Echoes of Chongqing


Book Description

The voices of ordinary women in China's War of Resistance against Japan




Prosperity's Predicament


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.




American Women in a World at War


Book Description

This title brings together twenty-five writings by women who share their rich and varied World War II experiences, from serving in the military to working on the home front to preparing for the postwar world. By providing evidence of their active and resourceful roles in the war effort as workers, wives, and mothers, these women offer eloquent testimony that World War II was indeed everybody's war. Litoff and Smith combine pieces by well-known writers, such as Margaret Culkin Banning and Nancy Wilson Ross, with important-but largely forgotten-personal accounts by ordinary women living in extraordinary times. This volume is divided into the six sections listed below: Preparing for War In the Military At 'Far-Flung' Fronts On the Home Front War Jobs Preparing for the Postwar World




China's Influence and American Interests


Book Description

While Americans are generally aware of China's ambitions as a global economic and military superpower, few understand just how deeply and assertively that country has already sought to influence American society. As the authors of this volume write, it is time for a wake-up call. In documenting the extent of Beijing's expanding influence operations inside the United States, they aim to raise awareness of China's efforts to penetrate and sway a range of American institutions: state and local governments, academic institutions, think tanks, media, and businesses. And they highlight other aspects of the propagandistic “discourse war” waged by the Chinese government and Communist Party leaders that are less expected and more alarming, such as their view of Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that owes undefined allegiance to the so-called Motherland.Featuring ideas and policy proposals from leading China specialists, China's Influence and American Interests argues that a successful future relationship requires a rebalancing toward greater transparency, reciprocity, and fairness. Throughout, the authors also strongly state the importance of avoiding casting aspersions on Chinese and on Chinese Americans, who constitute a vital portion of American society. But if the United States is to fare well in this increasingly adversarial relationship with China, Americans must have a far better sense of that country's ambitions and methods than they do now.




Intimate Communities


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.




New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities


Book Description

The nine empirical studies in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities, organized under the general framework of urban space, examine three critical dimensions of the great urban transformation in Republican China—social, legal and governance orders. Together these narratives suggest a new perception of this historical urbanism. While modern economic development was a major drive for Chinese urban transformation, this volume highlights the dimension of the multilayered forces that shape urban space by looking into that less quantifiable, but equally important cultural realm and by exposing the ways in which these forces created new urban narratives, which became themselves shapers of urban space and of our perception of the Republican urbanity.




Seeing History: Public History in China


Book Description

When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view. It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public is prosuming history. Public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.




Living and Working in Wartime China


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.




The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China


Book Description

The study of contemporary China constitutes a fascinating yet challenging area of scholarly inquiry. Recent decades have brought dramatic changes to China′s economy, society and governance. Analyzing such changes in the context of multiple disciplinary perspectives offers opportunites as well as challenges for scholars in the field known as contemporary China Studies. The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China is a two-volume exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in the both disciplinary and China-specific contexts. Drawing on a range of scholarly approaches found in the social sciences and history, an international team of contributors engage with the question of what a rapidly changing China means for the broader field of contemporary China studies, and identify areas of promising future research. Part 1: Context: History, Economy, and the Environment Part 2: Economic Transformations Part 3: Politics and Government Part 4: China on the Global Stage Part 5: China′s Foreign Policy Part 6: National and Nested Identities Part 7: Urbanization and Spatial Development Part 8: Poverty and Inequality Part 9: Social Change Part 10: Future Directions for Contemporary China Studies




Women and Politics in Wartime China


Book Description

Focusing on Chinese elite women as a special socio-political group, this book places the sophisticated networks they formed in the shifting geographical, social, cultural and political spaces of wartime China, where their political engagement, knowledge-making, and network-building in support of 'national resistance and reconstruction' (kangzhan jianguo) unfolded. By examining the emergence, development, integration, and transformation of these networks as an unsettled, fragmented process - a process that lasted through the extended wars and upheavals in China from the 1930s to the 1950s and that moves beyond party ideologies and geopolitical borders, the book seeks to explore the dynamics of war, politics, and gender in the broader context of the Second World War.