Rethinking "China" and the "Cold War": The Kuomintang, the Philippine Chinese, and Diasporic Anticommunism in the Mid-20th Century

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Rethinking "China" and the "Cold War": The Kuomintang, the Philippine Chinese, and Diasporic Anticommunism in the Mid-20th Century

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.

	15 September 2023 Friday 3.45pm - 5.15pm		School of Social Sciences & College of Integrative Studies Seminar Room 3-3, Level 3 10 Canning Rise Singapore 179873

SPEAKER

Kung Chien Wen
Assistant Professor of History, NUS

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 Modern Chinese and International and Global History from Columbia. 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.

MODERATOR

Charlotte Setijadi
Assistant Professor of Humanities (Education), SMU
Lee Kong Chian Fellow

Dr Charlotte Setijadi teaches Asian studies and Southeast Asian history at the School of Social Sciences. She is also the Coordinator of the Global Asia second major programme. An anthropologist, Dr Setijadi researches Chinese Indonesian identity politics, Indonesian political culture, Chinese soft power among ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, and Indonesian diaspora politics. Her book Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia will be published by University of Hawai’i Press in October 2023.