Thermal technocracy: climate, subtropical modern architecture, and the Great Leap Forward in Maoist Guangzhou, 1953–62

This article contributes to existing literature on the transnational interplay between China's two tropical architectures, i.e. its overseas architectural aid in the decolonising Africa and its domestic subtropical modernist architecture in southern China, by offering an alternative techno-political narrative of how they were both concurrent and co-constitutive in the geo-political and socio-economic contexts of decolonisation, the Cold War, and global socialism. Based on archival materials from China, Tanzania, and the UK, it moves beyond traditional architectural historiography relying on the comparative formal analysis of monumental cultural buildings to attend to the entanglement between architectural technologies and politics in the Chinese-built industrial infrastructures both within and beyond China. Drawing on theories of techno-politics and critical temperature studies, it develops the notion of ‘thermal regime’ to capture the often-neglected interdependence between the use of thermal technologies and the exercise of socio-political power. Through the in-depth case studies of Guangzhou Ramie Textile Mill (1956–1958) in southern China and China-aided Friendship Textile Mill (1966–1968) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the article reveals how globally-circulated climatic knowledge and thermal technologies transcending Cold-War rivalries were marshalled by both Chinese and Tanzanian actors, driven by their common desire for socialist industrialisation. These further evidence the rise of a productivity-centric thermal regime, a technocratic control of environmental parameters, and a more extensive exploitation of human labour.

Editor's Note

(2000). The Problem of the Intelligentsia and Radicalism in Higher Education Under Stalin and Mao. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 52, No. 8, pp. 1489-1513.

Reviewed by: The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination by Robeson Taj Frazier Keisha N. Blain THE EAST IS BLACK: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. By Robeson Taj Frazier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. In a fascinating new book entitled The East is Black, Robeson Taj Frazier explores the significance of China for a cadre of black activists and thinkers during the Cold War. Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources from the United States and China—including archival material, newspapers, oral histories, films, and travel narratives—Frazier describes how W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Robert F. Williams, Mabel Williams, Vicki Garvin, and William Worthy “deployed and grappled with media, travel, and travel narrative in their interactions in China and in their formulations of transnational politics” (4). Using the terms “radical imagining” to describe the ideas, interactions, political practices, and creative expressions that he traces, Frazier deepens our understanding of the cultural and political exchanges and historical connections between people of African descent and persons of Asian descent. In five chapters (including a coda), Frazier examines the significance of China’s march towards socialism for black Americans during the Cold War. These men and women, Frazier asserts, “opposed U.S. imperialism abroad and capitalism and antiblack racism at home … [and] made it well known that the social and economic treatment of black Americans and racial minorities in the United States amplified the inadequacies of the country’s paradigm of international relations and world community” (5). [End Page 151] While Frazier is attentive to the myriad ways black men and women engaged China and endorsed Afro-Asian solidarity, he pays equal attention to the contradictions in their positions. In the first chapter, Frazier describes the significance of the Du Boises’ visit to China in 1959, highlighting the couple’s admiration for China’s modernization project, the “Great Leap Forward,” and the efforts to strengthen relations between Africans and the Chinese. According to Frazier, the Du Boises “believed that China’s rejection of U.S. domination and its projects to induce China’s economic advancement could aid decolonial efforts in Africa” (47). Yet, they overlooked the disastrous consequences of the “Great Leap Forward” and “perpetuated a paternalist framing of Sino-African relations: Africans as under Chinese tutelage” (49). In this chapter, Frazier also offers a close reading of Du Bois’s historical novel Worlds of Color (1961), unpacking some of the contradictions in the black radical imagination and interrogating global discourses on race and racial identity. In subsequent chapters, Frazier grapples with these tensions through an exploration of the ideas and activities of a diverse group of black men and women who engaged in transnational political practices through various mediums including journalism, media, and overseas travel. Frazier’s The East is Black is a deeply nuanced and well-researched book that enriches the literature on twentieth century black internationalism. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on Afro-Asia by Gerald Horne, Robin D. G. Kelley, Yuichiro Onishi, and others. Among its many strengths, Frazier’s book highlights the gendered contours of black transnational ideas and activism; and draws insights from various fields including history, American studies, and critical race theory. Through careful and in-depth analysis, Frazier has written an important study, which will enhance undergraduate and graduate course syllabi on a range of topics including Race and Ethnicity, Transnationalism, and the modern African Diaspora. Keisha N. Blain University of Iowa Copyright © 2016 Mid-America American Studies Association

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

Reviewed by: Mao's China and the Cold War Xiaobing Li (bio) Chen Jian. Mao's China and the Cold War. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. x, 400 pp. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4932-4. Since the sudden end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there has been in America and in the West generally an increasing interest in the mysterious, untold, "view-from-the-other-side" stories of the Communist experience. This book provides a comprehensive study of Communist China's experience during the Cold War from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972. Making the first effort of this kind, Chen Jian offers path-breaking insights into the calculations, decisions, and divergent views toward the world in general and the United States in particular by Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders. Rather than using the traditional America-centered methodologies to follow the Soviet-American rivalry, Chen instead focuses on the Sino American conflicts that made East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War. He studies the relatively neglected inner dynamics of the Chinese revolution, which defined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worldview and determined their foreign policy. With its fresh new look at Sino-American relations, this book should be read by both specialists and nonspecialists interested either in China's foreign policy or in Asian international relations. Chen begins by introducing Mao's doctrine of "continuous revolution" and the role played by communist ideology in Chinese foreign-policy making. Then, the book follows a chronological approach, beginning with the examination in the first chapter of China's transition between World War II and the revolutionary [End Page 374] civil war in 1945-1946. Although at this time the CCP attempted to establish "a closer relationship with Washington" and had actually felt "betrayed" by Stalin, the Soviet-American confrontation nevertheless "had a profound effect" on China and eventually brought the Cold War to East Asia (p. 36). The second chapter challenges the commonly held belief that the United States somehow "lost" China, suggesting instead that it was impossible for Washington to establish a normal working relationship with the CCP since Mao was using an anti American discourse to mobilize the masses for his revolution. The discussion of Mao's grand plans continues into the next two chapters, explaining why China entered the Korean War in 1950, why Mao sought a negotiated settlement to end the war, and the growing problems between Beijing and Moscow. Since Mao treated China's foreign policy as an "integral part" of the revolution, his policy and actions also served to maintain and enhance the "inner dynamics" of the CCP revolution. Chapter 5 is devoted to Mao's support of the Vietnamese Communists in their struggle during the First Indochina War of 1950-1954. For example, Mao sent a "Chinese Military Advisory Group" to Vietnam, supported the Dien Bien Phu campaign, and pushed a settlement at the 1954 Geneva Conference, where Premier Zhou Enlai emerged as "the real winner." A deepening rift between Beijing and Moscow in the late 1950s is discussed in chapter ., where it is argued that the Polish and Hungarian crises may have "triggered a series of more general confrontations within the Communist world, eventually leading to the decline of international communism as a twentieth-century phenomenon" (p. 145). Chapter 7 deals with the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and shows Mao's desire to use the issue of Taiwan to create new momentum for his Great Leap Forward movement, one of the most important episodes in the development of China's continuous revolution. Chapter 8 explains China's deep involvement and its ultimate policy failure in the Vietnam War in the period 1962-1969. According to Chen, Beijing lost its influence over Vietnam after the collapse of an alliance that "was once claimed to be 'between brotherly comrades'" (p. 205). There was a "huge gap" between Beijing's words and actions: while portraying itself as a model and leader of the communist movement, Beijing failed to satisfy the Vietnamese communists. When the unification of Vietnam made...

A diverse and valuable contribution to Cold War studies, The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures features essays from a variety of international scholars of the Cold War. The contributors’ wealth of approaches is evident in the wide-ranging focus of the book, which includes chapters on Cold War print culture and literary publishing in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with forays into cosmopolitan sites of collaboration and exile such as interwar Berlin, which, as Supriya Chaudhuri notes in her chapter, “The Traveller as Internationalist: Syed Mujtaba Ali,” was “a hub for revolutionary groups, especially from India and the Middle East, while Germany provided a haven for disaffected colonial intellectuals” (p. 48).The focus of the book is the volatile transitional period of the Cold War, when the “Third World” was just coming into existence, defining itself against the so-called First and Second Worlds and also struggling to establish a unified identity among multiple internal factions competing for control of the future of these nations. Such a protean moment offers rich territory for these scholars of print culture and Cold War literature.The question of how ideology and form intersect, and indeed whether and how political ideology can influence decisions about literary form, largely frames the book. In chapters demonstrating a multiplicity of approaches, the authors explicate genre and medium more often than formal decisions. But print culture is the focal point of these critical investigations, from decisions to favor one type of fiction over another, to the strategy of publishing magazines, literary newspapers and affordable, widely distributed paperbacks in order to promote a particular politics or worldview through literature.Paulo Lemos Horta's essay, “Euforia, Desencanto: Roberto Bolaño and Barcelona Publishing in the Transition to Democracy,” is one of the book's highlights, a bracing and necessary reappraisal of the Chilean writer and worldwide literary star who spent much of his adulthood in Spain. Horta examines Bolaño's life and work in the context of his close contacts with insurgent writers and publishers, focusing on his engagement with Spanish politics during a particularly unsettled period and arguing that these issues are reflected in his writing. The picture that emerges here of Bolaño as an outspoken, engaged writer is more subtle and subversive than many casual readers of Bolaño's popular novels may recognize.As a radical leftist, Bolaño and his writing were considered by some to be “‘militantemente minoritario,’ a phrase that captures … Bolaño as a partisan, a soldier in the defense of the literature for the few against the demands of commercial publishing” (p. 296). The transnational scope of the book is exemplified here by Horta's description of writing from Allen Ginsberg published alongside uncritical comments on the Baader Meinhof Group in a Spanish magazine, suggesting that Bolaño's reading of Ginsberg in Barcelona in 1977 had connotations very different from those most apparent to readers in the United States, the majority of whom knew relatively little about the politics of Cold War Europe.Itzea Goikolea-Amiano's “The Poetics and Politics of Solidarity: Barg el-Lil (1961) and Afrotopia” examines how the eponymous novel helped form the postcolonial consciousness in Tunisia, in part by featuring “the first enslaved black protagonist in a modern Arabic novel” (p. 267). In this informative essay Goikolea-Amiano also suggests how Barg el-Lil examined and even helped facilitate the difficult process of cultural contact between Europeans and Muslims without falling prey to nationalist and religious stereotypes.The study of the Cold War has been invigorated over the past two decades by several groundbreaking texts, specifically concerning literary transnationalism and the insidious yet often creatively generative work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that sponsored significant literary publications around the world during the Cold War. Francesca Orsini's “Literary Activism: Hindi Magazines, the Short Story and the World” complicates some of the scholarship on this topic, especially concerning the Third World. This is particularly clear in the way Orsini departs from work by Andrew Rubin and Elizabeth Holt, who have argued that the global simultaneity of publications by CCF-sponsored journals had a homogenizing effect on the literary and political discourse. In fact, as Orsini writes, “multiple and competing visions of world literature could be found in the same magazine at the same time—tracing different ‘significant geographies’ and belying simple geopolitical polarities” (p. 105).The competing visions of world literature that flourished during the Cold War have continued to animate the work of scholars of the period, providing numerous, often contradictory frameworks through which to read and interpret this writing. By using multiple approaches while focusing specifically on the print cultures of the Third World, this book enriches our understanding of how Cold War ideology played out in the literature of developing nations in the late twentieth century. The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures encourages a decentralized, transnational approach rather than the First World narratives and points of view that have tended to dominate the critical discourse among Western scholars.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

<i>The Ends of Modernization: Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era</i> by David Johnson Lee

During the Cold War, the Central-European capital of Prague, alongside other locations in the polarised post-war world, emerged as a key site where an art world of particular importance for artists from South Asia developed. By emphasising cultural mobility as a catalyst for exchange and network building, this book challenges and complicates assumptions about Cold War binaries of East and West and the polarisation between so-called totalitarian regimes and free cultures. Positioning Prague as a nexus where South-Asian modernisms intersected with multiple peoples, histories, and ideologies in the post-World War II era, it offers a narrative of decolonisation that rejected rigid systemic alignment in favour of participation across blocs by prioritising migratory aesthetics over nationalist parochialism. Well-researched and rich in archival materials, this book proposes new ways of writing art histories and makes a significant contribution to both Cold War studies and critical global modernism studies.

Government marginalized freedom of expression rights of communists, socialists, labor and Leftist groups during the two prolonged Red Scare eras and during wartime to the extent that individuals and groups might impede the war effort. Much of the world was divided during the Cold War among communist ideology that favored collective rights, socialism that favored more public ownership of the economy and more social programs, and capitalism that favored puissant property right protections, less government involvement in the economy, and fewer social programs. An ideological impasse over property rights ostensibly corresponded with security threats. Did prolonged eras of national security peril influence the political system, societal values, and jurisprudence? During the Cold War, individuals and groups that sought to exercise free speech rights by advocating economic policies outside of dominate discourse or organize into suspect collective action groups, confronted restrictions. The Cold War was foremost premised on security threats from weapon buildups, but did the stigmatizing labels of communism and socialism, and the praised label of capitalism influence the political landscape and the role of corporations in political agendas? During the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court bestowed elevated rights to business organizations. Both Republicans and Democrats represent campaign positions that will get them elected based on the perceptions of the median voter. Politicians seem to have shifted to become more beholden to corporate America, which coincides with criticism surrounding corporate capture of government institutions, lobbying, and campaign contributions.

Trade unionism was at the leading edge of African freedom struggle in the 1940s and 1950s. It was an incubator where different visions of decolonized futures vied for ascendency after WWII. This article analyzes international labor networks and trade union activism in Kenya to explore the entanglements of decolonization and Cold War from Africa in the 1940s to 1960s, an era when competing modes of anticolonial internationalism laid paths to independence. This story is told in two phases. Through Makhan Singh, the article assesses the influence of Indo-African connection, Marxism and the radical left on labor organization over the 1940s. Then, through Tom Mboya, the article charts Kenyan affiliation to the anticommunist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from the early 1950s. It shows how this internationalist volte-face transformed Kenya’s trade union landscape, propelled anticolonial agitation and, by the late 1950s, wrought irreparable fractures in fledgling pan-African institutions over the very nature of postcolonialism. The article argues that mobile African labor leaders coproduced, domesticated, and molded Cold War networks—that the conduits of early global Cold War agency ran both ways. Singh and Mboya were interlocutors in pluripotent world conversations marshaled for African decolonization. They also helped delineate the terms of global dialogue at a moment of neocolonial peril and decolonizing opportunity. This calls on historians to define alternative chronologies of globalist possibility masked by the tighter constraints placed on African states in the later twentieth century.

During the Cold War, the Central-European capital of Prague, alongside other locations in the polarized post-war world, emerged as a key site where an art world of particular importance for artists from South Asia developed. By emphasizing cultural mobility as a catalyst for exchange and network building, this book challenges and complicates assumptions about Cold War binaries of East and West and the polarization between so-called totalitarian regimes and free cultures. Positioning Prague as a nexus where South-Asian modernisms intersected with multiple peoples, histories, and ideologies in the post-World War II era, it offers a narrative of decolonization that rejected rigid systemic alignment in favor of participation across blocs by prioritizing migratory aesthetics over nationalist parochialism. Well-researched and rich in archival materials, this book proposes new ways of writing art histories and makes a significant contribution to both Cold War studies and critical global modernism studies.

We did not volunteer to review the first issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism. It was the editor of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism who, in the spirit of encouraging properly critical debate, i...