United States and served as the state’s mechanism for his removal. Passed at the height of the U.S. anticommunist crusade, the McCarran-Walter Act rearticulated immigration reform as a cold war imperative, admitting “desirable” immigrant subjects through numerical quotas while administering new restrictions to exclude and expel “undesirable” aliens from U.S. borders. Although the act did not specify any provisions for admitting refugees, section 243(h) of the act stipulated that deportation might be withheld for any alien who faced physical persecution in his country of origin.108 Reiterated in the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, the U.S. resolve to protect deportable aliens from persecution underscored the liberal anticommunist consensus that reaffirmed the United States’s belief in itself as a beacon of democracy. Asian military assets like Hsuan Wei exploited this legal-cultural loophole, reconstituting themselves as “political refugees.” In so doing, they not only deprived the Chinese government of “valuable human material … likely to contribute to the development and the welfare of Formosa,” as Francis E. Walter, the coauthor of the 1952 immigration law, put it, but they also subverted the boundary between “foreign” and “domestic” that was becoming increasingly important and difficult to pinpoint during this time.109
Wei had become an “illegal alien” at the end of his journey as a militarized subject, and this was not an anomaly. It was entirely logical within the broader U.S. project of policing the boundaries of “free Asia.” His transformation from a military asset into an immigration problem revealed the severe restrictions undergirding the terms of Asian inclusion into the U.S. transnational security state. He could be one or the other and nothing else; any deviation demanded swift reprisal and containment. Against these legal subjections, Wei nonetheless and remarkably carved a life for himself beyond what U.S. and Taiwanese officials had envisioned for him. In 1967, after a six-year hiatus from the media spotlight, the Chicago Tribune resurrected Hsuan Wei to public attention in response to one reader’s curiosity about his fate. A Tribune columnist discovered that Wei finally was granted permanent U.S. residence in the early 1960s, and at the time lived in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and son, and taught math at Ithaca College.110 His long elusion of authorities and ultimate legal victory had once again transformed his status. Now, Wei was a “good immigrant,” the kind who reaffirmed the domestic civil rights narrative of national inclusion and redemption.111
In the end, the failure of individuals like Hsuan Wei to live up to their promise did little to dislodge the racial logics that made Asians indispensable to the U.S. military in an age of decolonization. Against the anticolonial currents sweeping the decolonizing world, U.S. officials redoubled their claims of supporting postliberation freedom struggles in the name of supporting an Asia for Asians. Throughout Asia and the Pacific ordinary people had an immense role to play in bringing about this new reality, and the military was vital to the process. In 1954, the victory of Vietnamese nationalist forces over the French demanded renewed U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The project of securing Asia for Asians in the 1950s, the next chapter shows, unfolded along the expanding circuits of U.S. militarism that connected the Philippines and South Vietnam. Within this space of the decolonizing Pacific, the U.S. state mobilized its former colonial subjects in an endeavor to bring lasting changes to South Vietnamese society and to secure South Vietnam for the “free world.”
TWO
Colonial Intimacies and Counterinsurgency
THE PHILIPPINES, SOUTH VIETNAM, AND THE UNITED STATES
SHORTLY AFTER THE UNITED STATES proclaimed Philippine independence in 1946, the liberating empire confronted a problem that threatened to unravel the legitimacy of its fifty-year-old colonial experiment. The Huks, an independent guerrilla army that fought alongside American troops during World War II, started to rally its forces after the war. The Huks galvanized peasants in Central Luzon and stirred rebellion against a peonage system that government officials and corrupt landlords maintained. While U.S. state officials hailed the Philippines as its “showcase of democracy” to Europe and the decolonizing world, the Huk rebellion demonstrated that the colony had subversive influences emerging in its midst. Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned, “Victory of the Communist-led and dominated Huks would place us in a highly embarrassing position vis-à-vis the British, French and Dutch whom we have been persuading to recognize the realities and legitimacy of Asiatic nationalism and self-determination.”1
Much like what took place in Korea after World War II, the radicalization of the peasantry in the postwar Philippines signaled a collective refusal among the landless class to return to the colonial order. Efforts to suppress the Huks by resorting to terror tactics invariably failed, similar to events that transpired in South Korea under the U.S. occupation. JUSMAG, the U.S. Military Advisory Group in the Philippines, decided to pursue a different approach. In December 1950, JUSMAG aided the Philippine government to launch the Economic Development Corps (EDCOR), a rehabilitation program aimed to incentivize surrender among the Huks that was carried on by the Philippine Army. EDCOR adopted the popular communist slogan “land for the landless,” and proceeded to give former Huks and retired soldiers government lands. Between 1950 and 1955, EDCOR continued offering people “a new chance in life” by constructing four large-scale farm communities, including a vocational rehabilitation center, and relocating an entire barrio to “a more favorable area” beyond communist influence. In this five-year period, the Philippine Army reported that approximately nine thousand Huks out of an estimated rank of twenty-five thousand had surrendered. It seemed that EDCOR provided an effective solution to the subversive threats and potential radicalization in the Philippines.2
EDCOR was the brainchild of Edward Lansdale and Charles Bohannan, two American military men who had served in the Philippines during World War II. An advertising executive and an anthropologist-in-training before their military careers, respectively, Lansdale and Bohannan were aware that engineering social relations required appealing to the masses in creative ways. With their expert knowledge, they developed a unique entity through EDCOR and transformed the Philippine Army. “I have seen many armies,” one foreign correspondent wrote, “but this one beats them all. This is an army with a social conscience.”3 The program marked the first attempt by the Philippine Army to conduct “civic activities,” demonstrable actions that conveyed the meaning of democracy in ways that print propaganda did not. There was more to EDCOR’s success, however. Lansdale later explained it succeeded because despite being a “U.S. plan, the Filipinos were led into thinking of it and developing it for themselves.” EDCOR was a “foreign idea [that] became thoroughly nationalized—an important step” toward winning the support of the people.4
What Lansdale and Bohannan developed was a new approach to war and military conduct for the age of decolonization. In the early 1950s, military officials believed EDCOR was an exportable concept for countering guerrilla insurgencies. British officials flocked to Central Luzon to observe the EDCOR communities and drew up comparative lessons for their experiments of controlling the people in Malaya.5 When events in Vietnam demanded heightened U.S. involvement in 1954, Lansdale and Bohannan saw the opportunity. They were among the first Americans on scene. The pair brought the tactics and agents of their counterinsurgency experiment in the Philippines to Vietnam.
Scholars have drawn the connections between U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines and Vietnam, but we still know little about what this transference of military knowledge and practices entailed.6 The focus on Lansdale as a central figure obscures the role of lesser-known actors who played a key role. In 1954, months after the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, Filipino doctors and nurses arrived in Saigon to begin their humanitarian mission of bringing medical relief to the hundreds of thousands of refugees migrating from the communist north to the south after the national partition. Later that year, retired Filipino army officers, many who had taken part in EDCOR, arrived to provide social services to Vietnamese veterans, and to teach the “lessons” of the Huk campaign to Vietnamese Army soldiers. These groups went
