A Second Evil Empire

The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold

War Cinema
SEBASTIAN GEHRIG 1

On 17 September 1964, the James Bond film Goldfinger premiered at the Odeon Theatre,
Leicester Square, London and was soon hailed by many critics as the archetypical Bond ad-
venture (see Chapman 2007, 49). The film revolves around the villain Auric Goldfinger, su-
perbly played by Gert Fröbe, who attempts to detonate an atomic device in the US gold de-
pository of Fort Knox. Himself a millionaire and obsessed with gold, Goldfinger hopes to in-
crease the value of his own gold reserves tenfold by rendering the US reserves unusable.
Shortly before the assault on Fort Knox, Goldfinger reveals his plan to Bond, certain that the
latter will die in the raid. Bond confronts Goldfinger with the fact that it is impossible to trans-
port all of the gold deposited at Fort Knox to another place before the US military sends rein-
forcements to foil the scheme. Goldfinger then discloses to Bond that the “red-Chinese” have
supplied him with an atomic device to carry out his plan, and that he does not intend to re -
move the gold bullion at all (1964, scene starting at 1:23:20). As in the first and fifth James
Bond films, Dr. No (1962) and You Only Live Twice (1967), the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) appears as the driving force behind Bond’s opponent. The creators of the cinematic
Bond linked the first few films in the series to the rising threat of “Red China” in Cold War

1 Research for this article was supported by the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global
Context” at the University of Heidelberg.

Sebastian Gehrig is Senior Lecturer in Modern European

History at the University of Roehampton, London.

Volume 2 · Spring 2019

ISSN 2514-2178
DOI: 10.24877/jbs.45
Distributed under CC BY 2.0 UK
politics of the time. Indeed, only one month after the premiere of Goldfinger, the PRC would
test its first atomic bomb at the Lop Nur test site on 16 October 1964.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the pivotal role films have played in shaping Western
imaginaries of the Cold War divide. 2 The role of cultural products in moulding popular under-
standings of the Cold War as an imaginary war is a crucial puzzle piece in understanding how
people and societies have dealt with a conflict which would most likely have resulted in global
annihilation had it ever turned “hot”. 3 In terms of shaping popular understandings of Cold War
adversaries, the representation of the PRC in Western film has so far attracted little attention
(a notable exception is Greene 2014, 95-150). Yet “Red China” became a central theme in
one of the most prolific blockbuster series’ in the 1960s, the James Bond franchise. The pro-
ducers of the James Bond films built on an already well-established trope: “Red China” had
served as one of the major threats to the West in representations of Asia in US films of the
1950s. The Bond series further played an important role in reconfiguring older literary and
cinematographic tropes of the Yellow Peril into a distinctly communist “red-Chinese” threat
(Dick 2016, chp. 8). The depiction of “Red China” in the James Bond series helped to reas-
sure Western viewers of the First World’s hegemonic position and, in particular, as Cynthia
Baron has noted, represented “British strategies of self-definition in the ‘post-colonial’ era”.
Baron argues that James Bond’s exploits remained steeped in the discourse of an “Oriental-
ism which positioned the East as mysterious, incomprehensible, and pathologised in order to
justify Western imperialism” (2003, 135). Read from this perspective, the James Bond films
translated traditional, popular stereotypes of a mystical East depicted in the Yellow Peril liter-
ature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (such as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu
series) into the Cold War era. The appearance of “Red China” in the James Bond film series
marked the peak in popularity of Western filmmakers’ use of Maoist China as a Cold War ant-

2 For a discussion of the understudied aspect of audience reactions to James Bond films in particu -
lar see: Dodds 2006, 116-130. For the role of cinema in shaping imaginaries of Cold War adversar -
ies between East and West see: Shaw and Youngblood 2010; Shaw 2007; Shaw 2001. Klaus
Dodds has noted the importance of film in shaping “popular geopolitics” and popular understand-
ings of “geographies of threat and danger”. See: Dodds 2005. This scholarship ties into broader
debates within historical scholarship on Cold War culture and how the cultural history of the Cold
War is written about and documented. For studies centred on the US see: Whitfield 1996; Kuznick
and Gilbert 2001. For a leading collection on Asia see: Zheng, Hong, Szonyi 2010. In recent years,
a further debate has emerged as to the ways in which the cultural history of the Cold War has been
written as a series of entangled perspectives from the geopolitical East and West. See: Vowinckel,
Payk, Lindenberger 2012; Major and Mitter 2004.
3 Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann have recently examined the Cold War as an imaginary war
by exploring the central trope of the atomic bomb in post-war thought and culture. See: Grant and
Ziemann 2016.

2 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

agonist to the West between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the so-
called Second Cold War in the 1980s.
However, there was no uniform manner in which China was depicted within Western
cinema. Arthouse and left-wing filmmakers close to the emerging student movements of the
late 1960s viewed the rise of Socialist China in a different light. When the Cultural Revolution
began to inspire left-wing opposition to mainstream politics in Western Europe and the US,
Maoist themes also had a short honeymoon amongst radical left-wing audiences (Connery
2008). Maoism (or Mao Zedong Thought) was central to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
and Maoist ideology was promoted as the “spiritual atom bomb” of the twentieth century (see
Cook 2014a and Leese 2011). Radical left-wing activists across the West viewed this new re-
volutionary anti-imperialism as the ideological touchstone in their opposition to the Vietnam
War, the remnants of the colonial era, and the conservative social mores which dominated
their societies at home (Gehrig 2011; Gehrig, Mittler, Wemheuer 2008; Wolin 2010; Connery
2008; Elbaum 2002, 41-58; Cook 2014b). When adherence to Maoist ideology took hold in
the West, cracks within the radical left emerged which caused diplomatic rifts between the
PRC and some Western European governments. A comparison of those blockbuster films
produced at the time (such as the James Bond series) and several arthouse and left-wing
films demonstrates the extent to which cinematic stereotypes (such as the threat of the Yel-
low Peril) are simultaneously crafted, contested, and deployed for a number of political ends.
This article explores the ways in which the rise of Maoist China in international Cold War
politics, as well as the ideological threat posed to the West by the Chinese Cultural Revolu-
tion, transformed China into a prominent geopolitical antagonist within Western post-war
cinema. I contrast prolific Cold War films such as the James Bond series with films from
European leftist directors to illustrate how the reimagined Yellow Peril of “Red China” im-
pacted Western Cold War popular culture. While blockbuster cinema of the period had a
broad appeal, arthouse and left-wing cinema was made for (and reached) a much smaller
cross-section of the public. However, these different types of cinema nevertheless formed an
important part of the West’s cultural production of Cold War imaginaries; these films became
“critical determinant[s] of the Cold War”; not simply “adjunct[s] to diplomacy and military af-
fairs”, but a significant factor that “shaped the meaning and nature of the conflict for millions
of people from beginning to end” (Shaw and Youngblood 2010, 6).
Western cinema anticipated and directly reflected the rise of the PRC in Cold War polit-
ics. In turn, images of Maoist China depicted in Western cinema impacted and shaped the
cultural construction of the Cold War for Western audiences. Through this process, images of
China merged with older Western imaginaries of the Far East into transcultural imaginaries
(see Herren, Rüesch, Sibille 2012). In the studio films of the 1950s, European or American
actors usually played “red-Chinese”. Distinctions between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vi-

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 3
etnamese languages, costumes, and objects used in these films were seldom made. This
changed with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that sparked intense left-wing interest
in Maoism as a new source of political legitimation (Gehrig 2011; Gehrig, Mittler, Wemheuer
2008; Wolin 2010; Connery 2008; Elbaum 2002, 41-58; Cook 2014b). With the rise of the
PRC in world politics, Chinese themes were more accurately depicted than in the 1950s. By
the late 1960s, the popularity of Red China reached its peak in Western cinema shortly be -
fore the PRC finally (and decisively) entered the world stage by taking over the UN Security
Council seat from the Republic of China (ROC). It was in this historical moment that the
James Bond film series assisted in the cultural transformation of “Red China” from a regional
Asian threat into a danger to global stability within the Western consciousness.

THE CHINESE YELLOW PERIL: FROM FU MANCHU TO COMMUNIST BRAINWASHING

The orientalised threat of China to the West originated in the popular culture of the late nine-
teenth century. Chinese immigrants to the US and Britain sparked fears of an “Asian inva-
sion” among Western audiences at the time. The film history of a Chinese Yellow Peril began
with the creation of the definitive Chinese super-villain, Dr. Fu Manchu, in the early twentieth
century. A creation of the British author Sax Rohmer, the Fu Manchu saga gained immediate
popularity and resulted in a succession of thirteen novels, published between 1913 and 1959.
After Rohmer’s death, the novel saga lived on through continuation authors Cay Van Ash and
William Patrick Maynard. The Fu Manchu books achieved their popularity through an effect-
ive publication strategy. Rohmer succeeded in publishing his stories simultaneously on both
sides of the Atlantic as newspaper serials. Their success quickly led to radio broadcasts,
films, comic strips, and books.
Rohmer’s novels formed part of a social discourse within Britain and the US on Chinese
immigration, with clear racist undertones. Following the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the
US Congress in 1882, fear of immigration and a growing military threat originating from Asia
took hold within the Western public imagination (Clegg 1994, 13-36; Mayer 2014, 21-6; Wu
1982, 164-82). In the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu, Boris Karloff’s performance shaped
the look and style of Fu Manchu for future film adaptations (Mayer 2014, 4). With the intro-
duction of the character of Fu Manchu to audiences, the archetype of the Asian villain striving
for world domination became firmly embedded within Western popular culture by the 1930s.
However, Fu Manchu was initially viewed as an archetype of the “evil oriental” rather than as
distinctly Chinese (Mayer 2011, 117). The rise of Fu Manchu’s cinematic popularity thus
mirrored the resurgence of the century-old Yellow Peril scare that had emerged in the wake
of Genghis Khan’s threat to Europe. The film adaptation of Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning novel, The Good Earth, which later earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, marked the
short-lived height of positive imagery of China in the 1930s (Greene, 50-94). Yet, this soon

4 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

changed. In the interwar period, a growing but somewhat undefined “Asian threat” re-
emerged within the European and US cultural imagination.
The end of the Second World War, which had been dominated by anti-Japanese senti-
ments in the US and Britain, as well as the emerging Cold War, transformed the Yellow Peril
into a distinctly Chinese threat. The American public, in particular, struggled to accept that
China had been “lost” to the communists in 1949 (Greene, 95-150). At the end of the Korean
War in 1953, the American public was shocked when news spread that twenty-one GI sol-
diers who were released from Prisoner of War camps had opted against repatriation in favour
of remaining within Asia. It seemed incomprehensible for Americans that US soldiers could
renounce the American way of life with all its luxuries and move to an impoverished Asian
country. In attempting to explain away the soldiers’ behaviour, the journalist Edmond Hunter
spoke of communist “mind murder” and promoted the idea of “brainwashing” in Chinese in-
ternment camps. Although CIA director Allan Dulles had attempted to prepare the American
public for the possibility that some American soldiers might decide against repatriation, never-
theless public anger within the US was sparked following news coverage of the soldiers who
elected to remain in the PRC. The US public seemed to care little for the fact that, in turn,
22,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers equally refused repatriation. While the GIs were
waiting for their release to the PRC in the Indian camp Panmunjom, US media coverage
slandered them as “invalids”, “dupes”, “rats”, and “cheese-eaters”. At the same time, GIs re-
turning to the US were also met with growing suspicion as fears of “reprogramming” and
“brainwashing” within the internment camps suggested that Americans could not necessarily
trust those soldiers who had successfully be repatriated (Carruthers 2009, 174-6).
Driven by the intense anti-communism of the early 1950s, suspicions of effective “ori-
ental” torture and brainwashing struck fear to the hearts of many Americans. It is no wonder,
then, that an increasing number of films and television series adapted these culturally-preval-
ent themes. For one, the trope of communist brainwashing became central to many of the
Cold War films produced during this period (see Burton 2013). In September 1953, NBC re-
leased The Traitor, which was soon followed by ABC’s POW (part of the US Steel Hour
series funded by the US Steel Corporation). When one particular broadcast of POW was in-
terrupted due to technical problems in the Detroit area, some angry viewers called the televi-
sion station switchboard to notify the network of suspected communist sabotage (Carruthers,
198). In 1954, the Ronald Reagan-led Prisoner of War and The Bamboo Prison continued to
peddle the themes of communist maltreatment of POWs and brainwashing. These films were
increasingly met with negative responses from critics and the US Army (Carruthers, 200).
When a number of those twenty-one GIs who had initially refused repatriation began to return
to the US from the PRC in the 1950s, their very public defence of the PRC’s political and so-
cial system further provoked the ire of the American public, thus embedding within that cul-

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 5
ture the notion that communism was a pervasive, insidious threat very much at risk of taking
hold within the US (Carruthers, 219).
By the mid-1950s, the expression “Bamboo Curtain” came to define the schismatic di-
vide between the geopolitical East and West in global politics in much the same way that
Winston Churchill’s famous diagnosis of the “Iron Curtain” delineated the topography of
Europe (Spence 1990, 627-33; Shaw 2001, 65; Roberts 2006). Show trials across the social-
ist bloc as well as further cases (and suspicions) of “brainwashed” POWs ensured that the
threat of the Chinese Yellow Peril was kept alive. Such themes inspired a generation of “com-
munist films” such as The Master Plan (1954), The Blue Peter (1954), The Gamma People
(1955), The Mind Benders (1963), and John Frankenheimer’s famous The Manchurian Can-
didate (1962) (Greene, 107-20). The use of the definite article in all of these titles seems to
offer some assurance to the viewer of the very legitimacy of the threat of communism. Other
such films – Operation Malaya (1953), The Yangtse Incident (1957), and The Devil Never
Sleeps (1963) – followed suit, and the threat of the Yellow Peril, sublimated by fears of “Red
China”, was further enhanced. These films also renewed interest in the figure of Fu Manchu,
and, in 1956, Republic Pictures, part of Paramount Pictures, produced a thirteen-episode
television series called The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu. Of course, Dr. No, who appeared
in the film of the same name in 1962, became the first archetypical villain in a long line of
James Bond’s cinematic adversaries. That the Bond filmmakers should elect to open the
franchise with a loosely-disguised reconfiguration of the Fu Manchu character is no coincid-
ence.
Western anti-communist hysteria at the time had already fuelled a number of critical re-
sponses. In 1957, Raymond A. Bauer, an expert in Soviet psychology, pleaded for a more
“mature, confident acceptance of diversity of political views” on the part of the American pop-
ulous, in particular, and condemned the mass panic that had resulted from the suspicions of
communist brainwashing. For Bauer, Chinese attempts to persuade Americans of the efficacy
of their particular ideologies did not constitute “demonology”, as many sensationalists in the
American press liked to suggest. Bauer dismissed American fears that “nothing less than a
combination of the theories of Dr. I.P. Pavlov [a Soviet scientist] and the wiles of Dr. Fu Man-
chu could produce such results” as ludicrous, arguing that such an opinion suggested more
about the nature of the American people themselves (and their misconceptions of the Yellow
Peril) than their supposed enemies (1957, 46). For Bauer, the hysteria directed against brain-
washing was a sign of America’s own ideological uncertainties and political doubts. After the
censure of Joseph McCarthy by the US Senate in 1954, Bauer reflected on a period of
heightened anti-communism during which any sympathy for communist ideology had been
branded “Un-American”. He emphasised that Americans needed to be prepared for the fact
that disaffection with their own political system would lead some to convert to communism.

6 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

 Ever since the October Revolution in 1917, Hollywood studies had actively participated
in the construction of anti-communist ideologies, and, as such, the PRC increasingly came to
represent within the studio films the threat of the East, particularly during the Hollywood films
of the 1950s (Shaw 2007, 65). After the Korean War ended in a military stalemate in 1953,
the US Secretary of State, John Forster Dulles, pointed to an Asian communist threat in a
speech on 29 March 1954. Almost immediately prior to Dulles’ speech, on 13 March of the
same year, the Vietnamese army had engaged in a besiegement of French troops in the val-
ley of Dien Bien Phu. The US administration was not willing to commit troops to another war
in Asia against hostile public opinion at home, as the trauma of the costly Korean War still
dominated US debates. President Eisenhower and Dulles hoped to prevent the deployment
of Chinese troops to Vietnam after the French defeat. Dulles threatened the PRC government
by publicly announcing his Domino Theory, in which he admonished the Soviet Union and the
PRC as powers looking to expand their territories. His rhetoric suggested that the US would
not tolerate any further expansion of Soviet or PRC influence within South-East Asia (Immer-
man 1999, 92). Dulles painted the Chinese threat as regionally confined to South-East Asia.
This assumption was closely mirrored in US and British cinema at the time. In Fred T. Sear’s
Target Hong Kong (1953) for example, Richard Denning plays an American adventurer who
is recruited by US officials and Chinese nationalist agents to prevent a communist attack on
Hong Kong. In the film, the PRC is depicted as the driving force behind a growing threat to
the US and Western alliance in Asia, and through Hollywood the geopolitical importance of
Vietnam was asserted. Hollywood blockbusters of the period prepared the ground for an in-
creased presence of US troops in Asia. By the mid-1960s, the US government eventually dis-
patched more than half a million US troops to Vietnam when the conflict spiralled into open
war (Immerman, 92).
In this public atmosphere, films such as Sam Fuller’s romantic adventure China Gate
(1957) and James Clavell’s Five Gates to Hell (1959) paved the way for the later Cold War
propaganda classic The Green Berets (1968). In China Gate, American willingness to inter-
vene in the growing conflict in Asia is realised when two US veterans of the Korean War
(played by Gene Barry and Nat King Cole) join the French Indo-Chinese Army. Serving as
mercenaries in the French Foreign Legion, they set out to destroy a Vietcong ammunition de-
pot at the border to the PRC. In Five Gates to Hell, the threat of the Yellow Peril reached new
levels, as “red-Chinese” mercenaries kidnap, maltreat, and rape a group of nuns who are
working for the Red Cross in French Indochina (Shaw 2007, 209). In British cinema of the
same period, Maoist China was depicted as a threat to the declining British Empire in Asia as
well as on the British Cold War home front. The plot of Little Red Monkey (1954), for in-
stance, suggests that the Chinese are behind certain acts of political subversion. The film de-
picts the defection of a scientist called Leon Duschenko, who is from the Soviet bloc. After

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 7
Duschenko successfully escapes from East Berlin to London, he is captured by an under-
ground communist organisation masquerading as an “international friendship club”, run by
the Chinese. At the end of the film, Duschenko is rescued by Western secret agents. The film
was notable for its cautionary warning to Britons at the time against subversive attempts by
the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to indoctrinate British subjects through docu-
mentaries which claimed to showcase the “good life” of Eastern Europe, the USSR, and the
PRC. Public defections of Soviet agents to the West only weeks prior to the film’s release
nonetheless reaffirmed in the British consciousness the ideological superiority of the West’s
political system (Shaw 2001, 49, 82). The arrival of British Secret Service agent James Bond
a short number of years later would further affirm the attributes of Western (and, specifically,
British) political doctrine.

007 AGAINST “RED CHINA”

The first Bond film, Dr. No, was released against the backdrop of Cold War tensions in 1962.
In Ian Fleming’s novel, which was based on the adaptation of a screenplay treatment for the
American television producer Henry Morgenthau III, Bond is sent to Jamaica to recover from
a KGB poison attack. During his stay, he discovers underground facilities through which the
sinister Dr. No. is sabotaging US missile tests at nearby Cape Canaveral, Florida. In the
novel, Dr. No is working for the Soviet Union. For the plot of the film, however, screenwriters
Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkely Mather adapted the screenplay to the
contemporary Cold War climate in order to increase the political frisson for the audience
(Baron, 136). Dr. No became the son of a German missionary father and a Chinese mother, a
hybrid figure who straddles the political East-West divide of both the Bamboo and Iron Cur-
tains. To accommodate West German audiences for the film, however, the nationality of Dr.
No’s father was changed from German-Chinese to British-Chinese in the German-language
version of the film. The characterisation of Dr. No draws heavily on Fu Manchu, and the film
plays with stereotypes that were widely in use in popular culture of the period. All of Dr. No’s
accomplices are of Chinese origin, and while each of the women in his employ wear Chinese-
style attire, the uniforms of Dr. No’s guards resemble elements of the Japanese Army and
German storm-trooper uniforms. Most significant in terms of the film’s geopolitics is the switch
in Dr. No’s allegiance: in the film, he no longer works for the Soviet government (as he does
in the novel); now he works for SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence,
Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, an international, de-politicised terrorist network. Thus,
while Dr. No uses missile toppling equipment supplied to him by the Chinese, his ultimate
goal is wealth and personal supremacy rather than the political sovereignty of Maoist China.
Klaus Dodds has noted that explicit references to “Red China” in early versions of the screen-
play for Dr. No were removed precisely to avoid political controversy and so that the charac-

8 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

ter of Bond’s first nemesis could more aptly fit the generic mould of the nation-less “evil
genius”, a trope that had been dominant in Victorian novels (2005, 277). When, in the film,
Bond accuses Dr. No of “working for the East”, Dr. No retorts: “East. West. Just points of the
compass, each as stupid as the other” (scene starting at 1:31:09). While the PRC supplies
Dr. No with the technology he needs to topple American missiles, the film makes it clear that
No wishes to achieve personal autonomy and that he is only aided by communist powers.
The racialist stereotypes of the character (a diabolical Chinese nuclear scientist) very much
played into colonial racial prejudices of the period and reflected growing concerns that the
PRC was soon to acquire atomic capabilities.
In the third Bond film, Goldfinger, the PRC is seen to have a much more expanded role
in the plot. Though the original source novel (published in 1959) makes no reference to the
PRC, in the film it is the mysterious Chinese agent, Mr. Ling, who provides Goldfinger with
the atomic device necessary to radiate the US gold depository. Also significant is the choice
of costume for Goldfinger’s henchpeople: their attire closely resembles the uniforms of the
People’s Liberation Army of China. Thus, the film can be read as part of a more overarching
trend within Hollywood and big-budget studio filmmaking at the time to portray the PRC as a
much greater threat to Cold War stability (and the American economy) than the Soviet Union,
particularly in the wake of American and Soviet détente after the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962),
which ensured an uneasy but relatively stable period of relations between the two countries.
In the next Bond film, Thunderball (1965), references to the PRC continued, albeit less expli-
citly: it is noted briefly that SPECTRE sells Chinese narcotics in Western countries – an aside
that is most evocative of the insidious threat of Fu Manchu and the iniquitous opiate dens of
Victorian England. Non-Bond films such as Battle Beneath the World (1967) and The Chair-
man/The Most Dangerous Man in the World (1969) further succeeded in demonising the
PRC. In the former, the Chinese harness the power of a gigantic laser to plant atomic bombs
underneath major American cities; in the latter, Gregory Peck plays a scientist, Hathaway,
who is sent to China to retrieve a scientific formula. When Chairman Mao himself agrees to
meet with Hathaway personally, Hathaway’s superiors secretly plant a bomb in his head to
assassinate Mao during the meeting (Chapman, 110). The absurdity and outlandishness of
these plots (no less absurd than many of the Bond films) speaks to the extreme paranoia, ig-
norance, and fear which characterised Western visions of China and the communist Far East.
In the fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice, the threat of “Red China” and Mao’s alleged
attempts to rule the world became most apparent. The screenplay for the film, by children’s
author Roald Dahl, largely departed from Fleming’s original novel published in 1964. The ori-
ginal novel centred on Japan, where Bond has tracked his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the
head of SPECTRE, after two previous encounters (in the novels Thunderball [1961] and On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1963]). In the filmic adaptation, which is still set mostly in Ja-

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 9
pan, the PRC’s role as the dominant new threat to Cold War détente is emphasised. In 1957,
Mao Zedong had given a speech in Moscow, in which he remarked that half of China’s popu-
lation might perish in a nuclear Third World War, but, he asserted, the rest would survive and
live to rebuild the world in its image. The speech was subsequently published in the Beijing
Review on 6 September 1963. Most harrowing for Western commentators was how little fear
Mao seemed to express at the prospect of a nuclear war:

Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion
people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half [...] I
say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left,
but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become so-
cialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again. (qtd. in Dikötter 2010,
13)

Mao’s apparent readiness to engage in a nuclear war seemed to have fuelled Dahl’s imagina-
tion while writing the screenplay for You Only Live Twice. At the time, many articles in the
Western press expounded on Mao’s ignorance of the dangers of nuclear war and accused
him of blatant disregard for human life. Given Soviet commitment to the policies of détente
with America, as well as a shared understanding of the threat of mutually-assured destruc-
tion, China now seemed to be positioned as the dominant threat not simply to Western eco-
nomic interests in Asia but global political interests, and these increasing hostilities were most
acutely felt at the European front-line of the Cold War: the geopolitical divide between East
and West (Jaspers 1967, 15-28).
In the original source novel of You Only Live Twice, Japan is depicted as a suicide-ob-
sessed nation, and the negative portrayal of Japanese culture revived the anti-Japanese sen-
timent which had guided propaganda efforts during the Second World War. In Dahl’s screen-
play, Japan is presented as an eminently modern country (Chapman, 110). The head of the
Japanese secret service, Tiger Tanaka, assists Bond in his mission, and it is clear that Dahl’s
revisioning of Japan as technologised and, above all, friendly to the interests of the British
Secret Service, signals the new alliance between Japan and the West against the PRC.
Much like Dr. No in the first Bond film, Blofeld and SPECTRE’s interest is aligned with the
Chinese government. The fuel for Blofeld’s space rocket is shipped out of Shanghai on board
the tanker Ning-Bo; the rocket itself is designed to interfere with US and Soviet space mis-
sions and to instigate conflict between both nations; and Blofeld’s financial backer is a “for-
eign power” embodied by Chinese secret agents who demand war “between Russia and the
US”. In a key scene, Blofeld explains to Bond that “in a matter of hours, when America and
Russia have annihilated each other, we shall see a new power dominating the world” (scene

10 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

starting at 1:39:05). In 1967, when You Only Live Twice was released in cinemas, the PRC
had just tested its first hydrogen bomb and, incidentally, Kingsley Amis, the first Bond con-
tinuation author (writing under the pseudonym “Robert Markham”), was working on Colonel
Sun, the first of the Bond novels to introduce “Red China” as a major antagonist. The James
Bond series, then, played an instrumental role in elevating China from a regional Asian threat
to a major player in world geopolitics.
Running concurrent to the rise of “Red China” in the James Bond series, the figure of Fu
Manchu was also undergoing a revival on screen. From 1965 onwards, producer Harry Alan
Towers released a new Fu Manchu film each year, starring Christopher Lee as the Chinese
villain. The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of
Fu Manchu (1967), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) all
premiered throughout the mid-to-late Sixties while the Cultural Revolution raged in the PRC.
In these films, traditional Chinese motifs are blended with a form of “techno-orientalism” in
which the villainous Fu Manchu uses mass media technologies in order to control Western
minds. The intersecting themes of brainwashing, the threat posed by weapons of mass de-
struction, and distrust of mass communication technologies coalesced in these films and
spoke to contemporary fears of “a global empire of streamlined creatures” controlled by the
Chinese which took the place of “national communities of self-determined individuals” (Mayer
2014, 97). While the Bond films had a global reach, the Fu Manchu films of the 1960s attrac-
ted a mainly European audience. The films were produced in the UK and drew on the visual
traditions of the old Dracula and Frankenstein productions. Over the course of the five films,
the threat of a Pan-Asian conspiracy, though prominent in earlier iterations of the stories, was
abandoned. In The Face of Fu Manchu, for instance Fu Manchu is supported in his schemes
by a European organisation known as “Wireless International”; while in The Vengeance of Fu
Manchu his actions are backed by the “gangs of America”. The plots of these films all play
with the theme of the atomic bomb scare of the period and the fears that mass communica-
tion devices could be transformed into potential weapons. The Sixties’ iteration of the Fu
Manchu stories formed part of the shifting position which the PRC occupied within the
European Cold War imaginary (Gehrig 2014). In the US market, orientalised characters mod-
elled after Fu Manchu, such as Yellow Claw and Ra’s al Ghul, were popularised in the Cap-
tain America and Batman comic universes, respectively, extending the threat of China to
American nationalism into a new generation (Mayer 2014, 139-47,168).
Around 1970, the “Red China” theme reached its peak in Cold War cinema. John Hus-
ton’s The Kremlin Letter (1970) dramatised the threat of Maoism to the world. In the film, a
group of US agents is sent to Moscow to retrieve an unauthorised letter sent to the Soviet
government. In the letter, it is promised that the US will aid the Soviet Union in an armed con-
flict with the PRC, and the letter’s phrasing reads like a declaration of war against China.

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 11
When British and US authorities discover the potential danger of this, they send their agents
to retrieve the letter. Since the Sino-Soviet split, confrontations between the two communist
giants had continued to accelerate. On 2 March 1969, military clashes ensued between the
Soviet Union and the PRC at the Ussuri River (Yang 2000). The story of The Kremlin Letter
made use of the tension between the two leading socialist powers and suggested further re-
conciliation between the US and the Soviet Union who, together, were both facing the threat
of “Red China”. However, in terms of realpolitik, US president Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to
the PRC seemed to signal the opposite, as his visit marked the beginning of a more amicable
period in US-China relations, while the Second Cold War would again accelerate US-Soviet
tensions only a few years later.
By the mid-1970s, the end of the Cultural Revolution, the rapprochement of the PRC
with the US and other Western countries, as well as the beginning of economic reforms fol-
lowing Mao’s death brought a decline in the use of “Red China” and the Yellow Peril as sen-
sationalist themes within Western cinema. While the PRC reappeared in the Bond series in
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), the Cold War divide between East and West had vanished and
the film’s depiction of the PRC itself was ambivalent. In the film, though a female Chinese
Secret Service Agent (played to much acclaim by Asian action star Michelle Yeoh) aids Bond
in his mission, the film’s British villain conspires with with a rogue Chinese general in order to
topple the sitting PRC government. Tomorrow Never Dies thus very much belongs to a geo-
political era in which the West was retrospectively evaluating its position within the Cold War
(Shaw 2013, 1).

SUBVERSIVE REVOLUTIONARY FUN AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN THE WEST

The Cold War image of “Red China” promoted in the James Bond series and other Hollywood
films did not remain uncontested in Western cinema of the period. Since the mid-1960s, left-
wing activists demanded fundamental political changes in Western Europe and the US.
Across Europe and the US, subcultural leftists developed new protest methods that were
rooted in the Situationist thinking of the 1910s and 1920s. In stirring public spectacle and irrit-
ating social authorities, activists hoped to gain publicity within their societies (Gehrig 2011;
Holmig 2007, 107-18). The playful and ironic nature of initial social and political protests soon
also inspired left-wing filmmakers. In 1965, Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! captured the imagina-
tion of revolutionary student protesters, who were quick to associate Malle’s vision with Mao’s
call for a permanent revolution. In their memoirs, leading West German student activists Rudi
Dutschke and Dieter Kunzelmann, for example, detailed the significance of Viva Maria! in
founding the first West German terrorist group, which was a firm adherent of Maoist rhetoric.
Malle’s film fascinated left-wing males across Europe – not least of all because of the two
lead actresses Brigitte Bardot and Jean Moreau. Film stars such as Bardot and Uschi Ober-

12 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

maier came to define a radical, chic fashion which marked the increase of Maoist icono-
graphy within revolutionary Western cinema, fashion, and art (Koenen 2002, 145; Wolfe
1970).
Increased police surveillance and violence quickly radicalised left-wing protests in the
late 1960s. In the eyes of radical left-wingers, the “fascist” Western states now revealed their
true faces while the US engaged in fighting a costly war in Vietnam. The New Left turned to
Third World liberation movements as their new role models for protest and resistance to state
authorities. Within the Third World coalition, the PRC had meanwhile assumed a leadership
role and had advocated a revolution against Soviet “social imperialism” (Cook 2014a; Fried-
man 2011). European left-wing cinema followed suit, now openly incorporating Maoist ideo-
logy. In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) famously depicted a Maoist commune
living within a shared apartment and planning for the revolution. Resembling Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed (1872), Godard depicts the life of a group called the
“Aden Arabie” cell, named after the novel Aden Arabie by Paul Nizan. The five members of
the group debate the virtue of terrorist resistance to the state. In a short appearance, one
“Comrade X” visits the group. Comrade X is clearly modelled after the leader of the Black
Power movement, Malcolm X, another link to Third World revolution and Maoism (Johnson
2013, 233-57). After one commune member has been singled out for Soviet revisionism, the
leading member, Veronique, sets out to assassinate the Soviet Minister of Culture on a visit
to Paris. By mistake, Veronique plants the bomb in the wrong hotel room and kills an inno -
cent man. Godard’s film interrogates the dangers of political violence and the failure of its ulti-
mate aims. Yet, La Chinoise makes extensive use of the contemporary debate in radical left-
wing circles between supporters of political violence and proponents of cadre party-building.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution served as the ideological point of reference for both factions
and highlighted the importance of Maoist ideology as one of the major political trends within
radical subcultures in the late 1960s and early 70s (Gehrig 2011). In Le Monde, Godard ex-
plained his intentions behind the film as follows:

Why La Chinoise? Because everywhere people are speaking about China. Whether it’s
a question of oil, the housing crisis, or education, there is always the Chinese example.
China proposes solutions that are unique [...] What distinguishes the Chinese Revolu-
tion and is also emblematic of the Cultural Revolution is Youth: the moral and scientific
quest, free from prejudices. One can’t approve of all its forms […] but this unpreceden-
ted cultural fact demands a minimum of attention, respect, and friendship. (qtd. in
Wolin, 114)

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 13
Here, Godard highlights the appeal of the Cultural Revolution to Western left-wing activists:
the Chinese model seemed to speak to almost any issue young left-wing protesters were
concerned with. To many left-wing activists, the Cultural Revolution appeared to be the ideal
blueprint for protests in Europe. Godard soon produced two other pro-Chinese films. In 1969,
The Wind From the East was released, followed soon after by See You at Mao in 1971.
When the French government led by George Pompidou closed down the French Maoist
newspaper La Cause the Peuple in 1970, Godard was with Jean-Paul Sartre and other prom-
inent French intellectuals who protested against the newspaper’s ban and the imprisonment
of its editors (Wolin, 116).
While French leftist cinema could rely on the support of a strong political Left since the
1950s, activists in other Western European countries and the US quickly became disassoci-
ated from popular cinema. In West Germany, Maoist themes entered the short films of stu-
dent radicals such as Harun Farocki’s Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chair-
man, 1967), but these were quickly banned from public screening. Farocki’s film glorified
Maoist slogans which insinuated that militant action was legitimate. Holger Meins, a later
member of the terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), served as director of photography for
the film. In the film, the protagonist is dressed like a member of the Chinese Red Guard. Mak-
ing a paper dart from one of the pages of the Little Red Book, he throws it at another actor,
who is playing the Shah of Iran in the scene, and says: “The words of Mao Zedong have to
become weapons in our hands” (scene starting at 1:00 min). The film was shot in the context
of the infamous visit of the Iranian Shah to West Berlin, which triggered large-scale student
protests in the Federal Republic. When a small group of West German student activists
turned to terrorist action in 1970, short films such as Farocki’s endorsement of militancy were
quickly banned by the government.
By the early 1970s, many radical left-wingers began to see the PRC much more critic-
ally, while others entrenched themselves further and founded Maoist cadre parties. In 1974,
Jean Yanne’s Les Chinois à Paris caused a scandal in France. Yanne used the popular
theme of Maoist China to mock French society for its refusal to face the legacies of the Vichy
regime. The film depicts the invasion of France by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The
film serves as an allegory of French society’s behaviour under Nazi occupation in the Second
World War and points to the then still unaddressed legacies of French collaboration with the
Nazis during the Vichy regime. While the PLA is shown to occupy France without military res-
istance, Parisian society quickly adapts to its new rulers’ lifestyle. Meanwhile, the Chinese oc-
cupiers choose the Galleries Lafayette as their headquarters. The invasion happens as
Chinese Secret Service intelligence has determined that the French are the world’s greatest
fumistes (“stove fitters” but also “sluggards”). Consequently, the French are ordered to pro-
duce stoves by their Chinese occupiers. Eventually, a small French group forms a resistance

14 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

movement. Meanwhile, a French woman seduces the leading Chinese commander, while
members of the Parisian society undercut the morals of their Chinese occupiers with their
decadent lifestyle. In reaction, the Chinese leave the country fearing for their moral integrity.
After their departure, the French resistance is seen to take over Paris.
Such satirical Western adaptations of Maoist themes did not go unnoticed by the PRC
government. Yanne had a reputation of being a satirical commentator of current political af-
fairs in Europe. In 1972, he had completed a persiflage of the French Left with the film Moi,
y’en a vouloir des sous, which mocked the orthodoxy of French unions. While his focus on
French political affairs was obvious for European audiences, Yanne’s record as a public critic
of French politics was of no consequence for the PRC government. The Beijing government
took the depiction of their country in Les Chinois à Paris literally. In the insecure political cli-
mate towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, no PRC official abroad or at home could be
seen to ignore an attack on Mao. The Chinese ambassador to France immediately filed an of-
ficial complaint to the French government, in which the PRC government demanded that the
film be banned. The Chinese complaint encompassed three aspects: first, it argued that the
film paralleled Nazi Germany; second, it alleged that the honour of the PLA was slandered;
and third, it argued that Chinese culture was mocked. As such, the PRC government attemp-
ted to protect the Cultural Revolution both at home and abroad. The constant vilification of
the PRC, spearheaded by the James Bond films of the 1960s, had taken its toll on officials in
Beijing. The initial interest of radical left-wing groups in Maoist ideology, which was once in-
corporated into arthouse and left-wing cinema, was now waning, paving the way for a much
more critical perspective on the PRC in radical circles, following Mao’s death in 1976.

CONCLUSION

In the1960s, Western fears of a rising Chinese threat to Cold War stability were galvanised in
the James Bond franchise. The Bond films focused on the PRC’s capability of building nuc-
lear power stations, atomic bombs, and long-range missiles, and Western fear at such pro-
spects became thematic of the Cold War arms race in the mid twentieth century. The rise
within Western cinema of “Red China” and the threat of the Yellow Peril was fuelled by the
fear of Cold War confrontations. While studio films from the 1950s presented the PRC as a
regional threat within South-East Asia, the advent of the atomic bomb meant that “Red China”
was transmuted into a major threat to global welfare, and the Bond films were instrumental in
re-imagining (and heightening) the perceived threat of the PRC to Western audiences.
The engagement of arthouse and left-wing cinema with Maoist China reflected the deep
rifts within Western societies in the late 1960s and 70s. While the danger of “Red China” was
undisputed in films of the 1950s and early 1960s, when anti-communism still prevailed as the
dominant public mood across Western countries, the conflicts caused by the rise of the New

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 15
Left and student movements showed a much closer engagement with Maoist ideology. Initial
left-wing endorsement of the PRC’s revolutionary politics contrasted with a more critical dis-
tance towards the PRC shown in later adaptations of Maoist themes in arthouse and left-wing
cinema. Contrasting blockbuster studio films and films made for narrower audiences allows
for the exploration of political frictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s within Western coun-
tries, as well as an examination of the ways in which products of popular culture transformed
the PRC from a national-regional threat to a wider global and ideological threat.
Cold War cinema not only shaped the imaginaries of the Western public but also global
realpolitik. Examining the relationships between Ian Fleming, CIA director Allen Dulles, and
US president John F. Kennedy, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has argued that Fleming’s
James Bond novels have served as a catalyst, though not necessarily as a blueprint, for such
risky operations as the invasion at the Bay of Pigs (Moran 2011, 208-15). The President of
Walt Disney Studios, Richard Frank, even insinuated in a US Congress hearing in July 1989
that film directors and movie studios had played a vital role the 1989 Tiananmen uprising.
Frank noted that “I won’t be so bold as to say that American movies are responsible for the
popular uprising in China. But I am willing to bet that for more than a few Chinese citizens our
films served as an inspiration to strike for something better” (qtd. in Shaw 2007, 301). Holly-
wood films undoubtedly captivated the imagination of Western audiences and shaped their
imaginaries of “the enemy” during the Cold War. This was especially true for a large number
of the global populous for whom the Cold War was experienced not as a “hot conflict” but as
a more abstract, continuous, and pervasive threat, the likes of which was fuelled by the
James Bond films.

REFERENCES
Baron, Cynthia. 2003. “Doctor No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty.” In The James
Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, ed. Christoph Lindner. Manchester:
Manchester University Press: 135-50.
Bauer, Raymond A. 1957. “Brainwashing: Psychology or Demonology?” Journal of Social Is-
sues 13(3): 41-7.
Burton, Alan. 2013. “Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British
Spy Dramas of the 1960s.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 10(1): 27-48.
Carruthers, Susan L. 2009. Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chapman, James. 2007. License to Thrill. A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. Lon-
don: Tauris.
Clegg, Jenny. Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril: The Making of a Racist Myth. London:
Trentham Books.

16 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

Connery, Christopher Leigh. 2008. “The World Sixties.” In The Worlding Project. Doing Cul-
tural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Con-
nery. Berkeley: North Atlantic Book: 77-108.
Cook, Alexander C. 2014a. “Introduction: The Spiritual Atom Bomb and its Global Fallout.” In
Mao’s Little Red Book. A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press: 1-22.
Cook, Alexander C., ed. 2014b, Mao’s Little Red Book. A Global History. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Dick, Bernhard F. 2016. The Screen is Red. Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War.
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Die Worte des Vorsitzenden. 1967. Harun Farocki, Federal Republic of Germany.
Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Cata-
strophe, 1958-62. New York: Walker & Company.
Dodds, Klaus. 2005. “Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War films
(1962-1967).” Geopolitics 10(2): 266-89.
Dodds, Klaus. 2006. “Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the
Internet Movie Database (IMDb).” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
31(2): 116-30.
Elbaum, Max. 2002. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. New
York: Verso.
Fleming, Ian. 1958. Dr. No. London: Jonathan Cape.
Fleming, Ian. 1959. Goldfinger. London: Jonathan Cape.
Fleming, Ian. 1961. Thunderball. London: Jonathan Cape.
Fleming, Ian. 1963. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. London: Jonathan Cape.
Fleming, Ian. 1964. You Only Live Twice. London: Jonathan Cape.
Fleming, Ian. 1965. The Man With the Golden Gun. London: Jonathan Cape.
Friedman, Jeremy Scott. 2011. “Reviving the Revolution. The Sino-Soviet Split, the “Third
World,” and the Fate of the Left.” PhD-diss., Princeton University.
Gehrig, Sebastian. 2008. “‘Zwischen uns und dem Feind einen klaren Trennungsstrich
ziehen’: Linksterroristische Gruppen und maoistische Ideologie in der Bundesrepublik
der 1960er und 1970er Jahre.” In Kulturrevolution als Vorbild? Maoismen im
deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. Sebastian Gehrig, Barbara Mittler, and Felix Wem-
heuer. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang: 153-78.
Gehrig, Sebastian, Barbara Mittler, and Felix Wemheuer, eds. 2008. Kulturrevolution als Vor-
bild? Maoismen im deutschsprachigen Raum. Frankfurt/M.: Peter-Lang.
Gehrig, Sebastian. 2011. “(Re-)Configuring Mao: Trajectories of a Culturo-Political Trend in
West Germany.” Transcultural Studies 2: 189-231.

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 17
Gehrig, Sebastian. 2014. “The People’s Republic of China in West German Cold War Polit-
ics.” In Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 233-48.
Goldfinger. 1974. Guy Hamilton, EON Productions, United Kingdom.
Greene, Naomi. 2014. From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American
Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Grant, Matthew, and Benjamin Ziemann. 2016. “Introduction: The Cold War as an Imaginary
War.” In Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict,
1945-1990, ed. Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann. Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press: 1-29.
Herren, Madeleine, Martin Rüesch, and Christiane Sibille. 2012. Transcultural History: Theor-
ies, Methods, Sources. Heidelberg: Springer.
Holmig, Alexander. 2007. “Die aktionistischen Wurzeln der Studentenbewegung: Subversive
Aktion, Kommune I und die Neudefinition des Politischen.” In Handbuch 1968. Zur
Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler: 107-18.
Immerman, Richard H. 1999. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. For-
eign Policy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jaspers, Karl. 1967. Antwort. Zur Kritik meiner Schrift Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?
Piper: Munich.
Johnson, Matthew. 2013. “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-
American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979.” Past and Present 218(8): 233-57.
Koenen, Gerd. 2002. Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–
1977. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer.
Kuznick, Peter J., and James Gilbert, eds. 2001. Rethinking Cold War Culture Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Books.
Leese, Daniel. 2011. Mao Cult. Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Major, Patrick, and Rana Mitter. 2004. “East and East and West is West? Towards a Com-
parative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War.” In Across the Blocs. Cold War Cul-
tural and Social History, ed. Patrick Major and Rana Mitter. London: Frank Cass: 1-
22.
Markham, Robert. 1968. Colonel Sun. A James Bond Adventure. London: Jonathan Cape.
Mayer, Ruth. 2011. “‘The Greatest Novelty of Our Age.’ Fu Manchu, Chinatown, and the
Global City.” In Chinatown in a Transnational World, ed. Vanessa Künnemann and
Ruth Mayer. London: Routledge: 116-34.

18 International Journal of James Bond Studies · Volume 2 · Spring 2019

Mayer, Ruth. 2014. Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow
Peril Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Moran, Christopher. 2011. “Ian Fleming and CIA Director Allen Dulles. The Very Best of
Friends.” In James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough,
ed. Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield and Jack Becker. Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing: 208-15.
Roberts, Pricilla Mary, ed. 2006. Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World
beyond Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Shaw, Tony. 2013. “Introduction: Cinema, Television and the Cold War.” Journal of British
Cinema and Television 10(1): 1-6.
Shaw, Tony. 2001. British Cinema and the Cold War. London: Tauris.
Shaw, Tony. 2007. Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Shaw, Tony, and Denise J. Youngblood. 2010. Cinematic Cold War. The American and So-
viet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence: Kansas University Press.
Spence, Jonathan. 1990. The Search for Modern China. New York: W. W. Norton & Com-
pany.
Vowinckel, Annette, Markus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger. 2012. “European Cold War
Culture(s)? An Introduction.” In Cold War Cultures. Perspectives on Eastern and
Western European Societies, ed. Annette Vowinckel, Markus M. Payk, and Thomas
Lindenberger. New York: Berghahn Books: 1-20.
Whitfield, Steven J. 1996. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University
Press.
Wolfe, Tom. 1970. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” New York Magazine (June 1970).
Wolin, Richard. 2010. The Wind from the East. French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,
and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wu, William F. 1982. The Yellow Peril: Chinese-Americans in American Fiction 1850-1940.
Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
Yang Kuisong. 2000. “The Sino-Soviet Border Clash of 1969: From Zhenbao Island to Sino-
American Rapprochement.” Cold War History 1(1): 21-52.
You Only Live Twice, 1967. Lewis Gilbert, EON Productions, UK.
Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu, and Michael Szonyi, eds. 2010. The Cold War in Asia: The Battle
for Hearts and Minds. Leiden: Brill.

S. Gehrig · The James Bond Series, “Red China”, and Cold War Cinema 19