SING SHEN VS. SOUTHWOOD

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. BROOKS
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Cold War

In 1952 Chinese immigrant Sing Sheng encountered racial discrimination when he tried to purchase a home in the all-white South San Francisco housing tract of Southwood. Sheng, believing that racism could not be the majority sentiment in a democracy, asked white Southwood residents to vote to accept or reject his family. The Shengs lost the unof�cial referendum, but it became national news and created immense sympathy for the family. Many white Americans claimed that housing discrimination against Asian Americans could in�uence Asian nations to reject democracy and embrace communism. The Sheng affair and similar incidents demonstrate that the Cold War improved housing opportunities for California's Asian Americans, even though many whites perceived them as foreign and continued to discriminate against blacks and Mexican Americans.

Labor, the UN and the Cold War

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Karan Jacobson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

One of the significant structural differences between the organization of economic and social work under the League and under the United Nations is the extent to which non-governmental organizations (NGO's) have been allowed to participate. NGO's have been granted far greater privileges in the UN than they enjoyed in the League. Initially, they were formally recognized in Article 71 of the Charter, which gives the Economic and Social Council the right to make “suitable arrangements” for consultation with them. While defined in differing ways during different periods, consultative status under this article has, subject to various conditions, always included the right to participate in the debates of ECOSOC, its commissions and committees, and to propose items for inclusion in their provisional agenda. NGO's have made extensive use of these privileges. Their use, however, as well as the entire record of NGO action in the UN, has been inseparably linked with the cold war. Russian demands at San Francisco for privileges for the newly created, communist-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) were a contributing factor in the decision to include Article 71 in the Charter. The initial definition of this article resulted primarily from the interaction of pressures by the Soviet Union and the WFTU and the western response.

Takeshima/Dokdo Problem in the San Francisco System

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Kimie Hara
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Helsinki Declaration ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

Various issues were left unresolved in the San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan. The Takeshima/Dokdo problem is no exception. A close examination of the post-war territorial disposition of Japan suggests that these issues were left unresolved under the strong influence of the Cold War. The treaty was prepared and signed in a multilateral framework, in which several issues were linked together. However, their historical and political linkages have been neglected or overlaid by other features over the years. Remembering its Cold War origin and multilateral linkages, settlement of the Takeshima/Dokdo problem may be considered together with other outstanding issues in a broader multilateral framework. There are important lessons to learn from the European experiences, including the 1975 Helsinki Declaration (Accords). A workable settlement formula would include mutual concessions and collective gains among the concerned parties in East Asia.

To Be an Apolitical Political Scientist: A Chinese Immigrant Scholar and (Geo)politicized American Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-155
Author(s):  
Qing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Cold War

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and producing knowledge about China for the United States during the Cold War. It analyzes how Tsou navigated a complex political terrain in which his Chinese identity was both a professional asset and a liability. Examining Tsou's personal and professional decisions as well as his response to the politicization of his Chinese identity reveals the (geo)politicization of higher education more broadly.

“A Saga of Democracy”: Toy Len Goon, American Mother of the Year, and the Cultural Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiou-Ling Yeh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
American Press ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Chinese Mother

In 1952 Toy Len Goon, an unknown Chinese immigrant, a widowed mother of eight, and a laundry shop owner, was selected to be Maine Mother of the Year and later won the national title as American Mother of the Year. The news was circulated widely in domestic media, propaganda abroad, the Chinese American press, and newspapers in Taiwan. This article examines the meaning of how a self-employed Chinese mother, against the dominant discourse of white, middle-class domesticity, was promoted as a rhetorical tool domestically and globally in the Cold War ideology of containment and integration. The Goon case illustrates the complexity of the cultural Cold War and indexes the ways that multiple layers of power and resistance operated under the banner of containment.

This Promise of Paradise

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The Other ◽  
White American ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Cold War

This fourth chapter considers the intersection of white engagement with representations of Asian culture such as the musical South Pacific, as well as something of its opposite: a nightclub in San Francisco known as Forbidden City. At this club, Asian American musicians and dancers put on a kind of whiteface show in which, for example, singer Larry Ching performed as the “Chinese Frank Sinatra.” These dueling representations illuminate two larger and intersecting trends. One is the experience of white American service members returning home from the Pacific front. The other was the experience of Asian American in California, especially in the Bay Area where many Chinese Americans were joining the suburban middle class. Globalization was nothing new in the 1940s, but in the context of the Cold War, the development of these new styles of representation took on particularly fraught meanings.

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