This book examines “East and West German involvement in the global South” (287) in the context of the “simultaneity of decolonization and Cold War” (319). The core of the book is a set of narratives that detail the political motivations and everyday experiences in humanitarian (including medical) and development campaigns that East Germany, West Germany, and other states carried out in newly independent Asian and African states during the 1950s and 1960s. The narratives are carefully crafted and reveal little-known material. Especially interesting are those about the experiences of Indian, Filipina, and especially Korean nurses in the Federal Republic; West German sponsorship of a hospital in Pusan, South Korea; East German sponsorship of a hospital in North Vietnam; and East Germany efforts to rebuild Hamhung, North Korea. Other state actors and sites are included as well: US medical aid (and refugee “manipulation”) in South Vietnam; East German assistance to Algerian insurgents and, later, West German assistance efforts in the context of French efforts to block or limit humanitarian aid to Algerians; East and West German humanitarian aid in Congo in the early 1960s; East German health and hygiene exhibits and medical aid in Asian and African countries; medical students in East Germany; West German oil exploitation in Syria and Algeria; East German and West German involvement in Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and unified Tanzania. This partial list gives some sense of the richness and scope of the book.

That last story about Tanzania serves Hong's larger purpose well because it demonstrates how the postwar rivalry between the two Germanies shaped their relationships with newly independent states. As the author shows, the bilateral health and development efforts of each German state had already undermined West Germany's Hallstein Doctrine (the refusal to maintain diplomatic relations with states that recognized East Germany) prior to West Germany's turn to Ostpolitik. Hong also demonstrates how Sino-Soviet relations and Chinese development policy in Africa affected East German, West German, and other European states’ policy decisions. The book argues that the global south “served as both the mirror image of their own society and as the object of humanitarian and development programs” (319), and offers fascinating hints about how the East German state sought to use its campaigns in Asia and Africa to shore up its legitimacy at home.

Hong's narratives show that these campaigns were far more complicated than a mere transfer of expertise and goods (and even such transfers were rarely carried out as promised). She focuses on the politicization, instrumentalization (especially for the sake of an obsession with security), material deficiencies, and plain incompetence of several of these programs and their sponsoring states, and she is unsentimental about ideas of socialist solidarity. These narratives truly require transnational and global contexts, and Hong provides them: they belong to the history of East or West Germany, to German-German interactions, to the domestic politics of newly independent states, to transatlantic relations, to relations between the NATO countries and the Soviet Union, to Sino-Soviet relations, and, last but not least, to the relations among nonaligned states. And while the various campaigns may have been hatched or monitored at the diplomatic level, they were experienced transnationally at the level of individuals. Like similar work in the “new diplomatic history,” this book takes seriously these lives and intercultural encounters as they were inflected by the history of colonialism and racism. The narratives are at the same time unusual in their local details and quickly recognizable in the broad global outlines of the era of Cold War and détente. Hong gives anticommunism its due as a shaping force in those years; she illuminates the Sino-Soviet context of socialist internationalism, which directly shaped East German foreign policy; and she notes the presence of colonial- and Nazi-era personnel in the campaigns.

Hong's empirical narratives touch upon big topics that require further conceptual and historical elucidation than she provides. Any single one of the following large themes could have served to structure the whole project: health, humanitarianism, development, communism, anticommunism, sovereignty, and international relations during the period of formal colonial empire and then decolonization. Each of these topics has complex origins, contested meanings even among their adherents, and multiple aftereffects. Hong gives the most attention to health campaigns, yet this book is not a postcolonial history of health policy—i.e., if one expects such a history to provide a grounding in the historiography of colonial and welfare-state medicine, to track changing concepts of health, and to assess the relative impact those concepts on later developments. Hong instead presents health campaigns as expressions of coloniality, among other things such as technical assistance campaigns and the reception of Asian and African students at European universities.

This book offers the reader tantalizing glimpses of many things, rather than a definitive account of what one big topic (such as “health” or “development”) meant in that era. In the end, it is the narratives that are vivid to the reader, not the title's promised “global humanitarian regime,” the contours of which remain elusive. The book presents big questions and provokes more of them. Hong chose empirical breadth within a compact time frame. She indicates her knowledge of larger problems, but does not guide the novice reader through them. For example, she has organized her extensive material under numerous introductory sections and section headings, but these do not necessarily fit the empirical material closely. They function more as an insider's allusions than as key terms that will be discussed in greater depth in the text. For example, when she refers to development as a “time machine” (215) in a heading, she does not follow up with an explanation of the metaphor in the text. The book will be most valuable to advanced scholars, but the individual narratives could be singled out for teaching to provoke valuable classroom discussion about questions such as why “health” is such a prominent commodity in postcolonial settings and what the purpose of “development” is and should be.