PhD Candidate in History Yasser Nasser Publishes "Making Friends and Making 'Asia': Sino-Indian Friendship, 1947-1957"

Published on November 1, 2022 

The Department of History's Yasser Nasser was recently published in Past & Present.  His article, "Making Friends and Making ‘Asia’: Sino-Indian Friendship, 1947–1957," draws on a rich collection of sources across numerous countries.  Yasser argues that by invoking both China and India's colonial past and dreams of a shared postcolonial future, the India-China Friendship Association (ICFA) and its backers in the Indian state promoted Sino-Indian friendship as the blueprint for a peaceful, decolonized Asia capable of creating a better world. 

Despite their different political and economic systems throughout the 1950s, state and non-state actors in India pursued a fragile policy of friendship towards the People’s Republic of China. Instead of focusing on the failures of this relationship or its naivety, this article examines the intellectual moorings and political aspirations of its major organizational advocate, the ICFA. Through dynamic transnational exchanges of ideas, the ICFA imagined India’s friendship with China as the harbinger of an Asia that could overthrow imperialism and navigate the complexities of Cold War bloc politics. In doing so, it drew a contrast between a horizontal friendship that respected differences and saw them as productive in the shared struggle for nation-building and upholding regional peace, and the more hierarchical relationship augured by the Cold War’s security pacts and military alliances. 

Yasser Ali Nasser is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the ways in which anti-imperialist networks in China, India, and Japan used “Asia” to critique the international system in the early Cold War. 

Read his article here.