This panel humanizes transnational networks in twentieth-century Chinese history by examining the intimacies of power through which migrants, refugees, and sojourners navigated revolution, Cold War ideological conflict, and postwar realignment across the Americas. Moving beyond state-centered narratives of diplomacy and geopolitics, the four papers foreground how power was experienced, negotiated, and reworked through personal relationships, religious belief, economic survival, and affective exchange.

The panel traces Chinese global lives across the United States, Jamaica, Venezuela, and transpacific networks linking China and the Americas in the second half of the 20th century. Julia Haoran Ni’s paper examines Nien Cheng, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, whose gendered experience of political persecution illuminates how elite victims reimagined freedom, citizenship, and belonging through migration to the United States. Focusing on Chinese Catholic communities in Cold War Jamaica, Zichan Qiu examines how religious teachings, devotional practices, and Catholic media offered a moral framework through which overseas Chinese interpreted communism, anti-communism, and China’s political future. Jian Ren’s research historicizes the Chinese diaspora in Venezuela from the 1960s to 2000, demonstrating how migrant economic strategies and community life preceded and shaped the People’s Republic of China’s later diplomatic and commercial engagement. Using Digital Humanities methods, Xuening Kong analyzes the correspondence between Chinese aviation trainees and an American couple in San Diego, revealing how affective exchanges served as informal extensions of Nationalist diplomacy.

Together, these papers argue that Chinese transnational networks were not abstract geopolitical structures but lived, relational worlds. By centering personal archives, religious print culture, migrant economies, and private correspondence, the panel offers a bottom-up reinterpretation of Chinese global history that highlights how ordinary actors humanized global connections and shaped transnational belonging during the Cold War.