ABSTRACT
The early 1950s in Asia were marked on the one hand by the local movements against colonialism and on the other by the conflict between the socialist camp and the free world. There was a proliferation of communist movements, more or less closely attached to the ruling communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. Official American policy defined, at least for public purposes, communism as a monolithic, disciplined political movement, directed from Moscow, bent on world domination. The Asian economic model, including its Chinese version, was predicated on limited political participation by the public at large. Both conservative and radical elites in Asia found common ground in decrying the American influence, basing their complaints on a purported incompatibility of American ways with "Asian" culture. The Cold War was mainly an ideological confrontation between sovereign states, and the appeal of communism was in principle more cross-cultural than Islamism is likely to be.
