Date: Friday 26 August 2022
Time: 12.00-1.00pm AEST
Location: Online
About this event
Fears of Southeast Asia’s Chinese as conduits for the People’s Republic of China defined the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Yet, ironically, the example of the Philippine Chinese shows that the “China” which intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian country after 1949 was the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. Based on my 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 what I call shared, non-territorial sovereignty. Taipei and Manila’s intersecting anticommunist projects were, in turn, instrumental to how translocal Chinese forged politically appropriate identities and adapted themselves to the postcolonial Philippines as ethno-ideological subjects.
About the speaker
Chien-Wen Kung is an assistant professor of History at the National University of Singapore and the author of Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s (Cornell University Press 2022). Born and raised in Singapore, received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D in Modern Chinese and International and Global History from Columbia University. His research straddles the fields of Sinophone history, Chinese migration and diaspora, the Cold War, and modern China in the world.
“Talks in Chinese Humanities” are co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Department of Chinese Studies, the Australian Society for Asian Humanities and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW.