Last week Heather Streets-Salter, a Professor at Northeastern University, spoke about the Noulens Affair and how it could have been the start of anti-communism before the Cold War even started. She began the talk by educating the room about the Noulens Affair which took place in Shanghai in 1931. Professor Streets-Salter prefaced the story by guessing that no one in the audience had heard about it before because of the lack of literature surrounding the event.<\/p>\n
The Noulens Affair began with the arrival of Joseph Ducroux and Wong Muk Han in Singapore where they were arrested for their role in the communist party. At the time of the arrest, Ducroux was carrying an address book with names of the people involved, which led them to Shanghai. The authorities were led to an apartment which had a key to another apartment, where they hit the \u201cjackpot\u201d, as Streets-Salter described. In the second apartment the French and British authorities found papers of the Far Easter Bureau of the Comintern including payroll documentation, lists of pseudonyms, correspondence and cipher codes. These documents led to 276 arrests and the confiscation of 963,601 copies of communist literature. Additionally, they found links between Moscow and Shanghai and many other parts of Asia. European governments wouldn\u2019t claim the Noulens\u2019, the holders of the apartment, so they were imprisoned in China and sentenced to death. Although there was pushback all over the world, there is a lack of English literature surrounding the events of the Noulens affair and the amount of people that were involved.<\/p>\n
Professor Streets-Salter not only aimed to educate us about the Noulens Affair itself, but also to argue the significance in terms of communism pre-cold war and to show the state of the world at that time. She argued that the Noulens affair was a metaphor for thinking about empires in the 1900s, not as bounded territories or specific places but more as communication between different territories and how they were connected. A good example was that the Noulens\u2019 were connecting communist movements in southeast Asia while their captors were working together to question and control the communist movement. The main point of the presentation was to illustrate how the Noulens Affair contradicts the origins of the Cold War. Streets-Salter explained that the commentary on the confiscated papers is a good way to understand the level of threat that the colonial powers and China believed they were facing. They understood that the communist movement was capable of crossing boundaries and that it was aided by a powerful outside source. It is extremely likely that in the Noulens Affair we see the beginnings of the Cold War years before it even started. Additionally, one audience member asked if Streets-Salter was able to obtain the original documents that the authorities found in the Noulens\u2019 apartment and she described that many of them were still protected by the British government. I think the lack of literature surrounding this event also displays the effects that it had on the colonial powers and shows the fear that they felt towards the communist movement years before it came to fruition in the cold war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week Heather Streets-Salter, a Professor at Northeastern University, spoke about the Noulens Affair and how it could have been the start of anti-communism before the Cold War even started. She began the talk by educating the room about the Noulens Affair which took place in Shanghai in 1931. Professor Streets-Salter prefaced the story by … <\/p>\n