This volume presents a comparative analysis of three key cities—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei—during the Cold War. Strategically positioned within international trade networks, these cities also served as critical nodes for both regional conflicts and cooperation. The comparison primarily focuses on their urban landscapes, drawing on the memories embedded in their collective memoryscapes, the imagery presented in their filmscapes, and the perceptions of their inhabitants, as reflected in fiction and films that portrayed urban life and the experiences of ordinary people. The Cityscapes of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore during the Cold War explores both the shared characteristics of these cities as frontiers in the bipolar global system (divided between Communism and the Free World) and their distinctive features as unique spaces shaped by their own meanings and opportunities.

The nine essays in this volume reexamine the “hundred days” in 1898 and focus particularly on the aftermath of this reform movement. Their collective goal is to rethink the reforms not as a failed attempt at modernizing China but as a period in which many of the institutions that have since structured China began. Among the subjects covered are the reform movement, the reformers, newspapers, education, the urban environment, female literacy, the “new” woman, citizenship, and literature. All the contributors urge the view that modernity must be seen as a conceptual framework that shaped the Chinese experience of a global process, an experience through which new problems were raised and old problems rethought in creative, inventive, and contradictory ways.