Professor Judd Kinzley (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

From 1940 to 1945, the United States relied heavily on a steady stream of Chinese tungsten ore, hog bristles, and tung oil in order to power American wartime industry. The flow of Chinese products to the United States was only possible with the efforts of a small handful of Chinese businessmen who served as the linchpins in a vast wartime production network that channeled raw materials from China’s rural hinterland to American factories. The wartime efforts of these businessmen helped lay the foundation for a postwar, Cold War order that was shored up through the exchange of resources for dollars with allied countries throughout Latin America and the Pacific. In this talk, I will focus on one of these businessmen, a man named Li Guoqin or K.C. Li, who was later known as China’s “Tungsten King,” to reveal the powerful role that these businessmen played in shaping the dimensions of American power in East Asia, Latin America, and the wider Cold War world.