scholarly journals State-Building after Disaster: Jiang Tingfu and the Reconstruction of Post-World War II China, 1943–1949

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-206
Author(s):  
Rana Mitter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
State Building ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
New Thinking

AbstractPost-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

Ideology Was A Uniform to Be Taken On and Off: An Anti-Communist Prisoner’s Survival from Manchuria to Korea to India

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
United Nations ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.

scholarly journals Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

Writing

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-223
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Action ◽  
World War ◽  
Art Of Living ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Primary Medium

This chapter follows Eva Palmer Sikelianos's life to its end. From writing Upward Panic to exchanging weaving tips, to translating Angelos Sikelianos's work, to becoming a polylingual correspondent with hundreds of people as World War II gave way to the Cold War, Eva made writing the primary medium of her art of living. She found urgency in writing—a clarity of purpose that propelled her into the present in a new way—especially after she received a contraband package of Angelos's wartime resistance poems on the eve of the Greek civil war in 1944. The urgency of that critical moment thrust her into political action, turning her pen into a tool for anti-imperialist activism in a way that set up her brilliant last act.

The New Conservatives

2017 ◽  
pp. 106-139
Author(s):  
Peter Kolozi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Right

Post World War II conservative thinking witnessed a marked shift in criticism away from capitalism itself and to the state. Cold War conservatives’ anti-communism led many on the right to perceive economic systems in stark terms as either purely capitalistic or on the road to communism.

scholarly journals The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers from the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symposia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
World War ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Mail Service

<p>Writers in the field of postal history have incredibly diverse interests and approaches. As a result, the postal history symposia have been organized around themes. The three themes represented in papers here are mail and the Civil War (2012), the development of transoceanic air mail service (2014), and the influence of postal treaties on post office reforms (2016).</p><p>The American Civil War affected mail in many ways, particularly in the Confederate States of America, which faced the challenge of quickly developing its own postal system, as well as shortages of supplies, including paper. The mail itself can be used to tell the story of the conflict through the examination of patriotic and propaganda images on envelopes and through the study of shifts in mail routes and practices as the war progressed.</p><p>The histories of aviation and of mail delivery are intertwined. Pressure to deliver mail faster and more efficiently helped to propel investment in aviation innovations. In turn, developments in flight opened new possibilities for carrying the mail. The development of transoceanic air mail from its very early days in the 1920s through the rise of military air mail services during World War II is examined.</p><p> Throughout much of history, mail has been the primary means of communication both within and between nations; thus, the regulations and agreements concerning what may be mailed, and for what cost, have had a profound effect on a population’s access to information. Postal reform, and particularly the creation of national postal systems, required that immediate needs as well as political and economic visions of the future be considered and addressed legally and structurally during state-building. Cases of the United States in the revolutionary era and Brazil in the nineteenth century are examined here.<br></p>

scholarly journals The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers from the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symposia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
World War ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Mail Service

<p>Writers in the field of postal history have incredibly diverse interests and approaches. As a result, the postal history symposia have been organized around themes. The three themes represented in papers here are mail and the Civil War (2012), the development of transoceanic air mail service (2014), and the influence of postal treaties on post office reforms (2016).</p><p>The American Civil War affected mail in many ways, particularly in the Confederate States of America, which faced the challenge of quickly developing its own postal system, as well as shortages of supplies, including paper. The mail itself can be used to tell the story of the conflict through the examination of patriotic and propaganda images on envelopes and through the study of shifts in mail routes and practices as the war progressed.</p><p>The histories of aviation and of mail delivery are intertwined. Pressure to deliver mail faster and more efficiently helped to propel investment in aviation innovations. In turn, developments in flight opened new possibilities for carrying the mail. The development of transoceanic air mail from its very early days in the 1920s through the rise of military air mail services during World War II is examined.</p><p> Throughout much of history, mail has been the primary means of communication both within and between nations; thus, the regulations and agreements concerning what may be mailed, and for what cost, have had a profound effect on a population’s access to information. Postal reform, and particularly the creation of national postal systems, required that immediate needs as well as political and economic visions of the future be considered and addressed legally and structurally during state-building. Cases of the United States in the revolutionary era and Brazil in the nineteenth century are examined here.<br></p>

Internationalization of the State under Japanese Quasi-Hegemony: Marginalizing Northern Workers, 1980–2000

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Glassman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Value Added ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Exporting Firms ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Political Dominance

The internationalization of the Thai economy and the Thai state analysed in the last two chapters was—like all processes of internationalization—highly uneven. The modern Thai state was formed historically through collaboration between the Siamese monarchy, based in Bangkok, and British colonial officials, with Chinese merchants playing an important subsidiary role (Suehiro 1989; Chaiyan 1994; Thongchai 1994). By the early twentieth century, internationalization of capital and the state under this triple alliance had already led to the emergence of the Bangkok-centred political economy and strongly centralized state that has characterized Thailand throughout the past one hundred years (Dixon and Parnwell 1991). Thus, by the time rapid agrarian and industrial transformation began to take hold in the post-World War II period, it did so against a backdrop of already substantial Bangkok primacy and political dominance. The patterns of internationalization that have developed in the post-World War II period have largely strengthened this primacy and political dominance. Bangkok was the centre of the new triple alliance based on collaboration between military capitalists, Chinese merchants, and the US Cold War state (Suehiro 1989). As Cold War counter-insurgency and development projects proceeded, significant numbers of displaced peasants left agrarian society to seek urban-industrial employment and, as the overwhelmingly dominant centre of industry, Bangkok received a disproportionate share of the rural-tourban migration stream, with secondary cities remaining small and economically underdeveloped (Tables 4.1 and 4.2; London 1980; 1985). Consequently, the transformation of urban-industrial labour and the labour relations system described in Chapter 3 took place fundamentally in and around Bangkok, which remained the core area of manufacturing growth. For most of the post-World War II period up to 1985, the BMR’s industrial development was centred on low-wage, low value-added products such as textiles, garments, and low end electronics components, and though there were a number of very large firms in these lines, most manufacturers remained very small in scale, this being the case even among investment-constrained exporting firms. Small size was even more the norm with firms in upcountry regions, where manufacturing development was largely very rudimentary and generally centred in industries such as textiles, garments, and food processing (Table 4.3; Department of Labour 1985–6).

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