The world we live in influences the way that we look at the past. Before the second-wave feminist movement in the US in the 1960s, the field of women’s history did not exist. Once women became more empowered, then people “discovered” that there had been women in the past too. . . and started to write about them.
The process of globalization that has become so visible since the end of the Cold War has likewise led historians to look at the past differently. Just as “border crossing” is common today in multiple forms, so have historians now discovered many ways in which people and goods in the past crossed various kinds of borders.
One way that historians have done this is by looking at diasporas. There are many cases throughout history in which we find certain populations of peoples being scattered away from their homelands, and in the past twenty years many such historical diasporas have been studied and theorized extensively.
That said, there is one type of diaspora that I think is special and yet I haven’t seen it theorized as such, and that is what I call the “Cold War Confucian diaspora.”
In the twentieth century, during the Cold War, there were three “Confucian” nations in Asia that became divided, leading to the creation of diasporas: Vietnam, Korea and China.
In 1949, China became divided when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan. This created an interesting situation in that the Nationalists originally came from all over China, and then after 1949 these people from many different local “homelands” became stranded together on an island and could not return.
A few years after that, the Korean War left the Korean Peninsula divided, and people who originally came from the other side of the divide when the war ended, were forced to remain where they were.
Finally, with the fall of Saigon in 1975, many Vietnamese fled overseas and ended up in various countries. This dispersal of peoples led to the formation of what I think many people see as a more typical form of diaspora (i.e., people scattered from a homeland).
While the dispersal of peoples therefore took different forms in these three cases, there were two elements that united them all. The first was that these diasporas formed as part of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War. What this meant was that these dispersals were irreversible.
If you were a Nationalist who fled to Taiwan, you could not go back to the mainland. . . ever. The same held true for Koreans who found themselves on the side of the border that was not where there home was, and for Vietnamese who went overseas. There was no going home for any of these peoples.
The other common element between these three places was that they were all part of what we could call the “greater Confucian cultural world.” I don’t like the word “Confucianism” because it is so vague. However, what I think everyone who uses that term can agree upon is that filial piety is central to whatever we want to call Confucianism.
The fact that the peoples in these three diasporas were part of a cultural world that valued filial piety so highly and made it so central to their cultures, combined with the fact that the Cold War created a boundary that could never be crossed, made (I would argue) the disasporic experience for these peoples particularly traumatic (because they could not perform basic filial duties, like cleaning the graves of their ancestors, etc.).
Being forced by war to leave one’s home is of course traumatic for anyone. And of course it is very difficult (and probably erroneous) to argue that some forms of trauma are more severe or serious than others.
Nonetheless, I do think that this “Cold War-Confucian” combination was unique, and I hope that someone will examine this more deeply someday by making a comparative study of these three “Cold War Confucian diasporas.”
This Post Has 4 Comments
Thanks for the post. I like the way you have talked about this ‘Cold War Confucian Diasporas’ phenomenon. Actually there has been a political call as well as a scholarly call to de-Cold War, but you are right, certain confucian values are so deeply rooted among the diasporas that they have become real trauma; and such trauma decoded in the language and discourse of the Cold War could get even more dramatic. So de-confucianism is also necessary ;).
I also think that filial piety has been transformed in ‘confucian’ diasporic communities, whereby the ‘richer’ Chinese and Korean diasporas in Taiwan and South Korea respectively and Vietnamese diaspora communities in many Western countries tend to enact their filial piety by sponsoring their relatives and sending money home to their family members, etc. And it is right here that we can also see the reproduction of typical Cold War values, in that the ‘communist’ Vietnam, China and North Korea are projected as being ‘poor’, and in need of support from the other side to get out of poverty and things like that. Sounds like modernity too, but a part of the Cold War ideology did assume this.
Just a few thoughts, perhaps not well said here, but just want to put them down for further responses from you. Thanks :).
I think the point I didn’t really make clear is that during the Cold War, borders were much less porous than they are now. There is a war in Syria now and many people have fled. As bad as all of that is, my guess would be that many of those people believe that at some point they will be able to return.
For the people in the Korean/Vietnamese/Chinese diasporas that I talk about here, as long as the place they came from was participating in the Cold War, they had no hope of ever returning. And I think for Chinese on Taiwan in the 1950s, Vietnamese in various places in the 1970s-1980s, and for some Koreans still to this day, that sense of hopelessness was probably very strong.
With the end of Martial Law in Taiwan in 1987, it because possible for Chinese who had fled there in 1949 to go back to mainland China (via Hong Kong). I remember someone telling me a very moving story about that. There was one guy who fled to Taiwan as a soldier in 1949 when he was in his 20s. After 1987 he went back and visited his elderly mother for the first time in some 40 years. He was in his 60s and had never married. When his mother asked him why he had never married, he replied, “Mom, how could I get married without you at the wedding ceremony?”
There are countless tragic stories like that. What they show is that the combination of Cold War politics and Confucian moral dictates combined to affect the diasporic experience for these people in particular ways.
In your comments here you are referring to Chen Kuan-hsing’s call in his Asia as Method for people in Asia to move beyond the limitations that the dominance of “the West,” the Cold War etc. have had on their ways of viewing the world. The way he encourages people to do this is by theorizing from specific “Asian” experiences.
What I’m encouraging people to do by comparing these three diasporas is to do exactly that – to look at what it is that they share, and what is different about these diasporas as compared to others – and to theorize about that.
However, the way I look at this is to see it as an example of what “Western” scholars have been doing for decades now in the field of world/comparative history. So I have trouble seeing anything innovative in Chen’s approach, as all I see him encouraging people to do is precisely what countless historians in “the West” have been doing for decades – realizing that theories are not universal, and that comparative scholarship is a great way to develop new insights from a “non-Western” perspective.
Yeah, perfect! great that we’re on the same page in that we’re not impressed by this De-Cold War and Asia as Method approach, and yet not rejecting it, but trying to engage with its limitations too.
I will send you some stuff I wrote about all this, and love your Confucian-Cold War connection here. Thanks again :)!
I ‘d like to draw your attention to another Confucian diaspora , people uprooted from their homes and unable to perform their fillial duties , a Hot War king-sized diaspora . During the Vietnam war , the US displaced half the peasant population of south VN
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2015/04/26/from-the-fall-of-saigon-to-our-fallen-empire/
[ The most conservative estimate of internal refugees created by such policies ( with anodyne names like the “strategic hamlet program” or “Operation Cedar Falls”) is 5 million, but the real figure may have been 10 million or more in a country of less than 20 million. Keep in mind that, in these years, the U.S. military listed “refugees generated” – that is, Vietnamese purposely forced off their lands – as a metric of “progress,” a sign of declining support for the enemy.
In 1967, Jim Soular was a flight chief on a gigantic Chinook helicopter. One of his main missions was the forced relocation of Vietnamese peasants. Here’s the sort of memory that you won’t find in Miss Saigon, Last Days in Vietnam, or much of anything else that purports to let us know about the war that ended in 1975. This is not the sort of thing you’re likely to see much of this week in any 40th anniversary media musings :
“On one mission where we were depopulating a village , we packed about sixty people into my Chinook. They’d never been near this kind of machine and were really scared but they were forced in with M-16s. Even at that time I felt within myself that the forced dislocation of these people was a real tragedy . I could see the terror in their faces. They were defecating and urinating and completely freaked out. It was horrible . I never flew refugees back in. It was always out.
Quite often they would find their own way back into those free-fire zones , in spite of all the dangers at their lives ‘risk . We didn’t understand that their ancestors were buried there, that it was very important to their culture and religion to be with their ancestors.]