H-Diplo Roundtable XVIII, 12 on Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World [19 December 2016]

H-Diplo

@HDiplo

Roundtable Review
Volume XVIII, No. 12 (2016)
19 December 2016

Roundtable Editors:  Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable and Web Production Editor:  George Fujii
Introduction by Mark Philip Bradley

Hajimu Masuda.  Cold War Crucible:  The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World.  Cambridge:  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.  ISBN:  9780674598478 (hardcover, $39.95/£31.95/€36.00).

URL:  http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVIII-12

• Introduction by Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago.. 2
• Review by Gregg Brazinsky, George Washington University.. 4
• Review by Adam Cathcart, University of Leeds. 8
• Review by Sergey Radchenko, East China Normal University and Aberystwyth University.. 11
• Review by Julia C. Strauss, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London   14
• Author’s Response by Masuda Hajimu, National University of Singapore.. 18

© 2016 The Authors.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

It is not every day that a first book puts forward a field-defining argument to reframe our understanding of the global history of the mid-twentieth century.  Nor that notoriously tough H-Diplo reviewers are unanimous in calling the work “brilliant,” “provocative,” “innovative,” and “original,” or as one reviewer put it, “one of the most significant interpretations of the origins of the Cold War.”  Masuda Hajimu’s Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World is centrally concerned with the constructed nature of the Cold War, and the place of the Korean War in making it palpable and believable for states and people in Asia, Europe, and the United States.  At the center of his account are the messy and complex ways in which the Cold War came to function locally as an agent of social repression.  Masuda draws attention to the pattern of social purges that he argues appeared in many parts of the world almost simultaneously, among them not only McCarthyism in the United States but anti-labor drives in Great Britain, a Red Purge in Japan, the suppression of “un-Filipino” activities in the Philippines and a White Terror in Taiwan.  Central to this “global phenomena of purges” (200), he argues, was the deployment of anticommunist rhetoric to put into place more conservative visions of state and society around questions of race, labor, gender and the family.  So too, he suggests, did the Cold War come to China in the form of class-based social revolution.

Masuda’s efforts to simultaneously move between diplomatic and social history and to capture the entanglements of the local and the global across several continents are quite breathtaking, as is his work with primary sources in dozens of archives and libraries in China, Taiwan, Japan, Great Britain and the United States.  In some cases, especially his novel use of local Chinese materials, he is dealing with sources that have largely been untapped by previous scholars.  In other cases, he brings a new interpretative frame to bear on more familiar American and Japanese sources that recast our understanding of them.  There is, as one reviewer here suggests, a “dazzling range” to the sources he employs: archives, diaries, the popular press, cartoons and photographs.

The reviewers do offer important caveats.  Several raise the question of the comparability of Chinese and American experiences in reordering postwar society given the dramatic differences in regime type and state visions of a desired future.  Other reviewers are concerned about method.  Julia Strauss worries about confirmation bias.  In such a sweeping global history that emphasizes continuities across space and time, might evidence of difference between societies, especially around questions of toleration, go unnoticed?  Sergey Radchenko questions how autonomous grassroots social attitudes really are from state policies and practice.  Perhaps the most troubling critique is the marginal place of Korea itself in Masuda’s narrative.  Repression, Gregg Brazinsky rightly argues, was a central part of how the North and South Korean states consolidated their power well before 1950, suggesting that events on the Korean peninsula were critical to and preceded the global waves of purges Masuda so deftly captures in his book.  To ignore them, albeit unintentionally, reinscribes the too often marginal place of Korean actors in the historiography on the Cold War.  That said, the reviewers here all agree that Masuda “hits one right out of the park” with Cold War Crucible.  It should be required reading for all of us in the field, and deserves a central place on undergraduate and graduate syllabi on Cold War history and the international histories of the twentieth century.

Participants:

MASUDA Hajimu is a historian whose work concerns social and global history of the Cold War, U.S. foreign relations history, and modern history of East Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2012, and currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015), and has published a number of book chapters and articles which can be found in Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History, Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Journal of American-East Asian Relations, as well as the IIAS Newsletter and History News Network. He is currently working on two book projects: one, an anthology, tentatively titled, “Unlearning Cold War Narratives: Toward Alternative Understandings of the Cold War World,” and the other, a monograph, tentatively titled, “After the Occupation: The Rise of Social Conservatism in Postwar Japan.”

Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History at the University of Chicago.  He is most recently the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Gregg Brazinsky is Associate Professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell in 2002.  His first book, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy appeared from the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Eagle against the Dragon: Sino-American Competition in the Third World during the Cold War.

Adam Cathcart is Lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Leeds, where he teaches modules on the Korean War, Japanese war crimes trials, and Mao’s China. He has authored and co-authored a handful of research articles on Sino-North Korean relations (including in Cold War History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Korean Studies) and is at work on a manuscript analysing Chinese views of the US occupation of Japan. 

Sergey Radchenko is Zi Jiang Professor at East China Normal University, China, and reader in international politics at Aberystwyth University, Wales. His research interests include the Cold War and the history of Chinese and Soviet foreign relations. He is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2009) and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a history of Chinese foreign relations since 1949.

Julia C. Strauss is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She researches and writes widely on the evolution of the 20^th century Chinese state in both its PRC and ROC variants, and is currently completing a monograph that compares regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China/Taiwan in the early 1950s.

How and when did the Cold War begin?  It is a question that has been pondered and debated for several decades now—spawning a multitude of books and articles far too numerous to summarize here.  For the most part, however, historians have answered the question by assessing the relative importance of different individuals, events, policies, and documents.  They have focused on how elite statesmen in Washington and Moscow came to see each other as adversaries and adopted policies to contest each other.  Neglected in all of these debates over the wisdom and necessity of specific policies has been the role of ordinary people. After all, the Cold War was not like the two World Wars, which were fought over territory and began with the fire of weapons on the battlefield.  It was a war that existed first and foremost in the minds of people around the world.  How did businessmen, workers, farmers, parents, and children come to believe that they were living in a new era? And what was their role in making the Cold War?

In Cold War Crucible, Masuda Hajimu makes a broad ambitious effort to address these questions.  Masuda argues that the Korean War played a critical role in reshaping popular perceptions not only in the United States but also around the world.  Yet it is not simply the case that the war made people more fearful toward or hateful of their perceived enemies in distant parts of the globe.  Rather, different groups had significant agency in translating global tensions into lived realities.  In different parts of the world, everyday people came to embrace the logic of the Cold War for different reasons.  Most often, according to Masuda, these reasons involved efforts by local actors to use the emerging East-West confrontation as an excuse to control and suppress the social and political upheaval that was sweeping the globe in the post-war era.  The acceptance of the Cold War as what Masuda terms ‘a reality’ by ordinary people was in fact a very conservative reaction to the demands for greater equality and social change unleashed by World War II.

It is undeniable that Masuda’s approach is innovative, original, and path breaking.  Using broad, deft brushstrokes, Cold War Crucible repaints our understanding of the origins and meaning of the conflict.  Based on extensive archival research in the United States, Great Britain, the People’s Republic of China, and Japan it is a work with an impressive global sweep that ties together the experiences of a diverse array of protagonists, discovering the agency of individuals and groups that had for far too long been overlooked.  It skillfully interweaves social, political, and diplomatic history, highlighting the interrelatedness of international geopolitics with the transformation of everyday life.  Moreover, many of the insights into how the Cold War came about speak to contemporary international politics—most especially the war against terror—in intriguing ways.

In the first part of the book, Masuda problematizes what has become the standard view of the post-war world.  He argues that it is incorrect to see the period between 1945 and 1950 simply as a transitional period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.  It was a time when progressive forces emerged in the United States, Japan, China, and elsewhere to demand social change and greater equality.  Yet the demands of these progressive elements were fiercely resisted by conservatives with a vested interest in maintaining social order.  Masuda argues that anti-communism became a powerful force in the United States during this period not because Americans carefully observed the international situation and saw the Soviet Union as a threat to their security but rather as a “grassroots conservative backlash” against African Americans, women, and other groups whose demands for greater equality seemed to threaten the social order (24).

Masuda then explores the connections between policymaking and domestic society in China and the United States.  He argues that foreign policy making in both countries was more interconnected with underlying social currents than previous historians have let on.  Cold War Crucible takes a very sophisticated view of how popular attitudes and policymaking shaped each other.  Other scholars have argued that political elites manipulated popular opinion during the Korean War or used the war to mobilize the citizenry for domestic causes.^[1]  Masuda sees influence as having flowed both ways with political leaders carefully attuning themselves to popular social currents some of the time instead of simply controlling them.  For instance, Masuda demonstrates that there were still significant political divisions in Communist China by June 1950 and the CCP, which was eager to consolidate its control over the mainland, was constantly worried about them.  Thus China’s entry into the Korean War was both a response to popular pressures and an effort to consolidate the Chinese Revolution.

During the third section of the book Masuda looks at the global phenomenon of domestic purges that occurred during the Korean War.  His narrative ties together developments in Great Britain, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and the People’s Republic of China showing how the acceptance of the reality of the Cold War at the popular level had surprisingly similar effects in states with disparate ideologies and cultures.  In all of these places, the dawn of the Cold War swiftly became an excuse for those in power to carry out purges against their political opponents.  The intellectual sweep of this section is truly impressive. Today, the field of Asian studies remains heavily balkanized, with most works on Asian history confining themselves to one country.  Masuda’s efforts to swim against this tide and draw meaningful comparisons not only between Asian countries but also between Asia and the West is one of the most important contributions of the book.  By necessity, he at times obscures important differences between the different waves of repression that he identifies.  On the whole, however, he is persuasive in his contention that these instances represented part of a broader global phenomenon that deserves greater consideration.

Masuda’s use of the notion of a ‘reality’ unquestionably presents an intriguing new framework for understanding the origins of the Cold War.  And the author is generally persuasive in describing some (but not all) of the reasons why this reality emerged after 1950.  At the same time, broad ambitious works of this nature inevitably raise more questions and more issues, some of which make me wonder whether the dawn of the new Cold War reality was a more complicated and multi-faceted process than Masuda lets on.

First, in Masuda’s narrative, the emergence of the new Cold War ‘reality’ almost always became a tool of oppression used by elites to settle social conflicts in their favor and deny the rising demands of less privileged groups.  I am skeptical that the effects of this new reality were always as one-sided as Masuda makes them out to be.  In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s were a time of slow, halting progress in the civil rights movement despite the efforts of segregationists to suppress it.  Scholars such as Mary Dudziak, who have focused on the relationship between the Cold War and the civil rights movement, would certainly agree with Masuda that the new Cold War reality was used to limit the scope of acceptable dissent but they have also argued that it created new opportunities for those fighting for desegregation and equality.^[2]   Even while the Cold War may have enabled the government to monitor and restrict civil rights activists in the United States, it also enabled activists to point out the contradiction between America’s espousal of democracy abroad and denial of full equality to its citizens at home.  Masuda’s more uniform presentation of the Cold War as a suppressive force seems to understate the ironic and dualistic impact that the conflict had on struggles for equality in the United States.

Moreover, one wonders in reading Masuda’s work how and whether ‘realities’ of the type that he describes can ever be subverted or resisted.  James C. Scott and Michel de Certeau among others have shown how even when new social, cultural or intellectual orders become ascendant, ordinary people can still employ practices that deflect the power of these new orders in different ways.^[3]  Was the influence and power of the new Cold War reality described by Masuda ever subverted from within?  Of course, a complete answer to this question would lie somewhat outside the scope of Cold War Crucible and it is understandable that Masuda does not devote a great deal of attention to it.  Nevertheless, some discussion of how and when the new realities might have been resisted would have created a more balanced sense of the complexities of the historical phenomenon that Masuda describes.

Another problem is the somewhat marginal position occupied by Korea in Cold War Crucible.  Although the book is purportedly about “The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World,” Masuda’s focus is more on developments outside of Korea than it is on events in Korea itself.  The Korean experience of the war, for the most part, gets shunted aside and what little is said about Korea skirts over some important issues and ignores other interpretive possibilities.  The only effort to introduce some discussion of the Korean experience comes in the beginning of Chapter 2 where Masuda relates the memories of Kim Song-chil, a Korean historian who was killed during the Korean War.  In Masuda’s retelling, the outbreak of the Korean War did not immediately change things in Korea.  In fact, life continued as normal for many Koreans during the early months of the conflict.  One problem with this kind of analysis is that it takes a somewhat Pollyannaish view of the outbreak of the Korean War on the peninsula.  It is important to remember that by June 25, 1950, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had already lost their lives due to repressive measures carried out by the new North and South Korean states and border skirmishes that occurred regularly between their new armies.  If people on the peninsula did not take heed of the initial North Korean invasion of June 1950 it is unlikely that this was because they had not yet embraced a new Cold War reality (which Masuda seems to be suggesting) but rather that they saw the war’s opening salvo as the continuation of a new painful reality of national division and civil war that had begun five years earlier.  Masuda’s brief analysis of Korea does not completely contradict this reasoning but at the same time, it does not sufficiently engage it.

Moreover, a significant amount of repression occurred in both North and South Korea between 1948 and 1950 as these two new states consolidated their power.  The state-sanctioned slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people who questioned the authority of Syngman Rhee’s government in the south has been particularly well documented.  In South Korea too, anti-communism and the Cold War seemed to implicate themselves into ongoing social conflicts well before 1950.^[4]  I wonder how this can be squared with Masuda’s point that it was the outbreak of the Korean War that introduced the ‘reality’ of the Cold War to people across the globe.  At a minimum, juxtaposing events in Korea with Masuda’s analysis seems to suggest that Korea and Koreans should have occupied a more central place in Cold War Crucible.  By focusing on the United States, Taiwan, the PRC, Britain, and the Philippines, Masuda makes it look like the global wave of repression that gave birth to the reality of the Cold War was a phenomenon that suddenly manifested itself in 1950 outside of the Korean peninsula.  But one could also make a case that the global phenomenon of repression that Masuda describes began between 1948 and 1950 on the Korean peninsula and then spread outward as the rest of the world got drawn into the Korean conflict.  It is already the case that far too much of the literature on the Korean War—both scholarly and popular—neglects or ignores the Korean perspective and does not use Korean materials.  Although Masuda’s work is a world apart from much of this literature in terms of perspective and sophistication, it still, for the most part, reflects an unfortunate tendency in the historiography of the war.

Although Cold War Crucible leaves some questions unanswered and does not fully pursue all of the interpretive possibilities raised by its own innovative approach, it will nevertheless stand as one of the most significant interpretations of the origins of the Cold War and become required reading for new graduate students in the field.  By looking at this issue from a social as well as geopolitical perspective, Masuda breaks new ground and forces historians to reconsider a phenomenon that they had long thought they understood.

Masuda Hajimu has managed to create a work of great simultaneity which almost effortlessly bridges many perplexing divides and contributes to multiple fields of study. Based upon an impressive multi-lingual array of archival documents, as a reconceptualization of the Cold War in Asia, the book succeeds brilliantly. The book succeeds in part because it is not a comprehensive global history on the origins of the Korean War, but instead focuses on its ripples, the impact and expression of the war in multiple societies, particularly China and Japan, as well as the U.S. The Korean War is therefore more of a spark in this book rather than the main event, which is perhaps as it ought to be. After all, the internecine fighting along the 38^th parallel that culminated in June 1950 and quickly mushroomed into a locally fought international war has roots that others continue to unearth, and the debate over the war’s origins and evolution has, in a way, itself reached a stalemate.

Masuda does not so much deemphasize the notion of a divide between East and West in the Cold War as obliterate it. The author’s hop-scotching from place to place, particularly in Part III, conditions the reader to move beyond the national frame, almost as if the book were a sort of virtual-reality machine. While Masuda fails to follow up on all of these threads -- most of the subalterns we meet are met just once – the doors are opened for the reader, and the juxtapositions presented are sometimes startling. In this text, ‘observation data’ from London are aligned congruently with Chinese press warnings about a basic awareness of the possibility of subversion.

Why is it, then, that in looking back, we have had such a difficult time perceiving the inner connections which Masuda brings to the fore? Certainly much of the problem has to do with a state-centered approach to writing the history of the Korean War. This is in part a function of records themselves – it is a great deal to ask of a single person to delve into both Japanese and Chinese documents archives, let alone to plunge into the poorly-organized but protean documents captured around North Korea during the war by U.S. forces in their rush to the Yalu. Masuda’s archival work is admirable; he has put his travels to good use. Some of the sources aid in reminding us how bound together various events were in historical time, particularly in serial artifacts as such as The Economist magazine from 1950, a quote from which begins Masuda’s book in earnest. To the author’s credit, he brings readers back into contact with several older works of historical writing such as the reformist Kuomintang periodical Guancha^[5] and Harold Isaacs’s Scratches on Our Mind: Images of China and India^[6]

The prevalence of Japan in a book centered on the Korean War is to be welcomed heartily. The author’s approach is different from that of Wada Haruki, as well as Michael Schaller.^[7] Like the two senior scholars, Masuda aids in untangling the meaning of the “reverse course” and the impact of the U.S. occupation of Japan. But the focus on public opinion and individual experience here goes well beyond. The assertions of Japanese agency in the initiation and shaping of the reverse course (34) are particularly effective, showing how some Japanese leaned hard against the effects of the purges. The inveterate anti-communist Charles Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief who had been so wounded by the British and U.S. press during the Korean War, seems never to have been able to escape a certain penchant for the obscure and the paranoid (28), a fact nicely depicted by the author.

Early in the text, Masuda depicts the rightward swing in Japan by the U.S. authorities, but does so via focusing on China, where in summer 1948 the “Movement to Oppose American Revival of Japan” (or Fanmei Furi Yundong) was raging in cities around the country. The basic fact of Chinese interest – no, passionate interest – in postwar Japan cannot be overstated; Masuda is absolutely right to merge these threads. But amid this dynamic sense of interconnection, some questions are left unanswered: Why did these protests not move the Japanese public? Was this due to the fact that the Americans were censoring such news in Tokyo? Our assumption might be that officials in SCAP saw Chinese opposition as merely an annoyance, or as stimulated cynically by left-wing groups. Chinese opposition to Japan’s postwar direction was not simply feared by officials working for SCAP, it was at times manipulated by the Americans as well. Charles Kades, the powerful Deputy Chief of SCAP’s Government Section, gave a long dressing-down to five Japanese leaders working on the difficult issue of domestic purges in 1947. Kades warned them that failure to carry out their purges inadequately would not simply disappoint MacArthur, it would create more problems internationally for the U.S., which would then be effectively hurt by having allowed the Japanese too much leeway. After a long recitation of one particularly fierce Chinese editorial, Kades made a statement that might also seen as an epigraph for Masuda’s work on the global reverberations of the reverse course: “Everything that Japan does today and everything she fails to do is observed by the world. Whether you like it or not you just can’t help it. Everything has an international aspect in the domestic situation in Japan today.”^[8]

If the Americans were endeavouring to control and channel Japanese public opinion both before and during the Korean War, they were certainly not alone- Masuda points this out clearly in multiple instances. However, there are times in the text when the equivalencies extended sometimes overreach. In part, this could be a function of the archives, where local and national governments clearly wish to recollect their past responsiveness to public critique. Letters to the Renmin Ribao newspaper which end up in archives like the PRC Foreign Ministry Archive seem to be there for rather obvious reasons. East German archives are full of public statements of support for the war effort in Korea and denunciations of the American war mongers. In British archives, too, such documents can be found – but these were handed up the chain and in some cases make it to Parliamentary question time, and inquiries within the bureaucracies concerned. The odd thing about Korean War papers in East German archives is the kind of wall that there seems to be between ostensibly ‘mass movements’ and the discussions at the very top; whereas complaints about the British participation in the Korean War seemed to make it up to at least a secondary level of government, if not the Prime Minister himself.

Masuda’s analysis of Chinese propaganda on the homefront during the Korean War is an excellent reflection on the materials as they were seen at the time. Masuda reflects on Chairman Mao’s desire to use the Korean War ultimately as a means of bucking up public pride and moving beyond the national humiliation narrative, while simultaneously illuminating the great fears of war circulating among the public, particularly as regards air raids (pp. 63-66). Publications like the Dongbei Huabao (Northeast Pictorial) and daily papers in port cities like Dalian were educating the masses about how to identify various types of American war planes by their outlines. Gao Gang and other Chinese leaders at the time were by no means incorrect in their assumption that a broader air campaign against Northeastern cities was being discussed in Tokyo. In October 1950, Vice Air Marshall “Boy” Bouchier, the UK’s top air advisor to MacArthur, ruminated openly in his memos to London about targeting and destroying a single Chinese city like Shenyang to send the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a message about what might be in store for the new People’s Republic should they chose to intervene openly in the fighting in Korea.^[9] Masuda’s points about war fears in China are deeply anchored and point toward a new generation of studies where archives are used to fully explore the violent enmeshment of such movements as the Three-Anti, Five -Anti with PRC Korean War mobilization.

Mao, the man who had spent so much time writing about protracted war, might have been depressed about the population’s lack of education and vim for the possibility of ‘People’s War.’ Masuda largely chooses not to discuss CCP’s rather consequential methods of achieving social cohesion, a mixture of terror and incentives, but at least he points the way toward which such an examination could go, mixing propaganda with local trial data, for instance, or seeing how patriotic donations for the war were merged into broader trends of expropriation.

One of the biggest hits of U.S. children’s television in the 1990s-2000s was a series called Barney and Friends, a show about a purple, vaguely carnivorous dinosaur, Barney, who was brought to life through the power of children’s imagination. Every episode of this now safely retired show began with the performance of the constructivist manifesto, also known as the Barney Theme Song, which featured these troubling words: “Barney can be your friend too, If you just make-believe him!”

I was reminded of this show when reading Masuda Hajimu’s excellent book. Masuda argues that the Cold War did not become reality until it was imagined as such by the postwar societies across the world. It was like children imagining Barney, except of course that the adults’ “Cold War fantasy” (as Masuda calls it) had none of the hugs and kisses of the Barney show. It was brutal. It was oppressive. And, tantalizingly, it was similar across the board: from the United States, to Great Britain, to Japan, to Korea, to China, Taiwan and Philippines, the case studies in Masuda’s groundbreaking book.

Masuda’s argument is that the Cold War was just one of many possible social discourses in the immediate postwar years. It was the Korean War that turned it into the predominant one. Perhaps more important than ‘when’ was ‘how:’ the Cold War reality was, according to Masuda, just an outward projection of social repression of nonconformity. To use his own words, the Cold War was “an imagined reality, a gigantic social mechanism that operated to tranquilize chaotic postwar situations, worldwide, through putting an end to a multitude of social conflicts and culture wars at home” (284).

I was struck by the depth of Masuda’s insights. Constructivist approaches to history are of course nothing new, and are in fact becoming increasingly prominent in the writing of Cold War history. What I liked about Masuda’s approach is his comparison and juxtaposition of postwar discourses across a range of countries, which does help to bring out the general picture, one of conservative backlash against certain social phenomena like labor activism and the women’s rights movement.

He looks in turn at manifestations of McCarthyism in the United States, the Red Purge in Japan, anti-Communism in Britain, the White Terror in Taiwan and the crackdown on ‘un-Filipino activities’ in the Philippines to argue that rather than seeing the targets of repressions as simply innocent victims of anti-Communist paranoia (as historians often do), it may be more useful to see them as actually being ‘at fault,’ not as ‘Communists’ of course (as few were) but as local non-conformists who were perceived as dangerous by the socially conservative majority.

One would think that Mainland China would be an outlier to this socially conservative trend but Masuda navigates the issue by arguing that repression in China (in the context of the Zhenfan or ‘Suppression of the Counterrevolutionaries’ movement) was also in instance of forcibly bringing ‘order’ to a society riven by tensions and social conflicts. In effect, Masuda argues that the killing of the hundreds of thousands of ostensible nonconformists in this brutal movement brought about some sort of unification of the Chinese society, not unlike what was also observable in the West around the same time. Crucially, he argues that this was a process that was in many instances driven from below, not mandated from above.

In the course of his discussion of locally-constructed realities, Masuda comes face to face with a difficult chicken-or-egg type of question. It concerns the role of state propaganda in shaping public attitudes. When children make-believe Barney the purple dinosaur, they do not just come up with a random image. Instead, their reference point is a toy dinosaur that is then, by the power of their imagination, transformed into the walking and giggling version of its previous self.

I find it hard to believe that in the absence of a pre-supplied toy Cold War Barney in the form of state propaganda or opinion-forming national media, Lorraine Henderson, a high school student from Connecticut, would have written to President Harry S. Truman in the summer of 1950 that “[when] I heard a plane over head… a streak of fear went through me, afraid any minute we all would be killed… Why don’t we take a chance and sneak up on them…?” (85). Would Yang Tiwei, a Beijing student, still write to the Party, asking to be dispatched to Korea in order to “participate in the battle against American imperialism” (180)?

Perhaps not. Yang Tiwei in fact explains where he got the idea: “I have read articles in Renmin Ribao… and I was very much impressed” (179). Lorraine Henderson would have not advocated the idea of sneaking up on the Russians unless she first heard about the Russian threat from her parents or her teachers who in their turn would have learned about it by reading, perhaps, The New York Times. Masuda understands the importance of propaganda but argues all the same that social and historical contexts were “equally or, arguably, far more important” in conditioning grass root attitudes (185).

I take an exception to Masuda’s argument at this point. It is not that social or historical contexts were unimportant – of course, they were essential. But in and of themselves they don’t actually explain anything. Let us take the Chinese case. Masuda argues that while the Party “exerted enormous influence” through propaganda and censorship on the public perceptions of the West, “the CCP did not necessarily create such a trend” (180, Masuda’s italics). These preconceptions were instead “rooted in historical experiences and memories of Western and Japanese colonialism” (176).

Anti-colonial sentiments were undoubtedly wide-spread in China at the end of World War II, as elsewhere across Asia. But the transfer of these sentiments from their immediate focus – Japan – onto ‘American imperialism’ only became possible due to sustained state propaganda to this effect. In the absence of such propaganda, public anti-foreign sentiments could well be directed against Russia (was it also not a colonial exploiter of China?). In fact, this was exactly what happened in Taiwan, where GMD propaganda channeled public sentiments towards hatred and fear of the Soviet Union, which supposedly enslaved China in 1949. Indeed, this was what happened in Mainland China, only later, in the late 1960s, when the Soviet Union became a target for Red Guard attacks. It clearly required state involvement to shape vague public attitudes into very concrete hatred of, first, ‘American imperialism’ and, later, ‘Soviet social imperialism.’

This is not to say that I disagree with the overall direction of Masuda’s argument. I think he is on target in saying that policy makers everywhere (including even Communist China) were highly attuned to public sentiments and often catered to them. I would nevertheless argue that policy makers played a much greater role in shaping the public discourse than Masuda suggests, and that this was especially true in countries with massive state propaganda machines, like the one in the People’s Republic of China.

Another important question broached by Masuda is how and why the imagined ‘reality’ of the Cold War became - apologies for the oxymoron - the real ‘reality’ of the Cold War. Masuda’s argument is that for the Cold War to have become real, it first had to be imagined and later “solidified” as such (2), and it was here that the Korean War played an important, crucial role. I would not necessarily disagree with Masuda on the importance of the Korean War, although I would see the slide towards the Cold War as more of a process, going back to the Soviet take-over in Eastern Europe, the Iran crisis, Soviet espionage scandal in the United States, the Berlin airlift, the Chinese revolution and, of course, the Soviet detonation of the Atomic Bomb in August 1949. Each of these events tended to reinforce certain notions about the Soviet intentions or about the American intentions, so that when the Korean War actually broke out, perhaps the multiplicity of alternative discourses across the world was not as great as Masuda suggests.

I am more interested in the theoretical implications of Masuda’s argument. If we view all reality as socially constructed (as a bona fide constructivist would have to), then would it not be logical to argue that the Cold War was ‘imagined’ all the way, and that was all it was until the very end – an imaginary discourse. Masuda does not take the argument to its logical end, and I can see why: we all know that imaginary Cold War could well have ended with very un-imaginary devastation: the tanks were real, the bombs were real, and the deaths were real, as the millions of Koreans who were killed, maimed or displaced in the Korean War, would testify before the most exalted of social scientists.

Finally, let me touch briefly on the question of the endgame. Every episode of Barney and Friends ended on a happy note, and, with the song “I love you, you love me, we are a happy family,” Barney would be unimagined and returned to his original state, a purple toy dinosaur. At the risk of going a bit beyond Masuda’s book (which shows how the Cold War was ‘imagined’), I wonder how it was ‘unimagined’ in the end and why some places ended up to be much more of a happy family than others. I wonder why of all places, the Cold War was never ‘unimagined’ in Korea. This question concerns continuity and change, the scourge of realist historians. Social constructivism would arguably offer a more flexible framework for understanding how certain phenomena can come about or disappear. Given Masuda’s focus on grass-root social attitudes, it would be interesting to speculate whether and how the change in these attitudes may have contributed to the end of the Cold War.

Masuda Hajimu has written a refreshing, provocative and extremely important book that has contributed not only to our understanding of the Korean War, not even just the Cold War, but the past as a subject of scholarly enquiry. By pushing beyond conventional boundaries, and integrating grass root narratives from many different countries, Masuda has made a big splash in crowded waters, and I congratulate him on this impressive feat.

This is a wonderful book that will certainly be widely quoted and incorporated into a large set of literatures on the Cold War. It manages to do all the things that truly successful academic works must: be enough of its time to be understood and appreciated, be enough ahead of scholarly trends to be far reaching and edgy, be well written and accessible, be based on solid research that will stand the test of time, and perhaps most importantly be on a topic that is large enough and relevant enough that different sub-audiences of scholars will care to read it. In all these respects, Masuda Hajimu hits one right out of the park.

Cold War Crucible is that rare thing: a historical monograph that manages to link the macro big questions with the micro narrative in a way that is engaging and convincing. While the Korean War frames the entire work and is in the title, the book is only in the most general of ways about the Korean War. Rather than delving into the conflict in Korea and its role in the congealing of much larger the Cold War, it takes as its subject how the emerging Cold War was imagined and acted on by a range of actors in the different societies that congealed the Cold War and made it real, often (even typically) through a variety of petty local concerns and grievances. The range of places that Masuda Hajimu includes in his analysis is nothing short of astonishing: he engages in lengthy investigations of micro history in the United States, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China, all of which feature prominently in two or more of his chapters. He also gives somewhat less attention to three other cases: the Republic of China on Taiwan, the Philippines, and Great Britain, each of which merits the better part of one chapter. Indeed it is difficult to imagine any other scholar with either the linguistic capacity or the patience to collect relevant materials so widely.  Materials in Japanese, English, and Chinese are all frequently cited. The sheer range of sources on three continents - which include archives, diaries, the popular press, cartoons, photographs, contemporary reports, oral histories and of course secondary literature - is dazzling, and is more than enough to satisfy even the snippiest of archive rats, like myself. Archival depth, linguistic breadth, and a hook that ties together the macro and micro – this is the complete package.

No roundtable discussion can possibly do justice to such a wide ranging work with such a wealth of sources and interesting sub-arguments, but here is my take on the most important of the points that Masuda makes in different ways throughout the manuscript: 1) the Cold War cannot be understood outside the profound social and economic ruptures engendered by World War II, and the widespread fear that World War III was likely to be just around the corner, 2) that domestically within particular societies, the war in Korea, and the deepening of the Cold war provided the framework within which domestic social warfare was waged, 3) that individuals were willing, and often even eager participants in the processes for the restoration of social order launched by political elites, 4) that under these circumstances, quietism, or what Masuda calls “participation by absence” (269), in the context of Taiwan becomes a form of collusive participation and finally that 5) political leaders in regimes as different as the revolutionary People’s Republic of China and the conservative United States resorted to fear mongering and solicitation of popular input in order to (re)solidify social order, purge the impure “Other”  and purify society. Similar social struggles went on in Japan (with the Reverse Course of the Occupation), the Philippines (in putting down the Huk), and in Taiwan (with the White Terror under Chiang Kai-shek).

Masuda brings a wealth of information to bear on these claims, and what is presented reads convincingly and entertainingly. There can be little doubt that in a very wide cross section of societies in the early 1950s, the dominant political trend was towards the (re)imposition of the kinds of social and economic hierarchies that political elites wished to see institutionalized, and that this was in most cases framed as the imposition of essential national order. It is equally clear that in actual lived experience, this played out in through the filter of local status hierarchies, individual resentments and/or ambitions, after all, in political systems as different as the People’s Republic of China (revolutionary), the Republic of China/Taiwan (conservative military authoritarian), and the United States (increasingly conservative democracy), thousands of individuals, were willing and eager to inform upon or denounce their neighbors, co-workers, and even family members. It is precisely this commonality of pattern across so many different types of political system, evoked through such wonderful vignettes, that makes this book so compellingly readable.

For all these important strengths, it is possible that significant parts of the argument might not hold up quite as well as they seem to at first reading. My qualifications of an otherwise extraordinary piece of work are three. First, at what level of analysis is the real comparison being made? The book’s rapid shifts in register from the macro to the micro make it quite difficult to compare processes of internal purification beyond stating that they exist. This is certainly true, but it is equally the case that the impetus to internal purification plays out in different ways at different scales. The individual denunciation is qualitatively different from the collective shunning of the suspect neighbor, and both analytically distinct from a public mass movement that results in the public denunciation and execution of the impure ‘Other.’  Second, what about confirmation bias? This is a book that makes a bold argument across many different societies with a compelling range of different kinds of primary sources to support that argument. But no researcher, no matter how gifted, hard-working, and multi-lingual, is going to avoid colliding with the constraints of time, funding, and ability to keep so many balls in the air. Given how far the author has ranged in his subject matter and his collecting of source materials, is it not at least possible that the very process of research has resulted in the selection of sources that support an idea or argument already half, or more than half formed at the time of selection? In short, the sources to back up the argument made are all there, but what about what isn’t there? As just one small counter example that might give one pause consider Bill Hinton, who was nothing if not exactly the sort of subversive Fifth Column that the United States forces of conservative social order needed to expel or at least terrify and marginalize. After running into no end of official harassment and trouble after his return from China in the early 1950s, Hinton gave talks across the country to those he remembered as not left wingers but people who wanted to know about China. And Hinton recounted a wonderful anecdote for the Monthly Review copied and pasted here in full:

“I just want to tell you one more story. One of the more memorable talks was in a little town called Gowanda, New York. Gowanda is a little town south of Buffalo, very Republican upstate New York community. And there was a Methodist group of quite left-wing, radical ministers called the Methodist Federation for Social Action. This young minister invited me to talk to a student group on Sunday night. I went there and gave a talk on land reform. The parents and then the students came, and the young people. Everything went very well and they thanked me and they went home. Some of the parents went to the Rotary Club the next day and said there’s a wonderful speaker in town, you should invite him for Thursday night. Some other parents went to the FBI and said, ‘There’s a dangerous Red in town, you should go and investigate.’ And they investigated the whole thing, and they went to the Rotary Club and said, ‘You can’t invite this Hinton. He’s a dangerous Red.’ They said, ‘Who are you to tell us we can’t invite Mr. Hinton? Get lost.’ So I came back on Thursday night and I talked to the Rotary Club. That meeting lasted until three in the morning.” (http://monthlyreview.org/2003/10/01/background-notes-to-fanshen/, accessed 29 June 2015).

There is of course enough information in this Hinton anecdote to argue for the Cold War as the reification of internal social order, and particular community and ideological orthodoxies. But there is as well the evidence to support a very different notion of open expression, liberalism, and open defiance in the face of attempted shut down of debate. There were clearly others (we know only about the high profile ones like Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart) who attempted to openly resist and then caved in or simply went quiet when put under political, social, and economic pressure. It is at least possible that there are any number of other stories of locals who shielded or at least grudgingly tolerated the neighbors and relatives who held unpopular views in the United States – but the evidence to make this argument either pro or con is not there. Because the evidence is not there we have no idea how to quantify or assess the degree to which this kind of shielding or grudging toleration was practiced even in the United States, to speak nothing of what went on in political systems that had fewer legal protections and less of a tradition of free speech. The liberals, the union activists, the female workers, and the students who had supported profoundly different norms did not disappear because the conservatives ‘won’ in the Cold-War inflected ‘social warfare’ of the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

Finally, I would question whether it is particularly fruitful to suggest that the People’s Republic of China and the United States in the early 1950s had much of significance in common. To be sure, both were large continental states with substantial reservoirs of nativism and mistrust of cosmopolitan outsider elites, political elites that instrumentally stirred ‘the people’ to paranoid action over fears about internal security in the specific context of the war in Korea. And it is certainly the case that those deemed internally ‘Other’ suffered directly through economic deprivation, social isolation, and worse.  But is this not what all regimes do in order to stiffen patriotic resolve in the early stages of wartime?  There is certainly an abundance of examples in even the ‘liberal’ societies of the United States and Great Britain in both the First and Second World Wars to so suggest, and the examples could be multiplied indefinitely across other regime types. It seems to me that regime type matters quite dramatically for the kind of society that is being (re)ordered in the early years of the Cold War. As Masuda demonstrates so cogently, in most of the places he considers, this meant conservative social order and backlash against anything progressive, from gender relations to labor practices, to union representation, to what students were permitted to get up to. This was true in Japan, Taiwan under the Guomindang, Britain, the Philippines, South Korea, and most importantly in the United States itself. But it was demonstrably not the intention of the leaders of the revolutionary People’s Republic of China to establish social order. On the contrary it was their explicit intention to divide society into fixed and immutable categories based on presumptive class status, and to mobilize those categories of people in waves of successive campaigns precisely to carry out a transformative and revolutionary project. Nothing could be more illustrative of the differences between the conservative social order of the United States (or, for that matter Britain, Japan, or Taiwan) and the explicitly revolutionary one of the People’s Republic of China than their respective approaches to gender. At exactly the same time that jobs were being taken away from women, who were being re-traditionalized and lured back into the home with the promise of ever increasing consumer durables in the United States, women were being mobilized to organize into Women’s Federation branches, assigned work whenever possible, and initially backed up with what had the potential to be truly revolutionary in gender terms, with the promulgation of the New Marriage Law of May 1950. Only slightly later developments in the People’s Republic of China gave further indication of the regime’s revolutionary intentions: the waves of campaigns against all competitors (real and imagined), as well as the escalating campaigns for internal purity. Whatever the immediate excesses, there is a fundamental difference between a state that reins in political purges, as the United States did with the downfall of McCarthy, and one that ratchets them up on a regular basis, as did the People’s Republic of China.           

These questions aside, Cold War Crucible will be as runaway a success as any scholarly academic monograph can reasonably be. It does all the things that academic historians are currently predisposed to value. World history? Check. A multiplicity of sources? Check. Integration of two very different branches of history? Check. Engaging anecdotes juxtaposed against meaningful macro argument? Check. The restoration of agency to individuals? Check. That it does so in a manner that is both engaging and compelling is all to the author’s credit – perhaps no other scholar would have even attempted such a wide ranging monograph backed up with such a range of primary sources. The attention that the book will undoubtedly receive is entirely merited, and its arguments will set the standard for quite some time to come.