Book Review: The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of US-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Based on extensive archival work in the United States, Taiwan, the PRC and the United Kingdom, Oyen argues effectively that migration was a useful "low-stakes" vector through which each government's policymakers could show support, exert leverage, claim legitimacy or test new waters as their interests shifted over the Cold War. Oyen organizes her study into eight chapters grouped in three sections: the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, the height of the Cold War, and the rapprochement era of the late 1960s and 1970s. KMT officials sought "extraterritorial control" over overseas Chinese communities, from demanding better treatment from host countries to extracting financial support for the war effort. [...]migration policy became inextricable from the Chinese civil war and emerging Cold War.