1st Edition
Chineseness and the Cold War Contested Cultures and Diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong
This book explores contested notions of "Chineseness" in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong during the Cold War, showing how competing ideas about "Chineseness" were an important ideological factor at play in the region. After providing an overview of the scholarship on "Chineseness" and "diaspora", the book sheds light on specific case studies, through the lens of the "Chinese cultural Cold War", from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It provides detailed examples of competition for control of definitions of "Chineseness" by political or politically oriented forces of diverse kinds, and shows how such competition was played out in bookstores, cinemas, music halls, classrooms, and even sports clubs and places of worship across the region in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The book also demonstrates how the legacies of these Cold War contestations continue to influence debates about Chinese influence – and "Chineseness" – in Southeast Asia and the wider region today.
Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Introduction: Putting 'Chineseness' Back into Cold War Cultures Jeremy E. Taylor Section 1: Chineseness and "New China" in Cold War Southeast Asia 1. The Southern Film Corporation, Opera Films, and the PRC's Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Asia, 1950s–1960s Lanjun Xu 2. The Malayan Emergency and the Desinicization of the Malayan Chinese Choo Chin Low 3. Chineseness and the Cold War in Thailand: From "Red Scare" to Strategic Ally Wasana Wongsurawat Section 2: Anti-communist Chineseness in Cold War Asia 4. State-Building and Chinese Transnationalism during the Cold War: Chinese Sport in the Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 Mei Feng Mok 5. Soft-boiled, Anti-Communist Romance: The Story Paper and Liu Yichang’s Singapore Story Kenny K. K. Ng 6. Voice of America Chinese-dialect broadcasting and the Chinese Cultural Cold War, 1949–1953 Jeremy E. Taylor Section 3: Border-crossing "Chinesesness" in Asia 7. North Across the Southern Seas: Cold War Chinese Careers of Indonesian Songs Josh Stenberg 8. Visiting the "Overseas Chinese": Vatican engagement with the Chinese Diaspora in Cold War Southeast Asia Jeremy E. Taylor 9. Alternative Chineseness: War Experience and National Longing in Pan Lei’s Red River Trilogy (1952) and Deng Kebao’s Alien Lands (1961) Pei-yin Lin
Biography
Jeremy E. Taylor is an associate professor in modern Asian history at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Lanjun Xu is an associate professor in Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore.
