Winner, 2013-2014 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction presented by the Asian Pacific American Librarian Association
During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. In Citizens of Asian America, Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived “foreignness” of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War.
While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. She highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government’s desire to be leader of the “free world” by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution. Further, Cheng examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation’s ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.

"Cheng'sCitizens of Asian Americaplaces Asian Americans at the center of this story, showing how the project to highlight the superiority of U.S. democracy over Soviet communism involved removing long-standing barriers to immigration and naturalization for Asians and Asian Americans. . . . A solid addition to the literature on Cold War Civil Rights." - Pacific Historical Review

"In these chapters, Cheng offers a number of new insights into an understudied period. In her discussion of 'firsts,' she presents the lives of her subjects with a rare warmth and complexity; she also persuasively shows that such people developed their own understanding of race, democracy, and Americanness distinct from media portrayals of the mas symbols of American superiority and freedom. Juxtaposing celebrations of Asian Americans' loyalty with probes into their alleged subversion, Cheng astutely observes that these apparently conflicting ideas were in fact not so contradictory after all." - Political Science Quarterly

"Through Cheng's work, Cold War civil rights become much more capacious than previously thought." - Journal of Asian American Studies

"Accessible and well-structured,Citizens of Asian Americacould be generatively incorporated into graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on Asian American history, the Cold War, and post-1945 U.S. political and diplomatic history." - American Historical Review

"While many other works have focused on Asian Americans as the & foreigners within the dominant order, this book breaks new ground by demonstrating the centrality of conflicts over the political status of Asian Americans during the Cold War itself." - American Historical Review

"Citizens of Asian Americais a welcome addition to the scholarship on race and the Cold War. . . . Cheng certainly shows that there us a story to tell about the impact of Asian American civil rights on U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War." - American Politics

"Cheng (history and Asian American studies, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison) illuminates matters of race during the Cold War that scholars often have overlooked as they focused on the plight of African American efforts to achieve civil rights during the era." - Choice