Producing China in Southeast Asia: The Cold War, Decolonisation, and "Chinese Studies" at the University of Malaya, 1950s-1960s

The postwar founding of the University of Malaya is widely acknowledged as a landmark effort in cultivating a new postcolonial elite. However, much less has been written about how the University was entangled in Cold War geopolitics, in particular, efforts to cultivate a multicultural nation while discouraging Chinese students from returning to Communist China for higher education. This poster introduces recent archival research relating to the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Malaya, which sheds new light on how Anglophone British and Malayan elites attempted to carve out a space for knowledge production about ‘China’ amidst the anti-communist Emergency in Malaya, and the specter of the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution. As I demonstrate, attempts to produce a depoliticized, noncommunist “Chineseness” at the Department of Chinese Studies in the early 1950s were symbolic gestures that failed to address local demands for higher education. However, a decade later, when the University of Malaya was offered a second opportunity to redefine its scope of work (following a new campus established in Kuala Lumpur), “Chinese Studies” became synonymous no longer with Sinology but instead the improvement of race relations and multiculturalism in the new nation-state. In light of growing Chinese soft power efforts in Southeast Asia, this poster reflects on how Cold War histories of knowledge production shed light on recent interest in studying China (and the Chinese language) at Southeast Asian universities and the broader geopolitical considerations that shape them.