Browsing by Subject "Communism"
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Item Open Access American Perceptions of Sino-Soviet Relations: 1944 - 1963(2018-04-13) Song, YifanFor the first half of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China were perceived by many within the U.S. government to be a monolithic communist bloc. However, the development of the Sino-Soviet Split proved monolithic communism false. Why then did the U.S. take so long to realize the mounting differences and problems between China and the Soviet Union? My thesis explores the American perceptions of Sino-Soviet relations and what drove these perceptions in the period between 1944 and 1963. My research shows that U.S. perceptions of relations between Soviet Communists and Chinese Communists were fairly open and diverse prior to 1950. A series of events in 1949/50 then caused perceptions to become rigid and monolithic. These events included the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the rise of McCarthyism, the adoption of a militant Cold War grand strategy as embodied in NSC-68, and the Chinese intervention in the Korean War. The rigidity in perceptions of the Sino-Soviet relationship between 1950 and 1956 especially in the higher echelon of policymakers was a setback for U.S foreign policy, but some degree of pluralism in perceptions was preserved in the lower ranks of the intelligence community. Following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of early 1956, which marked a definitive ideological split between the Soviet Union and China, U.S. perceptions of Sino-Soviet relations began shedding its paralyzing rigidity. Between 1956 and 1963, the intelligence community became increasingly cognizant of Sino-Soviet problems and sources of potential conflict, but were still slow to explicitly state that a Sino-Soviet Split has occurred. Not until 1962-3 did the CIA make this explicit.Item Open Access Building a Better World: Youth, Radicalism, and the Politics of Space in New York City, 1945-1965(2012) Teal, OrionAccording to conventional wisdom, the period of intense antiradicalism that followed World War II effectively drove all radical activity underground by the early 1950s, severing the intergenerational connection between the "Old Left" of the Great Depression era and the "New Left" of the 1960s. Building a Better World revises this narrative by examining how radical activists in New York City carved out space for young people's participation in leftwing political culture between 1945 and 1965. Contrary to most studies of the postwar Red Scare that focus on the Left's decline, this study tells a story of survival. Despite concerted efforts by social critics and governmental officials to curtail radicals' political influence among the young, radicals maintained a surprisingly robust radical social world centered in summer camps, private schools, youth groups, cultural organizations, union halls, and homes throughout New York City and its environs. In these spaces, youth continued to absorb a radical worldview that celebrated the labor movement, decolonization struggles, and African Americans' quest for freedom, while forwarding a biting critique of American capitalism. This process of intergenerational transmission would not have been possible without access to social space and an ever-evolving interpretation of radical values responsive to changes in political culture and demographics. Building a Better World relies on extensive archival research, print material, visual sources, and original oral histories to document this hidden history. In so doing, the dissertation significantly revises our understanding of the American Left, the history of American childhood, spatial change in New York City, and the evolution of political, ethnic, and racial identities in modern American history.
Item Open Access Politics of the Sporting Body: A study of sport as a political tool under Communism(2007) Yang, LinBehind the violence and confusion of the twentieth century, communist ideology was also adding new dimensions to traditional power relations between state and society through the effective utilization of a centralized sports program.Item Open Access Why No NATO in Asia? Analyzing the Failure of the “Pacific Pact”(2021) Zu, Chuang StevenIn Europe and North America, NATO was established in 1949 to confront communist pressure. Meanwhile in Asia Pacific, however, no collective security institution was created, despite raging communism. Using the Foreign Relations of the United States and other diplomatic archives, I test current explanations for the contrast. Current explanations, insightful and illuminating as they are, fail to support themselves with sufficient evidence from documents. I then propose three arguments: US suspicion of the value-added of military commitment, a lack of commitment by regional countries towards collective security, and heterogeneity of communist threats. I conclude by proposing power configuration and geographic scope as two key factors that determine the effectiveness of collective security: the less major and middle powers included, and the larger geographical stretch covered, the less likely collective security is to succeed. This paper contributes to studies on the historical issue of collective security in Asia Pacific during the early Cold War as well as to real-world policy analysis of the current situation in the region.Keywords: Pacific Pact, Cold War, collective security, the United States, communism