This chapter analyzes Sino-American public diplomacy during WWII by focusing on the extraordinary career of Gong Peng – a cosmopolitan young Communist who worked as an interpreter, informal diplomat, and press attaché at the Communists’ Southern Bureau in China’s wartime capital of Chongqing. Due to the exclusion of the Communists from official US-China diplomacy, Gong Peng secured channels for the distribution of international propaganda by cultivating close friendships with the many American journalists, soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence officers who converged on Chongqing during the war. Gong Peng practised public diplomacy by forging an atmosphere of cosmopolitan sociability – a whirlwind of dinner parties and secret rendezvous, late-night meetings and narrow escapes. The informal practices of public diplomacy that Gong Peng developed in wartime Chongqing likewise contributed to the formalization of “people’s diplomacy” as a key element of China’s diplomatic infrastructure after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

During the US War in Vietnam, diverse activists and organizations advanced a range arguments against US intervention in Vietnam. These organizations did not form a singular or united antiwar movement, however, and many histories have overlooked the contributions of activists who did not focus their efforts solely on ending the US war. Indeed, many activists challenged injustices on multiple fronts and created unique antiwar discourses as part of their social justice advocacy. They often linked their advocacy and constituents within the United States with US treatment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. This chapter describes the diversity of antiwar rhetoric and activism in the 1960s and 1970s with the help of North Vietnam’s government, which fostered a people’s diplomacy with American citizens. In doing so, this chapter illustrates that many participants in antiwar advocacy saw their protests against US intervention in Vietnam as part of their larger fight to create a more just American society.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.