Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance

2000 ◽  
pp. 365-398
Author(s):  
G. Pickowicz Paul
Keyword(s):  
War Of Resistance

scholarly journals Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110179
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
World War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
War Of Resistance ◽  
Redress Movement ◽  
Intellectual Elites ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
Second World ◽  
Veteran Memorial

Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the ‘conspicuous silence’ of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalised sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.

scholarly journals Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China: Anti-Japanese Propaganda Cartoons

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Professional Journals ◽  
Japanese Male ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
War Effort ◽  
National Salvation ◽  
War Of Resistance ◽  
Female Soldiers

During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), China's leading cartoon artists formed patriotic associations aimed at repelling the Japanese military. Their stated propaganda goals were to boost morale among the troops and the civilian population by circulating artwork that would ignite the spirit of resistance among Chinese audiences. In keeping with the genre, racialized and sexualized imagery abounded. The artists created myriad disturbing visions of how militarized violence impacted men's and women's bodies differently. By analyzing the two major professional journals, National Salvation Cartoons and War of Resistance Cartoons, this article shows that depictions of sexual violence inflicted on Chinese women were integral to the artists' attempts to arouse the spirit of resistance. By comparing their depictions of different types of bodies (Chinese and Japanese, male and female, soldiers' and civilians') the article argues that the cartoonists believed that the depiction of sexually mutilated Chinese women would build resistance and spur patriotism while equivalent depictions of mutilated male soldiers would sap morale and hamper the war effort. The article concludes with a discussion about the dubious efficacy of propaganda that invokes a hypersexualized, masculine enemy other.

Punishing Han Traitors beyond Chinese Borders

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Yun Xia
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
War Of Resistance

This chapter investigates the struggle between Nationalists and Communists to punish so-called “hanjin” (literally, traitors to the Han Chinese nation) across the vast canvas of postwar East Asia. Drawing on hitherto unexamined government correspondence, legal codes, edicts, accusations, newspapers and popular literature, this chapter examines how former collaborators were brought to justice in legal and extra-legal ways. It examines the political struggles, and the tensions between justice and nationalism in the crucible of civil war. In so doing it delves into fraught categories of identity after empire, collaboration and nationalism, and postwar commemoration and memory of the so-called War of Resistance against Japan (1931-1945) in China. Ultimately this work forces us to reckon with questions of not just the meaning of “hanjian” but what the persecution of such figures reveals about the imperial roots of Modern China.

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