Research Seminar: The Bandung Moment: China’s Engagement and Taiwan’s Resistance 1952-1957

This talk examines China and Taiwan’s transitional relationships with the movement of Afro-Asian Internationalism throughout the early years of the 1950s. The Kuomintang’s (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) military calamity in the final phase of the Chinese Civil War severely distracted the Republic of China (ROC) from its ongoing engagement with postcolonial Asian solidarity. After the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) takeover of mainland China, the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought to interact with this rising movement of Afro-Asian Internationalism as the legitimate representative of the Chinese nation-state. In the aftermath of the Korean War, the PRC maneuvered to propagate the principles of “peaceful coexistence” and “searching for common ground” against the convention of the Bandung Conference. However, the acceptance and realization of these principles implicitly required other Third World countries to recognize/acknowledge the PRC as exclusively representing the “real/legitimate” China as an anti-imperial power. Thus, the PRC delegation exercised the principles of “peaceful coexistence” and “searching for common ground” both conditionally and selectively in the Bandung Conference to demonstrate the PRC’s legitimacy over the ROC on Taiwan as the successor to the pre-1949 anti-imperial Chinese state.

While relocating on Taiwan, the ROC co-founded the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL) with Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Philippines in 1954. To resist the PRC’s ideological campaign in Afro-Asia, the ROC delegation led the transformation of the existing APACL from a regional collective security network to a quasi-intergovernmental anti-Bandung platform that was symmetrically centered on national liberation and postcolonial state-building. Taiwan scrambled (even at the expense of confronting with South Korea) to admit Japan into the APACL to demonstrate the realignment with a former colonial enemy for East and Southeast Asian countries against “communist imperialism.” Under Taiwan’s leadership, the APACL had attracted an increasing number of Third World participants that belonged to the anti-communist and even non-communist groups, who opposed Bandung as the only version of Afro-Asian Internationalism.

The ROC had thus simultaneously strengthened its legitimacy of equally representing “China” as an anti-imperial Asian power.

Hao Chen is a visiting research fellow in the School of History at the University of Leeds. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and the International Security Studies at Yale University. Hao studies competitive Chinese internationalism within the pluralistic developments of postcolonial orders. He is currently revising his first book under Cornell University Press, titled Representing an Anti-Imperial China: The Chinese Rivalries for Legitimacy in Cold War Afro-Asia. This book examines how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan competed amid the movement of Afro-African Internationalism for legitimately representing “China” as a leading anti-imperial power in East Asia. Parts of this research have been published in Cold War History and International History Review. Hao received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Cambridge in 2022.