Abstract
Many have seen US–PRC tensions as the inauguration of a so-called “New Cold War,” most often represented in a binary framework of ideological conflict between “Democracy versus Communism.” This article examines Hong Kong as a non-sovereign site of inter-imperial facilitation between the US and PRC, a function that remains structurally hidden in order to maintain the legitimacy and viability of US–PRC global capitalist competition–collaboration. The deep capitalist integration between the two regimes demands attention to early Cold War economic history, which offers a different way of seeing beyond contemporary nation-state-centered refurbishment of “old” Cold War binary geopolitics. A material analysis of US–Hong Kong integration in the 1950s and US–PRC rapprochement in the 1970s shows that US–PRC tension is a fluctuation in inter-capitalist competition rather than an alleged “New Cold War.” For Hong Kong, structurally subjected in this inter-imperial struggle, grassroots resistance must build formations beyond nation-state boundaries in order to prevent being neutralized by the depoliticization of the Cold War state.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I use the acronym PRC to refer to what is often simply called “China.” The term “China” has long been highly politicized, acting as a conceptual category that gathers within it contested peripheries such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Use of the word China in direct quotations remain as is, along with uses referring to pre-PRC China. Specificity of the name at the cost of ease of use pushes against the PRC’s ahistorical claims of a transcendent “territorial integrity” and its current attempts to commodify a homogenizing “5000 years of civilization” narrative founded on violent settler colonial logics. For more, see: Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, (New York: Routledge, 2001); Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013); Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
- 2.
The “capital D” democracy and “capital C” communism here stand in for the official ideological labels that made up the binary camps of superpower competition, which distilled the complex state ideologies of the US and the USSR and PRC, respectively. While the USSR and PRC clearly differed much in their interpretation of Marxism–Leninism, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split (and the resultant rapprochement of the US and PRC), the capital letter ideologies here are used to delineate what was both projected, seen, and represented then as a binary totality, which was not reflective of the complex reality then, and much less now.
- 3.
Scholars have analyzed the PRC’s actions in its first decade in the WTO and concluded that it has become a “system maintainer” rather than a disruptor. See: Kennedy, Matthew. 2012. “China’s Role in WTO Dispute Settlement.” World Trade Review 11 (4): 555–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474745612000365.
- 4.
Some see this unprecedented economic integration as conclusive evidence, along with US and China’s nuclear arsenals, that there can be no military conflict between the two nations. On the economic side, US military action against China would so damage its own economy as to be unworthwhile. While full war is unlikely for those reasons, proxy wars loom as a real possibility. In any case, this hypothetical conflict would be between two competing capitalist regimes, unlike the events of the Cold War.
- 5.
This came at the cost of official recognition of Taiwan, of course. But the US continued to sell arms to Taiwan while the PRC looked the other way, in order to retain the official and economic benefits of trade with the US.
- 6.
Quoted in Garrison, Jean A. “Explaining Change in the Carter Administration's China Policy: Foreign Policy Adviser Manipulation of the Policy Agenda.”
- 7.
I use the term China here as a loose container describing what encompassed the Republic of China and CCP controlled territories during the Civil War period.
- 8.
However, even Nkrumah’s framework isn’t adequate to explain Hong Kong since he argues that, “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty.” Hong Kong, of course, has neither international sovereignty (despite its preferential treatment in certain international fora) nor does it have even a modicum of democratic self-determination in its legislature.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Promise Li and Cindy Gao for their incisive comments, inspirational thinking, and warm encouragement during the writing and research of this article. An earlier version of this essay appeared on The Abusable Past (Radical History Review) and my analysis here was deeply informed by the thinking of my co-author and collaborator Ellie Tse. Any errors and inaccuracies are my own.
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Chien, J. (2022). The “Hong Kong Card”: Against the New Cold War. In: Liu, W., Chien, J., Chung, C., Tse, E. (eds) Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4659-1_14
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