1. Rethinking "China" and the "Cold War"
- Author:
- Chien Wen Kung and Eugenia Lean
- Publication Date:
- 04-2023
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
- Abstract:
- Fears of Southeast Asia’s Chinese as conduits for the People's Republic of China defined the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Yet, ironically, the example of the Philippine Chinese shows that the "China" which intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian country after 1949 was the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. Based on the speaker’s book, Diasporic Cold Warriors, this talk explains how one of the smallest overseas Chinese communities in the region became the most ardent diasporic supporters of the ROC in the world from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, the Kuomintang-ROC party-state's overseas Chinese networks entrenched themselves in the Philippines with the consent and participation of the Philippine state, giving rise to a dynamic and contingent arrangement of shared, non-territorial sovereignty. Taipei and Manila's intersecting anticommunist projects were, in turn, instrumental to how translocal Chinese forged politically appropriate identities and adapted themselves to the postcolonial Philippines as ethno-ideological subjects.
- Topic:
- Cold War, History, and Regional Politics
- Political Geography:
- China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia