L. Maria Bo, "Writing on Water: Cold War Literary Translations and the Chinese Diaspora," in conversation with Vaughn Rasberry

During the Cold War, the ideological struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Chinese took place on the pages of literary texts. A battle of the books between Washington D.C. and Beijing mobilized entire networks of U.S. Foreign Service posts, book publishers, and higher education institutions to take sides in propagating representations of either democracy or communism to ethnic Chinese communities around the world. In Writing on Water, L. Maria Bo argues that these propagated literary texts, simply by undergoing translation, also became the means for new forms of anglophone Chinese identi