In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan’s challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan’s interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets.
This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims’ religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.
Journalist Lina Ferreira interviewed me for Macao’s Portuguese language tv station about Strangers on the Praia, WW2 Macao and the Jewish refugees (I’m in English with subtitles; Lina in Portuguese)….
David Cheng Chang’;s The Hijacked War vividly portrays the experiences of Chinese prisoners in the dark, cold, and damp tents of Koje and Cheju Islands in Korea and how their decisions derailed the high politics being conducted in the corridors of power in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.he Korean War lasted for three years, one month, and two days, but armistice talks occupied more than two of those years, as more than 14,000 Chinese prisoners of war refused to return to Communist China and demanded to go to Nationalist Taiwan, effectively hijacking the negotiations and thwarting the designs of world leaders at a pivotal moment in Cold War history.
Chang demonstrates how the Truman-Acheson administration’s policies of voluntary repatriation and prisoner reindoctrination for psychological warfare purposes—the first overt and the second covert—had unintended consequences. The “success” of the reindoctrination program backfired when anti-Communist Chinese prisoners persuaded and coerced fellow POWs to renounce their homeland. Drawing on newly declassified archival materials from China, Taiwan, and the United States, and interviews with more than 80 surviving Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, Chang depicts the struggle over prisoner repatriation that dominated the second half of the Korean War, from early 1952 to July 1953, in the prisoners’ own words.
Edited by Richard Davenport-Hines These private journals, made available here for the first time, record Hugh Trevor-Roper’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in the autumn of 1965, shortly before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, and describe the controversial aftermath of his journey on his return to England. The visit was a catalogue of frustrations, which he relates with the verve and irony of a master narrator who relished the human comedy. His efforts to meet the real life and mind of China, in whose history and politics he had long been interested, were blocked at every turn by the resources of state propaganda and the claustrophobic attention of sullen Party guides. The visit was arranged by the London-based Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which was ostensibly committed to the impartial interchange of culture and ideas. It proved to be run by a Communist claque whose ruthless methods of control outwitted the well-connected membership. Back in England, and with help from MI5, he resolved to get to the bottom of the society’s affairs. His investigations provoked a tumultuous public row which Trevor-Roper, no shirker of controversy, zestfully traces in these pages. Through the book, which closes with an account of his visit to Taiwan and South-East Asia in 1967, there run the wisdom of historical perspective that he brought to contemporary events and his lifelong commitment to the defence of liberal values and practices against their ideological adversaries.
Meeting Sorge, Smedley and otheres in 1930s Shanghai, according to Mcintryre at least…click here. From what snippets I’ve read so far this book looks more likely to be accurate on Shanghai than the error-ridden Owen Matthews’s bio of Sorge last year…
Myself and host Angus Stewart talking about Lin Yutang’s Hymn to Shanghai on the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast. It’s a nice, long, rambling sort of show so we get onto such controversial subjects as the vulgarity of Shanghai art-deco, Eileen Chang and the Nazis, why there are no bedbugs in Shanghai, the awfulness of flavoured gins, ex-pats in Shanghai then and now and some other musings, as well as a line-by-line reading of the piece. click here to listen (or if you are in China it’s on Ximalaya too (here)
With the two month countdown underway, we are excited to share another round of author announcements with you this week. HKILF will be a hybrid of live and online events this year, with more than 70 events taking place from 5th – 15th November.Â
Crazy Rich Asians fans can log on to hear author Kevin Kwan talk about his latest novel, Sex and Vanity, a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures and, of course, a love story. Also movie-related is a talk by Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee, whose new book illuminates her father’s life philosophies and presents them in tangible, accessible ways. Crime writer Ann Cleeves’ fiction may be best known through the television adaptations of her Vera and Shetland series. She will join us live from Forum Books in Northumberland to discuss the 9th Vera Stanhope novel, The Darkest Evening. Read on for more authors including International Editor, Channel 4 News, Lindsey Hilsum; journalist and China commentator Dexter Roberts; historian Elizabeth Sinn; scholar and designer Kai-yin Lo; travel writer Cameron Dueck; novelists David Vann and Eva Lau; author and baijiu aficionado Derek Sandhaus; and longstanding festival favourite Paul French.
Our 20th edition theme ‘Present Tense/Future Perfect’ explores in fiction and non-fiction how the world is responding to issues such as health, inequality and climate change, as well as possible future directions for humanity and the planet. More news and announcements in the coming weeks!
