Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s–1970s

Description

In Diasporic Cold Warriors, Chien-Wen Kung explains how the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) sowed the seeds of anticommunism among the Philippine Chinese with the active participation of the Philippine state. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary overseas Chinese Cold Warriors. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; not one was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China (PRC) as those in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Philippines shows that the "China" that intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian Chinese society during the Cold War was the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. For the first time, Kung tells the story of the Philippine Chinese as pro-Taiwan, anticommunist partisans, tracing their evolving relationship with the KMT and successive Philippine governments over the mid-twentieth century. Throughout, he argues for a networked and transnational understanding of the ROC-KMT party-state and demonstrates that Taipei exercised a form of non-territorial sovereignty over the Philippine Chinese with Manila's participation and consent. Challenging depoliticized narratives of cultural integration, he also contends that, because of the KMT, Chinese identity formation and practices of belonging in the Philippines were deeply infused with Cold War ideology. Drawing upon archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors reimagines the histories of the ROC, the KMT, and the Philippine Chinese, connecting them to the broader canvas of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building in East and Southeast Asia. Diasporic Cold Warriors Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Translation and Romanization Map of Southern Fujian and Taiwan Map of the Philippines Map of Manila Introduction: The Philippine Chinese as Cold Warriors 1. The KMT, Chinese Society, and Chinese Communism in the Philippines before 1942 2. A “Period of Bloody Struggle”: The Rise of the Philippine KMT, 1945–1948 3. Practicing Anticommunism: Chinese Self-Fashioning in the Cold War Philippines 4. Anticommunism in Question: “Communists” and ROC-Philippine Relations in the 1950s 5. Networking Ideology: Chinese Society and Transnational Anticommunism, 1954–1960 6. Experiencing the Nation: Philippine-Chinese Visits to “Free China” 7. Dissent and Its Discontents: The Chinese Commercial News Affair Conclusion: Rethinking “China,” the Overseas Chinese, and the Cold War Notes Glossary of Selected Chinese Names Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z