"Nationalism and Internationalism: Sino-American Racial Perceptions of the Korean War." In eds. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel, Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, vol. 2. Pp. 319-341. Leiden: Brill, 2015. (original) (raw)

China and the United States used to be allies during World War II. This cooperative relationship naturally added up some fondness and admiration to the emerging Chinese perception of the United States, if any, as the most powerful but the least aggressive among alien powers. By the same token, although the United States had a traditional bias against East Asians at home, the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act was revised in December 1943. With growing military demands, mutual images turned at large positive and friendly, in contrast to those of the Japanese, among societies in both. Shortly after World War II, however, the wartime alliance became torn up by ideological confrontations first in China and then across the globe. First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assisted by the Soviet Union overthrew the United States-sponsored Nationalist government in 1949, and then it challenged the American-led United Nations peace keeping troops in Korea from 1950 to 1953. During this time, the Sino-American relations declined to an unprecedentedly low level. The relations between the two countries were reflected in the images each side had of the other. As in former wars, we may observe inevitably self divinization alongside the demonization of the other. By here the ideological gap seemed broader than ever. Both communism and capitalism claimed internationally to be at the top of the social evolutionary chain. Race played here a significant role too. Nevertheless, the ideology was so pervasive and powerful that the racial discourse has been largely ignored. This chapter seeks to uncover the racism that underlaid the Sino-American military and ideological conflict during the first half of the 1950s. It examines the sources for the mutual racial hate, its manifestation, and consequences.

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