Présentation

Judd Kinzley (University of Wisconsin-Madison), accueilli à l’EHESS par Pablo Blitstein, prononcera une conférence sur Chinese Businessmen and the Wartime Roots of American Economic Power, 1938-1961.

From 1940 to 1945, the United States relied heavily on a steady stream of Chinese tungsten ore, hog bristles, and tung oil in order to power American wartime industry. The flow of Chinese products to the United States was only possible with the efforts of a small handful of Chinese businessmen who served as the linchpins in a vast wartime production network that channelled raw materials from China’s rural hinterland to American factories. The wartime efforts of these businessmen helped lay the foundation for a postwar, America-centered Cold War international order that was shored up through the exchange of resources for dollars with allied countries throughout Latin America and the Pacific. This talk will focus on one of these businessmen, a man named Li Guoqin or K.C. Li, who was later known as China’s ‘Tungsten King’, to reveal the powerful role that these businessmen played in shaping the dimensions of American power in East Asia, Latin America, and the wider Cold War world.

Judd C. Kinzley is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), focuses on the 20th century efforts by an assortment of state and non-state, Chinese and non-Chinese actors to find, exploit, process, and transport various natural resources in china’s far western province of Xinjiang. The work, which is based on archival research conducted in Urumqi (Xinjiang), Beijing, Taipei, Moscow, and London, explores the underexamined nexus that exists between natural resources, foreign capital, and the power of the state in borderlands in china and beyond. He is currently working on a new book length project that focuses on the trans-pacific material exchange of American industrial goods and lend-lease equipment for Chinese raw materials during the 1940s. He has published articles on gold mining, roads, and geological surveys and, broadly speaking has research interests that center around environmental history, borderlands, material centered histories, and political economy.

 

Lieu

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