This book explores contested notions of "Chineseness" in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong during the Cold War, showing how competing ideas about "Chineseness" were an important ideological factor at play in the region. After providing an overview of the scholarship on "Chineseness" and "diaspora", the book sheds light on specific case studies, through the lens of the "Chinese cultural Cold War", from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It provides detailed examples of competition for control of definitions of "Chineseness" by political or politically oriented forces of diverse kinds, and shows how such competition was played out in bookstores, cinemas, music halls, classrooms, and even sports clubs and places of worship across the region in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The book also demonstrates how the legacies of these Cold War contestations continue to influence debates about Chinese influence – and "Chineseness" – in Southeast Asia and the wider region today. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This comprehensive study of China's Cold War experience reveals the crucial role Beijing played in shaping the orientation of the global Cold War and the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The success of China's Communist revolution in 1949 set the stage, Chen says. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam War--all of which involved China as a central actor--represented the only major "hot" conflicts during the Cold War period, making East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War, while creating conditions to prevent the two superpowers from engaging in a direct military showdown. Beijing's split with Moscow and rapprochement with Washington fundamentally transformed the international balance of power, argues Chen, eventually leading to the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the decline of international communism. Based on sources that include recently declassified Chinese documents, the book offers pathbreaking insights into the course and outcome of the Cold War.

Maochun Yu tells the story of the intelligence activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China during World War II. Drawing on recently released classified materials from the U.S. National Archives and on previously unopened Chinese documents, Yu reveals the immense and complex challenges the agency and its director, General William Donovan, confronted in China. This book is the first research-based history and analysis of America's wartime intelligence and special operations activities in the China, Burma and India during WWII. It presents a complex and compelling story of conflicting objectives and personalities, inter-service rivalries, and crowning achievements of America's military, intelligence and political endeavors, the significance of which goes far beyond WWII and China.

During the early decades of the Cold War, the People's Republic of China remained outside much of mainstream international science. Nevertheless, Chinese scientists found alternative channels through which to communicate and interact with counterparts across the world, beyond simple East/West divides. By examining the international activities of elite Chinese scientists, Gordon Barrett demonstrates that these activities were deeply embedded in the Chinese Communist Party's wider efforts to win hearts and minds from the 1940s to the 1970s. Using a wide range of archival material, including declassified documents from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, Barrett provides fresh insights into the relationship between science and foreign relations in the People's Republic of China.

In After the Post–Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.

In Diasporic Cold Warriors, Chien-Wen Kung explains how the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) sowed the seeds of anticommunism among the Philippine Chinese with the active participation of the Philippine state. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; none was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China as the one in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Philippines shows that the "China" that intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian Chinese society during the Cold War was the Republic of China on Taiwan. For the first time, Kung tells the story of the Philippine Chinese as pro-Taiwan, anticommunist partisans, tracing their evolving relationship with the KMT and successive Philippine governments over the mid-twentieth century. Throughout, he argues for a networked and transnational understanding of the ROC-KMT party-state and demonstrates that Taipei exercised a form of nonterritorial sovereignty over the Philippine Chinese with Manila's participation and consent. Challenging depoliticized narratives of cultural integration, he also contends that, because of the KMT, Chinese identity formation and practices of belonging in the Philippines were deeply infused with Cold War ideology. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors reimagines the histories of the ROC, the KMT, and the Philippine Chinese, connecting them to the broader canvas of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building in East and Southeast Asia.

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.