RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series #7 - Rethinking China and the Cold War: The Kuomintang, the Philippine Chinese, and Diasporic Anticommunism in the Mid-20th Century

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Date

26 Feb 2024
Organiser

Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture
Time

16:30 - 18:00
Venue

BC202, PolyU

Speaker

Dr KUNG Chien Wen

Enquiry

Ms Carmen LAW 34008979 rcchc@polyu.edu.hk

Summary

Fears of Southeast Asia’s Chinese as conduits for the People's Republic of China defined Southeast Asia’s Cold War. Yet, ironically, the example of the Philippine Chinese shows that the "China" which intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian country was the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. Based on the speaker’s book, Diasporic Cold Warriors, this talk explains how one of the smallest overseas Chinese communities in the region became the most ardent diasporic supporters of the ROC in the world from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, the Kuomintang-ROC party-state's overseas Chinese networks entrenched themselves in the Philippines with the consent and participation of the Philippine state, giving rise to a dynamic and contingent arrangement of shared, non-territorial sovereignty. Taipei and Manila's intersecting anticommunist projects were instrumental to how translocal Chinese forged politically appropriate identities and adapted themselves to the postcolonial Philippines as ethno-ideological subjects.

Keynote Speaker

Dr KUNG Chien Wen

Assistant Professor of History

National University of Singapore

Kung Chien Wen is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. in International and Global History from Columbia University. His first book, Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s, was published in 2022 as part of Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. With funding from the Singapore Social Sciences Research Council, he is currently working on a cultural and intellectual history of Singapore in the larger Chinese-speaking world from the 1970s to the 1990s.

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