Chapter 3 shows how the loss of China to communism hugely increased the complexity of operating effective media censorship. The colonial government could no longer rely solely on pre-emptive daily vetting to contain undesirable content and comments. During the second half of the twentieth century, political censorship of the media and education sector was facilitated and supplemented by large-scale surveillance operations carried out through a collaborative network of local departments informed by global intelligence collected through London and British embassies around the world. Intelligence collected by this network allowed the colonial government to nip trouble in the bud, and resulted in a number of ‘troublemakers’ (including journalists, editors, publishers, teachers, students and principals) being arrested, detained and even deported without trial without any due regard to whether such actions were lawful. This chapter provides a comprehensive account of such surveillance and censorship operations targeting the media and education sector from the late 1940s to the late 1950s against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions and the new Communist China’s relations with the world.

The meaning, the uses, and the function of antisemitism have been rather varied on the left, as elsewhere on the political spectrum. while specific socialists, Communists, and radicals have made use of antisemitic rhetoric, many important leftists have perceived political antisemitism as reactionary, and have combatted it in a variety of different ways.

It is common to argue that the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam, following the theory of "people's war," defeated the French in the First Indochina War. This argument is correct everywhere except for southern Vietnam. France's slow and systematic implementation of what it called "pacification," in concert with allied self-defense and paramilitary forces, slowly brought increasing parts of the Mekong Delta under the control of France and its allies. In reaction, The Resistance pursued a four-prong strategy: 1) they strengthened the communist core of the Resistance by recruiting cadres, purging "unreliable" non-communists, and working to capture control of the Resistance at all levels; 2) they reached out to potential allies like the Khmer, Chinese, Buddhists, and Catholics; 3) they practiced outreach towards rivals and enemies through proselytization (Địch vận); 4) they strengthened Resistance ability to engage in a sophisticated repertoire of violence ranging from intimidation to conventional warfare. Despite this sound strategy, the Resistance precipitously shifted to conventional warfare. The French-led forces took advantage of this costly mistake. France's commission of war crimes in keeping food from the population, its access to increased American funding after 1949, and contingent factors also contributed to Resistance failure.

East Asian religions are marked by diffuse spirituality and close ties to the state (e.g. Confucianism). When the state was weak, however, independent sects gained an appeal, which created a niche for Christianity. On the other hand, a resurgent state brought repression of these groups. Early modern Japan is the most vivid example, but also in China at the same time in milder form. The Taiping rebellion is a nineteenth-century example. Missionary incursion sparked resistance (the Boxer rebellion) but also acculturation (Western education). Japanese nationalism coopted Christianity through WW II, but its appeal has been limited since. Korea exemplifies how persecution of Christianity, first by its Confucian monarchs, then by the Japanese and then the communists, only strengthened its appeal.

This chapter demonstrates that French arguments over the transfer of DPs to France sit at the juncture of several critical debates about post-war politics of migration and France’s diplomatic strategies in the context of the nascent Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, DPs constituted an enticing demographic opportunity to replenish a French population denuded by two world wars and a declining birth rate. And yet the question of DP emigration defied consensus in France. Communist decision-makers and their ideological fellow-travellers on the French left were strongly opposed to the recruitment of what they regarded as fascist DPs and ‘war collaborators’. Beneath the surface of what was ostensibly a political and ideological opposition to the entry of allegedly ‘anti-communist’ DPs lay a labyrinth of economic fears, a traditional protectionist reflex, as well as a raft of moral and cultural concerns about their ‘assimilability’ and ‘desirability’. Thus despite the early high hopes attached to the transfer of fit and industrious DPs to France, it was not until April 1947 that a coordinated and significant recruitment scheme was launched by French authorities. Crucially, this chapter reveals that the selection of DPs triggered extensive controversies about how far DPs could or should be assimilated into the nation state and about the presumed superiority or inferiority of various categories of DPs and refugees.