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Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders examines Sinophone literary and cultural production in relation to the politics of the global Cold War and decolonization in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. As we reckon with the historical and contemporary geopolitical standoffs in the Cold War–divided territories, Shuang Shen draws attention to the diasporic communities outside Chinese sovereign territories and shows that these supposedly peripheral locations were in fact significant cultural and political hot spots. 

Shen demonstrates how Cold War borders exerted geo-power over strategic hot spots, organized global flows of populations and cultures, hardened the boundaries of aesthetic debates, and managed interracial relationships and plurilingual exchange. The multifold bordering effect in turn complicates the common perception of the border as a mechanism of territorial division. Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders proposes that a critical examination of borders—not just territorial divisions, but also social, political, and aesthetic boundaries––can tap into different structures of power without needing to incorporate them into a single binary framework of the metropole versus colony.

Early twentieth-century China paired the local community to the world--a place and time when English dominated urban-centered higher and secondary education and Chinese-edited English-language magazines surfaced as a new form of translingual practice.

Cosmopolitan Publics focuses on China's "cosmopolitans," Western-educated intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and citizens of the wider world. Shuang Shen highlights their work in publications such as The China Critic and T'ien Hsia, providing readers with a broader understanding of the role and function of cultural mixing, translation, and multilingualism in China's cultural modernity.

Decades later, as nationalist biases and political restrictions emerged within China, the influence of the cosmopolitans was neglected and the significance of cosmopolitan practice was underplayed. Shen's encompassing study revisits and presents the experience of Chinese modernity as far more heterogeneous, emergent, and transnational than it has been characterized until now.