The last two decades have seen a surge in studies on the Cold War, transnational networks, and decentered approaches to global history. Diasporic Cold Warriors contributes to these fields through its account of how the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party, worked with the Philippine state to create an “intra-Asian anticommunist ecumene” (9) in the mid-twentieth century. Through his extensive use of collections and archival documents from Taiwan, the Philippines, and the United States, Chien-Wen Kung shows that the Philippine Chinese were outliers among overseas Chinese in terms of their visible identification with both the Republic of China (ROC) and anticommunism.
Neither, however, were historical givens. Chapters 1 and 2 show how the KMT competed with Chinese communists in the Philippines throughout the 1930s, the former gaining the advantage only after the Second World War. These chapters are particularly interesting for their account of the rise and fall of the...
