The American Cold War in Hong Kong, 1949–1960

Abstract

During the early Cold War years, the United States came to regard the British colony of Hong Kong as an outpost of its own in terms of relations with the People’s Republic of China. Sharing a border with New China, Hong Kong became an arena for both the Cold War between East and West and the conflict between Communist and Nationalist Chinese. By its very existence, it served as an intelligence and propaganda vector for the US Far Eastern containment policy, sometimes at considerable cost to Hong Kong itself. The existing scholarly literature on US policies toward Hong Kong during the 1950s largely focuses upon top-level Anglo-American negotiations, with little consideration of the role of Hong Kong per se as a regional pivot in making and waging the Cold War. This chapter examines those factors that enabled the colony to succeed in surviving the ideological confrontation, while arguing that over time the significance of Hong Kong to American Cold War strategy steadily increased. It scrutinizes in detail US propaganda institutions and programs in Hong Kong that appreciably influenced the overseas Chinese in East and Southeast Asia.