Author: Brett Sheehan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824892151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Covering the years of Japanese invasion during World War II from 1937 to 1945, this essay collection recounts Chinese experiences of living and working under conditions of war. Each of the regimes that ruled a divided China—occupation governments, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists—demanded and glorified the full commitment of the people and their resources in the prosecution of war. Through stories of both everyday people and mid-level technocrats charged with carrying out the war, this book brings to light the enormous gap between the leadership’s demands and the reality of everyday life. Eight long years of war exposed the unrealistic nature of elite demands for unreserved commitment. As the political leaders faced numerous obstacles in material mobilization and retreated to rhetoric of spiritual resistance, the Chinese populace resorted to localized strategies ranging from stoic adaptation to cynical profiteering, articulated variously with touches of humor and tragedy. These localized strategies are examined through stories of people at varying classes and levels of involvement in living, working, and trying to work through the war under the different regimes. In less than a decade, millions of Chinese were subjects of disciplinary regimes that dictated the celebration of holidays, the films available for viewing, the stories told in tea houses, and the restrictions governing the daily operations and participants of businesses—thus impacting the people of China for years to come. This volume looks at the narratives of those affected by the war and regimes to understand perspectives of both sides of the war and its total outcomes. Living and Working in Wartime China depicts the brutal micromanaging of ordinary lives, devoid of compelling national purposes, that both undercut the regimes’ relationships with their people and helped establish the managerial infrastructure of authoritarian regimes in subsequent postwar years.
Author: Isabel Brown Crook
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442225750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China.
Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”—a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism. For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China discouraged public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization—and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the war years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.
Author: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520300467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.
Author: Michael David Kwan
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478609311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize Things That Must Not Be Forgotten is a beautifully written collection of Michael David Kwans childhood experiences in China during the 1930s and 1940s. Born into privilege, David saw his pampered life disintegrate as the Japanese overran China. His father, the wealthy administrator for Chinas railroads, took a position in the pro-Japanese government to work covertly for the Chinese resistance. In Beijing, the Kwan household became a gathering place for resistance members. At their summer villa in Beidaihe, the family surreptitiously aided the guerillas in the nearby mountains. In Qingdao, the Kwans lived next door to a Japanese admiral and his wife. From a tree house overlooking their garden, young David enjoyed listening to the music they played, while his father worked secretly for the resistance. Davids other memories (for example, cricket hunting with his fathers tenant farmer, performing rituals as an altar boy, being tormented in school, gardening with the owner of an antique shop, and participating in Boy Scouts) provide fascinating insights into life in China during those turbulent times. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within days, Japan surrendered. Chiang Kai-sheks regime replaced the Japanese puppet government in Nanking. Chiang declared that all who had links to the defunct government would be considered traitors until proven otherwise. Davids father was imprisoned. During the Japanese occupation, Chiangs Kuomintang and Mao Zedongs Communists had been united against the invaders, but once Japan was defeated, China moved toward chaos as the two factions vied for power. At age twelve, David was sent to live with relatives in Shanghai before being spirited out of the country, not knowing if hed ever see his family again. Things That Must Not Be Forgotten will stay in readers hearts and minds long after theyve turned the final, wrenching page.
Author: Dan C. Pinck
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 9781682475126
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Readers with a penchant for real-life cloak and dagger stories won't be disappointed with this memoir. Dan Pinck's World War II adventures behind the lapanese lines in war-torn China resulted in vital information being passed along to the Allies and his up close-and-personal look at the world of covert military operations in that country will fascinate many. But the author does not focus on the heroics typically encountered in spy stories. Pinck ignores the glamour to give a totally candid view of events with an engaging style and self-deprecating wit. Just nineteen years old when he volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he was assigned to an area near Hong Kong where he worked with some twenty local agents. The sole American agent in the area, Pinck coordinated the gathering of information about troop movements and shipping along the Japanese-held coast, efforts that resulted in the sinking of several enemy ships. Prior to Japan's surrender he was mapping Japanese coastal emplacements in the area where an American invasion was scheduled.
Author: Chi-Chen Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
A chronological group of stories written by Chinese authors on various aspects of life during wartime China from 1937-1942.
Author:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226181685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
When Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, Voices from Shanghai fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere. Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these fascinating accounts make their English-languge debut in this volume. A rich new take on Holocaust literature, Voices from Shanghai reveals how refugees attempted to pursue a life of creativity despite the hardships of exile.
Author: Lucy M. Cohen
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
In much of the United States, immigrants from China banded together in self-enclosed communities, “Chinatowns,” in which they retained their language, culture, and social organization. In the South, however, the Chinese began to merge into the surrounding communities within a single generation’s time, quickly disappearing from historical accounts and becoming, as they themselves phrased it, a “mixed nation.” Lucy M. Cohen’s Chinese in the Post-Civil War South traces the experience of the Chinese who came to the South during Reconstruction. Many of them were recruited by planters eager to fill the labor vacuum created by emancipation with “coolie” labor. The Planters’ aims were obstructed in part by the federal government’s determination not to allow the South the opportunity to create a new form of slavery. Some Chinese did, however, enter into labor contracts with planters—agreements that the planters often altered without consultation or negotiation with the workers. With the Chinese intent upon the inviolability of their contracts, the arrangements with the planters soon broke down. At the end of their employment on the plantations, some of the immigrants returned to China or departed for other areas of the United States. Still others, however, chose to remain near where they had been employed. Living in cultural isolation rather than in the China towns in major cities, the immigrants soon no longer used their original language to communicate within the home; they adopted new surnames, so that even among brothers and sisters variations of names existed; they formed no associations or guilds specific to their heritage; and they intermarried, so that a few generations later their physical features were no longer readily observable in their descendants. Based on extensive research in documents and family correspondence as well as interviews with descendants of the immigrants, this study by Lucy Cohen is the first history of the Chinese in the Reconstruction South—their rejection of the role that planter society had envisioned for them and their quick adaptation into a less rigid segment of rural southern society.
Author: Hollington K. Tong
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 144749699X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This classic book was written by Hollington K. Tong whilst China was still in the clutches of war, and contains an affective account of what life was like within the country at that time. Extract : 'The Chinese believe that all things under heaven work together for good. An evil comes but will not long stay. No matter how a story begins, it has a happy ending. During seven years of war, the Chinese have suffered misery. There have been broken homes and broken hearts. There have been separations and dislocations. There have been worries about food and about clothes and about innumerable things. The war years are not the first in which the Chinese have suffered. In their best times, they were afflicted with poverty. The majority of them are poor by birth. On top of poverty there have been floods, droughts, civil wars, each bringing untold suffering. All these calamities soon passed. The Chinese rose after each, not only unbeaten but stronger through the discipline of hardships which, down the centuries, they have learned to endure and overcome. The present war has brought the worst of the worst to the Chinese people. Seven years is the longest that any evil has remained with them, but it has not been long enough to wear out people who, for thousands of years, have suffered hardships and privations, and have survived. This long war will end as all other evils have ended, and there will come a better day. Until it comes, the Chinese have the spirit to smile in the face of hardships and to carry on a spirit which has sustained them through the calamities of the seven years of this war as it sustained them through calamities of the past. It is the spirit of her teeming millions of farmers, from whom most of the five million men of China's army were drawn, and from whose fields comes the food for the army. It is the spirit of her laborers, her mechanics and engineers who have built China's wartime railways, highways, water ways, and other arteries of communication, and who work in China's arsenals to keep the guns supplied with ammunition. It is the spirit of China's women as well as her men. The people of China, despite the stress and strain of war, have carried on. They continue to make love, to get married, to give birth to babies and to support growing families on meager incomes. Seven years is a long time, during which many things can happen and many things have happened to Teng Chan.'
