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Classifying Citizens in Nationalist China during World War II, 1937–1941*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2011

RANA MITTER
RANA MITTER*
Affiliation:
Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford, Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG, UK Email: rana.mitter@chinese.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between state and society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classification of the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization through propaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than with their Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the key province for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards and welfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugees from occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propaganda campaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to support wartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize the population in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant change in the conception of Chinese citizenship.

Type
Part I: Experiencing China's War with Japan: World War II, 1937–1945
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2: China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy , March 2011 , pp. 243 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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10 This author's emphasis.

11 Culp, R. (2007). Synthesizing Citizenship in Modern China, History Compass 5:6 (November, 1997), 1833 and 1849 (footnote 2), 1851CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This suggestive article seeks to define the changing meaning of citizenship in China, focussing on the civic and cultural aspects of the term in the late Qing and Republic eras, with particular emphasis on the period before 1937 and the outbreak of war.

12 Author unknown (1996). ‘Kangzhan baofa hou Nanjing guomin zhengfu guofang lianxi huiyi jilu’ [Record of the National Government's conference on national defence after the outbreak of the War of Resistance], (7 August, 1937) Minguo dang'an [Republican Archives] 43, 30.

13 Culp, Synthesizing Citizenship, p. 1837. These terms all carry the meaning of ‘citizen’, but as Culp notes, they relate respectively to the role of the citizen as an actor within the state; in terms of public status; and in terms of urban role.

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17 Howard, Workers at War, pp. 201–218. However, Howard does point out the importance of coercion and repression by the Nationalists, particularly in the munitions industry, a key part of the government's resistance effort.

18 Lipkin, Useless to the State, p. 11.

19 van de Ven, War and Nationalism, pp. 160–163.

20 For the first phase of the refugee crisis, see MacKinnon, S. (2008). Wuhan 1938: War, Refugees and the Making of Modern China, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 44–61Google Scholar.

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22 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). (1938). Wei guojun tuichu Wuhan quanguo guominshu [Message to the nation on the National Army's withdrawal from Wuhan, 31 October, 1938], in Zongtong Jiang gong sixiang yanlun zongji [Collection of the thought and speeches of President Chiang Kai-shek] http://www.chungcheng.org.tw/thought/class07/0012/0009.htm [Accessed 16 December 2010], p. 301. I translate the term jianguo here and elsewhere as ‘reconstruction’: this term seems to me to capture the element of continuation, by which the war and the aftermath became part of a longer trajectory of republican and citizen consciousness in the minds of Nationalist policymakers.

23 White, T. & Annalee, J. (1947). Thunder Out of China, Victor Gollancz, London, p. 13Google Scholar.

24 This was manifested, for instance, in a new interest in the anthropology of the border areas (see Andres Rodriguez's paper in this collection, entitled: ‘Building the Nation, Serving the Frontier: Mobilizing and Reconstructing China's Borderlands during the War of Resistance (1937–1945)’).

25 Chiang Kai-shek, Fang Zhi diji hongzha gao ge sheng shi zhengfu ji quanguo guominshu [Letter to the provincial and city governments and the whole citizenry of the country regarding defence against enemy air-raids], in Zongtong Jiang: http://www.chungcheng.org.tw/thought/class07/0013/0007.htm [Accessed 16 December 2010], p. 56.

26 RG08 (Box 173, Folder 7, M. M. Rue papers), pp. 5–6, Yale University Divinity School Library.

27 Lincoln, T. (forthcoming). The Rural and Urban at War: Invasion and Reconstruction in China during the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, Journal of Urban History.

28 Ristaino, M. (2008). The Jacquinot Safety Zone: Wartime Refugees in Shanghai, Stanford University Press, StanfordGoogle Scholar.

29 Zhou, Y.Chongqing tongshi, vol. 2, p. 876Google Scholar.

30 For refugee relief in wartime Shanghai, see Ristaino, The Jacquinot Safety Zone; and on Wuhan, MacKinnon, Wuhan 1938.

31 Liu, L. (2002). ‘A Whole Nation Walking: The “Great Retreat” in the War of Resistance, 1937–1945’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, pp. 202–203, 210, 250 and 287. Liu's work gives a powerful account of the changes in welfare and employment provision in the Interior.

32 For relief in the Ming dynasty, see Smith, J. H. (2009). The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los AngelesGoogle Scholar; for the Qing, see Edgerton-Tarpley, K. (2008). Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los AngelesGoogle Scholar.

33 Kirby, ‘Engineering China’, pp. 144–145.

34 MacKinnon, Wuhan 1938, pp. 54–61; Ristaino, Jacquinot, pp. 51–53.

35 Reeves, C. (2007). ‘Grave Concerns: Bodies, Burial, and Identity in Early Republican China’, in Cochran, S. and Strand, D., eds. Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast and Diaspora in Transnational China, Center for East Asian Studies, Berkeley, pp. 27–52Google Scholar.

36 On the use of identity documents to restrict global Asian migration, see McKeown, A. (2008). Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, Columbia University Press, New YorkGoogle Scholar.

37 Sichuan Provincial Archives (hereafter SPA) Min [i.e.: Minguo-Republican era files] 38 [Files relating to conferences of the Sichuan Party cadres] Folder 2/614 (6 April, 1939).

38 SPA 38/2/614 (June, 1940).

39 SPA 38/2/614 (14 July, 1939).

40 SPA 38/2/614 (November, 1939).

41 SPA 38/2/614 (June, 1940).

42 SPA 38/2/614 (June, 1940).

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 See Plum, M. C. (2006). ‘Unlikely Heirs: War Orphans During the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford.

47 SPA 38/2/1737 (21 November, 1938).

48 Liu, ‘A Whole Nation Walking’, pp. 260–262, notes this phenomenon also. See also Lincoln, ‘The Rural and Urban at War,’ on the way in which conditions in the Yangtze delta calmed down in the months following the Japanese occupation.

49 SPA 38/2/614 (15 April, 1938).

50 SPA 38/2/614 (10 January, 1940).

51 SPA 38/2/1737 (3 March, 1939).

52 SPA 38/2/614 (June, 1940).

53 Harrison, Making of the Republican Citizen, p. 241.

54 Hung, C.-T. (1994). War and Popular Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 221–270Google Scholar.

55 SPA Min 50 [Files relating to provincial mobilization committees] Folder 23, pp. 47–48 (4 April, 1939).

56 See van de Ven, War and Nationalism, pp. 131–169.

57 On Nationalist Party politics of anti-superstition, Nedostup, R. (2009). Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity, Harvard East Asia Center, Cambridge, MassachusettsGoogle Scholar.

58 SPA Min 50/23, pp. 47–48 (4 April, 1939).

59 Callahan, W. (2009). China: The Pessoptimist Nation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 67–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 SPA Min 50/23, p. 17 (July, 1939).

61 Ibid.

62 See, for instance, Hung, War and Popular Culture, pp. 221–285. Recent work that addresses the question of culture in the Nationalist regions includes: Xie, X. (2001). Chongqing wenhuashi [A cultural history of Chongqing], Chongqing chubanshe, Chongqing, pp. 260–343; and Tang, Z. et al. (2004). Zhongguo xibu kangzhan wenhuashi [A cultural history of western China during the War of Resistance], Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, Beijing and Sun Yatsen Research Group (Chongqing branch) (2005). Chongqing kangzhan wenhuashi [A cultural history of Chongqing during the War of Resistance], Tuanjie chubanshe, Beijing.

63 SPA Min 50/23 (22 July, 1939).

64 van de Ven, War and Nationalism, pp. 255–258.

65 SPA Min 50/23 (22 July, 1939).

66 Author unknown (1996). ‘Kangzhan baofa hou Nanjing guomin zhengfu guofang lianxi huiyi jilu’, p. 30.

67 SPA Min 50/23 (22 July, 1939).

68 See, for instance, Glosser, S. (2002). ‘“The Truths I Have Learned”: Nationalism, Family Reform, and Male Identity in China's New Culture Movement, 1916–1922’, in Brownell, S. and Wasserstrom, J., eds. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 120–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 SPA Min 50/23 (3 February, 1939).

70 Ibid.

71 On mobilization of women in the Nationalist areas, see Li, D., Echoes of Chongqing, pp. 20–1.

72 Ibid.

73 SPA Min 113/6 (1944–1945) contains details of the effectiveness of health and hygiene reforms at the county level in Sichuan in the later war years.