Abstract
People’s Liberation Army Air Force Squadron Commander Fan Yuanyan flew his MiG-19 from Fujian Province, People’s Republic of China (prc) to the Republic of China (roc) on Taiwan on 7 July 1977. The timing of this defection, which came as u.s. President Jimmy Carter was moving decisively towards normalisation of relations with the prc, made Fan an anticommunist star. Fan spoke for years afterwards on behalf of the ‘800 million mainland compatriots’ who he felt wanted the roc to retake the mainland, even as he also became more critical of the excesses of capitalism and liberalism in Taiwan. Much of the Kuomintang’s propaganda use of Fan was related to ways in which Nationalist and Communist ideologies about authoritarian and antibourgeois values overlapped. Fan thus represents the ways in which Nationalist and Communist ideologies and societies were mutually constitutive and constructed with the other clearly in mind during the Cold War.
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