Supporting Impactful Research: MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant Awarded to Assoc. Prof. Els van Dongen

Associate Professor Els van Dongen has been awarded the MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant for her research project “Overseas Chinese Students” (qiaosheng) from Southeast Asia during the Early Cold War: China, Taiwan, and Intra-Asian Circuits of Educational Mobility, 1950s-1960s.

Congratulations, Prof van Dongen!

Abstract:

This project makes an original contribution to the study of migration and diaspora, global China, education, and the Cold War, through a study of “overseas Chinese students” (qiaosheng) who “returned” from Southeast Asia to the PRC and Taiwan during the early Cold War. As opposed to existing studies that focus either on return to the PRC or on U.S. involvement in the Cold War, this project analyses student mobility across the ideological divide. Furthermore, expanding the existing emphasis on the singular pathway of “return” from Indonesia and British Malaya to the PRC, it also considers student movement from the Philippines and Thailand to both Taiwan and the PRC, hence factoring in different colonial (or noncolonial) pathways and variations in positionality of emerging or newly emerged nation-states vis-à-vis the PRC and Taiwan and in Cold War alliances. Finally, it also considers the perspectives of the governments of the sending countries, hence moving away from unilinear and unilateral narratives that either foreground the PRC or that draw heavily on Western (colonial) sources. Singapore also features prominently in the study as it was an important point of transit in some educational return circuits. A small number of students also “returned” from Singapore. In sum, the study connects Southeast Asia with China, Taiwan, and U.S. circuits of student mobility through the lens of student “return” as an analytical category.