Part 1

• The Production of Knowledge on Nanyang (Southeast Asia) in Modern China and the Dissemination of Marxist International Relations Thought (1900-1949) Siyang Zhao Jinan University

  This paper examines accounts of Nanyang/Southeast Asia in Chinese literature during the first half of the 20th century, analyzing modern Chinese scholars’ observations and analyses of the region’s political economy and international relations. It elaborates on the formation of “Nanyang Studies” and the influence of Marxist international relations thought on this process. First, the paper notes that as early as the beginning of the 20th century, Chinese scholars began to frame issues related to Nanyang/Southeast Asia within the disciplinary framework of modern social sciences, conducting academic research on the region from historical, political, economic, and cultural perspectives. Second, modern Chinese scholars perceived Southeast Asia as an integrated entity. Through comparisons of various colonies in the region, they developed a holistic view of Nanyang, including its shared history of colonial rule and oppression under Britain, France, the Netherlands, and later Japan, as well as its common characteristics as a source of raw materials and a market for goods under capitalism. Third, during the first half of the 20th century, national independence and liberation movements in Southeast Asia, along with domestic reform issues, became important windows for modern Chinese scholars to understand “modernity” and political modernization. In the process of knowledge production about Southeast Asia, these scholars internalized Lenin’s theories on imperialism, deeply recognizing the political and economic methods of imperialist oppression and exploitation of colonies. This understanding subsequently fostered a political ideology advocating solidarity among colonies and weaker nations worldwide to resist imperialism—a ideology that constitutes the prehistory of later concepts such as the “Third World” and the “Global South.”

• The Contested Formation of Overseas Chinese Nationalism in Siam: Kuomintang Transnational Networks, 1920s–1940s Yanpeng Li Loughborough University

  This paper examines how Kuomintang networks shaped the development of overseas Chinese nationalism in Siam between the 1920s and the 1940s. It argues that this was neither a simple extension of political activism from Republican China nor merely a local response to pressure from the Siamese state. Rather, it was a historical process that took shape through constant negotiation among party organizers, local Chinese institutions, and Siamese efforts to define and defend state authority.
  Studies of overseas Chinese nationalism in interwar Southeast Asia have often emphasized either political mobilization directed from China or the growth of communal sentiment within migrant society. Both approaches, however, leave open an important question: how did nationalist politics actually take root in everyday communal life? Drawing on Thai surveillance records, Kuomintang archives, Republican government documents, and Chinese-language newspapers published in Siam, this paper turns to schools, native-place associations, commercial organizations, newspapers, and fundraising campaigns as the social settings in which political loyalty was cultivated, circulated, and disputed.
  The paper shows that Kuomintang influence in Siam depended less on direct control than on its ability to work through existing networks of trust, patronage, commerce, and community leadership. Chinese schools helped shape cultural attachment and political discipline; associations and guilds connected party activism to local authority and business networks; newspapers made events in China meaningful and urgent to readers in Siam. Yet these same institutions also limited party ambitions, since they were shaped by local interests, internal rivalries, and divided loyalties. At the same time, Siamese officials increasingly viewed them as channels of outside political influence within the kingdom. Overseas Chinese nationalism in Siam was therefore not a unified political project, but a contested formation produced through the friction between transnational politics, local society, and state power.

• Margins of the Nation, Fragments of the Revolution: Memory and Identity among Kuomintang Exiles in Thailand Suthasinee Phonsakunphaisan Chiang Mai University

  This paper explores the lived experiences and identity formation of Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) exiles and their descendants in Northern Thailand, focusing on two key field sites: Mae Salong and Ban Mai Nong Bua. Following the KMT’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War, remnants of its forces retreated into Southeast Asia, establishing militarized settlements in the Thai borderlands during the Cold War. Situated on the periphery of both Chinese and Thai national narratives, these communities provide a unique lens to examine how revolutionary ideologies are remembered, adapted, or abandoned in exile. Drawing on oral histories and community memory, this study investigates how individuals and families negotiated belonging, loyalty, and legitimacy while navigating shifting political landscapes. It further considers how the legacy of anti-communist struggle shaped everyday life, gender roles, and the intergenerational transmission of identity. By situating these personal and collective experiences within the broader framework of Sino-Southeast Asian ideological exchanges, the paper highlights how Cold War dynamics unfolded not only on battlefields and in state centers but also in remote villages and intimate spaces. Ultimately, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of marginal actors and the affective dimensions of twentieth-century ideological conflict.

Part 2

• Aligned Ruptures: The KM–SDK–MPKP Split and the Sino-Soviet Fissure in Philippine Radical Politics, 1967–1972 Joseph Scalice Hong Kong Baptist University

  In 1967, every major radical organization in the Philippines fractured. The Kabataang Makabayan (KM, Nationalist Youth), the Samahang ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK, Federation of Democratic Youth), and the Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP, Free Unity of Filipino Youth) split along lines that mirrored—but were not reducible to—the global Sino-Soviet dispute. Within two years, a new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) had been founded, aligned with Beijing, while the rump PKP deepened its alliance with Moscow and with Ferdinand Marcos. This paper reconstructs the class character of these organizational ruptures, tracing how diverging social bases and strategic orientations within the Philippine left gave domestic political content to a global ideological fissure.
  Drawing on party documents, newspapers, and declassified records, the paper follows the shifting trajectory of SDK from 1967 to 1972, showing how its members navigated the competing gravitational pulls of the PKP and the CPP. It argues that these splits were not primarily doctrinal but expressed real conflicts over alliances with rival sections of the Philippine bourgeoisie—conflicts that the Sino-Soviet split gave political form and ideological vocabulary. The intimate scale of these ruptures—mentorships broken, friendships destroyed, organizational loyalties rewritten—offers a ground-level view of how a global crisis within Stalinism was lived and fought out in the peripheral politics of a decolonizing nation.
  This paper contributes to the panel’s interest in the fissures of twentieth-century ideological exchanges between Southeast Asia and China by demonstrating how the grand narratives of revolution and counter-revolution were refracted through the personal, organizational, and class dynamics of the Philippine left.

• The Children of Southeast Asian Communists and the Maoist World Revolution (1950s–1980s) Ning Zhan University of Oxford

  This ongoing paper investigates the lives of Southeast Asian communist children who spent their formative years in exile in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Cold War. From the 1950s to the 1980s, hundreds of families from Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, and other regions relocated to China through Maoist internationalist networks. Their children attended Chinese schools, lived in state-run compounds, and in some cases accompanied their parents back to Southeast Asia to join revolutionary struggles. Their life trajectories ranged from armed participation and death in combat to eventual resettlement in mainland China, Hong Kong, and other parts of Southeast Asia, with some later migrating to Europe. These experiences reveal how exile, kinship, and ideological formation were embedded in broader processes of Cold War internationalism.
  While existing scholarship on Cold War studies has largely focused on diplomacy, military aid, and elite political actors, the experiences of families and children remain underexplored. This paper addresses the dynamics of exile by asking why families chose displacement, why children were placed at the centre of Maoist internationalist visions, and how kinship and ideology shaped divergent life paths. Methodologically, the study combines oral history interviews, family archives, and Chinese and Southeast Asian archival sources. This approach not only reconstructs lived experiences of exile but also offers new perspectives on the intimate dimensions of revolutionary internationalism. By foregrounding the intersections of childhood, kinship, and politics, it establishes an innovative framework for rethinking the legacies of global Maoism and expands the methodological repertoire of Cold War studies.

• Writing Sino-Burmese ‘women of letters’ in post-war Myanmar Yi Li Aberystwyth University

  This paper examines the post-war Sino-Burmese community through their Chinese-language writings in newspaper columns and classical poems in the 1950s and 1960s. After the independence of Myanmar in 1948, a group of educated Sino-Burmese collectively sought to document and reflect upon their shared past and present during a period marked by the regional Cold War, national reconstruction, and social realignment in early post-war Myanmar.
  While the majority of these members were ‘men of letters’, often dedicating to grand narratives of nation, identity and modernity, the focus of this study is the works written by or written about Sino-Burmese women, about their life trajectory and their approach to a fast-changing environment that were not always align with their male counterparts. Here, the impact of revolution linking to the ancestral land of China was never far away: either through the explicit cultural reconnection to a unique tradition, or via the underlying ideological call by a new regime next door.
  Positing the investigation amid diaspora, gender, and literature studies, it hopes to understand post-war Sino-Burmese cultural dynamics and collective identities, both in and beyond Myanmar. With hindsight, this cultural endeavour coincided with the 1962 military coup and the anti-Chinese riot of June 1967, the latter of which abruptly yet effectively ended these communal efforts on the ground. Yet a gendered aspiration of expressing and self-searching remained long afterwards.

• Postcolonial Writing of Singapore’s Leftist Movement: Sexuality, Memory and Female Subjectivity Beiyu Zhang Jinan University

  This study re-examines Singapore’s leftist movement through the lens of a literary work, Unrest by Ying Pway An, exploring the intricate interplay among student activism, sexual desire, and female agency. While existing research on the leftist movement predominantly examines political history, state repression, and ideological conflicts, less attention has been given to how literary texts reconstruct emotional frameworks and gendered representations through bodily experiences, sexuality, and intimate relationships. I argue Unrest juxtaposes revolutionary fervor, sexual drives, and post-colonial critique, revealing that leftist politics does not constitute a singular grand narrative but a historical practice unfolding through private emotions such as desire, shame, betrayal, and sacrifice. The analysis demonstrates how Ying Pway An deconstructs revolutionary myths through eroticized plots in his novels. Sexual imagery serves both as a metaphor for revolutionary passion and a mechanism of irony toward postcolonial nationalist narratives. The study argues that Unrest de-mythified the memory work for leftist history, reintegrating emotionally charged experiences excluded from state historical accounts into Singapore’s post-colonial cultural memory landscape.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• China
• Cold War
• Cold War legacy
• Colonialism
• Communist parties
• Global South
• Identity formation
• KMT exiles
• Kuomintang
• Maoist world revolution
• Memory politics
• Modern China
• Modernity
• Myanmar
• Nanyang Studies
• Overseas Chinese nationalism
• Philippine left
• Political thought
• Siam
• Singapore leftist history
• Southeast Asian communists
• State sovereignty
• Student movements
• Thai borderlands
• Transnational networks
• children
• female
• female voices
• gendered bodily experience
• global maoism
• postcolonial writing
• writing