Hong Kong and the Cold War
Hong Kong and the Cold War

Author: Chi-kwan Mark

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-08-05

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0199273707

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After 1949, the British Empire in Hong Kong was more vulnerable than the lack of Chinese demand for return and the success of Hong Kong's economic transformations might have suggested. Its vulnerability stemmed as much from Britain's imperial decline and America's Cold War requirements as from a Chinese threat. It culminated in the little known '1957 Question', a year when the British position in Hong Kong appeared more uncertain than any time since 1949.This is the first scholarly study that places Hong Kong at the heart of the Anglo-American relationship in the wider context of the Cold War in Asia. Unlike existing works, which tend to treat British and US policies in isolation, this book explores their dynamic interactions - how the two allies perceived, responded to, and attempted to influence each other's policies and actions. It also provides a major reinterpretation of Hong Kong's involvement in the containment of China. Dr Mark arguesthat, concerned about possible Chinese retaliation, the British insisted and the Americans accepted that Hong Kong's role should be as discreet and non-confrontational in nature as possible. Above all, top decision-makers in Washington evaluated Hong Kong's significance not in its own right, but inthe context of the Anglo-American relationship: Hong Kong was seen primarily as a bargaining chip to obtain British support for US policy elsewhere in Asia.By using a variety of British and US archival material as well as Chinese sources, Dr Mark examines how the British and US government discussed, debated, and disagreed over Hong Kong's role in the Cold War, and reveals the dynamics of the Anglo-American alliance and the dilemmas of small allies in a global conflict.

Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War
Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War

Author: Grace Ai-Ling Chou

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-10-14

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 9004182470

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By tracing the history of Hong Kong’s New Asia College from its 1949 establishment through its 1963 incorporation into The Chinese University of Hong Kong, this study examines the interaction of colonial, communist, and cultural forces on the Chinese periphery.

Chineseness and the Cold War
Chineseness and the Cold War

Author: Jeremy E. Taylor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-26

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1000450198

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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.

The CIA and Third Force Movements in China during the Early Cold War
The CIA and Third Force Movements in China during the Early Cold War

Author: Roger B. Jeans

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1498570062

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When the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists and occupied the mainland in 1949–1950, U.S. policymakers were confronted with a dilemma. Disgusted by the corruption and, more importantly, failure of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies and party and repelled by the Communists’ revolutionary actions and violent class warfare, in the early 1950s the U.S. government placed its hopes in a Chinese “third force.” While the U.S. State Department reported on third forces, the CIA launched a two-prong effort to actively support these groups with money, advisors, and arms. In Japan, Okinawa, and Saipan, the agency trained third force troops at CIA bases. The Chinese commander of these soldiers was former high-ranking Nationalist General Cai Wenzhi. He and his colleagues organized a political group, the Free China Movement. His troops received parachute training as well as other types of combat and intelligence instruction at agency bases. Subsequently, several missions were dispatched to Manchuria—the Korean War was raging then—and South China. All were failures and the Chinese third force agents were killed or imprisoned. With the end of the Korean War, the Americans terminated this armed third force movement, with the Nationalists on Taiwan taking in some of its soldiers while others moved to Hong Kong. The Americans flew Cai to Washington, where he took a job with the Department of Defense. The second prong of the CIA’s effort was in Hong Kong. The agency financially supported and advised the creation of a third force organization called the Fighting League for Chinese Freedom and Democracy. It also funded several third force periodicals. Created in 1951 and 1952, in 1953 and 1954 the CIA ended its financial support. As a consequence of this as well as factionalism within the group, in 1954 the League collapsed and its leaders scattered to the four winds. At the end, even the term “third force” was discredited and replaced by “new force.” Finally, in the early 1950s, the CIA backed as a third force candidate a Vietnamese general. With his assassination in May 1955, however, that effort also came to naught.

Screening Communities
Screening Communities

Author: Jing Jing Chang

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 9888455761

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Postwar Hong Kong cinema played an active role in building the colony’s community in the 1950s and 1960s. To Jing Jing Chang, the screening of movies in postwar Hong Kong was a process of showing the filmmakers’ visions for Hong Kong society and simultaneously an attempt to conceal their anxieties and mask their political agenda. It was a time when the city was a site of intense ideological struggles among the colonial government, Chinese Nationalists, and Communist sympathizers. The medium of film was recognized as a powerful tool for public persuasion and various camps competed to win over the hearts and minds of the audience. Screening Communities thus situates the history of postwar Hong Kong cinema at the intersection of Cold War politics, Chinese culture, and local society. Focusing on the genres of official documentary film, leftist family melodrama (lunlipian), and youth film, this study examines the triangulated relationship of colonial interventions in Hong Kong film culture, the rise of left-leaning Cantonese directors as new cultural elites, and the positioning of audiences as contributors to the colony’s journey toward industrial modernity. Filmmakers are shown having to constantly negotiate changing sociopolitical conditions: the Hong Kong government presenting itself as a collaborative ruling body, moral and didactic messages being adapted for commercial releases, and women becoming recognized as a driving force behind Hong Kong’s postwar industrial success. In putting forward a historical narrative that privileges the poetics and politics of shaping a local community through a continuous screening process, Screening Communities offers a new interpretation of the development of Hong Kong cinema—one that breaks away from the usual accounts of the “rise and fall” of the industry. “Despite the voluminous literature on Hong Kong cinema, Screening Communities doesn’t just fill in gaps; it positively seals up a number of fissures. Chang shows us a cinema on the ground, refuting the standard image of an apolitical, fantasized world of martial arts and musicals. When Hong Kong’s identity seems ever more precarious, this is a bracing reminder of how film was deeply implicated in Hong Kong identity-formation in the Cold War era.” —David Desser, University of Illinois “Screening Communities offers an exciting analysis of the role of cinemas in shaping Hong Kong and diasporic identities during the Cold War. Chang brings left-wing Cantonese filmmakers and the colonial state back into the story, and in the process broadens our understanding of the place of Hong Kong in the cultural and social history of the Cold War. This is an important contribution to the scholarship.” —Jeremy E. Taylor, University of Nottingham

Financial Cold War
Financial Cold War

Author: James A. Fok

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-12-20

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 1119862760

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A groundbreaking exploration of US-China relations as seen through the lens of international finance Rising tensions between China and the United States have kept the financial markets on edge as a showdown between the world’s two largest economies seems inevitable. But what most people fail to recognise is the major impact that the financial markets themselves have had on the creation and acceleration of the conflict. In Financial Cold War: A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets, market structure and geopolitical finance expert James Fok explores the nuances of China-US relations from the perspective of the financial markets. The book helps readers understand how imbalances in the structure of global financial markets have singularly contributed to frictions between the two countries. In this book, readers will find: A comprehensive examination of the development of financial markets in both China and the US, as well as the current US dollar-based global financial system Insightful observations of the roles of technology, innovation, regulation, taxation, and politics in the markets, and on their resulting effect on US-Sino relations Thorough explorations of the role of Hong Kong as an intermediary for capital flows between China and the rest of the world Suggestions for how, balancing the many varying interests, policymakers might be able to devise effective strategies for de-escalating current Sino-US tensions Financial Cold War is a can’t-miss resource for anyone personally or professionally interested in the intersection of economics and international relations, financial markets, and the infrastructure underlying the international financial system.

Made in Hong Kong
Made in Hong Kong

Author: Peter E. Hamilton

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0231545703

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Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital. Made in Hong Kong delivers a new narrative of this metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s. Peter E. Hamilton explores the role of an overlooked transnational Chinese elite who fled to Hong Kong amid war and revolution. Despite losing material possessions, these industrialists, bankers, academics, and other professionals retained crucial connections to the United States. They used these relationships to enmesh themselves and Hong Kong with the U.S. through commercial ties and higher education. By the 1960s, Hong Kong had become a manufacturing powerhouse supplying American consumers, and by the 1970s it was the world’s largest sender of foreign students to American colleges and universities. Hong Kong’s reorientation toward U.S. international leadership enabled its transplanted Chinese elites to benefit from expanding American influence in Asia and positioned them to act as shepherds to China’s reengagement with global capitalism. After China’s reforms accelerated under Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong became a crucial node for China’s export-driven development, connecting Chinese labor with the U.S. market. Analyzing untapped archival sources from around the world, this book demonstrates why we cannot understand postwar globalization, China’s economic rise, or today’s Sino-U.S. trade relationship without centering Hong Kong.

The Cold War in Asia
The Cold War in Asia

Author: Yangwen Zheng

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9004175377

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The Cold War stayed cold in Europe but it was hot in Asia. Its legacy lives on in the region. In none of the three dominant historiographical paradigms: orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist, does Asia, or the rest of the Third World, figure with much significance. What happens to these narratives if we put them to the test in Asia? This volume argues that attention to what has been conventionally considered the periphery is essential to a full understanding of the global Cold War. Foregrounding Asia necessarily leads to a re-assessment of the dominant narratives. This volume also argues for a shift in focus from diplomacy and high politics alone towards research into the culture of the Cold War era and its public diplomacy. "As a whole, the essays contribute to enriching our understanding of what was really happening in an era that is too often understood in the catch-all framework of the Cold War." - Akira Iriye, "Harvard University"

The Cold War and Asian Cinemas
The Cold War and Asian Cinemas

Author: Poshek Fu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-28

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0429757298

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This book offers an interdisciplinary, historically grounded study of Asian cinemas’ complex responses to the Cold War conflict. It situates the global ideological rivalry within regional and local political, social, and cultural processes, while offering a transnational and cross-regional focus. This volume makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War. Its geographical focus is set on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In adopting such an inclusive approach, it draws attention to the different manifestations and meanings of the connections between the Cold War and cinema across Asian borders. Many essays in the volume have a transnational and cross-regional focus, one that sheds light on Cold War-influenced networks (such as the circulation of socialist films across communist countries) and on the efforts of American agencies (such as the United States Information Service and the Asia Foundation) to establish a transregional infrastructure of "free cinema" to contain the communist influences in Asia. With its interdisciplinary orientation and broad geographical focus, the book will appeal to scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including film studies, history (especially the burgeoning field of cultural Cold War studies), Asian studies, and US-Asian cultural relations.

The Everyday Cold War
The Everyday Cold War

Author: Chi-kwan Mark

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1474265456

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In 1950 the British government accorded diplomatic recognition to the newly founded People's Republic of China. But it took 22 years for Britain to establish full diplomatic relations with China. How far was Britain's China policy a failure until 1972? This book argues that Britain and China were involved in the 'everyday Cold War', or a continuous process of contestation and cooperation that allowed them to 'normalize' their confrontation in the absence of full diplomatic relations. From Vietnam and Taiwan to the mainland and Hong Kong, China's 'everyday Cold War' against Britain was marked by diplomatic ritual, propaganda rhetoric and symbolic gestures. Rather than pursuing a failed policy of 'appeasement', British decision-makers and diplomats regarded engagement or negotiation with China as the best way of fighting the 'everyday Cold War'. Based on extensive British and Chinese archival sources, this book examines not only the high politics of Anglo-Chinese relations, but also how the British diplomats experienced the Cold War at the local level.