Taiwan, the United States, and the Hidden History of the Cold War in Asia

This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trumpeting anti-communism while promoting American-style capitalism. While the path-dependence of this historical moment has not by itself bequeathed Asia’s current crop of authoritarian governments, the authors argue that the current situation cannot be fully understood without reference to Cold War legacies. This introductory article contextualises the pieces in the special issue by providing a broad overview of the variety of Cold War political and economic legacies for the region. It concludes by noting the importance of the kinds of detailed, critical, theoretically informed and empirically rich research that Journal of Contemporary Asia has encouraged since its inception.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds—not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s fifteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino–Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds—not just in Europe but also Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s 15 chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds-not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s fifteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

An "Orphan" with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics Jodi Kim (bio) Officially she was never born. You will not find a record of her birth, not even in her small hometown. A miraculous conception in Korea, an anonymous drop-off at an orphanage, a hasty but surreptitious send-off to a foreign land. She is a paper child of ghosts. —Me-K. Ahn, Living in Half Tones Society has already told you and me that we have become Americans because of someone else's charity. Now we're being told that our cultural displacement had a purpose—multiculturalism. By growing up in white families, we can be examples, Luuk. We can show others that racial harmony is possible. We just can't show our burdened backs . . . I guess someone forgot to ask us if we wanted to become America's diversity mascots. —Kari Ruth, "Dear Luuk" Recent high-profile transnational, transracial adoptions by white U.S. über-celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, coupled with dramatic increases in the numbers of such adoptions in the last decade, have made what Toby Alice Volkman calls "new geographies of kinship" highly visible.1 Yet this "new" visibility and relative "popularity" of transnational adoption obscure the long-standing history of the practice, a history whose modern origins we can trace back to the end of World War II and one that intersects in complex ways with America's imperialist and gendered racial cold war in Asia.2 Indeed, America's protracted cold war military interventions in Korea and Vietnam have helped to produce the significant migration of Koreans and Vietnamese to the United States not only as immigrants, military brides, and "refugees," but also as transnational and transracial adoptees.3 The adoption of Korean babies after the end of the Korean War inaugurated what ultimately developed into the world's largest and longest standing transnational adoption program, and the adoption of Vietnamese babies was made possible in the final days of the Vietnam War, when the U.S. government launched a controversial "campaign" called Operation Babylift to airlift more than [End Page 855] two thousand "orphans" out of Vietnam.4 This intersection, or conjoined genealogies of cold war imperialisms in Asia and transracial adoptions out of Asia, impels us to reckon with the complex politics and affects of transracial adoption as not simply or solely an individual private matter motivated by altruistic desires to form new kinships and to provide better lives for orphaned and abandoned children. It is also a highly racialized and gendered process implicated in the United States' imperialist, capitalist modernity and indeed its foundational or constitutive projects of racial formation and "nation building" both domestically and internationally. In this article, I seek to highlight the cold war relations between the United States and Asia as a particularly charged, protracted, and significant condition of possibility and locus for a practice whose disturbing intersections with imperialist violence witnesses a proliferation of global locations. I grapple with these complex intersections, politics, and affects by analyzing Deann Borshay Liem's First Person Plural (2000), a fraught autoethnographic documentary on Liem's experience of being a transracial Korean adoptee, and Daughter from Danang (2002), a PBS documentary about the Vietnamese "Babylift" and a transracial adoptee.5 I argue that these films constitute an important site of knowledge production and representation that offers an unsettling hermeneutic of the imperialist and gendered racial logics of the U.S. cold war in Asia by displaying the psychic and material complexities of adoptions that are not only transnational, but also transracial and gendered. The films make visible how the conditions of possibility of transracial adoption surface at the disturbing nexus of the successive forced migrations engineered by U.S. and Western capitalist modernity, cold war imperialism in Asia, the white heteronormative bourgeois nuclear family ideal, and the long-standing imperialist desire to "save" the world. More specifically, within the context of the cold war in Asia, American military intervention and war produced the conditions—the birth of GI babies, increasing numbers of orphaned and abandoned children, devastation of local economies, and unequal economic and neoimperial dependencies...

Introduction New Approaches to the Study of the Cold War in Asia - Michael Szonyi and Hong Liu Part I: World System and Asian Order Chapter 1 What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretative Essay - Immanuel Wallerstein Chapter 2 Only Yesterday: China, Japan and the Transformation of East Asia - Takashi Shiraishi and Caroline Sy Hau Part II: The Propaganda Warfare Chapter 3 U Nu, China and the Burmese Cold War: Propaganda in Burma in the 1950s - Michael Charney Chapter 4 Communism, Containment and the Chinese Overseas - Meredith Oyen Chapter 5 Limits to Propaganda: Hong Kong's Leftist Media in the Cold War and Beyond - Lu Yan Chapter 6 Women's Liberation in China during the Cold War - Zheng Yangwen Chapter 7 The Historicity of China's Soft Power: The PRC and the Cultural Politics of Indonesia, 1945-1965 - Hong Liu Part III: The Export and Globalisation of Maoism Chapter 8 Transpacific Solidarities: A Mexican Case Study on the Diffusion of Maoism in Latin America - Matthew Rothwell Chapter 9 Mao and the Swedish United Front against the USA - Perry Johansson

Reviewed by: War Crimes Trials in the Wake of Decolonization and Cold War in Asia, 1945–1956: Justice in Time of Turmoil ed. by Kerstin von Lingen Sarah Kovner War Crimes Trials in the Wake of Decolonization and Cold War in Asia, 1945–1956: Justice in Time of Turmoil. Edited by Kerstin von Lingen. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 290 pages. Hardcover, €90.94/$99.99. This volume, the product of a 2014 conference at Heidelberg University, seeks to explain the Allied military tribunals in Asia and the Pacific at the end of World War II. It is an ambitious undertaking, seeing as proceedings occurred in more than fifty locations from Rangoon to Rabaul and Khabarovsk to Kwajalein; some 5,700 Japanese men were prosecuted, and a few more than 900 were executed. The topic requires deep knowledge of local histories and facility in multiple languages, making it a near-perfect theme for an edited volume. In the introductory essay, Kerstin von Lingen and Robert Cribb place the trials in the context of three major historical phenomena of the twentieth century: the development of international humanitarian law, Cold War confrontation, and decolonization. They argue that the war crimes trials constituted a watershed moment. “Political and ideological considerations emanating from decolonization and the Cold War [End Page 131] shaped, and were shaped by, the structure and outcome of the trials as a new post-imperial world gradually began to emerge” (p. 3). The book adds to a reexamination that began with Yuma Totani’s The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). Where Totani examines the better-known International Tribunal for the Far East, the volume under review focuses on the trials elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific. It is part of an emerging body of work, including Barak Kushner’s prizewinning Men to Devils, Devils to Men (Harvard University Press, 2015) and the definitive Japanese War Criminals by Sandra Wilson, Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt, and Dean Aszkielowicz (Columbia University Press, 2017), that completely upends the way we think about these trials. As von Lingen and Cribb argue, the “trial process was driven above all by a determination to do justice, rather than out of overt political considerations” (p. 6). We can no longer dismiss the trials as mere “victor’s justice.” One important contribution of this volume is that it puts each trial in its regional and local context. Thus Wolfgang Form’s essay on the Philippines highlights its colonial relationship with the United States, and Cribb’s essay on Burma treats not only the specific context of the British in Southeast Asia but also local Burmese politics. The geographical reach of the collection is impressive: three essays deal with China, two with France and French Indochina, and one each with the Netherlands and the Netherlands East Indies, India, Burma, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and Australia. The eleven contributions, which range from outstanding to very good, take up the main arguments of the introduction to varying extents. Questions addressed include extraterritoriality and its legacy, trial strategy by the French and Soviets, and the trials on the ground in Burma, the Philippines, Khabarovsk, and Indochina. In addition to the introduction, four essays are particularly notable for their highlighting of hitherto rarely discussed yet very important aspects of this history. Neil Boister takes up the opium question in chapter 2, pointing out that the Tokyo War Crimes trial was the first and possibly only international military tribunal “to take jurisdiction over the illicit traffic in drugs” (p. 25). He argues that in condemning Japanese policy on opium, the Tokyo Tribunal may have stopped one kind of imperial exploitation only to replace it with the moral imperialism of US prohibitionism. Whereas most people study the war crimes trials from the standpoint of political and legal history, Milinda Banerjee, the author of chapter 5, approaches the topic through intellectual history. His theoretically sophisticated and clearly written discussion examines why twentieth-century anticolonial actors retained “the framework of modern state sovereignty,” put in place by Europeans, despite its obvious “violence and exclusion” (p. 70). The remaining two chapters out of the four do a fine job of explaining how international and regional...

Great Power Conflict and the Chinese Civil War Qiang Zhai (bio) Odd Arne Westad. Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944–1946. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. x 220 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. For many years, scholars relied almost exclusively on Western sources to write about Cold War history. In his 1983 survey of the field of post-1945 Sino-American relations, Warren I. Cohen hoped for a breakthrough in the coming decade: access to Chinese archival material. 1 Since 1989, a steady stream of publications utilizing new Chinese documents as well as American archives has appeared. 2 By presenting highly revealing Chinese materials and incorporating Chinese perspectives into the investigation of Sino-U.S. confrontations, these new works have greatly invigorated the study of the early Cold War, especially its East Asian dimension. In varying ways, these studies have addressed many fundamental questions about the origins of the Cold War in Asia and the emergence of Sino-American conflict: What were Chinese Communist perceptions of the post-1945 international situation in general and the United States in particular? Why did Mao Zedong decide to lean to the side of the Soviet Union? What was the nature of the Mao-Stalin relationship? Why did Beijing intervene in the Korean War? What was the extent of China's assistance to the Viet Minh in the early 1950s? Many heretofore unknown events and episodes have been illuminated and many previously unanswered questions about the role of the communist side in the early Cold War have begun to be addressed. 3 The appearance of these new studies would certainly have satisfied Cohen, a doyen in the field of American-East Asia relations, who, together with Akira Iriye, has made tremendous efforts to encourage fresh scholarship and introduce young scholars into the field. The book under review represents one of the latest entries in this emerging international history of the Cold War in Asia. Westad has benefited from a great deal of previously unavailable Chinese material both on the mainland and in Taiwan. From the mainland, he has drawn upon a wide array of primary sources, including officially published documentary series, memoirs, [End Page 516] books, and articles written by Chinese researchers who enjoyed privileged access to party and government archives. In Taipei, he has consulted such significant sources as published collections of Chiang Kai-shek's personal papers and the diary of Wang Shijie. He has also used the papers of such former Nationalist officials as Hu Shize and Zhang Jia'ao, now deposited in the Hoover Institution archives. For the American perspective, Westad has utilized a broad range of archival documents and private papers. The result of such prodigious research is a volume that offers a much fuller picture than previous accounts of the complex and intriguing relationship between Soviet-American conflict and the genesis of the Chinese civil war. Westad adopts a quadripartite approach to discuss Chinese Nationalist, Chinese Communist, and Soviet interests and policies as well as those of the United States. To demonstrate his thesis that the Chinese civil war stemmed from the appearance of the Cold War, he begins by describing the creation and collapse of the Yalta system. As Westad sees it, the Yalta agreement represented a Soviet-American search for stability in East Asia. Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin desired to make China “a stabilizing buffer between a central and northeast Asian mainland dominated by the Soviet Union and a Pacific area dominated by the United States” (p. 31). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chiang “welcomed the Yalta agreement” (p. 32) because it made Washington a participant in Sino-Soviet relations, a goal that the Chinese leader had worked diligently to achieve during the closing days of World War II. To isolate Mao and his party and to prevent revolutionary change in China, Chiang made the decision to conclude the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945. A consistent strategy of Chiang was to win international support to compensate for his domestic weaknesses. His plan was to use Great Power endorsement of his authority to make Mao aware of the futility of continued opposition. Like...

The superpowers’ competition for allies constituted a large part of the Cold War in Asia. The alliance between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in February 1950 seemed to be a major diplomatic victory for Moscow. How to maintain the alliance proved a serious challenge. Conventional wisdom dictates that the commonalities in ideological, economic, political, and security interests between the two Communist powers would sustain the compact. Along with the personal idiosyncrasies of Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, cultural, racial, and domestic factors, nevertheless, eroded the cohesion of the Sino-Soviet alliance. This chapter aims to reconstruct how Beijing and Moscow tried to maintain the alliance, and how the corrosive Sino-Soviet partnership affected the course of the Cold War in Asia. From the Korean War to the Hungarian uprising From the outset, the Sino-Soviet alliance was loaded with expectations and aspirations. When the alliance treaty was signed, China wanted more than the Soviet Union was willing to give: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders aspired to secure Moscow’s commitment to defending China, not only to thwart a perceived threat from the United States, but also to ensure that the Kremlin would be a more reliable partner in the future than it had been in the past. They still remembered Stalin’s reluctance to support the CCP fully during China’s anti-Japanese war (1931–45) and his making deals with Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) during the civil war (1945–49). Ideologically, however, Mao had mixed feelings toward Stalin-style Communism. Although identifying himself as a Marxist, Mao aimed to apply Marxist-Leninist principles to Chinese realities. His open proclamation to “lean” to the Soviet side in 1949 was more a political move – intended to contain calls within and outside his party for taking a “third road” rather than following Soviet or American models – than an ideological requirement. For economic reconstruction, Beijing intended to learn from the Soviet experiences but without necessarily relying on Soviet assistance. Although trying to avoid expected Soviet interference, Mao found it unrealistic to be completely self-reliant, given China’s war-torn economy and political instability.

America’s Road to its Asian Dilemma Yoneyuki Sugita (bio) Yoichi Miura. Yoshida Shigeru to San Furanshisuko Kowa [Yoshida Shigeru and the San Francisco Peace Treaty]. Tokyo: Ohtsuki Shoten, 1996. xiii + 253 pp., vol. 1, and v + 326 pp., vol. 2. Tables, illustrations, notes, and index. 3,090 yen (vol. 1) and 3,296 yen (vol. 2). Daizaburo Yui. Nichibei Sensokan no Sokoku [Japan-U.S. Gap of War Images]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995. viii + 236 pp. Tables, illustrations, and notes. 1,800 yen. “[H]istory . . . is a continuous process . . . an unending dialogue between the present and the past,” E. H. Carr wrote in What Is History(1974, p. 30). Yoichi Miura and Daizaburo Yui reexamine the Pacific War, the U.S. occupation of Japan, and war memories in both countries, with a critical view in regard to the current situation in Japan and in Japan-U.S. relations. Miura casts doubt on the prevailing postwar concept among conservative Japanese that they should accept economic growth and subjugation to the United States as inseparable imperatives. He focuses on the process of establishing the San Francisco Treaty (including both peace and security treaties) from the perspective of Japanese history. Those who approve of the treaty insist that it was the only realistic choice for Japan while those who disapprove believe that the treaty imposed the rearmament program and incorporated Japan into the American militaristic world strategy. With the demise of the Cold War and the Japan Socialist Party, the validity of the treaty is now widely accepted; however, Miura is still critical of it, speculating on an alternative road Japan could have taken. He believes that there was a good chance of concluding a peace treaty in 1947 that would have made Japan a demilitarized and neutral country. Then, the Korean War would not have happened in the way that it did and the Cold War in Asia would not have escalated as much as it did. He goes so far as to claim that postoccupation security and economic issues had nothing to do with a peace treaty. In Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954(1988), John Dower sheds light on the pivotal importance of Yoshida Shigeru, who “bridged the decades from the turn of the century into the 1950s [End Page 326]as successfully and colorfully as anyone” (p. xii). Dower argues that since the Cold War enhanced Japan’s strategic importance, Yoshida used this as a bargaining chip to resist the American demand for swift and large-scale rearmament, successfully concluded a peace treaty, and firmly established the foundation for Japan’s postwar development. In contrast to Dower’s thesis, Miura regards this positive image as a “Yoshida myth.” Miura is convinced that Yoshida was an incompetent negotiator who relied completely on the United States, narrowing his focus only to acquiring independence. Miura criticizes Yoshida for not making much use of the outbreak of the Korean War increasing Japan’s strategic significance and John Foster Dulles’s concern about whether or not the United States could maintain bases in Japan after the occupation. Miura claims that Washington’s aim was not to pressure Japan to implement a prompt large-scale rearmament program but rather to establish a framework that would keep military bases in Japan and continue to channel Japan into a remilitarization course. Miura may have succeeded in destroying the Yoshida Myth; however, by doing so, he holds Yoshida himself responsible for establishing a distorted Japan-U.S. relationship. If Yoshida had been a better negotiator, could Japan have formulated a more equal relationship with the United States? He seems to argue in the rest of his book that the enormous difference in U.S.-Japan power relations and the emergence of the Cold War in Asia left Japan no choice but to wholeheartedly depend on the United States. In short, Miura’s challenge leads him to a self-contradiction. While Miura offers some empirical research with emphasis on security and the peace treaty, Yui tackles the broader issue of why the differences in the memories of the Asia-Pacific War widened over the last half century. Emphasizing images and cultural factors, Akira...

The main body of the text that follows appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Diplomatic History. It offers a summary and critique of the scholarly literature pertaining to the Cold War in Asia, concentrating on that work published between 1980 and 1987. A substantial number of books and articles on U.S.-Asian relations during the Cold War era has been written in the intervening eight years, of course, some of which have pushed the temporal and conceptual boundaries of the field in exciting, new directions. Consequently, I have added a postscript to the original essay, in which I examine the larger themes and issues engaged by the more recent scholarship on the Cold War in Asia. Among other matters, I seek in the postscript to reexamine my own earlier conclusions about the state of the field.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction3Ch. IThe Roots of Mao's Pro-Soviet Policy before 193715Ch. IICCP-Moscow Relations during the Anti-Japanese War, 1937-194531Ch. IIIFrom Enemies to Friends: CCP Policy toward the United States before Pearl Harbor57Ch. IVCourting the Americans: The CCP's United Front Policy toward the U.S., 1942-194574Ch. VPostwar Alignment: CCP-Moscow versus GMD-Washington in Manchuria, August-December 194598Ch. VIMao Deals with George Marshall, November 1945-December 1946119Ch. VIIThe CCP and the Cold War in Asia: Mao's "Intermediate-Zone" Theory and the Anti-American United Front, 1946-1947145Ch. VIIIMao's Revolutionary Diplomacy and the Cold War in Asia, 1948-1949161Conclusion187Notes197Select Bibliography229Index245

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

This chapter overviews the Cold War in Asia after 1953, covering important events in East, Southeast, and South Asia. This piece will focus on the intersections between the two major aspects of the Cold War in this region: the triangular relations among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, on the one hand, and local and regional conflicts stemming from the decolonization process, on the other hand.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction3Ch. IThe Roots of Mao's Pro-Soviet Policy before 193715Ch. IICCP-Moscow Relations during the Anti-Japanese War, 1937-194531Ch. IIIFrom Enemies to Friends: CCP Policy toward the United States before Pearl Harbor57Ch. IVCourting the Americans: The CCP's United Front Policy toward the U.S., 1942-194574Ch. VPostwar Alignment: CCP-Moscow versus GMD-Washington in Manchuria, August-December 194598Ch. VIMao Deals with George Marshall, November 1945-December 1946119Ch. VIIThe CCP and the Cold War in Asia: Mao's Intermediate-Zone Theory and the Anti-American United Front, 1946-1947145Ch. VIIIMao's Revolutionary Diplomacy and the Cold War in Asia, 1948-1949161Conclusion187Notes197Select Bibliography229Index245