ABSTRACT
The Cold War in East Asia, only secondarily a military standoff, was, first and foremost, a struggle to shape information regimes favorable to one or more of the parties to the Cold War. In this chapter, I argue that, from around the late 1960s, the Cold War in East Asia became part of an American effort to control the populations of various Asian peoples. This was part of a massive shift in American strategy from military confrontation during the early part of the East Asian Cold War, replete with an emphasis on the production of materiel for armed defense, toward the management of populations and their consumption of resources in order to maintain a concomitantly emerging consumption-based economy in the United States. The key document in this shift, National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200, also known as the “Kissinger Report”), shows how population control and the Club of Rome idea of a “population bomb,” with dire consequences for the United States’ economy and with deep roots in Malthusianism in Europe, eugenics in the United States, and eugenics programs in Japan, influenced the ways in which American institutions and individuals waged information regime Cold War in East Asia.
