From Third China to Free Asia: Working through the Archives of China Missionaries in the Transpacific Cold War

Despite a number of recent scholarly and political projects envisioning an interconnected Asia, challenges of access to multi-sited archives, language, and separate national historiographical fields has hampered the task of writing histories of the region. This paper proposes revisiting Cold War discourses of the Chinese diaspora as a “Third China”— scattered across the Cold War geography of “free Asia”— to think through the problem of narrativizing Asian connectivity through institutional archives since the latter-half of the twentieth century. I take as a case study the archive of the United Board for Christian Higher Education held at Yale Divinity School, which has hitherto been associated with US-China educational and cultural exchange in the early twentieth-century. By focusing instead on the Board’s post-1949 work among the Chinese diaspora in the United States and East/Southeast Asia however, I argue that the trope of “Third China” was not merely anticommunist propaganda stoking fears of a co-ethnic fifth column exporting revolution, but also a conceptual category deployed by Western “China missionaries” seeking to continue their mission after their reluctant exodus from China after 1949. By the mid-1950s however, this diasporic Chinese mapping was supplanted by “free Asia,” a Cold War geography which was both imagined by policymakers and propagandists, but equally a lived reality for missionaries, educators, and students who traveled through its various nodes and were connected as a result of new Cold War networks. Taking cues from recent scholarship in Cold War cultural studies, I look beyond impenetrable boundaries, instead refocusing on the Cold War as a generative, networked region-making force. I conclude by reflecting on the methodological possibilities for narrating histories of the region through the archives of other institutions with a regional/transnational footprint during the Cold War.