UCLA

Previous scholarship on Cold War Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China often employs one of two analytic frameworks: a Cold War paradigm that presupposes an ideological divide between capitalist modernity in Taiwan and Hong Kong and socialist modernity in China, or a postcolonial approach that frames one of these regions as both subject to and resistant against colonial domination. This study argues that both frameworks are insufficient. Instead, it introduces the concept of Sinophone Cold War humanisms to reexamine cultural contestations with structures of power in Cold War Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, focusing on their relationship to authoritarianism, exile, and proletarianism. Sinophone articulations of Cold War humanism can be viewed as two interrelated processes: first, transcultural negotiations with global discourses of humanism and anti-humanism that critique Western-centric ideals, offering standpoints that transcend the Cold War's ideological binary; second, complicity with Han cultural nationalism, which represses already marginalized cultural communities under Cold War regimes, as well as the alternative humanistic engagements that emerge in these communities as forms of cultural resistance. While a global humanist formation during this period redefined humanism as praxis rather than abstract ideals, particularly in its conceptualization of decolonial humanism in Africa and the Caribbean and debates on Marxist humanism in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, these discourses have largely overlooked the complexity of Cold War humanisms in the Sinophone world. Through the lens of humanism, this study reinterprets philosophical writings (New Confucianism and Maoism), literary genres (anti-Communist, modernist, “scar” literature), and cinematic forms (Healthy Realist, martial arts, minority nationality films) - that have often been dismissed as either state propaganda or nonpolitical escapism - by reframing them as sites of cultural contestations with authoritarianism in Kuomintang-ruled Taiwan, exilic conditions in British Hong Kong, and proletarian ideals in Maoist and post-Mao China. In moving beyond an area studies mode of knowledge production, the study repositions these cultural texts within a global matrix of human praxis. By contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of humanism in global Cold War cultures, it also sheds light on new approaches to decolonization in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and beyond.