Prisoners, diplomats, and saboteurs: an international history of the diplomacy of captivity during and following the Korean war

Abstract

Moving away from the high politics of the Cold War, this dissertation humanizes the Cold War struggle by placing a previously-forgotten and stigmatized group in the center of my scholarship. Based on previously-untapped archives, oral histories of the prisoners, official documents, and media reports from the United States, China, Taiwan, India, and Great Britain, this dissertation investigates the meaning of captivity. It examines how Cold War regimes—in this case, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, and the United States—utilized systematic indoctrination and political representations to contend for prisoners’ hearts and minds as a test of the superiority of each system. This dissertation argues that in the maneuvering of the issue of the prisoners of war, the United States gained an upper hand over Communist China by exploiting the behaviors of U.S. soldiers and non-repatriated Communist soldiers to fortify the ideological apparatus in both the U.S. and East Asia in the aftermath of the war.