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

246 Pages·2023·5.017 MB·English

by  Kenneth Paul Tan

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
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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 master-
narrative that could make sense of the often-bewildering events of the
past decades.
The most prominent among these was American political scien-
tist 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 ideolog-
ical 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 respon-
sibility and blame, and the centrality of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, to a
more interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, methodologically eclectic,
v
vi PREFACE
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 preoc-
cupations 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 tran-
scendence. 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 vii
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 communi-
ties, 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 identi-
ties 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 collabora-
tion 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
viii PREFACE
of all conference sessions can be viewed at https://www.hkbu.online/nar
ratingcoldwars/.
Kowloon, Hong Kong Kenneth Paul Tan
September 2022
Contents
1 Interpreting t he Cold War a nd the New Cold War
in Asia 1
Kenneth Paul Tan
2 Curating Memory: Cold-War Narratives in Museums
and Memorials in Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea,
and Cambodia 25
Giacomo Bagarella
3 Ecology as a Cold-War Scale: Lau Kek Huat’s Absent
Without Leave and Ha Jin’s War Trash 55
Zhou Hau Liew
4 Where Is My Homeland? Mainland Chinese Refugees
and Hong Kong Tenement Films During the Cold-War
Era 79
Linda Huixian Ou
5 Grand Strategies and Everyday Struggles Under
the New Cold War and COVID-19: A Sociological
Political Economy 103
John Wei
ix
x CONTENTS
6 The Cold-War Structure of Feeling: Revisiting
the Discourse of “Dalumei” (Mainland Little Sister)
in Taiwan 127
I-ting Chen
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 157
Emilie Tran and Yahia H. Zoubir
8 Hungary and the New-Cold-War Narrative on China 189
Ágota Révész
9 Haunted History: Exorcising the Cold War 221
Kenneth Paul Tan
Index 233