Home Base of an Exiled People: Hong Kong and Overseas Chinese Activism from Thailand

Abstract

Hong Kong during the Cold War years was like an anachronistic time capsule, which provided a special space for negotiation and compromise in between the contesting Cold War ideologies and the raging nationalist fervor of the newly established modern nation-states of East and Southeast Asia in the post-World War II era. While the People's Republic of China had established itself as an alternative leading power of the Communist bloc following its stellar success in the Korean War, Thailand, since the conclusion of the Second World War, had been a devout and devoted ally of the USA in the Cold War. Hong Kong, then still a British colony, came to serve as an asylum for ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs from Thailand who had been in danger of being persecuted by overzealous anti-Communist military government for their ethnic, familial, and cultural ties with the ancestral homeland. At the same time, the colony of Hong Kong also seemed to have served as an ideological no man's land upon which contesting Cold War participants from all sides-communist agents from the PRC, American CIA agents, the Thai consular general, and British colonial authorities-to collect and trade intelligence. Such `underground' activities of intelligence gathering were then further reflected and implemented in various state policies and decisions in each respective home country throughout the Cold War era.