Monitoring Friendship from Afar: Institutional Support for the Study of China and the Global South in the Early Cold War United States

China’s engagement with the Global South has become an exciting new frontier in Anglophone Chinese studies as it seeks to situate the international positioning of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) beyond the confines of great power relations. In addition to popular reportage and contemporary social scientific scholarship, historians have also started to examine the multifaceted relations between the PRC and developing countries in different parts of the world during the Cold War. What is also worth exploring is the early institutional support of the study of China and the Global South (CGS) in the United States in the early Cold War, which offers much-needed contextualized understandings of the topic’s current boom. This paper is a first attempt to reconstruct such institutional support and pursues a few leads. First, it draws upon the few known published monographs on the topic, such as Herbert Passin’s China’s Cultural Diplomacy (1963) and John Cooley’s East Wind over Africa (1965), and aims to uncover their authors’ varying connections to the contemporaneous establishment of Chinese studies. Additionally, it gauges the attention to CGS among major grant-making agencies in Chinese studies such as the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) by sifting through funded projects listed in its annual reports. Supported by the Ford Foundation, the SSRC was not just an important historical player in shaping area studies during the Cold War, and is also currently carrying out a project on CGS. Moreover, it consults the bibliographies compiled by the Association for Asian Studies, the main disciplinary association in Chinese studies founded in 1941, and examines how they categorized CGS-related research over the years. A close reading of these disparate sources will help establish a genealogy of CGS studies as multidisciplinary scholars take on the topic.