The Kuomintang (KMT)--the first legalized political party and movement in modern Malaysian and Singaporean history--is studied against the background of British colonial rule, the changing political circumstances and fortunes in China, and the rising and waning of Malayan Chinese nationalism from 1894. While it highlights the development of the Malayan KMT Movement in terms of leadership, organization, and ideology, it also analyzes changing British colonial policy and management techniques toward the Movement.

A ground-breaking analysis of how the Malayan Communist Party helped forge a Malayan national identity, while promoting Chinese nationalism.

The fascinating account of two former British colonies with a shared past but vastly different identities today! Singapore and Malaysia sit astride the sea lanes linking East with West--vital choke points in the world's commerce. Since ancient times, ports along the Silk Road of the Sea were populated by peoples from around the globe who came here to trade and live, carried by the steady flow of goods and the ever-present monsoon winds. Author Christopher Hale recounts many fascinating histories of this region, including: The ancient international trade in spices and the seven voyages to the southern seas of the Chinese eunuch Admiral Zheng He in the 15th century The rise of Islamic kingdoms along rivers bordering the Straits of Malacca and the conquest of Malacca, one of the world's largest cities, by a few hundred Portuguese marauders in 1511 The saga of Sir Stamford Raffles, credited with founding Singapore, and the development of tin mines and vast rubber and oil palm plantations on the Malay Peninsula The disastrous fall of "Fortress Singapore" to the Japanese in World War II after only three weeks of fighting, the worst British military defeat in history The wildly successful film Crazy Rich Asians, set in Singapore, the highest grossing romantic comedy of the decade A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia tells these and many other compelling stories about the people and events which have shaped these nations as they developed into modern powerhouses of international trade and tourism.

Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China's war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, government officials, professionals, and merchants flocked into India for training, business opportunities, retreat, and rehabilitation. This book is about how the activities of the Chinese sojourners in wartime India caused great concerns to the British colonial regime and the Chinese Nationalist government alike and how these sojourners responded to the surveillance, discipline, and check imposed by the governments. This book provides a subaltern perspective on the history of modern India-China relations that has been dominated by accounts of elite cultural interaction and geopolitical machination.

This book explores the impact of cultural identity, the internal configurations of the educational field, and the struggles both inside and outside the educational systems of post-World War II Singapore and Hong Kong. By comparing the school politics of these two nations, Wong generates a theory that illuminates connections between state formation, education, and hegemony in countries with dissimilar cultural makeups.

Illustrates the centrality of domestic politics to colonial rule and the ways in which mastery over servants was a key expression of colonial power

Through a variety of case studies, Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century examines the emergence of youth and young people as a central historical force in the global history of the twentieth century.

Much has been written about the White Australia Policy, but very little has been written about it from a Chinese perspective. Big White Lie shifts our understanding of the White Australia Policy - and indeed White Australia - by exploring what Chinese Australians were saying and doing at a time when they were officially excluded.Big White Lie pays close attention to Chinese migration patterns, debates, social organisations, and their business and religious lives. It shows that they had every right to be counted as Australians, even in White Australia. The book's focus on Chinese Australians provides a refreshing new perspective on the important role the Chinese have played in Australia's past at a time when China's likely role in Australia's future is more compelling than ever.

In Diasporic Cold Warriors, Chien-Wen Kung explains how the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) sowed the seeds of anticommunism among the Philippine Chinese with the active participation of the Philippine state. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; none was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China as the one in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Philippines shows that the "China" that intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian Chinese society during the Cold War was the Republic of China on Taiwan. For the first time, Kung tells the story of the Philippine Chinese as pro-Taiwan, anticommunist partisans, tracing their evolving relationship with the KMT and successive Philippine governments over the mid-twentieth century. Throughout, he argues for a networked and transnational understanding of the ROC-KMT party-state and demonstrates that Taipei exercised a form of nonterritorial sovereignty over the Philippine Chinese with Manila's participation and consent. Challenging depoliticized narratives of cultural integration, he also contends that, because of the KMT, Chinese identity formation and practices of belonging in the Philippines were deeply infused with Cold War ideology. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors reimagines the histories of the ROC, the KMT, and the Philippine Chinese, connecting them to the broader canvas of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building in East and Southeast Asia.

To understand how independence was gained for a politically complex country such as Malaysia, and how its structure took form requires familiarity with the key players involved. More importantly, only by locating these actors within the changing socio-political context in which they specifically lived does their influence both before and after the birth of the country become clear. Having written potent biographies about Malaysian and Singapore leaders such as Ismail Abdul Rahman, the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia who died in 1973, Goh Keng Swee, the economic architect and one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Singapore, and Lim Kit Siang, the unwavering opposition leader of Malaysia, Ooi Kee Beng now tells the story of Lee Hau-Shik, based on the latter’s extensive private papers housed at ISEAS Library, Singapore. Born in Hong Kong to a highly prominent family at a time when the Qing Dynasty was falling, Hau-Shik received degrees in Law and Economics in Cambridge and became a successful tin miner in British Malaya and an influential member of Kuala Lumpur’s colonial society. After the Second World War, his influence in elite circles in China, Britain and Malaya allowed him to play a key role in the gaining of independence for Malaysia. He was one of the founders of the Malayan Chinese Association, and served as the country’s first Minister of Finance. "Ooi Kee Beng’s new book on H.S. Lee provides a remarkable picture of an “unlikely politician” who made major contributions to the formation of the early Malayan state. It adds another dimension of study to the formidable task of nation building in a multi-communal society and is an excellent follow-up to his widely praised study of Tun Ismail as the 'reluctant politician'." -- Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore "Set against the global turbulence that marks the birth of modern Malaysia, Ooi Kee Beng has given us a compelling account of Sir Henry Lee Hau Shik’s personal life and political career, his role in the move to independence and the indelible imprint he left on the country’s history. In highlighting and contextualizing H.S. Lee’s own papers, As Empires Fell should be read by all those interested in how Malaysia came to be." -- Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawai‘i