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During the Anti-Japanese War, unlike the group of exiled writers from Northeast China who viewed the scenery of their homeland trampled upon by the invaders with a warm nostalgia, and the "picturesque scenery" constructed by Japanese, Korean, Russian and some Chinese writers in the Northeast region to cater to colonial rule, a large number of local writers in Northeast China who deeply felt the pain and evil of colonialism but were unable to escape described the dark and filthy scenery of different spaces in the city, revealed the real social situation in Northeast China under colonial oppression, exposed the "royal paradise" advocated by Japanese aggressors, accused the evil of colonial rule, and expressed resistance to colonial plunder with a close and profound "local gaze". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Luochuan Conference of August 1937 was a crucial moment in Mao Zedong's struggle for power. Mao tried to force the party to adopt his guerrilla war strategy; he failed. Mao nonetheless exploited his position as the Politburo member in charge of military affairs, and put his strategy into action in fall 1937. Mao's actions worried Josef Stalin, who was depending on Chiang Kai-shek to keep Japan from invading Siberia. Mao therefore moderated his behavior, but clung to his strategy. This article shows how Mao managed to win Stalin and the CCP over to his strategy, and thus consolidated his hold on the CCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstracts for articles in this special issue on the history of gender, masculinity, and femininity during both World War I and World War II are presented. Topics include progressivism and sexual assault during the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924, a study of the gender archetype of the "New Woman" under the collaborationist Provisional Government of the Republic of China, and German government policies regarding prostitution during both World Wars.

Before the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, almost all Chinese leaders and intellectuals believed that the large-scale agricultural settlement of China's western peripheries would rapidly deliver extensive economic and social benefits. At the onset of the war, many officials from the western provinces pressed the central government to fund programmes to allow millions of refugees from Japanese-occupied territory to settle on and cultivate ‘wasteland’ (huang) on the peripheries of their jurisdictions. Influenced more by pre-War ideology than the demands of the War, central and provincial governments established ‘land settlement and cultivation zones’ (kenzhiqu) in these provinces. However, these ventures were much less well supported than their proponents had hoped. This was not only because the War strained government finances—funding for kenzhiqu was always limited relative to support for agricultural cooperatives—but also partly because kenzhiqu attempts to recruit settlers clashed with the acute labour shortage in core zones of unoccupied China, which led to the abandonment of already cultivated land there, and partly because of the mistrust between central and regional governments. Nonetheless, wartime advocacy for more land cultivation in the Northwest did have important repercussions, leading to a renewed interest in penal colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the development of the Wang Jingwei personality cult during the Japanese occupation of China (1937–1945). It examines how the collaborationist Chinese state led by Wang sought to distinguish its figurehead from the person he had replaced, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on visual, archival, and published sources, it traces the development of the Wang cult from the early years of the war, and argues that the unusual context in which the cult evolved ultimately undermined its coherence. The case of Wang Jingwei illustrates how the Chinese case more broadly can enhance our understandings of personality cults that develop under occupation. To this end, I compare the Wang regime with various European “collaborationist” governments that sought to promote their leaders in similar ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The key to the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution lies mainly in the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to mobilize the people effectively. During the Anti-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, the CCP adopted different mobilization strategies in different contexts. During the Anti-Japanese War, the main strategies included arousing nationalist emotions among the peasants with slogans of anti-Japanese patriotism; satisfying the demands of the peasants by reducing rents, interest, and other burdens; and promoting the peasants’ political participation through the mass line. In the Civil War, mobilization was based on class categorization and identity formation, interest-oriented land reform, and emotion-oriented speaking-bitterness campaigns. Yet throughout the entire revolutionary era, the CCP approach reflected continuities that surpassed the differences visible during the successive stages in the Chinese Communist Revolution. In each war, CCP rural mobilization took the winning of the peasants’ participatory, psychological–emotional, and material support as the main goal. To achieve this goal, the CCP usually used key mobilization approaches such as satisfying peasants’ demands, reconstructing peasants’ identities, and stimulating peasants’ emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the July 7 Incident of 1937 when the Japanese military troops launched a sudden attack on the Chinese army at the Northern China, what kind of behaviors did General ZHANG Zi-zhong have who was then commander of the 38th division of the Kuomintang troops and also the mayor of Tianjin? What kind of pain did he suffer? Why was he not able to defend himself when accused of traitor of the Country? The academic circle cannot offer a proper evaluation even today. Detailed historical records reveal that ZHANG was commanded by SONG Zhe-yuan to defend Beijing and Tianjin by going about with the Japanese troops. In fact, what he did was to cover the 29th Army's withdrawing to keep the military force while trying not to loose any territory, which has hence given rise to misunderstandings from which he had to suffer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Chinese literature during the Anti-Japanese War has been generally narrated against the historical background of the nationwide pursuit of "saving the country first over enlightenment" and exaggerated the types of inefficiency of the development of Chinese literature, the two aspects of which reveal a simplistic understanding of the War itself. It is now necessary to jump out of our previous view about the complete and unified "Literature History of the Republic Period" to observe with care the relevant literary phenomena under a more complicated cultural logic. That is, the War destroyed the traditional cultural publication cause; but opened up a new space; the literary spirit hence gained new quality and style out of the War and led to the formation of multi-temporospatial intension and extension and deepening of a series of inherent literary themes. In fact, modern Chinese literature obtained its maturity and self-confidence during the third decade of the 20th century and hence achieved the opportunity to stand on a similar footing with the world literature. In one word, it matured during that extraordinary historical era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During China's war with Japan, the Chinese state and its affiliates turned their attention to a dual project of resistance and national construction. Social reformers and institutions believed that strengthening the minds and bodies of the population should begin with improving families, and that this in turn necessitated educating women to become better family managers and mothers. This essay provides an overview of two projects of wartime family reform, the work of the New Life Movement Women's Advisory Council and the development of family education experimental areas, in order to show the ways that educated women and the Guomindang state attempted to transform the families of China. By changing specific domestic practices, such as in the realms of hygiene and childrearing, these reformers aimed to create a more modern and efficient female citizenry primed for the ongoing fight against Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the waning years of the civil war, the Shanghai municipal government confronted a thorny and unprecedented problem: tens of thousands of Subei refugees had taken shelter in the coffin repositories and temporary burial facilities owned by the city's native place associations. This article examines how the situation became a lightning rod of controversy in the context of the civil war. Drawing on new archival sources that capture the experiences of Subei refugees in their own words, it shows how a previously marginalized group invoked claims of righteous resistance to counter allegations of immoral and unlawful behavior. In doing so, Subei refugees asserted themselves at the center of debates about social rights and the legitimacy of the Nationalist government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion examines wartime debates over the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives' (CIC) 'Gung Ho' movement. The CIC experience provides a distinctive case study of mobilisation in Nationalist China at war, endeavouring to extend the momentum of the 'great industrial migration' as a force for social transformation, from the inland cities to the countryside. CIC was also to become a focus for overseas support for Chinas resistance against Japanese invasion. The discussion reveals differences over elite- and mass-based strategies for cooperative development as revealed from Western inputs into the CIC debates, at the same time noting different ways in which foreigners sought to strengthen relations with wartime China. While CIC's promoters reached beyond philanthropism towards a pragmatic solidarity, cooperative experts from the emerging international development community sought universal formulations for overseas assistance, advocating adherence to Western cooperative models, and reinforcing an elitist emphasis on expertise. CIC was to fall far short of its ambitions for a people's cooperative movement as a permanent force for Chinas democratic future. Here it is argued that under combined pressures of Guomindang (Nationalist Party, Kuomintang) statism and Western neocolonialism, CIC's distinctive developmental strategy, based on the mobilisation of workers in cooperative self-help, was never allowed to fulfil its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shanghai Refugee Children Nutritional Aid Committee, formed in 1937, sought to improve refugee children's nutritional health by making and distributing a scientifically tested soybean milk and soybean cakes. By 1942, the Committee had adopted a national platform and changed its moniker to the Chinese Nutritional Aid Council, with plans to open offices and nutrition clinics in Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang and Kunming. This paper argues that in linking biomedical understandings of nutrition with social change, this group of Western-trained physicians and young female social workers enacted a new kind of social activism, one which seized upon the food-as-fuel idea and staked the welfare of the nation upon the nutritional health of its citizenry. In contrast to earlier social relief projects promoted by the imperial state and the local philanthropic initiatives of gentry elites, the Chinese Nutritional Aid Committee articulated an image of professional and specialised expertise in the science of nutrition and care. Theirs was a project of modern refashioning in which science played a key and foundational role in crafting their understanding of both relief and the children they aimed to save. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Life Movement is remembered in Chinese history primarily as the movement which Chiang Kai-shek launched in Jiangxi province in 1934 to change Chinese people's habits. This paper makes a different case: it argues that the New Life Movement and its organisations were central into the Nationalist Government's wartime mobilisation, and that the involvement of the civil servants through the NLM prevented the disintegration of society and administrative institutions under the impact of the war. This paper focuses on Chongqing and Chengdu between 1938 and 1942 and draws on archival materials and official reports to assess the scope of the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation. It analyses the involvement of the NLM organisations in the fundraising effort, in the mobilisation of women civil servants, and in the organisation of relief work in the first phase of the war and challenge the long-held view that the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation was insubstantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the Japanese invasion of 1937 on Chinese cities. Focusing on Wuxi, one hundred miles to the west of Shanghai, the author argues that bombing was mainly limited to those commercial and industrial areas of the city that had come to define its modern identity. At the same time, municipal authorities also took steps to prepare the city and its inhabitants for war, although these were largely ineffective. However, the destruction of the invasion actually led to changes in urban morphology as the city was rebuilt in 1938. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, some towns and villages remained wholly unaffected by the invasion. This exposes the need for a spatial analysis of how violence affects different areas in the city and countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the academic significance and impact of the book "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power," by Chalmers Johnson, on the field of contemporary China studies. The author reflects on the nationalistic aspects of the Chinese Communist Party in mobilizing popular support during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. Emphasis is given to how Johnson conceived of the Chinese nature of communism in China and the development of peasant nationalism. Other topics include programs for social justice, communism as a foreign import, and the withdrawal of the Nationalist Party.

Information is presented about several papers discussed at a scholarly conference on the roles of the Soviet Union and China in World War II held November 16, 2010 jointly sponsored by the Institute for Far Eastern Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Institute of International Studies at the People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry . Topics include wartime diplomacy, military aid to China, and the Nanking Massacre of 1937 in Nanjing, China.

A state-centered perspective in studies of revolutions holds that international pressures contribute to outbreak of revolutions, assuming that the magnitude and intensity of international pressures vary from case to case. This study argues that in the paradigmatic communist revolutions of the 20th century, such as the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the role of the exogenous factor of war was paramount. After outlining a war-centered framework for studying communist revolutions, this research shows how the devastating experience of total war against Japan (1937-1945) undermined the Kuomintang state in China and created structural conditions for the communist takeover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the history of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service during World War II and its activities in collaborating with authorities from the Japanese military occupation on the Chinese mainland. Analysis is given through documents taken from a 1945 government inquiry into the service's activities during the war. Conclusions are offered outlining the nationalistic interests of Chinese workers during the period, highlighting their loyalty to the Kuomintang government over other interested parties.

The article discusses the collection of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins in Shanghai, China during the Republican period and World War II. The author comments on the deaths of poor children in China during that period and notes that many poor people deposited the corpses of the dead on city streets. He comments on how economic conditions and Chinese funerary customs influenced the disposal of corpses in the city and notes attempts by charities and benevolent societies, such as the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery (SPBC) and the Tongren fuyuantang (TRFYT), to hold funerary services for unclaimed corpses and bury them in charity cemeteries. The effect of World War II on the geographic distribution of corpses is discussed.

From the middle of the Anti-Japanese War, corruption worsened in the Nationalist-held areas. The US dollar bond embezzlement case of 1942 provides a typical example. The suspected involvement in the scandal of his brother-in-law, H. H. Kong (Kong Xiangxi), placed Chiang Kai-shek in a dilemma. Although he upheld Kong's image in public, he ordered several secret investigations into the case. Despite his disappointment and rage on confirmation of Kong's guilt, he bore in mind the rule of the "party-state" and the reputation of his family, and not only failed to pursue the criminal responsibility of Kong and his corrupt associates but cracked down on the expression of public opinion. The fact that Chiang and the Nationalist government were unable to punish corruption further worsened the situation after the war ended. This was an important factor contributing to the Nationalist Party's loss of power on the Chinese mainland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relations between the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang) and the Communist Party of China (CCP) following the South Anhui (or New Fourth Army) Incident in 1941, in which Nationalist armed forces attacked a Communist army unit. Discussions among Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his advisers are recounted, as are the negotiations at the Second National Participating Conference to try to heal the rift in the Nationalist-Communist united front. The results are seen as a stalemate.

The article discusses the nationalist and feminist discourses on Jianmei (Robust Beauty) in China during its national crisis in 1930s. The New Life Movement showed that to discipline and train citizens' bodies was beyond the state's control. The newspapers and magazines promoted tiyu (sport, physical education) using the concepts of patriotism, modernization, aesthetics and fashion. This led to exceeding the strict guidelines of fenghua (morality, moral transformation).

The article reassesses China's military advance towards Tibet in 1942-1943. It cites the reasons why Chiang Kai-shek maneuvered towards a possible war with Tibet. It claims that Chiang Kai-shek's manipulation of the Sino-Tibetan border crisis showed how he and his military advisors perceived China's territoriality and border defense in the south-west region of the country. It concludes that this episode in China's history led to the problematic Tibetan issue that still haunts the international community.

The article focuses on the development of local ethnographic studies in China by Japanese scholars in years before the end of end of World War II. It explains that Japanese scholarly activity in China was extensive and immense and is aimed at facilitating the expansion of Japan's economic and military interest in China. Japanese researchers and scholars have started collecting data on the economy, religion, culture and society of local communities in China as early as 1870s. These Japanese scholarly activity in China has greatly helped the Japanese empire.

Presents arguments against the view that the Nationalists or the Koumintang were a militarist and authoritarian regime and their defeat was the result of the Stilwell myth, or their myopic refusal to follow the advice of General Joseph Stilwell to reform their armies and mount offensives against the Japanese during World War II. Origin of the Stilwell myth; Analysis of the Japanese advance in Burma; Strategy of the Allied Forces in Burma and China; Alternative interpretation of the Asian war theater.

Examines the cinematic representations of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. 'Massacre in Nanjing,' directed by Luo Guanqun; 'Black Sun: The Nanjing Massacre,' directed by T.F. Mou; 'Don't Cry, Nanking,' directed by Wu Ziniu.

Endeavors to recover the history of Chinese rhymers as they practiced their various performing arts in the early years of the border region era. The impact these artists and their history had on the later popular art that emerged from the folk-elite artistic confrontation in the Yan'an period, 1937-1947; The oral tradition of the rhymers.

Examines the rural co-operativization drive of the Yan'an Way from 1943 to 1944. Sociopolitical contexts in which the Yan'an Way was launched by Mao Zhedong; Building of co-operative movements after the May Fourth Movement; Communist Party's command of local resources; Principles of agricultural collectivism that were implemented in various regions of the Yan'an way.

Discusses the role of the Chinese Communist Party in the anti-Japanese war of the 1930s and 1940s. Nationalist appeal of the Communist Party; Emergence of the JinJiYuLu region as a crucial part of the history of the Communist Party; Socio-economic reforms being pushed by the Communist Party as the solution against the might of the Japanese.

Examines the effect of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945 on China, with a particular focus on Wuhan or Hankou. Economic effects of the war; Impact of the war on Chinese social, cultural and political life.

Examines the use of war songs by the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1949. Creation of symbols of socialism and visions of a new society through music; Music as an activating force in shaping the minds and hearts of the people and a determinant of historical reality.