 1949 China and the Soviet Union supplied the Viet Minh while the United States began funding France from 1950, turning the conflict into a Cold War proxy war; after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 the Geneva settlement divided Vietnam provisionally and the war did not really end.
(4) Judgement: the fork between negotiation and war depended on whether the colonial power could bear the cost of a long war and whether the great powers read the territory as a Cold War front line. The Dutch left quickly; the French were locked in by Cold War logic – the same nationalism produced two different endings.

Question 6

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the Korean War turned the Asian Cold War from political confrontation into a network of military alliances plus local hot war, and its effects outlasted the stalemate in Europe.
(1) Militarisation: war began in June 1950, the Inchon landing came in September, Chinese intervention in October turned it into three years of attrition; the armistice of July 1953 stopped the fighting without a peace treaty, and the demilitarised zone became Asia’s most durable military frontier.
(2) Alliance network: the San Francisco peace treaty and the US-Japan security treaty of 1951 fixed Japan as a base; the 1954 mutual defence treaty with the Republic of China and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation extended the line from Japan into Southeast Asia; Japan’s economy accelerated on war procurement and became the regional industrial centre.
(3) Relations inside the blocs: intervention raised China’s standing in the socialist camp but froze Sino-American relations for two decades and made the Taiwan Strait a second flashpoint, in 1954 and again in 1958; Soviet pressure for an armistice planted the seeds of the later Sino-Soviet split.
(4) Judgement: the impact was structural: Asia’s Cold War became bilateral alliances plus local war rather than Europe’s treaty standoff; describing it only as a Sino-American rivalry misses how Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia were each drawn into alliance systems.