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During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s the small island of Quemoy in the Taiwan Strait was the front line in the military standoff between Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China and Mao Zedong's People's Republic. Local society and culture were dramatically transformed. Michael Szonyi uses oral history, official documents, and dissident writings to convey the history of the island during this period. In so doing, he sheds light on the social and cultural impact of the Cold War on those who lived through it, as well as on the relationship between China, the United States and the USSR at this critical moment. By analysing the effects of Quemoy's distinctive geopolitical situation on the economy, gender and the family, and citizenship and religion, the book provides a new perspective on the social history of Cold War relations, showing how geopolitics can affect individual lives and communities.
- Sales Rank: #1224565 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2008-08-11
- Released on: 2008-07-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .75" w x 5.98" l, 1.16 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 328 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"...a thought-provoking antidote to all the literature that focuses on the 'high politics' of the Cold War, while ignoring its impact on local communities. Informative, well-written, and entertaining, it approaches the Cold War through local eyes, thus making a significant contribution to our understanding of the impact of this conflict around the globe." - Beth A. Fischer, University of Toronto
"Michael Szonyi has found a whole new way to write the history of the Cold War, combining detailed local history with world politics. With immense skill, he links the stories of the islanders to a wider narrative of the conflict between east and west. This is one of the most powerful books yet written on Cold War culture in Asia." - Rana Mitter, Oxford University
"Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Szonyi's Cold War Island breaks new - and fertile -ground in the social history of the Cold War in East Asia, and at the same time delivers a sobering meditation on the consequences of militarization for all of us." - David Ownby, Université de Montréal
"Szonyi offers an extraordinary retelling of the history of the Cold War in Asia. This is the Cold War as few will recognize it - seen not from the intoxicating heights of state power, but from down in the villages of a few off-shore islands in the Taiwan Strait. The result is one of the most surprising and entertaining new books on 20th-century China." - Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia
"The reason Cold War Island is such a persuasive account is that the author is everywhere cautious but thorough. When he claims something, you believe him, and this is in essence not because of his academic credentials but because of his style. Michael Szonyi is neither a sensationalist nor a slave to modish nostrums in the history academy, and his well-researched book is as a result a very welcome addition to Taiwan's story." - Taipei Times
"The author moves his study away from the usual international approach in Cold War history and instead focuses on the relatively neglected area of local society.... Asian specialists, military experts, social history teachers, and graduate students will find the stories interesting and important as they attempt to gain a better understanding of Cold War history." - History: Reviews of New Books
"...a fine work of scholarship." - The Journal of Military History
"Michael Szonyi ... effectively uses the former to elucidate the latter in this first detailed account in English of Quemoy ...Szonyi's book reminds us why the island mattered during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a detailed description of the local impact of Cold War conflict."
The Journal of Asian Studies
About the Author
Michael Szonyi is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His publications include Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (2002).
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The "Low Politics" of Jinmen-- Engrossing book
By Daniel
Mao Zedong's decision to shell Jinmen (Quemoy) in 1954 and again in 1958 has inspired a wealth of literature analyzing the Taiwan Strait Crises through the prism of high politics, leadership elites, and great power relations. In Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Frontline, Michael Szonyi, a Ming-Qing social historian , breaks with this tradition by writing a history instead focused on the social and cultural aspects of the crises that made Jinmen the frontline of the Cold War in Asia.
Drawing upon oral history interviews and Jinmen archival documents, Szonyi narrates in generous detail how the local people of Jinmen -villagers, farmers, militiamen, and their families-- were affected by artillery wars between the Communists and Nationalists, and more widely, by the Cold War tensions between China, the United States, and Moscow. By doing so, Szonyi moves away from an international history approach focused on Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, and Nikita Khrushchev and adopts a social history approach more focused on the everyday men, women, and children of Jinmen. In brief, Cold War Island strives to capture the "low politics" of Jinmen during the "Cold War", which Szonyi defines as beginning during the Battle of Guningtou in 1949 and ending during the demilitarization of Jinmen in the early 1990s.
Szonyi explores "four inter-related phenomena" in his stimulating study on Cold War Jinmen: militarization, geopoliticization, modernization, and memory . Employing Cynthia Enloe's loose definition of `militarization' -that is, "the step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or militaristic criteria"-- Szonyi chronicles how everything in Jinmen in short time became mobilized or subordinated to meet the needs and interests of the ROC military.
The militarization of Jinmen began in the years following the Japanese surrender and intensified especially in the days leading up to the Battle of Guningtou. KMT soldiers, for example, extorted civilians from their belongings-- things like chopsticks and bowls were commonly stolen items. KMT soldiers also forcibly put men, women, and children to work, building up Jinmen's military defenses along the beaches with materials from torn down houses (such use of civilian labor for military support would later become routinized) . The militarization of Jinmen also meant the local people had to respect curfews and blackouts, the killing of rats and collection of their tails, and the rules of household registration. Farmers were forced to learn new farming techniques to sell food to soldiers, and women constantly had to live under the threat of being raped by KMT troops. In part because of this militarization and militia-build-up of Jinmen, the Nationalists were able to defeat the Communists in the Battle of Guningtou in 1949. The surprise victory would only catalyze the ROC leadership to further mobilize civilians to support the KMT military and their goals, in the hopes of one day retaking the mainland from the Communists.
Though Jinmen would continue to function as "a military base for the imminent counter-attack to recover the mainland" , in the early 1950s, the island also became an important political and propaganda symbol. In an effort to score a propaganda coup against the Communist political and economic system, the ROC government set up a quasi-democratic War Zone Administration (WZA) system, which held democratic village elections up to the mid-1950s and enabled local residents to lead their village in the spirit of national economic development . This civilian government existed almost exclusively to "demonstrate the contrast between the ROC and the...system of the mainland" . The Nationalist government furthermore "justified the WZA by explaining that it formed part of the plan for China's political development envisioned by Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People".
But, as Szonyi documents, the WZA had only nominal and minimal powers over local decisions, with the first and last words resting on KMT military officials. "National development", Szonyi writes, "[was] taking place under the shadow of a military threat that was local" . Over time, the relationship between the army and civilians became blurred. The militarization of Jinmen had reached such great heights that during its peak in the 1980s, every civilian became a potential combatant and every enclave became a potential combat zone . Residents who refused to cooperate with Jinmen's policies of "militarized modernity" were subjected to intimidation and repression, sometimes by militiamen who were forcibly drawn from their own local communities . Some residents were kidnapped, beaten, or even killed for allegedly harboring ties with the Communists.
Szonyi generally concludes that Jinmen's military importance, in the narrow sense, declined after the 1958 Crisis. After 1958, Jinmen would not again suffer from massive artillery attacks from the mainland, except for a few small skirmishes. The leaders in Taiwan, China, Russia, and even the United States believed Jinmen was of no strategic or geopolitical importance. The PRC was not willing to risk US involvement by launching an invasion of Jinmen and the US had neutralized the Taiwan Strait, meaning Jinmen could not and would not launch a counter-attack on the mainland . Indeed, between October 1958 and December 1979, military conflict on the frontline was relatively subdued, save every odd numbered day when the Communists would fire several hundred rounds of "propaganda shells" into Jinmen. These shells would "explode in mid-air, scattering propaganda leaflets" . The military danger in Jinmen had largely eroded by the end of 1958.
Jinmen's militarization, in a broad sense, however, manifested itself up to the early 1990s as an aggressive political struggle between the PRC and ROC. The policies on Jinmen Island -economic, political, military, and otherwise-- were aimed at "demonstrating the superiority of the sovereign government of Jinmen over its sworn enemy and alternative [the Communist mainland]" . The ROC government engaged Jinmen's citizens in mass propaganda and cultural campaigns, some not unlike those on the Chinese mainland. The most notable campaigns were the Never Forget Our Time in Ju movement, which sought to "heighten the patriotism of the citizenry and strengthen their anti-Communist consciousness", and the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, which sought to paint Chiang and the KMT as the defenders of the Chinese culture, and by extension, the Chinese nation (this movement occurred concomitantly with the Cultural Revolution in China).
Yet, even while the Communist threat of attack subsided in the strait and Jinmen lost its geopolitical import, Szonyi notes that the combat capabilities, discipline, and independence of the Jinmen militia began to grow appreciably . The militia shifted its role from simply providing support to the KMT army to carrying out its own operations against the Communist mainland. "Jinmen's villages were no longer civilian population centers to be protected", Szonyi writes, "but military installations in their own right" . Szonyi believes the militia by the late 1960s had become a sort of "national and international symbol of ROC anti-Communism" . Highly militarized propaganda campaigns -which spoke of the militiamen as heroic resisters of the Communist threat-- sought to further juxtapose the political differences between the PRC and ROC. These campaigns also shored up support for an increasingly unpopular and irrelevant KMT government, which had no interest in integrating Jinmen into the global capitalist markets.
The militia's importance had evolved to something largely political that the KMT could exploit for propaganda: by supporting an "indigenous" militia force that drew from Jinmen's own civilian population, the KMT could paint Jinmen as an island bravely resisting Communist aggression. This was not only of high propaganda value for the Nationalists (for domestic and international consumption), but it also prevented the island from being reduced to a military installation, wherein a Communist attack could more easily be legitimized as mere military action .
Michael Szonyi's book is primarily a study of the social and cultural influence of the Cold War on the local people and politics of Jinmen, and to a lesser degree, on the KMT soldiers deployed there. Szonyi's goal is not to divorce the international and the local, but to show that that local stories and histories are indeed embedded in international affairs . While Szonyi takes a micro view of Jinmen society, the author links his study to macro global frameworks, and shows how Jinmen can serve as a cautionary tale for societies around the world. Jinmen, according to Szonyi, demonstrates that militarization can occur for reasons that have "little to do with military threat or military ambition" . And oftentimes, emergency can be used to justify militarization, which can breed authoritarianism and repression. Szonyi concludes his book by writing:
"In genuine or claimed democracies emergency is always the justification for militarization, and the aporia of emergency, its self-representation as necessity, and its ambiguous position between law and absence of law, is what enables militarization to extend itself into so many domains of life and then to normalize its extension. "
Szonyi warns that militarization in different settings and times can produce similar policies and social outcomes, regardless of the rationale or ideologies underpinning that militarization. The book is not so much a book on Jinmen, and the author states this in the beginning, but more of a commentary on the dangers of militarization.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
cold war island
By gregory
The best work on Quemoy in English. An insightful look on KMT War Zone Administration system. A must read for civil military officers.
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