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Shiqi Lin, To Fail, to Struggle, to Live the Impossible: Remembering Ackbar Abbas

I received my PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine under the guidance of Ackbar Abbas. When I was encouraged to write a personal reflection in memory of Ackbar, my initial reaction was reluctance. To me, it was an impossible task. Not because I wasn’t close to Ackbar, but quite the reverse. I had taken many seminars with him, TA’ed for him, typed for him, and spent numerous hours in conversation with him. I was also fortunate to see him every year—in Irvine and Beijing—from the year of my admission to grad school until January 2026. However, to respond to the boundless spirit of his mind and to unpack the deep bond of our mentoring relationship in words simply felt like: how might it even be possible to draw the universe in a painting or seize the stars from afar? 

And yet, I became convinced after further prodding that even my struggle to write the impossible would itself be meaningful to reflect on Ackbar’s teaching and thinking. This is a theorist who, in the past several years, was thinking extensively about failure and refusal in company with Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. Compelled by contemporary cultural conditions in Hong Kong and the world, as well as his own inability to return from Irvine to Beijing and re-unite with his wife Liu Sola during COVID-19, failure and refusal appeared as regular motifs in his class lectures, emails, chats, and in his last pieces of writing. To him, thinking itself is an act of struggle against the possibility of its own failure; it makes turns and refuses to give in to the realities of life. This endeavor was similar to another topic we often discussed extensively—the workings of documentary film: when the documentary hits a representational impasse, the solution is not to turn away but to take on documentation more forcefully so as to struggle with limits and engage with the impossible.

In practice, Ackbar’s teaching about failure happened several times during my time in grad school, when he’d respond to my writer’s block very kindly by saying, “It’s fine. You don’t need to give me thirty pages. Just bring a few paragraphs. I am here to think with you.” I am here to think with you… That is to say, I am here to share your struggle… You can fail, but you are not alone.

In the spirit of immense intellectual companionship, trust, and generosity instilled by this act of thinking-with, I write with personal memories that have been replaying in my mind in the past several months. In the course of following heartbreaking updates about Ackbar’s health conditions through Gabriele Schwab, my other mentor, and constantly feeling the ache of not being able to see him in Beijing this past summer, I know that thinking-with is the least I can do, but it is also the most possible so as to carry on with Ackbar’s cheerful and indefatigable spirit.

An Uncanny Journey

Studying with Ackbar had a mind-boggling start: I learned that he, a sophisticated theorist of new media and digital technology, didn’t know how to type. Even more dramatically, I once received a nickname, “ship”—yes, in lowercase—thanks to the autocorrect function of his email. This is the same advisor who had cut and pasted an image of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History on the cover of a notebook, as if he himself were living like the Angel fiercely resisting the storm of technological progress via his thinking and handwriting. When I discovered this Angel on his notebook, I came to the realization: “Okay, my advisor is a living ‘anachronism’ and ‘Baroque allegory’ analyzed by himself.” Since then, I observed again and again how it was a live contradiction, a quiet life, and the critical distance that he had intentionally curated between himself and the external world that allowed him to produce some of the sharpest and most interesting critiques of technology and cultural politics. It was amusing, as well as enlightening, that he was already talking about the eccentric thinker Byung-Chul Han as a crazy philosopher (as if he himself were not crazy enough!) as early as 2018; he was already quoting Han’s critique of social media as a “shitstorm” at a time when pre-pandemic digital discourse was largely utopian and forward-looking.

In the Winter 2020 quarter when I was TA’ing for him in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak, “how would my advisor use Zoom and get groceries” was a question that unnerved me just as much as the question of “where could I still find masks and Clorox wipes.”

During the pandemic years when he was stranded in Irvine, we had quite a number of marathon meetings that often lasted an entire morning or afternoon to discuss my writing drafts word by word, line by line. In spite of the anxious and violent time, the shared space of sincere and dedicated thinking offered me an invaluable source of calm and focus. Regardless of who he was speaking to and what topic was at hand, he upheld the same standard for every piece of writing: thinking had to reach its highest level of precision. Often, my inquiry about one word in my writing would turn into a thirty-minute discussion, with me asking him to re-iterate an idea three times or us debating big questions, such as whether “postcolonialism” or “neoliberalism” is (still/ever) an adequate framework to theorize contemporary China and East Asia. During those meetings, I brought mooncakes and dim sum, and he, in turn, offered his carrot juice, coconut water, a variety of teas, his favorite black sesame candies, along with his childhood stories of Hong Kong snacks. These sessions form some of my most cherished memories of the pandemic.

In 2023, I graduated from Irvine. This was around the same time that he finally achieved his dream of reuniting with Sola in Beijing.

As my parents also live in Beijing, I became one of the handful of lucky ones who maintained close contact with Ackbar and continued to see him every year after his retirement. It had already become my routine practice to see Ackbar during my every family visit back to Beijing. He is part of my family. Each trip to Ackbar and Sola’s lovely siheyuan residence from my parents’ place was a three-hour journey from the southwest of the city to the northeast end, switching between bus, subway, and Didi, until it became muscle memory to tell where I was in the journey.

I now have to grapple with the question of what it means that neither Beijing nor Irvine will be the same the next time I go back.

“I am a Hong Kong boy!”

One of my favorite memories about Ackbar dates from 2022 in Irvine, when a new friend, a visiting scholar and seasoned local from Hong Kong, asked to see him. At the university Peet’s Coffee where we met, Ackbar wore a baseball cap and responded to the friend’s query about his Hong Kong roots. He chatted about the local shops and schools in Kennedy Town from his childhood, some of which even pre-dated the friend’s knowledge, and he smiled gleefully: “I am always a Hong Kong boy!” It made me wonder: for those who have revered him as an academic tsar in conferences and lecture halls, could they ever have imagined this carefree boyish person behind the theorist?

Although I never crossed paths with Ackbar in Hong Kong, I was familiar with his legendary status and continuing enormous impact in the city. (According to him, even the flamboyant singer and actor Leslie Cheung, his ex-brother-in-law, looked up to him as a childhood hero.) In our conversations in Irvine and Beijing, Hong Kong came up regularly—usually prompted by my strong curiosity to ask him to share more—as a window into his fascinating past; as a node of urban interconnection; as a point of reference for theorizing contemporary global cultural situations; and as a paradigm of doing critical theory and cultural studies. Directly or indirectly, these conversations have sparked my long-term interest in thinking through Hong Kong.

Internationally recognized for his seminal book, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997), Ackbar is known for anatomizing the cultural politics of the layered city at its moment of handover from Britain to the PRC. However, for Ackbar, the relevance of Hong Kong went far beyond its actual geography and the 1997 moment. I always appreciated the times when he talked about his grandparents from Malaysia, India, and Cambodia (Cambodian Chinese), as well as his father’s wartime experience as a displaced refugee. As a living allegory of the making of modern Asia, his family story stands as a symbol to me for why Hong Kong is and will always remain a unique place for thinking about the world and cultural theorization: not because it’s an Asian or global financial center, not because of its interstitial status between British colonialism and PRC rule, but because it has always been a node of intercultural crossings, a murky grey zone, and a critical switch point that preserves its ambiguity and shelters people from all walks of life for making and re-making habitats in regenerative ways. In Ackbar’s words, Hong Kong is special not because it tells of local identity that should be essentialized, but because it manifests a larger cultural situation of dis-location—dis-location as both a global symptom of sociopolitical change and a strategy to rewrite the global contemporary.

In Ackbar’s teaching and writing after Hong Kong, this attentiveness to dis-location remained deep in his thinking and served as a capacious method when his analysis expanded into new cinema, digital media, urbanization, and a paradigm of globalization that runs on the logic of the fake in China, Africa, and the Global South. From Hong Kong to post-socialist China and, inevitably, to the post-2016 United States whose technopolitical changes have baffled and mattered to the world in a myriad of ways, Ackbar’s insights on not just contemporary social changes, but the changing nature of these changes in a shifting structure of global political economy, have proved time and again prophetic: it is not change that has changed, but the frames and coordinates through which change takes place that have changed.

I was very lucky to work with Ackbar at a time when the geographical focus of my doctoral research—contemporary China—aligned with much of his work and concern of the last two decades. The theoretical problematics of a fast-changing China organically chimed with many symptoms of Hong Kong that he had scrutinized, and he repeatedly encouraged me to see that understanding contemporary China and its mutating, intertwining relationship with the U.S. is indispensable to understanding the present and future of the world. With an emphasis on dis-location rather than exceptionalizing a space, what made his teaching particularly instructive for me is not his reading of an area, but the theoretical questions his work opened up for de-familiarizing our analytical lens of every place. It helps in building new strategies to articulate global social changes associated with translatable questions such as speed, scale, agency, mediality, and the political force of critical inquiry. For many of the students at Irvine, whose topics ran the gamut from Armenia to the Philippines, from literature and cinema to popular culture, he engaged with all our work with a sense of radical receptivity. What we learned from him was not a particular theory or a set focus on a geography, but a stance from which to think, a mode of problematizing the familiar, a way of navigating the world around us.

Living the Unknown

In my last several conversations with Ackbar, I frequently brought up a set of metaphysical questions, secretly praying that the master—in his remote study in Beijing surrounded by his favorites Benjamin, Kafka, Pessoa, Burroughs, Deleuze, etc.—would have the magic power to enlighten me and the world with decades of accumulated wisdom and life experience: “Ackbar, where do you think the world is going? What can my generation do about the collapsing systems everywhere? How do we persist?”

Sometimes he responded with two remarks on the unprecedented challenges faced by universities and the world’s two biggest economies, China and the U.S. Sometimes he recounted how the present time was nothing like earlier days. But more often, he just smiled like a Buddha, “It’s a question for your generation to figure out.”

This was the same kind of smile I got when I told him in the same conversations that my recent research interests had moved to the political histories of dance music, while showing him some flashy and bombastic Instagram reels of mass raves under bridges and inside tunnels. Partly to entertain him, and partly to sneak in questions seriously occupying my mind, I would ask, “Ackbar, what do you make of the hyper-mediality of this? What kind of political space is coming out of this?” Over the years, having patiently and supportively witnessed me explore my interests from documentary to digital media, from science fiction to popular music, sometimes luckily seeing some light through and some other times stumbling and hitting dead ends, he didn’t question my sanity. He just smiled and hinted, “This is interesting, and you have to figure it out yourself.”

This is interesting, and you have to figure it out yourself. Your generation has its own tasks to tackle—and you can’t hide. In these moments, even if Ackbar claimed that the challenges of the present day are exceptional, I found a strange parallel between the time we’re living now and another unprecedented moment—the time that gave rise to his theorization of Hong Kong in the 1990s. In fact, I was often haunted by the opening passage he wrote in the first essay of the first issue of the positions journal in 1993, on the poetry of the Hong Kong writer Leung Ping-kwan: “Living in interesting times, as the old Chinese adage tells us, is a dubious advantage. Interesting times are periods of violent transition and uncertainty” (Abbas 1993: 1). As someone who had navigated his own “interesting times,” he didn’t directly answer my queries, but I think the way he responded to his times with the critical distance to think, to critique, and to generate vocabulary on the sharp edge has already pointed in a direction.

When I think back to his Buddha-esque smiles, it feels as if I were receiving the message, just keep venturing and stumble. Fail, fail better, learn something from your failures, and keep failing. You don’t have to be scared of the unknown. You may have to fail—and that’s how you persist. To fail is to persist. Just as he wrote in one iteration of “failure as resistance”:

We find here not a failure of resistance, but rather failure as resistance; a politics of failure that is not the same as a failed politics and that has its own kind of heroism quite different from other kinds of heroism. […] In the volatile spaces of today, our motto may have to be: Dare to fail. Failure, we might say, is the moral heroism of our time, in social life as well as in our art. It is what allows us to continue under conditions of impossibility. To act, not because we have hope, but because we refuse to give in to despair.

Mission Accepted

After Ackbar’s passing, a few of us—friends, students, and former colleagues who have benefited immeasurably from his thinking and spirit—have been talking about how to properly remember and carry on his legacy in comparative literature and critical theory. To imagine an event and a material form of our remembrance, just like my struggle to piece together my thoughts and memories for this essay, feels impossible, because we all know that Ackbar hates cliché, hates both sentimentalism and formalism, and hates it when theory is deified rather than subverted. On a conceptual level, he is also giving us headaches such as “how can you embody ‘poor theory’ through an art performance” or “how can you really explain his mysterious cosmological thinking of the ‘quantum image’—the topic of the last grad seminar he offered at Irvine.” However, no matter what format we will eventually come up with, there is one thing I am sure of: we will take on the task of the impossible. As Ackbar taught us, theory cannot be reproduced as clichés, but must be meaningfully and playfully lived, performed, smashed, and re-invented at its edge. As such, I know that the spirit of Ackbar will stay longwith us, closely and profoundly, in the way we think, write, live, and grieve. We will miss you, Ackbar.

“To Shiqi – Now the work begins! ‘Be multiple, like the universe.’—Pessoa” A Christmast gift from Ackbar in my last year of grad school, which also turned out to be a graduation gift—a notebook from his personal collection. Among his acquaintances, Ackbar is known as an avid collector of fountain pens, pipes, (fake) watches, and notebooks. According to my mentor Gaby Schwab, before Ackbar passed away, he had prepared a gift notebook for each student he was still working with.
Ackbar in Beijing, June 2025

Acknowledgement

This article is written for both positions politics and Department of Comparative Literature, UC Irvine. I thank Rebecca Karl and Adriana Johnson for kindly nudging me to process my memory of Ackbar through this personal reflection. I thank Gabriele Schwab for sharing the grief and encouraging me to write for Ackbar. I thank friends who have been processing memories with me in the past several weeks.

 

Shiqi Lin received her PhD from UC Irvine in 2023; after a post-doc at Cornell, she is now Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Rochester. She is working on a book entitled Documentation as Transmedial Relay.

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Lucas Tse reviews Liu Jieyu, Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

Liu Jieyu, Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025).

Progress matters. It is hard to look at a family, our own or anyone else’s, without a story of progress underneath it—the freedom to choose, to love, to build a household of one’s own making rather than be swallowed by one. Those freedoms are real. But progress rarely runs in line with our desires.

In a Tianjin factory in 1962, an apprentice made the first move. Grandma Chen was studying Mao Zedong’s thought when she noticed a workmate she liked and asked one of his friends whether he already had a girlfriend. He wrote her a poem in reply. When her family set up a matchmaking meeting with a tall military officer, she declined and stayed with the poet. Then the Party secretary told her that her chosen man’s family was a problem. His father was a small business owner, and if she wanted the Party she would have to give him up. She chose the man and gave up the Party. Sixty years later, asked whether she would pick him again in her next life, she did not hesitate: “Yes, he’d still be the one.” She still dreamed about him, she said, “especially the years when we were courting and when we just got married.”

Grandma Chen’s daughter married a man who won her by lying. He swore his father ran the railway bureau and could place her brother in a good job. She would not choose him again; she and her husband make do. Grandma Chen’s grandson married in 2016, after a string of girlfriends—at least ten, according to him. He chose his wife because they came from “matching households” (mengdanghudui). He did not expect love to survive the marriage. He told the researcher that he had never once seen couples in their fifties still in love. The grandmother raised under Mao is the romantic; the grandson raised in the market is the sceptic. Whatever progress did to this family, it did not move in a straight line.

The method of Liu Jieyu’s Embedded Generations lets it catch this reversal and others. The unit of Liu’s fieldwork was the family, not the individual. She gathered some 260 life-history interviews from grandparents, parents, and children in the same eighty households. Sitting with three generations at once, she could set a grandmother’s account of her own courtship against her grandson’s account of his, and watch what actually passed between them. 

The book sees China from inside the living room. Its generational sequence design shows reversals that a cross-sectional survey cannot: a non-linear picture of how people court, marry, raise children, and bury their parents in the largest society on earth. Choice does not track progress. Her governing insight is quiet: choice is not the opposite of obligation but the form obligation takes as it passes down the generations.

Take Grandma Mu in Xi’an, who made choices at every turn. Born in 1942 to a Nationalist officer and a concubine eighteen years his junior, she joined the Communist Youth League at fourteen. She trained as a doctor. When she fell for a young soldier, her father’s Kuomintang past threatened his prospects in the army, so she ended the relationship to protect his career. She settled instead for a police clerk with a slight hunchback, partly to head off a match her mother was pushing. During the Cultural Revolution her husband arranged for her to be sent to his home village to nurse his widowed father, and she spent a decade there in hardship while he stayed in the city and climbed the ranks. She nursed him too, for fourteen years, until he died in 2013. Asked whether she would choose him again, she did not reach for warmth: “I think being single is the best option. All the hardships stem from marriage and family. If neither existed, there would be no suffering.” Grandma Mu was never powerless, but the exercise of her will took place in boxes, including those built by previous generations. 

Chapter 3 addresses narratives of sexual liberation. One of Liu’s younger interviewees says flatly that anyone who waits until the wedding night “must have something wrong with them.” Underneath that surface the old order holds. This chapter, built partly from an unplanned focus group of 1990s-born sales workers in Xi’an, captures a double bind: men prize a woman’s virginity and also read a woman’s willingness to have sex as proof of love. Liu traces possible responses to this bind by placing two women next to each other. Ms. Kong, an only child from a professional Xi’an family, held off through her first two relationships and gave in to her third boyfriend at twenty-four; she found the experience “a form of torture, particularly for my mind.” She feared pregnancy despite the condom, and behind that lay something colder: “what if the parents of that future ‘someone else’ took issue with the fact that I wasn’t a virgin?” 

Miss Lu, born the same year into a Shandong farming village, went the other way. She lost her virginity at twenty-two after a Christmas party and remembered it warmly, as “a pleasant sensation, leaving me desiring more,” and then found her way to Guangzhou, a circle of feminist friends, and a series of foreign lovers her mother could not talk her out of. The woman from the city is trapped and the woman from the country is free, which is the reverse of the map the reader brought in. 

Harder evidence concerns the men. Pressed in interviews, a significant minority—around a third—described their first time with a girlfriend as something close to force. One put it without embarrassment. “Although my girlfriend said no, her body said yes.” The same men were breezy about their own virginity; one told Liu it was “trivial for men. It doesn’t matter.” This asymmetry shows the book’s claim that intimacy reproduces rather than dissolves inequality. New marital and sexual scripts bring old hierarchies back to life. Nor does the pattern stop at the bedroom door of the unmarried. Inside long marriages, a wife explains that “my mind has taught my body to be passive,” and a husband describes waking his wife in the night until she gets up, goes to the bathroom “to wake herself up, and then cooperate.”

Not every marriage runs this way. One granddaughter speaks with real pride of a husband who both earns and cooks, who shares the childcare, and whom she would marry again without hesitation. Sometimes the equal, companionate marriage the modern story promises does arrive. But consider the story’s deepest promise, a love that answers to nothing but itself, which turns up in this book in the unlikeliest place. It survives in the affair. Ms. Tian, married at twenty-three into a violent household in Shandong, cannot leave: divorce might drive her migrant husband to harm her children or her parents, and she needs the twenty thousand yuan a year he brings in. So she conducts a hidden romance with a married party official, the one relationship she chose freely and the one cleared of any family obligation. “Whatever I can’t get from my husband,” she says, “I can get from him.” They have promised to live together when they are eighty. The freest love in the book is the one that had to hide—from regimes of intimacy that have decided in advance what love is permitted to be.

Liu’s approach cannot easily reach into the intimate realm. This chapter abandons the multigenerational structure because it is difficult to get all members of one family to speak about sex. The book’s larger claim to trace “the whole gamut of family practices over the entire course of life” within families therefore has a hole at a generative and most intimate point. 

Chapter 4 delivers an insight that is easier to develop within the book’s frame. Almost everyone reads the grandmother raising the grandchild as ancient Confucian custom. Liu’s three-generation structure shows the opposite: “while grandparenthood is traditionally honored in Chinese families, far from being rooted in Chinese culture, grandparenting is quite recent in origin.” The mass shift from grandparenthood (honored status) to grandparenting (childcare as duty) is a product of the last two generations. Kinship has no essence that persists. Grandparenting is a contested and desired good fought over between and within generations. 

Consider Mother Huang. Costed at a live-in nanny’s rate, her unpaid childcare saved her adult children some 300,000 yuan, more than the wealthy paternal grandparents contributed in cash, and it counted for nothing, because care performed inside a family is treated as natural and therefore free. Multiply Mother Huang across the country and you have the care infrastructure the state chose not to build. Mao-era urban grandmothering began because the state put women in full-time jobs then retired them early—fifty or fifty-five, while their daughters were working—which manufactured a cohort of available grandmothers who hadn’t existed in that form before. In the reform-era, the near-absence of public childcare created a void between the end of maternity leave and the start of kindergarten that conscripted grandmothers as unpaid carers. Housing arrangements confirm childcare arrangements—Mother Huang moved into her child’s second bedroom while Father Huang stayed in the family flat fifteen minutes away, so she is physically installed in the site of expectation. 

We’ve encountered the romantic Grandma Chen and her grandson the skeptic; the book shows how the idea of progress as linear change fails in this family, and in Chinese family life more broadly. Liu’s move is to compare across generations rather than across space, which would smuggle back the track of progress that she refuses. She asks us not to read China through tired stories of modernity, especially the one where industrialization pulls the world towards the nuclear, conjugal family. But the book draws heavily on British sociology and she is comfortable exporting this vocabulary to Xi’an work units and Shandong farms. Her interrogation of Western concepts is selective: sustained when it comes to the grand theory, barely when it comes to working analysis. 

This selectiveness has a cost at the very end, when Liu makes a bold claim that lifelong intergenerational interdependence is China’s “most distinctive feature.” Liu’s method handles the myth-busting well: China is not on the Western track, and the track is a myth. But it cannot establish the positive claim. Of the comparators that would test it, some never enter (e.g. Southern Europe), and some appear in the footnotes but never in the argument (e.g. the rest of East Asia). The problem isn’t ignorance of these cases—it’s a division of labour in which the West generates the concepts and the rest only does corroborative work. We never learn what is distinct about China set beside other “off-track” societies, let alone what is “most distinctive.” 

The family is not an autonomous social institution that the state acts on; it is made substantially of state policy. Liu’s chapter on grandparenting is not the only time when “family tradition” turns out to be the result of administrative decisions. Take the expectation that the husband’s family provides the marital home. Liu shows this is not timeless custom but “effectively adapting the patrilocal custom to the twenty-first century”—the same gendered outcome delivered first by the work unit’s allocation of flats to married men, then by the market’s transfer of that cost to the groom’s family. Policy does more than disguise itself as custom; it also produces what it never meant to. The 1950s settlement is the sharp case. Near-universal female employment and early retirement undermined the patrilineal bias of urban families—and, a generation on, manufactured the cohort of retired grandmothers the reform economy would conscript. The same policy modernized the family and, in time, re-traditionalized it. 

What policy can do is reshape the family’s internal structure, or restrict decisions—fewer births, later marriage. What it cannot do is add demand, because addition depends on desire, especially in a state that has spent decades building instruments to subtract rather than instruments to create. In this fundamental sense, the family cannot escape the state’s reach, and neither is its future something that the state can design.

Lucas Tse is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

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Hugh Shapiro reviews Du Chunmei, Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II 

Du Chunmei, Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Prof. Du Chunmei’s Everyday Occupation: American GIs and Chinese Civilians After World War II is groundbreaking. Imaginatively conceived and meticulously researched, this innovative book analyzes grassroots encounters between American servicemen and Chinese civilians from 1945 to 1949, showing that these everyday interactions shaped postwar modern China as profoundly as diplomatic strategy or battlefield outcomes. Among its richest analytical frameworks is “uneven reciprocity,” which captures how the formal architecture of Sino-American relations proclaimed equality while systematically favoring American interests in practice.

Everyday Occupation moves across an engrossing range of contact zones: the staged theatrics of Japanese surrender ceremonies; the racialized dimensions of sensory encounters; the symbolic arc of the Jeep from liberation trophy to instrument of terror; the complex persona of the “Jeep girl”; the fraught encounters in ambiguously defined territory between American forces and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) guerrillas, alienated Nationalist soldiers, local bandits, and armed civilians; the circulation of American commodities from coffee to penicillin to weapons, and the myriad conflicts these items engendered; all amid the repatriation of Japanese forces, the location of American POWs, and the resurgence of the GMD (Guomindang)–CCP civil war. This postwar drama of American forces in China was transformative, deeply influencing how events would play out between the two countries in the following decades.

This study is also heartbreaking. Tragedy was baked into the very forces set in motion at the end of the apocalypse of World War II. At the official level, US policy was conflicting, confused, and distracted, nominally neutral yet favoring the Nationalists (Guomindang). At the operational level, US ground forces mixed minimally trained raw recruits with battle-hardened veterans of the bloodiest Pacific campaigns, bearing their fatigue, homesickness, and PTSD. China’s suffering in the war is difficult to comprehend, with estimates of war dead ranging from fifteen to twenty million people. At war’s end, Chinese society was not only deeply wounded and heavily militarized, but also, in many areas, impoverished. This set the stage for horrendous encounters between US security forces guarding supply depots stocked with tons of food, fuel, commodities, and weapons, and the Chinese civilians who lived alongside them. Add to this the criminally inadequate linguistic preparation given to US forces in this environment. One tragic example from the book illustrates the point.

GIs guarding American assets in China were taught the Chinese word for “freeze,” something a person in law enforcement or on guard duty might yell at a suspect in the United States, understood as “halt.” In China, however, “freeze” carries none of that meaning. Worse, the word taught (dongge) was not only an inaccurate transliteration, it sounded much closer to dong 動, meaning “to move,” the exact opposite of the intended command. Add to this, genuine dialectal differences between the northern idiom being taught and the many dialects (languages, really) spoken throughout the country. When an American sentry shouted “dongge!” at a person suspected of trespassing or theft, believing he was ordering a halt, the suspect often ran instead, and was sometimes shot to death by the sentry. By 1945, the US Army had many highly skilled linguists fluent in both Chinese and English, yet this training gap persisted among the sentries posted at supply depots and elsewhere. This language-driven disaster captures the weariness and inattention of the American occupation during those troubled years.

Each chapter is methodologically and thematically distinct, bringing fresh material and insights to bear; I treat each in turn.

Chapter 1, “Occupying China: Mission Impossible,” traces the structural contradictions of the American military mission in postwar China, defined from the outset by the impossibility of maintaining neutrality in a civil war while assisting one of its combatants. Its treatment of the Japanese surrender ceremonies is a highlight: read as staged performances of American power addressed to multiple audiences, these ceremonies reveal how the occupation’s political logic worked through ritual and symbol as much as force. The contrast between the elaborate American-led ceremonies in Tianjin and Qingdao and the more restrained Chinese national ceremony in Nanjing suggests a complex sentiment among Chinese leaders, a mix of appreciation and quiet humiliation at their role as supporting players in what was, formally, their victory. 

Like much of this book, the section on American war crimes trials in China is original and important. This largely overlooked episode, in which the US military arrogated to itself the authority to arrest, detain, and try Japanese, German, Taiwanese, Filipino, and even American civilians on China’s soil, without formal authorization from China, is built on meticulous archival research. Reading the jurisdictional disputes as a microcosm of uneven reciprocity is persuasive and opens a productive new understanding of the history of extraterritoriality.

Chapter 2, “Sensory Contact: Life in the Orient,” ambitiously takes the senses (sight, smell, taste, sound, touch) as analytical categories.  The author’s recovery of the texture of everyday life in occupied China is innovative and illuminating. The discussion of smell stands out: American fixation on stench is traced not to a spontaneous reaction to unfamiliar conditions, but to a racialized mode of perception rooted in nineteenth-century discourses of civilizational hierarchy. The observation that American soldiers dwelled on the “atavistic filth” of an inherited memory based on racist tropes, while ignoring the industrial stench they themselves had generated in the Pacific campaigns, is a damning illustration of how even sensory experience is mediated by bigotry.

The sections on food and language are also fascinating. Reading pidgin English as a site of mutual misunderstanding and co-creation, rather than simply a tool of colonial domination, captures the entangled nature of Sino-American interaction. The etymological discussions of “ding hao” and “gung ho” illustrate how cultural contact produces hybrid forms that resist claims of authorship by either side of the encounter.

Chapter 3, “Embodied Vehicles: Jeep and GIs,” treats a single object, the Jeep, as the lens for examining Sino-American friction at the grassroots level. Its central argument traces the Jeep’s symbolic arc from trophy of liberation and object of popular fascination to instrument of terror and, ultimately, emblem of occupation. The concept of the merged “Jeep/GI,” a technologically enhanced, hypermasculine body blurring the boundary between human and machine, is a striking example of the book’s creative originality.

The analysis of the GI–rickshaw puller relationship as structured simultaneously by patronage, fantasy, rivalry, and violence recovers a type of encounter that often transpires out of sight and thus falls off the record. The reconstruction of two cases, drawn from petition letters, court-martial records, and CCP propaganda, shows how working-class victims were absorbed into nationalist narratives, sometimes serving interests other than their own. The epilogue tracing the Jeep’s afterlife, from captured war matériel to the domestically manufactured “Beijing Jeep,” is poetic, evocative to anyone who lived in China during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Chapter 4, “Intimate Relations: Jeep Girls and Gendered Nationalism,” positions sexual politics at the center of Sino-American relations during and after World War II. It recovers the “Jeep girl” debate as a genuine intellectual controversy, one that exceeds its usual framing as nationalist condemnation. Mapping conservative, liberal, leftist, and feminist voices, the author shows the phenomenon prompted sharp disagreement about modernity, Westernization, and women’s self-determination, before the 1946 Peking rape incident collapsed this plurality into a single hypernationalist register.

The chapter argues convincingly that the Peking rape case did not only inflame existing sentiment but restructured what could be said: former defenders of Jeep girls went silent or reversed course, and women’s experiences were absorbed into competing Nationalist and Communist agendas, neither of which treated the case as an issue focused on women. The concluding long view, tracing the Jeep girl trope through the Cultural Revolution into contemporary nationalism, is compelling and thought-provoking.

Chapter 5, “Entangled Goods: American Charms and Harms,” could be expanded into a monograph in itself.  It shifts the analysis to commodities themselves, canned food, coffee, Coca-Cola, DDT, penicillin, tracing how these objects became sites where larger geopolitical contests were experienced by ordinary people. The chapter refuses the binary of ‘American gift versus American harm’ that both 1940s-era writing and later scholarship sometimes impose: a rickshaw puller drinks instant coffee at a streetside stand; a student is stripped of a GI parka by military police; a local canned food company packages its product in American tin. In each case, American things simultaneously create new social spaces, economic dependencies, and grievances, often within the same object and the same body.

Epilogue, “Revisiting the Lost Era,” traces a genealogy of anti-American sentiment as a reusable political technology. Encountering GI misconduct, the CCP curated a repertoire of incidents, images, and victim archetypes reactivated across decades, from the Korean War through the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing. Du’sanalysis of the San Mao series is especially poignant, showing how a beloved fictional character became a vessel for transmitting this emotional script across generations. The epilogue also situates the post-war mission as a template for later American interventions, linking postwar occupation failures to Cold War patterns in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Finally, a word about Prof. Du Chunmei’s research and sources. The scholarship is deep, extensive, exemplary. Chinese-language materials are drawn from archives across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, spanning Republican-era government documents, CCP internal records, municipal administrative files, and local historical literature. Japanese sources appear indirectly, through translated memoirs and war crimes trial documents. The archival work is extensive and meticulous, including municipal archives in Beijing, Chongqing, Nanjing, Qingdao, Shanghai, and Tianjin, alongside Academia Historica in Taipei and the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database in Hong Kong. American archives include the National Archives, the Marine Corps History Division, the Hoover Institution, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, and oral history and manuscript collections at California State University Northridge, Columbia, Harvard, and other institutions. 

The periodical sources are also striking: roughly one hundred titles, both in Chinese and English. Chinese-language publications range from major national newspapers to illustrated weeklies, women’s magazines, children’s periodicals, and specialist trade journals. English titles include American newspapers, popular magazines, African-American press outlets, military unit publications, marine bulletins, submarine dailies, and service newspapers. Other sources include veteran memoirs, official US military handbooks, diplomatic papers, CCP propaganda compilations, statistical reports from China, court-martial records, oral histories, and an extensive interdisciplinary scholarly literature.

Everyday Occupation is a fascinating and important study. This original work will be read with great interest across disciplines.  I recommend it both to specialists and to serious readers of history, all of whom will be richly rewarded. 

 

Hugh Shapiro is associate professor of East Asian history at the University of Nevada, Reno. He works on the history of disease in comparative context.

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William Marotti, Sovereignty and Nuclear Politics in 1968: the Visit of the USS Enterprise to Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture

Last year marked the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also marked a new era in nuclear dangers, with the imminent expiration of the last of the strategic nuclear weapons treaties (New START). While the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has no expiration date, the associated commitment to a moratorium on tests by the signatory nations appears to be at risk of faltering. The 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites by Israel and the United States further imperil nonproliferation efforts by making transparency a potential risk, a situation compounded in 2026 by rhetoric threatening civilization-level death and other signs of unpredictable judgment.1

The memory of those atomic bombings eight decades ago has remained fraught in Japan, with survivors of the attacks—hibakusha—on the one hand facing discrimination, and on the other hand finding their perspectives caught up in national and international politics, appropriated for ends they do not support.2 Meanwhile, even as worries about some country finally breaking the “nuclear taboo” have escalated, the Japanese government has refused to sign onto the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.3

The gap between the urgent “lessons” of this past’s nearly incommunicable experience and the realities of continuing nuclear politics detached from any such assessment becomes ever clearer when considered against the ways in which the Japanese and American security states have worked to suppress objections to nuclear dangers. The legacy of the two nuclear attacks is intertwined with constraints on the exercise of postwar democracy and decades of extensive American involvement—overt and covert—in Japanese domestic politics.4 I will consider the legacy of one major confrontation—protests against the arrival of the nuclear powered, and nuclear armed USS Enterprise in Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture in January 1968—as a moment deeply embedded within this longer history. Reframing this legacy against demands for popular sovereignty and political debate shifts the terms of discussion from a frozen moment of hellish attack to a long-deferred question of democratic accountability of states to their publics.

Discussions of wartime experiences necessarily involve questions inconvenient to state political objectives. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, discussions and representations of the atomic bombings were specifically subject to censorship, and even undercover police surveillance once the Korean War began.5 Commitments to promoting a vigorous postwar democracy were attenuated for strategic concerns, and by what political scientist and Occupation Government Section staffer John M. Maki described as the “identity of interest between the Occupation and the government,” a situation created by the “decision to act through [the existing] Japanese government.”6 Despite early purges of militarists, the postwar state managed to preserve major portions of the Imperial state and its personnel with the assistance of the Occupation, colluding so as to limit popular sovereignty.7

Nuclear and strategic policy maintained and obscured this political legacy. The end year of the Occupation in 1952 coincided with the first Hydrogen Bomb test, and the ongoing Korean War. Signed in 1951, the Peace Treaty ending the Occupation was coupled with a Security Treaty that put Japan squarely within American strategic planning, securing basing rights, transit, and continuing extensive support for America’s cold and hot wars—and thereby made Japan a potential target should nuclear warfare eventuate.8 In contrast to Japanese national governmental acquiescence and accommodation, successive Hiroshima City mayors from 1947 would issue Peace Declarations on the anniversary of the August 6, 1945 bombing, and, beginning in September of 1968, would write directly to countries conducting nuclear tests to convey their opposition.9

Although the postwar constitution “renounced war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” daily life after the Allied Occupation was closely bound to Asian wars: war procurements during both the Korean and ongoing Vietnam Wars were crucial in inaugurating economic recovery and high growth, in turn supporting the U.S.-favored ruling party.10 The Korean War and Vietnam War also involved Japan directly, via two large naval bases, six air bases, and over 140 smaller bases, logistic depots, hospitals, and communication facilities. Another 80 were on Okinawa, which had remained under American governance; the first troops dispatched to Vietnam came directly from Okinawa, with Kadena Air Force Base going from sporadic use to full bombing sorties beginning in February of 1968.11 Strategic technology transfers and other support boosted the growing electronics industry.12 Hot and Cold Wars alike link present-day security with the recent imperial past: American Occupation planning sought to return Japan to economic regional preeminence similar to that of its wartime Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a goal finally realized in the 1960s through Vietnam-era economic involvements.13

The gulf between popular support for peace and denuclearization and a daily life deeply tied to war would come to the fore with the January 1968 visit of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Enterprise to the naval base US Fleet Activities Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture. For years, American strategists had expressed frustration with the troublesome resistance of the Japanese public to nuclear warfare, sometimes described as their curious “nuclear allergy,” and annoyance with the limits such opinions had on deployments involving bases in Japan.14 To promote compliance, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku had begun a multiyear campaign to increase public “defense consciousness,” but continuing wars and threats made such goals fraught at best.

A Department of State declassified memo on the visit made the intertwined objectives for the Enterprise visit explicitly clear:

The longer range political reason for the visit is our desire to involve Japan increasingly in our Far East defense posture… we also see some advantage in conditioning the Japanese to military nuclear matters since a solution to the Okinawa problem may well entail returning the island to Japanese administration while continuing to store nuclear weapons at our bases.15

Prime Minister Satō had publicly called for the reversion of Okinawa to Japan while campaigning in 1964, and in a highly-publicized visit to Okinawa in 1965 declared that Japan’s postwar era would not be over until Okinawa was restored.16 Expectations were thus raised following his November 1967 visit to Washington D.C. and meeting with President Johnson that progress to reversion might soon be seen.17 Protests at Haneda Airport sought to impede his departure, and to somehow ignite the underlying and potentially explosive issues involved, including active warmaking from American bases and especially of the assumed but scrupulously unacknowledged presence of nuclear weapons.18 The upcoming visit of the Enterprise in turn raised these stakes significantly.

The Japanese government had long maintained a declared policy of prohibiting the “introduction” of nuclear weapons, producing public suspicions over the improbability that, for example, American ships docking at Japanese bases would have been purged of such weapons. The negotiations for the return of Okinawa raised the issue anew, as reversion would, according to Satō, make it “on par with the mainland,” thereby begging the question again as to the nature of those arrangements.19 In the context of the government’s push to increase the public’s “defense consciousness,” and possible Okinawan reversion, the visit of the USS Enterprise “had given visit [the] character of [a] deliberate effort by Sato government to overcome Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy,’” according to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, U. Alexis Johnson, that is, to get the public to tacitly accede to nuclear weapons in both mainland ports and post-reversion Okinawa.20

A number of groups planned to oppose the visit of the Enterprise with a large demonstration at the naval base in Sasebo, again in the hopes of triggering a broader public opposition—to nuclear weapons, to the Security Treaty (up for renewal again in 1970), and to the deep involvement of Japan in hot and cold wars and the consequent threat of a conflagration. Japanese and U.S. officials were however sanguine about the situation. Prior confrontations such as in November of 1967 had met with public disapproval, while earlier regular visits of nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) since 1964 had apparently been successful in desensitizing the public.21 The Mayor of Sasebo, Tsuji Ichizō, had visited Ambassador Johnson and had promised that “his police and most of the townspeople were prepared to give the [student protesters] a warm welcome,” and asked for 48 hours’ notice to assist in billeting the “several thousand police reserves that he plans to mobilize.”22

Most of Ambassador Johnson’s January 17 telegram to the Secretary of State was dictated prior to protester-police confrontations. He expresses concern that “sensational press treatment that may well be given to accounts of violence instigated by a very small handful of extremist students who enjoy no substantial support…” He added, “[the] fact that they have obtained little or no popular or press support of any kind has encouraged police to take a harder line with them. [The Government of Japan] has mobilized in Sasebo several thousand riot police from all over Japan…”23

Ambassador Johnson’s chief concern was instead over the possibility of a “fluke”: “If even one American navy ‘defector’ fell into clutches of Beheiren (anti-Viet peace group) [sic] and started sounding off about presence [of] nuclear weapons on Enterprise, a situation would be created that, depending on its exploitation by opposition, could do considerable harm.”24 This group, the “Peace in Vietnam!” Citizens’ Federation,” Beheiren, had achieved growing prominence the previous Fall in part by facilitating the defection of four sailors from the USS Intrepid out of Japan to the Soviet Union and then to Sweden. The group and its contacts were among many that had been put under surveillance prior to the visit, with details shared with U.S. officials.25

Despite (or perhaps because of) the meticulous planning, it was in fact police overreaction that provoked a national outcry. On January 17, two days before the delayed Enterprise arrived, police exercised their “increased authority” in a spectacular manner.26 As the Embassy reported,

As hundreds of reporters and cameramen looked on, about 375 plastic-helmeted, stave carrying and rock-throwing Sampa Rengo students charged about four times as many riot policemen at a bridge directly in front of the US naval base… the police responded with their own billyclub charge, supported by tear gas and water cannon. The peak of the clash coincided perfectly with the noon television news and millions of television viewers were permitted to see the full force of the police counteroffensive…

[The American Consulate in Fukuoka] also reported …a curious shift in the Sasebo citizens’ attitudes occurred. “The initial mood of apprehension and annoyance at the invasion of trouble-making students was replaced by sympathy and even grudging admiration”… Judging from the press, similar shifts of attitude seemed to be taking place throughout the country.27

The riot police had in fact effectively enacted a spectacular police riot, beating and gassing not only protesters but also citizen onlookers and members of the press, chasing them onto the grounds of the Sasebo Citizens’ Hospital and beating them with their meter-long truncheons despite their lack of resistance. Citizens reportedly intervened too as police dragged injured students from the hospital, or witnessed other acts of excessive police violence.28 The Mayor himself was reportedly shocked by the results of this “warm welcome” and issued a public apology to gassed hospital patients and injured bystanders; police too were ordered to pay courtesy calls to injured citizens.29

Rather than somehow finalizing a homeopathic treatment of the longstanding “nuclear allergy,” or easing negotiations over Okinawa and over the 1970 renewal of the Security Treaty with the U.S., the visit made the Enterprise an icon for nuclear weapons within an inflamed public discourse. The police violence raised the larger question of why, given the likelihood of confrontations, it was necessary to stage this visit—and pay such a price—for a ship only two weeks out of port.30 In the context of Satō’s vague call for “defense consciousness,” Ambassador Johnson observed, it

raised old fears of resurgent militarism and newer fears of nuclear armament. The Enterprise visit is widely interpreted as U.S. collusion with Sato’s scheming to overcome Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy’ (read nuclear weapons allergy). This becomes related to current speculation about U.S. insistence on nuclear bases on Okinawa is price for reversion and Sato’s willingness to pay that price.31

The Government of Japan “had crawled out on a long limb insisting that there could not repeat not have been nukes on Enterprise because U.S. government did not ask for prior consultations.”32 In the wake of the Enterprise’s visit, some Diet members and even Foreign Minister Miki Takeo went on record explicitly denying the presence of nuclear weapons aboard the Enterprise, causing real concern for the U.S. State Department.33

In Japan, the visit was a political watershed: on the one hand, in the face of popular outrage, police were instructed to shift to a defensive position from their posture of aggressive response. On the other, that aggressive response had inaugurated a debate about the government’s violence against its own citizens in support of war. The consequent combination of self-restraint on the part of the previously activist police and augmented public attention made possible the flourishing of new forms of mass political activism in Japan, particularly through non-sectarian and non-party organizations such as Beheiren and the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees [Zenkyōtō]: their ranks rapidly swelled through the involvement of “ordinary” people and students without prior political experience.34 A “1968” experience in Japan was thus enabled through the unintended consequences of this nuclear politics, and the contradictions between strategic arrangements and popular sovereignty.35

While Prime Minister Satō’s 1965 declaration that the “postwar era” would not be over until Okinawa was returned echoed and antedated other similar statements asserting an end to “postwar,” it shifted the metric for this recurring declaration from economic recovery to a recompletion of the national territory.36 Nonetheless, the suppressed issues around nuclear politics pointed to something more fundamental than economics or territorial integrity: a “postwar” that marked a democracy shot through with unexamined histories and compromises, and a persisting relation to wars old and ongoing. The notion of a restored national unit likewise willfully obscured the thin lines between Okinawan incorporation and the colonial expansions and wars involved in establishing the nation-state of Japan. That long history had been deeply connected to the Asia-Pacific War, with the Pacific theater conflicts fought between imperial powers largely on colonial and semi-colonial territories, and with the post-WWII warfare that followed the “Japanese interregnum” displacing colonial rule, including in Indochina.37 The repeated demands to “end” that “postwar,” that is, that ceaseless relation to war, amounted to a demand to forget the aporetic legacy and embrace a sanitized recovered memory of its history. Okinawan reversion was held out as promising to restore national sovereignty, but the conditions for those negotiations, like all prior strategic negotiations, demanded a short-circuiting of popular sovereignty by secret compromises with the United States, as well as a truncated understanding of nuclear politics in the one country ever subjected to nuclear attack.

The continued entanglements in America’s ongoing wars—Vietnam, and possibly Korea again (the Pueblo incident in 1968 threatened to ignite a second Korean War)—marked a shared relation to warmaking that fundamentally disregarded public scrutiny in the name of national security. Participation in American wars was likewise underwritten by secrecy and manipulations of the public, and even state violence and propaganda, in defiance of democratic debate. Revelations of obscured histories, outright falsehoods and illegal government actions in the wake of the Vietnam War and contemporaneous protests would occasion myriad attempts in the United States to reign in the out of control national security state, from the War Powers Resolution of November 7, 1973 to multiple congressional committee hearings, including the creation of the Church and Pike Committees, and subsequently the establishment of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.38 In Japan, disclosures confirming the long-rumored CIA station and its role in facilitating and supporting the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, actions and propaganda against the left, and of the secret agreements regarding transit and storage of nuclear weapons, would be years in coming.39

The conflict at Sasebo in January of 1968 arose from the attempt by the U.S. and Japanese governments to facilitate nuclear involvements in regional warfare, to desensitize perceptions and obscure historical recollections over the atomic logics linking the two states together at a time in which ongoing conflicts, sustained by bad reasoning and misrepresentations, threatened further escalations and conflagrations. The police violence brought to bear upon the protests instead underlined for many the ways in which their government was committed to collusion and participation in warfare. If it led the way for a “1968” in Japan, its legacy also points to the link between official secrecy, the sidelining of popular sovereignty, and the likelihood of military misadventure—and even of a breaking of the nuclear taboo. While voices across the political spectrum have blamed some version of 1968 for our contemporary woes—from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to Slavoj Zizek—the actuality of that global moment was grounded in solidarity, in improbable recognitions across ostensibly incommensurate local scenes of struggle, equating all of the myriad forms of domination against the singularity of demands for liberation, equality, and voice.40 The present moment, with the spread of rightist governments, jingoistic, bigoted scapegoating rhetorics, and extralegal state violence, with oligarchs discussing the human race as disposable “biological bootloaders” while talking about “Navigating World War Three” and “Bring Back Nuclear,” all point to a moment in which humanity’s fate is again at stake.41 Who will decide our destiny this time?

William Marotti is  Professor in the Department of History at UCLA.

Police, demonstrators and onlookers face off at Sasebo. U.S. Navy photo, U.S. Navy Operational Archives.

Further Reading (in English):

For those interested in a deeper dive into some of the topics considered above, please consider the following.

The literature on the atomic bombings is massive; here are just a few selections in English: On Hiroshima’s expansion to global status and the making of “Hiroshima” memories, see Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima traces: time, space, and the dialectics of memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On the “postmemory” generations in relation to official memoration, see Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: history, memory, and Japan’s unending postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʿi Press, 2017). On the relative occlusion of Nagasaki and its specifics see Chad Diehl, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). A monument commemorating the thousands of Korean victims of the atomic bombing was finally moved within the Hiroshima Peace Park in 1999 (see Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb, accessed August 12, 2025). While twelve American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, some three thousand American citizens of Japanese descent, largely children of 1st generation issei who could not naturalize, also became victims: see Thousands of Japanese Americans Were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The US Government Still Won’t Recognize Them. – Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment, accessed August 12, 2025.

Historian Eiji Takemae notes that the nascent peace movement was seen as “communist inspired,” rather like most forms of dissent during the late Occupation and its Red Purges. See Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, translated and adapted by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (New York: Continuum, 2003), 506. On public discussions and state surveillance of the Maruki’s work see Yoshida Yoshie, “With the Hiroshima Panels on My Back,” trans. Mabuchi Kanako, National Center for Art Research, Japan, posted July 9, 2024, https://artplatform.go.jp/resources/readings/R202306. The Hiroshima Panels themselves are featured on the Maruki Gallery’s online page, The Hiroshima Panels | Maruki Gallery For The Hiroshima Panels.

Covert involvements involved manifold CIA payoffs supporting (and indeed helping to create) the Liberal Democratic Party which has dominated Japanese politics for decades. See JPRI Working Paper No. 11: July 1995 Chalmers Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction”; Norbert A. Schlei, “Japan’s “M-Fund” Memorandum, January 7, 1991,” and Michael Schaller, “America’s Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S. Japan Relations,” Working-Paper-11.pdf; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Democracy’s Porous Borders: Espionage, Smuggling and the Making of Japan’s Transwar Regime (Part I),” Japan Focus 12 (40), 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1557466014028009.

Foreign Minister (and Liberal Democratic Party President) Kōno Yōhei made a direct request to Ambassador Walter Mondale in 1995 that the US not release documents detailing CIA funding for the LDP in its formative years. The Ambassador, Embassy, and CIA station joined to urge suppression of the existence of the CIA station entirely. Embassy to Director, CIA, Telegram Tokyo 24344, “Eyes Only – For C/EA/J – Official Acknowledgement of Tokyo Station,” March 26, 1996, 2, Secret, Eyes Only. National Archives, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records, 2025 Release, Doc ID: 104-10326-10050. The Foreign Relations series would retrospectively acknowledge “in the 1958-1968 decade, the U.S. Government approved four covert programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political life” in 2006. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXIX, Part 2, Japan, ed. Karen L. Gatz (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2006), Editorial Note 1. Available online: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v29p2/d1. The debates over those disclosures are elaborated in William B. McAllister, Joshua Botts, Peter Cozzens, and Aaron W. Marrs, Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable”: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2015), chapter 12. Available online: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus-history/chapter-12. 

The revision and adoption of the 1951 Security Treaty into the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan occasioned huge protests throughout Japan between late 1959 and the spring of 1960. See Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2001); George Packard III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, N.J., 1966); Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines; Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

On the crucial role of a militarized Okinawa in the production of the mainland economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s, see Jon Mitchell, Why Are We in Okinawa?: A History of Violence (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). As Christopher Nelson observes, the enduring connections to war in the supposed “postwar” led photographer Higa Toyomitsu to call 2010 “year sixty-five of the Battle of Okinawa”; novelist and critic Medoruma Shun refers to the present as “year zero of the postwar,” in Nelson’s words “an unending duration of war, a peace yet to begin.” Christopher T. Nelson, When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060970

Departing Sasebo, the USS Enterprise was caught up with the seizure of the USS Pueblo, a SIGINT ship gathering intelligence off the coast of North Korea. On January 23, 1968, North Korean vessels fired upon and captured the ship and its crew, sparking an incident that raised fears of a second Korean War. The Enterprise, then en route to the Gulf of Tonkin, was rerouted to a position in the Sea of Japan. This fear is explicitly discussed in Airgram A-1098, 15 (see above), even before the Pueblo incident had been reported. The incident had followed close upon the “Blue House” raid of January 21, in which a North Korean team had attempted to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee. The attack was to press South Korea to withdraw its troops participating in the Vietnam War. See Steven Lee, “The Korean Armistice and the End of Peace: The US-UN Coalition and the Dynamics of War-Making in Korea, 1953-76,” Journal of Korean Studies 18 (2): 196-7. The Enterprise finally reached Yankee Station on February 21, three weeks after the start of the Tet Offensive, and commenced attacks on North Vietnam two days later. USS ENTERPRISE (CVAN-65) NARRATIVE COMMAND HISTORY 1968, unpaginated, available at: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-command-operation-reports/e/enterprise-cvn-65-viii/pdf/1968.pdf

On COINTELPRO and other covert abuses of power in the United States: the House Select Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were both created after a burglary of an FBI field office revealed COINTELPRO and massive, illegal surveillance and counterinsurgency acts by the FBI, CIA, military and other security entities. Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes that the 1997 report from the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy cited Max Weber’s discussion of secrecy and bureaucracy at length: the invention of “official secrets” by bureaucracy, the hiding of its knowledge and action, and its struggle against parliamentary inquiry—and hopes for a “poorly informed and hence powerless parliament.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: the American experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143.

On Okinawan reversion and nuclear weapons, and the Japanese government’s posture: Norris, Arkin and Burr describe Okinawa as “chock-a-block full of nuclear weapons of all types until 1972.” Norris, R. S., Arkin, W. M., & Burr, W., “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 55(6), 1999: 79. https://doi.org/10.2968/055006011. Bombs with removable capsules were helpful for politically sensitive allies, including Japan but also France. Ibid, 29. The National Intelligence Estimate of February 17, 1969 would anticipate that Satō “will feel compelled to press hard for the exclusion from Okinawa of the nuclear weapons which virtually all Japanese believe are stored there.“ Document 3. National Intelligence Estimate NIE 41–69, Washington, February 17, 1969, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XIX, Part 2, Japan, 1969-1972 (U.S. Department of State: 2022), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2, emphasis mine. In December of 1967 Prime Minister Satō was pressed on the intertwined issues of defense and nuclear weapons in relation to Okinawa; he attempted to shift the discourse from a debate about defense to that of “security,” asserting that protection under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was compatible with calling for an abolition of nuclear arms, with the Peace Constitution, and with Japan’s averred three nuclear principles—neither possessing nor manufacturing, and not introducing, nuclear weapons into Japan. 57th Diet, House of Representatives, Budget Committee, No. 2, December 11, 1967, 022,https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/txt/105705261X00219671211/22.

As I wrote elsewhere, “These [three] high-minded principles, which were part of the reason why Satō was chosen to share the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, were actually an exercise in dissimulation, and perhaps willful misunderstanding, that even today is incompletely detailed within the declassified archival record. By way of secret agreements to the Security Treaty in 1960, Japan explicitly permitted such transits… Satō’s three principles were in effect a doctrine of implausible deniability, sufficing nonetheless to deflect direct accusations of violation from the arrival of any particular ship—even a fully provisioned aircraft carrier heading for a combat station in proximity to Vietnam.” Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 112-13. On the nuclear weapons stored in the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands—also part of these negotiations—see the National Security Archive “Companion Page to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists January /February 2000 Issue,” U.S. Nuclear Weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima, accessed August 15, 2025. The islands were returned in 1968 with a secret provision that the U.S. could store nuclear weapons there in the event of an emergency.

Also in 1974, in October, Mayor Tsuji of Sasebo would join Tokyo Governor Ryokichi Minobe and Yokohama Mayor Ichiro Asukata in demanding the closure of Japan’s ports to US warships until the U.S. explicitly gives assurances that no nuclear weapons were being brought into Japan. See chronology, Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, Part I, 1960-1976 | National Security Archive (accessed August 15, 2025).

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Tejaswini Niranjana, The Dream-Work of Boredom: Remembering Ackbar Abbas (1942-2026)

When the news came that Ackbar Abbas was no more, I was shocked that someone who never seemed to grow old could have left us, just like that. I first met him in 2017 at his talk at the University of Hong Kong on fake news in the age of Trump. The talk was a brilliant but brief provocation on the false, the fake and the posthumous. All three terms would develop, as the years went by, his own unique spin. They would persist in his thinking as he used them to illuminate not just the contemporary world of late capitalism but also post-socialist societies, like the China in which he lived for part of the year. “Critique is always one revolution behind”, he pronounced in his customary gnomic fashion, as the audience full of PhDs struggled to grasp the arguments of the Laoshi (lo si in Cantonese), the master, who had never bothered to acquire a doctoral degree.

I had heard that the master, after years of living in the United States on retiring from HKU Comparative Literature, would not mind spending more time in Hong Kong, where he had family, and which was not too far from Beijing, where his wife Liu Sola (writer, composer, vocalist) lived. Hesitantly, I went up to speak to him and asked if he would consider visiting us at Lingnan University. My senior colleague Stephen Chan and I went to meet him at a café in Kennedy Town to discuss the details, and things moved quickly afterwards. Ackbar began to spend a few weeks every year as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies where Stephen and I worked. Each year, we planned a series of activities around his presence, starting with the Lingnan 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture he gave to a packed audience at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on October 23, 2017. Chatting with the attendees, I realised that a large number of them were his former Comp Lit students. They listened raptly to their Laoshi working his magic again, turning ordinary words into something that could shed light on major contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Here he re-introduced his concept of the posthumous, this time adding the term ‘socialism’ before it to describe present-day China, suggesting that China was neither capitalist or post-socialist in any simple way. Rather, the socialist past had a strong after-life, and might appear even more vibrant than before.

Here is the link to the lecture.

In my undergraduate core course at Lingnan on Culture and the Modern World, one of the first readings the students encountered was a chapter from Ackbar’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. In this prescient book, which came out in 1997 at the time of the Handover to China, Ackbar introduced the concept of ‘disappearance’, the one concept with which he is most associated, on which he is most extensively quoted. He initially used it to tackle the elusive and fugitive nature of culture in the former British colony. He argued that it was precisely at the intense moment caused by imminent disappearance that something like a ‘Hong Kong culture’ emerged.

He agreed very kindly to come and visit my class and talk to the students, who were struggling with the ideas of deja disparu and reverse hallucination. Perhaps it was not the right venue or the right audience for Ackbar, but at least I came away with a better understanding what this thinker, who always said he was born, brought up and corrupted in Hong Kong, was trying to articulate. And with a better understanding of Hong Kong too: how the rapidity of change in Hong Kong made one constantly battle with an anticipatory nostalgia, and with reverse hallucination, not seeing what is indeed there. Disappearance is connected to speed and the over-saturation of space with signs and images, leading to a kind of abstraction that is ‘ungraspable’. In this landmark book, Ackbar dwelt on cinema, architecture and literature, prefiguring his main preoccupations for the coming years. It was not that he set out to write about a film, an auteur, or an architect. These rich examples became for him a way of entering a thought-space and setting out concepts prompted by the material in front of him, concepts that could travel far beyond the film or the book. Although prompted by classic Western theorists like Kracauer, Benjamin, Virilio, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, et al, Ackbar’s agile thinking was constantly framing and reframing the world around him.

These moves were very much in evidence in a masterclass on ‘documenting Hong Kong’ at Lingnan, part of the Performing Archive series curated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, professor of practice that year. The series involved a docuthon, where three large screens showed Hong Kong documentaries in a loop for an entire day, followed by an engagement between Ackbar and Lingnan faculty and graduate students, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive. Ackbar picked up the terms put forward by his interlocutors in addressing the Hong Kong situation and gave his own glosses. ‘Failure as resistance’, he said, was not a romanticization of failure; instead, it should be seen as referring to new political models coming out of specific contexts. “If I don’t try too hard”, he said, “I’ll succeed in everything I do”. So one needs to fail. Failure is when you work with new impediments and with the unpredictable present. ‘Disappearance’ in the Hong Kong context was not part of a series including appear, reappear, disappear – all these were taking place at the same time.

Ackbar emphasized that we could not take the term ‘local’ literally (referring to the mini-film ‘Local Egg’ which is part of the 2015 Hong Kong fiction anthology ‘Ten Years’). Local cannot refer to a real, empirical entity, since the local is always dis-located. Just as Hong Kong can never be a nation; it’s a hyphenation. Another key term, ‘dependency’, was often used in the Hong Kong context, referring to Britain and/or China. But, said Ackbar, this was not like dependency in South America. In Hong Kong, dependency is turned into a fine art. It refers to arbitrage, to turn a profit. Ackbar also took up the concept of ‘demonstration’, which could be (a) a political gesture, and (b) a reference to what was being shown in the act, what critiques of the present emerged there, what sort of working through the archives it would involve. Just as in his response to the 1990s situation, Ackbar cast a critical eye on political developments post-Umbrella Movement, not denouncing or celebrating but trying to think through the complexity. The one thing he emphatically denounced, however, was sentimentality, whether emotional, cultural, or political.

Reading some of his unpublished essays now, and watching the recorded videos of his Lingnan lectures, we are struck by how certain ideas and tropes kept haunting the master. One of these is the ‘real’. “We are no longer in the real”, said Ackbar in his response to the Lingnan docuthon. “We are, to quote Baudrillard, in the desert of the real”. He began his commentary by invoking one of his favourite figures, Dziga Vertov, the Soviet film-maker who invented the ‘kino-eye’. Vertov’s ‘man with a movie camera’ overcomes, says Ackbar, the prejudice of the humanistic eye as it interrogates the ‘real’. While watching the Hong Kong documentaries for several hours at a stretch, Ackbar said he began to feel a certain boredom. Through the dream-work enabled by boredom he sought to analyse what documentary does. It’s no longer the lie that lies, he now thought. It’s the truth that lies. In a world where facts have become factoids and ‘reality’ is actually reality-TV, we see that the real exists as simulation. And when the real is simulation, what do you document? One can only indulge in nostalgia for the real. Akbar ended his masterclass remarks by claiming that documentary, like translation, is always impossible, “hence always a betrayal”. He proffered a different starting point, a challenge to the filmmaker: “Start with the fact of betrayal, and with the betrayal of fact”. This could become the new basis for documentary.

We did not see Ackbar again after 2020 and the breaking out of COVID, except for his gracious presence online at co-organised events between his home institution, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Centre for Cultural Research and Development (CCRD) at Lingnan Cultural Studies. Here is a link to his comments during our virtual research workshop on digital humanities during the pandemic, The Ghost in the (Twittering) Machine, Oct 24, 2020.

Starting with The Twittering Machine, a painting by Paul Klee, and a reference to the social media platform Twitter, Ackbar suggests that digital media is a ‘super-spreader’ of information and disinformation, or media-as-virus, and that the notion of the digital humanities might, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, actually produce monsters.

The last time we listened to Ackbar in a formal setting was during the 2021 research workshop, organised by UCHRI, CCRD and a newly-established Centre for Inter-Asia Research at Ahmedabad University, where I had just moved from Lingnan. After a discussion with Ackbar, and with the UCHRI Director, David Theo Goldberg, who had been a key presence in our collaboration, we decided the theme would be Racism by other Means. As we said in the workshop announcement: ‘Which are the novel (sociotechnical) ways through which racism(s) replicate, spread, infect, mutate, and travel? As forms of domination have changed, so do forms of resistance and compliance. This research training workshop aims to generate a multi-vocal conversation to understand how algorithmic racism may define new kinds of bio-politics, and how experiences and analyses of race/racism in one place can inform similar experiences and analyses in another place.’ You can view Ackbar’s short but sharp presentation at this link:

Ackbar spoke about the doxic as toxic, referring to the beliefs or doxa about race and races. He drew on three films, or as he put it, a single detail in each film, to point to the parodic doubling (another recurring theme in Ackbar’s work) in the production of commonsense. He began by saying that racism persists in posthumous form, not referring to its afterlife but its persistence in the form of hysteria (the symptoms of racism becoming arbitrary). Ackbar pointed to the larger social ecology in which racism existed, since it could not be enforced in isolation. His first example was from the Bruce Lee film Fists of Fury (1972), made in Hong Kong but set in the Shanghai of 1910 that faced various forms of foreign domination. The hero sees a signboard saying ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed’, and kicks the sign to pieces. The audience is meant to read this as an anti-racist moment. However, in the park where the sign is displayed is an Indian gatekeeper dressed in an exotic costume. Here the film’s protest against racism is occurring through the racist act of portraying the Indian, hence the parodic doubling of racism and anti-racism. Ackbar pointed to similar moves in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), where toleration could end up becoming the double of bigotry, and in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), where a fugitive woman fleeing gangsters is protected by a small town which subsequently turns against her. Three grim reminders of the doxic as toxic, and of racism by other means.

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Among my cherished memories of Ackbar is a chance meeting with him on the Mid-Levels escalator one afternoon in Hong Kong, the same escalator that features so prominently in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express. This was in 2019, in the semester Ackbar, Stephen Chan and Ashish Rajadhyaksha taught a course at Lingnan on Wong Kar-Wai. He often came over to Ashish’s and my flat in Yuen Long for dinner, and enjoyed chatting with the postgrad students and other faculty who sometimes were there too. Although Ackbar was fond of taking taxis, he came with us on the MTR many times, always insisting that he would not sit down, chatting in the same measured tones in which he gave a lecture as we clung to the overhead straps.

Having been grounded in the US by the pandemic, Ackbar was trying all kinds of strategies to be able to travel to China to be with his wife Liu Sola. We last spoke on Zoom some time before he headed back to Beijing. You will be greatly missed, Ackbar.

Writing this short piece gave me the opportunity to recollect the many wonderful occasions on which we interacted with Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. For making those occasions richer, and for their company during the Lingnan years, my warmest thanks to Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Kin Chi Lau, Lisa Leung, Anjeline de Dios, Soo Ryon Yoon, Roberto Castillo, Toto Eunsoo Lee and Kelvin Wu.

 

Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Director, Cente for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India. She is the author, most recently, of Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconsciousand the co-editor, with Ritty Lukose, of Digital Intimacy: Young Women, Gendered Modernities, and Aspirations in Inter-Asia.