War or Stratagem? Reassessing China's Military Advance towards Tibet, 1942–1943

2006 ◽  
Vol 186 ◽  
pp. 446-462
Author(s):  
Lin Hsiao-ting

This article re-evaluates an important yet usually ignored episode in modern Chinese ethnopolitical history. It seeks to argue that, in the midst of the Second World War, Chiang Kai-shek manoeuvred towards a possible war with Tibet in order to serve other military, strategic and political purposes, namely, to insert his direct control into China's south-western border provinces that were still in the firm grip of obstinate warlords. Chiang Kai-shek's careful manipulation of the Sino-Tibetan border crisis in 1942–43 also reveals how he and his top military advisors perceived wartime China's territoriality and border defence in south-west China. With considerations of regime security and national survival foremost in their minds, top KMT leaders took a pragmatic stance towards the intractable issue of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. In addition, at the diplomatic level, the Sino-Tibetan border crisis brought discord among the Allied Nations. The Chinese regarded Tibet as part of China whereas the British had long considered it within their sphere of influence. Eventually the Chinese won the sympathy of the US government. Facing Sino-British disagreement over Tibet's political status, the State Department continued to recognize Nationalist Chinese authority in Tibet, however fictitious that authority was. In retrospect, this episode, along with the US government's official stance towards China's sovereignty over Tibet, although a only a minor disagreement between the Allied Nations during the war, led to the problematic Tibetan issue that still haunts the international community today.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross D. Petty

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the debate about brand marketing that occurred as part of the 1930s consumer movement and continued after the Second World War in academic and regulatory circles. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an historical account of the anti-brand marketing movement using a qualitative approach. It examines both primary and secondary historical sources as well as legal statutes, regulatory agency actions, judicial cases and newspaper and trade journal stories. Findings In response to the rise of brand marketing in the latter 1800s and early 1900s, the USA experienced an anti-brand marketing movement that lasted half a century. The first stage was public as part of the consumer movement but was overshadowed by the product safety and truth-in-advertising concerns. The consumer movement stalled when the USA entered the Second World War, but brand marketing continued to raise questions during the war as the US government attempted to regulate the provisions of goods during the war. After the war, the public accepted brand marketing. Continuing anti-brand marketing criticism was largely confined to academic writings and regulatory activities. Ultimately, many of the stage-two challenges to brand marketing went nowhere, but a few led to regulations that continue today. Originality/value This paper is the first to recognize a two-stage anti-brand marketing movement in the USA from 1929 to 1980 that has left a small but significant modern-day regulatory legacy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (20) ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Veronica A. Wilson

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Michael Cox

This chapter maps the changing transatlantic relations and underlines how this impacts Brexit and EU-UK relations. It points out that the view of the US government remains influential in European affairs, despite claims about transatlantic divergence. It also mentions the endorsement and encouragement of the Trump Administration of the Brexit project, while the new Biden Administration remain unwavering in its commitment in favour of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland. The chapter suggests that Brexit should not just be regarded as a UK-European affair but one of the biggest geopolitical shifts since the Second World War. It discusses the Trump phenomenon and why it represented a threat to both the transatlantic relationship and the European project.


2020 ◽  
pp. 291-300
Author(s):  
E. V. Bodrova ◽  
V. V. Kalinov

Issues related to US attempts to engage the USSR in a direct clash with Japan during the Second World War are examined. The relevance of the study is due to the fierce ongoing debate regarding a number of aspects of the history of the war years. Particular attention is paid to the study of a document sent by the Soviet intelligence agencies to I. V. Stalin in 1942. The novelty of the study is seen, first of all, in the fact that the document under study was declassified only at the present time and has not been published before. Meanwhile, the document testifies to the strategies proposed to the US government by a number of very influential and informed representatives of the American elite, aimed at drawing the Soviet Union into the war with Japan. It is shown in this document that the role of the USSR in the Pacific theater of operations is rightly defined as very significant. Of particular interest is the list of recommendations cited in the article by H. Baldwin, the author of the document studied, recommendations designed to ensure the involvement of the USSR in the war with Japan. The conclusion is formulated that the studied “Memorandum” confirms the readiness of the Allies to do a lot to achieve the desired. At the same time, it demonstrates the temporary nature of a community of interests and is by no means an allied attitude towards our country.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-382
Author(s):  
Inger L. Stole

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to analyze the increasingly congenial relationship between business and government that developed in the immediate post Second World War period. This study explores the subtle, but systematic, uses of advertising for propaganda purposes to secure American political and commercial world dominance. It locates the relationship between the US Government and the Advertising Council as key components in a strategy to blur the lines between political and commercial messages. In addition to study the relationship between the two stakeholders, the study identifies some of the implications for both. Design/methodology/approachScholarship on the government’s postwar relationships with other organizations is relatively scant and few other scholars have focused on the advertising industry’s role in this transformation. This paper draws on trade periodicals and newspaper accounts, and relies on archival material from the Arthur W Page and the Thomas D’Arcy Brophy collections at the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Advertising Council’s papers at the University of Illinois. Charles W. Jackson papers, located at the Harry S. Truman Library, and the papers of Office of War Mobilization and Re-conversion, deposited at the National Archives, have also been consulted. FindingsThe Advertising Council’s “Peace” and “World Trade and Travel” demonstrate an acceleration of collaboration between business and government that continued into the postwar era. It shows the government’s willingness to trade on the Advertising Council’s goodwill and to blur the lines between political and commercial messages, in what can accurately be characterized as a duplicitous manner. Key conclusion includes a willingness among Washington’s policymakers to propagandize its own citizens, a strategy that it commonly, and disparagingly, ascribed to the Soviet Union, and a Council so willing to appease Washington, that it was putting its own reputation at considerable risk. Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is based on a study of two campaigns (“Peace” and “World Trade and Travel”) that the Advertising Council conducted in collaboration with the US State Department. While these were the first campaigns of this nature, they were not the only ones. Additional studies of similar campaigns may add new insights. Social implicationsRecent political events have brought propaganda and government collusion back on the public agenda. In an era of declining journalism credibility, rising social media and unprecedented government and commercial surveillance, it is argued that propaganda demands scholarly attention more than ever and that a historical study of how the US Government collaborated with private industry and used advertising as a propaganda smokescreen is particularly timely. Originality/valueThis study adds to the scholarship on advertising, PR and propaganda in several ways. First, it contributes to the understanding of the advertising industry’s important role in the planning of US international policy after the Second World War. Second, it demonstrates the increasingly congenial relationship between business and the US Government that emerged as a result. Third, it provides excellent insights into the Adverting Council’s transition from war to peacetime. The heavy reliance on archival material also brings originality and value to the study.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns

Gene Oishi’s autobiographical and episodic novel Fox Drum Bebop (2014) will likely be one of the final novels published by someone who was an internee in the detention camps in which the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As such, it presents complicated questions about temporality, rep- resentation, and the processes of trauma. Through focusing on the protagonist Hiroshi Kono (largely, though not restrictively, based on Oishi’s own life experience) and his siblings who have distinct ideological reactions to their ethnic identity and their wartime experience, Oishi explores how internment at once lasted for a determinate period but continues to extend in space and dilate in time for as long as the memories of it endure. The novel uses the musical aesthetics of jazz as a correlate for this discontinuous process- ing of experience. Oishi’s narrative asks if those who suffer oppression and trauma can ever find peace, and how, if at all, having a long life and reflecting upon the past can alter one’s sense of what happened.


2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 177-183
Author(s):  
Naomi Klein

Fitting to its doctrine of preventiv war, the Bush Administration founded a bureau of reconstruction, designing reconstruction plans for countries which are still not destroyed. Reconstruction after war or after a “natural disaster” developed to a profitable branch of capitalist investment. Also the possibilities to change basic political and economic structures are high and they are widely used by the US-government and institutions like the International Monetary Fund.


Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

In the 1940s, curbing undocumented Mexican immigrant entry into the United States became a US government priority because of an alleged immigration surge, which was blamed for the unemployment of an estimated 252,000 US domestic agricultural laborers. Publicly committed to asserting its control of undocumented Mexican immigrant entry, the US government used Operation Wetback, a binational INS border-enforcement operation, to strike a delicate balance between satisfying US growers’ unending demands for surplus Mexican immigrant labor and responding to the jobs lost by US domestic agricultural laborers. Yet Operation Wetback would also unintentionally and unexpectedly fuel a distinctly transnational pathway to legalization, marriage, and extended family formation for some Mexican immigrants.On July 12, 1951, US president Harry S. Truman’s signing of Public Law 78 initiated such a pathway for an estimated 125,000 undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers throughout the United States. This law was an extension the Bracero Program, a labor agreement between the Mexican and US governments that authorized the temporary contracting of braceros (male Mexican contract laborers) for labor in agricultural production and railroad maintenance. It was formative to undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers’ transnational pursuit of decisively personal goals in both Mexico and the United States.Section 501 of this law, which allowed employers to sponsor certain undocumented laborers, became a transnational pathway toward formalizing extended family relationships between braceros and Mexican American women. This article seeks to begin a discussion on how Operation Wetback unwittingly inspired a distinctly transnational approach to personal extended family relationships in Mexico and the United States among individuals of Mexican descent and varying legal statuses, a social matrix that remains relatively unexplored.


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