JY 00:26
Welcome to the latest episode of Lecture Theatre. With us today we have Ngoei Wen-Qing, Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. Wen-Qing is a historian of the Cold War and his new book is The Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States and Anti-Communism in Southeast Asia. Thank you so much for being with us.
Wen-Qing 00:52
Thank you very much for having me.
JY 00:54
So, tell us more about your life story. How did you become a historian?
Wen-Qing 00:59
Well, I became a historian in a kind of roundabout way. What I studied in the university was both English literature as well as history. I did that as a double major. But I started off with literature. In my honours year, I thought I was going to be a literature teacher, actually. But somehow in the midst of teaching, I was also teaching history a little bit, as staff movements occurred. I eventually moved towards history and eventually took on coordinatorship of very small department, and became full-time history. And after about seven years of teaching, I went on to pursue my PhD.
JY 01:43
Did your interest in literature influence your engagement with history in any way?
Wen-Qing 01:50
Yes, I think what I was really interested in was the way rhetoric affects people, the way that they feel, the way that they interact with each other—how rhetoric and speech can produce impressions and shape realities. And so, I asked myself about how history is also about the spoken word, about the written word, about impressions and creating realities— in the impressions that people have and the kinds of responses that they have to other people. A lot of history depends not on impersonal forces, but on encounters and interactions between people.
JY 02:35
So let's dive right into your latest book, The Act of Containment. So what is the arc of containment, for listeners who have not read the book?
Wen-Qing 02:45
Arc of Containment is about a geostrategic arc in Southeast Asia. If you think about the anticommunist countries—starting with mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines—if you think about them geo-strategically, they actually form an arc around the South China Sea. And this is something that US policymakers were actually envisioning from quite early on. In the late 1940s, they were thinking of the Southeast Asian countries as part of a great crescent, that would stretch from Japan, now newly an ally of the United States, through the South China Sea, and linking up with India. So it's great crescent. So the arc of containment is about the containment of the Vietnamese revolution, as well as China and whatever regional ambitions that it had—because this geostrategic arc of US-friendly states in Southeast Asia actually enclosed the South China Sea. So that's where the containment comes from.
JY 03:53
So how does your book challenge what we know about Cold War?
Wen-Qing 03:57
Yes, so a big part of how many scholars view post-1945 Southeast Asia, not only through decolonization, as well as the nationalist movements, is the failure of the United States in Vietnam. And particularly for people who look at American Foreign Relations, Vietnam caused this massive shadow over the way that people approach US-Southeast Asian relations. So they take this one particular of US-Vietnam relations, and they extrapolate it to be the general picture of Southeast Asia. Therefore, you could extrapolate and say that Southeast Asian nationalism kicked out all European or Western imperialism, and in some measure became completely free of imperialism. I mean, that's the most extreme, oversimplified version. So what I try to say is that Vietnam is an anomaly because so many of the states in Southeast Asia where the majority of the people are—Indonesia—and where majority of the resources are— Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia—these states actually went on a pro-US trajectory, in spite of America's failures in Vietnam. And they installed or undergirded that arc of containment. So instead of letting a Vietnamese-centric picture determine the way that we see post-1945 Southeast Asia, I try to show a more characteristic, a more consequential history of Southeast Asia, and its relations with the US by understanding how anticommunism in the region intertwined with US policy.
JY 04:27
And what about the role of Britain, which features in the subtitle of your book?
Wen-Qing 05:45
Yes. And I think the the big problem in the way that people see Britain in a conventional way, is they end up sidelining it, I think, because there's maybe an overemphasis on how French decolonization and its failures in in Vietnam become the failures of the United States. And then you don't see, unfortunately, this massive, fading but still tenacious empire of Great Britain lingering on in the region. And what I try to show is that, because Britain—through its tenacity, and its new colonial strategies—manages to persist in Malaya and Singapore, it overlaps with the United States expansion of power in the region. And I suggest that because of that, the intertwining of of a fading British Empire and a rising American power is more consequential to the history of Southeast Asia.
JY 06:52
So that's a pretty ambitious argument, a sweeping reorientation of the history. But do you have any favorite stories, human stories that really illustrate these geopolitical changes?
Wen-Qing 07:06
One of the stories that I liked working on was a kind of personal rivalry between the Prime Minister of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and the President of Indonesia, Sukarno. And even though there are moments when they seem to be meeting each other—and in my book, there's actually a picture of them having a light-hearted moment and they seem to be laughing and enjoying each other's company—there is actually a rivalry between the two of them that's sitting underneath one part of it, which I don't talk about in my book, but I make some references to. Sukarno thinks of himself as a true nationalist, because through his leadership, Indonesia wins. It is independence by revolution, by fighting, whereas Malaya only gets its independence—this is Sukarno's point of view—by negotiation, through constitutional reform. And there is evidence that he sort of needles the Tunku when he meets him: that you're not a real fighter. You're not a true revolutionary. Your nationalism is in some ways bestowed upon you. I mean, that's the the impression that is given from a lot of their interactions. But the Tunku is no less aggressive, no less, I think ambitious, in an expansionist way. So when I see the rivalry between the two, it goes back to the way that Malaya, freshly independent in 1957, is ready to assist the CIA and Britain in a plot to topple Sukarno. Because of Sumatra, for example, which was trying to secede from Indonesia. The Malaysians actually perceived Sumatra as a natural part of this greater Malayan unity between between Sumatra and Malaya. So there is a rivalry there. And it extends all the way into the Confrontation period in the 1960s. I enjoyed actually working on that. Because you can see the Tunku maybe from a different light. We don't normally think of him as that type of aggressive player in the region, taking on the rivalry and really pushing it. And so I liked going through some of the documents and seeing how he was also playing the game and working with the imperial powers.
JY 09:35
So let's talk a bit about sources and archives. So I think one of the things that's obvious of your book is just how transnational is, in trying to gather material from various libraries and repositories. So what was that like? How do you go about the research process for your book?
Wen-Qing 09:55
Well, I think the first step is to be really desperate about getting as many documents as you can, because how many opportunities will you have when you go to, for example, a presidential library? If I go to the Harry Truman Presidential Library, which is in Independence, Missouri, it's not like I'm going to Independence, Missouri on a regular basis. It's going to be one short—several days there. And I need to really plow through as many documents as I can. So the first step is figuring out what are the repositories which will have the wealth of documents, and then you plan your trip.
So the big trip that I did, which will be burned into my brain, is when I went to six different libraries over the course of eight weeks in the summer of 2012. And I'll never forget it. I went to the National Archives in College Park in Maryland. Then I went to the Princeton library for some documents, after which I flew to Boston, to do the John F. Kennedy library. After that, I went to Texas, Austin for the Lyndon Johnson library. After that, I went to the Truman library in Missouri, and after that, I went to the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kansas. It was a massive, massive road trip. And, I will always think of it fondly, and also think that I will never be young enough to do that again—just being on the road for for quite a long time.
And just being really obsessed with using my digital camera, to to just take as many pictures as I could have, of the documents relevant to Malaysian, Singaporean, British and American history that I could find. One of the archivists in the Eisenhower library said, oh, you're going through these boxes of documents as if they're going out of style. But I think they can understand that so many researchers are only going to have a very limited amount of time. And so they're just going to be rushing through to gather the materials. That's one thing to say, gathering materials is one part of it.
But the other part of it is, you know, obviously going in with a provisional narrative of what you're looking for, because you don't really have a chance to read the documents. Of course, different historians have different ways of doing this. But as a rookie, I think that desperation is just to gather materials. So I go in with a provisional sense of where these materials are going to fit in, and make myself constantly open to the possibility that what I come across is going to make it fork or deviate, or shift in a completely different direction. In terms of access, it is, I guess, a regrettable situation that a lot of the regional official diplomatic records are not necessarily easy to access. Some of them are just not available at all. Who knows if they've been cataloged? There is the Official Secrets Act, or governments are not necessarily interested in making them public. So I think that that is a very serious limitation.
But at the same time, what I was happy to find is that players who are major as well as maybe middle ranking, leave behind memoirs, private papers, that will intersect with their official roles. And you discover, you know, community leaders who have political impact—they leave their private papers behind, or they turn up in the newspapers, or they write memoirs . And these are the ways that we capture that Southeast Asian voice. It's not a perfect situation, but once you discover these sources, they match very nicely. In most cases, I found they match on very nicely to their appearances in the American and the British documents as well. So then you get a fuller picture of these players, and how significant and substantial their roles are in shaping British or American policy or regional affairs .
JY 14:18
So I think one of the things that really struck me was how you make a broad sweeping argument, but the same time you marshal vast amounts of information to tell in a really suspenseful and gripping narrative. How do you achieve that? How do you enliven these sweeping historical processes?
Wen-Qing 14:44
Yeah, I think that we don't want that historical narrative to be about impersonal forces, sort of pushing human pawns around, as if there was no inner life for a lot of these actors. And so, what I really wanted to get down to was the agency of human beings and the limitations of their agency. What agendas or what goals do they have? What fears did they have? What kinds of scrambling did they do to preserve their historical legacy? And so I tried to map personalities onto the events. Successfully or not, please buy the book, you know, and find out how that worked out!
But, I was encouraged to find a lot of the people who did proofreading said that they were excited by the stories of individuals caught up in these events, who are trying to control some of them, trying to manipulate some of these events, ending up also sometimes even just being pushed along by others in everything. So I tried to focus on the characters. And I guess if you zoom out, if you do a dramatic personae or cast of characters of my book, you may actually find that there aren't that many. And I thought that I wanted to write a book that I could manage my own mental picture of. How can my own limited mental capacity handle the constellation of characters? What are those limits for me? And I guess you'll discover it's quite limited. For me, and for the reader, right? How many Games of Thrones seasons can go through with just like one book? And so I wanted to focus on significant characters. Which, of course, is a perilous path. But I wanted to focus on significant characters, representative characters, but also characters that you could recognize were reappearing, as opposed to sort of being blindsided by, "Who is this guy? Who is this lady? You know, where did they come from? What is their backstory?" So I think I was really interested in that type of an approach: that events have an epic and global proportion are swirling around and passed through individuals, as they interact with each other, and try to command the events around them, with whatever success.
JY 17:35
Obviously, this kind of history has attracted the criticism that it's overly focused on have the Big Man, and especially with the Bicentennial, there's, I think, a renewed interest in the social and cultural dimensions of history, and of everyday lives. So where do you see political and military history going? Or where would you like to see it go?
Wen-Qing 17:58
I would like to see, I think, an increasing the amount of agency showcased and illuminated, of the characters that we don't normally look at. So in this field, this subfield of US and Southeast Asian history, increasingly we learn a lot more about Vietnamese actors. And that creates a very rich resource for understanding the terrible, brutal conflict of the US in Vietnam and also the Vietnamnese revolution and its implications. So we're discovering more and more about those actors. But much of the region's other giants, I guess, in historical memory—like Suharto, like Lee Kuan Yew, other than these characters—we don't necessarily have middle-rung people, ordinary people, who I don't think we should sideline. They were having tremendous impact on things that are happening at the middle level or at the highest, most elite level. So that is what I hope that military and political history can do.
And like I said, people who are working on Vietnamese history are already starting to do this, to think about the people who surround the figures that we now think of as very famous, epic characters. The people who surround them, whose names are not as familiar. What kind of impact did they have? What was their inner life, that we can infer from whatever they leave behind, or the impact that they had on others? What can we gain and surmise from the way that people reacted to even somebody who leaves very little behind? I think that will be very exciting. I mean, I tried to do that every once in a while in in my book. I guess I'm fortunate that the people that I focus on, they leave a lot behind because clearly they operate at that level. But I also tried to think about moments where people who don't leave anything behind seem to have a underappreciated the impact on what is occurring.
JY 20:12
The subordinates in history. The majors to the generals.
Wen-Qing 20:15
That's right. That's right. I mean, and, you know, I tried to bring them in every once in a while. But I think that I would like to be able to become a more skillful historian, to get at those types of stories in whatever is my next phase is, in being a scholar of the past.
JY 20:36
So you've worked on this book at both Northwestern and Yale before coming back to NTU and publishing it as a book. So I was wondering if you can say a bit more about how it was different working on this project in the United States, and then back in Singapore?
Wen-Qing 20:53
Well, I suppose I would say that while you're in the United States, there are conversations that you can have with greater immediacy. I mean, that's something that you can't necessarily get being out here in Singapore, you sort of have to wait for your email to go through the timezone, before somebody responds to you. And also at the same time, you don't necessarily have that that sort of personal touch of being able to speak to somebody.
JY 21:24
There are many more Cold War historians in the United States.
Wen-Qing 21:27
There will be more of them, the conversation will be easier to strike, because of proximity, and so on. But I think that the the difference for me was about release stages in in the formulation and production of the book. In in the US, it was about all the foundational moments: the research, making a narrative exist for the very first time, subjecting it to critiques at its very early stages before it becomes a dissertation and then manuscript. So I was able to do a lot of my revisions while I was at Yale. And I had a lot of space, and time, to be able to that.
But when I came back to Singapore, it was all the things that people don't think about when it comes to publication, for example, writing to repositories to ask for permission to get a particular picture, a map. How much do I have to pay you for the rights to use this picture? Oh, my goodness, I will never be able to afford that. So therefore, I need to go to another repository, which will give me maybe a parallel picture. So that whole process takes a tremendous amount of time. It is a project in and of itself—things like getting the rights, things like getting maps, things like getting permissions to use parts of your writing that have been published elsewhere, figuring out how your index is going to work. The very, you know, kind of ordinary parts of it that are all integral, that you don't even see as part of the process until you're in the thick of doing it. So I mean, it's about the stages, more than anything.
JY 23:21
It is a really interesting thing to think about: the project management, both part of the lifecycle of the book and of the academy. I was also wondering, though, do you think place or location has influenced the way you think about this history? So for instance, has being back in Singapore changed the way you think about the Cold War?
Wen-Qing 23:43
I think that when you ask the question that way, it's also important that now i'm also teaching it to Southeast Asians. And the stakes of trying to explain —especially, I think, to Singaporeans—about a history that doesn't usually appear on their radar. That, I think, changes the stakes slightly. It doesn't mean that they are greater or anything, but I guess in some ways, it also becomes personal, a different type of personal journey—to try and communicate a story to an undergraduate audience. You know, who's going to pick up my book? Who knows? Can I teach from my book? Yes, I can. And how do I communicate that when you have a tremendous baggage of having put together this project, and try to articulate it to an American audience or British audience, or international audience ? Now, the things that you use to articulate it— they're slightly different. How do you make it clear to a local audience what it means, because one of the things that that is important was that a lot of local students think of nation-building as an infrastructural process, right? Here's a hospital, here are some roads, here are schools, here are public utilities. That's what nation-building is: infrastructure.
But nation-building, if you think about revolutionary Southeast Asia, and you think about the Cold War, nation building is often a very, very bloody process, right? It is about one group that eventually rises to dominance for various reasons, whether it's external and internal or a combination of that. And the decimating of the oppositional force, another faction, which had an alternate vision for that revolution. So these far more brutal, far more violent parts of the story—they don't feature in, I guess, a lot of young students' notions of what nation=building means. So in fact, nation building is not a bloodless process, it is not this harmonious process of just roads. And even the war over where the roads are going to be in other countries and so on. These are big deals, right? And the stakes are life and death. And that's something I try to communicate. I'm not sure that I'm always successful with that, because like I said, that the book is so close to me. And I've articulated it over and over when I tried to explain my research, and trying to bring it to a an audience that is completely unfamiliar with it, and for whom the experience is entirely different. I think that is, that's an interesting test that I continue to wrestle with.
JY 26:43
You taught A-level history for a long time before you did your PhD. In hindsight, how do you think about that experience? Do you have any thoughts about the level of historical awareness among young people in Singapore, among the 17 or 18 year olds in junior college, or university students?
Wen-Qing 27:05
Okay. So that's a tough question. Because it requires that I hop back to times when I taught a syllabus that I was not always at ease with. Not because it was a poor syllabus, but because my book had not been written yet. And I had not gone on that journey to find out these things. So, you know, for example, there will be moments where you are teaching the Cold War, and then you come across a primary source and you bring it up in lecture. John F. Kennedy, for example, says something about, Vietnam this and Vietnam, that, and also Malaya. And then people start snigering in the class, because they're like, what happened in Malaya that is of any consequence, that would make an American president even mention it? Interesting, right? And so it's a blind spot. There was no text that systematically drew British decolonization, American Empire, the Cold War, and revolution together and put it in Malaysia and Singapore. When people started sniggering like that in a class, you say, there's actually no answer, because, in fact, the scholarship doesn't exist for you to make a statement about. And so, for me, the difference now is, I look back on those moments, and I think about ways of completing that dialogue with the students to say, well, I wasn't able to respond. And in my position, I didn't even know how to react to that. I even thought, yeah, you know, John Kennedy says something very strange. But now, it becomes much clearer to me: what that was about, what the stakes were. And there was a massive story behind it. And I went on that journey of trying to tell it.
JY 29:25
I mean, it's interesting you bring up the role of Malaya the Cold War, which is so understimated. I think in 2012, you gave a talk at a school about that precise topic, and I think you were doing your PhD. A friend was telling me all about it. That was the first time I really thought about Malaya being part of that.
Wen-Qing 29:51
You know, I think that that was a revelation to me. And let's let's be clear. Maybe you know that that is also a revelation about how naive and how ill-informed I was when I was encountering it. But, you know, this is in the documents. It's the beginning of 1954. And this is how my book starts. I'm sure you know this. It's 1954. And already the French are on the backfoot. They're losing to the Viet Minh, in a few months time, they will be defeated in Dien Bien Phu and then the French begin their retreat out of Vietnam. So the beginning of 1954, President Eisenhower's advisors are circling around him and suddenly suggesting that it's time for the US to commit American combat troops to save the French in their war against the Viet Minh. And, shockingly, Eisenhower says, I cannot imagine placing US combat troops anywhere in Southeast Asia with the exception of Malaya. And that was strange to me. It was shocking to me. And that's why of course, it appears in my book as the first entry point into the story. Because, obviously, if your entire worldview has been Vietnam-centric, that the Vietnam War is the thing that is most consequential and characteristic of Southeast Asian history. When you read this, your interpretation can very understandably be, "Here is Eisenhower finding a way to not get embroiled in Vietnam, and let's move on from here." But my positionality is, "Goodness me, Malaya? There must be some significance." Let's dig into it. And then you know, suddenly my, my project went from the shock of discovering a document like this to unearthing records, conversations, people freaking out in diplomatic cables over Malaya and Singapore, and how those were actually part of a bigger regional story that surrounded Vietnam.
JY 32:04
What do you think the Art of Containment can teach us about the present, be it in terms of the US-China trade war, Brexit, or any of the other regional conflicts?
Wen-Qing 32:18
I suppose it depends on whether or not anybody is reading my book, but maybe what it can do is help us understand. And I've started to write a little bit about this for op-eds, and other essays, and so on. What, most importantly, I want people to take away if they were going to try and think about the present and the future, is to remember that the story does not revolve around the two titans, the United States and China, when so much of the focus is on the big players. When the middle to small actors—the ASEAN countries—are probably the ones, for their own self-interests, because of their internal struggles during the immediate post-WWII situation, who shaped the transition of Southeast Asia from European-dominated colonialism to to US informal empire. If you look at the failure of the United States in Vietnam, it's clear that the economic and military power of the US was not a determinant in the way that Southeast Asia was going to move. It was not the prime determinant. In many ways, it was the agency of the Southeast Asians. So today, when we talk about rivalry in the South China Sea, the militarizing of the waters by China, and whether or not the United States is challenging them, you know, all these various artificial islands, the focus is so tight on the big powers, that I think the analysis gets distorted as to what ought to happen, or what you can really even expect to happen. And I've written an essay about this belief, it's going to come out soon, in a global analysis journal that, really, it's the Southeast Asians, and they don't necessarily have to act in concert. But it's the Southeast Asians—the decisions that they make, and the shape of what kind of order they they want to be in place—that is really going to determine how that that rivalry plays out.
JY 34:38
So one final question. Now that the book is out, what do you think you'd be working on in 10 years time?
Wen-Qing 34:45
In 10 years? Oh, my goodness. I'll be a very old person trying to take care of my health. I think in 10 years, I hope that I will be moving into the 1990s piece of the relationship between the US and Southeast Asia. Currently, I'm thinking about the 1980s, which is, of course, a follow-up from from my work. After the Vietnam War, what is the US relationship with ASEAN—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? And I gather, you know, I get the sense that that the 1980s story is obviously going to spill over into the 1990s. So depending on how long things take, and depending on how declassification goes, this project will morph into maybe two—or be the one project that I'll be building up to in the next five to seven years, as I try to chart what is the next phase of the relationship. There's actually very little that's written about it that that I've actually encountered at this time—about the 1980s for the US-Southeast Asia relationship, that is not necessarily about Vietnam, the fallout of the refugee crisis and so on. I want to look beyond that and maybe think about how the rest of the region is operating outside of just the fallout from Vietnam.
JY 36:16
Thank you so much for being here, Wen-Qing. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Till next time!
