The Cold War Origins of the Sino-American Conference on Mainland China: An Obscure Legacy of Chen-tsai Wu in Trans-Pacific China Studies

This article adopts a reflexive approach to investigate the history of the Sino-American Conference on Mainland China (SACMC,中美「中國大陸問題」研討會), the Cold War precursor of the Taiwan-U.S. Conference on Contemporary China (TUSCCC,台美「當代中國」研討會). Organized and hosted by the Institute of International Relations (IIR) of the Republic of China, the Cold War origins of the SACMC demonstrate the notion that power and knowledge-the practice of politics and theory of politics-are asymmetrically and symbiotically co-constitutive. The SACMC functioned as a KMT-sanctioned regime of justifications and persuasions, and the IIR was chosen to carry out the conference series for its international reputation and extensive international networks of exchanges. The ultimate purpose of the conference series was to sustain the ROC government's justificatory claim that it still legitimately represented China so as to thwart the ever-intensifying act of diplomatic legitimation by the People s Republic of China (PRC). However, the materialization of the SACMC by the IIR was much less a pre-determined development than a historical contingency that came about as an unanticipated result of the dynamic interaction of power and knowledge in the larger Cold War context.