Cultural Imagining of the Cold War: An Introduction

Abstract

N o. 2 0 2 0 / 1 • china perspectives Editorial china perspectives T he year 1989 has been commonly accepted as the time when the Cold War officially ended, epitomised by the worldwide broadcasting of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9. Since then, political scientists and historians have provided the world with a wealth of knowledge of what went on during the Cold War: the intricate intertwining of proxy wars, espionage, diplomatic manoeuvring, and propaganda campaigns across the globe. The Cold War may have been declared a closed chapter of history, but much of the cultural play throughout those years and around the globe still requires scholarly exploration and examination. Existing scholarship on the Cold War privileges diplomatic, military, and political history due in large part to the type of primary sources on which scholars draw. This Cold War discourse has produced a historical perception of the second half of the twentieth century as a polarised world dominated by political and ideological bifurcation of the Capitalist Western bloc, led by the US-UK alliance, and the Communist Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, with the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) being one of the largest nation-members of this coalition. But the world in reality did not experience the Cold War in such a neatly divided fashion. As Heonik Kwon aptly points out in The Other Cold War, to the European and North American nations, the Cold War era meant "a 'long peace'," whereas "for many new post-colonial nations elsewhere, the onset of the Cold War meant entering an epoch of 'unbridled reality' characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of political violence" (Kwon 2010: 6). While Kwon's main argument centres on challenging the general consensus of the end of the Cold War as having a definitive historical marker, how the Cold War was experienced by ordinary people in their everyday lives in varying societies across the globe also deserves to be investigated. As our understanding of the Cold War expands and becomes more nuanced, so will our perception of the socialist China led by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Mao's entire reign (1949-1976) spanned the Cold War years. Mao came into power after he led the Communist Party, with the support of the Soviet Union, to win the civil war against the ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). Psychologically, the defeat of the US-backed Nationalist Party created an imminent sense of threat to the West. As Martin Walker makes plain, the crisis of morale over the loss of China to the Communists was one of the worst moments in the early years of the Cold War (Walker 1993: 67). The defeated Nationalist Party retreated to Taiwan, with the protection of Washington. The Chinese civil war escalated the tension between the US and the USSR, and effectively launched the Cold War in East Asia. During its early years, the new China leaned heavily on the Soviet Union for international strategic advice and domestic technological, industrial, and econo...