This panel weaves together four diverse presentations to reveal how successive conflicts permeated the fabric of everyday life. Xinyue Zhang rethinks China’s experience of World War II by showing how wartime secrecy surrounding meteorological knowledge produced new forms of environmental vulnerability, especially in coastal communities prone to typhoons. Her paper contends that WWII marked a pivotal moment in the militarization of the environment in China and beyond, a process that continued into the Cold War. David Cheng Chang recovers the life trajectories of three Chinese interpreters who served in the China-Burma-India theater and later returned to the PRC from early Cold War America, demonstrating how individual decisions and transpacific mobility cut across geopolitical boundaries and providing a human-centered lens to understand the complex history of US-China relations in the early Cold War. Junyi Han explores how China's engagement in the Vietnam War intensified local violence in Yunnan's borderlands during the Cultural Revolution. The story of the Yunnan frontier represented a localized manifestation of Cold War dynamics, where global geopolitical tensions had imposed affective, physical, and structural violence on China’s borderlands. Yoshifumi Sato’s work examines the extraordinary life of Matsushita Kazutoshi, the only Japanese soldier captured as a POW while serving in the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army during the Korean War. Connecting life stories across imperial Japan, Nationalist and Communist China, and the Korean battlefield, this paper reveals the entangled, intimate histories of war that state narratives have failed to recognize.

Together, the papers demonstrate that grassroots experiences, knowledge circuits, and transnational encounters constituted the global entanglement of war across Asia. By bringing transnational, environmental, and borderland histories into conversation, this panel models new approaches for understanding how global conflicts were lived, negotiated, and contested from the bottom up. Situating modern China within the global history of war, this panel invites new theorization of war not as a temporary disturbance but as a generative condition actively produced and experienced through everyday mobilities, knowledge regimes, and local forms of violence across twentieth-century Asia.