Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars: Ideologies, Narratives, and Lived Experiences 9811976805, 9789811976803

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Images
List of Tables
1 Interpreting the Cold War and the New Cold War in Asia
Cold-War Histories
Cold-War Conflicts in Asia
The Korean War
The Vietnam War
The Chinese Civil War
The Malayan Emergency
China in the Cold War and the New Cold War
Cold-War Ideological Struggle
Cold-War Narratives
Museums and Monuments
Films and Television Serials
Novels and Non-Fiction Books
News
Cold-War Lived Experience
References
2 Curating Memory: Cold-War Narratives in Museums and Memorials in Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cambodia
Kinmen, Taiwan: The Island as an Open-Air Museum (December 2015)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Amusement Grounds and Propaganda (January 2016)
Seoul, South Korea: A Monument to Gratitude? (April 2016)
Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Narrating Victimhood, Complicity, and Guilt (July–August 2016)
New York, United States of America (Winter 2019–Summer 2022)
References
3 Ecology as a Cold-War Scale: Lau Kek Huat’s Absent Without Leave and Ha Jin’s War Trash
Bodies and the Jungle in Absent Without Leave
Bodies and Territoriality in War Trash
Conclusion
References
4 Where Is My Homeland? Mainland Chinese Refugees and Hong Kong Tenement Films During the Cold-War Era
British Hong Kong, Mainland Chinese Refugees, and the Battle for Hearts and Minds
Pro-communist “Patriotic” Cinema
Home, Sweet Home (1950)
The Show Must Go On (1952)
The Dividing Wall (1952)
U.S.-Backed Pro-nationalist “Free” Cinema
Halfway Down (1955)
The Mandarin’s Bowls (1956)
Coda
References
5 Grand Strategies and Everyday Struggles Under the New Cold War and COVID-19: A Sociological Political Economy
Geopolitics, COVID-19, and the New Cold War
Critical Sociologies and Current Issues in the New Cold War
Mobilities and Everyday Struggles Under the New Cold War and COVID-19
Mini Case 1: People with HIV Infections in Wuhan, China
Mini Case 2: Service and Factory Workers in Hong Kong
Mini Case 3: Factory Workers in Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry
Conclusion
References
6 The Cold-War Structure of Feeling: Revisiting the Discourse of “Dalumei” (Mainland Little Sister) in Taiwan
The Cold-War Structure of Mainland-Taiwan Relations: “Liberating Taiwan” and “Reconquering the Mainland”
The Entanglement of the Cold War and the Sex Wars
Dalumei in Popular Discourse: Mistresses and Sex Workers
Dalumei Are “Like Pan Jinlian”
Dalumei and “His” American Dream
Dalumei as a Haunting Effect in Taiwan
The Politics of Redistribution: Sisterhood at the Tea Table
Yuanyuan: The Respectable Mainland Hostess
Gold Digging and Gold Redistribution
Conclusion: From Feminist Impasse to Sisterhood at the Tea Table
References
7 China’s Health Diplomacy in the “New-Cold-War” Era: Contrasting the Battle of Narratives in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa
Theoretical and Conceptual Framework: Role Theory and Trust in Foreign Policy Analysis
China’s Role as a Global Public Health Leader for the Developing World
Trust in International Relations
China–M.E.N.A. Relations
Prior to the Pandemic
China’s Role Performance and Strategic Trust: Delivering Vaccines
Mena States’ Reactions to China’s Health Diplomacy
China–Europe Relations
Europe’s Reactions Towards China’s Health Diplomacy and Management of Covid-19
From Epidemic Relief Aid...
... to a COVID-19 Info War
Negative Views of China
Sinophobia
Conclusion
References
8 Hungary and the New-Cold-War Narrative on China
Hungary and the East vs. West Dichotomy
Another Dichotomy: Rural vs. Urban
Hungarian Attitudes Towards China
The Fudan Hungary Plan
The Discourse Around Fudan Hungary
Lessons Learnt... and Questions to Ask
Conclusion
References
9 Haunted History: Exorcising the Cold War
Trauma and Ritual
Home and Away
Marginalized Migrant Populations
China’s Rise
Exorcizing the Cold War
Index

Citation preview

Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars Ideologies, Narratives, and Lived Experiences Edited by Kenneth Paul Tan

Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars

Kenneth Paul Tan Editor

Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars Ideologies, Narratives, and Lived Experiences

Editor Kenneth Paul Tan School of Communication Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-981-19-7680-3 ISBN 978-981-19-7681-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

While there certainly had been people who imagined the fall of the Soviet Union, hardly anyone among them can be said to have predicted its dissolution and the peaceful end of the Cold War to any level of detail matching the dramatic events leading up to them in 1991, more than 30 years ago. That celebratory world-historic spectacle called for a masternarrative that could make sense of the often-bewildering events of the past decades. The most prominent among these was American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “end of History” thesis, which triumphantly announced the victory of capitalist liberal democracy over competing ideologies, including fascism and communism. Historiographical debates, which flourished and were fuelled by the events of the Cold War, came full circle as orthodox accounts that had blamed Soviet political and ideological expansionism for the Cold War and its worst excesses started to prevail again over revisionist and New Left efforts to shift the object of blame onto the hegemonic project of U.S. imperialism and its pre-eminent role in global capitalism. The end of History, it seemed, had finally arrived. And the victors were eager to claim its definitive authorship. But the political and historical impetus to unify a narrative for the Cold War at its conclusion also triggered divergent new lines of enquiry that shifted attention away from politically charged questions of responsibility and blame, and the centrality of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, to a more interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, methodologically eclectic, v

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contextually sensitive, and self-reflexive enquiry, directed at multiple scales of human and social experience, whose modes of analysis range from the technical to the moral and to the aesthetic. Over the last 30 years, much of this more diverse scholarship surrounding the Cold War has sought to dislodge it from the preoccupations of national security interests, geo-strategic power play, grand ideological conflict, political leadership, political regime typology, and military technology at the heart of more conventional approaches in the fields of history, international relations, and political science, giving more space to questions of psychology, beliefs, sentiments, (popular) culture, the arts, media, communications, new technology, and domestic politics including the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class. This was an acknowledgement of the sheer complexity of the Cold War and the gross inadequacy of linear causal thinking for making sense of it. The chapters in this book, individually and as a whole, show respect for this complexity. They were selected from over 70 papers presented at a three-day international and interdisciplinary conference held on 11 to 13 November 2021, titled “Narrating Cold Wars”. Marking the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, the conference—and subsequently this book—aimed firstly to enrich the textures of Cold-War studies by exploring the extension of the historic Cold War—that is said to have ended in 1991—into the present time. Today, we are witnessing rapidly growing and intensifying concerns over a “New Cold War”, driven in many respects by the emergence of a potentially new superpower rivalry between the United States and China, the former apparently in decline and the latter on the rise. Meanwhile, Russia—a shadow of the original Cold-War superpower that it used to be—continues to flex its geopolitical muscles, launching in 2022 a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine that could escalate into a larger war. Secondly, the book aims to provide “ground-up” perspectives to supplement, enrich, and perhaps even de-centre the persistent grand narratives and grand strategies of the Cold War that have tended to project the world abstractly in black-and-white terms—good vs. evil, us vs. them, heroes protecting victims against villains—terms that constrain the collective powers of imagination, collaboration, progress, and transcendence. Cold-War ideological struggles have not abated, continuing to filter down into—and be modulated by—the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. While high-level events and the Cold-War narratives and strategies that continue to frame and control their significance are

PREFACE

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certainly important for critical analysis, this book descends from the lofty considerations of geopolitics, foreign policy, and international relations to focus, at the level of lived experience, on how people and their communities, especially the marginalized, have been affected by Cold-War legacies, including its modes and styles of reasoning and feeling. In this respect, the book focuses on people and communities in Asia who have moved or been dislocated and resettled, sometimes brutally, and how their identities have subsequently been formed, suppressed, or contested. The book also focuses on how people and their communities have responded to a more confident and assertive China, particularly in the context of its soft power campaigns like the Belt-and-Road Initiative, showcasing Chinese government investments in massive global infrastructure development projects. The book aims to provide rich and diverse insight into the complex relationship between the Cold War and its legacies on the one hand and, on the other, their impact on Asia, its plural histories and peoples, and their shifting identities, their ideological beliefs, their lived experiences, and the stories that they tell about themselves and that others tell about them. The Narrating Cold Wars conference was organized by Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication (and Film), in collaboration with the Academy of Visual Arts and the Department of Government and International Studies. As the conference curator, I would like to place on record my thanks to members of its organizing committee: Noit Banai, Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Alistair Cole, Cherian George, Mateja Kovacic, Daya Thussu, and Ying Zhu. I also want to thank the School of Communication (and Film) led by its then-Dean, Huang Yu, and the university’s Research Office, headed by the then-Vice-President for Research and Development, Guo Yike, for their generous support. Videos

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of all conference sessions can be viewed at https://www.hkbu.online/nar ratingcoldwars/.

Kowloon, Hong Kong September 2022

Kenneth Paul Tan

Contents

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3

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Interpreting the Cold War and the New Cold War in Asia Kenneth Paul Tan Curating Memory: Cold-War Narratives in Museums and Memorials in Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cambodia Giacomo Bagarella Ecology as a Cold-War Scale: Lau Kek Huat’s Absent Without Leave and Ha Jin’s War Trash Zhou Hau Liew Where Is My Homeland? Mainland Chinese Refugees and Hong Kong Tenement Films During the Cold-War Era Linda Huixian Ou Grand Strategies and Everyday Struggles Under the New Cold War and COVID-19: A Sociological Political Economy John Wei

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The Cold-War Structure of Feeling: Revisiting the Discourse of “Dalumei” (Mainland Little Sister) in Taiwan I-ting Chen

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China’s Health Diplomacy in the “New-Cold-War” Era: Contrasting the Battle of Narratives in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa Emilie Tran and Yahia H. Zoubir

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Hungary and the New-Cold-War Narrative on China Ágota Révész

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Haunted History: Exorcising the Cold War Kenneth Paul Tan

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Giacomo Bagarella is a consultant and writer based in New York City. He is a Director at HR&A Advisors, where he advises clients on urban and economic development. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Government from Harvard University and a joint master’s in public policy from the London School of Economics and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His passion for cities, places, and their histories informs projects such as this one. His work has been published in magazines such as Foreign Policy, TechCrunch, and Gizmodo, as well as in peer-reviewed journals in Asia and Europe. I-ting Chen received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is currently a lecturer at HKU SPACE Community College. Her research interests include Cold-War politics, sexual labour, gender and sexuality, migration and mobility, and cross-strait intimacy between Taiwan and mainland China. Her articles are published and accepted by academic journals, including Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Forum in Women’s and Gender Studies. Zhou Hau Liew is Assistant Professor at National Chung Hsing University (NCHU). His current project, Land, Sea and Globe: Materiality and World-making in Chinese-Malaysian Literature, is a study of twentieth-century Chinese-Malaysian writing which critiques state-driven resource extraction and rethinks globality from the resource frontier. His academic and non-fiction writings have appeared in Critical Asian

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Studies, PR&TA, Mekong Review, and The Margins by Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Linda Huixian Ou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University. She holds a B.A. degree in English from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and a M.A. degree in Humanities from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is currently working on a dissertation on the history and politics of Hong Kong tenement films in the 1940s to the 1970s, aiming to open up a new avenue via tenement drama to understand Chinese history and culture, the Shanghai-Hong Kong-Guangdong film connections, and Hong Kong society in its social, political, and cultural aspects in the twentieth century. Ágota Révész sinologist, worked in China for six years as a diplomat representing her native Hungary. Her most recent research project at Freie Universität Berlin focused on Chinese cultural diplomacy. She is now leading an interdisciplinary project aiming at “China competence” at the Center for Cultural Studies on Science and Technology in China at Technische Universität Berlin. Her current research focus is EU-China relations, Chinese soft power, and perceptions of China (narratives and framing in the European media). She is also coordinator for the Working Group “Public diplomacy and knowledge production” of CHERN (China-in-Europe Research Network). Kenneth Paul Tan is a tenured Professor of Politics, Film, and Cultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). His recent books include Movies to Save Our World: Imagining Poverty, Inequality and Environmental Destruction in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2022), Singapore’s First Year of COVID-19: Public Health, Immigration, the Neoliberal State, and Authoritarian Populism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Singapore: Identity, Brand, Power (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Governing Global-City Singapore: Legacies and Futures After Lee Kuan Yew (Routledge, 2017) Emilie Tran is Assistant Professor, Division of Social Sciences, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France. She has been living and working in Greater China since 2000. Driven by international and multidisciplinary collaborations, her scholarship investigates global China and her research themes are framed

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in terms of global public health; digital and public diplomacy; comparative public policy and governance. She has published in the Journal of Contemporary China, Mediterranean Politics, China Perspectives, China: An International Journal, and International Migration. John Wei is a lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Otago. He is the author of Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes (2020, Hong Kong University Press). Yahia H. Zoubir (Ph.D.) is Professor of International Studies and Director of Research in Geopolitics at KEDGE Business School, France. He is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Qatar. He has taught at multiple universities in the United States, China, Europe, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author/editor of several books. He is the author of dozens of articles in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Contemporary China, Foreign Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Mediterranean Politics, International Affairs, Democratization, Middle East Journal, Middle East Policy, etc. His forthcoming edited volume is The Routledge Companion to China and the Middle East and North Africa.

List of Images

Image 2.1 Image 2.2 Image 2.3 Image 2.4 Image 2.5

Image 2.6

Image 2.7

Image 3.1 Image 3.2 Image 3.3

Chenggong beach and fortifications, which are typical of much of Kinmen’s coastline (© Giacomo Bagarella) Chinese artillery shells on display among knives on sale at the Maestro Wu shop (© Giacomo Bagarella) American soldiers falling into Communist traps, as depicted in Cu Chi’s dioramas (© Giacomo Bagarella) Display on U.S. air bombing campaigns at the War Remnants Museum (© Giacomo Bagarella) A display on the contributions of each country that participated in the United Nations’ operation in Korea (Note the U.N. logo mosaic. © Giacomo Bagarella) The defused landmine and explosives display at the Cambodia Landmine Museum (© Giacomo Bagarella) A former school building converted to an interrogation and torture centre at S-21 (Note audio guide item 6, “school equipment used for torture”, at the bottom left. © Giacomo Bagarella) United Nations Memorial Cemetery, Busan, South Korea (© Zhou Hau Liew) Movement of Malayan Communist Party members (© Zhou Hau Liew) Movement of Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (© Zhou Hau Liew)

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List of Tables

Table 8.1 Table 8.2

List of online news media outlets included in the research Summary of frames

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CHAPTER 1

Interpreting the Cold War and the New Cold War in Asia Kenneth Paul Tan

The Cold War dominated the twentieth century and its effects have been felt in almost every part of the world, even until today. Current issues and debates in global affairs are, for instance, often explained by notable personalities in foreign policy, academia, journalism, and the arts in terms of a “New Cold War”, though not without some scepticism. The New Cold War, it might seem to many, follows the same basic narrative of the original Cold War’s script, but is performed to different audiences, by different actors, on different stage sets, and dressed in different costumes. Given how destructive—even traumatic—the original Cold War has been, if we wish to break out of this potentially endless cycle of historical repetition, we will need to find new ways of interpreting the Cold War and consider how the different interpretive approaches can be brought together for more critical and transformative insights. This book aims to

K. P. Tan (B) School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_1

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contribute to ongoing work that integrates new and different approaches to understanding the Cold War. For many, the Cold War is principally a historical phenomenon, pertaining to a very large, complicated, and influential set, sequence, or causal chain of events that occurred mostly within a timeframe that starts in 1945 (the end of World War II) and ends in 1991 (the collapse of the Soviet Union). Understanding this historical Cold War demands intellectual rigour aimed at discovering the objective truth about what really happened, why, and therefore what it all means for us today. With greater access to an expanding pool of structured and unstructured data, especially from archives around the world in this internet and social media age, the task of ascertaining their authenticity and significance as historical facts and evidence—through logical reasoning, meaningful interpretation, and attention to context—becomes even more important. The objective truth about the historical Cold War is, however, elusive and subjected to continuous and sometimes unresolvable debate. This is not only because so much of the past is still simply unknowable and therefore necessarily reconstructed through imagination, speculation, and even wishful thinking, but also because important political and geopolitical interests are at stake. Today, we still ask whether the historical Cold War really concluded in 1991, or whether it has continued in essence to the present day, or whether a New Cold War is emerging and, if so, in what forms. Is the Cold-War superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union re-emerging today as a New Cold War between the United States (again) and China, a fast-rising superpower? For others, the Cold War is about ideological struggle. The world was divided, according to this view, into those countries in the “Western Bloc” led by the United States that were aligned with capitalism and liberal democracy, those in the “Eastern Bloc” led by the Soviet Union that were aligned with communism and authoritarian forms of democracy, and those that claimed to be non-aligned, offering the possibility of a third way in a basically ideologically bipolar world. According to this view also, which is understood to be the victor’s account of history, the end of the Cold War marked the victory of capitalist liberal democracy over communist totalitarianism. Today, though it would seem a much less ideologically driven time, concerns about a New Cold War are often also couched in ideological terms. It is, however, difficult to argue conclusively that the United States, whose democratic institutions have been severely strained by a Donald Trump presidency, is a purely capitalist liberal democracy

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or that China, whose own elite have described its ideological identity as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, is a purely communist autocracy. Nevertheless, ideological allegiance and alignment, in many cases a cover for more basic material and political interests, serve to mobilize support and motivate actions in the United States, China, and many countries that are drawn to engagement with either or both. For some others, the Cold War is interesting for the way it is individually and collectively narrated—that is to say, the stories that bring the historical facts and ideological beliefs to life through vivid storytelling techniques and formats. In this sense, the Cold War is not—and cannot possibly aim to be—an absolutely objective truth about our past. Its reality is based, instead, on the way stories give it meaning—from the loftiest grand narratives about global history to the smallest stories of everyday life. These stories about the Cold War are insinuated in the films and television programmes we watch, the books we read, the news we rely on to keep abreast of current affairs, the museums and public monuments that we visit, and the often barely noticeable propaganda messages that seep into every crevice of our popular consciousness and imagination. And finally, for some, the Cold War is a lived experience even today, several decades after its historical conclusion. The facts, ideologies, and narratives of the Cold War have shaped institutions, norms, and practices in the contemporary world in such ways as to tether everyday life inescapably to the logic and structure of the Cold War. For some, this opens productive possibilities and opportunities for human flourishing, while locking down others in hardship, exploitation, and oppression. Those interested in the Cold War as lived experience often study the lives of ordinary and marginalized peoples to gain clarity on the insidious ways that Cold-War histories, ideologies, and narratives have infused into the daily experience especially of the disadvantaged, shaping their prospects and choices in life. Centring on Asia and China in particular, this book is a collection of essays that focuses on the Cold War as lived experience and as storytelling, exploring how they intersect with the Cold War as ideological struggle and historical accounting. The book analyses museums, monuments, films, television serials, novels, non-fiction writing, news reports, political speeches, and marginalized peoples, using multidisciplinary methods that range from textual analysis, to critical discourse analysis, to ethnography, and to (micro-)sociological approaches to international relations and international political economy.

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Cold-War Histories The Cold War is a major topic of study in several disciplines, including history, international relations, international economics, political science, and various multidisciplinary combinations of these. American sociologist Craig Calhoun (2002) describes three approaches to Cold-War history: “traditionalist”, “revisionist”, and “post-revisionist”. The first of these—also often referred to as the “orthodox” approach— constitutes the “official” United States’ version of the Cold War. Unsurprisingly, it places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union, viewing its expansion into Eastern Europe as acts of aggression motivated by a worldwide call to communist revolution. These acts, traditionalists argue, forced the United States to give up its isolationism to counter communist insurgencies around the world (in accordance with its Truman Doctrine) and to provide foreign aid to its Western European allies to rebuild their post-war economies (through the Marshall Plan). The revisionist approach, Calhoun explains, views the United States as being more responsible than the Soviet Union for the Cold War, a claim supported with examples of how the United States had tried to isolate and confront the Soviet Union even before World War II had ended. The Soviet Union’s actions, therefore, are viewed as reactive and defensive in nature. This more critical view of the United States emerged during the Vietnam War (also known as the American War in Vietnam), when American public scepticism of its role in world affairs was at a high point. Calhoun briefly mentions a third, more balanced and nuanced, approach. This emerging post-revisionist scholarship is much less concerned with assigning blame, than it is with carefully contextualizing the actions and perspectives of all parties during the period. It is this approach that the chapters of this book will broadly adopt. Cold-War Conflicts in Asia The “coldness” of the Cold War is understood to mean the absence of direct large-scale military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Superpower conflict, however, did play out in non-military fields such as the space race to put a man on the moon, international sporting tournaments, trade wars, and propaganda campaigns that used the visual and performing arts, literature, films, television, popular culture

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in general, and news media to conduct psychological warfare and boost their own soft power in what has been described as a “cultural Cold War”. While both superpowers did not fight each other directly, they were very certainly behind proxy wars in the Third World, some major ones fought in the decolonizing or newly decolonized nations-states in Asia. The Korean War The Korean War was an example of this. After 35 years under the rule of Imperial Japan, which surrendered at the end of World War II in 1945, Korea was divided along the 38th parallel to create a northern zone administered by the Soviet Union and a southern zone administered by the United States. The Korean War broke out in June 1950 when the North Korean People’s Army invaded South Korea. Socialist North Korea was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while its capitalist South Korean adversary was backed by the United States and the United Nations more broadly. In October 1950, U.S. and U.N. forces jointly invaded North Korea and advanced to the Yalu River at the border of North Korea and China, a move that provoked China to send its forces across the Yalu and successfully repel the U.S. and U.N. forces back to the 38th parallel. Towards the end of the war, there was sharp disagreement over repatriation policy for Chinese prisoners of war held on Koje Island: China wanted immediate repatriation to their country of origin, but the United States wanted to give them the right to choose, which would mean allowing those who did not want to return to communist China to go to Taiwan and elsewhere. Although an armistice agreement was reached in 1953, without a peace treaty, the two Koreas continue until today to be in a frozen conflict. The Vietnam War In the case of the Vietnam War, which started in 1955 shortly after the military defeat and departure of the French colonial government, North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported (eventually with substantial direct military involvement) by the United States. This proxy war in Asia spilled over to neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, as American troops bombed supply routes to North Vietnam. Civil wars being fought there escalated.

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Following a policy of “Vietnamization” in 1968, the United States withdrew from Vietnam and Cambodia, and—as its material support for the strengthening of military and civilian capacity in South Vietnam weakened—North Vietnam was able to take over the south. The end of the war in 1975 saw Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos all become communist regimes. In Cambodia, the totalitarian and genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea and supported by the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), took hold of power in 1975 and was ousted in 1979 after an invasion by a now-unified communist Vietnam, surrendering only in 1999 after decades in exile. Under the Khmer Rouge’s rule of terror, there was death by starvation and disease, as well as torture and execution of political opponents and ethnic minority people, amounting to the death of about a quarter of the Cambodian population. All in all, the Vietnam War—as a battleground for Cold-War conflicts— has caused significant damage and loss in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, from lives to infrastructure to the natural environment. Up to today, Cambodia struggles with its problem of landmines, millions of them that had been laid by various factions during its civil war and whose locations are now dangerously forgotten and difficult to trace. As for the United States, the war led to public scepticism, economic damage, and a decline in its international prestige. A subsequent period of détente with the Soviet Union and China was very likely a result of these developments. The Chinese Civil War Although most of the Chinese Civil War, which started in 1927, took place before the Cold War, its final stages from 1945 to 1949 present aspects of a proxy war. In those years, the nationalist Kuomintang (K.M.T.) government of the Republic of China was backed by the United States, while its opponent the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) had the support of the Soviet Union. Once it gained control of the mainland in 1949, the C.C.P. established the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) as a communist state. The K.M.T. fled mainland China for several small islands (including Kinmen Island) and the island of Taiwan, where it continued to assert its legitimacy as government of all China. While armed conflict across the Taiwan Strait ceased in the late 1970s, cross-Strait relations have been very tense and are today one of the most sensitive issues in relations between China and the United States.

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The Malayan Emergency The Malayan Emergency, in fact a guerrilla war, was declared in 1948 and lasted until 1960. The Malayan National Liberation Army (M.N.L.A.), the armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party, fought against the military forces of the British Empire, mainly from jungle bases, for independence and a socialist Malaya. Attacking tin mines and rubber plantations, the M.N.L.A. aimed to destroy the economy of the British Empire in colonial Malaya to achieve their larger goal. In response, the British used chemical weapons against the M.N.L.A. and tried to starve them by cutting off their food supplies, which also meant imprisoning and even killing unarmed people suspected of supporting the communists. An estimate of about a million rural people, mostly ethnic Chinese, were forcibly resettled to more than 400 “new villages”, where the inhabitants, bound by curfew hours, were prevented from escaping by the installation of barbed-wire fences and search lights, as well as the stationing of armed guards in watchtowers (Chin, 2003: 268; Newsinger, 2015: 50; Sandhu, 1964). These measures contravened the Geneva Conventions, which are treaties that establish the international legal standards for the humane war-time treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, and soldiers who are incapable of fighting. There is an orthodox view of the Malayan Emergency as a proxy war, where the heightened violence of the Malayan Communist Party (M.C.P.) in the months leading to the Emergency declaration in 1948 resulted from an order issued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (C.P.S.U.). This view has been challenged by revisionist scholarship that identifies the coalescence of local factors as the main reason, including M.C.P. leadership changes, new laws to restrict the number of Chinese granted Malayan citizenship, repressive labour laws, and British efforts to remove illegal rural squatters, many of whom were communist supporters. However, a more recent post-revisionist or “neo-orthodox” position argues that the “Asian Cold War”, beginning with the Malayan Emergency, must take the C.P.S.U.’s role more seriously than revisionists would allow, but “within nuanced, multi-causal models” (Hack, 2009). These proxy wars in Asia—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Chinese Civil War, and the Malayan Emergency—are all discussed in this book. But a common thread that ties all chapters together is China— a major power in the Cold War and a potential superpower in a possible

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New Cold War—as well as the ethnic Chinese diaspora who have migrated and settled in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. China in the Cold War and the New Cold War The original Cold War, despite all its historical complexity, is primarily understood as a bipolar and binarizing geopolitical relationship between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A third power, the People’s Republic of China, had a substantial and very significant role to play right from its establishment in 1949, especially when it came to China’s direct and indirect involvement in the proxy conflicts of the Cold War in Asia. In this bipolar world, a Sino-Soviet alliance against the United States would seem completely natural given the Marxist-Leninist ideology that both countries shared. However, tensions between the two right from the mid-1950s would cause a breakdown of this alliance in the following years as their respective leaders—Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev— could not hide their mutual disdain and animosity for one another. Both vied for leadership of the global communist movement and thus thoroughly polarized it. In 1979, China invaded the now-unified communist Vietnam, a formal ally of the Soviet Union. China did this in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia the year before, through which the government of the China-backed Communist Party of Kampuchea that ruled the Khmer Rouge regime was ousted. The United States had already found in this split an opportunity to further divide and weaken the communist bloc. And so, in one of the most iconic moments in world history, the pragmatic U.S. President Richard Nixon travelled to Beijing in February 1972 to meet with Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, and was thus able to establish cordial relations between the two countries. Today, geopolitical and geo-economic discourses are dominated by concerns about U.S.-China rivalry. The rise of China is premised on continuously impressive economic growth since the late 1970s when major economic reforms were put in place. The popular prediction that China’s economy will overtake that of the United States to become the world’s largest this century is not without criticism. Some have argued that China has already passed or will soon pass its peak and decline will follow. Others have suggested that the growing success of

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China’s economy is illusory and limited by its problematic social and political underpinnings. And yet others have noted the risky nature of a crisis-prone economy. Nevertheless, China is often presented as an emerging power that increasingly threatens the United States’ global hegemony. While American President Joe Biden is determined to prevent this (“Joe Biden is determined”, 2021), the United States has, in fact, been struggling to retain its pre-eminent status in the world, hobbled by domestic politics and the rise of right-wing populism, economic stagnation, and military commitments around the world that it can no longer afford. Political commentator Ross Douthat (2020) argues that America has become a victim of its own success and its decadence underpinned by economic stagnation, cultural-intellectual exhaustion, and institutional decay. The provocative and much-cited “Thucydides trap”, coined by Harvard political scientist Graham Alison (2017), predicts that rising power China threatening to displace the United States as ruling power will create international structural stress and thus increase the likelihood of war. Out of the 16 historically similar case studies Alison investigated, 12 had led to war. Alison’s analysis, particularly its methodology, has been criticized. But there are indeed significant points of tension that could heighten the chance of war, such as cyber-espionage, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, human rights issues in Tibet and Xinjiang, and tensions with North Korea, Hong Kong, and—perhaps most pressing of all—Taiwan. So even if claims of China’s rise are exaggerated and the prospect of a “Chinese century” (Brands, 2018; Rees-Mogg, 2005) doubtful, a very tense new superpower rivalry between a declining United States and an emerging China is a probable scenario, one that summons the ghost of the historic Cold War to appear as a New Cold War. The question of whether it is appropriate or advisable to describe these current tensions as a New Cold War often comes up in discussions within academic, journalistic, and foreign policy circles. Those who say that it is not will often criticize the use of the term as overly simplistic, pointing to differences in details (that the powers, their elites, the battlegrounds, the technology and weaponry, etc., are not the same as those of the original Cold War), or differences in ideological division (that the powers involved are no longer as ideologically pure or ideologically distinguishable or even ideologically motivated as before), or differences in the global system (that globalization and global production chains have made the powers so integrated

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and inextricably linked to one another that geopolitical and geo-economic divisions are nearly impossible in practice). Those who say the New Cold War term is appropriate will often take the historical Cold War as an illustrative analogy to help focus on the formal or structural aspects of today’s Sino-American rivalry, stripped of its historical, political, sociological, and cultural specificities to reveal a helpfully parsimonious model with the fewest variables and the greatest explanatory power. For instance, a “Cold-War model” might help analysts identify binarized, polarized, and either/or ways of thinking of the world, mobilizing for “us” and against “them”, and the othering and even demonization that are required to produce an “enemy-other”. This book will extend this Cold-War model from a structure of thinking to a structure of feeling, enabling us to explore in a more textured way how the Cold War has been experienced in daily life. Those who approve of the term New Cold War may apply it to what they consider to be a re-emergence today of the historic Cold-War global power architecture after an interval of unipolar U.S. hegemony. Or they may regard it to be quite simply the latest manifestation of a continuous Cold War that never really ended. Either way, there are at least two prongs of this still-predominantly traditionalist account of the New Cold War. The first views a Russia re-emerging from the ashes of the Soviet Union and posing a renewed threat to the unipolar post-Cold-War world policed by a declining United States hegemon. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 sparked global outrage. Through the lens of orthodox Cold-War history, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared as an aggressor and expansionist with aspirations for a greater Russia through the absorption first of Ukraine and then possibly of others in the region. But through the lens of revisionist and post-revisionist Cold-War histories, the blame for this war must (at least also) lie with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.). American international relations scholar John Mearsheimer (2022) questions the orthodox view about Putin’s imperial ambitions and argues that the war was mainly a result of an American-led effort to integrate Ukraine into the European Union (E.U.), to transform Ukraine into a pro-West liberal democracy, and to incorporate Ukraine into N.A.T.O. In this highly provocative way, Ukraine would become “a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders”. Indeed, according to Mearsheimer, Putin viewed this as a declaration of war and an existential threat. The New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman (2022) similarly argues that the United States and its

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allies need to take responsibility for their efforts since the 1990s to expand N.A.T.O. into the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, but he also argues that Putin has taken advantage of this expansion “to rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of leadership” at least with regard to Russia’s economic failures. The second prong of this New Cold War account, which this book principally deals with, views China as currently the greatest threat posed to the United States. Those who argue that this New Cold War has already started often attribute heightened Sino-American tensions to U.S. President Donald Trump’s focus, right from the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2015, on China as the number one threat. In July 2022, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, warned the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s security and intelligence leaders not to “hype up the China threat theory” with “irresponsible” remarks to “smear and attack China”, advising them to “cast away imagined demons” and their “Cold War mentality” (Corera, 2022). Zhao was responding to Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) director Christopher Wray’s description of China as the “biggest longterm threat to our economic and national security”. In a joint appearance in London, Wray and MI5 head Ken McCallum had cited examples that included massive-scale cyber-espionage, technology theft, and interference in domestic politics and elections. Wray warned that China had learnt lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and—since it knows how to better insulate itself from sanctions than Russia has been able to—China would be emboldened to invade Taiwan, the economic consequences of which would be much more severe than the Russia-Ukraine War. Wray warned that “China has for far too long counted on being everybody’s second-highest priority” and declared that “[t]hey are not flying under the radar anymore”. A few months earlier, British historian Niall Ferguson explained that “Cold War II” had already started some time ago, though in this New Cold War, “China’s the senior partner, and Russia’s the junior partner”, and Ukraine is the battlefield (Swaminathan & Kelley, 2022). The term “deglobalization” broadly describes “a movement towards a less connected world, characterized by powerful nation states, local solutions, and border controls rather than global institutions, treaties, and free movement” (Kornprobst & Wallace, 2021). Whether it is in fact “deglobalization” that we have been witnessing since the early 2010s is debatable. But there has certainly been a rise of populism in both democratic and autocratic states worldwide, amounting to the empowerment

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of local opposition to globalized economies, international organizations, and international cooperation on global problems such as climate change and pandemics (Tan, 2022). In the United States, foreign policy seems to be increasingly driven by the concerns of domestic policy. For instance, to rebuild its middle class— ravaged by rising inequality, unemployment, and the impact of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008—its approach has been to shift manufacturing and supply chains away from Asia and back to the United States. The U.S.-China trade war, provoked by a 25% tariff imposed on Chinese imports by the Trump administration in 2018, epitomizes this approach in the context of U.S.-China rivalry. This was shortly followed by a tech war over global leadership in core technologies like AI, semiconductors, and 5G, with the United States accusing China of adopting unfair means. European countries have also pursued some form of strategic autonomy, aiming to become self-sufficient by reducing their economic reliance on the global supply chain and on countries like China. Beijing has also taken steps to “de-Americanize” its supply chain (“U.S.-China tech war”, 2021). John Wei in Chapter 5 and Emilie Tran and Yahia Zoubir in Chapter 7 discuss these New-Cold-War geo-economic and geopolitical shifts. Wei critically assesses their impact on Asia, particularly on ordinary people, migrant workers, and marginalized populations who live, work, and travel in the region. Along with China’s rise—and the heightened anxiety that this has provoked in recent years—has been the rise of Sinophobia, nourished by age-old orientalist fantasies and more overtly racist notions about the “yellow peril”. The COVID-19 pandemic has sharply augmented these perceptions in the general publics of the West, where people of Chinese and Asian ethnicities—the mask-wearing and disease-bearing spectacles of moral panic—have encountered racism, abuse, and violence (Gover et al., 2020). Meanwhile, China has been attempting to improve its international image and power, not only by going on the charm offensive to boost its artistic, cultural, diplomatic, and soft power appeal (Kurlantzick, 2006), but also by making substantial material contributions to international development. The Belt-and-Road Initiative (B.R.I.), involving massive Chinese investments in global infrastructural development since 2013, is a stunning example of this. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss evolving European perceptions of China in the New Cold War as it assumes its role as global leader in international development. In Chapter 7, Tran and Zoubir focus on China’s

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health diplomacy and its “national role conception” as global health leader. In their comparative analysis of news data, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tran and Zoubir conclude that countries in the Middle East and North Africa (M.E.N.A.) appear to view China’s actions favourably, while European countries—concerned about China’s promotion of a rival non-liberal-democratic system of governance—view these efforts unfavourably and with deep scepticism. In Chapter 8, Ágota Révész critically dissects reactions to China’s investment in Hungary’s higher education through a China-Hungary collaboration to set up a Fudan University campus in Budapest. She explores how contrasting images of China (and the “East” in general) intersect with Hungary’s domestic politics to produce a range of discursive formations and political outcomes.

Cold-War Ideological Struggle Closely related to the view of the Cold War as a history of political and economic struggle on a global scale with effects that last until today is the approach that foregrounds and focuses on the ideological underpinnings of this history. Such an approach not only treats ideology as a central object of analysis in studying the Cold War, but also considers ideological struggles as crucial to understanding the interplay between progress and regress in human history. At the historically momentous end of the Cold War, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama (1992) wrote The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he argued that, since capitalist liberal democracy had triumphed over fascism and communism, History (with a big “H”) was coming to an end. Although the events of history (with a small “h”) would of course continue indefinitely, the historical battle of ideologies would approach an end point as all political communities in this diverse world choose their own path and pace towards becoming capitalist liberal democracies. This, Fukuyama argued using Platonic and Hegelian philosophical foundations, is the logic of History that drives human progress towards the universal stage of capitalist liberal democracy, when human rationality is collectively able to satisfy all human needs, and everyone is mutually recognized and treated as equals. Although Fukuyama’s theory reverberated with the exuberance of the Cold War’s dramatic conclusion, it also retrieved and reactivated key aspects of modernization theory that was dominant in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Lipset [1960]), though highly

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contested since then (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson [2022]). Versions of this theory had linked economic growth and development, urbanization, industrialization, and mass education with the emergence of a middle class and a socio-political transition from “traditional” authoritarian to “modern” democratic systems. Fukuyama’s thesis appears to be hyperbolic and even mistaken today as we witness established liberal democracies upended by the persistence of poverty, the deepening of different kinds of inequality, and the dominance of corporate capital as capitalism itself grows unfettered; the rise of rightwing populism in both authoritarian and democratic countries (Brexit and Trumpism are usually held up as evidence of this); the trend towards autocratization around the world (V-Dem Institute, 2021); and China’s rise in stature, signalling the possible future replacement of Pax Americana with a new Pax Sinica, whose characteristics may not be capitalist, liberal, or democratic as we know it (Tan, 2022). The Cold War very certainly has not brought History to a pragmatic, contradiction-less end. Ideological differences have not resolved dialectically. In some ways, they have become even more pronounced on several fronts. They have become compelling as both resources for and critiques of the extremisms of the present: neoliberal globalization, right-wing and left-wing populisms, and so on. In the New Cold War, therefore, we should not expect the basic ideological contradictions and conflicts of the original Cold War to have abated, though they may certainly have shifted and multiplied. Indeed, Niall Ferguson wrote of “Cold War II” that the roles [between China and the original Soviet Union] have been reversed. China is now the giant, Russia the mean little sidekick. China under Xi remains strikingly faithful to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. Russia under Putin has reverted to Tsarism. (Ferguson, 2020: 53)

Others have argued that the ideological divisions in New-Cold-War times are much less stark than in old Cold-War times. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, a doctrine of the C.C.P. that originates in paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the late 1970s, envisions a socialist (non-capitalist) market economy to promote limited private ownership, investment, productivity, and growth as a necessary basis on which China could progress towards a more purely communist society. Today, in practice, China’s socialist market economy looks

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remarkably like those of their Western capitalist counterparts, even as the C.C.P. continues to hold a monopoly on political power. In the United States, even with the decisive neoliberal turn since the Ronald Reagan presidency in the 1980s, Americans still benefit from state welfare programmes and the political system is sufficiently pluralistic to include influential politicians on the left, even the far left, of the ideological spectrum. As for the West, there is not just one version of capitalism, but “varieties of capitalism” ranging along a spectrum, at one end of which are liberal market economies and at the other end coordinated market economies (Hall & Soskice, 2001). So even if the pluralistically neoliberal world of the present were ideologically coherent, it would not be recognizable through the lens of a starkly binary division between capitalism and communism, which is how the old Cold War continues to be characterized. But to characterize even the old Cold War in this way is problematic. The world was not simply divided into two opposing sets of ideas about how society, economy, and politics should be organized and what values they should uphold. These two opposing sets of ideas were not neatly championed by two sets of countries, one led by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a very large grouping of mostly developing countries of the Third World, was formed during the Cold War to resist its rapid bipolarization. Membership of this movement signalled the desire for independence and neutrality. The refusal to form alliances with the United States or the Soviet Union at a formal level also signalled an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and antiimperialist stance. Even the two superpowers were not always faithful to their ideological positions. The Soviet Union and China, though both in the Marxist-Leninist camp, allowed their power-political rivalry to weaken their otherwise natural alliance. The United States, under the realist President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was quick to embrace the opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union further by establishing cordial diplomatic ties with China. While ideology and idealism dominated the public rhetoric and official speeches of the old Cold War, what really drove decisions most of the time were considerations based on realism, pragmatism, and material and power-political interests. In this post-Cold-War era of neoliberal globalization, the United States and China are so entrenched in the global economy that even stated efforts to “de-globalize” amidst heated trade and tech wars cannot separate them into meaningfully distinguishable ideological camps. Economic

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and national interests—and not ideological ones—are what matter at the end of the day. Today, China tries to expand its sphere of influence not by enticing potential allies with its ideology. Instead, it offers them substantial assistance and infrastructure investment resources and opportunities, without necessarily expecting any adoption of its ideology, values, and institutions. The United States, in contrast, often demands that others around the world comply with its ideology and values, to some extent almost weaponizing “capitalist liberal democracy”. “Neo-conservative” hawks in the American political establishment, particularly during the George W. Bush administration, have advocated strong U.S. interventionism in international affairs to promote democracy and to defeat communism and domestic left-wing radicalism (Vaïsse, 2010). Ironically, during the Cold-War years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) covertly backed coups to oust and even kill foreign leaders deemed hostile to U.S. interests. In some cases, they had been democratically elected, and the pro-American leaders installed to replace them were dictators with a record of human rights abuse (Stuster, 2013). So how should we understand “ideology” in the context of the Cold War / New Cold War? Political philosopher Raymond Geuss (1981) suggested three meanings of ideology. A “descriptive” sense of ideology points to the neutral facts about the “socio-cultural features of a group”. A “positive” sense of ideology refers to the worldview that a society constructs or even invents to fully satisfy its members wants, needs, and interests. A “pejorative” sense refers to delusions that members of a society have about themselves and their interests, which often cause them and others to suffer. A critical theory would aim to expose this “false consciousness” and, through enlightenment, to emancipate people from exploitation, domination, suffering, and social injustice. This book, in so far as it is a critical analysis of the Cold War and New Cold War, will generally adopt the pejorative meaning of ideology. Capitalist liberal democracy as espouse by the United States and its allies and communist authoritarianism propagated by the Soviet Union, China, and their allies were not simply descriptions of the socio-cultural systems of two large and opposing groups of countries in the world. Neither were they necessarily constructed worldviews that were able to satisfy the wants, needs, and interests of the countries in each bloc. They were, instead, examples of false consciousness that not only deluded the members of each bloc, but also caused them suffering in different ways and for different reasons. This book will also analyse the active generation of

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these ideological delusions, which often disguise the interests of power and wealth, through propaganda in news, art, and popular culture, among others. For instance, in Chapter 8, Ágota Révész notes how politicians in Hungary, especially in the months leading to national elections in 2022, have projected a range of images of China in the public sphere, possibly to discredit their opponents and mobilize support by capitalizing on fear. These included a highly ideological enemy-image of China as a menacing, un-Western, Cold-War communist power threatening to turn Hungary back into a communist state through the Trojan horse of a major investment in Hungary’s higher education.

Cold-War Narratives The Cold War can be seen as a set of histories of how superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and the actions of China as a major power have extensively and deeply shaped global affairs and the domestic politics of nearly every country in the world from 1945 to 1991, and of how the effects of this rivalry have on many levels persisted in an ongoing New Cold War in which the declining U.S. superpower is being challenged by China, a rising superpower. The original ideologies that marked their differences during the Cold War—capitalist liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism—are much less pronounced in the New Cold War and perhaps have little more than rhetorical value in a thoroughly globalized world driven by economic interests and geopolitical power. A third way to think about the Cold War is to focus on the narratives that it has generated, partly as instances of ideology but also as elaborations of ideology that make it more accessible, vivid, compelling, and appealing through storytelling methods that draw individuals into a shared narrative of community, meaning, struggle, and destiny. Stories, much more than abstract and often arid ideological theorizing, have greater power to address their audiences, offering them a particular identity that they are encouraged and not forced to accept. When “interpellation” of this kind is successful, a person internalizes the values that they encounter in these narratives and willingly accepts the roles assigned to them through such an identification (Althusser, 1970).

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Many chapters in this book pay attention to the affective appeal of stories and storytelling. For instance, in the Cold War, narratives of usthem, friend-enemy, teamwork-rivalry, cooperation-competition, loyaltytreachery, heroism-villainy, freedom-oppression, and so on have greater emotional appeal than narratives of getting along with one another, win–win solutions, or rational and technical problem-solving. Such narratives are often expressed in mass media and—in the case of the New Cold War—in social media too, where gaining eyeballs usually translates to commercial gain. Thus, throughout the Cold War and now the New Cold War, we have seen volatile eruptions of moral panic, disproportionately heightening public attention and concern around a person or group, whose behaviour is viewed as a threat to mainstream society’s values, interests, and way of life. Public hostility and even violence towards them are amplified through public statements by politicians, religious leaders, experts, opinion leaders, and civil society activists, as well as through the production and circulation of negative stereotypes in the mass media, including news, political and policy speeches, films, and television programmes (Goode & Ben-Yahuda, 1994). Hate crimes against Asians, Sinophobia, xenophobia towards migrants and refugees, and stigmatization of people with infections—all discussed in various chapters of this book—are examples of moral panic in pandemic-stricken New-Cold-War times. Museums and Monuments In Chapter 2, Giacomo Bagarella discusses the stories that are told to visitors by and through contemporary museums and monuments commemorating Cold-War conflicts. These include the Beishan Broadcasting Station and Maestro Wu knife store on Kinmen Island, Taiwan; Cu Chi Tunnels, War Remnant Museum, and Hoa Lò Prison in Vietnam; Cambodia Landmine Museum, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and Choeung Ek Genocidal Center in Cambodia; and the War Memorial in Seoul, South Korea. Bagarella notices, for instance, how this South Korean War Memorial, which opened in 1994 with the aim of highlighting lessons from the Korean War and inspiring Korean reunification, seems nevertheless to be preoccupied with showing gratitude to the United States and the United Nations for their support, which has enabled post-war South Korea to rise out of abject poverty and become one of the wealthiest and most successful countries in the world today. ij

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In Chapter 3, Zhou Hau Liew discusses another South Korean monument, the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan. Liew notices how the space of commemoration has been “internationalized” by sectionalizing the area with wreaths and national flags from nations that had contributed to the United Nations Command during the Korean War. Excluded from all of this was any representation of the Chinese soldiers who had crossed the Yalu River and fought back the advancing U.S.-U.N. forces. Liew—and Bagarella, for different reasons—observes the predominance of the logic of nationhood in the construction of these memorials, conveying a friend-enemy narrative that defines the legacies of national participants in the Cold War, long after their deaths. Films and Television Serials Films, especially feature films, are powerful and—unlike site-specific spaces of memory—wide-reaching media of storytelling. They range from narratives that invite audiences to accept the status quo and their role in it to those that challenge conventional wisdom and the powerful and wealthy, whose interests these conventional wisdoms serve, inviting audiences to question the status quo and their role in it. In other words, narrative films can range from having a conservative to a revolutionary effect. In Chapter 4, Linda Ou explores how films made in 1950s Hong Kong reflected the ideological divisions and struggles of the Cold War. She focuses on films about mainland Chinese migrants in Hong Kong enduring the hardship of tenement life. The films that were produced by pro-communist studios—Home, Sweet Home (1950), The Show Must Go On (1952), and The Dividing Wall (1952)—presented narratives that portrayed Hong Kong society and the capitalism that it stood for in very negative light. Chinese migrants—confronted with cruelty, deceit, sexual abuse, exploitation, social injustice, and minimal opportunities for human flourishing—often opted to return to their mainland Chinese homeland, where communism offered a better life. The films that were produced by pro-capitalist Hong Kong studios supportive of U.S.backed nationalists in Taiwan—Halfway Down (1955) and Mandarin’s Bowls (1956)—presented narratives that ended with Chinese migrants preferring to stay in the harsh conditions of Hong Kong rather than returning to mainland China, where the communist regime was viewed as intolerable.

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In Chapter 6, Chen I-ting discusses a pair of Taiwanese films, the short film The Great Buddha (2014) and a feature film version of it The Great Buddha+ (2017). Though the films were produced in the period of the New Cold War, like the pro-capitalist Hong Kong tenement films in the 1950s, their narratives reflected the disdain of capitalist America-loving Taiwanese for mainland Chinese migrants in their midst and their anxiety surrounding the relentless threat of communist China’s return. In the same chapter, Chen also analyses a popular television serial Formosan Lady (1995), which features a Taiwanese businessman (who yearns for a life in the United States), his conservative Taiwanese wife, his loyal Chinese mistress who lives in the United States, and his greedy and conniving mainland Chinese mistress. The narrative connecting these characters to one another and to their fates resonates strongly with ColdWar geopolitical relationships among Taiwan, the United States, and the People’s Republic of China. Documentary films also tell stories that can be just as powerful as fictional accounts rendered by feature films. In Chapter 3, Liew provides a detailed analysis of Malaysian filmmaker Lau Kek Huat’s documentary, Absent Without Leave (2016). The film is about the Malayan Emergency and tells the stories of three generations of Chinese men in Malay(si)a, focusing on the themes of exile, corporeal displacement, and the ecological depictions that provide a “scale” for a critical transnational understanding of the Cold War that runs against the grain of the victor’s history that is enshrined in Malaysia’s official national narrative. Novels and Non-Fiction Books Also in Chapter 3, Liew critically analyses Ha Jin’s War Trash, a 2004 historical fiction novel about the Korean War, which describes the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s crossing of the Yalu, eventual imprisonment on Koje Island in the south, and subsequent repatriation after 1952, mainly from the point of view of the soldiers themselves. The novel’s narrative points to the complex intersections linking the Korean War, the Chinese Civil War, and American and Chinese interests and values. Chen, in Chapter 6, analyses two non-fiction publications, Mainland China as a Tender Strange Land and a moralistic guidebook titled Taiwanese Businessmen’s Extramarital Affairs in China, which offers sexually oriented advice directed mainly at Taiwanese men. The two books’ narratives are filled with negative and highly evocative stereotypes

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of mainland Chinese women. They are examples of how narratives of cross-Strait emotions have been sexualized and eroticized in ways that perpetuate hostility. News While the news can often reflect public opinion, it also relies on storytelling approaches to recruit audiences into the intended roles and identities that ideology requires. In Chapter 7, Tran and Zoubir comparatively analyse news data to characterize public opinion about China’s health diplomacy and role as global health leader in countries in the Middle East and North Africa and countries in Europe. They find that, in the New Cold War, M.E.N.A. views China positively while Europe views the rising superpower with deep scepticism and anxiety. In Chapter 8, Ágota Révész closely analyses news data—as well as political and policy speeches—to critically illuminate the ways in which narratives of New-Cold-War China intersect with Hungarian narratives about “East–West” and “rural–urban” to produce shifting and malleable conditions of possibility for domestic politics.

Cold-War Lived Experience Several of the chapters in this book critically analyse (New-) ColdWar narratives that appear in films, television serials, novels, non-fiction writing, news reporting, and museums and monuments. In doing so, they are able to critique the underlying (New-) Cold-War ideologies and how these ideologies operate as false consciousness, deluding people who accept the roles that they are invited into in ways that can perpetuate hardship, exploitation, and injustice. Other narratives invite audiences to question the status quo and their role in it, thus challenging the ColdWar ideologies that undergird them. Critically analysing stories and their ideological anchors demystifies the Cold War and the New Cold War as histories of powerful elites running powerful countries and conducting international affairs to secure their own interests, under the legitimizing and ennobling cover of ideology. A fourth way of thinking about the Cold War and New Cold War is to focus on lived experience, to try to understand the meaning of what knowledge individuals and communities affected by the Cold War or New Cold War directly gain through first-hand involvement in everyday events

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and the choices and options that confront them. Micro-socioeconomic analysis and ethnographic methods are highly suitable for understanding lived experience, shifting attention from grand theory and grand strategy down to the objective and subjective details of everyday life as experience by individuals and communities. In Chapter 5, John Wei discusses the impact of the New Cold War and the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary and marginalized peoples, such as people with HIV infections in Wuhan, China; service and factory workers in Hong Kong; and factory workers in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. He does this to understand more deeply the vulnerability and limited choices of people confronted by the lack of access to essential medication, the requirement to work from home, and the threat of job loss and displacement, resulting from drastic changes in the manufacturing industry provoked by geopolitical tensions and the profound impact of the pandemic on so many aspects of our lives. In Chapter 6, Chen delves into the lived experience of migrant mainland Chinese women working in erotic teahouses in Taiwan. These women face discrimination from male Taiwanese clients who, through Cold-War lenses, view them simultaneously as objects of desire and of fear. Through her own ethnographic research, Chen explains the choices available to these women and the strategies they have developed individually and collectively to survive and even prosper as a “sisterhood”. Chen’s study of the lives and livelihoods of this community of migrant women is triangulated with her analysis of films and television serials that feature wives, mistresses, female caregivers, and migrant women from mainland China, as well as guidebooks advising Taiwanese men (and their wives) on how to deal with mainland Chinese women. In Chapter 3, Liew discusses Lau Kek Huat’s documentary Absent Without Leave. It begins with Lau, the director and the protagonist, trying to connect with his estranged father to find out about his grandfather, whose story had been hidden from him because his grandfather was a member of the Malayan Communist Party. As he widens and deepens his enquiry through the documentary format, Lau gains greater knowledge about his lived experience, his past, and others like him. By employing “ecology as a scale”, Liew observes, Lau the filmmaker helps us to understand “the true impact of war on the human, as the legacy of such conflicts stretches beyond the fighters to the land, people, and generations after”.

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In the next chapter, Giacomo Bagarella “re-visits” the museums and monuments—what he calls “places of memory”—in four ColdWar conflict locations that he had visited in 2015 to 2016: Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. As he wrote the chapter, he selfconsciously reflected on the meanings of the memory of his experience of these commemorative sites, trying to make as much sense as possible of his notes, photographs, and various resources on the internet, including maps. Bagarella explores the shifting intersection of personal, shared, and universal memories, noting the importance of humility in doing so and acknowledging how his own experience of war in Europe—mostly through family stories and artefacts as he was growing up—has shaped his self-conscious encounter with war and violence in Asia. From his chapter, we learn to appreciate how commemorating the Cold War has “secular”, “religious”, and “experiential” dimensions—relating to analysis, collective remembrance, and interaction—all bundled up in political as well as commercial interests.

References Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2022). Non-modernization: Power–culture trajectories and the dynamics of political institutions. Annual Review of Political Science, 25(1), 323–339. Alison, G. (2017). Destined for war: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Althusser, L. (1970). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. Verso. Brands, H. (2018, February 19). The Chinese century? The National Interest. Calhoun, C. (2002). Cold War. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Dictionary of the social sciences. Oxford University Press. Chin, P. (as told to Ward, I. and Miraflor, N.) (2003). Alias Chin Peng: My side of history. Media Masters. Corera, G. (2022, July 7). China: MI5 and FBI heads warn of ‘immense’ threat. BBC News. Douthat, R. (2020). The decadent society: How we became the Victims of our own success. Avid Reader. Ferguson, N. (2020, January 20). Cold War II has America at a disadvantage as China courts Russia. Boston Globe. Friedman, T. (2022, February 21). This is Putin’s war. But America and NATO aren’t innocent bystanders. The New York Times. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. The Free Press.

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Geuss, R. (1981). The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press. Goode, E., & Ben-Yahuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: The social construction of deviance. Wiley-Blackwell. Gover, A. R., Harper, S. B., & Langton, L. (2020). Anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the reproduction of inequality. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45(4), 647–667. Hack, K. (2009). The origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40(3), 471–496. Hall, P., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford University Press. Joe Biden is determined that China should not displace America. The Economist, 17 July 2021. Kornprobst, M., & Wallace, J. (2021, October 18). What is deglobalization? Chatham House. Kurlantzick, J. (2006, September 1). China’s charm offensive in Southeast Asia. Current History. Lipset, S. M. (1960). Political man: The social basis of politics. Doubleday. Mearsheimer, J. (2022, July 16). The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war. Lecture at Schuman Centre, European University Institute. Newsinger, J. (2015). British counterinsurgency (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Rees-Mogg, W. (2005, January 3). This is the Chinese century. The Times. London. Sandhu, K. S. (1964). The saga of the ‘squatter’ in Malaya. Journal of Southeast Asian History, 5(1), 143–177. Stuster, J. D. (2013, August 20). Mapped: The 7 governments the U.S. has overthrown. Foreign Policy. Swaminathan, A., & Kelley, M. B. (2022, May 8). Historian Niall Ferguson details ‘Cold War II’—Which ‘began some time ago’. Yahoo! Finance. Tan, K. P. (2022). Movies to save our world: Imagining poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction in the 21st century. Penguin. U.S.-China tech war: Everything you need to know about the U.S.-China tech war and its impact. South China Morning Post, 23 April 2021. V-Dem Institute. (2021). Autocratization turns viral: Democracy report 2021. University of Gothenburg. Vaïsse, J. (2010). Neoconservatism: The biography of a movement. Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Curating Memory: Cold-War Narratives in Museums and Memorials in Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cambodia Giacomo Bagarella

The dirt tunnel I was crawling through was claustrophobic. And I had it good. I shuffled forward, half-kneeling in a space maybe half a metre wide and one metre tall, towards the exit shaft. I could visualize the hole collapsing, leaving me buried in Vietnam. Early that morning in early 2016, I had boarded a minibus in Ho Chi Minh City with a gaggle of tourists for a day trip to Cu Chi Tunnels. Half a century earlier, during the Vietnam War, the Communist Viet Cong had burrowed underground to escape American air power. Over time, they created a complicated network of tunnels that allowed vast numbers of fighters to live and move underground. For each time that the guerrillas emerged out of nowhere to strike at U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, there were days spent in near darkness, in quarters tight with people and

G. Bagarella (B) Independent Scholar and Writer, Brooklyn, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_2

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pests and with little food and supplies. The short tunnel I experienced had been conveniently enlarged for tourists. It still felt oppressive. I made it out in awe of its previous occupants. Above ground, a canopy of trees shaded the hard, tan earth beneath, which was dusted with a smattering of fallen leaves and the occasional shrub. All the vegetation had grown after the end of the war in 1975. American bombing and defoliants—industrial-strength weed killers that made plants’ leaves fall off—had gardened swathes of the Vietnamese jungle into a desert. Open-air dioramas displayed the traps that the Viet Cong had set for American patrols. They featured terrified white soldiers falling into spike-filled pits, being impaled by devices out of the devilish imagination of Wile E. Coyote’s guerrilla cousin.1 I wouldn’t have liked to have been a G.I. then, either. I can’t pinpoint when I became aware of it, but war has been a motif that has accompanied me since my childhood, like lunch-break football in the schoolyard. It was not a wrenching or all-encompassing presence— I have been fortunate to live mostly in countries at peace—but it wasn’t ever distant. I owe this both to family and to geography. War first suffused my consciousness through my relatives’ personal stories. My grandparents were born in Italy between 1911 and 1925. They endured, participated in, and opposed Fascist imperialism and World War II as soldiers, forced labourers, partisans, and civilians, each taking on different identities at different times. At my paternal grandmother’s home, I saw pictures of my grandfather in Africa, where he was a driver for Italy’s colonial forces in the 1930s and early 1940s—unwillingly, I was told. He survived the war but not a workplace accident soon thereafter, leaving my young father with little memory of his wartime experience, of which my grandfather was anyway reluctant to speak. When I spent time with my maternal grandmother, I often heard her retell the story of how she had hidden a Jew from deportation during World War II. It was often a dinnertime tale, though it was eventually also recorded by historians, documentarists, and even a journalist in a New York Times article that managed to misspell both her first and last names (Kilgannon, 2000; Zuccotti, 2007).

1 Wile E. Coyote is one of the characters of Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes cartoon series, in which Coyote uses convoluted traps, explosives, and other devices to attempt to catch and eat the Road Runner. The Road Runner always outwits the Coyote and escapes the traps in the cartoons; in reality, the Viet Cong’s traps may have been more effective—at least according to Cu Chi’s curators.

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These narratives are inseparable from where I’ve lived. My parents’ careers in international development also drew them—and sometimes us—into conflict and its aftermath in such places as Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. When I was growing up, my parents and I would go to the mountains near Vicenza, my hometown. On the Asiago plateau, we went hiking on terrain that still bore scars from World War I. Shell craters pockmarked verdant fields, collapsing trenches wound through woods, and empty concrete forts sat on peaks and crests. On a good day, I would come home with my pockets weighed down by the lead from exploded bombs that I avidly gathered, my mind full of stories of heroic assaults or defences of this or that ridge. When we lived abroad, I learned about other countries’ experiences. One year, my father went to work in Bosnia, after the war there in the mid-1990s. When my mom and I went to visit, he told us about the minefields that had been sown and how Sarajevo had been shelled into destruction as its inhabitants scurried through makeshift shelters to avoid sniper fire. Later, in the twilight of the 1990s, we moved to Hanoi. In Southeast Asia, the present and the past continued to envelop me. I attended a French school, a colonial legacy, which sent us first and second graders on field trips to Hoa Lò Prison, which American prisoners of war nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton”. Outside of school, my father told me about the demise of France’s colonialism in Indochina at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and took me on our motorbike to visit the crash sites of shot-down American bombers. When we travelled to Cambodia and Laos in ageing planes that may not have been fit to fly, my parents warned me against picking up strange objects. Unexploded cluster bombs and mines from more than two decades before were then—and still are—a threat to all. After some years in Vietnam, we moved to Skopje, the capital of the landlocked Balkan country now called North Macedonia. The hills above our Skopje house provided a similar experience to Asiago, yielding fragments of exploded bombs that delighted the young boy that I was. My father told me that the lead from these fragments was from the combat between Yugoslav partisans and German soldiers. When a short, ethnically driven civil war broke out in Macedonia in 2001, a classmate’s father brought us bullet casings that had been fired days, not decades, before. I was envious of his son, who got the largest one. For a while, the front approached Skopje and the rebels threatened the capital. Then, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) brokered a peace agreement. ij

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The real soldiers went home, but we children continued to play with BB guns in the streets, unaware of (or ignoring) the greater symbolism of what we were emulating. All these narratives and images textured my upbringing, weaving my emerging place in the world with the fabric of memory and connection to the past. As I aged, I developed agency in my interests. As a teenager, I stacked my bookshelf with both young-adult fiction and thick history books. In high school, I lobbied my father to take me to Normandy. There, I learned all I could about D-Day, but also about the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge), an organization that maintains German military cemeteries from World War I while pursuing a pacifist educational mission. The following summer, I volunteered with it for a two-week summer camp in northern France, the only non-German in the group. It was peak post-war Europe: I scrubbed graves and repainted names, attended lessons against neo-Nazism, and taunted my peers because Italy had just won the World Cup after beating both Germany and France. Almost a decade later and nearly twenty years after beginning first grade in Hanoi, I was back in Southeast Asia. My studies had led me to work in urban policy, a more peaceful profession than my initial interests and aspirations might have suggested. I was enrolled in a master’s in public policy degree programme and, after completing my first year in London, had chosen to complete the programme at a partner university in Singapore. Drawn by its distinct urbanism, I also wanted to be at the confluence of the world’s main geopolitical trends: the rise of China and India, the dynamism of Southeast Asia, and the triangular dance between South Korea, Japan, and the United States. From my base in the citystate, I could trace these patterns for myself—including the historical paths that had led to the present. Over the course of a year, I pursued the past wherever I could find it, bound only by the limits of my school vacation and student stipend. From Singapore, I travelled to Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cambodia as a student and as a tourist between late 2015 and mid-2016.2 These countries’ histories make clear that the “Cold War” was actually 2 The dates matter because, as Viet Thanh Nguyen notes in Nothing Ever Dies, “I must specify the time, for the museums and memorials of Southeast Asia change over the years, much as memory and forgetting themselves do. Museums, memorials, and memories change because their countries change” (Nguyen, 2017: 254).

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quite hot in Asia: between them, these conflicts caused many millions of civilian and military casualties and wounded and displaced many more. In some ways, they demonstrate that the Cold War persists, as in the separation between the Koreas and Chinas, and the ongoing Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. This essay offers my reflections on several places of memory I visited in each country: Kinmen Island in Taiwan, with its war museums and memorials and Cold-War souvenir industry; Cu Chi and various museums in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam; the War Memorial of Korea in South Korea; and the Landmine Museum, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields in Cambodia. These sites are personally and historically meaningful and evocative. As relatively well-known places internationally, they enable me to make at least three arguments. First, to use Viet Thanh Nguyen’s (2017) concept, these sites are industries of memory: destinations that are also on the global tourist itinerary and thus provide a critical way through which foreigners can experience and learn about local history without intermediation by external entities. Second, they provide narrative stances: while every site might claim to be “objective”, in reality, these places convey historical narratives that range across the scholarly, personal, and official (which some might call propaganda), stances that might shift across exhibits based on audience’s perspectives. Third, they extend beyond what Ian Buruma (2015) calls the religious (facilitating collective remembrance) and secular (facilitating analysis and understanding) to what can be seen as experiential (facilitating interaction and consumption). I must add an important caveat as well, which is the need to seek memory with humility. This means acknowledging three factors inherent in any exercise like this one. First, visiting any museum or memorial is a subjective experience informed by the viewer’s identities. One can simultaneously be a tourist, a scholar, and an individual informed by their personal experiences, knowledge, and perspective. Second, it is impossible to do justice to a country’s history—and its population’s histories— through a single place of memory. Likewise, any analysis of those places will be partial. Lastly, what I struggle with the most is the tension inherent in witnessing places of memory that represent human suffering and loss while also being drawn to grand narratives of national heroism, a place’s aesthetic appeal, or the artefacts exhibited there. Nearly every place I visited displayed instruments of war, whose symbolism or craftsmanship— think an iconic tank or a sleek aircraft—can embody horror, admiration, and awe. They can build on or challenge the greater narrative of the place.

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In my travels, I found many stories, some contradictory and some controversial. All felt familiar: there was suffering, hope for peace and prosperity, memory of fear and atrocity, and resurgent pride and selfbelief. I recorded my experiences in my journal with the intent to write about them one day. As I did so, I couldn’t tell if I was emerging from my tunnel or entering further into it.

Kinmen, Taiwan: The Island as an Open-Air Museum (December 2015) The Beishan Broadcasting Station is a dull, rectangular concrete tower that sits on the north-western corner of the bow-tie-shaped Kinmen Island. Its façade, with 48 cylindrical cavities each housing a loudspeaker, points north-northeast. When I visited this wind-swept possession of Taiwan, the grey December day hid their former target just a few kilometres away. Kinmen is an oddity born out of the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War. The conflict between the Communists and Nationalists began in the late 1920s as the two sought to gain control of China under their respective ideology. Interrupted by Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the Civil War resumed apace in 1945. Mao Zedong’s Communists gradually defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, eventually ejecting the latter from mainland China to the island of Taiwan—and to a handful of small islands much closer to the continent—in 1949. This established the 180-kilometre-wide Taiwan Strait as the focal point for the confrontation between the two regimes as the Nationalists continued to claim the mantle of being the legitimate government of China. One of the Nationalist-held islands was Kinmen, which became for decades an outpost in the battle between China’s two warring regimes (Image 2.1). Beishan, like many other sites across East and Southeast Asia, stands as a legacy of the twentieth century’s unresolved conflicts. The station, which for decades hurled propaganda towards enemy communities across a narrow waterway, is now an anachronism. In late 1949, thousands of Communist soldiers, whose objective was to seize the island, arrived on landing craft at the nearby Guningtou cliffs. They were repelled by forts that would feel at home on the Normandy beaches I visited, such as the infamous Omaha. Today, a peaceful ferry shuttles tourists between Xiamen (China, People’s Republic of) and Kinmen (China, Republic of). I don’t know what these visitors, unlike their armed

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Image 2.1 Chenggong beach and fortifications, which are typical of much of Kinmen’s coastline (© Giacomo Bagarella)

predecessors, are looking for. Any structure on Kinmen pales in comparison with the skyscrapers of Xiamen, a metropolis of more than four million people, just 12 kilometres away, but hidden that day by fog. There isn’t much on rural Kinmen that can’t be found across the water, perhaps with the exception of a certain kind of nostalgia and the idyll of roaming cows and resting egrets. It was the history that drew me to this speck of land on an earlymorning flight from Taipei, the only Westerner among bemused locals. I’d first heard of Kinmen under its history-book name of Quemoy in a college class titled The Origins of Modern Wars. As the name implies, the sardonic professor guided us students through the logic—or lack thereof—of the geneses of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflicts. Kinmen was a footnote in the Cold War, a tiny battleground that could have led to a U.S.-China war but didn’t (Miller & Wich, 2011). I mostly forgot about the islet, strategically significant only for its symbolism, until I landed in Singapore for my studies. This outpost

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placed me within striking distance of all the sites and memorials that had only previously existed for me on a page. Taiwan was my first stop. I had spent the night before visiting the Beishan Broadcasting Station in a delightful bed and breakfast. My hosts were a young couple who decided to move from Taiwan proper. They restored one of Kinmen’s centuries-old, Fujianese-style houses and converted it to a two-room guesthouse. The houses are as ubiquitous as they are unique. They sport swallowtail roofs whose eaves are decorated with colourful ceramic and terracotta animal figurines and geometric motifs. The houses’ grace and character contrast with the island’s other omnipresent structure: grey or camouflaged concrete bunkers, the likes of which you can find all over the world. On Kinmen, they pockmark the coasts and crossroads. My hosts renovated the house with modern comforts, but they tastefully maintained its ancient charm. My room was functional, all sliding doors and minimalism. In the living room, a small Christmas tree and fake gifts sat beside a large cabinet whose dark wood contrasted with decorations of golden phoenixes and botanical motifs. The combination of Japanese, Western, and Chinese elements dutifully represents Taiwan’s modern history: it was the first of imperial China’s territories that imperialist Japan annexed in the late nineteenth century, but after World War II it has remained detached from the People’s Republic, in part thanks to American patronage and protection. Like many Taiwanese, my hosts desired their nation’s independence (personal communication, 14 December 2015). The cruel logic of geopolitics, however, condemns the island to an ongoing limbo. In the morning, I awoke to the prospect of visiting more Cold-War relics and shopping for a souvenir. The latter two goals were connected and formed part of the reason I had chosen to travel to Kinmen in the first place. After visiting Beishan and Guningtou, I beelined for Jincheng, the island’s largest township. Nestled within its winding streets was the Maestro Wu knife store. There is no sharper symbol of Kinmen’s relationship to mainland China than one of the artefacts you can purchase in the small shop. After failing to conquer Kinmen, Mao decided to harass the island by other means (Craig & Logevall, 2009). Between 1958 and 1978, the People’s Liberation Army bombarded Kinmen every odd-numbered day, mostly with non-explosive projectiles filled with leaflets, ultimately firing nearly a million cannon shells. The August 23 Artillery Battle Museum, a niche attraction in a niche destination, had detailed, 1980s-style infographics

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on the long-lasting bombardment (August 23 Artillery Battle Museum, 2015). Ingenious islanders began collecting steel from the shells and using it to forge more useful implements. I could not leave without a bombshell knife and, after browsing the many options on display, I settled on a menacing fish cleaver (Image 2.2).

Image 2.2 Chinese artillery shells on display among knives on sale at the Maestro Wu shop (© Giacomo Bagarella)

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Kinmen is both a place where people live and create their own aspirations, as they would anywhere else, and an open-air museum where visitors encounter histories from both imperial and modern China. The Cold War continues to define the latter through narratives of a more violent period in cross-Strait relations produced by museums and memorials, and through souvenirs in which historical artefacts are cast into commercial products by artisans. That the island still belongs to Taiwan is an exhibit of itself, serving as an implicit reminder that their status is unsettled. Kinmen is a contested territory, a history that could be rewritten in a flash in the worst of circumstances. The island, along with a handful of similar Taiwanese islands scattered along China’s coast, is a vestigial remnant of the Chinese Civil War. Relations between Taipei and Beijing ebb and flow based on the politics in each capital—and in Washington. As this uneasy separation continues, locals brace for the gusts blowing from the mainland, hoping that the knifemakers’ forges won’t see fresh steel.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Amusement Grounds and Propaganda (January 2016) Western visitors at Cu Chi no longer face traps or ambushes. On the contrary, they can pay for the experience to test some of the Vietnam War’s iconic weapons at a shooting range within the site. I had never fired a gun before but was intrigued by the prospect of shooting a Vietnamese AK-47 and an American M-16. An attendant led us customers to the range and loaded our cartridges into the guns. These are bolted so that all we could do was swivel them marginally to take aim at bullseyes on a berm some tens of metres away. Ten bullets later, I found the act of shooting unremarkable, a faux communion with the revolutionary and the soldier in a Cold-War-themed amusement park environment. I picked up two spent casings as a souvenir and made my way back to the van to return to Ho Chi Minh City (Image 2.3). Modern Vietnam is a peaceful, economically vibrant, and relatively open (to tourists) country that stands in stark contrast to the one that existed in the years after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Back then, at the conclusion of decades of a major war that had devastated the country’s population and landscape, reunification bore additional costs. The victorious Communist government detained hundreds of thousands

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Image 2.3 American soldiers falling into Communist traps, as depicted in Cu Chi’s dioramas (© Giacomo Bagarella)

of former South Vietnamese government officials, soldiers, and sympathizers, often in inhuman conditions. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled the country, the so-called “boat people”. Today, Vietnam is no longer at war with itself or with the United States. On the contrary, it sees friendship with its former foe as a necessary counterweight to China’s much closer and more invasive presence. (China and Vietnam have ongoing territorial disputes in the South China Sea.) While foreign industries of memory keep the image of Vietnam solidly anchored to the Cold War and its American tropes, as in Spike Lee’s 2020 movie Da 5 Bloods (Nguyen, 2020), Vietnam’s youth feed on more contemporary stereotypes. As I sat at a busy park in the city writing down the day’s affairs in my journal, multiple men and women in their twenties gradually surrounded me: it was an opportunity for them to practice their English. In the same journal, I noted their different universities and professions and how, once they learned I was Italian, they immediately associated me with “Lamborghini supercar”, Silvio Berlusconi (Italy’s former prime minister known for his sex parties and corruption),

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the mafia, and art and architecture (personal communication, 7 January 2016). Their associations and stereotypes for my country did not surprise me. Strangers always evoke fantasies that are readily available to the imagination, some pleasant (the Italian Renaissance or Vietnam as a tourism heaven) and some not (Italy’s world-famous organized crime and the conflicts that haunted Vietnam). Vietnam’s urbane youth have become part of a global village of commonplace imagery. Amidst the focus on the present and future of Ho Chi Minh City and its inhabitants, the Cold War’s tragic legacy fades into the background yet never fully disappears. Various pocket memorials exhibit the usual legacy vehicles—a tank here, a fighter jet there. South Vietnam’s former presidential palace stands preserved at the end of a long avenue on which rows of trees stand at attention. Its distinctive, polluted-white façade is shaped like parallel stalks of overly tall cement bamboo, the narrow columns leaving gaps between them for air and light to filter through to the windows behind them. Here, the leaders of South Vietnam schemed against their Communist northern neighbour, the North’s guerrillas, and each other. American advisors assisted each task, promoting various military strategies doomed to failure and facilitating a maelstrom of coups, corruption, and misgovernment. Saigon, as the city was then named, fell to its regime’s internal contradictions and to North Vietnam’s conquest on 30 April 1975. The now renamed Independence Palace remains preserved as a relic of an extinct quasi-state. Outside, on the front lawn, workers were assembling or disassembling a massive stage. Lying at the back of it, a thirty-metre red banner sat emblazoned with Budweiser in cursive script. Anheuser-Busch, the American brewing company that owns the Budweiser brand, merely followed the path cleared by Communist tanks forty years prior. This future was unknowable to the city’s Marxist namesake, a testament to how history is continuously reupholstered, presenting onlookers with different sights and textures. If Ho Chi Minh were still alive, though, he could find some solace a block away, at the aptly named War Remnants Museum. This neutral nomenclature belies a series of changed names that tell the story of Vietnam’s recent history. The museum was born in 1975, a few months after the war’s end, as the “Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes”, before becoming the “Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression” in 1990. Tensions with Beijing in the late 1970s had culminated in a brief Chinese invasion of northern Vietnam in 1979, meaning that Hanoi cast its historical anger more broadly, including towards its former

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ally. The current name has graced the institution since 1995 as a result of warming relations between Vietnam and the United States (Schwenkel, 2009). Strolling in through the front gate, Ho Chi Minh would see to his right and left examples of the American armoured vehicles and aircraft against which his soldiers battled. Beyond them is the boxy structure of the museum itself, its name emblazoned in brass letters underneath the logo: a white dove overlaid on three grey, falling bombs. The museum’s message was vigorous, but I couldn’t really bring myself to think of it as propaganda. Yes, the South Vietnam regime is called a “puppet”, Hanoi’s forces are the “liberation army”, and selective quotes cast Americans as villains. One is attributed to Air Force General Curtis LeMay: “we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age”. Another, a caption for a picture of U.S. soldiers standing over a row of bodies: “Body count: A U.S. military’s [sic] yardstick for measuring success for the war” (War Remnants Museum, 2016). Elsewhere, a map of Vietnam with black dots for “areas impacted by U.S. ordnance” shows most of the country pockmarked into darkness (War Remnants Museum, 2016). Yet, underneath all the spin, it’s hard not to share the official view that the conflict and suffering were mostly Washington’s concoction, a putrid by-product of an overripe Domino Theory3 (Image 2.4). Nowhere did I feel this more emotionally than in the exhibit about Agent Orange. U.S. forces sprayed this defoliating and carcinogenic chemical on tens of thousands of square kilometres of jungle, wiping away the leaves and vegetation that could shield enemies while simultaneously leaving a legacy of widespread tumours and birth defects that haunts parts of Vietnam (and U.S. veterans) to this day. I found it hard to leave behind the images of deformed foetuses and children. It is one thing for the generations that lived during the war to suffer. It is a wholly different level of outrage when politicians, scientists, and military men cursed their enemy for generations. It is a gruesome peak in the sorrow of this war, a call to confront the uncomfortable horrors of injustice that no appeal to objective language can mask. Embodied in the museum’s displays are Vietnam’s pride in having defeated the United States and rancour at American indiscriminate bombing and chemical warfare. The downtown museum provides this 3 This Cold War theory, influential in U.S. foreign policy, advanced the idea that one country coming under the influence of communism would lead to other countries in the region following suit.

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Image 2.4 Display on U.S. air bombing campaigns at the War Remnants Museum (© Giacomo Bagarella)

serious, overarching narrative for the conflict, while the rural grounds at Cu Chi provide an almost cartoonish archetypal story, showing Communist fighters as cunning and Americans as hapless, as if they were real-life versions of the Roadrunner and Coyote, respectively. Cu Chi is also distinct in its immersiveness, allowing tourists to experience both claustrophobic tunnels and iconic weaponry. These narratives help mask anything

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unseemly Hanoi’s own regime might have done during and after the war, and the immense suffering of its own soldiers and civilians. Eventually, it was time for me to return to Singapore. As I passed through security at the Ho Chi Minh City airport, a guard found the Cu Chi casings in my carry-on and confiscated them. Futilely, I pleaded to keep them. Here is modern Vietnam, a country that sells the experience of firing vintage rifles and enforces airport security best practices. I wonder if the casings will end up on display with other contraband. They might still be in a glass case in the terminal, next to stuffed endangered species and drug paraphernalia, a wholly different kind of museum where the Cold War and modern mass tourism are indistinguishable.

Seoul, South Korea: A Monument to Gratitude? (April 2016) When I stepped on the plaza in front of the grandiose War Memorial of Korea in Seoul, the building’s colonnaded wings offered the enveloping feeling of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square. Like St. Peter’s, the War Memorial features an obelisk-like structure, a similarity that doesn’t appear coincidental in these two symbolic sites. Approaching the building on a gentle slope, I saw to my right odd shapes protrude through a canopy of trees. This is the museum’s outdoor display, which features a small army of tanks, more military aircraft than a minor country’s air force, and a warship incongruously perched on stilts above a decorative pond. Most imposing is a B-52 strategic bomber. The Vatican might learn a lesson here: few other machines inspire a fear of God as this one does. Despite its impressive hardware collection, what most distinguishes the War Memorial from most other war museums I’ve visited is its narrative. In its exhibits about the Korean War, the War Memorial is as much a tribute to domestic pride as a memento to foreign rescuers. Without the United States and United Nations, South Korea would not exist as it does today. Like in China, the end of World War II left behind in Korea unresolved political and territorial questions, sowing the seeds of civil war and what have become nearly eight decades of partition. In 1945, the United States and Soviet Union split between them the responsibility to administer the Korean Peninsula after Japan’s collapse. This division was supposed to be temporary. Instead, between 1945 and 1950, the arrangement congealed into two separate governments, under

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the communist Kim Il-sung in the north and the conservative, authoritarian Syngman Rhee in the south. Seeing a favourable situation, Kim sought support for a war of conquest and reunification from his patrons in Beijing and Moscow. With their backing, he launched an invasion of the south in 1950. A few years earlier, the United States had not directly intervened in the Chinese Civil War, leading to accusations that President Harry Truman’s administration had “lost” China to Mao. Now, to avoid a repeat of the same outcome and to preserve the south’s independence, the United States mobilized an anti-communist coalition under the United Nations’ flag. The U.N. campaign halted Kim’s aggression. It also ended up provoking Communist China’s own intervention in the war, which eventually yielded a stalemate. The two sides reached an armistice to end hostilities in 1953, but there is still no peace agreement between the two Koreas. North and South continue to trade live fire on occasion. At the War Memorial, a plaque on the plaza wastes no time in conveying the unique message of gratitude to strangers. At the outbreak of the Korean War, young soldiers from 21 countries participated in support of the freedom and peace of Korea with no strings attached. They came to help a country they never knew and a people they never met. Their noble blood and sweat have served as the foundation for the prosperity of Korea today. Korea honors their invaluable sacrifices. (War Memorial of Korea, 2016)

Nearby, the allies’ flags fluttered in the late April sun. It is a dim, cavernous hall within the museum, however, that drives the point home. There, a large mosaic of the U.N.’s emblem adorns the floor, while the profiles of allied leaders mark a wall nearby. Dag Hammarskjöld, the U.N. secretary general at the time, appears shoulder to shoulder with other, more recognizable figures: U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur. Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s then-president, rounds out the group. The quintet are implicitly credited as the architects of South Korea’s political and military salvation from communism. Along the remaining walls, shrines commemorate the contribution of each country in the coalition, from the peculiar (Colombia, the only South American country to join the effort) to the mundane (Italy, which dispatched a field hospital and 66 personnel) (War Memorial of Korea, 2016) (Image 2.5).

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Image 2.5 A display on the contributions of each country that participated in the United Nations’ operation in Korea (Note the U.N. logo mosaic. © Giacomo Bagarella)

Amidst this explicit and poignant narrative, it is easy for visitors to miss the revisionist argument against the claim that the U.N. forces fought for “freedom” (War Memorial of Korea, 2016). In fact, Rhee extensively repressed his political opponents, and the country did not begin to democratize until the 1980s. South Korea’s allies intervened on behalf of a non-communist regime, not in favour of a democracy. As misleading as this part of the story may be, it does follow a clear arc. The United Nations protected South Korea’s independence when it was weak and poor. Since then, the country has become democratic, wealthy, and a paragon of modernity. Nowadays, the museum’s chronicle continues, South Korea contributes to development aid and participates in peacekeeping missions throughout the world. Seoul has been working hard to repay its debt of gratitude.

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This is possibly one of the rarest emotions to be expressed in history museums. Just as the museum mimics the Vatican’s layout, it also seems to serve a similar role to the Christian concept of “ex voto”: an offering of thankfulness to God or a saint for a miracle bestowed on a believer. South Korea was doubly blessed by United Nations intervention in the Korean War and by its later economic miracle. These narrative stances infuse the museum. Despite its uniqueness in this regard, the War Memorial also follows a more common pattern among its peers through the legion of military vehicles on display, layering the industrial tools of war on the tales of human suffering and rebirth. Altogether, the War Memorial is a testament to both change and continuity, displaying the evolution that enabled South Korea to become what it is today and the stasis in the conflict—an ongoing cold war persisting after the supposedly defunct Cold War—that might make domestic and foreign sacrifice, with all its military hardware, newly necessary.

Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Narrating Victimhood, Complicity, and Guilt (July–August 2016) In Cambodia, I planned a stop in rural Siem Reap and one in urban Phnom Penh, where I would also meet an old friend. In both places, the small country’s modern contradictions and two pasts—one glorious, the other violent—are entangled. I began at Siem Reap, the town that serves as the launching pad for the ancient city of Angkor’s temple-studded landscape.4 Angkor was one of the world’s largest cities in pre-industrial times, a pinnacle of civilization and culture. Here, each sculpted tower emerged taller and more intricate than the last. Visiting was a thrill: one moment, I was tracing Hindu myths carved in bas-reliefs dozens of metres long, trying to follow their stories through my guidebook. In another, I was climbing to the top of a pyramid, from where I could observe all around me an expanse of majestic ruins blending with the jungle. The Cambodian rulers of the Khmer Empire spent centuries erecting monuments that continue to awe travellers more than eight centuries after they were built. These structures are a testament to the wealth, power, and ingenuity of the ancient Khmer. Sadly for the country, another Khmer, the 4 Angkor is the name of the city itself; Angkor Wat is its most famous individual temple.

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Khmer Rouge, seized power in 1975. In just a few years, this agrarian, totalitarian communist regime sullied the Khmer legacy in unimaginable ways. It destroyed people and culture instead of elevating them, creating a complicated and persistent web of national and individual guilt and victimhood. While this duality is not top of mind for most visitors at Angkor, it loitered within me and led me to a museum off the ruins’ beaten path. I headed out from my hotel by tuk-tuk—a rickshaw pulled by a small motorcycle—puttering past small woods and ample, light-green paddies. My destination was a modern archaeological museum which, like its peers the world over, displays human artefacts excavated from the ground. What sets it apart is the deadliness of its exhibits. The typical Greek vase or Chinese jade figurine will not cleave off an archaeologist’s leg and leave them bleeding out in a field. Here, however, the remnants of human history come in the form of landmines. Cambodia is equally blessed with marvellous antiques as it is cursed with hideous traps set in its decades of twentieth-century conflicts. At the Cambodia Landmine Museum, several small display pavilions surround a central case that is filled to the brim with recovered mines and explosive devices. (Visitors are assured that all items on display have been rendered harmless.) The museum is the work of the Cambodia Landmine Museum Relief Fund, a Canadian-Cambodian nongovernmental organization whose mission is to prevent additional landmine casualties, rehabilitate and support survivors, and educate foreign visitors. It partners with Cambodian Self Help Demining, another local N.G.O. that works to clear areas tainted by these devices. As the name suggests, Cambodian Self Help Demining began as a makeshift operation: its founder, Aki Ra, would use rudimentary tools like sticks and shovels to scour minefields while clad only in sandals and everyday clothes. He trained others in the delicate task of finding, neutralizing, and collecting explosive devices of all kinds, and endowed the museum with its collection. Eventually, he and his team professionalized. They are now accredited by the Cambodian government and use metal detectors and protective equipment to carry out their dangerous work (Cambodia Landmine Museum, 2016) (Image 2.6). Aki Ra’s story is one of personal and national redemption. He was a child combatant in Cambodia in the late 1970s, first for the Khmer Rouge and then for the Vietnamese forces that defeated them. The museum details some of his gruesome experiences and the violence he and others

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Image 2.6 The defused landmine and explosives display at the Cambodia Landmine Museum (© Giacomo Bagarella)

inflicted on their enemies, including by planting mines. As the conflict subsided, he chose one of the world’s most dangerous jobs to eradicate his deadly legacy and make the country’s landscape safe for human habitation (Aki Ra, n.d.). Apparently, he spends time at the museum to talk to visitors about his work, but I was not in luck: he was not there when I was. Even so, the museum left an indelible impression of how the last century’s wars still reap victims to this day, and how some Cambodians strive to build a different future. The next day, I took a bus back to Phnom Penh, making the leap between homemade tin prosthetics at the mine museum and artisanal cocktails at the rooftop bar my friend chose as our meeting point. Eventually, she and I made our way back to her house, a large, walled-off villa near downtown, where we sat down for dinner with her parents. We surrounded a table, too large for the four of us, in a spacious dining room. It would be hard to find more seemingly authoritative sources on

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the country: my friend’s parents are high-level officials in the national and city government. Inevitably for people with those roles, they are close to both Hun Sen, who has been prime minister since 1985, and to the Cambodian royal family, an enduring centre of power and symbolism in the country. Both Hun Sen and the monarchy represent the nature of change, or lack thereof, in this small state. The former is possibly the world’s longest-serving prime minister and a shapeshifter who managed to navigate Cambodia’s absurd and convoluted political transformations. He joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970 before defecting to their Vietnamese enemies in 1977. In 1979, he helped Vietnam to overthrow the Khmer Rouge. He was rewarded with the post of deputy prime minister in Vietnam’s puppet regime in Cambodia before ascending to the prime ministership a few years later. The deposed Khmer Rouge continued to fight an insurgency against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese through part of the 1990s, when a peace process finally settled the conflict. The country was reborn as the Kingdom of Cambodia: a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. Hun Sen navigated these transitions while accumulating power and accusations of human rights violations. The monarchy’s restoration also allowed King Sihanouk—who had been dubiously entangled with the Khmer Rouge as well—to resume his crown. My hosts’ allegiances make for a potentially fraught dinner conversation. I struggled to reconcile their local perspective with their role in a complex political and national situation. As our conversation veered towards politics, I learned that they were irritated by Western calls for “democratization” and by U.S. pressure to side with other Southeast Asian countries against China on the matter of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. They distrusted the United States for its role in Cambodia in the 1970s, when Washington intervened in local politics and secretly carpet-bombed the country as part of the Vietnam War. They believed that Cambodia and its neighbours should resolve any issues with Beijing bilaterally, without involving international institutions or faraway powers (personal communication, 31 July 2016). I did not challenge their position, as that would have seemed rude. At the same time, I remained inwardly sceptical of their arguments and suspected that there would be better alternatives for Cambodia: leaders without Hun Sen’s baggage and iron fist, development partners without Beijing’s authoritarian inclinations. The subject of the Khmer Rouge is another sensitive area. My friend’s family, like virtually all others in the country, lost relatives to the vicious

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regime. Her parents were in Europe during the dreadful years between 1975 and 1979, when the regime killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians—nearly a quarter of the population—through mass murder, forced labour, and famine. When I explained my plans to visit two sites commemorating the Cambodian genocide the next day, I sensed some chilliness in their response. What to me were museums and memorials to them were reminders of disappeared family members. My friend surprised me when she admitted to having visited one of the sites only once, briefly, in middle school. Cambodians, she told me, believe in the presence of the spirits of the dead, and that made it hard for her to go to such places (personal communication, 31 July 2016). This, too, left me puzzled and torn. Part of me acknowledged the individuality of grief and memory, its local specificity. Yet, part of me could not help but think that without confronting and knowing the past in the places where it happened, there could be no coming to terms, for either an individual or a nation—only a setting-aside or forgetting. The following morning, I went to see this past for myself. The compound that houses the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was witness to the fanatic frenzy with which the Khmer Rouge swept through Cambodia. Tuol Sleng is the site of the notorious S-21 prison and torture centre, a converted high school where the Khmer Rouge regime crowded up to 1,500 political prisoners at a time. The jail was not a long-term destination for these people, whom the regime suspected of being opponents and traitors, usually on spurious claims. The routine for the roughly 20,000 who transited through the facility during the reign of the Khmer Rouge involved being photographed and catalogued, confined in inhuman conditions, tortured, forced to confess, and sent away to be executed. The combination of ideological motives, bureaucratic organization, and industrial operations makes S-21 a classic example of twentieth-century depravity. I visited the museum with the assistance of a detailed audio guide. Number by number, I made my way through the site: 6, school equipment used for torture; 19, a survivor speaks, arriving at S-21; and so on (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2016). The former school buildings were laid out like an E, with airy, green courtyards between them. Despite the peeling paint, outwardly the structures reminded me of my own old elementary school in Hanoi. The classrooms sat on the inside of open hallways, allowing ventilation in the tropical climate. Only my school did

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not have barbed wire strung across the halls’ parapets to prevent occupants from attempting suicide. There were more differences inside, as the jailers added walls to partition some large classrooms into small holding cells and converted others into torture chambers. During the Khmer Rouge years, the school became a testing centre where pupils faced a single examination. Inquisitors asked them to confess to fictitious crimes, and to fail meant torture; to pass, death. Now, the school is once again a venue for genuine learning. In one of the courtyards, a survivor sat under an awning, selling a short biographical book. Bou Meng was old; he had a hard time understanding me. I would have liked to ask him about his experience, but I was at once deterred by the language barrier, his age, and how voyeuristic it felt to probe his past. His experience was one of tragic ironies: as a painter, he would have been singled out for execution by a regime with no room for arts and education. However, S-21 operators saw his value in producing portraits of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, and kept him alive. After the regime’s fall, Bou Meng used art to retell the atrocities he had seen (Vannak, 2010). There is more subtext in his story than fiction could conjure (Image 2.7). After my visit, I hailed a tuk-tuk and headed to the place aptly known as “the killing fields”. We left Phnom Penh’s urban embrace, travelling south for half an hour through the city’s suburbs—rural villages, not row houses with manicured lawns—and reached an unpaved parking lot next to some squat buildings. The gate and buildings were decorated with small golden spires, the same I had seen at pagodas elsewhere in the country. If there were any spirits here, though, they were tormented, as my friend had warned: the sign above the entrance read Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. Again, a thorough audio guide escorted me through the site, peeling away all pretence of innocence from commonplace items. Number 15 was a palm tree whose hard, saw-toothed fronds the Khmer Rouge used to slit prisoners’ throats (The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, 2016). There can hardly be a more apt symbol for the ruthless agrarian regime than making even nature complicit in its crimes. Towards the end of my methodical visit—I am not one to skip displays at a museum, often to the frustration of my companions—I paused and took off my headset. Around me, I saw small, grassy fields. Beyond them, trees and a derelict fence. And, beyond this fence, emaciated cows on the pasture. The cycle of life, death, and decay continued unarrested. I saw loud chickens and colourful roosters foraging amidst the mass graves. Some sort of large dark fruit, fallen to the ground and blasted

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Image 2.7 A former school building converted to an interrogation and torture centre at S-21 (Note audio guide item 6, “school equipment used for torture”, at the bottom left. © Giacomo Bagarella)

open to reveal its orange pulp, was the meal of flies and a brown and white butterfly. Not too far away, muddy soil continued to return the human bones and clothes of the 9,000 people who were killed and buried here. The cracked bones were still distinctly white; the clothes still purple and blue, despite forty years underground. They lay halfburied, matter-of-factly. At the centre of this pastoral resting place stood a white, spiry stupa, a Buddhist tower that typically contained relics. This one preserved thousands of skulls. It was a graphic monument to a people’s self-inflicted brutality in a setting that evoked both tranquillity and desecration, innocence and murder. Cambodia’s places of memory take us away from the Cold War of battles to the Cold War of mass murder. They show the brutal war of a regime against its own people, a regime where neighbours became each other’s jailers and executioners. Just as Tuol Sleng shows the industrial processing of victims with photos, torture, and death, Choeung Ek shows the regime’s brutal agrarian side, and the Landmine Museum

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shows the individual trajectory of someone who once enabled the Khmer Rouge’s violence and later spent decades atoning for it. These are sites intimately focused on their victims, as they should be, and draw visitors into the stories they tell through multiple media, their structures, and their untamed surroundings. In the end, Bou Meng got to confront his oppressor. Kang Kek Iew, more commonly known as Duch, the head of the Khmer Rouge secret police and head of S-21, went on trial for crimes against humanity in the late 2000s. Bou Meng was once again a witness, but this time not against himself. At a session of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Bou Meng faced his former jailor and provided evidence about his crimes. Bou Meng also sought answers about his wife Ma Yoeun’s fate. She had been arrested and brought to S-21 with him, where they were immediately separated. He had heard nothing of her since. That day, before being sentenced to life in prison, Duch asked Bou Meng and other survivors for forgiveness.5 Duch’s deputies—including the man Bou Meng suspects of killing Ma Yeoun—remain free, hiding behind the claim that they were just following orders. These former Khmer Rouge live as neighbours to the Cambodians whose relatives they once tortured and executed. At the conclusion of his biography published in 2010, Bou Meng cannot forgive Duch or accept the freedom of other perpetrators. But neither does he desire personal vengeance. He navigates this imperfect justice seeking peace for his own soul and for those of his wife and the Khmer Rouge’s other victims (Vannak, 2010). Though age and adversity may have shrunken him physically, Bou Meng, to me, embodies heroic self-reflection and dignity. Bou Meng the witness and Aki Ra the deminer display the potential of transformation, of overcoming violence and dehumanization, of finding purpose if not peace.

5 Duch died of lung disease in September 2020 while serving his term; Bou Meng outlives him.

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New York, United States of America (Winter 2019–Summer 2022) As I sat writing, sifting through my travel journal and the photos I had taken of monuments and plaques, I tried to retrace the steps of my journeys. I visited these places just a few years ago, but without my notes, so much of what I experienced would already have been lost to memory. How could I then do justice to a century of complex history and individual stories? I know I have simplified events that are the subject of dozens of books and did not speak to locals as much as I wish I had. I was and am constrained by my language and in my perspective, in my ability to capture and reflect stories that are not entirely mine, but to which I feel a connection. The more I explored, both as I travelled and while I wrote, the more I felt that I hadn’t ventured into a tunnel but into quicksand. I am mired in indulging my interest in war and in masking my shame for how morbid this passion can sometimes appear—what W. G. Sebald (2004: 98) labels as “an aura of the forbidden … even of voyeurism” in his essay on the Allied bombings of Germany. My fascination for history is inextricably linked to my knowledge of its horrors. Despite all the eyewitnesses I’ve listened to or the museums and cemeteries I’ve visited, perhaps I am not repulsed by war and all its accoutrements because I have not been personally affected by it. This discomfort is probably essential for anyone writing about war to do so without ever forgetting its underlying essence as a human tragedy. For me, like for many of my peers in much of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the experience and memory of conflict are fading into the past. As our elders pass, we lose both the private tales of family stories and the public testimonies of people like Bou Meng and others. And yet, in the places that I visited during my travels, I saw a collective experience that there remains something unresolved in Asia’s conflicts, an essence that lingers and torments to this day. In some cases, the palpitations come from unresolved disputes around territory and nationhood, as is the case with the two Chinas and Koreas. In others, physical war remnants like mines and chemicals have plagued people who tried to re-establish normal post-war lives. Throughout all, there remain unaddressed questions of identity, of who we are, what we did, what was done to us, and who we want to be. It is here that museums and memorials add their voices. They are enduring symbols of national mythology, whether they are built by civil

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society groups—like the Landmine Museum in Siem Reap—or by the state, like most others. History has been created, erased, and recast since oral epics first and the origins of writing much later. It is not surprising then that modern nation-states should seek to do the same. In Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cambodia, this editorial process of personal and national history frequently converged on themes of victimhood and guilt, endurance and rebirth. I found some more convincing than others. In Cambodia, the genocide memorials did represent the country’s downfall amidst the atrocities of a former regime. Elsewhere, the matter was more of a propaganda spectrum of narrative stances. Where the War Memorial of Korea (with its claim that the U.N. intervened to support democracy) or the War Remnants Museum (with its anti-American plaques) might sit, I can say for myself, though others’ subjective views will differ. The latter museum’s official narrative obscures the Communists’ share of crimes, but I still can’t bring myself to fault its curators given what the United States perpetrated in Vietnam. These sites seek to communicate their countries’ pasts, but they also constrain their futures. A narrative elevated on a pedestal can anchor a country to an outdated position. Monuments at times aid in national and international reconciliation just as other times they sow distrust. There will never be a memorial that pleases everyone, either through what it represents or through its form. Even so, there are some that are better than others at facilitating a critical look at history and, through that, at ourselves and our nations. This leaves me with four broad conclusions that draw on my experience visiting these places of memory. First, memory is messy and subjective. The first industry of memory is the mind, but the mind makes deliberate or accidental mistakes. This doesn’t mean that there are unlimited truths and that there aren’t versions of history that are more accurate than others. Second, memory is mediated and composite. I visited these sites and tried to perceive their text and subtext, and then remembered them through my pictures, diary, Google Maps, and the internet. Third, museums and memorials are fraught: they take a stance that can evolve over time, and we can discuss which stances are more or less accurate and considerate of history’s human subjects. They are part of an ongoing editorial process of personal and national histories. Fourth, memory is both personal and universal: there is shared humanity in the many ways people choose to approach personal and common histories, even though those specific histories might differ. As I look back at the

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arcs of the unique countries I visited—and those of their peoples—I can’t help but relate those to the history of Italy and of my own family. Above all, it seems that humans share instincts for clinging to, forgetting, and reforging our pasts. Personally, I find that I am still in the wilderness. I entered a tunnel to discover what lay inside and to see how changed I would be when I emerged. I found memories and stories that anchor part of who I am. I also learned that I continue to seek the same threads. In A Turn in the South, V. S. Naipaul’s (2012) account of his travels in the historically complicated U.S. South, he says of a man whom he was meant to interview, “But it wasn’t possible to tell him exactly what I wanted from him, for the simple reason that on this kind of journey one doesn’t know what one wants from a man until one has spoken to him”. When I set out for Singapore and from there to other countries, I wanted simply to speak with history. What I found out there is that I want to speak with it some more.

References Aki Ra. (n.d.). The story of my life. Self-Published. August 23 Artillery Battle Museum. (2015). Permanent exhibit. Jinhu Township, Kinmen, Taiwan. Buruma, I. (2015). The wages of guilt: Memories of war in Germany and Japan. New York Review of Books. Cambodia Landmine Museum. (2016). Permanent exhibit. Siem Reap, Cambodia. The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. (2016). Audio tour of the permanent exhibit. Choeung Ek Commune, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Craig, C., & Logevall, F. (2009). America’s Cold War. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kilgannon, C. (2000, May 7). From a wartime escape to a stateside reunion. The New York Times. Miller, A. L., & Wich, R. (2011). Becoming Asia: Change and continuity in Asian international relations since World War II . Stanford University Press. Naipaul, V. S. (2012). A turn in the South. Picador. Nguyen, V. T. (2017). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University Press. Nguyen, V. T. (2020, June 24). Vietnamese lives, American imperialist views, even in ‘Da 5 Bloods’. The New York Times.

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Schwenkel, C. (2009). The American war in contemporary Vietnam: Transnational remembrance and representation. Indiana University Press. Sebald, W. G. (2004). On the natural history of destruction. The Modern Library. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. (2016). Audio tour of the permanent exhibit. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Vannak, H. (2010). Bou Meng: A survivor from Khmer Rouge Prison S-21: Justice for the future not just for the victims. Documentation Center of Cambodia. War Memorial of Korea. (2016). Permanent exhibit. Seoul, South Korea. War Remnants Museum. (2016). Permanent exhibit. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Zuccotti, S. (2007). Holocaust odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and their flight through France and Italy. Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Ecology as a Cold-War Scale: Lau Kek Huat’s Absent Without Leave and Ha Jin’s War Trash Zhou Hau Liew

At the end of Lau Kek Huat’s documentary, Absent Without Leave (2016), the narrator’s father wanders around his childhood home, seemingly lost. His corporeality is emphasized by a series of shuffling steps, as he is unable to pinpoint his exact location. This inability to recognize his home, which is now a plantation, represents a larger issue, concerning the exilic remnants of the rural ethnic Chinese in the Cold-War conflict known as the Malayan Emergency. Specifically, the documentary depicts communist fighters exiled from modern-day Malaysia, showing the impact of the Cold War through their corporeal displacement from the Malayan ecology. The documentary’s shots of the Malayan landscape and jungle are visual depictions of the land, which commemorate the past homes

Z. H. Liew (B) National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_3

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of these documented subjects. Its documenting of their bodily displacement to places like Thailand and China, then, is an argument for representing the Malayan Emergency beyond ideological confrontation between nations, expanding our imagination of the Cold War spatially. Ha Jin’s historical fiction novel War Trash (2004) also depicts the movement of fighters in ecological terms. Focusing on members of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army who were held as prisoners of war on Koje Island, it highlights the corporeality of Chinese repatriation by narrating the story of a soldier who fights in the Korean War. Imprisoned in a POW camp after crossing the Yalu River into Korea, he is asked to choose the land of his return as part of a repatriation campaign conducted by the United Nations Command, which administers the camp. By narrating how his body interacts with an unfamiliar ecology during wartime, the novel shows how he is subject to territorial imaginaries, where repatriation itself becomes inflected by Cold-War divisions of friend and enemy. Recent scholarship on the Cold War has emphasized the importance of rethinking the Cold War transnationally, by exploring two things: first, cultural history in Asia that is influenced by Cold-War soft-power policies; and second, oral histories as a way to broaden our understanding of the impact of the Cold War on lives on the ground (Fu Yip, 2021; Hajimu, 2022; Taylor & Xu, 2022). This chapter offers another framework for rethinking the Cold War transnationally, through an examination of the ways that Absent Without Leave and War Trash both employ ecology as a Cold-War scale. They present ecological scenes to commemorate histories of moving Chinese bodies that are otherwise left out in national narratives of the Cold War. Tracking these moving bodies is thus a scale-making move on their part that challenges the territorial imaginaries of Cold-War national remembrance in these two countries. Scale, as anthropologist Anna Tsing puts it, is “the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary”. Scale is not “a neutral frame for viewing the world; scale must be brought into being … scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects” (Tsing, 2005: 58). Absent Without Leave and War Trash not only reveal the scalemaking projects of Cold-War national narratives, but they also document a different, transnational scale of migrant bodies in the Cold War, which can be viewed as forms of scale-making through the medium of cinema

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and fiction, respectively. The title Absent Without Leave suggests an unresolved absence in the historical record, whereas the title War Trash conveys the lack of autonomy these soldiers had over their bodies and their representation during and after war. Both show how this bodily scale is juxtaposed against a national scale that obscures and limits the stories of their subjects. If territory—the lines drawn on a map that define and separate one country from another—is the abstract result of Cold-War national narratives, then their scenes of and about ecology—the interaction of body with land—return the minor histories of these moving subjects to the fore. These works commemorate their experiences even as they question existing historical representations of the Cold War. In Absent Without Leave, this is shown in an early sequence where the narrator flips open his elementary school textbook and comments on how the Malayan Communist Party is represented in official history, as “terrorists” who committed murder and arson in tin mines and rubber plantations and, in turn, “disturbed the peace of the nation” (Lau, 2016: 8:06). The narrator notes that he has no “concept” for understanding this history and asks if his grandfather who, at this point, has only been represented as a missing piece of a family portrait, is in fact a terrorist (8:10). In this sequence, the narrator points out how the official national history of the Emergency subsumes his family history. In response to the killing of several rubber plantation managers in rural Malaya, the British declared a state of emergency in 1948 which lasted until 1960. This twelve-year period witnessed a guerrilla war fought by communist members based in the jungles of Malaya. It is testament to the power of official national history, as a scale-making project, that it distils and reduces the communists’ war history to a line in an elementary school textbook. His subsequent journey with his camera is an attempt to fill in this blank, by capturing the images and stories of surviving, displaced excommunist members. Beyond his grandfather’s story, the documentary comments on the need for a “concept” to explain this absence, one not available in existing national histories. The narrator claims at the end of the documentary to have found, in the “bodies” (shen shang ) of these displaced subjects, his grandfather’s “body and shadow” (shen ying ), that is to say, a trace of his grandfather (15:05–15:22). This is a central point that the documentary makes: narratives left out of national history can be found in the bodies of those displaced across the spaces of historical Malaya and present-day Malaysia, Thailand, and mainland China.

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In the prologue of War Trash, the narrator notes that his task is to “tell my story in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy” (Ha, 2004: 4). While travelling to the United States to visit his children who live there, he writes his memoir. He intends to pass down his story as a veteran of the Korean War to his grandchildren, as he is planning to return to mainland China (Ha, 2004: 5). The novel’s opening conceit thus also addresses a family history affected by war. What triggers his impulse to document is a tattoo inscribed below his navel, which states “FUCK … U … S …”, a tattoo forcibly branded during his imprisonment on Koje Island, initially as an anti-communist slogan (“FUCK COMMUNISM”), and later transformed through surgery. Like Absent Without Leave, the body is depicted as a container for living histories of forced movement during the Korean War, which the narrator implies is otherwise unavailable in the Anglophone world. As such, he stresses the importance of writing in English, “a language that I started learning at the age of fourteen” (Ha, 2004: 5). The relationship between history and the body is further emphasized as he notes that he is on the cusp of returning to mainland China, which will “retain my bones” and be his final resting place (Ha, 2004: 4). The memoir, then, is a last act on his part to account for a missing history of the Korean War, the stories of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. These works identify the body as a motif for transnational, travelling Cold-War narratives that have been marginalized. A sequence in Absent Without Leave depicts a communist stele destroyed by Malaysian state authorities, later rebuilt and kept in secret in a warehouse by ex-communist members. Similarly, the narrator’s family hides his grandfather’s only remaining portrait for fear of retribution. These forbidden objects symbolize how commemoration is viewed as a threat to national territory in Malaysia. In Busan, South Korea, a memorial for the Korean War, known as the United Nations Memorial Cemetery, commemorates those who perished in the war. Wreaths from each nation that contributed to the United Nations Command during the Korean War are placed at the memorial, complete with national flags and symbols that seemingly mark an international territory. Its internationalization, however, does not extend to the Chinese soldiers who were on the other side of the war. The expulsion of these Chinese bodies from this territory thus follows a ColdWar logic of friend and enemy, which defines their legacy even after death (Image 3.1).

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Image 3.1 United Nations Memorial Cemetery, Busan, South Korea (© Zhou Hau Liew)

Bodies and the Jungle in Absent Without Leave If official history and archival footage render the Chinese body invisible, Absent Without Leave provides a context for its representation through editing and voiceover techniques. In the film, black-and-white footage of Malayan ecology is commented upon by an exiled communist fighter, a grey-haired woman named Zhang Ping who now lives in Guangzhou and identifies herself as an anti-colonial patriot. Dotted with villas, the countryside and hills in the archival footage are where cricket players and genteel women gather, walking in a neatly landscaped botanical garden (Lau, 2016: 23:12). Through voiceover, however, she notes their separation from the “common people”, the pastoral scene undercut by her memory of an act of violence she witnessed—a British officer kicking an Indian worker who was “mowing the lawn incorrectly” (23:33). This incident sparked her anger and frustration with the British colonial government. As she notes, “I saw it and felt it was not right – you’re a human being, he’s a human being too” (23:49). Cutting back to another grainy sequence, this time of an English couple strolling leisurely while

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workers carry firewood, the narrator poses a rhetorical question to his missing grandfather, asking if he had disappeared and left his family to join the communist fight against the British because he had seen similar injustices. This sequence shows the ecological stakes of the Cold War in Malaya. It depicts one of the main conflict zones of the Malayan Emergency—rural Malaya—and landscaping as a form of colonial power that transformed the Malayan ecology. This landscaping takes place in the countryside, near the jungle and tropical rainforest where the communists waged a guerrilla war, after the British colonial government declared the Communist Party illegal. By highlighting this space, the documentary alerts us to the importance of British control over rural ecology in the exercise of colonial power.1 It also reveals how the Malayan Emergency, which lasted from 1948 to 1960, was an extension of colonial dominance over land. In the film, depictions of ecology are accompanied by voiceovers about British rule. For instance, over black-and-white footage of the Malayan economic landscape, and shots of ports, rubber plantations, and paddy fields, the narrator imagines 1930s Malaya—the Malaya of his grandfather—as a place under British divide-and-rule. The Malays, Chinese, and Indians were separated according to their economic niches. Moreover, it depicts a hierarchy of land use: the British elite class smelling the flowers, leisurely interacting with a manicured landscape, while the coloured masses work and extract the land. This suturing of the economic with the ecological—his search for an absent grandfather brought into focus by the bodily interaction of workers with land—thus reframes the Malayan Emergency as a conflict over land. It foreshadows the exile of the communists from Malayan land, both physically and historically, as the power of British colonial rule later transforms into the deportation of Chinese bodies. In the following scene, an old, bronze bugle is laid out horizontally on a table like a museum piece. This decontextualized bugle not only evokes the jungle war of the Emergency—the bugle being a common military instrument—it also hints at the work of commemoration that the documentary conducts. If the physical and historical absence of his grandfather is due to colonial control over ecology, then the film’s representation of these exiled fighters will focus on the body to ensure their return, even if they lack citizenship of the land (Image 3.2). 1 Recent scholarship about the Malayan Emergency reinterprets it as a conflict over control of rural Malaya. See Hack (2013) and Harper (1999).

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Image 3.2 Movement of Malayan Communist Party members (© Zhou Hau Liew)

This reframing of the Emergency through the body and ecology extends its scope beyond the British and the Cold War. Reinterpreting the communist legacy in Malaya, the film presents the communist fighters as patriots who were first stirred to action by the Japanese invasion of Malaya. The narrator begins by noting that “on the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor…the Japanese, after suffering a defeat in China, invaded Malaya unexpectedly”, presenting a series of photographs of Japanese army soldiers on bicycles traversing the Malayan landscape, signifying their taking control of the land through the unfurling of the name Syonan—the Japanese name for Singapore—after its successful invasion (24:25–24:45). This is supplemented by a series of images that show various coercive techniques against the bodies of surrendered and captured Chinese men, their imprisonment and distress portrayed as revenge by the Japanese army for their losses in China. The narrator intones mournfully that “150,000 Chinese people were killed as part of a massacre”, the sequence culminating in violent images of bodies lying in a ditch as Japanese soldiers hover menacingly above, ending with two photos of unknown skulls and bones (25:22). In the reduction of these bodies to bare corporeality, the film suggests that the lack of historical

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representation of the communist fighters is directly connected with their expulsion from the land, as these bodies are unidentifiable. What the film equates here across historical eras is the liminality of the Chinese body in Malaya. It is viewed as irreconcilable with the land by various ruling and invading powers. As the narrator continues, “you (grandfather), like Malaysian Chinese during that time, you were born and raised here, but you couldn’t be a citizen of this country … if you didn’t choose to be Chinese, you had nowhere else to belong to” (20:12– 20:41). While the film is not solely about exiled ethnic Chinese, most of the ethnic Chinese fighters in the film are portrayed in city blocks and houses, whereas the sole Malay communist who is interviewed is given an extended walking scene through a village. The transition scenes of the film, which pan across the hills and jungles of Malaysia, thus show a longing for place, representing the exile of these bodies from its ecology due to the war. This can also be seen in black-and-white footage which depicts the resettlement policy undertaken by the British during the Emergency to cut off support from the rural Chinese to the communist fighters, and images of heavy weaponry used in the jungles of Malaya. Both represent ecological warfare. As Zhang Ping points out, they either starved to death or were eaten alive by animals in the jungle—a profound alienation from the tropical jungle in which they hid and fought (46:14). This disconnection is further emphasized by images of captured communists, including one of a man seated helplessly in the jungle, surrounded by British soldiers at gunpoint. Zhang notes that they were fighting through hunger and starvation, cut off from the nourishing aspects of the land. Another shot is of a British soldier standing upright, holding the severed heads of two communist fighters. This violent image shows the Chinese body literally severed from its surroundings, left behind as remains, and separated by force by the British from the land they fought on. The documentary thus shows the cost of their struggle and subsequent exile through the “afflicted body”. These images of affliction, destruction, and severance represent the flipside of what has been called “Malayanization”, the nationalization of Malaya and transformation of Chinese identity to local loyalties, here told through the perspective of those expelled from national territory (Taylor, 2019: 4). In the documentary, they provide a context for this past and, by so doing, redefine the Malayan land from a distance. They re-narrate the past from a transnational distance, showing what is left out of archival footage of the Malayan

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ecology—namely, the legacy of the jungle war and lives transformed by its violence. Besides utilizing voiceovers to recontextualize archival footage, the camera also zooms in on the bodily movements of both the narrator’s father and the communist members in exile, through little vignettes of their daily lives. Zhang, who lives in Guangzhou, remembers her past in Malaya and her sisters who still live there. The camera introduces her cooking a broth in the kitchen, a scene whose significance becomes clear as she explains how she dreams of Malaya and its landscape every night (Lau, 2016: 17:26). She recollects her childhood, playing amidst coconut trees, a space she is barred from returning to due to her communist involvement. She notes that “she can only go back to Malaya in her dreams”, and her body is trapped in the present, outside the territory of the nation-state (76:08). Her desire for mobility is only slightly sated by the condensed milk—a staple of Malayan cooking transported across borders—and dreams, a form of transport that frees her from the constraints of her ageing body. Another subject tells of her experience giving birth during the war and her later separation from her daughter as she was forced to leave Malaya for China. As she grimly notes, she was still breastfeeding her threemonth-old daughter when they were separated, though she also admits, “I did not have much milk, so I added a little condensed milk” (54:21). Exile here is exemplified by separation from her own flesh and blood. She is estranged from her daughter, who views her as a stranger who abandoned her by escaping to China. Another male subject, deported to China in 1963 after he was imprisoned by colonial authorities for twenty years, is shown limping with a walking stick, making his way through presentday Hong Kong to find the school he could have enrolled in as a student, instead of entering the jungle and joining the communist struggle for independence. These vignettes manifest the trauma of deportation and forced migration in the afflicted bodies of the communist fighters in exile. The narrator himself represents the jungle war, which mainly took place in rural Malaya, as a disruption of his homeland. His move to Taiwan is explained as estrangement from the nation’s history, which affects him as family amnesia about their involvement in the Malayan Emergency. Yet, through visual representations of the rural, he expands his family context to the larger one of anti-communist nation-building undertaken by the British and relates it to the suppressed and deported histories of the communists who lost the war. Thus, the rural landscape in the

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film is haunted by these histories. There are multiple shots of commemoration: family members burning paper money and tending to graves, and ex-communist members worshipping at the stele. These clandestine commemorations, recorded through the lens of the narrator, show a persistence of the past within the nation’s territory. The documentary’s landscape scenes, which are captured in vivid tones and long panning shots, present a horizon of remembrance which has persisted, a form of memory distinct from existing archival footage of Malaya. While that footage, edited together, shows forms of war violence against bodies and the land, this representation of the Malayan landscape refigures it as an unresolved space, haunted by the expelled ethnic Chinese. The Malaya that the narrator grew up in and understood is founded upon these expelled bodies, their stories erased by the power of national history, a Malaya built on absences and disappearances. This absent past can be glimpsed at through the archives, but it is a past without context. As the film makes clear, the legacy of this ecological severance goes beyond the exiled fighters. Returning to the family narrative, the absence of this generation—deported, exiled, and killed—affects the subsequent generation, alluded to previously through the exiles’ estrangement from their flesh and blood. Post-war rural Malaya is a profoundly alienating space for the ethnic Chinese. In contrast, a sequence features the narrator’s father, who with rare levity recounts a hard but idyllic childhood in the rubber plantation situated in the rainforest, “catching birds … going to the nearby brook … coming back covered with mud” (59:29). Here, ecology is holistic, and the body is marked through interaction rather than alienation. This sequence culminates in the father singing folk songs about weddings and farming life, alluding to bamboo sticks, hogs, rice, and duck eggs, while images of the rainforest, palm oil trees, chickens, and their house are shown. As the father explains, these were songs sung almost daily by the narrator’s grandmother while working in the rubber plantations, and he learnt to sing them over time. In contrast to the black-and-white images of violence, death, and exploitation, this poignant sequence depicts an idealized ecology of the smallholder Chinese who worked the land, its distinctive migrant Nanyang identity evident through the weaving of folk songs carried over to the Malayan landscape. Secondly, this link with place is beyond mere citizenship, as it describes a living ecology. Finally, this sequence expands on the loss of the narrator’s grandfather, as he is not only absent from his family, but also the ecology of

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rural Malaya. In the portrait of their family house in present-day Malaysia, the rainforest is still, but haunted. Thus, the documentary shifts focus from this remembrance to a corporeal memory that is represented in the unconscious of its subjects—their dream narratives of homeland that point to somewhere else from their present—and the stele structure built for lost communist fighters in the jungle that is removed, as it does not conform to Cold-War narratives that assert communist disloyalty to the nation. As one of the interviewees notes, many of the communist fighters were buried in the jungle. The narrator also notes that his grandfather was “living at the border of the jungle, because it is only here that you would not be called terrorist”. And yet, there is no final grave for his body. He remains an absent figure to his family, especially to the narrator’s father (36:54). The documentary’s perspective from the ground-up not only depicts the stories of those in exile. Its emphasis on the Malayan ecology is a form of historical scaling that shows what was involved in the Cold-War British anti-communist campaign and its impact on the ethnic Chinese, whose connection with place was upended by the war. Absent Without Leave argues that the legacy of the jungle war goes beyond what happened in the jungle temporally and spatially, as it involved the remapping of the Malayan landscape during the period of imperial withdrawal and Malayan independence. The national project—or the Cold-War “Malayanization” project—required the bodily exile from place of these ethnic Chinese communist fighters, whose legacy the documentary explores through multiple generational absences in the narrator’s family. He is not only searching for his grandfather, but also an understanding of his father, whose own absence from the narrator’s life is finally understood to be a consequence of an unaddressed trauma due to the disappearance of the grandfather. The missing grandfather, father, and the narrator’s own departure for Taiwan, emphasize absence as a structuring legacy of the rural Chinese, traceable to the jungle war’s impact on the rural ecology, and the British use of military and state power to remap the space according to their territorial imagination. At the end of the documentary, the narrator’s father is unable to pinpoint his childhood home, wandering in a place he once knew, noting that “I’m not sure where I am anymore” (86:30). It is an apt metaphor for the unresolved legacy of this unrepresented war. How does the film represent this haunting of the jungle? And what of the ending, in which the narrator’s journey diverges from his father’s?

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Referring to the exiled subjects, the narrator contends that he has found, in the process of making this documentary, many surrogate grandparents who fill in the missing story of his grandfather. His father, however, is lost in his transformed childhood home. One clue lies in an earlier scene, where the narrator notes that his father is rendered aimless without a place to go, since he has no memory of his own father, who was a part of the generation pursuing a “Malayan dream” (40:08). At one level, this represents a lost generation—the generation of the narrator’s father— that was created due to the violence of “Malayanization”. They are the war’s left behind orphans. At another level, it refers to the loss of his childhood ecology, the smallholder life that was disrupted by the war. As the documentary shows in a poetic sequence, however, it is really the lack of connection between the three generations—the narrator, his father, and grandfather—that renders the jungle an opaque space. The documentary’s scaling thus aims to generate a connection that is missing. As the narrator puts it, “this is the jungle where you (grandfather) fought and sacrificed your life; this is also where my father grew up playing, as a fatherless child; both of you have never met each other on the river that transcends time” (62:54–63:33). In this shot, the river reflects the leaves of a palm tree, its water shimmering in a darkened, tinted space. The shots prior to this are a close-up of moving ants and quiet, billowing shady trees. As such, the jungle is preserved, but refracted. It is an opaque shot that suggests the possibility of a history that can be recovered, albeit partially. The image of the river is thus a meta-statement about the documentary’s ecological scaling.

Bodies and Territoriality in War Trash If, in Absent Without Leave, the jungle and the countryside are the space where Malayan nationhood is imprinted, and in which absence is felt by the rural Chinese, Ha Jin’s novel about the Korean War, War Trash, locates historical absence in the rural landscape of Korea, specifically the Manchurian borderlands and the POW camps of Koje Island. It features extensive descriptions of landscape from the perspective of those who volunteered for the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in the Korean War. Their movement across the Yalu River leads them on a journey through war-torn lands, forced to survive against hostile forces in unfamiliar territory. After surrendering, they are imprisoned on Koje Island, held by the United Nations Command (U.N.C.) until they are repatriated.

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The legacy of war and the U.N.C. can be seen in real-life commemorations of the Korean War. Besides these Chinese soldiers, other soldiers from countries such as Turkey, the United States, and Australia also fought in Korea. As mentioned, the Korean War memorial in Busan includes wreaths from each nation that contributed to the U.N.C., complete with national flags and symbols that mark out territories, as if they are mini settlements for those who perished in the war. On the sidewalks leading to this memorial, there are multiple translations of the word “peace”. This area, now known to locals as the “U.N. area”, is home to an internationalized afterlife, where war victims have been given a second home, officially interred in another country. They live on as markers on a territory that was irrevocably changed by their entrance. Yet these spatial markers also reveal how the Korean War has been conventionally described in terms of war between nations. It is an instance of Cold-War territorial imaginaries, as the graves demarcate the ideological fault-lines of the Cold War. As land markers, they make visible the bodily remains in this space. The memorials, however, are constructed according to the logic of nationhood, and they commemorate the Korean War based on a world divided into nations. War Trash focuses on the body as a site where these territorial imaginaries manifest, while probing the ambiguities of nationhood in this conflict. In the beginning, this ambiguity is expressed via ecological scenes, from the narrator’s perspective. Crossing over to the Korean side of the Yalu River marks the narrator’s official entrance into the Korean War. In the novel, this is a prologue to the incidences that take place on Koje Island, where the issue of repatriation splits the Chinese prisoners into opposing camps, those in favour of returning to mainland China and those who desire to be sent to Taiwan and elsewhere. The Yalu split, across the Sino-Korean border, illustrates the power of imagined borders and territories that will be questioned repeatedly throughout the novel (Image 3.3). Paradoxically, the goal of these Chinese soldiers—to “defend our country” (a phrase repeated by the narrator multiple times)—requires leaving their homes and crossing the border (Ha, 2004: 8). Rather than trumpeting their heroism, the novel unfolds the ambiguities of home and homeland, through depictions of wartime ecology. Their Chineseness becomes salient, as the defence of the homeland requires them to leave national borders for a gruelling journey that ultimately ends with their imprisonment. In other words, the narrator’s journey into Korea, which

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Image 3.3 Movement of Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (© Zhou Hau Liew)

is described through his encounters with the environment, and the other participants of this war, is also a journey which gradually redefines his identity beyond the national and complicates his idea of China, rendering its imagined territory unstable. But it also applies to the Cold-War territorialities that persist after the war, as seen in the commemorative site in Busan, a world dominated by an international system represented by the United Nations. By illustrating the body and its interactions with land, Ha Jin also employs the scale of ecology, which emerges through the narration, to undercut forms of territory that are imposed through the Cold War. This scale renders ambiguous the “us and them” logic that leads to the absence of the enemy from the land after the Korean War. Through the border-crossing narrator’s observations and interactions with the environment—a view from the ground-up—the novel critiques narratives of the Cold War that are deeply penetrated by this territorial logic. It does so by refocusing the reader’s attention to ecology and settlement as shared human needs, which cut across territorial and national borders. The settlements that the narrator observes across the Yalu River provide a starting point. In the narrator’s initial crossing, he notices the extent of war damage in the “villages east of the Yalu”, which lie in ruins (Ha, 2004: 12). He describes the Korean land as a different place to

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farm, a “rugged land…where boulders and rocks stuck out of the ground everywhere” (Ha, 2004: 13). Yet, “every scrap of tillable soil was used, and even low hills were terraced with small patches of cropland” (Ha, 2004: 13). This scene of productive settlement and life-giving vitality is in contrast to the gruelling and ceaseless march that the Chinese soldiers undertake to reach the 38th Parallel—an arbitrary border dividing the Korean peninsula with “no correlation to any geographical or cultural boundary on the ground”—as they are constantly bombarded by American planes and tanks (Kim, 2019: 6). Settlement here is presented in opposition to the journey of leaving to defend their homes. Due to geopolitical considerations, these soldiers are also required to remain unmarked and unidentified, giving up markings, insignias, and IDs prior to the crossing to avoid the implications of direct conflict between China and the United States. For them, this first march across the Yalu River is a shedding of identity, a leaving of the homeland. War Trash describes this crossing in detail to highlight the ambiguities of their march, as they are reminded of their foreignness to the land. Their movement across the land is punctuated by reminders that they are trespassers and outsiders. This is accentuated by the cold and wet environment—which contains indigenous, wild, and poisonous plants— where they also encounter propaganda distributed by the United Nations. In one scene, the narrator notes: The roads we trod were strewn with leaflets, dropped by American planes and printed in both Chinese and Korean, urging us to capitulate. One had an ancient couplet on it: “How piteously the skeletons lie on the riverside / Still dreamed by many a bride!” Another showed a woodcut in which a young woman stood on the shoulder of a mountain, gazing into the distance, longing for her man’s return. (Ha, 2004: 16)

In the leaflet, the environment is portended as a future of death and unfulfillment, where they will become ghosts that haunt a foreign land, lamented by those who remember them. The roads which they traverse are transfigured into a deathly journey of no return. The novel’s poetic use of this leaflet highlights their distance from place and their un-belonging, while the skeleton emphasizes the ghostliness of those who in wartime leave and lose their homes. In contrast to the Korean peasants, who try to make a home out of the land, the novel suggests that their movement

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will lead only to unburied remains, a place where they live on as foreign ghosts. The war thus uproots these soldiers, who have no timeline for return. By the end of the march to reach the 38th Parallel, they have lost supplies and suffered casualties. Their supplies are carried by horse carts, unlike the settled peasants who till the land. After they arrive at the 38th Parallel, he notes: “like sick animals, we slept in the mountain woods for the rest of the day” (Ha, 2004: 16). Their uprooting and homelessness are described as an animal-like existence. The narrator’s observations reveal how this war strips bare their human identities. As the soldiers move across borders, their bodies shrink and waste in war conditions, until they seem to almost trespass the line between human and non-human. This bodily wastage, in the light of the propaganda leaflets especially, foreshadows a Cold-War territoriality that comes to dominate their lives through the war’s toll, its power juxtaposed with the decreasing importance of the individual body. This initial uprooting foreshadows the territorial division of Chineseness in the prisoner of war camps of Koje Island. For the imprisoned soldiers, the dominating territorial division is between the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party, a legacy of the Chinese Civil War alluded to in the novel. From 1945 onwards, the two parties fought for control over mainland China, an escalation of rivalry since 1927 that was interrupted by Japanese encroachment of China between 1937 and 1945. The civil war resulted in a communist takeover of the mainland, and the retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949, leading to an uneasy standoff between both parties throughout the Cold War. While the Korean War divisions were more than just between the Chinese—as the narrator of War Trash observes in his limited interactions with Korean communist members and prison camp guards, who occupy opposite ends of the ideological spectrum—the relative absence of Koreans from the main narrative shows the strangeness of these Cold War territorial imaginaries. The particulars of a Chinese conflict play out in a POW camp constructed on rural terrain in Korea. As the Korean environment becomes inflected by these geopolitical relationships, the soldiers embody Cold-War territorial divisions. The part of the POW camp that the Chinese soldiers inhabit is a site divided according to Kuomintang and Communist Party lines, as well as combatant and guard hierarchies. As the novel goes on to show, this logic inflects every level of the prison organization, leaving a direct impact on the soldiers’ bodies.

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Recent scholarship has framed the POW camp as a “dense node of global politics”, a Cold-War site with geopolitical implications that went beyond the local terrain of Koje Island (Kim, 2019: 10). One of its political flashpoints revolved around the issue of repatriation of Chinese prisoners of war, concerning the soldiers’ choice of country after the war, as some would return to mainland China, and others would be sent to Taiwan and other countries. The United Nations Command’s 1952 decision to introduce voluntary repatriation for these prisoners of war quickly sparked a global dispute over the fate of the soldiers resettled to Koje Island, among whom were 21,000 Chinese soldiers (Chang, 2011: 5). Both the United States and China, this war’s major powers, claimed to be following universal humanitarian principles when it came to their repatriation—the former supporting the prisoners’ own decision according to liberal freedom of choice, whereas the latter calling for the immediate repatriation of prisoners to their countries of origin, citing the Geneva Conventions (Kim, 2019: 7–8). Among the Chinese prisoners, this issue of repatriation crystallized the fault-lines that had emerged. Some of them had participated in the Chinese Civil War on opposing sides prior to the Korean War. Tattooing campaigns and infamous “blood letter” petitions sprung up as ways of declaring one’s opposition to repatriation. Violence erupted prior to the screening process conducted by U.S. authorities for gathering data and numbers in favour or against repatriation (Chang, 2011: 226; Kim, 2019: 10). In that sense, the bodies of the prisoners became a site to signify territory and place. These signals of allegiance to place speak to the powerful emotional appeal that Chinese repatriation had over the prisoners. Repatriation raised questions of loyalty, origin, and the identity of one’s imagined China. Yet these imaginaries were mediated through the foreign territory of Korea, its fault-lines emerging out of a technology of concentrating large numbers of people during the Cold War. A settlement constructed to detain war participants temporarily became a place where one’s future was determined. Further, this repatriation triggered violent incidences, where, for instance, pro-Kuomintang detainees attempted to coerce the repatriates to change their decision (Chang, 2011: 256). War Trash conveys this spatial ambiguity through the narrator’s tattoo, forcibly branded on him during one of his run-ins with pro-Nationalist prisoners. In the prologue of War Trash, it is revealed that his body is inscribed with a tattoo that says “FUCK … U … S …”, a tattoo that worries him as he attempts to enter the United States. Yet, this had been originally branded

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as “FUCK COMMUNISM” before it was partially removed upon his successful repatriation to mainland China by a quick-thinking doctor. The ambiguity of this tattoo is akin to his own subject position in the war as, at the end of the novel, he warns the reader, “do not take this to be an ‘our story’. In the depths of my being I have never been one of them. I have just written what I have experienced” (Ha, 2004: 349). By employing this incomplete tattoo as a motif throughout the novel, War Trash emphasizes not only the narrator’s struggles to survive the war and return to his hometown, but also his resistance against the territorial logic of the Cold War. Even though he served in the army battalion and followed his unit to the repatriation section of the POW camp, the narrator observes that his decision to do so was purely a personal one, not political. This refusal of politics stands in for a politics of the Cold War understood through ideological and territorial divisions, supplementing the novel’s insistence on the ground-up view of the war, through the soldiers’ bodies and their interactions with war terrain. In another scene, the narrator observes the prisoners fighting over food due to the lack of rations, and he wonders, darkly, if “some of these men would kill their siblings just for a ladle of boiled soybeans” (Ha, 2004: 68). As in their march towards the 38th Parallel, the novel uses the symbolism of the body and its deprivation to show the individual’s decay under war conditions, the destruction of human relationships and its identity, and its transformation into the feral. It portrays the hunger of the individual body as something irreducible to the political—at least the political as understood through the lens of geopolitics. The bodies of the soldiers and their wartime environment are the ground zero of these soldiers conducting the war. While they are corralled and stamped by the logic of Cold-War territorialities in the POW camp, the novel argues, they cannot be fully defined by their ideological allegiances. The narrator’s “personal decision” is thus a desire for something pre-political, as represented by the image of settlement that recurs throughout his stay in the camp. As he notes, “at night we lined up on the ground like packed fish … every two men had to share a mat made of cornstalk skins”, a bucolic image hemmed in by the logic of a concentration camp (Ha, 2004: 65). This tension between politics, ecology, and the body is thus expressed in his palimpsest-like tattoo. It is a metaphor for the erasure of history on the ground and on the move, the reduction of the individual’s complexity during wartime, and subsequent attempts to corral those involved into the nation’s field of recollection.

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As such, the narrator’s tattoo becomes emblematic of the way he conducts himself. Unlike the territorial logic of repatriation in the POW camp, he emphasizes repeatedly the basic needs and desires of these soldiers, which goes beyond factions and sides. He is loyal to his unit, but not for ideological reasons, as he constantly avoids calling himself a communist. In fact, his main loyalty is to his family and fiancée back in mainland China, and this is his main drive to survive the Korean War. Even after a symbol of Cold-War territoriality is branded upon his body, he refuses to be coerced by it, finding ways to evade its encompassing logic, by staying true to human needs, evident in his doubts about the war. As he observes in an encounter with an American officer: To be able to function in a war, an officer was expected to view his men as abstract figures so that he could utilize and sacrifice them without any hesitation or qualms. The same abstraction was supposed to take place among the rank and file too – to us every American servicemen must be a devil, whereas to them, every one of us must be a Red. Without such obliteration of human particularities, how could one fight mercilessly … The larger a victory is, the more people have been turned into numerals. This is the crime of war: it reduces real human beings to abstract numbers. (Ha, 2004: 192)

The body, which in wartime is easily reduced to mere contingency and bearers of abstraction, is restored in the novel as sacred. The “war trash”—or “mere pawn[s]” of the Korean War, as the narrator observes— refers to how these soldiers were concentrated, processed, and politicized in the POW camps, where the notion of home and homeland is transformed from the personal to a global dispute (Ha, 2004: 345). In that sense, the ecological scaling of the novel responds to this territorial scaling of bodies, returning corporeality to the individual rather than as a standin for ideology. Displaced from home and transformed into political messaging, the POW camp is a complex that erases their humanity, not merely by physical deprivation, but by the incorporation of their identities into geopolitical dispute and bargaining.2 2 Chang (2011: 254) quotes a United Nations Command announcement about repatriation that was broadcasted in the POW camp:

If your final decision is that you are violently opposed to repatriation, you may undoubtedly be held in custody here on Koje-do for many long months. However,

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Historians have noted that there were two Korean Wars, “the first over territory, the second over prisoners” (Chang, 2020: 338). In Ha’s representation, both are predicated upon this voiding of the soldiers’ control over their bodies. The return of the human, then, is depicted in several ecological scenes when the narrator leaves the camp, as he observes the Korean landscape that reminds him of his past: One day, standing at the shoulder of the eastern knoll, I had gazed at that town, whose sun-drenched tranquillity moved me. The rice paddies beyond a thin brook reminded me of the countryside near the Yangtze River, where my paternal grandparents had lived. Though strewn with rocks, the land here was pretty and peaceful, dotted with clumps of daylilies and wild chrysanthemums … if not imprisoned, I wouldn’t have minded living for a year or two in such a place, away from the turmoil of the world. If I had not been engaged to Julan or had my old mother at home, I could have imagined myself marrying a Korean woman and settling down here forever, just like many Chinese who had emigrated to Korea before the war. (Ha, 2004: 245–246)

This desire of a “common man”, as he puts it, is an image of settlement, which contrasts with his uprooting due to war (Ha, 2004: 246). Through the mention of migration, he also alludes to how borders and territories were fluid before they were hardened by this Cold-War conflict. The narrator’s in-betweenness in this war is due to a simple desire for settlement, which has now become unavailable, as they are forced to choose sides. The narrator’s ability to survive multiple situations in which his loyalty is tested thus resists the hostile logic of war. His survival is attributed to the tattoo’s almost “talismanic” quality (Ha, 2004: 3). Even though it was forcibly branded on him, the shape-shifting tattoo proves to be

the U.N.C. cannot house and feed you forever. The United Nations Command can make no promises regarding your future. In particular, the U.N.C. cannot and will not guarantee to send you to any certain place. This is a matter which you should consider most carefully … Prisoners of war will move to the interview point when called by the clerks, where they will be asked to express their decisions. They will carry their equipment and clothing with them. Depending upon each individual’s decision, he will remain in his present compound or be moved immediately.

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useful. In one incident, he is ordered to take the place of a Communist Party member in the camp while reporting to American officials. In custody as they suspect his real identity, he is asked by American officers to prove that he is not a communist sympathizer. He shows them his “FUCK COMMUNISM” tattoo as proof, even though the tattoo means nothing to him (Ha, 2004: 289). Contrary to the intention of those who branded him and wished for him to leave mainland China for Taiwan, his body takes on another quality—that of a thing in between places, in between territories, as he wonders if there is a “third choice so that I could disentangle myself from the fracas between the Communists and Nationalists” (Ha, 2004: 313). In the binary logic of the POW camp, there is no such choice, and he realizes that he needs to survive to be able to return to his mother and fiancée. He eventually returns to the mainland, even though he is nearly sent to Taiwan at the screening for repatriation. Yet his return is not complete, as the events in the Korean War mark his body even after the Cold War, with the repatriates under suspicion of disloyalty to the country. After he is repatriated back to mainland China, he asks a doctor at the processing centre for recent repatriates to remove his tattoo. The doctor suggests removing several letters in “COMMUNISM” instead, transforming it into “FUCK … U … S …”, “U … S …” standing for the United States. This later proves to be useful, as he is caught up in events of the Cultural Revolution and asked during a “struggle session” to prove his loyalty to an audience, who accuses him of “dreaming of the United States” (Ha, 2004: 347). Explaining the tattoo’s transformed meaning, he manages to convince them that he is on their side. His writing of the memoir, the novel’s opening conceit, addresses this long-standing territorial marking of his body by providing a testament to events from his point of view. As he notes, China is “the land that … will retain my bones” (Ha, 2004: 4). The writing of the memoir is thus an attempt to banish these territorial marks, such that he can finally return to the land where he is from. But this land is not merely China—it is a metaphysical land of peace and settlement that is, due to the events of the war, forever lost to him, inaccessible except in death. The tattoo’s mark is thus transfigured into a document for the future, his body to its state prior to the war. The scaling of his memoir serves to undercut the territorial hold on his body. Its ecological scale is thus a form of bodily recuperation, a final gesture against the Cold-War territorialities manifested in the Korean War.

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Conclusion Both Absent Without Leave and War Trash employ the scale of ecology to challenge the territorial scale of Cold-War national narratives. They do so by documenting the journeys of those who were forced to move and the effects of such displacement during and after the conflict. They argue that national narratives of the Cold War—be they state-sanctioned national history of the Malayan Emergency or historical commemoration of the Korean War through the United Nations—are shot through with territorial imaginaries that continue to shape and form perspectives and identities even after the Cold War. These narratives not only leave out the voices of ethnic Chinese exiles and mainland Chinese repatriates, whose involvement in Cold-War conflicts is reduced to the role of enemy in Malaysia and South Korea. They also prevent us from seeing the true impact of war on the human, as the legacy of such conflicts stretches beyond the fighters to the land, people, and generations after. Their use of ecological scaling thus shows a different Cold War beyond national remembrance. By emphasizing bodily connection with land, they remember soldiers and fighters displaced by war and its territorial logic. They highlight, in wartime, the loss of land through conflict and the difficulties of return, both physical and metaphysical. The documentary and novel thus intervene to provide a space of return, even if only located within the confines of their works. These works are documents that also open up time as an unfinished scale, by recording and transmitting ColdWar experiences to subsequent generations. They ask of us to reconsider the commemoration of the Cold War as an unfinished project, which requires both a larger scale and smaller scale than the nation, to represent those who were on the move. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Asia Culture Center for generously supporting my research on the Korean War as part of a residency fellowship from September to November 2019. Parts of this chapter appeared previously in a Korean-language volume entitled (Chinese Borderlands: Imagined Lands in Asian Cold War Narratives ) as part of the Cross-over Asia Series by the Asia Culture Center.

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References Chang, D. C. (2011). To return home or ‘return to Taiwan’: Conflict and survival in the ‘voluntary repatriation’ of Chinese POWs in the Korean War (Doctoral dissertation). UC San Diego. UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14d4n47s Chang, D. C. (2020). The hijacked war: The story of Chinese POWs in the Korean war (Kindle ed.). Stanford University Press. Fu, P., & Yip, M. F. (Eds.). (2021). The cold war and Asian cinemas. Routledge. Ha, J. (2004). War trash. Vintage Books. Hack, K. (2013). Malaya—Between two terrors: ‘People’s history’ and the Malayan Emergency. In H. Gurman (Ed.), Hearts and minds: A people’s history of counter-insurgency (pp. 17–49). The New Press. Hajimu, M. (2022). Reconceptualizing the cold war: On-the-ground experiences in Asia. https://rcw-asia.com/ Harper, T. (1999). The end of empire and the making of Malaya. Cambridge University Press. Kim, M. (2019). The interrogation rooms of the Korean war. Princeton University Press. Lau, K. H. (Producer and Director). (2016). 不即不离 [Absent without leave] [Film]. Hummingbird Production. Taylor, J. (2019). ‘Not a particularly happy expression’: ‘Malayanization’ and the China threat in Britain’s late-colonial Southeast Asian territories. The Journal of Asian Studies, 78(4), 789–808. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00219118190 00561 Taylor, J., & Xu, L. (2022). Chineseness and the cold war: Contested cultures and diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Routledge. Tsing, A. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Where Is My Homeland? Mainland Chinese Refugees and Hong Kong Tenement Films During the Cold-War Era Linda Huixian Ou

Tenement drama was once a popular film genre in Hong Kong, with a total output of over 100 films depicting the chronic social predicament of housing in the colonial enclave during the 1940s to the 1970s. These films showcase the lives of urban lodgers from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, dwelling on bunk beds in cramped partitioned rooms or along indoor corridors and sharing facilities in communal areas under the same roof. The films emphasized collective solidarity and mutual support among the tenants to overcome social crisis of various kinds. The classic tenement drama has long been regarded as a highly politicized mode of representation favoured by the left, though it has also been utilized by right-wing filmmakers. In fact, Hong Kong tenement films embody opposing political and ideological forces of the Cold War.

L. H. Ou (B) Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_4

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This chapter is an in-depth study of such films, aiming to scrutinize the cultural dimension of Cold-War conflicts in Hong Kong. It will combine textual analysis with archival research on old newspapers and film magazines to closely analyse several Hong Kong tenement films of the 1950s, including Home, Sweet Home (1950), The Show Must Go On (1952), The Dividing Wall (1952), Halfway Down (1955), and Mandarin’s Bowls (1956). The portraits of tenement life in these films reveal a range of sociohistorical problems encountered by the diasporic Chinese communities in post-war Hong Kong. They include war, displacement, mass unemployment, housing shortage, abject poverty, class struggle, gender oppression, left–right ideological confrontations, and the historical traumas and collective memories associated with them. In particular, the chapter will delve into Hong Kong’s social and cultural milieu to illuminate the popular portrayals of refugee experiences, the political functions of the tale of exile, and the contentious meanings of the concept of “homeland” through a Cold-War lens. The chapter aims to make clear how the production, circulation, and reception of a series of tenement dramas in 1950s Hong Kong cinema were strongly shaped by the ongoing impact of global Cold-War politics and British imperial politics, reflecting Hong Kong’s crucial geopolitical position as a locale of Chinese diaspora and a battlefront of the psychological warfare in Cold-War Asia.

British Hong Kong, Mainland Chinese Refugees, and the Battle for Hearts and Minds The end of World War II ushered in an age of the global Cold War, when the world was in an intensified state of strain and collisions between two power blocs defined by political and economic disparities. The western/capitalist bloc refers to the United States and its allies, who were more inclined to declare themselves as the “free world”, adopting a social order grounded on democracy and capitalism (Yip, 2017: 34). The Soviet Union and its communist allies constituted the eastern/socialist bloc, supporting a one-party system and a command economy (Yip, 2017: 34). When the Chinese communists defeated the nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, P.R.C.) in 1949, Hong Kong, a British colony situated at the South China coast, became a central battleground for ideological combat as the Chinese Civil War between the new-born communist China and the exiled nationalist regime in Taiwan

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remained unfinished (Fu, 2018: 2). Soon after the P.R.C. entered the Korean War, the “new” China was deemed an emerging menace to the free world amid bipolar rivalry (Yip, 2017: 34). Under such circumstances, Hong Kong was transformed overnight into a Cold-War frontline in Asia, the “Berlin of the East”, an aggressively contested arena among communist China, the U.S.-led “liberal camp” in alliance with nationalist Taiwan, and, more hesitantly, the British colonial administration. The twentieth century witnessed constant crisis and chaos in China. In contrast to the widespread social and political upheaval in mainland China, provoked by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War in the 1930s to the 1940s, British Hong Kong was relatively a safe haven. In consequence of this, hundreds of thousands of mainland refugees poured into Hong Kong to seek sanctuary. Particularly after the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, C.C.P.) took over mainland China and the Kuomintang (hereafter, K.M.T.) government retreated to Taiwan, the population of the colonial city swelled exponentially from 0.6 million in 1945, to 1.86 million in 1950, to over 2.8 million in 1956, and to 3.128 million by 1960 (Fu, 2018: 5). Although most of the new arrivals were destitute peasants and labourers from the neighbouring Guangdong Province struggling to survive in tumultuous times, there were also business tycoons and cultural elites from Shanghai and its environs, representing a wide spectrum of political and cultural beliefs (Fu, 2018: 5). Among these Chinese migrants, many were politically unaligned, in the hope of building a career in the politically stable colonial enclave. Some were earnest Chinese communists who had either escaped the persecution of the K.M.T. in power or been appointed to promote communism in the crown colony. There were also many former nationalist officials, their families, and their supporters who had been taking shelter in Hong Kong out of fear of political persecution since the fall of mainland China to the C.C.P. in 1949. Due to its proximity to mainland China, whose border was closed shortly after the C.C.P. had gained control of the country, along with an abundant supply of Chinese migrants, refugees, and émigrés, Hong Kong was perceived by the United States and nationalist Taiwan as a “watchtower on China”, an ideal base for espionage, surveillance, and other covert operations to contain the expansion of Chinese communism (Fu, 2020: 241; Yip, 2017: 34). Likewise, Hong Kong was of great strategic significance for the C.C.P. as an imperial outpost, a “window” to gather information about the capitalist bloc and its regional ally,

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nationalist Taiwan. Furthermore, when New China was under siege by the American-led global blockade in the early 1950s, Hong Kong served as a “ventilation shaft” through which China could get access to foreign goods and markets, and a conduit to receive foreign currency through remittances and investment from overseas Chinese, particularly the prodigious population of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (Fu, 2020: 240; Roberts, 2016: 30; Yip, 2017: 34). In this light, the tiny British colony was made use of by various competing ideological parties as an intelligence and propaganda front for the Cold-War battle to win hearts and minds, targeting not merely Hong Kong’s local residents, but also the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and around the world. With its long-established distribution networks for diasporic Chinese moviegoers stretching across Southeast Asia and the Pacific and numerous southbound film workers equipped with extensive filmmaking experience and savvy business strategies, Hong Kong’s cinema industry was on the front line of Asia’s Cultural Cold War (Fu, 2018: 3). Since Mandarin was broadly acknowledged by the ethnic Chinese-speaking communities across the region to be the official language of Chinese nationhood starting from the republican era, Mandarin cinema in 1950s Hong Kong bore the brunt of Cold-War struggles to shape the general public’s perception of the globe through their propagandistic messages, embedded with doctrines of bipolar geopolitics, to win over the politically neutral (Fu, 2018: 3). Thus, the local film industry, especially Mandarin cinema, was caught up in the cutthroat left–right tensions and contests between pro-communist “patriotic” studios and U.S.-backed pro-nationalist “free” studios (Fu, 2018: 3). However, to construct a more comprehensive picture of the complicated relationship among Hong Kong cinema, its target audience, and the Cultural Cold War in Asia, this study does not analyse only Hong Kong tenement films in Mandarin, but also those in Cantonese and English. Confronted with the complex challenges of superpower conflict, the British colonial administration reinforced its governance to preserve Hong Kong’s role as a colony for Britain’s economic interests in the “Far East”. It stayed vigilant against all sorts of political propaganda and activities that blatantly advocated either side’s ideological agendas. It applied draconian censorship and, when necessary, jailed and deported subversive pro-communist leftists and pro-nationalist rightists alike, trying to prevent any possibility of sabotaging Hong Kong’s social stability (Fu, 2018: 3, 10). Throughout the Cold War, the colonial government performed a

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delicate balancing act to justify its legitimate rule over Hong Kong. On the one hand, the British authorities strove neither to appease nor to infuriate Red China, keeping in mind Hong Kong’s reliance on China for its supply of food and water, and Hong Kong’s vulnerability to a possible attack by the mainland to take the city back by force (Chang, 2016: 143; Roberts, 2016: 28, 38). On the other hand, as Britain was a prime ally in the U.S.-led capitalist bloc, the British administration prioritized conciliation with the United States over pragmatic relations with New China (Roberts, 2016: 36). Therefore, despite claiming to be neutral and impartial towards all parties in the Cold War, British colonial officials actually adopted a more tolerant policy towards the Americans and American-backed nationalists in countering the escalating influence of Chinese communism on the territory (Fu, 2020: 241; Roberts, 2016: 35; Yip, 2017: 34). As Hong Kong offered a comparatively safe haven for Chinese migrants, refugees, and sojourners from the war-ravaged mainland in the first half of the twentieth century, the colonial enclave’s sudden population explosion inevitably gave rise to a string of social problems, among which mass unemployment and housing shortage were most severe (Kung, 1983: 156). Worse still, harsh economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations, under pressure from the U.S. to ban trade with communist China in the early 1950s, in effect cut off the colony’s economic lifeline to function as an indispensable entrepot in intermediating trade between the mainland and the rest of the world, which brought tremendous economic hardships to Hong Kong (Fu, 2018: 5; Roberts, 2016: 31). Meanwhile, among the people who relocated from the mainland to the colonial enclave for political or economic reasons were cultural workers and film talents with conflicting ideological stances and political allegiances. They were keenly aware of the mass media’s power to edify the common folk and so they were determined to infuse Cold-War ideologies into films, magazines, newspapers, and other literary works (Chang, 2016: 143–144). Fully cognizant of cinema’s popularity, both communist authorities in Beijing and the U.S.-backed nationalist government in Taipei endeavoured to enlist the support of Hong Kong’s film industry to win the hearts and minds of diasporic Chinese audiences (Yip, 2017: 35). Hong Kong cinema’s tactic of “representing China” through diverse ideological lenses exemplified the Cultural Cold War in the colony. Hong Kong filmmakers from disparate ideological camps produced social-realist

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films to describe the suffering of Chinese migrants and refugees in the British colony, evincing their attitudes towards New China and “true” China. Through the form of tenement drama, they provided lifelike representations of multifarious social problems confronted by the diasporic Chinese communities in post-war Hong Kong, with contested narratives of “homeland”.

Pro-communist “Patriotic” Cinema To galvanize support from both local and overseas Chinese for the communist revolution and the new regime, the C.C.P. and the proBeijing “patriotic” film community managed to set up a Hong Kongbased interconnected network of production and distribution facilities between 1950 and 1953, aspiring to bring stories of New China to the diasporic Chinese spectators (Fu, 2018: 13–14). Among the major leftleaning film production companies in Hong Kong, Great Wall (Chang Cheng) Movie Enterprises and Phoenix (Feng Huang) Motion Picture Company specialized in Mandarin filmmaking, with members of the latter drawn mainly from two studios founded in the early 1950s, namely the Fifties (Wushi Niandai) Motion Picture Company and Dragon-Horse (Loon-Ma) Film Company (Yip, 2017: 37). Sun Luen (Xin Lian) Film Company and its sister studio the Union (Zhong Lian) Film Enterprise were devoted exclusively to Cantonese film production (Chang, 2016: 145). Abbreviated as “Chang-Feng-Xin” (Chang Cheng, Feng Huang, and Xin Lian) today, these influential leftist studios were sponsored by the Beijing government, though they strove to hide this fact by disguising themselves as private enterprises with investment from overseas Chinese (Fu, 2018: 14). In principle, members of the pro-Beijing studios needed to acknowledge the legitimacy of the C.C.P. as the Chinese ruling government in building a new, modernized China (Fu, 2018: 12). When the Beijing authorities declared the “Provisional Measure for the Import of Foreign Films” in 1950, New China’s door was practically closed to Hong Kong cinema (Chang, 2016: 146). In stark contrast to the unrestricted importation of films before 1949, the new Chinese regime tightened regulations, severely limiting the importation of Hong Kong films. By 1952, strict controls were imposed on all Hong Kong productions. Even pro-communist studios no longer enjoyed free access to the Chinese market (Law & Bren, 2004: 153). Only after being endorsed by a central government committee as “healthy and harmless

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to the people of China” could a few Hong Kong leftist films, which were distributed by the state-subsidized Southern (Nan Fang) Film Corporation, be authorized for importation into the mainland (Fu, 2018: 14; Law & Bren, 2004: 153). Given that the local market in the colony was not big enough to sustain Hong Kong film companies, many of them turned to Southeast Asia and Taiwan for a substitute economic lifeline (Chang, 2016: 145). Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s left-wing cinema was viewed by the communists as a mighty tool of influence for winning over the ethnic Chinese, specifically in Southeast Asian countries. In fact, the fierce left–right competition over local and overseas film markets was really a struggle over the identity politics of the diasporic Chinese in a globalized Cold-War context. Post-war Hong Kong cinema was more than popular entertainment; it was also a cultural expression of Chineseness, nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, modernity, as well as gender and social inequality. At this critical juncture, Hong Kong’s leftist film cultural workers sought to promote their progressive ideology, vision for a new Chinese society, and sense of unity through cinema to the Chinese diasporas, which was consistent with the C.C.P.’s policy to take advantage of Hong Kong as “a strategic location to build a broad united front, forming alliances with supporters of all kinds (even capitalists) and winning the hearts of the politically neutral” (Yip, 2017: 42). Home, Sweet Home (1950) Home, Sweet Home (Nan lai yan) is a Mandarin film produced in 1950 by Great Wall Movie Enterprises with a southbound cast and crew including the director Yue Feng and the scriptwriter Ma Guoliang. The film revolves around a young man, Zheng Yisheng, and his fiancée, Wang Qiaolian, who relocate to Hong Kong from the turbulent mainland when the Chinese Civil War is drawing to a close. During their journey to the south, a large portion of their belongings are confiscated by the K.M.T. soldiers. When they finally arrive in the modern metropolis in the hope of an auspicious start, the young couple come across a warm-hearted fellow villager, who helps them find a place to live. There is a serious shortage of accommodation in the wake of a massive influx of Chinese war-time migrants and refugees. Soon they settle down in a cramped and spartanly furnished lodging house that has been converted to a pigeon-coop-like dormitory crammed with rows of two-person bunk beds. Both male and

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female lodgers take up residence in a wooden bunk bed, where pieces of cloth serve as doors, offering minimal privacy. The tenement house is heaving with dwellers, the bulk of whom are the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat from all walks of life. Far beneath their expectation, life in the British colony is by no means happy or easy, but rife with temptation, deception, exploitation, and misery. Ingenuous Chinese migrants fall prey to the treacherous and greedy bourgeoisie in a merciless capitalist society. Mr. Zhou, a speculator who runs a gold exchange shop and lives in a luxury mansion, rapes Qiaolian, who works for him as a domestic servant. Qiaolian’s brother, Fuquan, who came to Hong Kong a few months earlier to make a living, dies of infection in detention after being bitten by a ferocious watchdog guarding Zhou’s mansion. Having suffered six months of unemployment, Fuquan had resorted to burglary out of desperation. Yisheng, following the good-natured advice of his working-class friends, spends most of his money in an effort to build social connections in a Chinese society where the cultivation of relationships matters a great deal. And yet, he still loses his new job as a kitchen helper when his profit-seeking restaurant manager chooses to obey Zhou’s instructions to dismiss him immediately. Lao Luo, Yisheng’s flat-mate and friend, is a jobless jailbird. While in prison some months ago, his vulnerable wife, Meiying, was raped by Zhao Tian and coerced into being his mistress. Zhao Tian, a gold dealer and Zhou’s regular client, gets upset when he loses money. He treats Meiying even more cruelly, demanding 500 dollars from her in exchange for her freedom. Since Lao Luo cannot find a job, it is Meiying’s compassionate friend Xiao Hong who helps purchase her freedom with the money she has saved working as a prostitute. At her recommendation, Meiying finds work as a waitress in the same restaurant where Yisheng works as a kitchen boy. Things do not get very much better. The mercenary manager forces Meiying to bow down to Zhou and other supercilious male customers. Under Zhou’s instructions, Zhao Tian intimidates Yisheng, hounding him out of Hong Kong right away. With the help of his fellow lodgers, Yisheng escapes and goes in search of Qiaolian. When the distraught man finds his fiancée in Zhou’s bedroom, he slaps her, thinking she has become his mistress. Disgraced by Zhou’s sexual abuse and Yisheng’s contempt, Qiaolian attempts to take her own life by jumping into a nearby river, but she is rescued. Back in the tenement, Qiaolian cannot hold back her tears. Her fellow lodgers sympathize with her.

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Qiaolian’s mother, who came to visit her at the tenement house and was astounded by how the younger generation had been in the throes of unemployment, oppression, and frustration in Hong Kong, regrets sending her children to the crown colony, where her son’s life ended in agonizing death and her daughter ended up a victim of sexual assault. The landlady, however, shows no mercy, remarking with a nonchalant air that such fates are quite common in this city. Unable to endure life in British Hong Kong, the cohort of Chinese migrants—“the wild geese that moved to the South”—depart the cursed city by train for their homeland. At that moment, they are only too glad to hear that China has been liberated by the C.C.P. Through the use of melodrama to portray the ruling and upper classes as evil oppressors and the underprivileged and socially vulnerable people (especially women) as the kind, hardworking, and downtrodden masses, Home, Sweet Home is reminiscent of the classic left-wing Shanghai cinema of the golden era from the 1930s to the 1940s and the Hong Kong tenement films of the 1940s. The political message in the film is palpably calculated to condemn the corruption of the nationalist government, foreground the colonial ordeals and the hypocrisy of Hong Kong’s capitalist society, and support the victory of the Chinese communist revolution with a newfound patriotism. In common with Hong Kong tenement films of the 1940s, the tenement house offers insights into the depressing human condition of Chinese migrants and refugees in colonial Hong Kong. In the context of a dire housing crisis, the tenement house in the film functions not simply as a domestic space for sleep and rest, but also as a social space where a cluster of biologically unrelated Chinese people gather, interact, and realize that they are travellers on the same boat, where solidarity is fostered within and across classes and genders to grapple with hardship in an egregious social milieu, and where a unanimous decision is taken among the diasporic Chinese communities to return to their homeland. The propaganda message to overseas Chinese is clear: life in New China under the rule of the C.C.P. is more promising than that in republican China or colonial Hong Kong. The Show Must Go On (1952) Dragon-Horse, a sister studio of Great Wall on the left of the ideological and political filmmaking spectrum, produced The Show Must Go On (Jianghu ernu) in 1952. Originally scripted by the eminent Shanghai

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director Fei Mu, who died before its completion, the film project was taken over by two southbound filmmakers, Zhu Shilin and Qi Wenshao. Bearing a close resemblance to Home, Sweet Home, The Show Must Go On delineates the adversities and struggles of an acrobatic troupe comprising a batch of mainland fugitives taking shelter in Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War. The group of men and women, both young and old, live together, like a family, in a tenement house, in which everybody does their bit to earn a living for the whole community. Since they can hardly make ends meet in the British colony that is overshadowed by an economic slump, the troupe members are often famished, which results in the accidental death of a starving little performer who falls from great height to the ground during her performance. In the grip of poverty and hunger, the troupe reluctantly performs in a dance hall, a place of materialistic comfort and pleasure. Tang, the lecherous and profit-driven ballroom manager, insists that Hehua, the beautiful female principal performer and only child of the troupe founder Xiao Zhongyi, dresses in a see-through costume for the pleasure of his male customers. The troupe leaves furiously as there is no room for negotiation. In compensation for “breach of contract”, the troupe’s props are confiscated by Tang’s subordinates. Discouraged by the daunting prospects in Hong Kong, a few troupe members bid Zhongyi a sad farewell and leave one after another. Zhongyi realizes that he should not have been so stubborn and resolves to stage their shows on the streets, aiming to raise funds for their trip back to their motherland. They are successful and their street performances are greeted with rapturous applause. But just as they are about to raise enough money for the trip, several hooligans start to harass them for protection money. The male leading performer Tie Zhu, Hehua’s fiancé, gets into a fight with a thug and is stabbed in the back. With Tie Zhu incapacitated, Hehua forces herself to perform in spite of her pregnancy. Unfortunately, she falls during her solo performance and is sent to hospital promptly. Unable to afford Hehua’s medical expenses, Tie Zhu, who has not yet recovered from his physical injury, has no choice but to accept an invitation to perform in a dangerous act at Manager Tang’s dance hall. In the nick of time, two fellow acrobats who have just come back from the mainland save the day. They inform the troupe that China’s political and economic situation has drastically improved after liberation. The troupe decides eventually to give up their nomadic way of life in the crown colony, where

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they are despondently plagued by capitalist exploitation, mass unemployment, destitution, classism, gender inequality, and societal violence. They return to their homeland with enthusiasm to start a new life with Hehua and Tie Zhu’s new-born baby, signifying hope and a brighter future. The film has an anti-nationalist slant, which is expressed explicitly through the open captions at the outset that explain why this band of Chinese circus performers went into exile in Hong Kong—they could hardly get by in a corrupt society at the hands of “nationalist bandits” led by Chiang Kai-shek. Yet, their life in the British colony is no better than in the old days, and so they pine for their motherland. When New China is established, this exiled Chinese community ultimately reaches a consensus on returning to their homeland, to escape being further exploited in capitalist Hong Kong. In view of an intense Cold-War ideological battle fomenting in the territory, with “threats” of an ever-expanding communism, the British authorities rapidly took measures to stem the deepening leftist influence on Hong Kong cinema. For example, they arrested and expelled ardent progressive filmmakers and cultural workers who had instigated a labour dispute through “study groups” organized among the employees at Li Zuyong’s pro-nationalist Yung Hwa studio in early January 1952 (Law, 1990: 16–17; Law & Bren, 2004: 154). A few days later, 10 leftist filmmakers, scriptwriters, and actors were accused of subversive activities to promote communism in Hong Kong film circles, and hence were arrested and banished from the colony (Law & Bren, 2004: 154). The Dividing Wall (1952) The colonial government’s interference dealt a blow to the Hong Kong film industry, particularly in the case of leftist filmmaking. For instance, The Dividing Wall (Yi ban zhi ge) is a prominent Dragon-Horse production directed by Zhu Shilin and scripted by the credited screenwriter Wen Bai, a pseudonym for a collective of writers including Qi Wenshao, Bai Chen, Lu Yu, and Situ Wenxin. The production of this tenement drama was substantially impeded in 1952 because several pivotal members of its cast and crew, such as the male lead Liu Qiong who initially played the role of “Chen Qiang”, and two scriptwriters Bai Chen and Qi Wenshao, were deported back to the mainland owing to the Yung Hwa strike. Following the left-wing cinematic tradition of 1930s–1940s Shanghai, the film was elaborately crafted with a sympathetic depiction of the petty

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urbanites living within a shabby lodging house (Fu, 2018: 18). It criticizes colonial capitalism through a story about a teacher Chen Qiang working at a commercial primary school and a typist Chen Youqing employed in an import and export company. Both of them struggle in British Hong Kong, beset by a housing shortage, widespread unemployment, poverty, social inequality, and hypocrisy. Dejection at work, compounded by the discomfort of a restricted co-living space, causes an escalation of friction between the two male tenants who reside in adjoining quarters separated by a flimsy wooden wall. Their new neighbour living under the same roof, Miss Hua, is a caring person, a dedicated teacher at a left-leaning primary school. She helps the two troubled men resolve their conflicts by helping them realize their common fate in a capitalist society under colonial rule. The film bears a conspicuous similarity to previous Hong Kong cinematic tenement dramas for its patriotic theme of “returning to the homeland”. However, taking into account the clear warning against growing left-wing infiltration into the local film industry issued by the colonial authorities who were expelling leftist filmmakers and cultural workers from Hong Kong, the mobilizing message in this tenement film is more subtle. Only Miss Hua returns to her homeland for a reunion with her fiancé, whilst the two male tenants remain in Hong Kong. Chen Youqing removes the slat partition that not only divides his room from Chen Qiang’s, but also blocks their eyes and hearts from connecting. The symbolism is obvious: the two men will continue their struggles in the colonial enclave, but now with empathy and mutual support. Before 1950, there was no system of film censorship in Hong Kong. It was introduced in the early 1950s to enable colonial administrators to exercise stringent regulation of film exhibition (Ng, 2008: 24–26). The British administration, wary of the dangers of motion pictures as ideological weapons deployed by international powers in the Cold-War rivalry, sought to maintain stability in a territory that was witnessing frenetic left–right clashes and to pursue its economic interests amidst bipolarized global politics. Thus, the British colonial administration established official film censorship regulations by stealth in 1953 to ban films with offensive or provocative contents that might “affect (their) relations with neighbouring states or create internal trouble” (Ng, 2008: 27). The control of visual imagery on celluloid was an attempt by the colonial government, who had taken cinema’s attributes of transnationality and boundary-crossing into consideration, to restrain the flow of

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images and ideologies across borders (Ng, 2008: 23). In hindsight, colonial film censorship was implemented for over thirty years without much public awareness, maintaining the illusion of Britain’s strategy of “noninterference” in wrestling with pro-communist and pro-nationalist forces to alleviate the perils of the Cold War in the free port (Ng, 2008: 27). An outcome of the colonial government’s surveillance and control of screen culture was the disappearance of radical anti-colonial elements and the patriotic theme of “returning to the homeland” in leftist films. Instead, Hong Kong’s left-wing cinema applied a softer touch, to be both educational and entertaining, following the essential principle of “guiding the audiences to do good” (dao ren xiang shan) (Yip, 2017: 41). This coincided with the fact that Hong Kong tenement films made around and after 1953 by the leftist camp focused more on the intricacies of human relationships and the hypocrisy of capitalist society. They did this through a collective sketch of the petit bourgeoisie and the lower classes within a derelict and overcrowded tenement house to present a microcosmic depiction of the horrendous living conditions in Hong Kong’s lower depths of society. This trend was exemplified by the Union’s In the Face of Demolition (Weilou chunxiao, 1953), Dragon-Horse’s House Removal Greeting (Qiaoqian zhi xi, 1954), and Between Fire and Water (Shui huo zhi jian, 1955). All these films in either Cantonese or Mandarin dwelled on the plight of the underclass living under one roof in Hong Kong’s slum areas, but concluded with the diasporic Chinese communities carrying on the struggle in the British colony with determination and solidarity. At first glance, they were examples of social-realist cinema, offering audiences moral education through true-to-life representation of the social problems in the colonial city without an overt anti-colonial sentiment. But the implied criticism that it was the capitalist-colonialist status of Hong Kong that caused the masses to suffer could be discerned, especially by Southeast Asian overseas Chinese moviegoers who were able to identify with the film characters for their shared victimhood under colonial capitalism (Fu, 2018: 18).

U.S.-Backed Pro-nationalist “Free” Cinema The exiled K.M.T. regime in Taiwan upheld its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of China and the custodian of the Chinese civilization by demeaning the C.C.P. as betrayers who had sold out to the Soviets (Fu, 2018: 20–21). Acknowledging the strategic significance of

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the psychological warfare in creating a global anti-communist campaign with the ultimate goal of “fighting back to the mainland” (fan gong dalu), Chiang Ching-kwo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son responsible for Taiwan’s intelligence at the time, launched a new initiative to utilize films as ideological vehicles for political propaganda (Fu, 2018: 21). With respect to both filmmaking technology and Mandarin-speaking film talents, however, the film industry in Taiwan was too small and underdeveloped for an ambitious cinematic psywar. Instead, the K.M.T. government viewed British Hong Kong, which had a relatively well-built entertainment infrastructure and overseas distribution network and, more importantly, a bountiful community of exiled filmmakers and cultural workers, as a well-suited site to start the psychological battle for hearts and minds (Fu, 2018: 21). Since communist China closed their mainland market, the nationalists strove to elicit support for the propaganda war from southbound film industry personnel by offering various types of financial assistance to help them survive in the crown colony (Fu, 2018: 21). The nationalist strategy of cinematic containment gained America’s full support as it operated in congruence with the United States’ global efforts to counter the expansion of communism, especially in resource-rich, politically tempestuous Southeast Asia (Fu, 2018: 26). Since the United States Information Service and the Central Intelligence Agency (hereafter, C.I.A.) regarded the diasporic Chinese—in particular, mainland refugees in Hong Kong and the ethnic Chinese population in Southeast Asia—as the chief targets of the American anti-communist crusade in Asia, the U.S. took a pragmatic route by cooperating with the nationalists to win these people’s allegiance to Chiang’s regime (Fu, 2018: 26). On this score, it was cinema in Mandarin, not in Cantonese or other Chinese dialects, that appeared at the forefront of the Cultural Cold War in the 1950s, when the U.S.-backed nationalists competed with the Chinese communists for overseas Chinese audiences. Mandarin was not only accepted as the common language of ethnic Chinese communities of different native tongues spread across the region, but it was also “a hegemonic language of Chineseness” enforced by the rival regimes across the Taiwan Strait as a means to “impose national unity and cultural cohesion” (Fu, 2018: 26–27). Meanwhile, in 1956, the pro-K.M.T. film professionals Wang Yuanlong, Zhang Shankun, and Hu Jinkang founded the Hong Kong and Kowloon Filmmakers Free General Association Limited, which was renamed one year later as the Hong Kong and Kowloon Cinema and

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Theatrical Enterprise Free General Association Limited (hereafter, the Free Association) (Wong, 2001: XXII). Nominally, a union for Mandarin film artists in Hong Kong, the Free Association, which was given the objective to “shoulder the responsibility for a counterattack against the C.C.P. on the front line of art”, was virtually under the sway of the nationalist authorities in Taipei (Mak, 2021: 17). It served as a censorship apparatus, a gatekeeper deciding what Hong Kong films could be released in Taiwan, one of the major film markets of Hong Kong when the mainland’s door was shut (Yip, 2017: 47). Filmmakers and cultural workers affiliated with the Free Association were called “free film workers” (ziyou yingren) committed to a “free cinema” (ziyou yingye) in support of “free China” (ziyou zhongguo), which referred to Taiwan, and their films could be circulated to the “free world” (Chang, 2016: 145; Fu, 2018: 24; Yip, 2017: 47). In this sense, the left–right Cold-War rivalry was institutionally consolidated in Hong Kong’s film industry through a binary division of “patriotic” cinema versus “free” cinema, communism versus freedom (Fu, 2018: 24). Apart from shoring up the exiled nationalist regime in its psywar against pro-communist cinema in Hong Kong, the U.S. energetically engaged in funding covert propaganda efforts to curb the spread of communism. Without bearing a U.S. label, the Asia Foundation (hereafter, A.F.) was an American organization for the anti-communist cause in Asia. The A.F. was established initially as the Committee for Free Asia (hereafter, C.F.A.) in 1951, until its name was changed in 1954 (Leary, 2012: 549). Carefully camouflaged as a non-governmental philanthropic organization, the A.F. obtained a substantial government subsidy from the C.I.A. for the purpose of “disseminat[ing] throughout Asia a negative vision of Mainland China, North Vietnam, and North Korea” (Lee, 2017: 520). Since the A.F.’s first president, Robert Blum, recognized the imperative of combating communism in the cultural arena to win the battle for hearts and minds in Asia, it was the A.F.’s top priority to mobilize journalists, writers, and opinion leaders to oppose the pro-communist forces through a variety of underwritten activities, including conducting research on Asia, writing and distributing non-communist literature, publishing news about the free world, and making feature films to advocate for a capitalist social imaginary based on freedom and material prosperity (Lee, 2017: 520–521; Yip, 2017: 34). In mid-1952, the C.F.A. accepted a proposal from a right-leaning journalist, Chang Kuo-sin, in Hong Kong. In an attempt to offset the

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“Red” penetration into Hong Kong cinema and other media, Chang in his “A Tri-Dimensional Project for the Battle for People’s Minds” proposed to form a triumvirate of cultural apparatuses—a publishing house, a film production company, and an intellectual club—which could mutually benefit from one another in producing books, magazines, and films to proclaim “traditional free values of China and the principles of the Free World” (Lee, 2017: 523). With financial assistance from the C.F.A., Chang’s anti-communist scheme was carried into effect with the publishing unit, the Asia Press, coming first in September 1952. The Asia Press succeeded in constructing an intricate network for publication, distribution, and retail of anti-communist materials in Chinese between 1952 and 1960, whilst some of its published works by non-communist Chinese authors were adapted on celluloid for the second component, Asia Pictures, a film company set up in the existing Yung Hwa studio in July 1953 (Leary, 2012: 549; Lee, 2017: 523). During its short lifespan, between 1953 and 1958 when it produced a limited repertoire of nine Mandarin films, Asia Pictures took up the mission to compete against the pro-Beijing Great Wall Movie Enterprises, whose successful productions at the box office brought it popular and critical acclaim in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Southeast Asia (Lee, 2017: 523; Yung, 2009: 125). Asia Pictures aimed to make films “promoting the principles of democracy and freedom and condemnatory of Communist totalitarianism” (Lee, 2017: 523). The third component, an anti-communist talent club, however, failed to be granted full consent by the C.F.A. over its legality (Leary, 2012: 549). Even though Chang’s projects to disseminate American propaganda received significant financial support from the C.F.A./A.F., Chang convinced the U.S. representatives that his anti-communist projects must be managed by the Chinese and their connections with America and American subsidies must be shrouded in secrecy to prevent them from being labelled by their political opponents as products of “American imperialism” (Leary, 2012: 554). As previously mentioned, after the communist takeover of China, Hong Kong became an asylum for a mass exodus of mainland fugitives, the majority of whom were ex-K.M.T. cadres, their families, and their adherents. The C.C.P. refused to readmit these people to the mainland. The exiled K.M.T. authorities in Taiwan, who eventually took several thousand of them, were reluctant to admit the remainder (Roberts, 2016: 39). In the first few months, an old fort on Mount Davis on western Hong Kong Island was turned into a refugee camp to accommodate the

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nationalist émigrés. However, it became a target for demonstrations by communist sympathizers in June 1950, which resulted in vicious left–right confrontations (Roberts, 2016: 39). To avoid further social unrest, the colonial government transferred six thousand refugees to Tiu Keng Leng (also known as Rennie’s Mill) one week later. Located far away in the New Territories, the new settlement was soon swamped by an additional 10,000–20,000 likeminded asylum-seekers (Roberts, 2016: 39). These exiles, many of whom were former middle-class professionals and intellectuals, now had to build makeshift squatter huts with planks, take up a marginalized existence collectively in the refugee camp, and learn to get by on odd jobs (Fu, 2018: 5; Ng, 1990: 33). Halfway Down (1955) Hong Kong literature, in consequence, started to feature refugees and exiles. Struggle of Humanism (Banxialiu shehui), which was written by the pro-nationalist refugee intellectual Chao Tse-Fan and published initially by the Asia Press in July 1953, is a representative work of this genre. Since this anti-communist fiction gained enormous popularity among the nationalist adherents in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it was adapted into a melodramatic film entitled Halfway Down (Banxialiu shehui) by Asia Pictures in early 1955 with Tu Guangqi as director and Yi Wen as screenwriter. Undoubtedly, Halfway Down is a right-wing riposte to the left’s Home, Sweet Home and The Show Must Go On, as it captures the trials and tribulations of a cluster of intellectual exiles who flee from communist-controlled China and form a refugee community in a Hong Kong squatter settlement. These mainland émigrés of all ages and genders live like an extended family bound together not by kinship but ideological belief. They reside in connecting rooms within the same or adjacent squatter huts in a refugee camp located in Tiu Keng Leng, which has become their spiritual fortress. Unlike the clear and emphatic anticommunist stance in the original work of fiction, the political messages conveyed by the cinematic adaptation are implicit but unmistakable. To begin with, it is to escape the rule of a new totalitarian (communist) regime that these pro-nationalist Chinese intellectuals, former K.M.T. officials, soldiers, and their families become downtrodden refugees in colonial Hong Kong. A dying professor brings with him a pouch of soil from their homeland to remind the exiled Chinese never to forget their mission to reclaim the mainland. Furthermore, in a plaintive song sung

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in unison during the Mid-Autumn festival, one of the most important traditional festivals in Chinese culture to celebrate family reunions, the exiled community expresses their wistful yearning for their homeland and their utter resolution to return home someday to rebuild their dilapidated villages. In their song, they vow to kick out all the beasts (which signify the C.C.P.). The political implications of both the soil and the song echo the nationalist slogan of “fighting back to the mainland”. The film ends with these idealistic intellectuals remaining in the British colony with solidarity and hope, despite the conflicts, plights, and torments that they have experienced in Hong Kong. This indicates that they would rather endure suffering and pain in exile as humans with free will than languish in communist-occupied China, where they believe they would be deprived of their personal liberty, dignity, and security. As soon as Halfway Down was completed, it was circulated for public screening in Asian countries and districts that belonged to the “free world”, beginning with Taiwan in September 1955, followed by Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong in November 1955, January 1956, and March 1957, respectively (Su, 2014: 385). But some pro-nationalist film critics were disappointed at the cinematic adaptation, arguing that the transformation of a compelling anti-communist social-realist drama into a conventional romantic melodrama undermined the ideological underpinnings of the original text (Su, 2014: 386). Without a sense of fear or paranoia generated by the classic Cold-War movies from Hollywood, Halfway Down might not be regarded as an effective anti-communist propaganda film. Not to mention the fact that it spotlights the benefits of collective solidarity over individualism; the appalling living conditions of the underprivileged Chinese in the British colony; the cruel exploitation of women and children in a patriarchal society; the rejection of Hong Kong’s materialistic temptations and capitalist lifestyle that are usually characterized as ignorance of traditional ethics, self-dignity, and nationalistic conscience; and, lastly, a profound melancholic longing for homeland, all of which are ironically the motifs seen more frequently in the leftist cinema of post-war Hong Kong and 1930s–1940s Shanghai (Law & Bren, 2004: 157; Leary, 2012: 552; Yip, 2017: 45). To accomplish its ideological purpose, the film could have elaborated on the experiences of these displaced Chinese people in communist-occupied China, featuring for example the deprivation of individual rights and freedoms, to accentuate the menace of Chinese communism, as found in Chao’s writing. However, if the accent on romance was the screenwriter

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Yi Wen’s personal preference, and the reshaping of a social-realist drama into a melodrama was to satisfy most Chinese moviegoers’ viewing preference at the time, the oblique attacks on the C.C.P. and the deletion of the sensational plot of shipping the pro-nationalist mainland émigrés from Hong Kong to Taiwan were due in large part to the film artists’ reaction to rigorous colonial film censorship that banned politically sensitive pictures during the Cold War. Asia Pictures’ founder Chang Kuo-sin prudently abandoned the popular theme of “Return to Mother China”, seeing how a number of films based on it had been barred from exhibition in Hong Kong (Leary, 2012: 553). The Mandarin’s Bowls (1956) Another right-wing film bringing up the subject of Chinese refugees in 1950s Hong Kong cinema is The Mandarin’s Bowls (Taipingshan xia, aka Nu haidao baozang ), co-directed by Tu Guangqi and Huang Tianshi in 1956 as Dragon Motion Picture Corporation’s inaugural production. It is the first Hong Kong movie filmed in English dialogue and yet it has received scant scholarly attention. The film is about a young Americanborn Chinese lady named Aileen Cheng who comes to Hong Kong to conduct research for her dissertation on a mysterious Chinese pirate of the 1830s. In the British colony, she is advised by Dr. Lau, a professor and refugee from mainland China, to scout around for archival materials about the pirate. When she learns that the venerable professor has not found a teaching position in Hong Kong, Aileen wonders why Dr. Lau does not move to the United States. This question appears natural and apolitical at first blush, but it really points quite favourably to the U.S. as a democratic, open-minded, and prosperous country with a freer social environment and more job opportunities. Dr. Lau replies sincerely that he has a moral obligation to help the mainland refugees in Hong Kong and to struggle along with his fellow compatriots. From the conversation, Aileen comes to realize that a host of Chinese refugees, many of whom are intellectuals and professionals, have been taking shelter in the colonial enclave, leading a pathetic life in squatter huts since the C.C.P. took control of the mainland. At first, Aileen is apathetic about the issue of Chinese refugees. However, as she needs for her research an antique book possessed by Dr. Lau’s former student Richard King, a young member of the exiled Chinese community, Aileen visits the squatter settlement, only to find that it has burnt down. The

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Chinese refugees are resettled temporarily in a decrepit old temple, where Richard and his sister are engrossed in tending to the disaster victims whilst Dr. Lau continues to share with Aileen what he knows about the pirate and hidden treasure. A gang of thugs eavesdrop on their conversation and conspire to steal the treasure. They surreptitiously follow Aileen and her friends to a cemetery and attack them the instant Richard unearths an antique bronze bowl engraved with the vital clue about the pirate’s treasure. Thanks to the timely intervention of the Hong Kong marine police, the thugs surrender with the buried treasure eventually uncovered. During this adventure, Aileen, a bookworm preoccupied by her research and oblivious to her surroundings, becomes inspired by the exiled Chinese intellectuals to nurture a caring heart for people in need. Instead of returning to the U.S., Aileen remains in Hong Kong in the end and casts her lot with Richard as they carry out relief work for the Chinese refugees. After the founding of the P.R.C., Hong Kong—a city of refugees— produced a multitude of Mandarin and Cantonese films portraying the woeful life of mainland Chinese fugitives in the British colony (“Chinese Actors”, 1956). The Mandarin’s Bowls was the first Chinese film that featured English dialogue, making it accessible to international audiences, in particular the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asian countries who speak different languages and dialects (“Chinese Actors”, 1956; “The Mandarin’s Bowl”, 1956). As Ping-Kwan Leung (2012: 56) has argued, even though Hong Kong films of the 1950s were by and large guided by the bipolarized politics of the left and the right, one side depicting the other as corrupt and oppressive, these films nevertheless shared certain characteristics in common. They emphasized the power of cooperation and unity among disadvantaged Chinese people in the construction of an ideal space for their community. Even though anti-communist denunciation in The Mandarin’s Bowls was muted by colonial film censorship, the film ends with a young lady from the U.S. joining a young exiled Chinese intellectual to do welfare work in British Hong Kong. This could be interpreted— through a Cold-War lens—as close collaboration between the U.S. and pro-nationalist forces to deliver humanitarian aid to mainland émigrés from communist China. Both The Mandarin’s Bowls and Halfway Down worked in tandem with the ruling principle of Sir Alexander Grantham, the 22nd Governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, to make Hong Kong “a living

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example for the Chinese of a free life” to be disseminated throughout South China and beyond, by taking advantage of colonial Hong Kong’s special position where people from both communist China and the free world encountered each other every day (Roberts, 2016: 37–38).

Coda In view of Hong Kong’s strategic role and the power of cinema to promote doctrines and ideologies of bipolar geopolitics, this chapter has argued that Hong Kong tenement dramas of the 1950s were more than just entertainment; they were also ideological devices deployed by both pro-communist leftists and pro-nationalist rightists in the Cold-War battle for hearts and minds under broad practices of colonial censorship. By casting a miscellaneous collection of lodgers inhabiting cramped and ramshackle tenement houses—oftentimes located in urban slums or refugee camps—these tenement films not only capture the diversity of mainland Chinese migrants and refugees taking shelter in British Hong Kong, but they also enable multiple narrative threads to occur naturally so that a wider cross-section of the colonial city—afflicted by the huge inrush of people from mainland China, the ensuing housing shortage, mass unemployment, grinding poverty, gender and social inequality—is displayed. Tenement life in the storytelling functions as a microcosm of post-war Hong Kong’s quotidian communal life, in which the predicaments of the diasporic Chinese communities come to the foreground. The chapter contends that the renderings of refugee experiences, the tales of exile, and the contentious claims of “homeland” were not simply cinematic representations of Hong Kong’s social reality in the 1950s, but strategic narratives and cultural manifestations of political and ideological allegiance, which served a larger political end for the identity politics of overseas Chinese in Cold-War Asia. Focusing on Hong Kong tenement films, this chapter sheds light on the intersections among lived experiences, ideological beliefs, and contested identities of Chinese migrants and refugees in Hong Kong in the early stages of the Cold War and the complex interplay between cinema and the Cultural Cold War in Asia.

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Roberts, P. (2016). Cold War Hong Kong: Juggling opposing forces and identities. In P. Roberts & J. M. Carroll (Eds.), Hong Kong in the Cold War (chap. 1, pp. 26–59). Hong Kong University Press. Su, W. C. (2014). Zai lu shang: Zhao Zifan Banxialiu shehui yu dianying gaibian de qujing zhi dao (On the road: From Zhao Zi-Fan’s novel Struggle of Humanism to film adaptation). Chengda Zhongwen Xuebao (Chinese Journal of National Cheng Kung University), 45, 373–404. “The Mandarin’s Bowl”. (1956, March). International Screen, 6. Wong, A. L. (2001). Preface. In J. Au-Yang (Ed.), An age of idealism: Great Wall & Feng Huang days (Monographs of Hong Kong film veterans, Vol. 2, pp. XVI–XXVII). Hong Kong Film Archive. Yip, M. F. (2017). Closely watched films: Surveillance and postwar Hong Kong leftist cinema. In K. Fang (Ed.), Surveillance in Asian cinema: Under eastern eyes (chap. 2, pp. 33–59). Routledge. Yung, S. S. (2009). Weidu jiekang; zhenghe lianheng—Yazhou chubanshe/Yazhou yingye gongsi chutan (Containment and integration: A preliminary study of the Asia Press-Asia Pictures). In A. L. Wong & P. T. Lee (Eds.), Lengzhan yu Xianggang Dianying (The Cold War factor in Hong Kong cinema) (pp. 125–141). Hong Kong Film Archive. “Zhongguo yanyuan shouci paishe de yingyu duibaipian—Taipingshan xia (Chinese actors and actresses play in a Chinese film in English dialogue for the first time—The Mandarin’s Bowls )”. (1956, February). International Screen, 5.

Filmography Between Fire and Water (Shui huo zhi jian), Dir. Zhu Shilin, Dragon-Horse Film Company, 1955, Mandarin. Halfway Down (Banxialiu shehui), Dir. Tu Guangqi, Asia Pictures, 1955, Mandarin. Home, Sweet Home (Nan lai yan), Dir. Yue Feng, Great Wall Movie Enterprises, 1950, Mandarin. House Removal Greeting (Qiaoqian zhi xi), Dir. Zhu Shilin, Dragon-Horse Film Company, 1954, Mandarin. In the Face of Demolition (Weilou chunxiao), Dir. Lee Tit, The Union Film Enterprise, 1953, Cantonese. Mandarin’s Bowls (Taipingshan xia, aka Nu haidao baozang), Dir. Tu Guangqi & Huang Tianshi, Dragon Motion Picture Corporation, 1956, English. The Dividing Wall (Yi ban zhi ge), Dir. Zhu Shilin, Dragon-Horse Film Company, 1952, Mandarin. The Show Must Go On (Jianghu ernu), Dir. Zhu Shilin & Qi Wenshao, DragonHorse Film Company, 1952, Mandarin.

CHAPTER 5

Grand Strategies and Everyday Struggles Under the New Cold War and COVID-19: A Sociological Political Economy John Wei

The ongoing geopolitical tensions and conflicts between China and the United States on various fronts including trade, technology, and national security have marked an escalating “New Cold War” (or “Warm War”) in the current global superpower competition between a rapidly rising power in the East and an established but declining incumbent in the West. Further, both the geopolitical tensions and people’s living conditions have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected and

Another paper by the author, focusing on similar issues but through a different framework, is under review for publication at the time of this book’s publication. The two essays share some content between them, each with a different twist. J. Wei (B) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_5

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will continue to shape the superpower rivalry and the post-COVID-19 socioeconomic recovery in China, the United States, and many places inbetween. Focusing on Asia, this chapter interrogates the current narratives of grand strategies of geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry in the global superpower competition, as well as the lived experiences and everyday struggles and sufferings of marginalized populations. It does this to question and challenge the dominance of this grand narrative of the New Cold War and recast our focus on the lives and livelihoods of regular people who suffer from the current uncertain times caused by the shifts in the geopolitical landscape and the impacts of COVID-19. More specifically, the central argument of this chapter is that the geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalries and the pandemic have reshaped and restructured the socioeconomic conditions facing average and marginalized people, such as migrant workers, yet the narrative of the New Cold War mainly focuses on the grand strategies in raw power competition between China and the United States, thus overlooking and overshadowing the lived experiences of average people and marginalized populations who often suffer the most from the changing socioeconomic conditions. This situation calls for a shift of focus from an international political economy of raw power struggles between countries to a sociological analysis and understanding of everyday struggles between people under the ever-changing regional and global geopolitics and geoeconomics. This approach potentially helps us construct a new “sociological political economy”—a loose, rather than institutionalized, concept in political economy delineating a sociological concern for underserved people—to better examine and understand people’s lives and livelihoods under the New Cold War and COVID-19. Here, I should note that Asia itself is a highly diverse and rapidly developing and changing area. For example, the shift of global manufacturing and supply chains to Asia, and the continued supply of international tourists and students from Asia to the West, had shown that a promising “Asian Century” was upcoming (Lingle 2019/1997; West, 2018)—until Asia’s relentless economic growth and supply of people and products were temporarily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic amid growing and ongoing geopolitical tensions between China and the United States. A rising China has been competing with the United States for international influence to win over friends, although the two sides are divergent in their strategies. Financial aid, bundled with requests for liberal

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reform, has dominated U.S. foreign policies that aim to promote “capitalism plus democracy” as the international development model. Chinese financial aid, however, does not often have the same kind of strings attached for political change and hence may appear more popular among less democratic countries in today’s superpower competition (Milanovic, 2019: 126; 2021; Walt, 2021). Middle powers and small economies are concerned that they must choose between the two, which will endanger this so-called Asian Century and reshape the world order established since World War II (Lee, 2020), given that the ensuing chaos between China and the United States may significantly alter the current international order and multilateral cooperation in trade, security, and global economy. Meanwhile, the United States has turned to traditional allies in the Asia– Pacific to contain China’s rise (Dezenski & Austin, 2021; Jaishankar & Madan, 2021). In addition, the pandemic has functioned as a multiplier of cascading (geo)political, environmental, and socioeconomic fallouts that were already underway in many places before the emergence of the novel coronavirus (Erni & Striphas, 2021), compounding and amplifying existing crises with a once-in-a-century pandemic. To address these issues, this chapter adopts and connects three theoretical lenses: critical international relations (to make sense of the New Cold War narrative), international political economy (to consider the geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry), and sociologies of social structures and economic conditions (to focus on disadvantaged populations). It will also present three “mini case studies” or “mini critiques” to discuss how the geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions and the pandemic have significantly changed the lives and livelihoods of disadvantaged people across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan vis-à-vis their counterparts in the United States. In so doing, the chapter encourages a shift from grand narrative and grand strategies to a micro-socioeconomic analysis of everyday struggles in a sociological political economy, thus potentially changing how we perceive and approach the New Cold War narrative in a time of unprecedented regional and global uncertainty. In what follows, I first consider global geopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic to cast a critical light on disadvantaged populations. Second, I point out the issues in current narratives of the New Cold War as well as their inadequacy in addressing the challenges facing us through present humanistic and critical sociologies. Third, I offer an expanded mobility theory and three case studies (mini critiques) to demonstrate what a sociological political economy can do and can be in and beyond the current

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geopolitical and COVID-19 crises. In so doing, this chapter reconsiders and reframes critical international relations, political economy, and critical sociologies for a critique of existing discussions and scholarship to explore the relations, tensions, and contradictions between grand strategies and everyday struggles under the New Cold War and the COVID-19 pandemic. The three mini critiques focus on marginalized populations respectively in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. More specifically, China is a major player in the current global superpower competition (the New Cold War), while the once-in-a-century pandemic is usually understood to be caused by a virus that originated from China, whose early mistakes in containing the outbreak were also to blame. As well, the increase in Chinese peoples’ mobilities has reshaped global trade, migration, and now the spread of the virus. Second, Hong Kong went through significant social unrest shortly before the onset of the pandemic, and the central government crackdown from Beijing intensified the West’s doubt about whether China would continue its social, economic, and political reform, or become more authoritarian and hostile towards Western democracies. Third, Taiwan is a geopolitical hotspot and a key area of focus in the China-U.S. rivalry, as well as a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse and a key player in global supply chains facing the disruptions caused by COVID-19. These three locations are chosen for analysis to enable better understanding of people’s everyday life and struggles under the constantly shifting regional and global geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions.

Geopolitics, COVID-19, and the New Cold War Since 2019, when flagship Chinese technology company Huawei became a target of U.S. and Western sanctions amid concerns of the integration of its hardware in local 5G (the fifth generation) telecommunication infrastructures, a full-blown “tech war” has started between China and the United States on top of the existing and ongoing “trade war” launched in 2018 by the Trump administration in line with its “America first” policy. The tech war entered a new phase in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when the U.S. government tried to ban TikTok, a mobile social media and video-sharing application owned by a Chinese company and popular among Western youths. The U.S. government forced its sale to U.S. firms due to concerns of data privacy and its potential as a platform for enforcing agendas, censorship, and ideologies imposed by the Chinese

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Communist Party. The intended ban extended to WeChat, a popular mobile networking tool in China and global Chinese communities that has morphed into a mega-platform of e-commerce and fintech (financial technology), integrating mobile payment, social networking, and online streaming. The forced sale of Chinese technologies to U.S. firms, as seen in the case of TikTok, was also widely discussed in the West and Asia as a way for the United States to acquire advanced algorithms (e.g. those developed by TikTok to rank and recommend content) that will safeguard existing U.S. advantages and curtail China’s efforts to build capacity in esoteric data processing and intelligent algorithms. Controlling advanced technologies will help the United States maintain its technological supremacy and help American companies keep their global market share facing increased competition from China. In other words, the tech war has been driven by both national security and economic concerns in the current paranoid geopolitics. The bludgeon and bulwark used by both sides in this saga have shed light on the entangled nationalist and capitalist interests in the ongoing animosity between China and the United States. The rivalry has foreshadowed a New Cold War—or Warm War when the relationship between the two has cooled off significantly—despite the continued economic and political engagements in trade and foreign policy (Daly, 2022; Mearsheimer, 2021). International relations have become increasingly complex through non-traditional and asymmetrical engagements and entanglements between the United States and China in a time of geopolitical, public health, economic, and mobility crises that have marked a new epochal shift. Further, the pandemic has also been weaponized to provide ammunition for this geopolitical rivalry, with China and the United States disputing the exact origin of the virus. However, what has been overlooked in the ongoing dispute so far is the impact of the pandemic and the New Cold War on the lived experiences of people, especially vulnerable social groups. Compared to the general population, marginalized people often face more risks, such as migrant workers who are unable to return to work during COVID-19-induced lockdowns, service and factory workers who cannot work from home during the outbreaks due to the nature of their work, and unskilled and lower-skilled labourers who are facing increased risks of unemployment and displacement due to the shifting global manufacturing and supply chains as a result of the geopolitical rivalry and the impact of the pandemic. I will further explore

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and exemplify these issues in what follows, to rethink and reframe our current approach of grand narratives and grand strategies through a more sociological approach to political economy.

Critical Sociologies and Current Issues in the New Cold War Along with the continued development of the New Cold War narrative, at least two issues have emerged and become more urgent due to the compounded impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the raw power competition and international geopolitical rivalry are often understood as separate from, or indeed irrelevant to, the lived experiences and everyday struggles of average people. From a sociological perspective, this is no longer sufficient for a deeper and fuller understanding of the New Cold War and the pandemic, especially in the context of Asia where social changes are driven by rapid economic development, ongoing urbanization, internal and inter-regional migrations of labour forces, continued social class stratification, and unbalanced rural/urban and regional economic development, opportunities, and outcomes. A sociological approach focusing on the people—especially those with limited access to recourses—who are more vulnerable to socioeconomic shifts and transformations, must be combined with the analysis of the changing geopolitical and geoeconomic landscapes through a sociological political economy. This sociological political economy must maintain a humanistic concern for underprivileged populations, be attentive to the impact of geopolitics and international relations, and directly engage economic development. Second, in current critical studies and critical sociologies in general, our focus is often on sociocultural analysis rather than economic structures and social class structures. This tendency is particularly strong in the United States and among scholars following the U.S. academic discourses, with a few noticeable exceptions discussed below. Their counterparts in the United Kingdom have, to a larger extent, retained materialist analyses of structural issues such as stratification (Stoffel, 2021: 178). As political scientist Sheri Berman reminds us in Foreign Policy, a semi-academic U.S. magazine: [those] on the left stopped focusing on capitalism entirely during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, turning their attention instead to intellectual

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currents such as postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, and postcolonialism, which were cultural rather than economic in nature. … The left lacked a coherent narrative of the existing order’s problems as well as convincing plans for transforming it. (2020, my emphasis)

This was largely the case when the New Cold War narrative started to emerge and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global recession. Those of us working in humanistic sociologies and the arts and humanities still lack a coherent narrative and a critical mass to challenge deeper socioeconomic structures other than focusing on the cultural trends that are important but lack the “edge” for structural transformations. Cultural and personal politics must fit into the deeper and greater structure and struggle—a struggle that defines our time and marks the way forward. Canadian cultural scholar James Penney (2014), writing in a different context, has attributed this division to the shift in both the “material production” of goods and the “intellectual production” of theory in the late twentieth century. Since the 1980s and the 1990s, the shift away from material production in the West appeared to have paralleled the departure from materialism in intellectual trends in Western academia. If we agree with Penney on the connection between the two, then a focus on economy and class seems both reasonable and imperative in today’s Asia, given its central role in global manufacturing, supply chains, and mobilities. The importance of this argument lies in the fact that most of Asia’s population still live in middle-income and lower-middle-income economies, and material production and economic development are still central to people’s lives and livelihoods in many Asian countries. Save for a few exceptions, Asia is not post-industrial, and studies of Asia should not be post-material. In the case of China, while it is already the world’s second-largest economy and set to overtake the United States by 2028 (CEBR, 2020), its GDP per capita—both nominal and in purchasing power parity—is only a fraction of that of the United States (Qian, 2021). Also, China’s prosperous urban sector often overshadows the poorer rural population and rural-to-urban migrants with less human capital investments, while the shift of manufacturing and supply chains away from China due to rising labour cost since the mid-2010s has put many migrant workers out of jobs (Rozelle & Hell, 2020). The narrative of “de-coupling” from China to shift back manufacturing for local supply-chain reliabilities has become increasingly popular in the West since the onset of the

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New Cold War and the pandemic, which may lead to further unemployment and displacement of China’s workforce that was already underway. “De-coupling”, however, remains difficult in both a conceptual and a practical sense due to the deep integration of China in the world economy. Overall, the stark rural/urban divide, the shifting manufacturing and supply chains, and a rapidly ageing population together with the sluggish fertility rate shown in China’s census released in May 2021 (The Economist, 2021b) have been widely recognized as major threats to China’s continued economic growth and geopolitical ambition. Turning to the United States, we see that the working class and the working middle class (those relying on wages with limited access to capital returns) are equally discontent about deprived economic opportunities and rising inequalities, leading to Joe Biden’s historic “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” (Traub, 2021) that effectively continues his predecessor’s approach to international relations based on the economic interest of the domestic electorate. This grand strategy aims to reverse the negative impact of free trade and globalization, where foreign policy is contingent on protecting and improving the earning power and living conditions of the working American (Baer, 2021). This explains Biden’s continued hard-line policy against China as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, and international relations are now driven by domestic politics to revive the middle class. Meanwhile, Biden’s historic infrastructure investment is marketed to the public as a necessity facing the competition from China, where foreign threats are used to justify domestic spending. The home front and the foreign front have once again merged in this New Cold War against China (Brands & Gaddis, 2021) amidst the COVID-induced economic downturn, market fluctuation, and future uncertainty. At any rate, economy/technology and social class/demography now both play a key role in China and the United States (and many places in-between) in post-COVID-19 recovery and geopolitical rivalry. In critical studies and critical sociologies, a mainly cultural focus is inadequate to address current, urgent socioeconomic issues facing average people that have been laid bare by COVID-19 and the changing global geopolitics. These have and will continue to disrupt and shift existing supply chains and modes of production and mobilities. These changes have bestowed on us a historic responsibility and opportunity to provide structural support through our analyses to challenge the status quo through

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people’s ongoing struggle in and beyond the current time. This argument is every bit important to reunite and break the binary of culture and economy, discourse and social class, and high theory for conceptual thinking and low theory for the practice of knowledge under structural changes in a sociological political economy of the New Cold War and the COVID-19 crisis. In her essay against the culture/economy dualism, Jessica Kaplan (2021: 382) points out that this dualism “remains common sense in political philosophy, theory and public discourse”, where “class sometimes sits uneasily apart from listings of race, gender, sexuality” and other issues that are often framed through a cultural lens. Kaplan situates this dualism in the left discourse on social injustice and traces it back to the schism in the late 1990s between the “cultural left” and the “social left”, which represent the two ends of a conceptual “spectrum” that focus respectively on culture and economy but fail to align with the ontological reality that minority groups may face both inequalities simultaneously (Kaplan, 2021: 382–385). The dualism treats the economy as an objective mechanism insulated from cultures and politics and free from public dispute, although economic distributions are often mediated through sociocultural representations along the demographic lines (Kaplan, 2021: 388). This dualism hence must be abandoned. While I strongly support Kaplan’s call to reunite culture and economy, I question her approach that sees the economy as mostly “an ideological objectification” of labour value and labour outputs by dominant social groups (Kaplan, 2021: 392). At any rate, framing “economy” as mainly ideological is still a cultural analysis rather than an economic one. This view essentially drags “economy” into a discursive rhetoric of recognition/representation that is still “cultural rather than economic in nature”, to borrow Berman’s words (2020) once again, and does very little to fix the imbalance in critical studies that heavily relies on cultural issues with little direct investment in the analysis of the economy. Socioeconomic structures often take backstage for cultural representations—even if the topic is discussed, the focus is often on distributions along the line of sociocultural differences rather than economic development and its structural functions. Although we agree on breaking the dualism to reunite cultural and economic analyses, Kaplan’s method is to double down on the current and dominant cultural approach in critical studies, while mine is to directly challenge this intellectual dominance that I consider a form of negligence.

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Here, my argument is to link culture (recognition and representation) with economy and social class (development and distribution) by rebalancing our intellectual and empirical investments through the combined sociological political economy. We must look directly at key economic and financial institutions, mechanisms, benchmarks, indicators, and trends and patterns along with social, generational, and demographic changes that shift the underlying structures and material foundations behind cultural recognition and representation. While shifts in culture and social ethos often take time to materialize, changes in economic conditions and policies often have an immediate impact on people with long-term structural consequences. The importance of the economy should take centre stage, and a “dialogue of approaches” works better than a fusion of culture and economy (Morson & Schapiro, 2017: 17, 39) if we focus more on humans rather than the institutions (McCloskey, 2021). This line of thought can be traced back to both Antonio Gramsci, whose work has related economic productions with cultural developments (Chitty, 2020: 27) while rejecting the simple economic determinism in orthodox Marxism (Penney, 2014: 83), and Pierre Bourdieu, for whom the cultural is inseparable from the economic and other forms of capital, as shown in my previous study of disadvantaged young migrants in today’s China, though in a different context (Wei, 2020). To connect humanistic sociologies with political economy, we should take a closer look at the lived experiences of those in rural and less developed areas, for example, as well as the aged, the working class, and those whose job is at risk due to the shifting global supply chains under geopolitical tensions and who cannot work from home during the pandemic. If the goal of academic research in general is to improve people’s well-being and living conditions, a lofty goal as it is, then focusing on the vulnerable population who have more stakes in our research will be more powerful and attentive to our current time and struggle. It is hence important to reconsider the materialist approach to focus on the earthiness and messiness of the underlying structures—economy, class, and demographic shifts that underpin our critical analysis. This is not a return to the old, tandem argument we had in the 1990s of cultural approaches versus the Marxist fascination with class and economy; rather, “culture” and “economy” are mutually reinforcing beyond a binary methodology for our studies of current geopolitics and COVID-19. This argument itself is not new, but the changing geopolitical conditions and the pandemic have substantiated this thesis with a newly found social contingency and urgency.

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Mobilities and Everyday Struggles Under the New Cold War and COVID-19 For any kind of sociological political economy to become conceivable, we must address the lessons we have learned through COVID-19 and the ongoing and shifting global geopolitics that continue to reshape the very concepts of Asia/China, international relations, foreign policy, globalization, and de-globalization (Nederveen Pieterse, 2020; Steger & James, 2020). Also, they should be intersectional and interdisciplinary in nature to enable a convergent analysis. Further, these theories must be both attentive to local social conditions and responsive to global challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic and escalating geopolitical struggles as part of an action plan for social change. Last, they should consider the impact of rapid technological advancements, although the potential solutions to many current social issues do not necessarily lie in technologies. That means, first, we should focus more on “at-risk” groups who have been and will continue to be disproportionally impacted by the pandemic, including the rural, the elderly, people with lower income, the working class, and those with compromised immune systems or physical and mental disabilities. This is not identity politics; rather, we should focus on how basic socioeconomic structures shape their access to public health services, benefits, pensions, and other safety nets and social insurance that may compound social stigmas with underlying socioeconomic inequalities. These issues are highly important when some middle-income and lower-middle-income countries without robust social security systems in Asia are now facing a large and upcoming ageing population. The situation may be worsened if manufacturing and supply chains continued to shift away from Asia, as the United States and other Western countries boost domestic construction, production, and consumption to create jobs and opportunities through historic economic stimulation. The struggling working class and the working middle class who rely on wage income and limited savings, including young people and migrant workers in Asia’s fast-growing economies, are increasingly locked out from asset and capital returns (Wei, 2020: 123–124) in the global “asset economy” (Adkins et al., 2020) and “rentier capitalism” (Christophers, 2020) that compound economic inequalities with public health and geopolitical crises.

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This analysis leads to the second imperative in rethinking and reframing the grand narrative of the New Cold War: for us working in humanistic sociologies and the arts and humanities, we must connect our critical analysis with examinations of deeper socioeconomic structures for an intelligible critique of present and future social issues under and after COVID-19, when the post-pandemic economic recovery plays a key role both in global geopolitics and for the well-being of those disproportionally impacted by COVID-19 restrictions (Qian & Fan, 2020). A crisis like this should not be wasted, and the lesson we have learned is that the traditional Marxist focuses on economy and class is crucial to many of our ongoing and future challenges, as long as we avoid economic determinism or a tandem theory of oppression and struggle, both of which no longer suffice in current social conditions. The third part in my attempt to reframe the grand narrative of the New Cold War is that we must address the issue of mobilities —an expanded version beyond the mere physical and geographical movement and relocation of people. The pandemic itself is a mobility crisis: (a) the spread of the virus was partially due to the increase in Chinese people’s mobilities, compared to the SARS epidemic in 2003 that was mainly contained in China; (b) the pandemic has interrupted domestic and international mobilities and supply chains, showing that mobility can be fragile but still important—think, for example, about the shipping and supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the distribution of vaccines; (c) there has been a re-bounce of mobility as more people get vaccinated and re-start to travel and socialize, although new variants of the virus and new waves of outbreaks may continue to enforce pockets of lockdowns and border closures across many places; and (d) mobility is a privilege underlined by social class distinctions, as in the case of digital mobility that affords some people to work from home but excludes many factory and service workers who cannot. That is to say, in a sociological political economy, we need to consider wider social and economic conditions and consequences of mobilities, including (a) the movements of people, products, and capital as well as the barriers and disruptions caused by COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, the trade war and geopolitical tensions, and debates on immigration in the West and in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan that need migrant workers to address labour shortage facing the ageing population and low fertility rates; (b) the mobility of cultures that goes hand in hand with the mobilization of people and ideas; (c) shifts in regional and global

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manufacturing and supply chains in geopolitics and post-COVID recovery that will have a major impact on the working class, as well as the privilege of “digital mobility” and “working from home” (WFH) technologies that are less accessible for factory and service workers; and (d) social class migration and upward social mobilities that drive population movements, as well as continued social stratification, that play a major role in today’s Asia and lead to significantly different life outcomes for many. In what follows, I adopt one theory and present three case studies as mini critiques to demonstrate how we can rethink and reframe the grand narratives of the New Cold War and COVID-19. The theory I adopt here comes from my previous framing of convergent forms of mobilities in a slightly different context (Wei, 2020) as well as recent discussions on mobilities in Asia (e.g. Martin et al., 2019; Valjakka, 2021). Here, my approach to mobilities is to connect internal and international migrations, inter-generational mobilities, transnational cultural flows, mobile digital technologies, and social class mobility and immobility in today’s Asia. Unlike the common view of mobility as the movements of people, goods, and capital, this theory of mobility attributes population movements and capital and cultural flows directly to social class migration when new economic conditions and opportunities in a rising Asia have afforded new forms of mobilization for younger generations, and both continued and reshaped existing socioeconomic inequalities. This approach helps reframe the concept of mobilities for my case studies. Mini Case 1: People with HIV Infections in Wuhan, China The first case focuses on the difficulties facing people with HIV infections in Wuhan, the epicentre of the initial COVID-19 outbreaks in China. Under tight lockdown at the height of the outbreak in early 2020, they had great trouble accessing HIV medication. This was potentially lifethreatening, as later reported in the news (Liu & Yu, 2020) and caught up in a nexus of complex issues. First, although the medication is subsidized by the state and mostly free for those infected with HIV, the distribution is based on where a person first received the diagnosis and entered the public health system. As hundreds of millions of Chinese people work and study in other parts of the country outside their hometown for better economic opportunities—a sheer condition and consequence of mobility—most people can only access subsidized medication in the place they normally reside. The initial peak outbreak of COVID-19 in

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China occurred around the Lunar New Year when many people were back with their families and locked down in their hometown. Although the central government promptly allowed people to access medicines locally, they must have their medical records transferred from the place of diagnosis to local public health services in Wuhan, which turned out to be extremely difficult as the latter was already inundated with COVID-19 patients. Second, many social workers and volunteers in HIV/AIDSintervention organizations reached out through phone calls and mobile social apps (WeChat) to distribute the medication to those in need, but the highly restrictive lockdown made it hard for them to acquire a permit from the authorities to deliver the medicines using motor vehicles, and sometimes they had to make the delivery by cycling or on foot since these were less restricted. Further, elderly people without smartphones or who did not know how to use mobile apps and how to get in touch with social workers were left with limited options, and some people in the surrounding rural areas had to walk for more than 10 hours to the city to get medication (Liu & Yu, 2020). On top of that, the strong stigma around HIV/AIDS and the taken-for-granted association between HIV and homosexuality had made most people reluctant to disclose their diagnosis to their family, which would also reveal their sexuality. Some of them put their lives in danger after they ran out of medication but were unwilling or unable to acquire more without raising questions from their families, relatives, and neighbours. This case itself shows how public health crises like COVID-19 have disproportionally impacted the rural, the aged, and those with HIV infection and compromised immune system. While the crisis and the lockdown disrupted mobilities and the normal supply and distribution of essential medication, the privilege of “digital mobility” and the support of social workers are not always accessible for the elderly and those in rural areas. Similarly, the ongoing and future distributions of COVID19 vaccines are also structured by socioeconomic inequalities that pose a challenge in a large country like China, where local realities do not always align with central government policies and the stark rural/urban divide often concentrates the resources in the city while leaving rural populations behind. Those infected with HIV already have compromised immune systems but may not be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination, due to their difficulty in accessing public health services and social invisibility under a strong stigma in many Asian countries like China.

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Further, as many factory and office workers in large cities come from villages and small towns, the post-COVID-19 economic recovery is still fragile if further community outbreaks once again disrupt production and mobilities—which has already happened around the world in 2021 and 2022. Mini Case 2: Service and Factory Workers in Hong Kong My second case study considers another marginalized population, namely low-skilled service workers in Hong Kong, to consider the impact of the pandemic and geopolitical tensions. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan shifted a large part of their manufacturing to mainland China in the early 1990s. However, as discussed before, labour cost started to rise quite significantly in China since the mid-2010s, and many companies started to once again shift their factories out of China to other countries in South and Southeast Asia. This process is still ongoing and has been accelerated by the pandemic when geopolitical tensions drive the West to de-couple from China. Many countries realize that “just-in-time” deliveries have made their supply chains vulnerable, and they have to re-shore the factories back to their homeland. Hong Kong, on the other hand, has changed forever since 2020: the new National Security Law means the end of Hong Kong as we know it, although the city has largely retained its status as Asia’s financial centre (Tong, 2021). Nonetheless, the Hong Kong government must think about how to revive the local economy and rebuild society after years of stagnation, pro-democracy protest, and the blow of the pandemic. Since 2021, Hong Kong has been trying to bring back factory jobs that left decades ago by subsidizing manufacturing to diversify its economy from the single focus on the financial industry, although currently manufacturing counts for only 1 per cent of Hong Kong’s GDP (Hancock, 2021). This is part of Hong Kong’s ambition to revive the economy, create jobs, and increase upward social mobility for young people after the pandemic, as most white-collar jobs (led by the financial industry) are only for the highly educated, while many others in the low-skilled service sectors have suffered much more under COVID-19 as travellers and tourists disappeared from the city. However, the re-shoring of manufacturing may not solve the issues for the masses, as what has been brought back is largely high-tech manufacturing that relies more on automation and less on human labour (Hancock, 2021). That is to say, the shifting supply chain

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and the re-shoring of factories may still attract the better educated, while many local and immigrant workers in low-wage service sectors will be left behind, unless they can upskill through further training and education to acquire the knowledge for better-paid jobs in the high-tech factories. It also remains unclear how Hong Kong will compete with other regional tech-hubs including Shenzhen, Hsinchu, Bangalore, and Singapore for advanced manufacturing, as shown in the next case study below. Mini Case 3: Factory Workers in Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry The third case focuses on microchip production and supply-chain reliability in the world’s continued shift towards a digital economy accelerated by COVID-19. The United States has imposed strong restrictions on Chinese tech companies, banning firms from working with Huawei and other Chinese tech giants since before the pandemic while delisting state-owned Chinese enterprises and other tech companies from U.S. stock exchanges. The problem is that these restrictions have disrupted the global technology supply chain and the flows of capital that both China and the United States rely on, hurting Chinese and Western companies and consumers alike and creating operational problems as the list of banned companies keeps changing. This tech war has created a surprise winner of TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, that holds advanced microchip technologies and fabrication facilities, leading the industry by a large margin over established chipmakers including Intel and Samsung as well as challengers such as China’s SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation). Benefiting from the rise in the demand for digital devices since COVID-19, TSMC has become indispensable in supplying advanced microchips to the world including the United States and China for postCOVID-19 social renewal and economic recovery. Riding the trend, Taiwan’s chipmaking industry helped the island-state achieve a higher GDP growth than mainland China in 2020, the first time in 30 years since Taiwan’s manufacturing industry shifted to the latter in the early 1990s (Lee, 2021). Supplies of microchips are now essential for everything from electric vehicles to smartphones and computers powering today’s ubiquitous mobilities and technologies, as in the cases of TikTok and WeChat discussed earlier as well as technologies that enable people to work from home. TSMC and the chipmaking industry have thus created a buffer for Taiwan and made it indispensable and irreplaceable in the global supply

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chain (The Economist, 2021a), putting the island-state in a so-called “Silicon Shield” (Tsai, 2021) that protects it against heated geopolitical turmoil when the military standoff has intensified in the Taiwan strait since late 2020 and a single miscalculation from either side may become a casus belli that triggers a full-blown war. The massive global microchip shortage in 2021 has only valorized Taiwan’s chipmaking industry and its geopolitical prowess when China and the United States are deep in a New Cold War or Warm War in trade, security, and technology. In these cases, the global supply chain has been partially disrupted by geopolitical tensions and the pandemic but nonetheless remains crucial with significant strategic values. The trade war and rising labour cost already started to shift the supply chain away from China before the pandemic (Rozelle & Hell, 2020), while COVID-19 and the geopolitical turmoil may continue this trend, potentially leaving many unskilled and lower-skilled workers displaced in China’s large floating population (Song et al., 2021). On the flip side, supply chains often extend to multiple tiers and layers in the economy; moving factories out of China is different from replacing the entire web of suppliers (Ciuriak & Calvert, 2021: 400). Even “re-shoring” has been a hot topic in the United States and the West since COVID-19, self-sufficiency is practically impossible for small countries and challenging for larger ones (Ciuriak & Calvert, 2021: 401, 408) and may alienate existing geopolitical and geoeconomic allies (Dezenski & Austin, 2021). The manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, for example, still rely on international collaboration to supply both raw materials and finished products, as seen in the “vaccine diplomacy” and competition between China and the United States as well as the vaccine shortage in Taiwan and many other places in and beyond Asia. Further, from Asia to the United States and everywhere in between, those who must keep working in factories to produce essential products like microchips, digital devices, and medical supplies are at more risk of getting infected with COVID-19, as factory and service workers are unable to work from home. The surge of community transmission of the virus in Taiwan in mid-2021, for example, saw clusters of COVID-19 infections among factory staffers including many migrant workers (Ellis & Wang, 2021), which caused further delays and disruptions when Taiwan’s role was crucial in the stretched global tech supply chains. Its unique position in the global economy is both a blessing for Taiwan and a misfortune for its underprivileged workers, as the strategically and geopolitically

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important “Silicon Shield” cannot protect its most vulnerable people who face more risks during the pandemic to supply essential products so other people can work from home, despite Taiwan’s early success in containing the outbreak (Wu, 2021). When we consider today’s mobilities in Asia and beyond, we must look deep at these socioeconomic issues such as supply chains (movements and distributions of medical and tech products) and vulnerable migrant workers (who face more risks of displacement and COVID-19 infections) under the ongoing pandemic and continued geopolitical complications. The three case studies indicate that medical and digital technologies and supply chains carry strong socioeconomic imperatives and contingencies, especially for vulnerable people who need essential medication and who cannot work from home, as well as those who are more likely to become unemployed and displaced under the pandemic and the shifting manufacturing industry in geopolitical tensions. It is these groups of vulnerable people and the changing socioeconomic structures behind their lives and livelihoods that need our attention in today’s New Cold War narrative both under and after COVID-19. The current crises have emerged in a time when social class boundaries have become more concretized and started to hinder once-promising social mobilities in fast-growing Asian economies like China (Wei, 2020), exacerbating inequalities along the lines of existing socioeconomic distinctions (Qian & Fan, 2020). Better digital technologies and a slew of new trade agreements that have come into being since the pandemic have kept the world connected, although the intra- and international networks of mobilities still face geopolitical and socioeconomic disturbance that often has a disproportional impact on the more vulnerable population. All these changes embedded in and shaped by geopolitics, COVID-19, and mobilities/immobilities have substantiated a new urgency for us to focus on structural changes as well as people’s socioeconomic conditions and well-being in the age of grand strategies and great power rivalries. Looking at these three case studies and considering economic restructuring in post-COVID-19 geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts, we need to consider the lives and livelihoods of disadvantaged people who are particularly vulnerable under both the public health and the geopolitical crises. The grand narratives and grand strategies of the New Cold War should be recast to focus more on the social groups on the margins of the geoeconomic and geopolitical reproductions of the New Cold War.

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It is more important than ever to think about the privilege of mobilities facing the barriers and disruptions in COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, trade wars and tech wars, and shifting manufacturing and regional and global supply chains. Here, I use these case studies as mini critiques to show what micro-narratives can do for social analysis under the grand narrative of the New Cold War and the grand strategies adopted by China and the United States in the current bipolar superpower competition. These micro-narratives and lived experiences present important imperatives and contingencies in post-COVID-19 economic recovery, social revival, and future geopolitical rivalry to shed light on the coming and becoming of a New Cold War in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Conclusion Through the geopolitical turmoil and the COVID-19 pandemic that dominate our current time and foreseeable future of superpower conflicts and post-COVID-19 recovery, this chapter reframes critical international relations, political economy, and mobility theories for a three-pronged critique of the New Cold War to explore and construct a sociological political economy that differs from the grand narrative of raw power competition in international relations. The case studies further demonstrate what sociological political economy can do and can be through what we have learned from the intensified geopolitical conflicts, the COVID-19 pandemic, and various forms of mobilities that have been disrupted but remain imperative to save lives and people’s livelihoods. The triangulation of continental China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan has connected the arguments for a materialist shift to socioeconomic structures focusing on people’s living conditions and well-being in the entangled forces of mobilities and immobilities shaped by the geopolitical and COVID-19 crises. This approach can be and should be further tested in the analysis of other Asian economies and societies and in other areas of social and critical analyses and studies. The expanded and expansive theory of mobilities has marked a possible route for a different understanding of the New Cold War. This version of mobility theory considers the multifaceted force of mobility as a predominant, if not defining, social structure that shapes and conditions population movements, supply-chain efficiency, digital mobile technology, social class mobility and immobility, and inter-generational social mobilization

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in Asia’s changing demography. All these factors present important imperatives in post-COVID-19 economic recovery, mass vaccination, resurged mobilities, as well as future geopolitical tensions and conflicts. Social theorists and scholars, both during and after COVID-19, have a unique task and opportunity to reconsider people’s struggles, lived experiences, and social conditions that have been substantiated with new meanings, values, and urgencies at the current historical turning point. This reframed approach can potentially equip us with the analytical tools necessary in the study of continued geopolitical rivalry and post-pandemic social recovery in a time of increased regional and global uncertainties, complications, and contingencies.

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CHAPTER 6

The Cold-War Structure of Feeling: Revisiting the Discourse of “Dalumei” (Mainland Little Sister) in Taiwan I-ting Chen

Today, there is competition between two paradigms for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic—the “dynamic zero-COVID” strategy adopted mainly in mainland China versus the approach favoured by other countries to treat COVID-19 as an endemic. But even before this, the virus had already stirred up fear of the Chinese “Other” in Taiwan, shaping a “war logic” in everyday life (Lin, 2020: 577). In May 2021, the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wanhua district, one of the oldest red-light districts in Taipei city, raised social anxiety about the bodies and intimate labours of the hostesses and sex workers in the area.

I-t. Chen (B) HKU SPACE Community College, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_6

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The media named it the “Wanhua virus”.1 On 12 May, a news article titled “Two hostesses of Wanhua erotic tea parlour tested positive: LINE dialogue reveals that four to five employees had fever” (Huang, 2021) included a photo displaying LINE chats between the erotic tea parlour’s hostesses and workers. One of these messages was written in simplified Chinese, which is the form usually used in mainland China. Without justification, the reporter identified the sender of the message as a “mainland hostess” (luji xiaojie 陸籍小姐). Later, netizens discussed the article on the PTT “Gossiping” sub-forum.2 They were especially interested in the identity of this mainland hostess and the simplified Chinese used in the LINE chats. They used terms like “mainland chicken” (daluji 大陸雞) and “mainland little sister” (dalumei 大陸妹), and discussed questions like, “What if the Chinese nationals who were smuggled into Taiwan are virus carriers?” (該不會偷渡進來的中國籍附帶病毒) (day 1077, 2021). These forum discussions reveal hostile sentiments towards mainland Chinese migrant women who work as hostesses and sex workers in Taiwan. They also echo both the anti-communist propaganda of the Chinese Civil War between the Communist Party of China (C.C.P.) and Kuomintang (K.M.T.) in the 1940s, and the discourse of anti-prostitution campaigns conducted in Taiwan in the 1990s. Similar feelings about mainland Chinese3 hostesses, including fear and hostility, are expressed in conversations among Taiwanese clients in the teahouse area in Taipei. I have documented them in my own ethnographic work. At an early stage of this work, I conducted participant observation as a helper in one of Taipei’s erotic teahouses called Golden Phoenix.4

1 For example, ETToday used “Wanhua virus” in the title “Where does Wanhua virus

comes from? Chen Shihchung denied “3+11” policy as the problem. Ko Wen-je’s latest response”, see (Chen, 2021). 2 PTT is known to be the largest bulletin board system (BBS) in Taiwan. Users enjoy posting articles and leaving comments on PTT because they can do so anonymously using its interactive interface. Journalists sometimes treat the information on PTT as a source for their news articles, which demonstrates its role in public discourse. 3 In Taiwan, one usually refers to a person from mainland China as a “mainland person” or “mainlander” (dalu ren 大陸人) rather than “mainland Chinese”. In this chapter, “mainland women” and “mainland Chinese women” are used interchangeably, depending on the narrative context. 4 To protect the privacy of the participants in this research, all names are anonymized, including the name of the teahouse.

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When I stood with other hostesses outside the teahouse, curious passersby as well as potential clients often wanted to know my “nationality”, asking questions like, “Are you a mainlander? It sounds like you are from the mainland”. These men had identified me as a “mainlander” right at the start of our conversation. When they discovered that I was a Taiwanese Ph.D. student doing research on teahouse culture, they offered an explanation for the misrecognition. According to them, a young female in the red-light district, who did not fluently speak Minnanese (the dialect that is used by many people in the area), must be a mainlander. Sometimes, the clients did not believe that I was from Taiwan, as they presumed that most hostesses around my age were from mainland China. One client challenged me, “If you are Taiwanese, why can’t you speak the Taiwanese language (Minnanese)?” I tried to “prove” that I was authentically Taiwanese by speaking in Minnanese: “I am a Taiwanese (我是台 灣人 wa si Tâi-uân-lâng)”. However, my Minnanese was so poor that it confirmed their suspicion. Why was nationality or national origin so important to these men who came to the teahouse to enjoy the company, services, and entertainment provided by hostesses? How did cross-Strait imagination of the Taiwanese and the mainlander shape their understanding of mainland migrant women in Taiwan, who are sometimes stigmatized as “dalumei”? After World War II ended in 1945, the Civil War between the C.C.P. and the K.M.T. resumed. In 1949, the C.C.P. defeated the K.M.T. and established the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), while the K.M.T. retreated to Taiwan. Therefore, the main struggle of the Chinese Civil War took place between 1945 and 1949, which was also the period when immigrants to Taiwan were regarded as “waishengren” (people from outer province 外省人). Other residents who had migrated before 1945 are known as “benshengren” (people of the province 本省人). An “usOther” division has formed between these two groups of Han Chinese in Taiwan (Chen, 2010). In this context, the argument surrounding my own national origin was settled only after I revealed my waisheng background. I had grown up in an ethnically mixed family—my grandmother is Taiwanese and my grandfather was a waisheng veteran. A client, Brother Gao, observed that when it comes to Taiwanese people who cannot speak the Taiwanese language, there are only two possibilities: the person is either from a military dependents’ village (juancun 眷村) or from a family of waishengren. The

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mainland origin in my family became proof of my Taiwanese “authenticity”: I was a third-generation Taiwanese from a waisheng family, and not a mainland Chinese who migrated to Taiwan after the lifting of restrictions on cross-Strait exchange in 1987. What, then, does “Taiwanese” mean? Why is it so important to distinguish between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese? Brother Gao continued to highlight the differences between mainlanders and Taiwanese, praising Taiwanese clients in the teahouse area for their integrity: “Taiwanese people are too kind, so it is easy to do business with and take advantage of them”. Brother Gao portrayed Taiwanese male clients as victims of mainland hostesses’ shrewd business strategy. The sentiment of an us-Other division (Chen, 2010: 55) in relation to national and sexual bodies between Taiwan and mainland China is widely discussed in the literature on mainland Chinese migrant women and the representation of mainland China in Taiwan (Chao, 2008; Chen, 2015, 2020; Friedman, 2010; Lu, 2008). However, the ways in which this usOther division is imbued with a sentiment of the Cold War need further examination. In this chapter, I align the dalumei narrative in Taiwan with regional relations among Taiwan, the United States, and mainland China.

The Cold-War Structure of Mainland-Taiwan Relations: “Liberating Taiwan” and “Reconquering the Mainland” Demonstrating national integrity through the lens of gender and sexuality was an important means by which the C.C.P. and K.M.T. justified their leadership of “authentic China”. The cross-Strait stand-off has continued since 1949 to the present day, with the two governments claiming sovereignty by circulating slogans, such as the C.C.P.’s “liberating Taiwan” (解放台灣) and the K.M.T.’s “reconquering the mainland” (反攻大陸) (Lu, 2008: 126). Since this antagonism has given rise to a particular imagination of the “Chinese Other” in Taiwan, the definition of “Taiwanese” must be grasped in a more nuanced way. Taiwanese scholar, Kuan-Hsing Chen, discusses the ethnic configuration upon which the us-Other division can be drawn, by illuminating the psychic dilemma between benshengren and waishengren:

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Ethnic conflict remained a strong undercurrent in Taiwan society, but it did not fully emerge until the 1980s, when ethnicity was mobilised as a political strategy by the opposition D.P.P. in its bid for power. The central discourse of the Taiwanese nationalist movement is now premised on this bˇenshˇeng-wàishˇeng or us-Other division. (Chen, 2010: 55)

Media reportage on family reunions between North and South Korea echoed Chen’s own memories of his family’s experience. He notes how the influence of the Cold War still exists in East Asia, even during the socalled post-Cold-War period (Chen, 2010). The implications of the Cold War persist in the sense that, on the one hand, U.S. military operations in many countries in East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, still play an important role in implementing its power. On the other hand, the cultural effect of the Cold War lingers on. Chen notes how “our worldview, political and institutional forms, and systems of popular knowledge have been deeply shaped by the cold-war structure” (2010: 119). Through accounts of longing for family reunion and the formation of worldviews and beliefs, Chen’s study provides a cold-war framework in explaining the more nuanced and controversial feelings discerned by people across the Taiwan Strait. A cold-war framework, as such, complicates the way we understand social, national, and sexual manifestations of the discursive formation of dalumei in Taiwan. Cross-Strait tensions during the post-Cold-War era continued to be informed by Cold-War narratives, including events such as the mainland Chinese government’s missile test in 1996, the then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the United States in 1995, and Taiwan’s growing dependence on trade with mainland China (Shih, 1998). CrossStrait migration after 1987, it is argued, had elevated “Taiwan’s anxiety about contamination and fear of takeover by the Chinese” (Shih, 1998: 296). However, such tension and fear did not stop cross-Strait interaction. With economic development on the island, more people from mainland China saw Taiwan as a place that could fulfil their “gold-digging aspirations” (Shih, 1998: 296). Mainland China’s economic reforms from 1978 and the lifting of Martial Law in Taiwan in 1987 enabled both sides to lift restrictions, allowing exchanges between them, including cross-Strait trade and cross-Strait marriage (Friedman, 2010). As cross-Strait visits became possible, many veterans (former soldiers of the K.M.T. troops) took the opportunity to meet mainland Chinese women when they visited their families in mainland China. Many of

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these women later became the mainland wives. Cross-Strait relations were imbued with controversial emotions including political antagonism, people’s longing for change, and possibilities of migration. Part of the literature on mainland Chinese migrant women focuses on how these women’s mobility through cross-Strait marriage posed questions to the national and sexual boundaries maintained by state sovereignty (Chao, 2008; Chen, 2015, 2020; Friedman, 2010; Lu, 2008). Others examine migrant women’s experiences of being mainland Chinese spouses after their cross-Strait marriages with Taiwanese husbands (Liu, 2003; Wu, 2004). These migrant women were not only wives to Taiwanese veterans, but also their care givers, as the men got older and needed someone to look after their everyday needs (Chao, 2008; Friedman, 2010). Supplementing the state’s role of caring for veterans by providing domestic and care labour, mainland wives are simultaneously their husbands’ care givers and domestic workers (Chao, 2008). Most of these mainland spouses are the only intimate Other to their veteran husbands, as many veterans did not have relatives in Taiwan. Thus, paradoxically, their mainland origin renders them the suspicious communist Otherenemy in the eyes of their husbands. Husbands have called their mainland wives “communist spy” and “life-long red guard” (Chao, 2008: 97–98). Furthermore, this type of marriage is regarded by Taiwanese officials as an exchange between care labour and monetary remuneration (Chao, 2008: 103). Cross-Strait intimacy5 between veterans and mainland Chinese migrant women in Taiwan, facilitated by the former’s home visits, reveals an affective paradox: these women are simultaneously the intimate and hostile Other of their veteran husbands. From immigration policy to ideological antagonism, migrant women from mainland China, through marriage with Taiwanese veterans, become the Other, whose citizen status and identity are affected by cross-Strait politics (Chen, 2020; Friedman, 2010). This affective paradox has been entangled with media portrayals of dalumei. Many mainland spouses expressed how much they disliked being associated with this label (Liu, 2003: 143–144; Wu, 2004). While the mainland wives object to labels such as “dalumei” and “gold-diggers” (Liu, 2003: 64) that imply indecent intention or occupation, marriage

5 On “cross-Strait intimacy”, see (Chen, 2020).

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and sex work, as institutions involving reproductive labour, share similarities. Chen and Wang (2021) discussed how “flexible intimacy” challenges the boundary between cross-Strait marriage and cross-Strait sex work. When marriage is seen as an investment to improve these migrant women’s lives, the concept of intimacy varies: “if their husbands can provide economic security, they stay in the marriage, but if the husbands fail to fulfil this requirement, the women may leave for good” (Chen & Wang, 2021: 270). Despite the similar functionality between marriage and sex work, mainland wives consider dalumei to be a debased label as it implies not only gender (little sister, mei 妹) but also nation (the mainland, dalu 大陸) in a way that devalues their identity, suggesting a “gender representation that has attracted the heaviest concentration of political anxieties” (Shih, 1998: 289). Furthermore, Taiwan’s mainstream media has amplified this political anxiety with erotic and exotic projections: dalumei implies “money and sex” or prostitutes, while “dalu nuzi” (mainland women 大陸女子) and “dalu taitai” (mainland wives 大陸太 太) refer to mainland mistresses and wives of Taiwanese citizens (Shih, 1998: 297). On the theme of mainland women’s intimate and sexual labour, there have also been studies on cross-Strait intimate encounters between Taiwanese businessmen and mainland women (Shen, 2005, 2008). Taiwanese sociologist Hsiu-Hua Shen, for example, works on sexual and emotional labour provided by mainland Chinese women to Taiwanese businessmen in mainland China (Shen, 2008). Shen notes an affective paradox that is similar to the one between veterans and their intimate Other, their mainland wives. The mainland mistresses satisfied the emotional and sexual needs of Taiwanese businessmen, who often felt lonely working distantly from their families in Taiwan, yet these women were depicted as the sexual and national Other (Shen, 2008). The label dalumei, in this context, referred to dangerous intruders of monogamous marriage, who are “cheap”, “sexually loose”, young, and more attractive than the Taiwanese “first wives” (Shen, 2008: 71). Significantly, Shen observes a cold-war sentiment in her conversation with Taiwanese businessmen, who borrowed slogans circulated during the cross-Strait stand-off period after 1949, such as “rescuing our compatriots” (Shen, 2008: 67) to describe their consumption in the sex industry and intimate encounters with mainland Chinese women. The phrase used to urge patriotism against the communist regime now is adopted by

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Taiwanese businessmen to “express their economic, and sexual, achievements in China” (Shen, 2008: 67). This sentiment of being a Taiwanese saviour is intertwined with the “sub-imperialist tendencies” (Chen, 2010: xii) that drive these Taiwanese businessmen to rationalize their motives and intentions by comparing themselves with American and Japanese men, who had visited Taiwan for prostitution between the 1960s and the 1980s: “If American and Japanese men did it, why can’t we do it now?” (Shen, 2008: 65). To understand the ways in which this sub-imperialist sentiment perpetuates the cultural effect of the Cold War and colonialism, Chen examines the growing middle-class in Taiwan, the “new Taiwanese” in the mid-1990s (Chen, 2010: 171). Club 51 is a group that aimed to save Taiwan through a campaign to “say yes to America” and become its 51st state during the 1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis. Chen has argued that this was driven by the same anti-communist sentiment that the K.M.T. had mobilized from the Cold-War discourse (Chen, 2010: 161). The belief Club 51 held was that, to counter the armed threat across the Taiwan Strait and gain national independence, Taiwan needed U.S. intervention and protection in military, diplomatic, and economic terms (Chen, 2010). Fear of mainland China was then translated into longing for U.S. protection, demonstrating how the Cold War as “emotional structure” (Liu, 2019: 408) has been productive of cross-Strait tensions and the idea of the Taiwanese vis-a-vis the mainlanders. On the other hand, the longing to become part of America helps explain these Taiwanese businessmen’s cross-Strait/cold-war imagination regarding mainland Chinese women.

The Entanglement of the Cold War and the Sex Wars During the Cold War, cultural products were circulated to demonstrate each camp’s ideological superiority, whereas the “enemy” was portrayed as “evil” and “primitive” (Liu, 2017; Tseng, 2000). The discourse of the Cold War, including an imagination of the evil Other, totalitarianism, freedom, and democracy, not only reinforced a binary ideological structure between the First and the Third World, but also enhanced concepts of gender, such as femininity and masculinity (Kim, 2020). To investigate the influence of the U.S. Cold War on the formation of feminist discourse in non-Western countries, feminist theorists and historians looked into

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how the United States had mobilized women’s issues as a way to fight its Cold-War enemies (Laville, 2002; Yoneyama, 2005). During the post-war era, the project of “saving” women from “enemy patriarchal-cum-socialist influences” through non-governmental organizations (N.G.O.s) and the United Nations (U.N.) enabled the universalization of U.S. feminism or Cold-War feminism (Barlow, 2000; Ding, 2015: 58). Cold-War feminism shaped the ways in which the Cold War was consolidated through the language of feminism in countries that were once ruled by “totalitarian” governments, such as West Germany and Japan. Lisa Yoneyama (2005) notes how U.S. post-war occupation in Japan was justified as “saving” Japanese women from the exploitation of Japanese men and the patriarchal society. Helen Laville (2002) argues about the ways U.S. women’s groups and N.G.O.s imposed a pedagogical agenda that aimed at “re-educating” German women, to free them from “authoritarian indoctrination”. These discussions illustrate how the U.S., during the Cold War, deployed feminism to promote American values as superior, while preventing those nations within the socialist world from becoming the “hinterlands of the world” (Ding, 2015: 57). The impact of U.S. feminism and its sex wars in the 1980s fuelled the “cold sex wars” in 1990s Taiwan. In the 1997 feminist split (jia bian 家變), Taiwan’s feminist scholars and activists divided into different groups in the midst of debates surrounding the abolishing of licenced prostitution in Taipei. This highlighted the influence of the U.S. sex wars in Taiwan. Theorizing the split as Taiwan’s sex wars, Naifei Ding (2015: 57) notes how Taiwan is inflected by U.S. knowledge and language, proposing an “invisible frame” in understanding the continuity between U.S. feminism and Taiwan feminisms in 1997. As a consequence of these sex wars in Taiwan, mainland Chinese women were seen as potential victims of human trafficking in the early 2000s. Sandy Yeh, the then president of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, declared its determination to join the global war against human trafficking and urged the government to work with women’s groups, such as the organization she worked for (Yeh, 2006). In this light, the labour and bodies of mainland Chinese women served as the Other for the emergence of two different but similar subjectivities. One is the subjectivity of “new Taiwanese” among the Taiwanese businessmen and their superior position as the buyer and consumer of mainland women’s bodies and labour. Another is the “positional superiority” (Ding, 2015: 60) shared by U.S. state feminism and Taiwanese

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women’s groups who campaigned to abolish licenced prostitution in Taipei. The two subjectivities demonstrate a similar commodification of the cultural effect of dalumei, whose sexual labour and bodies are key to the accumulation of profits, both financially and ideologically. Meanwhile, dalumei represents a threat to monogamous marriage in Taiwan, as well as the position occupied by Taiwanese wives, which further complicated the feminist perception of dalumei. To be sure, the availability of mainland Chinese women to Taiwanese men threatens local feminists as it endangers local women’s desire for “monogamy, equality, and economic security” (Shih, 1998: 301). As such, the cultural effect of dalumei suggests a desire for “the impossible assimilation into the U.S. middle class” (Chen, 2010: 170–171) in Taiwan. In spite of tensions between the two groups, Taiwanese businessmen and the anti-prostitution camp during the feminist split both longed for a superior position as saviour of the victimized mainland Chinese women. Meanwhile, both groups’ careers depend on rejecting and abolishing political ideology manifested by a “barbaric” and “primitive” imagination of the wanton mainland dalumei. Drawing attention to the sub-imperialist desire for the United States on the one hand, and the continuum of polygamy/concubinage/prostitution (Ding, 2010: 326) relating to the existence and availability of mainland Chinese women on the other, I suggest a reading of the representation and the lived experience of mainland Chinese mistresses, sex workers, and hostesses, through the framework of the Cold War. As I will show in this chapter, this would reveal not so much the New Cold War between China and the United States, but how the cold-war structure of feeling can help us to grasp the simultaneous desire and fear felt towards the tropes of dalumei and the “American dream” in the context of Taiwan.

Dalumei in Popular Discourse: Mistresses and Sex Workers Research focusing on mainland Chinese women in Taiwan points to how these women are seen as a threat to not only Taiwanese men but also Taiwan as a nation. For example, dalumei in the mass media is used to portray “a sexualised body hungry for economic gain” (Shih, 1998: 301), “prostitutes” (Chen, 2015: 88; Lu, 2008: 130; Shih, 1998: 301),

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and “mainland gold-diggers” (Chen, 2015: 88). Meanwhile, a mainland spouse married to a Taiwanese husband is potentially a “communist spy” and “life-long red guard” in the eyes of her husband (Chao, 2008: 98). In this section, I shed light on the representation of dalumei in popular culture in Taiwan through an analysis of materials such as guidebooks in relation to cross-Strait intimacy (especially regarding extramarital relationships and commercial sexual activities), as well as movies and television series that depict mainland Chinese protagonists as sex workers, mistresses, or both. Building on my earlier discussion of how dalumei serves as a symbol that enables the pursuit of Taiwan’s American dream, I will in this section pay attention to what effect dalumei has on the viewers and how a cold-war structure of feeling is mobilized in cross-Strait relations. Dalumei Are “Like Pan Jinlian” Taiwanese Businessmen’s Extramarital Affairs in China (Liu, 2000) is a guidebook that targets Taiwanese businessmen and their Taiwanese wives. The author Liu Wen-Chen hopes to prevent extramarital affairs between Taiwanese businessmen and mainland Chinese women by giving Taiwanese men and their wives advice in advance (Liu, 2000). For example, the author shows how wives may “nip [cross-Strait intimate encounters] in the bud” or at least “convince them [the husbands] to give up” (Liu, 2000: I–II). The book’s contents are embroiled with a moralistic tone as the author not only sympathizes with the Taiwanese first wives, but also condemns the “filthy” Taiwanese businessmen who could not defend their own families in Taiwan but surrendered themselves to the seduction of mainland femme fatales. In a section titled “The temptation of mainland girls”, Liu depicts mainland Chinese women as “shameless enough to display [their] lustful side like Pan Jinlian”, however, when it comes to sex, they are merely a tool to “provoke men’s sexual desire, instead of seeking their own gratification” (Liu, 2000: 107). Liu advised these women to stop “treating their bodies as a tool of reproducing children for some men” and start “reclaiming their rights to body; reclaiming women’s body and mind that had been dictated by men for over thousands of years” (Liu, 2000: 107). Liu’s remark here suggests a hierarchical position between two types of female subjects. One is the mainland female subject that is objectified as a “tool” for provoking men’s sexual needs, represented by the character Pan Jinlian, the iconic “yinfu” or wanton

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woman in the classic Chinese novel Jing Ping Mei (1997). The other is the female subject who can act freely in pursuit of her own pleasure and gratification. The author assumes a position of superiority and, as if a saviour to mainland Chinese women, seeks to educate these Pan Jinlian-like women and free them from the Chinese regime, traditional patriarchy, and sexual dictatorship. All this reflects the “either/or” Cold-War mentality (Ding, 2020: 207; Rich, 1984: 221). American poet Adrienne Rich’s interrogation of the connection between the Cold-War mentality and “a form of feminism so focused on male evil and female victimization”, reveals how both allow little room for understanding the “differences among women, men, places, times, cultures, conditions, classes, movements” (1984: 221). While it neglected the continuum of “feminised intimate labour” among women in and out of the modern institutions of family and marriage, the Cold-War politics of division helps explain Taiwan’s cold sex wars from the late 1990s on (Ding, 2020: 207). Here lies an important question: How has the Cold-War mentality made it impossible for women, who have pursued a better life through strategically instrumentalizing their intimate and sexual labour, to be considered feminist, even when they claim to be just that (Chin, 2014: 103)? The way Liu distinguished mainland Chinese women (whom he compared to Pan Jinlian) from women who embrace a feminist spirit and exercise more control over their own bodies (instead of catering to others’ needs), leaves little space beyond the territory bounded by the “either/or” Cold-War mentality. Moreover, Liu’s desire to “educate” mainland Chinese women “away from enemy patriarchal-cum-socialist influences” (Ding, 2015: 58) reinforces the multi-layered hierarchical relations among himself (the decent Taiwanese businessman/writer), the modern feminist subject, and the “yinfu” Pan Jinlian. In this sense, women are not only Cold-War warriors “fighting” on the front line (Laville, 2002), but also Cold-War subjects whose behaviours and practices are at the heart of Cold-War politics. Whether they are women on their own terms or women who have utilized their reproductive labour (including sexual, intimate, and care labour) to strive for possibilities rendered under patriarchal conditions, underscores the way the Cold-War mentality has produced meanings through shaping national and sexual imaginations. Understanding the representation of dalumei in this light reveals the traces and undercurrents of the Cold War in Asia.

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Based on his own participation as a Taiwanese businessman in the entertainment industry in mainland China, Lee Ya wrote a book titled Mainland China as a Tender Strange Land, in which he discussed how and why mainland China is a place full of dalumei seduction that Taiwanese businessmen find irresistible (Lee, 2001). He depicted the mainland (dalu 大陸) as an “uncultivated new land” (xin tiandi 新天地), where capitalist influence and popular culture from “Taiwan, Hong Kong and Western societies” awakened mainland Chinese women’s “tender feeling that had been deeply suppressed for years”, who since then “took off the uniform blue cotton-padded coat, [and] sheepishly put on colourful red clothes” (Lee, 2001: 37). Capitalism here refers to a system that is not only economically advanced, but also more desirable in its cultural experience, which attracted mainland women to “look up to these (Taiwanese) men with a (capitalist) aura” (Lee, 2001: 37). Lee described how Taiwanese men visited mainland China as if they were entering an “exhibition” full of mainland women from different origins with diverse ethnicities: It feels like walking into an exhibition. Here you will find more than the one and only “Taiwan” booth, there are various booths, including that of Shanxi, Hunan, Beijing, Shanghai … as well as Han, Manchu, Hui, and Uyghur booths, like a dazzling kaleidoscope. They (the mainland Chinese women) speak different dialects …; have different personalities and lifestyles; act tenderly and charmingly in different ways. To put it more bluntly, they have different ways of having sex and different sound of moan. (Lee, 2001: 38–39)

Sexualizing mainland China as a pleasurable and exotic “uncultivated new land”, where women are “made ready” for Taiwanese men to consume, the imagination of intimacy and sex is embroiled with the ideology of a “war” on communism. Lee described intimate and romantic cross-Strait encounters by noting how Taiwanese men were soldiers who were assigned the anti-communist mission, on which they fought against the communist regime, reconquered the mainland, and liberated mainland women (Lee, 2001). To illustrate this, Lee pointed to a song often chanted by soldiers during their military service in the national army (2001: 189): I have two guns 我有兩支槍 Different lengths 長短不一樣

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The longer one defeats communist bandits 長的打共匪 The shorter one surrenders girls 短的打姑娘

The war imagination that frames the liberation of mainland Chinese women perpetuates the hostile and sexualized Cold-War mentality across the Taiwan Strait. The cultural effect of the Cold War in the crossStrait context, as such, has not ceased, even long after its supposed end. Rather, it maintains a hierarchical relationship between mainland China and Taiwan through cultural imaginaries, such as dalumei, in daily life. Analysing Taiwanese movies and TV series that project similar cross-Strait intimate encounters by reinforcing and ridiculing the American dream, I further complicate the effect of the Cold War in what follows. Dalumei and “His” American Dream In the 1995 TV serial Formosan Lady (1995), the polygamist Fang Wenzheng is a Taiwanese businessman who tries to hide from his Taiwanese wife his affairs with two women, one his ex-girlfriend and current mistress who lives in the United States, the other his mistress in mainland China. The depiction of these three women of different backgrounds—Taiwan, mainland China, and the United States—demonstrates the complex entanglement of intimacy, nation, gender, and class. In contrast to the Taiwanese wife, who is a good mother, and his U.S.based mistress, who is devoted to Wenzheng until the final days before his death, the mainland Chinese mistress Zhao Jihong is portrayed as a “golddigger” who strives for “the most glamorous” (最拔尖的) life. To pursue such a life, Jihong is willing to give up everything, including her fiancé, an ordinary taxi driver in her hometown Tianjin whose social and economic background cannot give her the life that she yearns for. Through an extramarital relationship with her Taiwanese employer Wenzheng, Jihong seizes the opportunity to climb the social ladder. However, Wenzheng treats Jihong badly, fully aware that she is only after his money. He considers their relationship to be a convenient transaction between sexual labour and material gain. Like the Taiwanese businessmen discussed earlier, Wenzheng is lonely and requires someone to look after his daily needs when he conducts his business in mainland China. Having secured financial support from Wenzheng, Jihong is emboldened to find a way to replace his Taiwanese wife and become “Mrs Fang”. Jihong gets herself

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pregnant with Wenzheng’s child and goes to the United States, where all three women finally meet one another. Jihong’s abandoned fiancé Cheng Wei turns out to be the mainland cousin of Wenzheng. After some dramatic twists and turns in the narrative, Cheng Wei falls in love with Wenzheng’s Taiwanese wife Lee Xiuzhong after he moves to the United States and lives temporarily in the house of the Fang family. The romantic relationships that revolve around the two cross-Strait cousins and the three women project jealousy and competition between Taiwan and mainland China. Notably, the two characters from mainland China are depicted rather differently: a decent working-class man Cheng Wei and a “gold-digger” mistress Jihong. After coming to know that Wenzheng’s mainland mistress is his former lover Jihong, Cheng Wei tries to persuade her to give up being a mistress and restore her integrity. Chen Wei despises Jihong’s achievement of a “glamorous life”, for such a life is sustained by money that does not belong to Jihong: “after all, your livelihood relies on another person” (再怎麼說, 你 還是要靠別人養) (episode 17). However, Jihong does not feel ashamed. Instead, she questions Cheng Wei: My livelihood relies on another person, but how about you? It’s just that I am supported by a man and you are supported by your aunt, both of us need other’s help. Someone helped you leave [mainland China], why do you think you can come back feeling entitled to give me the lesson? We are not that different! (episode 17)

To defend himself, Cheng Wei points to the shame of Jihong having to disguise herself as a maid in Weizheng’s wife’s presence: “We are different, when the person’s wife comes back, I don’t have to sleep in the maid’s room” (episode 17). Ironically, Cheng Wei, as a Chinese migrant in the United States of the 1990s, experiences no less shame than Jihong, the mistress. After migrating to the United States, Cheng Wei faces racism and unequal treatment. As a stranger who is naive about American culture and law, Cheng Wei’s Chinese customs, habits, and body language turn him into a criminal. Cheng Wei is taken to the hospital and the police station after he tries to burn weeds to grow vegetables in the backyard of the Fang household. He also gets into an argument and then a fight with an American colleague in the supermarket where he works. In the TV serial, America is a dream land, representing what many of the characters aspire to. For Wenzheng, after a robber threatened the

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safety of his wife and son in Taiwan, he decides to migrate as a family to the United States, a “better” place than Taiwan, remarking, “[If we] move to the U.S., the environment, public safety, and education for Dawei (their son), all are better than Taiwan” (episode 1). Wenzheng and his middle-class peers, who have experienced Taiwan-to-U.S. migration, chat about how playing golf in the United States gave them an inexplicably “different feeling”. They encourage Wenzheng to experience for himself the magic of the American dream (episode 1). Although the Taiwanese middle-class desire for the United States is described as magical and difficult to rationalize, it intersects with how the characters perceive themselves in tandem with national identity, gender, freedom, material achievement, and personal development. For example, the relationship between Wenzheng and Jina, his ex-girlfriend and the only person who genuinely loves him—not simply to fulfil a responsibility or to pursue material gain—demonstrates Wenzheng’s continued fight against his mother’s insistence on his arranged marriage with Xiuzhong. Jina moved to the United States 10 years ago, after realizing that Wenzheng’s mother would not accept her as a daughter-in-law. As a wise wife and good mother (xianqi liangmu 賢妻良母), Xiuzhong is the ideal daughter-in-law, as compared to Jina, an Americanized modern woman. Jina even tells Xiuzhong that she, unlike Wenzheng’s wife by an arranged marriage, is able to exercise her freedom to say “yes or no”, instead of obeying the orders of the previous generation (episode 2). Filial piety, in Jina’s view, is an outdated practice at the end of the twentieth century. Fighting against “traditional Chinese values”, Jina considers her secret relationship with Wenzheng a practice that is relatively modern, as it embraces “true and free love” between two individuals. In Jina and Jihong—one Americanized and the other “greedy” mainland Chinese—we see how unconditional love is juxtaposed with love as transaction. From the beginning to the end, Jihong is clear about what she wants in a romantic relationship with men. She loves Wenzheng because he can give her the life she dreams of. For this very same reason, she cannot marry Cheng Wei. Even Wenzheng finds it difficult to convince himself that Jihong loves him. In Wenzheng’s final days, before he dies of AIDS, Jihong undergoes an abortion, as she fears her child will be stricken by the disease. After that, she decides to leave Wenzheng, who is no longer able to support her glamorous lifestyle. Before she leaves, Jihong asks Wenzheng for a large amount of money as compensation for her loss.

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If he does not comply with her wishes, Jihong threatens to “ruin” him by revealing the news of his disease to the media and his mother. In contrast, Jina’s “genuine love” for Wenzheng is met by his unwillingness to disappoint his mother. Jina symbolizes the male protagonist’s desire for the United States, a dream land where he can finally be liberated from traditional values that compel him to be an obedient son. Like Formosan Lady, other films and TV serials have also characterized mainland Chinese mistresses and sex workers as wanton women who would do anything to achieve their goals, hence posing a threat to the Taiwanese protagonists. For example, The Great Buddha (2014) and The Great Buddha+ (2017) are films about how the murder of mainland mistresses—and thus the attempt to destroy the dalumei—resulted instead in their return as ghosts that continue to haunt the male protagonists. Dalumei as a Haunting Effect in Taiwan Shot 20 years after the TV serial Formosan Lady, The Great Buddha and The Great Buddha+ both featured another Taiwanese businessman named Huang Qiwen, whose wife and son also migrated to the U.S. Qiwen runs a business in Taiwan that manufactures Buddha sculptures. The Great Buddha+ is a longer and more elaborate version of The Great Buddha, a 20-minute short film. Both films were directed by Taiwanese director Huang Hsin-Yao. The 2014 short film begins with a comment on the American dream, which is desired in both material and ideological terms and yet ridiculed through its association with sex. Pickle (菜脯) and Belly Button (肚臍), two bored working-class men, enjoy reading American porn magazines that Belly Button collects from dump sites. In Pickle’s office, an old warehouse where he works as a guard for Qiwen, the two men view the magazines together. Belly Button praises the female bodies displayed on one page: “the American ones are bigger”. Pickle agrees with him and laments: “No doubt the American way is preferred. All the money my boss [Qiwen] earns is transferred to the U.S. to his son”. In another scene, Pickle and Belly Button mischievously view recordings from the dashboard camera of Qiwen’s car. In the voyeuristic pleasure of watching the recordings, both men gain access to the colourful world of the rich. Two recordings in particular interest the men most, both involve sexual and intimate play between Qiwen, who is driving the car, and a female passenger. In the first recording, Qiwen and his female

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passenger are on their way to a love motel. The dashboard camera does not show either of their faces, but only the view in front of the car. The voices inside the car can be heard. The film audience shares the same visual and audio information as Pickle and Belly Button in the film. From the conversation, we learn that the female passenger is a sex worker and a university student. Qiwen asks why she chooses to be a sex worker. She replies that she wants to study in the U.S. Qiwen then tells her that “very soon” she is going to see America, because “America is in between my legs”. In the second recording, Pickle and Belly Button view a quarrel between Qiwen and his mainland Chinese mistress. The woman threatens to expose Qiwen’s illegal business activities to the media if he does not give her money for her business in Shanghai. Provoked by her threat, Qiwen murders the woman and hides her body inside a Buddha sculpture. The expanded 2017 version, The Great Buddha+, presents a third recording. Featuring the mainland mistress, who is now known as “Miss Ye”, this was added to the film to provide the audience (as well as Pickle and Belly Button) with more context and information about the mainland Chinese woman, soon to be Qiwen’s victim. In the recording, the audience hears the explicit sounds of Miss Ye performing oral sex on Qiwen, even as he is driving along a busy main street. The director’s voiceover explains, I can totally put myself in Qiwen’s shoes. As a man, however emotionless you are, once you are dealing with women like Miss Ye – aggressive with good skills – you can’t help it.

The depiction of Miss Ye not only pleases Qiwen, her male master, but also other onlookers, including the director, Pickle, Belly Button, and the audience. Pickle exclaims that he “had an erection even just listening to it” (用聽的也會勃起耶). Miss Ye, through the depiction of her sex act and voice performance—is the “object-thing” of the “master-subject”, not unlike the “yinfu” Pan Jinlian in the Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. In Ding’s reading of the novel, Pan Jinlian deploys her sexual and intimate power to “play with consummate artistry at will” in order to please the heterosexual male “master-subject” Ximen Qing (2002b: 162). Like the other mainland Chinese mistress Jihong in Formosan Lady, Miss Ye is not satisfied with being a nameless mistress. After she realizes that it is impossible for her to become Mrs Huang, Qiwen’s wife, she asks

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for monetary compensation. Miss Ye laments how she was “used” like a “tool” instead of being treated as a human being: After all these years we are together, I showed up whenever you felt like it [sex], knowing that you’d bend my body like I was a yoga instructor. Yet you never treated me genuinely.

Like an object that is disposable when it is no longer needed, the mainland mistress in both films is killed by her furious master Qiwen. Yet killing the mainland mistress in both movies neither eliminates her influence nor silences her voice. In the 2014 version, she returns as a ghost that terrifies Pickle and Belly Button at Qiwen’s factory. In the longer 2017 version, her ghost bangs loudly from inside the Buddha sculpture in which she is entombed. Her omnipresence signals memories of fear and intimacy relating to the communist Other from the Cold War to present cross-Strait encounters between mainland Chinese women and Taiwanese men. Dalumei has become a symbol of the Cold War that lingers in Taiwanese society from the 1990s onwards, proliferating fear as the practices of exchanging intimate and sexual labour for monetary gain imply an evil and materialistic spirit. This cold-war mentality is reflected in Taiwanese media representation of mainland women as “gold-diggers”, “communist bandits”, and “red guards”. In other words, mainland Chinese mistresses, hostesses, and sex workers are seen collectively as the “Other” because they are “money oriented”. As a client in an erotic teahouse in Taipei commented, “the dalu mei-mei will do everything as long as you pay” (大陸妹妹, 你只要給她錢, 她都可以). In the next section, I adopt the concept of “the politics of redistribution” (Kotiswaran, 2006: 3) to discuss what I describe as the mainland Chinese hostesses’ “sisterhood at the tea table” in the erotic teahouses of Taipei.

The Politics of Redistribution: Sisterhood at the Tea Table Those dalumei always invited 10 [hostesses] to sit [with us], every time [we] spent loads of money. The boss lady is good at dragging people in [to the teahouse]. (client Brother Xu, interview, 2018)

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From nothing to now [I have everything], you see, this is achieved by myself and no one else. This is the land I distributed; do you understand me? (mainland hostess Xiaomei, participant observation, 2018)

In the first quote above, Brother Xu describes a business strategy in the erotic teahouses in Taipei known as “return the table”6 (還檯). Most clients, when asked, expressed how much they dislike such a strategy as it requires each client to spend more to patronize the hostesses as a group instead of individually. Most hostesses participate in this practice: the more they share with other hostesses, the more the others will return the favour. Thus, all the hostesses end up earning more. Yet, a few clients told me that the practice is executed relentlessly by the mainland cohort. A Vietnamese hostess who works closely with other mainland hostesses shares a similar point of view. In her experience, mainland hostesses are serious about the favours they owe or share with others through “return the table”. If a hostess fails to return the favour within one week, she may have to pay back with the tips she has earned to clear her debt. A client even argued that anyone who does not plan to follow this business ethic should not work at the teahouses. “Return the table” is the key to the formation of the hostesses’ community, as it encourages everyone to share business resources and networks, including knowledge of the clients’ preferences with regard to choice of tea, alcohol, karaoke songs, and type of hostess. They do this to promote the business as a collective. It also helps to balance the incomes between beginners and more skilful hostesses. When a new hostess joins, she largely relies on other hostesses to introduce clients to her. If she works hard, with some luck, she will soon have good clients who will support her business. A client once told me how he supported a hostess by patronizing all (quan peng 全捧) the hostesses in the same teahouse.

6 The discussion of “return the table” stems from my Ph.D. research on Cold-War intimacy beyond the Taiwan Strait (Chen, 2020), in which I conducted ethnographic work in multiple sites including the teahouse Golden Phoenix in Taipei. It took me at least four years to finally understand how the business tactic “return the table” works and what social meanings it facilitates. Over a total period of seven months from 2018 to 2020, during which I conducted fieldwork for my dissertation, Xiaomei, a major interlocutor of the research, introduced me to the community and put me in contact with other hostesses and clients. During the ethnographic work, I usually acted as a helper for Xiaomei’s business. The clients used different nicknames for me. Sometimes, I was the “little sister” (妹妹) and sometimes “the one who writes thesis” (寫論文的).

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Every hostess then needed to “return” the favour to the new hostess by sharing their tables with her, thus introducing her to more clients. A hostess who has already established a relatively stable business can help a beginner, who may be younger and in the process of building her clientele. Later, when the new hostess builds her own business network, she needs to return the table to the ones who had helped her. Otherwise, she will be saddled with a poor reputation for being selfish. I will now explain how the practice of “return the table” provides us a way to understand mainland Chinese migrant women’s everyday life in the teahouse, as they strive to become respectable hostesses. Yuanyuan: The Respectable Mainland Hostess It is the highest honour if a hostess can talk her client into patronizing all the hostesses in one go, as this shows her spirit of selflessness and power to take the lead in the hostess-client relationship. Also, she is generous enough to share the income that otherwise belongs to herself (although the clients usually reduce the amount of tips when there are fewer hostesses). Such practice requires the client to be selfless too. He may be interested in only one hostess but must also pay other hostesses to support her. In the teahouse, the client and the hostess interacted with each other through exchanging face (mianzi 面子) and favours (renqing 人情), which are key to building a guanxi (relationship 關係) network. Hwang (1987) theorizes about face (mianzi 面子), favour (renqing 人情), and relationships (guanxi 關係) in the context of Chinese culture. Depending on the intimacy of their guanxi, the participants (including petitioner and resource allocator) exchange their resources with one another during the “power game”. Money and gifts, during the power game, can be transformed into non-material accounts, such as face and favour, that support the other party. The hostesses exchanged favours with each other, from which they gained face and good reputation. It is key to the dynamic among hostesses and clients in the teahouse. In their research on Taiwanese hostess clubs, Bedford and Hwang (2013) explain how individual identity is intertwined with morality and social norms, shaping the implications for guanxi network. In a similar vein, a participant in the teahouse, according to my observation, gains face by acting altruistically in the presence of others. This explains why being able to benefit all, instead of just oneself, is welcomed among the hostesses. The monetary gain is here transformed into non-material

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benefit, including emotions, feelings, face, and reputation. Moreover, when every hostess embraces such business ethics, all the hostesses gain higher incomes because of the tips they receive from more clients. In some teahouses, where hostesses conform strictly to the practice of returning the favour and not losing face, some hostesses may secretly lend their clients money to pay the bill, thus encouraging them to invite more hostesses to join their table. Sophisticated hostesses like Yuanyuan, Xiaomei, and Lingling, who have already built a firm clientele of loyal customers, often mobilize the wealthier clients to patronize almost all the hostesses in the Golden Phoenix teahouse. Among them, Yuanyuan is known to be one of the most skilful hostesses. Although she is younger, Yuanyuan has already acquired a good reputation through her generous and selfless behaviour. Although the mainstream media portrays mainland migrant women in Taiwan as “gold-diggers”, Yuanyuan actually shares the “gold” that she digs out from the clients’ pockets with women in her community. The clients find Yuanyuan attractive and her business ethics respectable. In their eyes, she is like a swordswoman, selfless in spirit. What follows is an example of how Yuanyuan strategically deploys narratives of morality and face to urge a client to pay another hostess more for her services. Gold Digging and Gold Redistribution At a karaoke session hosted by Lingling, Yuanyuan was invited to help create a nice “atmosphere”. Behind the scenes, Lingling was returning some tables and favours to Yuanyuan. After a few rounds of drinking, Yuanyuan saw an opportunity to encourage the client to tip more, given he was slightly drunk already. When hostesses participate in a session to entertain clients, they often cooperate with one another, putting on a show, making up stories, and pretending to be affectionate lovers. They do this to encourage the client to spend as much as he can, until his wallet is emptied. But that is not the end. A hostess can figure out other ways to earn more money from him. For instance, she may accompany him to a nearby ATM (automated teller machine) where she can persuade him to spend more. At a tea session, it is customary to present a hostess with an “award” after she finishes singing a song. This award takes the form of money offered as a tip.

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When Lingling finished singing a song, the client tipped her NT$100 (US$3.4). Thinking it was too little, Yuanyuan took a NT$500 note from her own purse and put it on top of the NT$100 note from the client, challenging him, “I tipped her five hundred, so now it’s your turn. In doing so, Yuanyuan left no space for the client to say no. Otherwise, he would be seen as “less competent” than a female hostess, which would cause him to lose face (mei mianzi 沒面子). Yuanyuan did this so that Lingling would receive more tips. Another hostess, Pearl, commented that Yuanyuan is very good at “zuoren” (做人), or maintaining good personhood: Yuanyuan is very good (henlihai, 很厲害). She is good at zuoren (做人). That’s why the clients come to visit her. Because when she sits at the table, she will, well, buy a bottle of beer and gift it to the client. Moreover, she buys fruit for the clients to eat. Even though [doing this] she could lose money, she still spends [for the clients]. The clients feel guilty so that’s why they come to see her. Yuanyuan is very good, she knows how to make the clients like her … She buys a medium size of Gaoliang [Taiwanese liquor] that costs her 500 (US$17) while she only earns 300 [the tip is around NT$300, or US$10, for the table fee]. (Phone interview with Pearl, 2020)

It took enormous effort for Yuanyuan to build a good reputation and guanxi with her clients, who return the favour by supporting her business. Pearl observed that Yuanyuan’s clients are among the most generous ones: “It is always Yuanyuan’s clients who call the most hostesses [to sit by the table so they can earn tips], at least ten to fifteen, usually more than ten [hostesses]”. Cooperating with one another to “redistribute” the client’s money, Yuanyuan and other hostesses established what I call “sisterhood at the tea table”. I adopt the term “sisterhood” to avoid the tendency to view “victimisation” as the basis of feminist solidarity (hooks, 1995). The hostesses bond with one another “on the basis of shared strengths and resources” at the tea table, for “women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives” (hooks, 1995: 295). The business practice of mainland Chinese hostesses, therefore, sheds light on migrant women’s collective solidarity in “fleecing” their clients. These shared strengths and resources counter the discourse of dalumei that mainland Chinese migrant women are either victims or wanton women.

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Moreover, sisterhood in the context of the teahouse also refers to the relationship between close hostesses, known as “maternal female cousins (biao jiemei 表姊妹)”. Female cousins in the mainland community indicate a special closeness between two hostesses, usually due to enormous gratitude one owes the other. It is sometimes defined by blood ties while at other times by close bonds and guanxi or relationship. A female cousin can be a hostess’s best friend back home. The female cousin often is the one who enables a mainland Chinese migrant woman to come to Taiwan, advising her through a viable plan for migration, sharing her own experiences, lending money to pay travel fees, arranging fake husbands through their network (sometimes involving the lower-class clients they know), and helping with the application of a tourist visa. In other words, some of the networks between the hostesses exist before they even start working in the Taiwan teahouses. Because of the same closeness and trust shared by different groups, tensions and quarrels between hostesses were often observed when favours were not returned as expected. Baobei is a hostess who left the previous teahouse because of such issues between her and her older cousin. To show her gratitude, Baobei always invited her cousin to join her tables. However, the cousin’s expectation went beyond that. She assumed that Baobei should extend her gratitude to her best friend in the same teahouse. Complaining to me about the challenge of maintaining the guanxi network, Baobei said: In our [tea] house you have to patronize ten [hostesses] (peng shige, 捧十個). It would have been easier if my client came and was willing to patronise all – I wouldn’t have to pick [which hostess to join]. However, my client was not that rich and I had to pick ten [hostesses]. I took a look and picked [ten]. When the hostesses entered [the karaoke room], my cousin was angry because she couldn’t find her friend. [She] asked me why I didn’t include her friend. I told her that she is your friend, not mine. It is fair for me to invite you, why would I invite her? Besides, she [the cousin] changes her bestie all the time. Last time she was close to that one, then they were no longer close, so she became close with this one. It’s none of my business! (Baobei, participant observation, 2018)

Although reciprocity and altruism are highly valued in the teahouse as principles, the extent to which favours are exchanged and returned is rationalized through complex guanxi networks. The central dispute between Baobei and her cousin turns on whether Baobei’s gratitude

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should be extended to her cousin’s best friend, who is not Baobei’s closest friend. Baobei’s decision in relation to the ethics of “return the table” highlights key features of the sisterhood at the tea table: loyalty, intimacy, and the fluidity of guanxi network.

Conclusion: From Feminist Impasse to Sisterhood at the Tea Table From my ethnographic fieldwork, I have found that “sisterhood at the tea table” and “return the table” can help us better understand the lived experiences of mainland Chinese hostesses working in the erotic teahouses of Taiwan, especially the strategies they adopt to survive and pursue a better life, beyond the feminist impasse. Focusing on the material aspects that intersect with sex work and marriage, legal scholar Prabha Kotiswaran (2006) identifies a feminist impasse between structuralist and individualist feminist camps during the feminist sex wars in the 1980s. The feminist impasse lies in a divided set of questions seen often in the debates of the two feminist camps, including “is sex work a form of work or violence, is it chosen or coerced, are sex workers agents or victims” (Kotiswaran, 2006: 23)? What remains overlooked by both camps is that sex work is still seen as a special occupation, different from other types of labour, whereas transactional and recreational sex is distinguished from monogamous and marital sex (Kotiswaran, 2006). Meanwhile, the “top-down totalitarian structuralist theory of power” still presumes women in sex work have “little room for resistance, pleasure or the possibility of fluid bargaining situations between sex workers and other stakeholders in the sex industry” (Kotiswaran, 2006: 27). The problem of the feminist impasse, as such, lies in a similar Cold-War mentality of either/or. In the light of the complicatedly intertwined relationships that connect feminist sex wars and the Cold War, this chapter unpacks hierarchical relationships between the master subjects and the “not-yet not-quite subjects” (Ding, 2002a: 452), including dalumei in popular discourse and the lived realities of mainland Chinese hostesses. In doing so, this chapter highlights the historical and social formation of fear, desire, and anxiety in Taiwan society, relating these feelings to the cultural imagery of dalumei on the one hand and the American dream on the other. This chapter also demonstrates how “businesses” and “careers” of the Taiwanese subjects, including the Taiwanese businessmen, women activists, and leading figures in women’s groups in the late 1990s, needed to reject

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and abolish the ideology and practices represented by “dalumei”. The term dalumei has become the equivalent of “victim of human trafficking”, “gold-digger”, and “communist bandit” in Taiwan society, perpetuating the Cold-War mentality. As such, mainland Chinese women’s sexual practice and intimate labour have rendered them inferior—materialistic— subjects, like Jihong in Formosan Lady, the nameless mainland Chinese mistresses and sex workers depicted in the books Taiwanese Businessmen’s Extramarital Affairs in China and Mainland China as a Tender Strange Land, as well as the mainland mistress Miss Ye in The Great Buddha and The Great Buddha+. The memories of fear of “dalumei” linger as the mainland Chinese female characters finally speak up, posing threats or haunting the masters in the movies after their deaths. By contrast, examining mainland Chinese hostesses’ business strategy “return the table” and their sisterhood at the tea table in the erotic teahouses in Taipei allows us to move towards an understanding of the politics of redistribution. By adopting a politics of redistribution to understand the mainland Chinese hostesses’ business ethics and sisterhood, this chapter draws attention to the “resistance, pleasure or the possibility of fluid bargaining situations between sex workers and other stakeholders in the sex industry” (Kotiswaran, 2006: 23). By doing so, this chapter problematizes the structure of feeling shaped by the Cold War and the feminist sex wars. This cold-sex-war structure of feeling neglects mainland Chinese women’s intimate and business practices, presenting these women’s crossStrait activities as “gold-digging” and the women themselves as dalumei. This chapter has problematized the differentiated and divided Cold-War narrative between the superior master/subject and the not-yet not-quite subjects (Ding, 2002a: 452). In doing so, it hopes to have contributed to the “de-cold war” project (Chen, 2010) by complicating the effect of the Cold War in our everyday life.

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CHAPTER 7

China’s Health Diplomacy in the “New-Cold-War” Era: Contrasting the Battle of Narratives in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa Emilie Tran and Yahia H. Zoubir

In a keynote speech delivered from Beijing to the World Economic Forum on 17 January 2022, President Xi Jinping declared that “We need to discard the Cold War mentality and seek peaceful coexistence and win– win outcomes” (Xi, 2022). This statement is illustrative of the heightened geopolitical tensions between China and the West, particularly the United States. As Ho-fung Hung (2022) contends, the 180-degree turn from

E. Tran (B) Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] Y. H. Zoubir Kedge Business School, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_7

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“Chimerica” (a neologism coined in 2006 to describe the economically symbiotic relationship between China and the United States) to the “New Cold War” has resulted in a “clash of empires” in the 2010s and 2020s. This chapter examines how the creeping “Cold-War mentality” has spilled over to the global public health sector in the form of cold-war battles of narratives about China and COVID-19. After being afflicted with the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2—first identified in Wuhan, China—and once they were able successfully to contain at home what would subsequently become a global pandemic, Chinese authorities extended their health aid to “[n]early all the world’s countries” (Rudolf, 2021). Striving to be perceived internationally as a responsible great power, Beijing concomitantly advertised its support to the world not only in its official reports, such as Fighting COVID-19: China in Action (The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2020), but also in traditional and social media venues of target recipient countries of its health diplomacy. Notwithstanding China’s COVID-19 narrative, arguably chauvinistic and offensive at times (Tran & Tseng, 2022),1 as many as 150 countries worldwide received masks, respirators, and testing apparatuses, and 43 countries welcomed teams of Chinese doctors, according to the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Rudolf, 2021). The pandemic has certainly offered China a unique opportunity to assert itself as a leader in global public health, a role it has sought to play since the early years of the People’s Republic in 1949, but that gained greater

1 A good example are the statements of China’s Ambassador to Paris, Lu Shaye, who was summoned by the French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs in April 2020. The Chinese embassy in Paris had posted in its website and in social media a series of acerbic statements. In particular, an article stated that “residents of retirement homes were made to sign certificates of ‘waiver of emergency care’; the nursing staff of the Ehpad [statesponsored elderly homes in France] abandoned their posts overnight, deserted collectively, leaving their residents to die of hunger and disease”. China became embroiled in Twitter disputes not only in Europe, but also in several countries across continents. In Sri Lanka, the Chinese embassy’s Twitter account was shut because of inflammatory posts. It had posted, “when westerners publish their opinions, it’s called freedom of speech, no matter how false. When Chinese say something different from them, it’s called a disinformation campaign. Hilarious double standards”. The Chinese ambassador to Cyprus said the world was embarrassed by how quickly China had solved the virus outbreak and had resorted to “blame shifting and lies”. In another post he wrote: “Sad to see #Boris [Johnson] tested positive and confirmed cases surpassing 100 k in U.S. Hope it’s not the result of herd immunity policy”—as opposed to China’s zero COVID-19 approach.

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visibility with China’s potent economic status in the twenty-first century. Throughout the 2010s, as Beijing advanced towards becoming a major global player, its influence has been contested by Western powers, which increasingly framed China’s rise as a threat to their security (Chen & Gao, 2022; Chubb, 2022; Rojelia & Tsimonis, 2020; Song, 2015). Critical of China’s health diplomacy, Western news media, political commentators, and officials suggested that China used the pandemic to advance its soft power, leverage, and influence. They argued that helping others during the pandemic was no more than a propaganda tool that Beijing used to establish its world domination and thus supplant European influence throughout the globe. The pandemic and China’s assistance to other countries in fighting the virus generated major political debates in Western countries about how to counter China’s economic and political influence. In the United States, although countering China had been on top of the Trump Administration’s agenda prior to the pandemic, COVID-19 has exacerbated tensions between the two rivals. These hostilities have certainly not abated even after the election of President Joseph Biden. In fact, U.S. rivalry with China has intensified under the Biden administration. In the developing countries, including the entire Middle East and North Africa (M.E.N.A.), responses to China’s assistance have not generated anxieties or anti-Chinese sentiments. On the contrary, perceptions regarding China’s role during the pandemic have been rather positive and indicated, in most cases, the prospect of even closer ties in the postCOVID-19 era despite the United States warning M.E.N.A. states against developing closer ties with China. Reactions to China’s aid in the fight against COVID-19 were positive and reminiscent of the actions taken by China to combat the Ebola epidemic when it erupted in Africa in 2014. As it also did during the COVID-19 pandemic, China had provided considerable medical aid in fighting Ebola, resulting in Sino–African cooperation in developing the Ebola vaccine. This chapter seeks to analyse the power relations between China, M.E.N.A., and Europe, by addressing the two following questions. Firstly, what were China’s actions when the epidemic moved from China to M.E.N.A. and European states in spring 2020? Secondly, how did M.E.N.A. and European states perceive and react to China’s health diplomacy? Based on qualitative research, this chapter’s dataset consists of two categories of open-source documents. In the first category are official

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statements and speeches made by Chinese, M.E.N.A., and European officials, as well as foreign policy papers. These statements and speeches stylize in policy and diplomatic language the capitals’ respective positions. Verbal statements operationalize norms and values in foreign policy behaviour (Aggestam, 1999). As Nabers (2011: 81) puts it, “How, one might ask, can we analyse the expectations that underlie roles if not by looking at language and discourse?” In the second category are media reports from M.E.N.A. and Europe.2 These reflect the distrusting reactions and sentiments of the recipient countries towards China’s health diplomacy. This chapter adopts the methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a growing interdisciplinary research movement (Johnson & McLean, 2020) that stems from Foucault’s dialectical view of discourse (Foucault, 1969). CDA considers discourse to be socially shaped as well as socially constitutive. Typically, CDA encourages researchers to ask questions like: If we are determined by social discourse, what determines the discourse? What rules, codes, and ideologies dictate the way we engage in discourse—that is, how we speak, behave, interact, and perceive? If discourse refers to a particular view of an event, who creates that view? (Williamson et al., 2018). Whereas China’s COVID-19 global relief programmes had been well received in the M.E.N.A. (Zoubir, 2020; Zoubir & Tran, forthcoming), the reactions from Europe were outright adversarial in some instances (Tran & Tseng, 2022). Comparing the deployment of China’s health diplomacy to the M.E.N.A. and Europe, this chapter argues that role performance and expectations, as well as trust, constitute the determining factors in shaping the discourse of Chinese, M.E.N.A., and European actors about Beijing’s self-proclaimed and perceived intentions and ambitions.

2 We have used local newspapers in English, French, and Arabic languages, published in the Middle Eastern and North African region, including but not limited to: Africanews, Al-Ahram, Al-Araby, Agence Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP), Alanbat News, Algérie Presse Service (APS), Al Jazeera, Al Monitor, Asharq el-Awsat, Arab News, Arabian Business, Bahrain News Agency, Al Arabiya, Daily Sabah, El Moudjahid, Emirates News Agency, Gulf News, Haartz, Hurriyet Daily News, Khaleej Times, Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), Israel21, Jordan Times, Le Matin, L’Orient-Le-Jour, Le Temps, Lebanon News, Lybia Observer, Morocco World News, Oman Observer, Public Radio of Armenia, Syrian Chinese Business Council, Tehran Times, Times of Oman, Times of Israel, Tout Sur l’Algérie (TSA), Qatar Airways, etc.

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Following the presentation of the theoretical and conceptual framework that combines two distinct sets of literature on role theory and trust in foreign policy analysis, the remainder of the chapter analyses China– M.E.N.A. and China–Europe relations, and the reactions of M.E.N.A. and European states and peoples towards China’s health diplomacy in the early 2020s.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework: Role Theory and Trust in Foreign Policy Analysis China distinguishes itself from other nations through demonstration of its long-standing commitment to foreign aid (Kobayashi, 2013). Development assistance in the health sector has been an integral component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (B.R.I.) since 2015 (Tang et al., 2017). Following the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese leadership has promoted the “health silk road” as essential to building a “global community of common destiny for mankind”, President Xi’s stated foreign policy goal since 2017. The pandemic has revealed how the B.R.I. could function in times of crisis. China’s health diplomacy aims to be farsighted and strategic. Beijing has linked measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in aid recipient countries with the prospect of postpandemic cooperation within the B.R.I. framework. But whether and how China will be able to win hearts and minds depends on the level of trust each country has vis-à-vis China. This section analyses China’s health diplomacy using role theory and the concept of trust in foreign policy analysis. China’s Role as a Global Public Health Leader for the Developing World Since the 1970s, role theory has been applied to the study of International Relations. Holsti (1970) proposes the idea of national role conceptions (N.R.C.) to explain how states operate in the international system. Shih (1988: 600) suggests that, as part of a N.R.C., a state feels it has a mission. China unquestionably shows that part of its N.R.C. is the mission to aid developing and the poorest countries fight epidemics and other dangerous diseases. Inspired by, on the one hand, Harnisch et al. (2016), who applies role theory to China and, on the other hand, Yan (2019), who emphasizes

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China’s philosophical thinking and its current attempts to differentiate itself from hegemonic powers through its human authority (“humane realism”3 ), this chapter employs role theory to examine China’s health policy and its self-attributed role in global public health. Simply put, role theory uses the analogy of theatre, in which an actor plays a role according to a script (Aggestam, 2006). “Role conception” comprises both an actor’s perceived position (e.g. China’s role in the international system) and the perception of other actors’ “role expectations” (what others expect from China). In other words, there are two categories of role expectations: ego expectations that emanate from oneself and alter expectations that are demanded by others. One of China’s self-attributed roles has been to assist African states in the health sector. In the 1960s, Chinese Medical Teams (C.M.T.s) began deployment in Africa (Li, 2011). In 1963, the first ever mission was dispatched to Algeria and has continued on a rotating basis to this date. China also initiated primary disease prevention campaigns in Africa throughout the 2000s: anti-malaria campaigns, prevention of HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and improvement of medical facilities and infrastructure (Procopio, 2020). A 2014 analysis estimated that China had committed at least US$3 billion to about 255 health-related projects in Africa from 2000 to 2012. This would place China in the top 10 list of bilateral health aid contributors to Africa in this period (Grepin, 2014). Updated after China’s release of a 2014 white paper on foreign aid, though, investment appears to be closer to US$5.67 billion from 2000 to 2013 with 531 health-related investments (Shajalal, 2017). In 2015, China pledged US$60 billion in development financing. This amount included a public health track to increase cooperation between regions, which comprised investment in the African Centres for Disease Control (C.D.C.s) and cooperation between 20 African and 20 Chinese health facilities (Green, 2018). In 2018, China committed to another US$60 billion in financing, but with breakdowns of the different areas of focus. The area of health focused on public health surveillance systems in Africa and emergency response while also announcing an upgrade to 50 medical and health aid programmes, specifically naming the African 3 Yan Xuetong (2019: 48–53) argues that, based on its ancient philosophical thinking as well as contemporary attempts to differentiate itself from hegemonic powers, China may achieve humane authority (王道) (moral realism) if it can persuade followers that it is indeed a benevolent and just state.

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C.D.C.s and China-Africa Friendship Hospitals. The programme also focused on HIV prevention (led by the region’s Presidents’ wives in a three-year advocacy programme for youth) (Kennedy, 2018). The areas of health in which China has sought to confirm its leading role have varied over time. To prove its leadership role, China has engaged in a diverse range of actions. Thus, China held the High-Level Meeting on Health Cooperation towards the Health Silk Road in 2017, where it signed 17 bilateral memorandums of understanding promoting health security along the Silk Road. Topics ranged from health policy to hospital management, and maternal health to traditional medicine. China and other conference participants also signed the Beijing Communique, outlining global health priorities, with the broad goal of advancing the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (S.D.G.s) (Tang et al., 2017). China also hosted the annual Asia Pacific Military Health Exchange (first in 2015 and the most recent in 2018, co-hosted by the United States and China with 28 countries in attendance) (Yang, 2018). Checkel (2005) considers role play as a form of socialization, the central goal of social interaction being to elicit the recognition of specific roles (Harnisch et al., 2011; Thies & Breuning, 2012). Unquestionably, the health and other fora that China participates in serve as socialization arenas but also as spaces to extract recognition of its role as leader in health aid. Trust in International Relations How states perceive China’s role is also contingent upon the level of trust between China and the stakeholders. In their external altercasting, actors get strategic credibility through role performance/enactment, that is, when they carry out the pledges that they have made. Thus, what is said is important. In the M.E.N.A. region, for instance, China builds this trust through the different types of strategic partnerships it enters. The strategic partnerships provide the “structures of social interaction in which actors’ international roles play out with the aim of enhancing their status and hence securing a favorable international role position” (Michalski & Pan, 2016). One can argue that “trust, shared identities, and familiarity encourage further contact, … an expansion of the number of topics viewed as appropriate for discussion, and the development of common definitions of problems and appropriate actions” (Aggestam, 1999).

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Trust (and its antonym, mis/distrust) constitutes one of the backbones of economic and political life, as well as social interaction. Trust is defined as “a belief that the other side is trustworthy, that is, willing to reciprocate cooperation” (Kydd, 2005: 3). Trust and trust-building have re-emerged in international relations literature, for the concept is a key variable in explaining foreign policy decisions, the formation of institutions, and global solidarity generally (Brugger et al., 2013; Keating & Ruzicka, 2014). China has long sought to convince its partners to establish trust, particularly in the area of health. However, as Lieberthal and Wang (2012) and Chan (2017) argue, strategic distrust has underpinned the rivalry between China and the West. Since the mid-2010s, Chinese and European officials have, in their respective speeches, reiterated the importance of restoring trust (Tran & Zoubir, 2022). When S.A.R.S. broke out in 2003, China was criticized for having mishandled the virus reporting and cooperation under the World Health Organization’s early warning framework, which created a precedent with regard to distrusting the Communist Party-State’s official discourse. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the communist regime has again been accused of concealing relevant information, leading to greater distrust and a cold-war-like info war, as discussed below.

China–M.E.N.A. Relations Prior to the Pandemic In 2020, China’s “anti-epidemic diplomacy” in the M.E.N.A. region signalled at least three important factors. First, it confirmed China’s role as a global player in health. Second, it highlighted the level of trust that exists between M.E.N.A. states and China. Third, it confirmed a growing relationship marked by a commitment to expand and/or enhance relations in the post-COVID-19 era. In contrast to the mistrust that characterized European discourse on aid from China, most M.E.N.A. countries—with very few initial exceptions4 —exhibited no such doubts 4 Initial tensions with Turkey regarding masks imported from China, and a controver-

sial labelling on medical supplies boxes featuring Ararat Mountain, were rapidly resolved. Iranian officials, too, initially criticized China for the “inaccurate” statement about COVID-19, depicting it as a “bitter joke”. There were isolated cases of anti-Chinese sentiments in Morocco and Egypt following the effects of the epidemic in the region (Zoubir, 2020).

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about China. In the last two decades, China-M.E.N.A. relations have grown exponentially, especially in the areas of trade, business, energy, technology, and economics. Because of its self-attributed role as leader of the Global South and promoter of South-South cooperation, China expanded its ties—bilaterally and within multilateral organizations (such as the China Arab States Cooperation Forum, C.A.S.C.F.)—with Middle Eastern and African states. Such relations resulted in the signing of comprehensive strategic partnerships (with Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and U.A.E.), strategic partnerships (with Sudan, Iraq, Morocco, Qatar, Jordan, Djibouti, Kuwait, and Oman), a strategic cooperation relationship (with Turkey), and an innovative comprehensive partnership (with Israel). Soon after coming to power and launching the One Belt, One Road, renamed Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, President Xi Jinping indicated at the Ministerial Meeting of the C.A.S.C.F. in 2014 that “the establishment of the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum was a strategic step the two sides took for the long-term development of the China– Arab relations”. Two years later, China published the 2016 Arab Policy Paper (The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2016), in which China stressed that it would continue its old friendship with the Arab states and encourage cooperation at all levels, re-emphasizing the strategic nature of those relations whose purpose is to foster peace and stability. Thus, when COVID-19 struck China, Beijing had already strengthened relations with almost all M.E.N.A. states. This probably explains why the M.E.N.A. came to China’s aid immediately after the epidemic spread over its territory. Regardless of their individual capacities, M.E.N.A. governments sent millions of masks and other medical equipment to Wuhan, the city where the virus appeared and from which it spread. While seeking to contain the virus, Chinese authorities used this epidemic to “remind the world that, in the era of globalization, all countries’ interests are closely interconnected and human society has one shared future”, and so global society must “continue building the community of common destiny”. President Xi asserted that “China hopes to step up public health cooperation with the world to interpret the true essence of building a community with a shared future for humanity” (cited in Xinhua, 11 March 2020). This was precisely the policy that President Xi presented to the world on 18 May 2020.

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Mankind is a community with a shared future. Solidarity and cooperation is [sic] our most powerful weapon for defeating the virus. This is the key lesson the world has learned from fighting HIV/AIDS, Ebola, avian influenza, influenza A (H1N1) and other major epidemics. And solidarity and cooperation is [sic] a sure way through which we, the people of the world, can defeat this novel coronavirus (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the P.R.C., 18 May 2020).

China’s Role Performance and Strategic Trust: Delivering Vaccines At the peak of the pandemic, China pledged that it would deliver vaccines to the developing and poor countries once they became available (Culver & Gan, 2 December 2020). Once they were manufactured, China delivered both Sinopharma and Sinovac vaccines to many countries, including those in the M.E.N.A. In December 2020, China delivered the first doses of vaccines to Egypt and another shipment in March 2021. By September 2021, Egypt was able to start the manufacture of millions of Chinese vaccines in two plants, with the intent of becoming the “biggest vaccine producer” in the Middle East and Africa (Africanews, 1 September 2021). In March 2021, Djibouti was the recipient of a first consignment of Chinese COVID-19 vaccines made by Sinovac (Somaliland News, 19 March 2021). On 29 September 2021, Algerian authorities launched the manufacture of the Chinese vaccine CoronaVac in a plant in Algeria’s Eastern city of Constantine. This is a joint venture binding China’s Sinovac with Algeria’s Saidal. The plant can produce 8 million doses per month and even double that number if necessary (Le Monde, 30 September 2021). The Algerian government has donated vaccines produced in Constantine to countries like Tunisia, Mali, and Niger (TSA, 25 January 2022) and, like Egypt, Algeria planned on sending vaccines to Sub-Saharan African countries that have a dire need for vaccines. Evidently, China’s approach to dealing with COVID-19 in the M.E.N.A., like in the rest of the world, reflected its foreign policy, theory of international relations, and humane realism (Yan, 2019) that it has been putting in place since at least the presidency of Hu Jintao (2003– 2013). Thus, in subscribing to the concept of one human community with a shared future, China made a commitment to offer aid within its capability to countries in need, in their fight against COVID-19.

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Mena States’ Reactions to China’s Health Diplomacy Within two months, the spread of the epidemic in China was under control. However, the spread of the virus expanded worldwide and had become a devastating pandemic. The M.E.N.A. countries, like many developed states, were ill-prepared for such calamity. Cognizant of the assistance it received from the M.E.N.A. governments and to also live up to its role as global health leader, China responded swiftly to their calls for help. The other reason, of course, was the opportunity for China to deploy its health diplomacy. All M.E.N.A. countries received assistance from China regardless of their size, ideology, or strength of relations with China. A perusal of hundreds of newspaper articles reveals the great appreciation expressed by governments and populations towards China. In the poor countries of the M.E.N.A., and even in the not so poor ones, people were dying by the thousands as health facilities were inadequate and the number of doctors insufficient. The popularity of China in the region was unmistakable. As it did in the rest of the world, China launched a gigantic campaign to distribute medical aid. In the M.E.N.A., China dispatched epidemiologists, virologists, and doctors to Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Djibouti, Sudan, and the other M.E.N.A. states. Most of China’s medical aid entailed recurrent deliveries of millions of masks, including N95 masks, goggles, temperature screening devices, COVID-19 testing kits, protective garments, and ventilators. In Egypt, a Sino–Egyptian face mask factory in Cairo began the production of 1.5 million masks daily (Moneim, 2020). China organized online conferences between doctors in China and their colleagues in the region. Face-to-face conferences were also held with Chinese medical staff dispatched to the region. The medical teams who arrived from China trained local medical staff in hospitals on how to control the pandemic. Chinese doctors worked in hospitals treating COVID-19 patients and visited quarantine centres. Aid was provided by the Chinese government, businesses, and private citizens. Chinese corporations working in the M.E.N.A. participated in the drive to raise financial assistance and supplies of medical equipment. For instance, the Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Doha Branch offered one million pairs of medical gloves and thousands of sets of protective clothing. In Oman, Chinese citizens and businesses donated infrared thermographic thermometers to Muscat Airport,

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offered testing kits to the Ministry of Health, as well as making monetary donations. Chinese companies operating in Duqm contributed medical supplies (Li, 5 May 2020). Appealing to the international community to cooperate with Iran and safeguard public health, China sent many containers of medical supplies to Iran (Tasnim, 25 March 2020), a team of doctors, and prefabricated rooms, among other donations (Gupta and Singh, 13 April 2020). Chinese aid helped mitigate the medical scarcities caused by the severe sanctions that the United States has imposed on Iran. China’s aid was very well received by the peoples and the governments alike throughout the M.E.N.A. Having extended support and expressed their empathy when China was fighting COVID-19, M.E.N.A. states subsequently conveyed their gratitude for China’s health aid in numerous ways. The most dramatic illustration was certainly in the U.A.E. The Burj Khalifa, A.D.N.O.C. Headquarters, and other U.A.E. iconic landmarks were lit up on 2 February 2020 for the Chinese New Year with the colours of the Chinese national flag and slogans in solidarity with China. Lin Yaduo, Chargé d’affaires at the Chinese Embassy in Abu Dhabi, noted how “many Chinese living and working here in the UAE were moved to tears” (cited in Emirates News Agency, 2020). The only hitch was in Turkey: China’s deliveries of medical supplies on 9 April 2020 bore labels referring to “Ararat Mountain”, which caused an uproar. China apologized immediately, and the Turkish government was satisfied with Beijing’s explanation that the writing in English was added to the packages after they had left China (Ghazanchyan, 2020). The mutual aid during the pandemic, coupled with other geopolitical interests (such as the importance of Turkey to the Belt and Road Initiative), had little negative impact and the development of Sino–Turkish ties has continued to crescendo (Stone, 2020). In other words, this incident did not have a negative impact on excellent Sino–Turkish relations. Due to its health diplomacy and the effective assistance it extended to the M.E.N.A. states, while most Western powers were in lockdown mode and limited in the aid they could provide, China earned many positive points that contributed to political rapprochement and economic cooperation. Thus, in pro-West Jordan, for instance, China’s assistance was appreciated. As Samer Khair Ahmed, a Jordanian expert on Arab– China relations, said China’s sharing anti-coronavirus experiences with and offering medical equipment to Jordan and other countries, made it “a trustworthy country” (Aydinlik, 25 June 2020; Xinhua, 5 June 2020).

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In Sudan, sending Chinese experts to the country provided the opportunity to restate the robust ties of friendship and oft-repeated mottos of “strategic trust” and “mutual trust, mutual benefit, mutual help and mutual learning”. Sudan’s state minister for foreign affairs declared, “We hope the China-Sudan ties would continue, and we hope to continue working with the People’s Republic of China in its work to support Sudan in its development and in the fields of health, education, agriculture and others” (Xinhua, 12 June 2020). Due to unconditional aid, Oman “gave China a lot of appreciation as a true ally and friend of these countries [those it aided] and as a trusted friend in a time of trouble [Emphasis added]” (cited in Xinhua, 9 June 2020). In the Maghreb region, Algeria received several medical supplies from China. The Algerian government, through its minister of health, reiterated “the gratitude of the Algerian Government to the People’s Republic of China for its assistance in the fight against the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19)” (APS, 2 April 2020). Tunisia’s President Kais Saied recognized the extent and importance of China’s aid for his country’s economic and social development, as well as the shipment of numerous batches of medical materials to fight COVID-19. The president was persuaded that cooperation between Tunis and Beijing would increase and that bilateral relations would be a model of international relations (Xinhua, 8 December 2020). The Palestinian Authority extended its appreciation to China for its support for the Palestinian cause (Xinhua, 11 June 2020). In the case of Morocco (Le Desk, 22 March 2020), China’s official news agency Xinhua stressed that China and Morocco have strengthened relations through joint efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In parallel, their multilayered cooperation in public health, culture and other fields has deepened under the Belt and Road framework. (Xinhua 1 June 2020)

Stronger China-Syria relations have resulted from Chinese aid that was especially valued for post-conflict reconstruction. Damascus has, in fact, played a substantial role in the B.R.I. And so has Lebanon, fuelling its tremendous drive for investment and infrastructure development. The post-COVID-19 crisis and mutual aid have already resulted in the strengthening of Sino–M.E.N.A. states relations (Yellinek, 2022). But China’s health diplomacy resulted not only in the strengthening of (or pledges to strengthen) bilateral ties with the Middle East and North

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African states, but also in the projection of a more positive image of China. Friedrichs (2019: 1634) asserted that: China enjoys considerable popularity in the Middle East and Africa, not only among political and business elites but also among ordinary people. All Middle Eastern and African regimes (including those that are hostile to one another, like Iran and Saudi Arabia) are on friendly terms with Beijing. Every year, opinion polls confirm China’s popularity at street level.

Prior to the pandemic, a poll published by Pew Research in December 2019 showed that, while China’s image in the West was largely unfavourable, it was quite favourable in the Middle East and Africa (Silver et al., 2019). The following year, in the midst of COVID-19, another poll conducted by Pew confirmed the popularity of China in the M.E.N.A. (Robbins, 2020). Pew’s 2021 poll also showed similar results (Robbins, 2021). Our own analysis, obtained through content analysis of official statements and newspaper articles, confirms the growing popularity of China in the region. One can safely surmise that the deployment of China’s health diplomacy and the Health Silk Road (Zoubir & Tran, 2022) have contributed to such favourable opinions in the Middle East and Africa at large. Not only the aid it provided at the peak of the pandemic but also the vaccines it supplied to these regions greatly account for China’s positive image in the region. There has been some concern in Beijing over criticism of its health diplomacy policy received from private media companies in the M.E.N.A. region, which viewed China’s medical aid as a stratagem to make geopolitical gains. Interviews with Chinese scholars in December 2021 and January 2022 reveal that such criticism urged Beijing to reassess its old policy of dealing primarily at the government-to-government level. Now, China seems to pay much greater attention to public opinion and has decided to make every effort to build trust with civil society in the Middle East and Africa. The objective is to demonstrate that relations with those countries are based on mutual trust. Various China scholars told the authors in WeChat interviews in late November and early December 2021 that China had become cognizant of its limited soft power influence and is seeking to remedy this lacuna (Authors’ interviews 2021).

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China–Europe Relations China, the European Union, and individual European states have been entangled in a multilateral and multifarious relationship (Christiansen et al., 2019). The E.U. has defined China as a “strategic partner” but, at the same time, also as “a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance” (European Commission, 2019). On the one hand, China, the E.U., and individual European states share significant common interests, engaging with one another through trade and investments leading to global economic growth, fighting climate change, and promoting international security (European Commission, 2017). On the other hand, China and Europe have grown increasingly apart in their respective values and outlooks. Since the 1980s, Europeans had hoped for more and quicker concessions from China in terms of greater reciprocity in market access. However, certain Chinese positions, reflected in such industrial and technological strategies as “Made in China 2025” issued in May 2015, seemed to “be designed to make an already uneven economic playing field more uneven at a time when Europeans (and others) were asking for greater reciprocity in market access (not less of it)” (Breslin & Pan, 2021: 199). A “shared sense of economic imbalance, disappointment and unease” (Oertel, 2020) has emerged among most E.U. actors. Under President Xi Jinping, the persistent lack of a level playing field, coupled with a more assertive authoritarian Chinese Communist Party-State, have led to growing distrust from the E.U. and Europeans towards China (Tran, 2022). Consequently, the E.U.’s approach towards China has moved to a more “defensive if not confrontational” approach over the years (Le Corre, 2020). This can be seen through the imposition of sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights violations (Zenz, 2022) and the freezing of the ratification process of the Comprehensive Investment Agreement by the European Parliament in May 2021 (European Parliament, 2021a).5 It is now a challenge for the E.U. to develop closer economic and political relations with 5 The E.U.–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, agreed to by negotiators in December 2020 after seven years of talks, aimed to put E.U. companies on an equal footing in China and cement Beijing’s status as a trusted trading partner. The European Parliament halted in May 2021 (with 599 votes in favour, 30 votes against, and 58 abstentions) the ratification of the long-awaited investment pact with China until Beijing lifts the sanctions that it had imposed on 10 E.U. politicians, think-tanks, and diplomats two months earlier, in response to Western sanctions against Chinese officials accused

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China while maintaining its normative claim of promoting human rights, democracy, and the rule of law worldwide (Mattlin, 2012). Heightened economic, geopolitical, and ideological competition between China and the United States (Hung, 2022) have raised questions for Europeans as to how to position themselves, including in the Indo-Pacific region (Simon, 2021; Tran, 2022). Emulating the debates in the U.S., Australia, and Britain (McCourt, 2021), European capitals across the board have shifted their views on China, seeing Beijing increasingly as a security threat (Chen & Gao, 2022; Chubb, 2022; Rojelia & Tsimonis, 2020; Song, 2015). However, there are different voices in this debate, among E.U. actors, on the one hand, and among European states, on the other, which explains why the E.U. has been struggling to speak to China with one voice. At the E.U. level, some scholars and policymakers argue that the E.U. should reduce to a minimum its reliance on China and its exposure to Chinese stakes (Holslag, 2017, 2019). Other voices suggest that the E.U. should avoid being drawn into the U.S.–China rivalry. Europeans should, instead, develop an independent approach of continued engagement (Biscop, 2019), or a “European strategic third way”, “between the “traditional transatlantic alliance and the pull of the Chinese market (Casarini, 2022). The E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrel, put forward a “Sinatra doctrine”, laying out “how the E.U. should deal with the US–China competition”—when faced with an assertive, expansionist, and authoritarian China—“in its own way” (Borrell, 2020). “European sovereignty” or “strategic autonomy” should ensure the E.U.’s capacity to act independently and become more resilient in areas including defence, trade, industrial, and digital policies (European Parliament, 2021b). The views of the individual E.U. member states diverge on core issues such as the scope of China’s access to the E.U.’s single market, or how to position the E.U. in face of “conflicting great-power interests” (Do Céu Pinto Arena, 2022: 1). E.U. member states often prioritize their bilateral relations with China, thereby “undermin[ing] Brussels’ capacity to fashion a clear and coherent China policy” (Casarini, 2015: 122). Fox and Godement (2019) categorized E.U. member states into four groups, namely: “assertive industrialists, ideological free traders, of the mass detentions of Muslim Uyghurs in northwestern China. This exacerbated the dispute in Sino–European relations.

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accommodating mercantilists and European followers”. Tran (2022) and Esteban and Armanini (2022) showed that growing distrust, respectively, in France–China and Spain–China relations, have compelled Paris to enact a new role vis-à-vis China, that of a “coopetitor” (combining cooperation and competition), while Madrid has adopted cooperation with more conditionalities. Some Chinese initiatives, notably the cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European countries, also known as “16 + 1”, and Xi’s foreign policy signature programme, the Belt and Road Initiative, effectively drew some E.U. states closer to China, which has contributed to preventing a more coherent and assertive European approach (Pepermans, 2018). Some member states with closer ties to China have opposed joint E.U. measures. For example, Greece vetoed an E.U. statement critical of Beijing’s human rights record, and Hungary refused to sign a joint E.U. statement criticizing the reported torture of detained lawyers in China in 2017. In the next chapter, Ágota Révész discusses social and political tensions within Hungary, unleashed by China’s efforts to set up a campus of higher education in Budapest. China–Europe relations prior to the pandemic was already strained. So, when Europe was hit by its first COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, China’s epidemic relief aid arrived in a Europe whose people were divided: some Europeans clearly trusted China more than others. While some Europeans welcomed China’s helping hand, the majority of them and the E.U. questioned China’s true intentions and ultimate ambitions.

Europe’s Reactions Towards China’s Health Diplomacy and Management of Covid-19 In sharp contrast with the overall positive response from the M.E.N.A. states and peoples, Europeans by and large not only displayed exceptionally unfavourable views towards China, but they also committed various acts of discrimination against China and the Chinese communities across Europe. We now attempt to deconstruct the process that transformed what was a mixed attitude towards China to sheer distrust, resulting in Sinophobia. From Epidemic Relief Aid... Notwithstanding their growing wariness and divergence in attitude towards China, Europeans, through the E.U., did provide 50 tons of

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equipment to the Chinese at the beginning of the outbreak in January 2020, a gesture which China reciprocated two months later, when the centre of the pandemic shifted to Europe. While Europeans went into lockdown amidst their first COVID-19 outbreak, China, which had just recovered from the first wave, delivered surgical masks, protective gear, respirators, and ventilators worldwide, in addition to providing loans and medical assistance (Zhao, 2020; Zoubir & Tran, 2022). European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a video posted on social media that China had not forgotten this aid and that, as Europe was struggling with the outbreak itself, the E.U. was “grateful for China’s support”. Von der Leyen said she had spoken to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on 18 March and agreed that the powers required “each other’s support in times of need” (Von der Leyen, 2020). However, these gestures of mutual help and words of gratitude did not compensate for the serious disturbance in the global supply chain, which exposed Europe’s overreliance on China. In a 16 April 2020 conference call (as Europe was on lockdown due to the pandemic), the E.U. trade ministers agreed on the importance of diversification to reduce reliance on individual countries of supply. Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan outlined the need for a discussion “on what it means to be strategically autonomous” (Hogan, 2020). The main question for the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS)—a German think tank—was whether the pandemic would reinforce, “decoupling trends, pulling major economies further apart and disrupting commercial flows and other exchanges” (European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and MERICS, 2021: 3). Emphasizing the growing geopolitical tensions, the report also documented how China was redoubling its efforts to achieve self-reliance: “European companies in China report that this drive is different and more radical than in the past” (European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and MERICS, 2021: 4). Clearly, COVID-19 reinforced the wary sentiments of Europeans towards China before the pandemic. As China sought to enact a new role during the pandemic, showing solidarity with its own diaspora (Tran & Tseng, 2022) and the world at large, the consortium of the European Think Tank Network on China released a special report in April 2020 arguing that the health crisis had served as “a catalyst for a number of trends that have been shaping Europe–China relations in recent years, while in other ways it has turned the tables” (Seaman and French Institute

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of International Relations, 2020: 7). Titled COVID-19 and Europe– China Relations: A Country-Level Analysis, the report concluded that this effectively ended the “age of ‘naiveté’ towards China” (Seaman, 2020: 10). China’s health aid and diplomacy were seen to have gone “into overdrive” with aid and mask deliveries and the promotion of China’s COVID-19 response as a “success story” (Seaman, 2020: 8). ... to a COVID-19 Info War Mentioning for the first time the novel coronavirus in a public address on 20 January 2020, Xi Jinping played the role of a leader at the forefront of a war to “stem the spread of the virus”. The memory of the first global epidemic of the twenty-first century was still very much present in the Chinese authorities’ minds: in 2002 to 2003, China was already criticized for concealing the facts about the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), creating panic, and causing 774 deaths worldwide. Understandably, Xi wished for China, under his leadership, to avoid the same health and public relations fiasco. Following the West’s criticisms of China surrounding the origins of the virus—which President Trump provocatively referred to as the “Chinaflu” and “kung flu”—and China’s initial mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak, there ensued a long and fierce COVID-19 info war campaign. Filled with conspiracy theories (Foucart et al., 2021), this campaign led to the politics of mutual blame (Jaworsky & Qiaoan, 2021). In April 2020, the E.U. was criticized for caving in to pressure from China to dilute a report on disinformation. European officials delayed and then rewrote the document, deleting details of the Chinese government’s false claims about the pandemic (Apuzzo, 2020). In May 2020, the President of the European Commission Van der Leyen, in an interview with CNBC, urged Beijing to cooperate in the investigation on the origin of the virus, insisting that such a query would not weaken relations with China because it was in the best interest of every country (Amaro, 2020). However, the 13-member WHO-led mission was only able to visit China much later, in January to February 2021. Peter Ben Embarek, leader of the mission, recalled that “Politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table. We had anywhere between 30 and 60 Chinese colleagues, and a large number of them were not scientists, not from the public health sector” (Kupferschmidt, 2021). In June 2020, the E.U. Commission said that Russia

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and China were running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the E.U., its neighborhood, and globally” (European Commission, 2020). China and the E.U. held their first virtual summit in late June which ended without any agreements or joint statement (European Council, 2020). Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, wrote after the summit that “Engaging and cooperating with China is both an opportunity and a necessity”, adding that “at the same time, we have to recognize that we do not share the same values, political systems or approach to multilateralism” (European Council, 2020). Negative Views of China Following the first outbreak and China’s health diplomacy in spring 2020, global polling that same year across the board, except for the Arab Barometer, reported a decrease in favourable views of China. A YouGov poll in August found that respondents in Nigeria (70%), Thailand (64%), Mexico (61%), and Egypt (55%) had more positive views of China regarding world affairs, while those in Japan (7%), Denmark (13%), Britain (13%), Sweden (14%), and other Western countries had the least positive views (de Waal, 2020). In October 2020, a survey by the Pew Research Center showed that unfavourable views of China had reached historical highs (Silver et al., 2020). Across the fourteen nations surveyed (among which nine were European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the U.K.), a median of 61% said China had done a bad job dealing with the outbreak. A majority in each of the fourteen countries expressed an unfavourable view of China, while in most countries, around threequarters or more saw the country in a negative light. Around a third or more in Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., and Sweden had very unfavourable views of China. In 2021, the Global Attitude Survey showed that in nearly all the 17 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center (13 Western countries plus Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan), unfavourable views towards China were at, or near, a historic high (Silver et al., 2021) because of China’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak and the restricted freedoms in the country. An Ipsos (2020) poll found those in Russia (81%) and other developing economies were most likely to believe China’s future influence would be positive, while Great Britain (19%), Canada (21%), Germany (24%), Australia (24%), Japan (24%), the United

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States (24%), and France (24%) were least likely. An International Republican Institute survey from February to March 2020 found that only in Kosovo (75%) did most respondents express an unfavourable opinion of the country, while majorities in Serbia (85%), Montenegro (68%), North Macedonia (56%), and Bosnia (52%) expressed favourable views. A Globsec poll (Hadju et al., 2020: 48–51) that focused on Central and Eastern Europe and Western Balkans found that the highest percentage of those who saw China as a threat were in Czechia (51%), Poland (34%), and Hungary (24%), while it was seen as least threatening in Balkan countries such as Bulgaria (3%), Serbia (13%), and North Macedonia (14%). The reasons for threat perception were generally linked to the country’s economic influence. Sinophobia In their framing analysis of China’s “mask diplomacy” in Europe early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Qi et al. (2021) argue that Beijing’s medical aid revived Orientalist discourses and the fear of a Yellow Peril, invoking a racist metaphor of the nineteenth century. Tran and Tseng (2022) contend that this simple object of self-protection against the coronavirus led to a string of racist incidents. In the winter of 2020, many East Asians wearing facemasks in Europe were often viewed as COVID-19 carriers and super-spreaders, making them vulnerable to stigmatizing speeches and discriminatory behaviours in public. People boycotted Chinese restaurants and businesses; while in schools, children and youths of East Asian origin were stigmatized or harassed, mirroring similar incidents in the United States and Australia. On 26 January 2020, the front page of a French daily newspaper, Courrier Picard, read “Yellow Alert” [Alerte Jaune] (BBC, 29 January 2020), while the inside story was titled, “New yellow peril” [Le nouveau péril jaune]. Although the article was eventually withdrawn from the newspaper’s website (Courrier Picard, 26 January 2020), there were various other instances of clumsy and tendentious wording across European media, which also circulated as social media content, contributing to a climate of ignorance and anxiety in European countries, especially those with large Chinese communities such as France and the U.K. In response to this worldwide phenomenon against Chinese diasporic communities, the hashtag #IAmNotAVirus was created and quickly relayed on social media.

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Conclusion To the first question—“What were China’s actions when the epidemic moved from China to M.E.N.A. and European states in spring 2020?”— this chapter has shown that Beijing deployed its health assistance to both developing and developed economies in the M.E.N.A. and Europe. China did so partly because it followed its self-ascribed role of a global health provider, and partly to assert its leadership position in the COVID-19 era. To the second question—“How did M.E.N.A. and European states perceive and react to China’s health diplomacy?”—this chapter has demonstrated the positive reactions from M.E.N.A. states and peoples who were thankful to China for offering a helping hand. Across the M.E.N.A. (and Africa), governments and populations trusted that China would help them in times of need and prove that it is indeed the allweather friend of people in the Global South. To this date, government officials and the media do not miss any opportunity to express appreciation for China’s rescue during the pandemic. In sharp contrast, the Europeans expressed unfavourable views of China, due to the lack of trust that had been building up prior to COVID-19, a situation that the pandemic aggravated to outright distrust in many European countries since 2020. China’s offensive global communication campaign dubbed as wolf-warrior diplomacy, coupled with revelations about its human rights record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, overshadowed Beijing’s health assistance during the first COVID-19 outbreak. And precisely because of that profound distrust, the West’s “often narrow focus on the qualitative defects of Chinese aid fails to recognise that, in the absence of traditional aid donors, Beijing has supported many third [world] countries effectively and extensively” (Rudolf, 2021). In contrast, the M.E.N.A. countries have not failed to recognize the effective and extensive Chinese support they received.6 The tensions between the E.U. and China are ongoing and do not seem to be abating any time soon. Indeed, on 7 June 2022, the European Parliament adopted a report on its security challenges in the Indo-Pacific, 6 While European businesses (Authors’ exchanges with European business communities

and diplomats, 2020, 2021, and 2022; Kine, 2022), the World Health Organization (Rigby & Mason, 2022), and the International Monetary Fund (Bay, 2022) were critical of China’s zero-COVID policy, the M.E.N.A. countries have been silent on the issue. M.E.N.A. countries continue to rely on China’s advice or expertise on how to contain COVID-19.

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claiming that China poses a threat to the E.U.’s interests in the region, criticizing China’s position on the Ukraine crisis, as well as Taiwan-, Hong Kong-, Macao-, and Xinjiang-related issues (News European Parliament, 2022). In response, a spokesperson of the Chinese Mission to the E.U. said that the report was based on ideological bias, distorting China’s policy and position, playing up the “China threat”, denying the country’s legitimate right to safeguard its sovereignty and security, and grossly interfering with its internal affairs (Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the European Union, 2022). Similar to the proxy conflicts of the Cold-War era, mounting tensions in the Indo-Pacific constitute a proxy zone of conflict between the E.U. and China in the twenty-first century. Despite these tensions and power rivalries, China, the E.U., and European states have continued their close trade and economic relations because of the mutual benefits each draws from them. E.U. policy towards China remains less adversarial compared to U.S. policy towards China. Presently, the threats faced by the international community are numerous; in particular, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, with its surge of variants threatening especially the populations of the Global South. Those present and clear threats require cooperation and trust among states to manage them.

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CHAPTER 8

Hungary and the New-Cold-War Narrative on China Ágota Révész

Since early 2018, the “official” onset of the U.S.-China trade war, we have witnessed the rise of a Cold-War narrative on China in the mainstream news media of the core countries of the European Union. Hungary, under the Orbán government, seemed unaffected for a few years, until plans to allow Fudan University in Shanghai to open a campus in Budapest were announced in early 2021. Subsequently, a harsh Cold-War rhetoric appeared in Hungarian oppositional media, presenting “Fudan Hungary” as a choice for the nation between East and West. As a Hungarian citizen with some professional background in diplomacy between Hungary and China, I found it striking how fast the discourse on Fudan was able to internalize Cold-War rhetoric. This chapter presents a detailed case study of Fudan Hungary, with the aim of analysing and contextualizing it, and also to shed light on the operability of the Cold-War narrative. The chapter is based on frame analysis

Á. Révész (B) Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_8

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of textual samples from Hungarian news media, but I will first explain the domestic political environment and conclude by pointing out the relevance of the case in a global context.

Hungary and the East vs. West Dichotomy Ever since its arrival in the Carpathian basin at the end of the ninth century, the Hungarian nation has been confronted with the question of belonging. The country’s geopolitical location and its complex history that has seen confrontation with forces from different parts of the East (Tatars, Turks, Russians) and those from the West (Habsburgs, Germans) have proven to be formative for the shaping of Hungarian identity—or, rather, identities. Starting from the foundation of the Hungarian state in exactly 1,000 C.E., Hungarian political elites have seen the need to position themselves along the East–West axis, reinforced later by the emerging East–West narrative within Europe (Neumann, 1999; Wolff, 1994). In this culturally defined narrative, “almost all political and social actors in the ‘East’ and ‘West’ identify themselves on a descending scale from ‘civilization to barbarism’, from ‘developed to non-developed’ status”1 (Melegh, 2017: 25). Hungary has also seen long periods of occupation: after (and for certain territories also during) the Ottoman (Turkish) rule (1541–1699), the Habsburg Empire controlled most of the land. Hungarian selfdetermination grew against this backdrop and culminated in the failed revolution of 1848–1949, after which Hungary formed the well-known Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the Habsburg dynasty until the end of World War I. Although Hungary did not enjoy complete independence in the period of the so-called Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), economic progress, urbanization, and a rapidly growing middle class connected the land with the Western parts of the continent, turning Hungary into a semi-periphery of the core of Europe. In parallel to bitterness from a sense of being “colonized” and wedged between East and West (as shown by the notion of Hungary being a “ferry nation” [kompország ]), there was also a struggle for cultural “upward mobility” towards the core, as is demonstrated by the discourse of an entire

1 With the “West” standing for “civilization” and “development”.

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generation of intellectuals calling themselves “Westophiles” [nyugatosok] in the early twentieth century. (Levy & Révész, 2021: 19)

Soviet occupation in Hungary was unwelcome not only because of its political repression but also because the nation did not identify with the culture of its Eastern occupiers. Hungarians are not a Slavic nation. The Hungarian language is Finno-Ugrian and thus very far from Russian. There was considerable popular resistance against what was perceived as a distinct “other”. Moreover, the Hungarian urban upper-middle class—of which the older generation were educated in the Monarchy and fluent in German—suddenly found itself torn from its Western intellectual roots. Although Cold-War propaganda was operating at full swing with the concepts of “freedom” and “progress” reserved for the Soviet bloc, a majority of the Hungarian population associated these concepts with the West. Throughout the seventies, Hungarian intellectuals were all listening to Radio Free Europe—the voice of the other side, where “real” freedom was—fantasizing about a free Western world, under American leadership. These fantasies were also fed by the fact that after the failed 1956 uprising, approximately 200,000 people (2% of the population) left the country for the West within a few weeks, several of them heading for the United States (Soós, 2002). Already in the decade preceding 1989, the socialist party and intellectual elites were conducting an intense discourse on the West as a possible model (Csizmadia, 2001), going as far as “freeing the concept of the West from all negative ideological connotations” (Csizmadia, 2020: 76). No wonder that Hungary embraced the 1989 regime change and the 2004 E.U. accession with the euphoria of homecoming. To quote a leading Hungarian economist on the prospect of the E.U. accession: After several centuries of peripheral existence Hungary would eventually become fully integrated. The significance of this can perhaps only be paralleled with the founding of the state [1000 C.E.]. We can take roots in Europe, and deep ones now, for a second time. (Inotai, 1996: 3)

In a significant speech, given six weeks before the E.U. accession in 2004, Minister of Education Bálint Magyar stressed the magnitude of Hungary finally returning to Europe, to “its brothers and sisters”, who would thus also return to Hungary (Megemlékezések, 2004).

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Integration into the European family has, however, proven to be much harder than originally thought. The focus of the Eastern enlargement was on how to prepare the countries for accession, not on what might happen after it, and satisfaction of the new member states was taken for granted. As Ágh has put it: In the Eastern enlargement only the ex-ante conditionalities were elaborated in the Copenhagen criteria and the ex-post conditionalities were missing, since both the compliance, the positive attitude to the implementation of the further integration measures, and the linear development of N.M.S. [new member states] with a point of no return were taken as evident. (Ágh, 2020: 358)

Not long after the accession, however, the people in Hungary felt that the country had merely become a new market and a cheap labour pool for the West of Europe. Thus, Euroscepticism followed (Andor, 2019; Cabada, 2020; Krastev & Holmes, 2019). This trend reached its peak around 2012, then reversed until 2020, when only 12 per cent of the population expressed a negative view about the European Union (Göncz & Lengyel, 2021). According to a recent extensive survey on values and ideological orientations in Hungarian society during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, values connected to the political right were dominant, while leftist values had lost their appeal—the only exception being the strong, continued presence of “European” or “Western” sentiments (pointing to a sense of belonging) among the population (Szabó et al., 2021: 52). There has also been substantial criticism directed at the “Westophile” discourse. Iván Zoltán Dénes, for instance, is very articulate in his disapproval, saying supporters of the European model insist that there is a pattern – the only one, the only right one – to follow, which must be applied in order to catch up [with the West]. …Those supporters claim that they are entitled to lecture others. To tell them what to do and how to do it. They are the ones who lead the infantile nation by the hand to a paradise. If this nation is a good, obedient child, it will sooner or later join the ranks of the free and democratic welfare societies of the West. Following the [Western] pattern is associated with an absolutist mindset and a sense of chosenness. … It is not reformers and traditionalists, but good and bad, angels and devils, who are pitted against each other. (Dénes, 2014: 57)

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Another Dichotomy: Rural vs. Urban Again, we need to go back in time, to the early twentieth century, when, after the end of World War I and the extremely traumatic Treaty of Trianon, a polarization appeared in Hungarian public discourse and political debates. It is difficult to translate the concepts. I’ve chosen here the translation given by Béla Borsi-Kálmán (2014): a debate between “rural” and “urban” intellectuals.2 The “rural” side visualized Hungarian rejuvenation through reliance on the settled, rural population, depicting them as the “core” of the Hungarian nation, the silent, underrepresented pillars and sufferers of Hungarian history. The “urban” side overlapped largely with the “Westophiles”, that is to say, with the cosmopolitan, internationally mobile part of Hungarian intellectuals, who supported the idea of following a top-down development pattern based on the Western model. They were also open to the idea of Marxism (also coming from the West), and became the backbone of revolutionary social change reaching beyond the boundaries of a single nation. The split between the two narratives—different approaches to the demands of modernization—became so conclusive that generations of the Hungarian political and intellectual elite identified themselves with either the “rural” or the “urban” side throughout the decades to follow. During the Cold-War era, a new dichotomy cut across these two sides. Both had their regime-supporting “leftist” parts as well as those belonging to (and actually heading) the opposition. The 1956 uprising was a formidable instance of cooperation between the formerly antagonistic “rural” and “urban” sides (Kopátsy, 2001). The socialist regime saw its “natural” enemy in the “rural” intellectuals, claiming they were providing for “the preservation of national consciousness, and not in support of the socialist forces, but rather against them” (Resolution of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1958, as quoted in Ács, [1997]). As much as these intellectuals were reluctant to join the “urbans”—and the reluctance was prominent on the other side as well—they did not see any alternative. There was no alternative to reach

2 Other translations are “folk” vs. “urban” (Fricz, 2013) or “populist” vs. “urbanite” (Laczó, 2013; Trencsényi, 2014). I refrain from using “populist” for the whole movement, due to the negative connotations of the concept of populism. One could also label the dichotomy as “conservatives” vs. “liberals”, but I also wish to avoid using this distinctly Anglo-American terminology.

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out to for assistance on the international arena either. As a prominent figure wrote about it later: The rural group was not an uncritical supporter of U.S. policy. [But] in the tense international situation, there was no third way. It was either with Moscow or with Washington. (Borbándi, 2006: 45)

As early as before the 1989 regime change (Éber et al., 2014: 50), the “rural” development ideal was clearly articulated in the form of a party (Hungarian Democratic Forum), which then gave the first democratically elected prime minister of Hungary of the post-communist era. The “ruralist” view is also at the heart of the ethnopopulist programme of the current and much criticized Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He has been rather successful in his attempt at discrediting the “urbanist” / “Westophile” camp by monopolizing the concept of the nation3 and waging war against all “anti-national” forces, notably segments of the U.S. political-economic elite (represented by Hungarian expat George Soros) and the European Union (the “Brussels bureaucrats”). The historical dichotomy of the two modernization discourses has developed into a “lasting discursive polarization in post-1989 [Hungarian] politics” (Éber et al., 2014: 52). Authors on both sides go as far as to define it as a “political Cold War” (Fricz, 2013: 284) or “Kulturkampf” (Trencsényi, 2014). Through his concept of illiberalism, Orbán managed to define the Hungarian and European liberals as the enemy and rearticulate the nation as the basis of legitimacy. … In Hungary, whoever controls the expressions of nation and the discursive constitution of “us the people” related to it claims to have a legitimate right to control the state. (Palonen, 2018: 316, 312)

The idea of national rejuvenation or even national exclusivity—also called “new nationalism” (Feischmidt, 2014; Trencsényi, 2021)—is very much at the centre of Orbán’s foreign policy. Not only does he distance himself from the European Union, but he also has an articulate goal to “move” the core of Europe, that is, to create a new geopolitical centre out

3 After his party lost the 2002 elections, Orbán—then in opposition—questioned the legitimacy of the outcome by saying “the nation cannot be in opposition”.

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of what is now considered a periphery: Hungary and the whole CentralEastern European region in a broader sense (Levy & Révész, 2021). In his discourse, he has made various attempts to distance [himself] from the West, which was being morally decadent or behaving in an “imperialist way” toward the “truly European” nations in Central Europe, in which discourse … Central Europe existed as a terrain of national resurrections. (Melegh, 2017: 29)

The traditional “urban” argument is that Hungary, as a small country wedged between West and East, cannot possibly survive outside of Europe. Thus, detaching itself from the core of Europe would be suicidal (Grossmann, 2016). Orbán has developed an argument that this geopolitical location has its distinct advantages, as Hungary could not only become a bridge between the two spheres of power, but could also use this specific position to distance itself from the Western (core European) development paths or at least apply them in a more flexible way (Miklossy, 2010: 91).

Hungarian Attitudes Towards China In-betweenness became a political strategy for Orbán. In 2010, shortly before the elections he won, Orbán gave a programmatic speech, in which he used an image that would recur often in later speeches: “although [Hungary] sails under a Western flag as an E.U. member state, the wind of the world economy blows from the East” (Orbán, 2010). The governmental policy of “opening to the East” started the very same year, and apart from being eager to join all major initiatives of China—the Belt and Road Initiative, the CEE-China Initiative (better known as “16 + 1”), and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—Hungary also launched the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway project, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Hungarian history, offering rail route for Chinese products from Piraeus to Central Europe. Apart from a generally friendly disposition towards China,4 the Hungarian population had practically no experience of interacting with 4 Hungary-China relations have also been shaped by the common assumption of historians about the Asian nomadic ancestry of the Hungarian nation. The Turanist movement, which had its peak in the early twentieth century, produced wide-ranging professional and

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Chinese people until the early 1990s. There was, however, a three-year period (1989–1991) of visa exemption between the two countries, as a result of which, over 10,000 Chinese people entered Hungary in 1990, and almost 30,000 in 1991 (Nyíri, 2012). Not all of them stayed on in Hungary. Still, most cities suddenly had a multitude of Chinese restaurants and cheap Chinese shops, together with Chinese neighbourhoods5 and “China markets” in run-down districts of Budapest. Although the adjective “Chinese” soon became synonymous with cheap and bad quality products, the Chinese shops catered for a broad mass of low-income customers. Hungarian society was not straightforwardly accommodating, but it was rather due to the general attitude of the population towards migrants—we are talking about the period before the migrant crisis—and was not particularly directed towards the Chinese newcomers (Bernát, 2010). There was no general rejection of China or the Chinese people, and the “China threat” narrative did not appear in the media. The Hungarian government before Orbán (that of the Hungarian Socialist Party) also nurtured friendly relations with China. Then PM Ferenc Gyurcsány told journalists after meeting with Wen Jiabao in Beijing in 2005: I am here to make sure that China comes to Hungary when it wants to come to Europe. … We want to set the pace, we want to make sure that China, when trying to enter Europe, sets foot in Hungary first within the very competitive world called Europe. (Kínai, 2015)

Tamás Matura describes the relationship between Hungary and China, and the former’s attitudes towards the latter, quite aptly, from as recent as 2018: It might be expected that China has become an important factor in Hungarian domestic politics, and opposition parties might try to denounce the government as pro-China or pro-communist. In fact, the opposite is true. Despite all the deep divisions in the Hungarian political arena, good Sino-Hungarian relations enjoy broad political consensus. None of the major parties publicly question the importance of China, and politically

non-professional research about the Orient to locate the roots of the nation so obviously unique in Central Europe. 5 Lacking though the coherence and cultural narrative of the Chinatowns of the U.S.

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sensitive issues such as human rights, Tibet or autocratic tendencies are not part of the domestic political agenda. Prominent politicians in the opposition parties barely mention China at all in their public statements, and, unlike in some other countries, its increased political and economic presence has not triggered any alarm in Hungarian political circles or among the wider public. (Matura, 2018: 48)

The Fudan Hungary Plan In 2018, Central European University, founded and funded by George Soros, was ousted from Hungary after a long legal battle. The popular graduate university with an international student body was accused of breaching Hungarian higher education regulations by offering AmericanHungarian double degrees while having a campus only in Hungary, but not in the United States That is to say, the university was not effectively operating in both countries. Notwithstanding a series of supportive demonstrations, the university finally left the country. In the very same year, Orbán signed a mandate to start negotiations surrounding Fudan University (Shanghai)’s participation in Hungarian higher education. A cooperation agreement was signed a year later to open a Fudan campus in Budapest. This was followed, in late 2020, by the Hungarian government’s decision to purchase real estate for Fudan within the area formerly selected for a “Student City” to offer residence and education facilities to the students of several Budapest universities. Criticism was at first few and scattered, such as the Facebook post by Bernadett Szél, an independent but openly oppositional member of parliament (MP), who said: Western values are undesirable, but Chinese communist principles are welcome. Viktor Orbán has just found his way home! (Szél, 2021)

Such voices, however, were few and far between, and Fudan did not occupy a central position on the media agenda. In February 2021, the government announced the signing of a declaration of intent to set up a campus for Fudan Hungary University in Budapest. A new oppositional website, Napi, broke the news the same day with an article titled “Instead of C.E.U. here is the Chinese Fudan University” (Domokos, February 2021). The coverage, however, did not elaborate on the C.E.U.-Fudan contrast, but merely introduced the facts

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given by the ministry and ended with a highly positive image of Fudan, repeating the arguments of the ministerial announcement: Fudan is world no. 34 according to the “prestigious” Q.S. World University Ranking of “best universities” and has been cooperating with “elite universities like world no. 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics or the University of Sydney for several decades”. It became public knowledge at the time that this would be the first Fudan University campus outside China, and that it would offer full degree programmes (B.A./B.Sc., M.A./M.Sc., and Ph.D.) in its four faculties: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Faculty of Public Policy and Business, and Faculty of Medicine. It would issue a Chinese-Hungarian double degree; and when it starts operating in full swing in 2028, it would house 330 faculty, 150 administrative staff, and 5,000 students (with the target group being students from Hungary and the whole Central-Eastern European region). It was also public knowledge that the Hungarian government had purchased real estate for Fudan Hungary at HUF821 million (US$2.77 million). In March 2021, a centre for investigative journalism, Direkt36, published an extensive investigative piece on Chinese espionage in Hungary, mentioning how Fudan’s “Institute of International Studies has a long history of cooperation with the Chinese secret service” (Panyi, March 2021). Yet, there followed no straightforward response from political actors. Three weeks later, Direkt36 published a second article on the major oppositional news website 444 with the title “The mega-investment in Hungarian higher education is made with Chinese loan: the government has already promised it to a Chinese company” (Panyi, April 2021). The piece focused on the financing structure for the construction of Fudan Hungary through loans from the Chinese state, comparing the project to the Belgrade-Budapest railway line, already under heavy criticism by the opposition due to intransparency in financing. It was finally this piece of news that sparked the fight over Fudan Hungary. The article referred to a non-public governmental document obtained by the investigative journalists of Direkt36 to uncover the fact that the construction of the Fudan campus would be financed by the Hungarian state. Out of the total estimate of HUF540 billion (US$1.77 billion), a Chinese state loan would take up approximately HUF450 billion (USD1.48 billion). The authors named China Development Bank as the financing institution, one of the so-called policy banks of China raising

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funds for large-scale infrastructural developments, while China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) would be contracted for the job. The project of Fudan Hungary was compared to the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway (re)constructed with a HUF750 billion (USD2.3 billion) heavy budget, 85 per cent of it financed through Chinese state (Exim Bank) loan. The comparison with the railway line, widely considered to be a high-profile corruption case, spoke for itself, and the coverage stressed the intransparency frame, coupling it with the former claims of Direkt36 about espionage. This was also the start of the run-up to the national elections, which were to take place in early spring 2022.

The Discourse Around Fudan Hungary For an analysis of the discourse around Fudan Hungary, I have searched through oppositional and governmental online news media outlets for publications that deal with the Fudan case in the period between 1 January 2021 (following the announcement of the governmental purchase of real estate for Fudan) and 30 June 2021 (after parliament passed the bill to donate state-owned land on the site of Student City to a newly established Fudan University Hungary Foundation). Although the bulk of the news appeared in the three-month period of April through June, the initial phase of the debate (January through March) reveals a lot about the birth of the New-Cold-War narrative. I apply a processual (chronological) approach, as the media coverage reflects how the discourse evolves. I used the search words “Fudan” and “Budapest”, and selected only those articles that dealt substantively with the issue. I included parliamentary addresses and inquiries by MPs for both sides. For the oppositional side, I also included slogans and images at demonstrations, as primary examples of framing. I ended up with a corpus of 98 pieces (73 pieces from 12 online news media outlets, 14 parliamentary addresses, 4 speeches, and 7 posters at demonstrations) for the opposition, and 75 pieces (70 pieces from 9 online news media outlets and 5 parliamentary addresses) for the government. Translations have been done by myself, unless otherwise attributed (Table 8.1). I conducted manual qualitative framing analysis through close reading of texts in the corpus, adding a longitudinal perspective, that is to say, examining also their development. There have been several definitions

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Table 8.1 List of online news media outlets included in the research

Online news media outlets for the government

Online news media outlets for the opposition

888 www.888.hu Híradó www.hirado.hu Index6 www.index.hu Magyar Hírlap www.magyarhirlap.hu Magyar Nemzet www.magyarnemzet.hu Mandiner www.mandiner.hu Origo www.origo.hu Pesti Srácok www.pestisracok.hu Világgazdaság www.vg.hu

168 www.168.hu 24 www.24.hu 444 www.444.hu Átlátszó www.atlatszo.hu Azonnali www.azonnali.hu Direkt36 www.direkt36.hu Heti Világgazdaság www.hvg.hu Mérce www.merce.hu Napi www.napi.hu Népszava www.nepszava.hu Portfolio www.portfolio.hu Telex www.telex.hu

of the concept of frames (de Vreese, 2005; Entman, 1993; Gamson & Modigliani, 1987). For this study, I rely on George Lakoff’s compact definition: “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world” (Lakoff, 2014: xi), complemented by Judith Butler’s observation: The frame does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality. … Although framing cannot always contain what it seeks to make visible or readable, it remains structured by the aim of instrumentalizing certain versions of reality. (Butler, 2016: xiii)

6 In terms of its ownership, Index is part of the pro-government media empire, but it publishes (or in 2021 did publish) centrist content, making it an exception in the highly polarized world of Hungarian media.

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As to the method, a qualitative approach seemed proper for mapping the discourse and its evolution in time, since figures arrived at through quantitative analysis “don’t necessarily reflect the nature of the data” (Berg, 2009: 343). I derived frames inductively, identifying the particular frames based on the corpus, while focusing on this single issue of Fudan Hungary. The inductive qualitative method allowed me to reach well beyond the level of word occurrence into the areas of syntax and rhetorical features (David et al., 2011; Matthes & Kohring, 2008; Pan & Kosicki, 1993), paying special attention to the use of metaphors, as they carry particular emotive power (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Wehling, 2016). I also focused on the desired effects of the identified frames, especially political evaluations (Price et al., 1997) and actions they imply (Benford & Snow, 2000). Supported by an underlying constructivist view (de Bruijn, 2019; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Scheufele, 1999; Van Gorp, 2007), this is an inquiry into the new reality created by the framing of Fudan Hungary. Having analysed all texts for specific Fudan-related frames, I identified nine frames. Based on Lakoff’s theory—“[i]f you negate the frame, you still activate the frame” (Lakoff, 2003: 32)—I considered a frame and its negation as one. In the following table, I indicate these binaries: in some cases, the negation was the simple opposite; in the last two frames, thesis and antithesis had been used individually before and came together as a binary during the Fudan debate. I also indicate the changing prominence of the frames, as there were significant power shifts among them during the period under examination. Attention was paid to the dynamic between governmental and oppositional media as well, as it took some time before the “front lines” got settled and both sides developed their stable sets of frames that started operating not along rationality but political affiliation. Table 8.2 presents a summary of frames. In the first two months (January and February), six out of the nine frames appeared in the news media, apart from “Security”, “Representation”, and “Freedom”. The first two frames (“Elite” and “Centre”) of the government dominated the public discourse around Fudan, so much so that the oppositional media also took them over as established facts. The “Elite” frame was supported by figures: Fudan is the world’s 34th best university, while there is no Hungarian university among the best 500. The comparison was intended to achieve an assessment of poor standards in Hungarian higher education and to suggest that Fudan would assist it

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Table 8.2 Summary of frames Frame key word

Opposition

1 Elite

2 Centre

3 Security

Fudan is a security threat (Fudan will house Chinese spies threatening the security of Hungary)

4 Communism

Fudan is a communist threat (the autocratic, communist Chinese state is threatening Hungarian academic freedom and freedom of expression)

5 Intransparency

The project’s financing is intransparent (due to the Chinese loan, the country might land in a dept trap) Fudan is a threat to Hungarian universities (Hungarian higher education is so small that a huge new university will topple the balance) The public is not represented in the decision-making process (call for a referendum)

6 Disadvantaged Hungarian Higher Education

7 Representation

Government Fudan is world’s elite (one of the world’s best universities help Hungary catch up with the international educational elite) Hungary as centre (Fudan will reposition Hungary as a regional knowledge centre in Central-Eastern Europe; it will also attract investment) Fudan is no security threat (many Western universities cooperate with Fudan; Hungarian intelligence can defend the country) Fudan is no communist threat (Fudan will observe Hungarian academic principles) + Opposition leaders are communists themselves Fudan will not cause a debt trap, but will be profitable in the long run Fudan will instigate healthy competition in Hungarian higher education

A referendum can be held on Fudan, if there is a legal way to do so

(continued)

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Table 8.2 (continued) Frame key word

Opposition

Government

8 East vs. West

a. China is a threat to Hungarian/European culture (a war between the cultures of East and West) b. Government garners Chinese (and Russian) – i.e. Eastern – support sacrificing national (Western) interest

9 Freedom

China (Fudan) is a threat to Hungary’s freedom – ultimately to Hungary’s sovereignty

a. China is an attractive new power (China is a global power and walks its own path, spurs development) b. Opposition garners Western support (the opposition uses Fudan to gain Western support; U.S. wants to interfere with the forthcoming democratic elections in Hungary) Fudan is merely a university, no threat to Hungary’s sovereignty

to catch up with the global elite. Most probably because of the prominent presence of statistics, and the conviction that there is no way to argue against figures, the opposition did not respond in the negative. Similarly, the opposition did not act upon the “Centre” frame either, the one that fit into the broader and much articulated vision of Orbán of Hungary’s rejuvenation, that is to say, the transformation of Hungary into a new European centre, instead of its current semi-peripheral position (Levy & Révész, 2021). The frames “Communism”, “Intransparency”, and “Disadvantaged Hungarian Higher Education” did come up during this initial period in oppositional media, but rather sporadically and not in a conclusive form. The oppositional media did apply the “East vs. West” frame as well from the beginning, mainly by contrasting C.E.U. (American) and Fudan (Chinese), initially just indicating it without further elaboration. Governmental media also started positioning Fudan in this frame by quoting experts: “At the beginning of the Eurasian era, we will need a lot of experts on Asia and China”, said Levente Horváth, or “the teaching of international studies might become less West-centric than it is at present, but that is a positive thing, rather”, said Gergely Salát in an interview (Kohán, 2021).

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The “Security” frame was introduced into the discourse in mid-March with the publication of Direkt36’s investigative piece on Chinese espionage in Hungary, discussed earlier. The danger of Hungary’s exposure to innumerable spies who cannot be differentiated from harmless people is highlighted by a quote from an anonymous Hungarian intelligence expert: “Any Chinese who goes abroad and comes into contact with political, economic, technological or military institutions, whether they are students, friends or spouses, they will certainly file reports”. The image of a lurking enemy spying on Hungarians from every corner (re)started the engine of the Cold-War narrative. With the application of the “Security” frame, Hungarian oppositional media joined U.S. and Western-European authors and journalists who, in recent years, had been focusing on positioning China in this particular frame (e.g. Ohlberg & Hamilton, 2020). This intense securitization trend—the framing of China as a national security threat—has also been thematized by scholars working on narratives (Ambrosio et al., 2020; Rogelja & Tsimonis, 2020). Direkt36’s next piece on the financing structure of Fudan Hungary, which—as discussed earlier—was published on the website 444 and ignited a full-fledged debate in early April, was based on the “Security”, “Communism”, and “Intransparency” frames. “Chinese expansion from Hungarian money, … [Fudan is] an important tool for China to gain political influence”, wrote its author Szabolcs Panyi (6 April 2021). The “Intransparency” frame, however, came into the foreground with news of the immense Chinese state loan, which suggested potential corruption, as mentioned above. In the tsunami that followed, Gergely Karácsony, mayor of Budapest and then prime ministerial candidate of three oppositional parties, spoke out most vehemently against Fudan: We oppose [Fudan] because the construction of a Chinese university could be a tool for the Chinese state to gain political and intelligence influence and power in Hungary and Europe. … We oppose it because the investment planned by the government will impose a huge debt on Hungarian taxpayers, while the economic benefits will be enjoyed primarily by the Chinese state. … We oppose it because it is about bringing to Hungary a university whose principles include central control by the Chinese Communist Party instead of freedom of thought. (Erdélyi, 2021)

At this point, the concept of freedom was operationalized within the “Communist” frame.

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Within ten days, 444 put out a long piece bearing the title “Is it a loyal cadre trainer of the Chinese Communist Party heading for Budapest, or a Western-style elite university?” (Miklósi, 2021). The article concluded that “Fudan will bring with it what is commonplace at home: the constant monitoring of each other by students and teachers, and the frequent sending of reports to Chinese official bodies”. Around this time, even some of the oppositional media were trying to dismantle the “Security” and “Communist” frames. Azonnali interviewed China expert Matura, who dismissed these two frames as “fully fictional” and added that “in the articles published on Direkt36 and 444 there is also a lot of American, Cold War propaganda” (Tóth, 2021). Two days later, on the same website, a vice mayor of Budapest (the “oppositional bastion”) confirmed this and added that his major concern is the lack of transparency (Petróczi, 2021). On 24 April, Momentum, one of the opposition parties, hung red stars and posters on the headquarters of Fidesz, Orbán’s party. The posters were drawn in the style of the Cultural Revolution, depicting Orbán with a red flag and in a Mao Zedong pose, and bearing the slogan “There are two ways to conquer a nation: with sword or with debt”, a quote from Orbán himself from 2011. This can be considered to be the first instance of the “Freedom” frame. Three days later, on 27 April, a strategic cooperation agreement was signed between the government of Hungary and Fudan University. On the same day, an article appeared on the 444 website with the title “Traitor of the West”. Let me quote it at length: Orbán is a three-level, all-comfort traitor: seller and traitor of the Hungarian homeland, nation and people; of the E.U. and N.A.T.O.; of the Western civilization. … Cemeteries and mausoleums break open throughout the country. The great [fathers] of our nation are vomiting upon the head of the traitor of the West, the Xi Jinping- and Putinserving Felcsút [Orbán’s birthplace] dictator. Voltaire, Diderot, Kant are also turning restlessly [in their graves], and even Michelangelo himself has stirred. As a Hungarian, I am ashamed of this. … The Chinese Trojan horse and the Russian Trojan horse – Orbán has opened the gate to these two, he is pulling them into the European Union and N.A.T.O. The gate opener, the Hungarian dictator, must now be stopped and held accountable. (Sükösd, 2021)

Using the image of the “Trojan horse”, the author visualized a fullfledged war: the cultural conflict (attack on “Western civilization”) was

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complemented by the conflict between alliances. Through monumental figures of Western culture, he placed Hungary at the heart of it to produce an image of an East–West conflict as a “war of cultures”. At the same time, the East–West conflict was also a geopolitical one, namely between military forces, as the reference to Hungary as a N.A.T.O. member state implied. To underscore the alliance and further strengthen the geopolitical aspect, 444 published, the next day, an official reaction of the U.S. Embassy in Hungary to the Fudan issue, which hailed Hungary’s N.A.T.O. membership, thanks to which Hungary did not have to fear external security threats. However, the embassy stressed that the possible opening of the first European campus of Fudan University should be a cause for concern, as Beijing had a proven track record of using its institutions of higher education to gain influence and stifle intellectual freedom (Herczeg, 2021).7 In May, the “Freedom” frame took centre stage next to the “Communism” and the “East vs. West” frames. In early May, Klára Dobrev, also prime ministerial candidate, articulated it very clearly in an interview: “I am saying this slowly, so that Viktor Orbán can also understand: we will not become a Chinese colony”, adding, “This is not just about money, but also about our political independence” (Bíró & Fábián, 2021). Using the metaphor of “colony”, she evoked the bitter image of Hungary’s Soviet occupation during the Cold War, attempting to stir people into action, but now against China and the Orbán-government. In mid-May, already in the midst of very heated public discourse, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén submitted a bill to parliament to donate state-owned land on the site of Student City to Fudan University Hungary Foundation. The maps reveal that Fudan would get two-thirds, while Student City a mere one-third of the built area on the property. On 26 May, a day before the parliamentary debate on Fudan, 15 renowned Hungarian economists protested against the construction of Fudan Hungary, their arguments based “exclusively on economic concerns” (Közgazdászok, 2021) relying heavily on the “Disadvantaged Hungarian Higher Education” frame. Next day, however, at the parliamentary debate on the proposed bill, opposition MP Tímea Szabó

7 As I had no access to the original document the report is based on, I had to translate it back into English. That is why it is not indicated as an exact quote.

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accused Viktor Orbán of “high treason” because of “the complete sellout of Hungary to the Chinese Communist Party” (Országgy˝ ulési, 31 May 2021: 30,178–30,179), accentuating the “Freedom” frame. On 5 June, at a demonstration organized by the opposition against Fudan, Tímea Szabó marched with a Tibetan flag over her shoulders. One popular slogan reflected the newly introduced existential fear: “We will not become a colony!” At the demonstration, prime ministerial candidate Gergely Karácsony addressed his supporters with the words: “The Fudan issue is about whether this small country of 10 million can finally decide its own fate, about whether we will really be a free nation” (Micimackós, 2021). The demonstration acquired the nickname “Winnie-the-Pooh demonstration”, since many demonstrators carried Winnie-the-Pooh plushies as an ironic reference to Xi Jinping. Two days before the demonstration, Global Times —a tabloid under the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily—ran an editorial on the Fudan project, naming the United States as the actor behind its opposition: “In recent years, the U.S. has led its allies to become more ideological in their relations with China. Hungary may face more pressure” (An anti-China, 2021). The frame of “Representation” came up as late as the end of April, when Krisztina Baranyi, mayor of the district that was to house the new Fudan campus and that still owned part of the property designated for the whole Student City project, suggested that a referendum be held in the city of Budapest, because it is the local people who should get a vote on “whether to give the assets of [the district] to a private university, the costs of which will be paid for by our grandchildren” (Baranyi, 2021). By the time of the demonstration, this idea for a local vote turned into a call for a national referendum. In the run-up to the demonstration, Krisztina Baranyi joined the framing of Fudan as a communist, authoritarian threat by a radical protest action: she renamed the streets bordering the property “Free Hong Kong Road”, “Uyghur Martyrs’ Road”, “Dalai Lama Road”, and “Bishop Xie Shiguang Road”. After the demonstration, the Chinese embassy in Budapest also issued a protest, saying The rhetoric is full of ideological prejudices and incites antagonism and hostility. This is a gross interference in China’s internal affairs, a deliberate sabotage of the friendly and mutually beneficial cooperation between the two peoples, and a trend of the times that is incompatible with win-win

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cooperation. We strongly protest, resolutely oppose and strongly condemn this. (Zhu Xiongyali, 2021)

As I have indicated in the table above, the government was largely on the defensive within the Fudan discourse, and by negating the frames of the opposition, they in fact reinforced them. Using their capacity for frame-setting, the opposition managed to win public support: an opinion poll conducted in May revealed that two-thirds of the voters were against the Fudan project (A Fudan Egyetem, May 2021). At the end of June, after the parliament passed the bill on Fudan, six prime ministerial candidates signed an open letter to Xi Jinping asserting that, due to its intransparency, “[t]he construction of the Fudan University campus in Budapest lacks consensus among the political forces in Hungary and the support of the majority of the public”. They pledged to “immediately halt the project” if any one of them were to win the elections (Bereznay, 2021).The reaction from the governmental media was: “the left has gone on a diplomatic rampage, with Gergely Karácsony and Ferenc Gyurcsány pretending that there was no tomorrow” (Kiss, 2021). After June, Fudan continued to feature in the public discourse, but the fight subsided and the frame that recurred in the news was that of “Representation”, with the opposition pushing for a national referendum. In April 2022, Fidesz—Orbán’s party—won the elections with a twothirds majority for the fourth time: a huge defeat for the opposition. The call for referendum, which had again been put on the table the previous month by the opposition, was rejected right after the elections, “because it concerned an international treaty” (Népszavazási, 2022). There are two complex frames that demand deeper scrutiny. The first one is the “Communist” frame, which became highly convoluted, as governmental media started to blame the opposition for being too China-friendly. They quoted leading leftist members of the current opposition, who had also been seeking partnership with China earlier and allegedly shared an adherence to Marxist ideology. One of the staunchest government-backing websites called an oppositional one “new bolsheviks” trying to “reignite class struggle” (Huth, 2021). By June, both sides were intensely blaming each other for harbouring communist ideology.8

8 In Hungarian public discourse these days, there is even a verb for this: “to communist”—meaning to call someone a communist and, by doing this, to blame them for

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To quote one of the leading government news portals that presented an elaborate adaptation of the “Communist” frame to the Fudan case: If they were able to remain true to their principles and policies, the Gyurcsány9 coalition would today welcome and support Chinese investment in knowledge. … What has happened is that the external environment has changed radically and now [they] have to mimic the policies and ideology of the American left and, of course, to comply uncritically with the neo-Marxist far-left majority in the European Parliament. As a small but sovereign country, however, it is in our interest to be on good terms with all the major powers as a proactive partner. … Including China. (Berszán, 2021)

The second frame to discuss at some length is the “East vs. West” dichotomy. I have identified two slightly different sub-frames there, the first one echoing Orbán’s former rhetoric and painting the image of China as an attractive new power. According to MP Tamás Schanda “Hungary needs international universities, the focus of the economy – as we all know – is shifting eastwards, so we are also opening up to the East” orinc (Országgy˝ ulési Napló, 27 May 2021: 29988), while another MP, L˝ Nacsa claimed that “now, in 2021, the old thesis that capital and knowledge flows only from West to East is no longer true, it now flows from East to West as well” (Országgy˝ ulési Napló, 27 May 2021: 29999). This sub-frame was also supported by bringing into play the historical dichotomy of “rural vs. urban”, as discussed earlier, a unique development path vs. a Western model. In the governmental discourse, a unique national development means finding a balance between East and West, and creating a unique identity out of the in-betweenness. As one author wrote, reflecting on the freshly started Fudan debate in April in a government-backing outlet: we have lived here for a thousand years on the route between the West and the East, it is not a matter of choice. … As if the task were to choose

wanting to re-establish communist rule in the country. Through its widespread and nondifferentiated use in political discourse, “communist” has largely become synonymous with “enemy”. 9 Ferenc Gyurcsány: former PM, as indicated earlier; currently one of the leading figures of the opposition.

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between the Western or the Eastern pattern. But neither of these garments fits us. We have to create our own style. (Orbán, 2021)

A direct reply came from an opposition colleague: through the actions of the [current] cynical power, the proclaimed national paths are in fact bringing us closer to the Eastern model of globalisation. Responsible conservative politics, however, must take a stand on the false urgent dilemma of West or East. (Béndek, 2021)

The author uses strikethrough for the word “false” as an ironic reference to the title of the previous article to which he was responding. The second sub-frame focused on political alliances, hinting at foreign interference in Hungarian domestic affairs. Here, both sides placed the Fudan project into the broader New-Cold-War context of the U.S.-China rivalry: the opposition blamed the government for courting China, which has a “well-conceived geostrategic master plan” (Heimer, 2021); while governmental media also warned about the harmful influence of the West (E.U. and the U.S.) on Hungary’s domestic affairs, claiming at one point that “CNN made it clear: it is on the side of the left in the [election] campaign, in which it would intervene in Hungary, as it did in the U.S” (Amir˝ ol, 2021).10

Lessons Learnt... and Questions to Ask Somerville described the historic Cold War, that period between World War II and 1990, as “a broad frame into which stories of conflict could be simply but often misleadingly fitted to enable the media to narrate a story in an established form of discourse” (Somerville, 2017: 52). The case of Fudan Hungary fits this description well. Much has been written about the deep division in the Hungarian political community after the regime change (e.g. Antal, 2016; Balázs, 2014; Dénes, 2014). This has deep historical roots, as I explained at the beginning of this chapter. The textual examples above demonstrate clearly how the plan to open a campus of Fudan University in Budapest gradually got interpreted through familiar domestic patterns. As an interplay of the 10 The report is referring to V4NA, a London-based, Hungarian government-backing media outlet.

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domestic political division and the increasing polarization on the global stage, this discourse adapted to an understanding of the global context, demonstrating a reflexive quality in Hungarian political thinking (Sz˝ ucs, 2015). Within a span of half a year (January through June 2021), the applied frames and their dynamics added up to a mature New-Cold-War narrative. Hungary’s national elections fuelled the strategic creation of an enemy image, drawn from a Cold-War narrative (Burke, 2018; Medhurst et al., 1990; Robin, 2001). The Fudan case offered an opportunity for the opposition to close ranks and step up as a united force against the Orbángovernment, a level of unity that had never been achieved before. On 2 April 2022, a day before the national elections took place, Gergely Karácsony sent a message in support of the final single prime ministerial candidate of the opposition. It said: “instead of the dictatorships of the East, we must belong to the West and serve peace” (Domokos, 2022). It highlights what Csizmadia has found in his study on political cooperation: “The opposition sees itself as the only one with Western values, and rejects any claim of the political right for Westernness” (Csizmadia, 2015: 25). Indeed, the opposition was counting on Hungarian popular support for “belonging to the West”, and weaponized the frame, which, in the end, still proved to be insufficient for an electoral victory. Observing the construction process of the enemy image, we can also notice an escalation dynamic that propels the discourse and leaves increasingly less space for deliberative discussion. One factor behind the escalation was the introduction of new frames. As I have indicated, the last frame to be employed was that of “Freedom”, carrying the message that national sovereignty was at stake. Another factor behind the escalation was the increasingly confrontational rhetoric within the individual frames, encouraged as public rhetoric approached the style of war journalism: us vs. them (where “them” is marked as the source of evil or conflict), a zero-sum-orientation, and the demand for emotional involvement (Kempf, 2003). Victims were also visualized: Hungarian students losing out on the project and ultimately the whole nation falling prey to China’s power ambitions. The “Communist” frame had a very strong resonance in Hungary, as it served the identification of the enemy in an all-too-well-known, Old-Cold-War context. The “East vs. West” and “Freedom” frames got readjusted, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union. With the elections approaching, the international context provided a way for both

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sides to instrumentalize the Fudan project for domestic political gains. Through the narrative construction of the new reality of having to take sides, and after the obvious reactions from the United States and China, Hungary’s participation in the New Cold War became a fact. It remains an open question whether refraining from certain frames (especially from the historically laden conflict frames of “Communism”, “East vs. West”, and “Freedom”, which operate with bellicose rhetoric and are very prone to escalation) could have kept in focus those other frames that enable and even require dialogue, such as “Intransparency”, “Disadvantaged Hungarian Higher Education”, and “Representation”. It is also an open question whether it is possible at all for a country having a long history of “in-betweenness” not to become part of the “big picture” when it comes to a complete rearrangement of global power relations.

Conclusion The Fudan case deserves attention, because it demonstrates, in miniature form, the creation of a New-Cold-War narrative. Hungary-China relations had been stable and friendly before the start of the political discourse on Fudan, so it signalled not a tipping point, but a turning point in the relations of the two countries. In Hungary, the New-Cold-War division of the world has translated into historical national dichotomies (East vs. West; rural vs. urban), turning the current antagonism into a continuation of existing domestic political and intellectual traditions. In turn, as the discourse on Fudan evolved, and Hungary adopted and co-created the New-Cold-War narrative, it also reinforced it as a new global reality. By doing so, Hungary has certainly—and somewhat ironically—become “globally up-to-date”. Yet, this step also signals the loss of space for deliberation and the loss of ownership over the narrative. Within a war narrative, there remains no space for public debate, and the lack of this debate disempowers the people and undermines the very idea of a public sphere, ultimately that of democracy. Acknowledgements I owe gratitude to my colleague Péter Vámos (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary) for calling my attention to the questions raised by Fudan. In the timeline, I relied to some extent on the unpublished material he put together for a student debate in Budapest.

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CHAPTER 9

Haunted History: Exorcising the Cold War Kenneth Paul Tan

Characterized by a starkly bipolar world, divided politically, ideologically, and culturally between two militarily symmetrical superpowers and their allies, the historic Cold War did not, of course, simply end in 1991 with victory for the United States and its allies, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the triumph of capitalist liberal democracy and a stable and durable unipolar world with the United States as sole hegemon. Instead, it has very likely continued and morphed into a New Cold War. The twenty-first century has been described as the “Asian century”, reflecting a widespread view not only that wealth and power are shifting to Asia where most of the world’s population reside, but also that the United States is a superpower in decline, severely strained by its resourcedraining involvement in continuous wars since the end of the historic Cold War, while China is a rapidly rising power, in fact a potential superpower. Tensions between the two have been running high and, since 2018, both have engaged in costly trade and tech wars.

K. P. Tan (B) School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_9

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Meanwhile, Russia—under strongman Vladimir Putin’s rule driven by fears of N.A.T.O. expansion into its sphere of influence and a nostalgic yearning for the U.S.S.R. and Russian imperialism—continues to flex its geopolitical muscles, launching in 2022 a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine that threatened to unleash a major war that would have devastating effects on the world. Heightened Sino-U.S. tensions over Taiwan also threatens to do so. Between the historic Cold War and the New Cold War of the present are several continuities and discontinuities. The chapters in this book have all approached the Cold War and its legacies in Asia through some analytical combination that addresses them critically as phenomena that are historical, ideological, narrative, and experiential in nature. The chapter authors have adopted methods—reflecting the different academic backgrounds they come from—that range from textual analysis (Chapters 3, 4, and 6), to critical discourse analysis (Chapters 7 and 8), to ethnography (Chapters 2 and 6), and to a critical-sociological approach to international relations and international political economy (Chapter 5). Together they have urged their readers to turn their attention away from the lofty heights of grand theory, grand strategy, and the most abstract levels of geopolitics and geo-economics, down to the ways in which ColdWar histories and ideologies have—firstly—manifested themselves in films, television programmes, fiction and non-fiction writing, news media, and even museums and other commemorative sites; and—secondly—shaped the conditions of people’s lives and livelihoods at the everyday level, particularly for the disadvantaged. The focus of analysis in each chapter sits at the dynamic intersection of different conflicts (including proxy wars) all tied to the Cold War. For example, the commemorative sites on Kinmen Island in the Taiwan Strait (Chapter 2), the ideologically polarized propagandistic “tenement films” produced in 1950s Hong Kong (Chapter 4), the vulnerable factory workers in Taiwan’s booming semiconductor industry in the midst of a pandemic (Chapter 5), and the mainland Chinese migrant women working in erotic teahouses in Taipei (Chapter 6)—as diverse as they are— all sit at the unsettling intersection of the Cold War, the Chinese Civil War, and their mutually reinforcing amplification of cross-Strait tensions. The repatriation of Chinese prisoners-of-war on Koje Island as depicted in the 2004 novel War Trash and the Korean War memorials in Seoul and Busan all sit at the intersection of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Chinese Civil War. The public debates surrounding Fudan Hungary sit in

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the intersection of the old and New Cold War and the divisive internal politics of a European country, formerly a member of the communist bloc, but now finding its identity “in between” East and West, and rural and urban (Chapter 8), and so on. While there was no direct large-scale conflict between the two Cold-War superpowers, the criss-crossing effects of related conflicts have had deeply divisive, degenerative, and dangerous ramifications in Asia and beyond.

Trauma and Ritual A common theme that runs through many of the chapters is trauma. The Cold War and the effects of the conflicts that it has exacerbated and even caused in Asia have created extremely disruptive, dislocating, and often violent experiences for individuals and communities, experiences that they were unable fully to represent in language or assimilate in their memory in the usual way. The traumatic events and the severe physical, psychological, and emotional suffering of the Cold War were fundamentally indescribable, even unrepresentable in language, creating dissociative gaps and a compulsive need to repeat them in narrative reproductions of the past. The museums, monuments, films, television programmes, and fictional and non-fictional writing discussed in these chapters can all be seen as recurring narrative reproductions of the unrepresentable traumatic events of the Cold-War past. For example, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia narrates the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime of torture and death as a way of “confronting and knowing the past in the places where it happened” since, without that, “there could be no coming to terms, for either an individual or for a nation – only a setting-aside or forgetting” (Chapter 2). Giacomo Bagarella, in Chapter 2, described his encounter with Bou Meng, a survivor who was kept alive because his artistic talent made him useful for painting portraits of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. He now spends his days using “art to retell the atrocities he had seen”—atrocities that remain unrepresentable and that demand replaying in a compulsive effort to comprehend their depths. At the Cambodia Landmine Museum, another man—Aki Ra—could often be found. Aki Ra was a former combatant for the Khmer Rouge and then for the Vietnamese forces that attacked Cambodia. He was responsible for some serious brutality, including the planting of mines that would continue to endanger people in Cambodia right up to the present

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day. As Bagarella noted in his chapter, Aki Ra atoned for his violence by setting up an N.G.O. to support survivors and prevent more landmine casualties. He himself taught people how to detect and defuse landmines. Like Bou Meng who painfully revisits trauma through art, Aki Ra repeatedly confronts his indescribable horror by trying to negate it in his public educational efforts. The recurrence of traumatic experiences caused by the Cold War is like a haunting. In its representational inadequacy or absence, the trauma persists like a nameless ghost that simply refuses to go away or that keeps coming back, demanding acknowledgement. In the 2016 Malaysian film Absent Without Leave, three generations of Chinese men have each been corporeally displaced, “exiled” from their Malay(si)an homeland, partly by the violently territorializing forces of the Cold War and of Malaysia’s exclusionary nation-building efforts. The film narrator’s grandfather, a member of the Malayan Communist Party, has been missing for decades and no one in the family speaks of him. The narrator’s estranged father is inexpressive and detached. The narrator himself moves to Taiwan, estranged from his own nation’s official history. The film, as Zhou Hau Liew argued in Chapter 3, uses ecological depiction to highlight these absent bodies—absent without “leave”—and the haunting that persists in Malaysia decades after independence began and the Cold War ended. In the 2014 Taiwanese short film The Great Buddha and its 2017 feature-film elaboration The Great Buddha+, which I-ting Chen analysed in Chapter 6, a Taiwanese businessman kills his mainland Chinese mistress after they have sex in his car and she—not wanting to be exploited by her “master” anymore—blackmails him, threatening to expose his illegal business dealings to the media. Her return as a vengeful ghost signals the recurrence of capitalist-patriarchal trauma imposed by U.S.backed Taiwanese capitalism on the lives and prospects of objectified and sexualized mainland women already repressed by communism. The films, television programmes, novels, commemorative sites, and individuals who keep summoning up the traumas of the Cold War and representing them in various—often narrative—ways may be seen as a kind of ritual. The unsatisfactorily indescribable experience of the “original” traumas produced a compulsive need to re-create the experience, stylized according to what contemporary norms and conventions allow, in order to name that traumatic experience correctly before one can even

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hope to dismiss it. As in an exorcism, one must name the demon before it can be cast out. But the ritualistic dimension of dealing with Cold-War traumas can be motivated by other purposes too. Modern rituals can serve to commemorate Cold-War traumas to honour the past, to remember accurately and learn from mistakes to avoid endlessly repeating them, to seek justice, or to find healing. Modern rituals may also, of course, be a form of propaganda—the “pejorative” sense of ideology I discussed in Chapter 1— designed to establish and reinforce guilt and innocence, friend and enemy, good and evil, presence and absence. As Bagarella observed in Chapter 2, Vietnam’s Cu Chi Tunnels display pride in Vietnam’s defeat of the United States and in the Viet Cong’s operational dominance over American G.I.s on the battlefield, while the War Remnants Museum is saturated with bitter resentment towards the cruel multi-generational devastation of U.S. bombing and chemical warfare. In South Korea, the War Memorial, as Bagarella also noted, seems to display gratitude to their war-time saviours the United States and the United Nations, with whom a holy alliance enabled an authoritarian system to achieve prosperity and the growth of a middle class over a short period of time, which became the foundation of democratization in the 1980s. This followed the larger narrative of modernization theory and gave fodder to the triumphal declaration of the “end of history” and the victory of capitalist liberal democracy as the last ideology standing, as I discussed in Chapter 1. And, of course, modern rituals are not immune from the logic and dynamics of consumerism and profit-making so prevalent in our neoliberal-globalized times: Bagarella in Chapter 2 noted the “industrial” dimension of sites of memory. Through the souvenir industry and ticketed museums and monuments, tourism monetizes trauma, foreign fascination, and perhaps even liberal guilt. The same may be said of film, television, and the arts where the culture and entertainment industry is concerned.

Home and Away Another theme that resonates with haunting and that cuts across several chapters in this book is home in the context of uncertainty, displacement, deportation, exile, and repatriation. Bagarella, in Chapter 2, reflected on his visit to Kinmen Island in the Taiwan Strait, noting how it continues to be a contested territory,

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governed by Taiwan, but located very much closer to the Chinese mainland. In the New Cold War, heightened tensions in cross-Strait affairs and worsening relations between the United States and China make for great uncertainty and a degree of precarity for the residents who consider this island to be their home. Liew, in Chapter 3, reflected on the way ecology is used as a “scale” in Absent Without Leave to render more visible the movement of Chinese bodies across boundaries at the national scale. “Exiled” from their Malay(si)an homeland, three generations of men—and others like them— continue to haunt the ecological landscape in this film, thus expanding the audience’s spatial imagination of the Malayan Emergency and the Cold War, ordinarily limited by exclusionary national narratives, textbooks, and commemorations. Linda Ou, in Chapter 4, reflected on the deluge of migrants and refugees from mainland China after it was established as a communist state in 1949. Seeking political sanctuary and better life prospects in Hong Kong, they included destitute peasants and labourers, but also business tycoons and the cultural elite who were attracted to Hong Kong’s relatively stable politics and society. There were also former Kuomintang cadres and their families, who had been denied readmission to mainland China and to Taiwan, where the nationalist government-in-exile would only admit a limited number of them. As they grew in population, many were settled in refugee camps in squatter-like conditions. Other migrants had to make do with tenement living as housing was in very short supply. Ou analysed how Hong Kong films, produced in the 1950s, depicted the challenges of tenement life in a city that had become a site of espionage and an ideological battleground in Asia’s “cultural Cold War”. Its thriving filmmaking industry, nourished by large flows of talent from different parts of the world, meant that it became an important location for producing propaganda films targeted at Chinese audiences in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, but also the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. These films all conveyed the intense hardship faced by migrants and refugees in a city that was confronted with social problems including a housing shortage, mass unemployment, exploitative practices, and a society that was portrayed as violent, cruel, and immoral. In these films, 1950s Hong Kong was a symbol of the evils of capitalism and colonialism. Tenement films that were pro-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-nationalist often ended with a patriotic return to the mainland Chinese homeland, where communism had created a much

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better society than what they found in Hong Kong or remembered of China under the previous nationalist government. Tenement films that were pro-capitalist, pro-nationalist, and anti-communist would often end with migrants choosing to stay in Hong Kong, willing to endure a life of hardship that was still better than living in an intolerably communist China that could no longer be their home. In Chapter 3, in his analysis of War Trash, Liew discussed the question of post-war repatriation for Chinese prisoners-of-war who had crossed into Korea to fight the joint forces of the United States and the U.N. in the Korean War. China expected them to return to their communist homeland, but the United States argued that repatriation should be voluntary. The camp compound was a physical and ideological battleground between pro-communist and anti-communist prison factions. Violence broke out as the Chinese prisoners—many of whom had fought on opposite sides of the Chinese Civil War—expressed their allegiance to place according to the territorial logic of the Cold War. As Liew noted, “Repatriation raised questions of loyalty, origin, and the identity of one’s imagined China”. The novel’s narrator was able to manipulate the tattoo on his body so that he could slip back into his hometown in mainland China, escaping the political, ideological, and territorial divisions of the Cold War. He wrote his memoirs as a metaphysical form of coming home, to a land of peace in a world with fluid borders before the Cold War hardened them and displaced him.

Marginalized Migrant Populations A third related theme cutting across several chapters involves migrant populations and how their lives and livelihoods have been affected by the Cold War and New Cold War. John Wei, in Chapter 5, sketched out what life has been like for three migrant populations, whose prospects have been shaped by the logic and dynamics of the New Cold War as they confront the severe and unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wei argued that the local effects of geopolitical and geo-economic shifts driven by New-ColdWar grand strategy and their accompanying narratives have been amplified by COVID-19, severely disrupting and re-shaping the intense migratory trends that had been accelerated by the allure of economic prosperity and opportunities associated with the “Asian century”. This disruption has caused much hardship in Asia, where mobilities are fraught with

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uncertainty as migrants grapple with evolving structures of opportunity, with strategy and policy changes resulting from shifting geopolitical and geo-economic tensions, and with fast-changing and often incompatible national and local policies to manage COVID-19 in a still thoroughly globalized world. Wei’s mini case studies show how migrant peoples disproportionately face challenges every day that usually go unnoticed by mainstream society. Firstly, HIV-infected migrant workers have a very hard time maintaining access to their prescribed medication during periods of lockdown. Secondly, workers in Hong Kong’s tiny but growing manufacturing sector—in part caused by geo-economic shifts—have difficulty finding good jobs in a renewed economy that demands mainly workers with high-level skills and is replacing low-skilled workers with automation. Hong Kong’s substantial pool of low-skilled service workers will also be left behind in this economy, whose prospects are unavoidably shaped by New-Cold-War China’s intensifying political control over the former British colony. And thirdly, COVID-19 has raised the global demand for digital and medical devices, which is an enormous boost to Taiwan’s already successful semiconductor industry. Although this places a “silicon shield” over Taiwan, protecting it against U.S.–China geopolitical tensions, workers in this industry are unable to work from home during the pandemic, thus risking infection and displacement. I-ting Chen, in Chapter 6, gave a detailed account of the lived experience of migrant women from mainland China who work as hostesses and sex workers in the teahouses of Taipei. In Taiwan, these women— simultaneously feared and sexually desired by their male Taiwanese clients—are often derogatorily labelled as agents of communism and as gold-digging and family-wrecking seductresses. Feminist movements in Taiwan, including those that mimic U.S.-style (or Cold-War-style) feminism, have generally contributed to the Othering of these women. Chen explained how, in her fieldwork, she would encounter male clients who took great interest in whether she was authentically “Taiwanese”, making distinctions among those who migrated from the mainland before 1945, those who came during the most intense years of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), and those who came after the lifting of crossStrait exchange restrictions in 1987. All these factors coalesce to create what Chen called a “Cold-War structure of feeling”. Although intensely Othered by this Cold-War structure of feeling and regularly confronted with discriminatory attitudes and behaviours, these mainland Chinese

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migrant women, Chen argued, have not assumed the role of victim. Instead, in their teahouses, they work together strategically as a “sisterhood”, aiming to make the most of their situation and to do better in life. To understand more deeply the lived experience of these migrant teahouse workers—the choices available to them and the knowledge they gain about their own living and work conditions—Chen conducted ethnographic research. In her chapter in this book, she also triangulated her ethnographic data with close textual analysis of a television serial, two films, and a couple of guidebooks to see how mainland Chinese migrant women have been consistently characterized in their roles in Taiwan as wives, caregivers, mistresses, and sex workers. While Chen combined textual analysis with ethnographic research to understand the lived experience of a marginalized migrant population, Wei urged a shift from grand strategy to micro-socioeconomic analysis of everyday struggles, noting how Asia’s still mostly industrial conditions demand critical-analytical attention to the economic and class bases of the conditions of their lives and livelihoods. Inequalities and social injustice need to be understood by treating economy (involving development and distribution issues) and culture (involving recognition and representation issues) as mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Lived experience described through ethnography, when combined with textual analysis and critical theory, can be a powerfully transformative mode of scholarship.

China’s Rise And finally, in all the chapters, China was discussed either as a major power in the Cold War or as a potential superpower in a New-Cold-War rivalry with the United States. Chapters 2 to 6 all discussed crossboundary movements of Chinese people due to reasons that spring from the Cold War, its proxy conflicts, and the New Cold War. Chapters 7 and 8 focused on rising China’s global leadership role in international development and the mixed reactions to its global prominence in a contested world order. Emilie Tran and Yahia Zoubir, in Chapter 7, trawled through news data relating to China’s global health leadership role and found a stark contrast between the positive views of countries in the Middle East and North Africa and the negative views of European countries. Going beyond explanations based on geopolitical rivalry or mistrust, Tran and Zoubir noted a rise of “Sinophobia” in

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Europe and the United States, drawing on centuries-old racist ideas about the”yellow peril” and fuelling a more general emergence of Asian hate in Western societies today. Ágota Révész, in Chapter 8, analysed news data, parliamentary and other speeches, and demonstration slogans to gain insight into Hungarian attitudes to China with respect to its investment in Hungary’s higher education. These attitudes were divided and, while there were positive images of China as the wave of the future, there were also many negative images of China as a national security threat (referring to espionage), as opportunistic (its purpose was to gain global influence and its financing model involved taking loans from China banks and giving contracts to China constructions companies), and as authoritarian (referring to C.C.P. control and impact on academic freedom). While these contrasting images of China that were projected and circulated in Hungary’s public sphere may have been symptomatic of election campaign hyperbole (the data was gathered in the year leading to national elections), they do also generally reflect an internationally divided view of China in the New Cold War, as Tran and Zoubir pointed out in their chapter.

Exorcizing the Cold War The historic Cold War may have formally ended in the early 1990s, but its influence continues to weigh heavily on much of our imagination today. In one sense, the Cold War has been a highly generative source of creativity, invention, and optimism in the human ability to surpass our natural limitations. Chapters in this book have analysed creative expressions of Cold-War histories and ideologies, such as films, television programmes, novels, and even monuments and museums. But in quite another sense, the Cold War continues to constrain our thinking and behaviour, locking us into what seems like an eternally repetitive cycle of division, binarism, polarization, competition, othering, fear, conflict, violence, and trauma. The same tragic script, but with different actors, dressed in different costumes and occasionally improvising their lines. At the end, it is the same old catharsis and self-congratulatory applause on global, national, and local stages. The chapters in this book have provided “ground-up” perspectives to supplement, enrich, and perhaps even de-centre the persistent grand narratives and grand strategies of the Cold War that have tended to project the world abstractly in black-and-white terms—good vs. evil, us

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vs. them, heroes protecting victims against villains—terms that constrain the collective powers of imagination, collaboration, progress, and transcendence. Cold-War ideological struggles have not abated, continuing to filter down into—and be modulated by—the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. While high-level events and the Cold-War strategies and narratives that continue to frame and control their significance are certainly important for critical analysis, the chapters in this book have descended from the lofty considerations of geopolitics, foreign policy, and international relations to focus, at the level of lived experience, on how people and their communities, especially the marginalized, have been affected by Cold-War legacies, including its modes and styles of reasoning and feeling. The Cold War has been a major source of trauma affecting so many people around the world. They lived under brutal regimes and witnessed—or were even forced into committing—indescribable atrocities. They lost their homes or were forcefully dislocated from their homelands, living as refugees or in exile, forgotten by their families and communities. They moved in search of opportunities and settled in places where they faced discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization. And as China rises and challenges the global pre-eminence of the United States, the international system has come under more strain, raising the likelihood of war. And so, the cycle of violence and trauma continues. The Cold War legacy—its modes and styles of reasoning and feeling—will continue to stand in the way of progress in the name of social justice, democracy, and peace around the world. The Cold War is an old spectre that tenaciously haunts our world, begging to be exorcized and therefore liberated from our collective lack of understanding and imagination. What the world needs now is an exorcism, a ritual of diverse liturgies to summon the ghosts of the Cold War so that we may set them, and us, free at last.

Index

A Absent Without Leave, 20, 22, 55–59, 65, 66, 76, 224, 226 Asian Century, 104, 105, 221, 227 August 23 Artillery Battle Museum, 32, 33

B Beishan Broadcasting Station, 18, 30, 32 Belt and Road Initiative (B.R.I.), 12, 161, 165, 168, 169, 173, 195 Benshengren, 129, 130 Biden, Joe, 9, 110 Bodies, 37, 56–65, 67, 68, 70–75, 127, 130, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 144, 197, 224, 226, 227

C Cambodia, 5, 6, 8, 18, 23, 27–29, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 223 Cantonese, 82, 84, 91, 92, 98

Capitalist liberal democracy, 2, 13, 16, 17, 221, 225 Censorship, 82, 90, 91, 93, 97–99, 106 Centre, 45–48, 75, 112, 117, 167, 174, 194, 198, 201, 203, 206 Chinese Civil War, 6, 7, 20, 30, 34, 40, 70, 71, 80, 81, 85, 88, 128, 129, 222, 227, 228 Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), 6, 14, 15, 70, 81, 84, 85, 87, 91, 94, 96, 97, 107, 128–130, 205, 207, 230 Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, 20, 56, 58, 66 Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, 18, 47 Cold sex wars, 135, 138 Cold War, 1–4, 6–10, 13–21, 23, 28–31, 34–37, 39, 42, 48, 55–57, 60, 61, 67, 68, 70–72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 91, 97, 99, 130, 131, 134–136, 138, 140, 145, 151, 152, 157, 206,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. P. Tan (ed.), Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0

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INDEX

210, 221–224, 226, 227, 229–231 Communism, 2, 13, 15, 16, 19, 37, 40, 75, 81, 83, 89, 92, 93, 96, 139, 203, 204, 206, 212, 224, 226, 228 COVID-19, 12, 13, 22, 103–106, 108–122, 127, 158–161, 164–170, 173–179, 192, 227, 228 Cross-Strait tensions, 131, 134, 222 Cu Chi Tunnels, 18, 25, 225 D Dalumei (mainland little sister), 128, 130–133, 136–140, 143, 145, 149, 151, 152 De-globalization, 113 Deportation, 26, 60, 63, 225 Direkt36, 198, 199, 204 E Eastern Bloc, 2 East vs. West, 203, 206, 209, 211, 212 Ecology, 55–57, 59–68, 72, 76, 226 Elite, 3, 9, 21, 60, 81, 190, 191, 193, 194, 201, 203, 226 Emotional structure, 134 End of history, 13, 225 Europe, 21, 23, 28, 46, 50, 159, 160, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 190–192, 194, 195, 230 European Union (EU), 10, 171, 174, 179, 189, 192, 194 Exile, 6, 20, 59, 60, 62–66, 76, 80, 89, 91–99, 224–226, 231 Exorcism, 225, 231 F Factory workers, 22, 107, 222

Feminism, 135, 228 Formosan Lady, 20, 140, 143, 144, 152 444, 198, 204–206 Frame, 140, 159, 189, 199–201, 203–209, 211, 212, 231 Freedom, 41, 49, 71, 86, 93, 96, 134, 142, 176, 191, 201, 204–207, 211, 212, 230 Fudan Hungary, 189, 198, 199, 201, 204, 206, 210, 222 G Global public health, 158, 162 Global supply chain, 12, 106, 112, 119, 121, 174 Grand strategies, 104–106, 108, 120, 121, 230 H Halfway Down, 19, 80, 95, 96, 98 Haunted, 36, 64, 65, 221 Haunting, 37, 65, 69, 143, 152, 224–226, 231 Health diplomacy, 13, 21, 158–161, 167–170, 176 HIV/AIDS, 22, 115, 116, 142, 162, 163 Hoa Lò Prison, 18, 27 Ho Chi Minh City, 25, 29, 34, 36, 39 Home, 19, 22, 26–28, 30, 40, 55, 65–67, 69, 73, 80, 85, 87, 88, 95, 96, 107, 110, 112, 114, 118–120, 132, 150, 158, 205, 225–228, 231 Homeland, 19, 63, 65, 67, 69, 73, 80, 84, 87, 89, 90, 95, 96, 99, 117, 224, 226, 227, 231 Home, Sweet Home, 19, 80, 85, 87, 88, 95 ij

INDEX

Hostesses, 127–130, 136, 145–152, 228 Human rights, 9, 16, 45, 171–173, 178 Hungary, 13, 17, 173, 177, 189–192, 194–198, 203–207, 210–212, 230

I Ideology, 8, 13, 15–17, 21, 30, 73, 85, 136, 139, 152, 167, 208, 225 Info war, 164, 175 Intransparency, 198, 199, 203, 204, 208, 212

J Jing Ping Mei, 138 Jin, Ha, 20, 56, 66, 68 Jinping, Xi, 157, 165, 171, 175, 207, 208 Jungle, 7, 26, 37, 42, 55, 57, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66

K Kinmen Island, 6, 18, 29, 30, 222, 225 Koje Island, 5, 20, 56, 58, 66, 67, 70, 71, 222 Korean War, 5, 7, 18–20, 39, 42, 56, 58, 66–68, 70, 71, 73–76, 81, 222, 227 Kuomintang (K.M.T.), 6, 70, 81, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 128–131, 134, 226

L Landmine Museum, 29, 43, 44, 48, 51

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Lau Kek Huat, 20, 22, 55

M Maestro Wu knife store, 18, 32 Mainland China as a Tender Strange Land, 20, 139, 152 Malayan Emergency, 7, 20, 55, 56, 60, 63, 76, 226 Mandarin, 82, 84, 85, 91–94, 98 Mandarin’s Bowls , 19, 80, 97, 98 Marginalized, 3, 12, 22, 58, 95, 104, 106, 107, 117, 229, 231 Melodrama, 87, 96, 97 Memorials, 19, 29, 32, 34, 36, 46, 50, 51, 58, 67, 222 Memory, 19, 23, 26, 28–30, 35, 46, 48, 50, 51, 59, 64–66, 175, 223, 225 Migrant, 12, 18–20, 22, 56, 64, 81, 83–87, 99, 104, 107, 109, 112–114, 119, 120, 128–130, 132, 133, 141, 147–150, 196, 222, 226–229 Minnanese, 129 Mistresses, 22, 133, 136, 137, 143, 145, 152, 229 Mobilities, 106, 109, 110, 114–118, 120–122, 227 Museums, 3, 18, 21, 23, 29, 34, 36, 37, 39–44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 60, 222, 223, 225, 230

N Napi, 197 New Cold War, 1, 2, 8–12, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 103–111, 114, 115, 119–121, 136, 158, 212, 221–223, 226, 227, 229, 230 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 15

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O Orbán, Viktor, 189, 194–197, 203, 205–209

P Pan Jinlian, 137, 138, 144 Politics of redistribution, 145, 152 Propaganda, 3, 4, 17, 29, 30, 37, 51, 69, 70, 82, 87, 92–94, 96, 128, 159, 191, 225, 226 Putin, Vladimir, 10, 11, 222

R Refugees, 18, 81, 83–85, 87, 92, 95, 97–99, 226, 231 Relief aid, 173 Repatriation, 5, 20, 56, 67, 71–73, 75, 222, 225, 227 Representation, 19, 57, 59, 60, 62–64, 74, 79, 84, 91, 99, 111, 112, 130, 133, 136–138, 145, 201, 207, 208, 212, 229 Return the table, 146, 147, 151, 152 Ritual, 224, 225, 231 Role performance, 160, 163 Rural vs. urban, 209, 212 Russia, 10, 11, 175, 176, 222

S Scale, 13, 20, 56, 57, 68, 75, 76, 226 Security, 11, 39, 96, 103, 105, 107, 113, 119, 133, 159, 163, 171, 172, 178, 179, 201, 204–206, 230 Semiconductor industry, 22, 228 Service workers, 114, 115, 117, 119, 228 Sex workers, 127, 128, 136, 137, 143–145, 151, 152, 228, 229 Sinophobia, 12, 18, 173, 229

Sisterhood at the tea table, 145, 149, 151, 152 Sociological political economy, 104, 105, 108, 111–114, 121 Soros, George, 194, 197 South Korea, 5, 18, 23, 28, 29, 39–42, 51, 58, 76, 114, 131, 176, 225 Soviet Union, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 11, 15–17, 39, 80, 211, 221 T Taipei, 31, 34, 83, 93, 127, 128, 135, 136, 145, 146, 152, 222, 228 Taiwan, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 18–20, 22, 23, 28–30, 32, 34, 51, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, 75, 80–82, 85, 91–97, 105, 106, 114, 117–121, 127–138, 140–143, 148, 150–152, 176, 179, 222, 224, 226, 228, 229 Taiwanese Businessmen’s Extramarital Affairs in China, 20, 137, 152 Teahouses, 22, 128–130, 145–148, 150–152, 222, 228, 229 Tech war, 12, 15, 106, 107, 118, 121, 221 Tenements, 19, 20, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86–91, 99, 226, 227 Territoriality, 70, 73 The Dividing Wall , 19, 80, 89 The Great Buddha, 20, 143, 152, 224 The Great Buddha+, 20, 143, 144, 152, 224 The Middle East and North Africa (M.E.N.A.), 13, 21, 159–161, 163–168, 170, 173, 178, 229 The Show Must Go On, 19, 80, 87, 88, 95 Thucydides trap, 9 Trade war, 4, 12, 106, 114, 119, 121, 189

INDEX

Trauma, 63, 65, 80, 223–225, 230, 231 Trump, Donald, 2, 11, 12, 106, 175 Trust, 150, 160, 161, 163, 164, 170, 173, 178, 179 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 18, 46, 223

U Uncertainty, 105, 110, 225, 226, 228 United Nations Memorial Cemetery, 19, 58 United States (U.S.), 2–6, 8–12, 15–18, 20, 25, 28, 35, 37, 39, 40, 45, 58, 67, 69, 71, 75, 80, 81, 83, 92, 97, 103–105, 109, 119, 130, 157, 159, 168, 172, 177, 191, 221, 225–227, 229–231

237

V Vaccines, 114, 116, 119, 166, 170 Veterans, 37, 58, 129, 131–133 Vietnam, 4, 6, 8, 18, 23, 25, 27–29, 34–37, 39, 45, 51, 225 Vietnam War, 5–7, 25, 34, 45 W Waishengren, 129, 130 War Memorial of Korea, 29, 39–41, 51 War Remnants Museum, 36, 37, 51, 225 War Trash, 20, 56–58, 66, 67, 69–73, 76, 222, 227 Western Bloc, 2 Westophiles, 193 Wuhan, 22, 115, 116, 158, 165 X Xinjiang, 9, 178