Thirty years from Tiananmen: China, Hong Kong, and the ongoing experiment to preserve liberal values in an authoritarian state

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
World History ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​

scholarly journals The Air Torpedo of Bäckebo: Local Incident and World History

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Mats Burström ◽  
Anders Gustafsson ◽  
Håkan Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World History ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Southern Sweden ◽  
Space Flights ◽  
Future Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

In June 1944 a German V2-rocket exploded and crashed in Bäckebo in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. Technically the rocket represented the most modern the world had seen at the time. It laid the foundation for future space flights as well as for the fear of missiles of the Cold War. Today the incident in Bäckebo is largely forgotten or is unknown to people in Sweden. But what traces has the incident left locally? What kinds of memories still exist in the form of material remains and stories? Do parts of the rocket still remain in the ground? Can an archaeological survey for them trigger a process of remembering?

scholarly journals Emerging trends: Ethics, intimidation, and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Kenneth Ward Church ◽  
Valia Kordoni
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
New Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThere are well-meaning efforts to address ethics that will likely make the world a better place, but care needs to be taken to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. In particular, ACL has recently introduced a new process where there are special reviews of some papers for ethics. We would be more comfortable with the new ethics process if there were more checks and balances, due process and transparency. Otherwise, there is a risk that the process could intimidate authors in ways that are not that dissimilar from the ways that academics were intimidated during the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Icons of Dissent

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Osama Bin Laden ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Che Guevara

The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.

Prologue Cold War Hong Kong

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
The World ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
1997 Handover ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Nodal Position

For Hong Kong, the Cold War was a distinct and crucial period in its own evolution and in its relations with China and the rest of the world. Without the global clash of ideologies, the city might well have failed to win and keep the key nodal position it attained in those years. Economically, intellectually, socially, and culturally, the Cold War years were crucial in ensuring that Hong Kong became a unique and cosmopolitan metropolis. Hong Kong, whatever its limitations—and it could at times be parochial, inward looking, and self-obsessed—was set on the path to become one of the world’s greatest and most vibrant cities, a city that would play a key role in the modernization of Greater China, especially the mainland, even as it developed a sense of specifically Hong Kong identity. From its outset, Hong Kong has been unique. During the Cold War and in many ways thanks to the demands, challenges, and opportunities arising from that conflict, already established social, economic, political, and administrative patterns of behavior within Hong Kong were intensified and adapted, transforming the territory. Run initially by British officials but increasingly by local Hong Kong recruits to the civil service, a hub not just for economic networks of capital and governmental exchanges of every variety but also for transnational intellectual, political, and social interchanges at every level, Hong Kong was one of a kind, its essence almost undefinable. Hong Kong developed its own voice, one that, perhaps muted in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 handover and the Asian economic crisis, is once more becoming ever more discernible. Its greatest contribution to China’s modernization may yet lie in the future....

The Economic Success of Hong Kong

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Y. So
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
World System ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World

This article studies the origins and development of the economic success of Hong Kong. After pointing out the problems of the free-market explanation and the authoritarian state explanation, this article turns to the world-system perspective for new insights. It is argued that the historical development of Hong Kong is shaped both by the capitalist world-system and by the interactions between socialist China and the capitalist power bloc between the 1950s and the 1970s. This article contributes by showing how these world-system dynamics have affected the Hong Kong political economy over the past three decades.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-280
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Number Of Individuals

The world after 1989 was not necessarily less likely to suffer cataclysmic destruction; however, the imagination of that destruction had moved to new hopes and fears. These new sites of imagination were not only filtered through and generated from the half century of nuclearity that had preceded them; they dwelt in its physical and fictional ruins. Far from receding into the past along with the Cold War that birthed it, the affordances of nuclear apocalypse have proliferated in the new millennium. And as their atomic origins continue to mutate, the process appears less as novelty or aberration than as an everyday matter of course. Dwelling in a permanently bunkered and postapocalyptic condition affords several insights that clinging to the fantasy of a preapocalyptic way of life surviving under the nuclear condition does not afford. Recognized as ontological, the bunker fantasy ceases to operate exclusively as a powerful tool for legitimating surveillance, separation barriers, and enclosure in the name of enhanced security. It can also help to understand the spatio-cultural history of the security imaginary that makes these measures welcome to some, tolerable to some, and abhorrent to others. It enables us to recognize apocalypse not solely as the cataclysmic, unique, and always deferred rupture in time that a nuclear war surely would be, but as an ongoing historical condition always affecting a certain—and substantial—number of individuals and groups within unequal societies, affecting them unequally, and affecting them in intersecting but not always commensurate ways.

Hong Kong in the Cold War

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
The World ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War was a distinct and crucial period in Hong Kong’s evolution and in its relations with China and the rest of the world. Hong Kong was a window through which the West could monitor what was happening in China and an outlet that China could use to keep in touch with the outside world. Exploring the many complexities of Cold War politics from a global and interdisciplinary perspective, Hong Kong in the Cold War shows how Hong Kong attained and honed a pragmatic tradition that bridged the abyss between such opposite ideas as capitalism and communism, thus maintaining a compromise between China and the rest of the world. The chapters are written by nine leading international scholars and address issues of diplomacy and politics, finance and economics, intelligence and propaganda, refugees and humanitarianism, tourism and popular culture, and their lasting impact on Hong Kong. Far from simply describing a historical period, these essays show that Hong Kong’s unique Cold War experience may provide a viable blueprint for modern-day China to develop a similar model of good governance and may in fact hold the key to the successful implementation of the One Country Two Systems idea.

Special Session of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the 13th RISA Convention: Changes in the Research Field of the History of the Cold War

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10 (108)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Mikhail Lipkin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World History ◽  
World System ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Special Session ◽  
Book Series ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The article makes a review of the 8 academic papers presented at the special session of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences conducted as part of the 13th RISA Convention in Moscow “The World System of Socialism” and global economics in 1950s — 1970s: discussion in historiography and the recent archival evidences”. The session summed up results of 5 years of research work of scientific team at the Institute of World History financed by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation 17-18-01728 in 2017—2021. The author specifies main publications and reviews in press on the published book series “The World System of Socialism” and global economics” established in the “Ves’ Mir” publishing company as part of the project, and analyses its merit in comparison with analogоus book series which appeared in the world. The key talking points of presented papers are represented threw the lense of a search for alternative development in 1950s — 1970s, alternative to the capitalist system. The comparative analysis of modernization efforts in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, institutional reforms in COMECON and UN (creation of UNCTAD), collective answer to technological challenges of the colour TV (SECAM) is displayed around discussion on the struggle between political and economic concerns of policymakers in this period of time. The author comes to conclusion that the trend line in the world historiography of the last 5 years becomes a study of the global Cold War from the angle of “East — South” relations. The interdisciplinary research conducted by Russian historians answers this new challenge in research field of the Cold War history.

Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 531-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan D. Hemmings ◽  
Sanjay Chaturvedi ◽  
Elizabeth Leane ◽  
Daniela Liggett ◽  
Juan Francisco Salazar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Antarctic

Whilst nationalism is a recognised force globally, its framing is predicated on experience in conventionally occupied parts of the world. The familiar image of angry young men waving Kalashnikovs means that the idea that nationalism might be at play in Antarctica has to overcome much instinctive resistance, as well as the tactical opposition of the keepers of the present Antarctic political arrangements. The limited consideration of nationalism in Antarctica has generally been confined to the past, particularly “Heroic-Era” and 1930s–1940s expeditions. This article addresses the formations of nationalism in the Antarctic present. Antarctic nationalism need not present in the same shape as nationalisms elsewhere to justify being called nationalism. Here it occurs in a virtual or mediated form, remote from the conventional metropolitan territories of the states and interests concerned. The key aspect of Antarctic nationalism is its contemporary form and intensity. We argue that given the historic difficulties of Antarctic activities, and the geopolitical constraints of the Cold War, it has only been since the end of that Cold War that a more muscular nationalism has been able to flourish in Antarctica. Our assessment is that there at least 11 bases upon which Antarctic nationalism might arise: (i) formally declared claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica; (ii) relative proximity of Antarctica to one’s metropolitan territory; (iii) historic and institutional associations with Antarctica; (iv) social and cultural associations; (v) regional or global hegemonic inclinations; (vi) alleged need in relation to resources; (vii) contested uses or practices in Antarctica; (viii) carry-over from intense antipathies outside Antarctica; (ix) national pride in, and mobilisation through, national Antarctic programmes; (x) infrastructure and logistics arrangements; or (xi) denial or constraint of access by one’s strategic competitors or opponents. In practice of course, these are likely to be manifested in combination. The risks inherent in Antarctic nationalism are the risks inherent in unrestrained nationalism anywhere, compounded by its already weak juridical situation. In Antarctica, the intersection of nationalism with resources poses a particular challenge to the regional order and its commitments to shareable public goods such as scientific research and environmental protection.

scholarly journals Repositioning Indonesia – Thoughts on the Indo-Pacific

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Anthony Milner
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Asian Values ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministry

Before considering how best to reposition Indonesia in the world – and I will be looking, in particular, at Indonesia’s current Indo-Pacific initiative -  we need to ask how the world itself has been repositioned. The terms of reference for this conference go straight to this second question. They immediately highlight the theme of globalization, noting how it has promoted “growing connectivity among states” and “revolutionized human interaction”. How then has this region been reconfigured over the last decades? Until the mid-20th-century the entire Asian region was either under European colonial rule or strong Western imperial influence. That is how the region was structured – with the great centres of power in London, Paris, The Hague and Washington. After the extraordinary conquests by Japan, which effectively ended the Western imperial project, Asia was quickly drawn into the Cold War. Countries lined up as Communist or Anti-Communist, and some tried to sustain a degree of neutrality or equi-distance. At the end of the Cold War, in the last decade or so of the 20th-century, as is often commented, there was a unipolar moment – an America-dominated world with a sense of globalization not merely being economic, but also a globalization of ideas. One commentator wrote of the ‘end of history’ – the US had won, he said, with its liberal democratic ideology. Communism had been annihilated, and Western liberalism had the ‘wind in its hair’. This said, there were still objections. Dr Mahathir in Malaysia and a number of bright Foreign Ministry intellectuals in Singapore spoke of ‘Asian values’. They said you had to understand Asian values to explain the great economic transformation taking place in Asian countries – and there was also a need to respect Asian values in the political arena, and not just insist that all societies must develop in the same way. The democracy, human rights, and other supposed responsibilities of government which Westerners have tended to advocate, it was argued, are not necessarily universal norms.  

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