Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

David Cheng Chang – Escaping From the Communists and Then From the Anti-Communists: A Prisoner’s Odyssey From Southwest China to Korea, India, and Argentina

October 13, 2021 @ 10:00 am - 11:30 am

Speaker: David Cheng Chang, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; HYI-Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2021-22
Chair/discussant: Arunabh Ghosh,  Associate Professor of History, Harvard University

By the end of the Korean War, only 88 out of more than 150,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war (POWs) refused to return to either side of their divided countries; instead, they sought asylum in neutral nations. Using oral history interviews and archival documents from the United States, Taiwan, and India, this talk charts the life history of Cheng Liren: from his education as a police academy cadet during the civil war and his first job as a police officer in his home province Guizhou in the final days of the Nationalist regime, to his desperate enlistment in the Communist army, desertion in Korea, rise and fall as an anti-Communist POW leader on Koje and Cheju Islands, his daring escape from fellow anti-Communist POWs at Panmunjom, to his two-year sojourn in India, and his final settlement and business success in Argentina.

Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItd-qurD8rGNJBFrr8tS6X1695eSvlSswX

More info: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/events/escaping-from-the-communists-and-then-from-the-anti-communists-a-prisoners-odyssey-from-southwest-china-to-korea-india-and-argentina/

Details

Date:
October 13, 2021
Time:
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Event Categories:
,
Website:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItd-qurD8rGNJBFrr8tS6X1695eSvlSswX

Organizer

Harvard-Yenching Institute

Subscribe to the Events Newsletter

Be the first to know about upcoming events.