Taiwan: democratic David in 21st century east Asia

Democracy in China: challenge or opportunity?

Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue

By 1993, Guns N’ Roses had hit practically every benchmark possible for a rock n’ roll band. Their eight-year journey had included an explosive and game-changing debut record, a self-indulgent but even more successful double album release, a handful of raucous global tours, and various front-page controversies over their lyrics, band members’ drug addictions, and lead singer Axl Rose’s rattlesnake temper. The most captivating part of the Guns N’ Roses story was just beginning, however. A fifteen-year saga was about to unfold over the creation of the group’s sixth studio album,Chinese Democracy—a perverse and jaw-dropping tale that would come to involve not only a small nation of diverse musical talent but also several figures from the world of professional sports, a multinational soft drink company, and the FBI. Cultural critics couldn’t agree if the resulting work was unprecedented genius or a criminally mediocre. Magnum Opus: The Unbelievable 15-Year Saga of Guns N’ Roses’Chinese Democracy recounts in engaging depth and detail the long and often ludicrous road to the last mythic rock ’n’ roll album of the 20th Century. Of course, Chinese Democracy was not released until well into the 21st Century, andMagnum Opusassembles a thrilling narrative of the mishaps, detours, and near-death experiences that accompanied the long journey to its release. Combining outrageous facts and never-before-told stories from as many direct sources as possible, this is the definitive story of a famously troubled album that will allow rock ’n’ roll die-hards to finally separate truth from fan lore and outright fabrications.

Numerous studies on religion during the Cold War have been published over the last two decades. Some focus on how Christianity influenced US foreign policy, others examine North American Christianity itself during the Cold War, and a few look at religion in Southeast Asia—even if US actors still feature prominently.1 Yet Unfinished History stands out among Cold War and religion scholarship in three ways: (1) it marks the first published volume in English on the interplay between Christianity and the Cold War in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan; (2) it follows East Asian actors more closely than US or European actors; and (3) since Asia is typically understudied among Cold War historians, its focus on East Asia is noteworthy in itself (e.g., as volume editor Philip Wickeri points out, of nineteen volumes in Palgrave Macmillan’s Cold War History Series, none focus on Asia). These historiographic innovations make this volume a welcome contribution.Yet its aim is not solely academic. Wickeri’s four-page introduction explains that Unfinished History features papers from a 2014 conference in Hong Kong titled “Christianity and the Cold War in East Asia, 1945–1990,” which was informed by “the belief that such a gathering would be relevant for the churches and seminaries, as well as scholars and academic institutions” (11). Hence Archbishop Paul Kwong’s prefatory hopes that these essays will help readers “better understand both ourselves and our churches,” “reenvision the Church’s mission,” and “build mutual understanding and trust with our brothers and sisters in Asia from whom we have been divided” (8). Given these ecclesial aspirations, it is fitting that this volume, although academic, is largely accessible to lay audiences. While its contents are mostly historical, authors occasionally take on a normative theological bent—perhaps most conspicuously by Jin Kwan Kwon, who “use[s] the term distortion when it comes to the theological ideas communicated from and within the churches during the Cold War” (224; emphasis added).Unfinished History’s main strength is the insight it offers into East Asian Christianity during a politically charged period, and with five chapters foregrounding (and three others backgrounding) it, Christianity in China is this volume’s star. For example, intriguingly, in 1965 a miracle reportedly transpired in China’s Shanxi province, and Wang Meixiu draws from government documents and oral histories to capture varying responses from Chinese Catholics and government officials, who labeled it a “disturbance.” Weiqing Hu documents struggles of Shantou area churches to survive before the Cultural Revolution, highlighting, for instance, concrete problems caused by churches transferring properties to the state while severing institutional and financial ties to foreign denominations.Three chapters feature Korea prominently. Volker Küster, for instance, examines Minjung theology’s Cold War provenance. Yen-zen Tsai’s contribution centers on Christianity in Taiwan, presenting a case study on the True Jesus Church, and Yosuke Matsutani details the first Japanese delegation of Christians to visit Chinese churches after World War II. Wickeri’s chapter theorizes “Cold War religion,” which, he proposes, has three characteristics: “intensified . . . politicization of religion and religious studies” (59), Cold War binarism in religious beliefs, and limits placed on religious expression. He also delineates six subject areas for studying Cold War religion in East Asia (see 60–64: Christian missionaries leaving China; Vatican ties to churches in Asia; the Korean War’s far-reaching impact; nonaligned churches/the Christian Third Way; Christian-Marxist discourse in Asia; debates in the World Council of Churches), supporting his theory with a brief case study involving Hong Kong and Macau.One shortcoming is that this volume does not consider gender in any depth, and all contributors but one are men. Some chapters connect case studies to broader scholarly conversations on religion and the Cold War (Qiang Zhai’s chapter on Christianity’s impact on the United States’s China policies under Truman and Eisenhower, for instance, does this well), but not all do. Yet given the dearth of literature on Christianity behind the Bamboo Curtain, these case studies are valuable in themselves. Although this book certainly attains its modest goal of examining Christianity and the Cold War in East Asia, more studies on this topic are needed—not only rendering Unfinished History’s title appropriate, but also warranting the hopes for a future conference conveyed in the introduction (11).

In describing the coercive security measures that characterized George W. Bush's 2003 visit to Gorée Island residents complained that, “It was like slavery had returned.” Despite, in his speech, referring to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a “crime of history” Bush, that day, traded on the spectral capital afforded by captive Senegalese to diminish the legacy of U.S. involvement in this earlier moment of human trafficking by inadvertently re-staging the exchange of bonded Africans. The Gorée fiasco occurred as a result of events set in motion several decades before, but which catalyzed with the tragic September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Immediately afterward, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade created an African coalition “contre le terrorisme,” which the U.S. supported rhetorically and, ultimately, financially. Senegal was perhaps a likely candidate for African leadership in this regard one of the primary architects of Africa's newest neoliberal solution to economic crisis, NEPAD (the New Partnership for African Development), Senegal was also, during the Cold War-era, an outspoken critic of Soviet assistance in African liberation struggles. With its long history of political participation achieved through exceptional status the French colonial government granted Senegal, the country has a long history of republicanism. Still, the widespread idea that Senegal is more democratic than other African nations camouflages a pragmatic politics whose benefits are unclear to a population faced with a weakening currency and unprecedented rates of unemployment. Senegal is, despite this, celebrated as an African success story, both because vendors abroad typify the austere work ethic privileged in meritocratic narratives as the solution to economic distress, and because the government maintains close ties to the United States, especially in the post-9/11 period, since its status as an Islamic country makes it, from the standpoint of the U.S., a valuable ally.

Historian James A. Bill famously described America’s relationship with Iran as a tragedy. “Few international relationships,” he wrote, “have had a more positive beginning than that which characterized Iranian-American contacts for more than a century.” The nations’ first diplomatic dealings in the 1850s resulted in a treaty of friendship, and although the U.S. government remained largely aloof from Iranian affairs until World War II, many Iranians saw Americans and the United States positively by the early 20th century. The United States became more deeply involved with Iran during the Second World War, and the two nations were close allies during the Cold War. Yet they became enemies following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. How did this happen? The events that led to the Islamic Republic of Iran dubbing the United States the “Great Satan” in 1979 do indeed contain elements of tragedy. By the late 19th century, Iran—known to Americans as “Persia” until the 1930s—was caught in the middle of the imperial “Great Game” between Great Britain and Russia. Although no European power formally colonized Iran, Britain and Russia developed “spheres of influence” in the country and meddled constantly in Iran’s affairs. As Iranians struggled to create a modern, independent nation-state, they looked to disinterested third parties for help in their struggle to break free from British and Russian control. Consequently, many Iranians came to see the United States as a desirable ally. Activities of individual Americans in Iran from the mid-19th century onward, ranging from Presbyterian missionaries who built hospitals and schools to economic experts who advised Iran’s government, as well as the United States’ own revolutionary and democratic history, fostered a positive view of the United States among Iranians. The two world wars drew the United States into more active involvement in the Middle East, and following both conflicts, the U.S. government defended Iran’s sovereignty against British and Soviet manipulation. The event that caused the United States to lose the admiration of many Iranians occurred in 1953, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Intelligence Service staged a coup, which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, because he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The coup allowed Iran’s shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, to transform himself from a constitutional monarch into an absolute ruler. The 1953 coup, coupled with the subsequent decades of U.S. support for the Shah’s politically repressive regime, resulted in anti-American resentment that burst forth during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The two nations have been enemies ever since. This article traces the origins and evolution of the U.S. relationship with Iran from the 19th through the early 21st centuries.

In 1957, Congress voted to set up the United States Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency within the Department of the Interior, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the onehundredth anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Politicians hoped that a formal program of activities to mark the centennial of the Civil War would both bolster American patriotism at the height of the cold war and increase tourism in the South. Almost overnight, however, the patriotic pageant that organizers envisioned was transformed into a struggle over the Civil War's historical memory and the injustices of Jim Crow. In Troubled Commemoration, Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organization, and ultimate failure of this controversial event and reveals how the broadbased public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement. Cook shows how the centennial provoked widespread alarm among many African Americans, white liberals, and cold warriors because the national commission failed to prevent southern whites from commemorating the Civil War in a racially exclusive fashion. The public outcry followed embarrassing attempts to mark secession, the attack on Fort Sumter, and the South's victory at First Manassas, and prompted backlash against the celebration, causing the emotional scars left by the war to resurface. Cook convincingly demonstrates that both segregationists and their opponents used the controversy that surrounded the commemoration to their own advantage. Southern whites initially embraced the centennial as a weapon in their fight to save racial segregation, while African Americans and liberal whites tried to transform the event into a celebration of black emancipation. Forced to quickly reorganize the commission, the Kennedy administration replaced the conservative leadership team with historians, including Allan Nevins and a young James I. Robertson, Jr., who labored to rescue the centennial by promoting a more soberly considered view of the nation’s past. Though the commemoration survived, Cook illustrates that white southerners quickly lost interest in the event as it began to coincide with the years of Confederate defeat, and the original vision of celebrating America's triumph over division and strife was lost. The first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Civil War Centennial, Troubled Commemoration masterfully depicts the episode as an essential window into the political, social, and cultural conflicts of America in the 1960s and confirms that it has much to tell us about the development of the modern South.

Reviewed by: Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin Matthew Masur Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. By Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 388pp. $39.95 (cloth). Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965. By Pierre Asselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 319pp. $55.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). If the “origins of the Cold War” is a well-trod subject for historians, Masuda Hajimu offers an innovative approach to the topic. The Cold War, he argues, was not “something that existed as an objective situation immediately following World War II.” Instead, the Cold War was an “imagined reality” that “existed . . . because people thought that it existed.” Cold War Crucible is “a history of the fantasy of the Cold War, focusing on its imagined and constructed nature as well as the social need for such an imagined reality” (p. 2). According to Masuda, the “imagined reality” of the Cold War initially took hold in the United States, East Asia, and Europe—areas that had potent recent memories of wartime experiences. (Africa and Latin America would be slower to adopt the “Cold War” construct because they tended to view international events through a postcolonial lens.) But even in areas where the “Cold War” reality took hold, it was as much a product of local conditions as it was the reflection of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the immediate post–World War II years, the United States, Japan, and China experienced periods of intense social and political conflict. In the United States, a grass-roots conservative movement attacked groups or individuals perceived to be “un-American.” In Japan, conservatives pushed back against postwar occupation reforms intended to reshape Japanese society. In China, anger at America’s “reverse course” [End Page 343] in Japan led to growing support for the Chinese Communist Party and vocal denunciations of America’s Guomindang allies. While all of these disputes would later be identified as part of the early Cold War, Masuda sees them as outgrowths of local political and social conditions. It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that people in the United States, Japan, and China—and in other parts of the world—began to interpret domestic politics through a Cold War lens. Particularly in areas affected by World War II, people came to see the Korean War as the beginning of a new global conflict—the first salvo in World War III. In this heightened atmosphere, the political differences that had emerged after 1945 intensified and hardened. Moreover, political and social conflicts took on a distinctly “Cold War” cast, reflecting the growing perception of a global conflict between communism and capitalism. The Korean War has long been understood as a key event in the hardening of American and Chinese Cold War policies. Masuda echoes this view, though he explains the relationship differently. In both the United States and China, common people reacting to the conflict in Korea pressured their governments to respond firmly. On the American side, Masuda argues that public opinion influenced the Truman administration’s decisions to cross the 38th parallel and to adopt NSC-68. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Communist Party similarly responded to growing public pressure to intervene in the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Both cases illustrate “the encroachment of the social into the sphere of high politics” (p. 143). They also show that “the Cold War was not necessarily a product created through policymakers’ conduct and misconduct; numerous nameless people were, more or less, also participants in the making of such a world” (p. 144). Cold War Crucible concludes with a section describing the suppression of dissent—often violently—during the Korean War. In Korea itself, massacres of civilians were perpetrated under the guise of eliminating Communists or class enemies. Masuda suggests that a similar dynamic was at work elsewhere: at roughly the same time, “China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries; Taiwan implemented the White Terror; the Philippines suppressed ‘un- Filipino’ activities; Japan conducted its...

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

22 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, Spring 2011 India-U.S. Relations: Expectations, Reality and the Future Aneek Chatterjee* With the conclusion of American President Barak Obama’s ‘historic’ visit to India, the first American President to visit India in his first term, post Cold War bilateral relationship has assumed newer dimensions. India, with sustained economic growth for nearly two decades, is poised to play a big role in world politics. In this context India’s relations with the U.S., the only super power in the present world order is crucial. From the American perspective, an ‘emerging’ India with market and military potentials is significant for American business and strategic calculations. There is little doubt that during the post Cold War period, India-U.S. relationship has attained the level of maturity and strength that was unimaginable during the Cold War period. Official visits of three consecutive American Presidents to India since 2000 are a few among many instances of this mature relationship during the post Cold War phase. But has the relationship moved on the expected route after the end of the Cold War. The time is appropriate for a clinical appraisal of India-U.S. relations two decades after the end of the Cold War. The present article examines the post Cold War ‘Expectations’ and ‘Reality’ in Indo-U.S. relations and proposes a future course of action that may help to strengthen the bilateral relationship of two major actors in international politics today. It begins with Expectations in bilateral relationship between people in both countries. The article emanates from a theoretical interest to review current bilateral relations in the perspective of relations immediately after the end of the cold War in 1991, with a view to examine whether these *Aneek Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Political Science, Presidency (College) University, Kolkata, India. Currently, Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor, Center for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A. 23 1 For instance, almost all Annual Reports published by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, from 1990-91 to 1995-96 projected very bright India-U.S. relations after the Cold War. See in this context, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Annual Report 1990-91; Annual Report 1991-92; Annual Report 1992-93; Annual Report 199394 ; Annual Report 1994-95; and Annual Report 1995-96. For similar projections in American official documents see, House of Representatives, 103rd Congress, 1994. Round Table on South Asia : Testimony Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives – 103rd Congress, Second Session, Washington, D.C. : U.S. Govt. Printing Press. Also see, House of Representatives, 105th Congress, 1994. The Clinton Administration’s Policy Toward South Asia : Hearing, Before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 105th Congress, First Session, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Press. For non-official documents see, Singh, Jasjit. 1992. Indo-US Relations in Changing World. New Delhi: Lancer Publishers. Also see, Frankel, Francine R. ‘Indo-US Relations: The Future is Now’, The Washington Quarterly, vol. 19, no.4, pp. 129-49; also, Harrison, Selig S. ‘South Asia and the United States: A Chance for a Fresh Start’, Current History, March 1992, pp. 97-105. 2 See Ripley, Randall B. and James M. Lindsay, ed. 1977, U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh; also, Jentleson, Bruce W. 2000. American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. expectations were realized, and what could be done to augment relations in future. The Expectations After a generally distant relationship during the Cold War, the post Cold War world order provided many new opportunities to both India and the U.S. to set their relationship on a fresh course. A listing of these opportunities will help to focus on the expectations for a better relationship during the post Cold War era: (1) the end of the Cold War; (2) the disintegration of the Soviet Union; (3) the rise of the U.S. as the only surviving super power; (4) the need for adjusting and reshaping foreign policies in a new...

Editor's Note

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

<i>The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History</i> by Austin Jersild

Editor's Note