Chien-Wen Kung

Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s

 

Book Talk with Chien-Wen Kung (National University of Singapore)

 

Online Event

 

*RSVP requested

The UW Taiwan Studies Program will welcome Professor Chien-Wen Kung to discuss his newly published monograph, Diasporic Cold Warriors. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia and possibly the world’s most exemplary overseas Chinese Cold Warriors. Fears of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Southeast Asia’s Chinese as conduits for PRC influence gripped states and societies then – as indeed they do today. Yet, ironically, the example of the Philippines shows that the "China" which intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian country during the Cold War was not the PRC. It was, rather, the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. Drawing upon archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors tells for the first time this story of the Philippine Chinese as anticommunist partisans by tracing their evolving relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Philippine state over the middle third of the 20th century.

Chien-Wen Kung is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore and the author of Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s. His scholarship has also been published in Modern Asian Studies, the International History Review, and Asian Ethnicity. Born and raised in Singapore, he received his B.A. in History and English from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. in Modern Chinese and International and Global History from Columbia University. With funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and National Heritage Board in Singapore, he is currently working on a cultural history of Singapore-China-Taiwan relations in the 1970s and 1980s.