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Takamichi Serizawa, Chien-Wen Kung. Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s–1970s., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1226–1227, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae204
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During the Cold War, although both countries, Taiwan and the Philippines, belonged to the camp of so called “free world” allying with the US, the interrelations between these two countries captured less scholarly interest and thus have not been well studied. Some studies on Chinese influence in Southeast Asia during the period have focused on the communist camp, or the “enemy” for the West, and not paid so much attention to the anticommunists, or the “own” camp. At the same time, the assimilation of ethnic Chinese into Southeast Asian nations was a key preoccupation of scholarship, and therefore the spread of right-wing Chinese nationalism over the region was not worth consideration by scholars.
Chien-Wen Kung’s insightful book, Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s–1970s, fills in these gaps by exploring the understudied anticommunist movements and networks that bridged Taiwan and the Philippines. Unlike other parts of Southeast Asia, where the Kuomintang (KMT) members, branches, sympathizers, schools, and organizations were suppressed by the state as the threat of terrorism, the Chinese residents in the Philippines, which Kung terms “Philippine Chinese,” including both the old migrant generation and the native-born generation, experienced less suppression due to the laissez-faire approach toward the Chinese community originally inherited from US legislation. Meanwhile, in 1902, the US extended its 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the Philippine Islands, which prevented the inflow of Chinese “coolies,” and the Chinese population in the country remained the smallest compared with British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and Thailand.
