Join us for a panel moderated by Qiao Collective on U.S. militarization of Asia and the Pacific under the auspices of the renewed U.S. “containment” doctrine and the new Cold War on China. We will analyze how the U.S. deploys false claims of a “China threat” narrative to justify the further entrenchment of its own militarization of regions in Asia and the Pacific. We will highlight how renewed U.S. Cold War aggression on China is further expanding the U.S. militarization and occupation of regions in Asia in the Pacific such as Korea, Hawai’i, Guam, Okinawa, and beyond.
This panel will also unpack the false equivalence of posing the U.S. and China as “equal instigators” of the militarization of the Asia-Pacific region. Building connections between national anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles in Korea, Guam, China, and beyond, this panel centers an interregional approach to resist the impacts of a U.S.-led new Cold War. In order to disarm the U.S. empire’s framing of the “Asia-Pacific” as a strategic terra nullius for U.S. military and economic supremacy, we highlight people’s struggles under the rubrics of internationalism and anti-imperialism to pose an alternate vision for Asian and Pacific futures.
Panelists: Professor Christine Hong, Mark Tseng-Putterman, Professor Michael Lujan Bevacqua
Bios:
Michael Lujan Bevacqua:
Michael Lujan Bevacqua is a co-chair for Independent Guåhan, an organization dedicated to educating the Guam community about the need to decolonize and seek a new political status as an independent nation. He has testified multiple times at the United Nations as an expert on Guam’s decolonization and is a member of Guam’s Commission on Decolonization.
Christine Hong:
Christine Hong is a professor at UC Santa Cruz in the Literature Department and in
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, specializing in transnational Asian American, Korean diaspora, U.S. war and empire, and comparative ethnic studies. Hong is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, which offers a radical account of the United State’s transformation into a total-war state as the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, and antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between US police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home.
Mark Tseng Putterman:
Mark Tseng-Putterman is a writer and PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. His work focuses on Asian American political formation, internationalism, and the politics of networked media under the U.S. Cold War empire.
