From Cold War Consent to Cold War Dissent: The Chinese Student Weekly

• In Event: More than a Mouthpiece: Media Culture in Cold War China

Abstract

The Cold War was a total war. New scholarship on the Cold War has moved beyond the emphasis on elite politics, international diplomacy or military dimensions to study the cultural dynamic of the global conflicts. My paper follows this “cultural turn” to bring to light the missing dimension of the Cold War: the role of Hong Kong’s popular magazine in the battle for the “hearts and minds” of ethnic Chinese in Asia.

Although peripheral in the global geopolitics, the British colony was central in Asia’s cultural Cold War. The Chinese Student Monthly encapsulated the complexity of this history. Founded by some émigré Third Force intellectuals in 1952 to reach out to the educated youths, and financed by the CIA-Asia Foundation, the magazine had been in the forefront of struggle for supremacy between Freedom and Communism in the region. Yet its stance towards “Free China” and Chinese culture was fraught with ambivalence. The 1960s brought enormous changes to the cultural politics of the magazine as a result of the generational revolution. Combining archival research, oral interviews and textual analysis, my paper explores the changing role of Chinese Student Monthly in Asia’s cultural Cold War, and how the global conflicts influenced the debate it helped shape among young intellectuals about modernity and cultural tradition.

Author

• Poshek Fu, University of Illinois