Solving the Chinese Problem: US Cold War Policy, Southeast Asia's Chinese Diaspora, and the Indigenous Nationalism across the Region

This paper demonstrates that American Cold War aims melded quite easily with Southeast Asian nationalism beyond Indochina due to shared U.S., European and indigenous prejudices against the region’s Chinese diaspora. Prior to World War II, colonial and indigenous authorities frequently exploited local resentment of the Chinese diaspora (and their apparent economic success), winning popular approval for their anti-Chinese campaigns to enable their expanding political, economic and social controls of the country. After 1945, many Southeast Asian nationalists tacked largely to the same path, but now stoking local anxieties that Chinese communities across the region pledged loyalty to the supposedly expansionist Chinese communists. During the early Cold War, Southeast Asian nationalism thus overlapped with exaggerated U.S. fears of precisely such a transnational Chinese menace in Southeast Asia. This paper examines how, even in majority Chinese Singapore, anticommunist nationalists of ethnic Chinese descent mobilized anti-Chinese sentiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, securing political dominance and aligning the former British colony with the United States. It places this case study within the larger regional context of parallel anti-Chinese maneuvers that undergirded the authoritarian, pro-U.S. regimes of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. By highlighting the region-wide anti-Chinese logic of Southeast Asian nationalism, this paper offers new explanations for American predominance in the Asia Pacific despite U.S. failures in Vietnam.