This work examines Asia as a second front in the Cold War, looking at how the six powers, the US, China, the USSR and North and South Korea, interacted with one another and forged conditions that were distinct from the Cold War in the West.
The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia’s Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia’s leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.
This textbook provides a survey of East Asia during the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. Focusing on the persistence and flexibility of its culture and tradition when confronted by the West and the US, this book investigates how they intermesh to establish the nations that have entered the modern world. Through the use of newly declassified Communist sources, the narrative helps students form a better understanding of the origins and development of post-WWII East Asia. The analysis demonstrates how East Asia’s position in the Cold War was not peripheral but, in many key senses, central. The active role that East Asia played, ultimately, turned this main Cold War battlefield into a "buffer" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Covering a range of countries, this textbook explores numerous events, which took place in East Asia during the Cold War, including: The occupation of Japan, Civil war in China and the establishment of Taiwan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, China’s Reforming Movement. Moving away from Euro-American centric approaches and illuminating the larger themes and patterns in the development of East Asian modernity, The Cold War in East Asia is an essential resource for students of Asian History, the Cold War and World History.
The essays and artworks gathered in this volume examine the visual manifestations of postcolonial struggles in art in East and Southeast Asia, as the world transitioned from the communist/capitalist ideological divide into the new global power structure under neoliberalism that started taking shape during the Cold War. The contributors to this volume investigate the visual art that emerged in Australia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines. With their critical views and new approaches, the scholars and curators examine how visual art from postcolonial countries deviated from the communist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues of identity, environment, rapid commercialization of art, and independence. These foci offer windows into some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War, including humanistic responses to the neo-imperial exploitations of people and resources as capitalism transformed into its most aggressive form. Given its unique approach, this seminal study will be of great value to scholars of 20th-century East Asian and Southeast Asian art history and visual and cultural studies.
A History of the Manila Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) from its establishment in 1954 until its dissolution in 1977. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) has received meagre scholarly attention in comparison to other key events and global developments during the duration of the Cold War, due to its perceived failure early in its existence. However, there has been a renewed interest in the academic study of the organization. Some scholars have argued that SEATO was not an outright failure. New literatures have also shed in detail the workings of SEATO, such as operational-level contingency plans and counter-insurgency plans. This book aims to reconstruct a comprehensive life cycle of SEATO using declassified archival documents which were unavailable to scholars studying the organization from the 1950s through the 1980s and provide a nuanced assessment of it. In addition, in recent years, there is also an emerging interest in the possibility of a multilateral military alliance in Asia, for instance the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue morphing into an "Asian NATO". As such, it is therefore crucial to study how previous multilateral alliances in the context of Asia were formed, how they functioned, and subsequently dissolved. A groundbreaking reference on a key element of the United States’ Cold War strategy in Asia, which will be a valuable resource to scholars of twentieth century diplomatic history.
The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.
This comprehensive study of China's Cold War experience reveals the crucial role Beijing played in shaping the orientation of the global Cold War and the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The success of China's Communist revolution in 1949 set the stage, Chen says. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam War--all of which involved China as a central actor--represented the only major "hot" conflicts during the Cold War period, making East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War, while creating conditions to prevent the two superpowers from engaging in a direct military showdown. Beijing's split with Moscow and rapprochement with Washington fundamentally transformed the international balance of power, argues Chen, eventually leading to the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the decline of international communism. Based on sources that include recently declassified Chinese documents, the book offers pathbreaking insights into the course and outcome of the Cold War.
The summation of more than two thousand years of one of the world's most august literary traditions, this volume also represents the achievements of four hundred years of Western scholarship on China. The selections include poetry, drama, fiction, songs, biographies, and works of early Chinese philosophy and history rendered in English by the most renowned translators of classical Chinese literature: Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, David Hawkes, James Legge, Burton Watson, Stephen Owen, Cyril Birch, A. C. Graham, Witter Bynner, Kenneth Rexroth, and others. Arranged chronologically and by genre, each chapter is introduced by definitive quotes and brief introductions chosen from classic Western sinological treatises. Beginning with discussions of the origins of the Chinese writing system and selections from the earliest "genre" of Chinese literature--the Oracle Bone inscriptions--the book then proceeds with selections from: • early myths and legends; • the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, the Book of Songs; • early narrative and philosophy, including the I Ching, Tao-te Ching, and the Analects of Confucius; • rhapsodies, historical writings, magical biographies, ballads, poetry, and miscellaneous prose from the Han and Six Dynasties period; • the court poetry of the Southern Dynasties; • the finest gems of Tang poetry; and • lyrics, stories, and tales of the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties eras. Special highlights include individual chapters covering each of the luminaries of Tang poetry: Wang Wei, Li Bo, Du Fu, and Bo Juyi; early literary criticism; women poets from the first to the tenth century C.E.; and the poetry of Zen and the Tao. Bibliographies, explanatory notes, copious illustrations, a chronology of major dynasties, and two-way romanization tables coordinating the Wade-Giles and pinyin transliteration systems provide helpful tools to aid students, teachers, and general readers in exploring this rich tradition of world literature.