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Keep Calm and Carry On: Airmindedness and Mass Mobilization during the War of Resistance
Abstract
Japanese air raids and the Chinese response to them have been studied primarily in the context of Chongqing, the wartime capital, but air defense was a nationwide project, which is best understood in relation to interwar ideas about airmindedness. The combination of pre-war attempts to spread foreign ideas about air defense with the experience of Japanese attacks had a great impact on mass mobilization. The Nationalist government used successful air defense in domestic propaganda as an example of the success of the Chinese war effort and in international propaganda as proof of both the sufferings of the Chinese people under Japanese imperialism and China’s viability as a modern military ally.
War was a major aspect of Shanghai history in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, because of the particular political and territorial divisions that segmented the city, war struck only in Chinese-administered areas. In this paper, I examine the fate of the Zhabei district, a booming industrious area that came under fire on three successive occasions. Whereas Zhabei could be construed as a success story—a rag-to-riches, swamp-to-urbanity trajectory—the three instances of military conflict had an increasingly devastating impact, from shaking, to stifling, to finally erase Zhabei from the urban landscape. This area of Shanghai experienced the first large-scale modern warfare in an urban setting. The 1927 skirmish established the pattern in which the civilian population came to be exposed to extreme forms of violence, was turned overnight into a refugee population, and lost all its goods and properties to bombing and fires.
This paper examines the geographical imaginations associated with aviation in fascist Italy, focusing on the representation of flight on the one hand, and on the other hand the role of propaganda flights organized by the regime in the 1930s. The representation and use of aviation in interwar Italy is explored in light of the concept of technological legitimation, based on an understanding of technological practice as a political and ideological instrument. Aviation, as one of the new subjects of artistic representations of the modern era, was grasped by avant-garde and modern movements in the early twentieth century. In turn, representations of aviation were used by Mussolini's regime, which considered it a key to national development and modernization, materially as well as in the representational sphere. Propaganda flights in 1930s Italy were organized by the Ministry of Aeronautics and local aero clubs, and were an expression of the politicized use of aviation, both in terms of representations of technology and the aviator, and the exploitation of flight's public potential for the construction of fascist spectacle.
Examines the military operations that emerged from the Japanese invasion of Southern China. Opens a new window on this rarely studied theater in World War II and shows for the first time how the conflict served as a “proxy war” to support aims more in line with the goals of the Allied nations than with China’s.
Relying on documents previously unavailable to both Western and Chinese researchers, this history demonstrates how Western technology and evolving traditional values resulted in the birth of a unique form of print capitalism that would have a far-reaching and irreversible influence on Chinese culture. In the mid-1910s, what historians call the "Golden Age of Chinese Capitalism" began, accompanied by a technological transformation that included the drastic expansion of China's "Gutenberg revolution." This is a vital reevaluation of Chinese modernity that refutes views that China's technological development was slowed by culture or that Chinese modernity was mere cultural continuity.
During the spring of 1938, a flood of Chinese refugees displaced by the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) converged on the central Yangzi valley tricity complex of Wuhan. For ten remarkable months, in a highly charged atmosphere of carnage, heroism, and desperation, Wuhan held out against the Japanese in what would become a turning point in the war-and one that attracted international attention. Stephen MacKinnon for the first time tells the full story of Wuhan's defense and fall, and how the siege's aftermath led to new directions in the history of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.
The Chinese peoples’ experience of war during the Second World War, as it is known in the West, was one of suffering and stoicism in the face of dreadful conditions. China’s War of Resistance began in 1937 with the Japanese invasion and ended in 1945 after eight long years. Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period, tells the tragic history of China’s war and its consequences from the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors, and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the accompanying economic and social disintegration. Her focus is on families torn apart, men, women, and children left homeless and struck down by disease and famine. It is also a story of courage and survival. By 1945, the fabric of China’s society had been utterly transformed, and entirely new social categories had emerged. As the author suggests in a new interpretation of modern Chinese history, far from stemming the spread of communism from the USSR, which was the Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of the war, and the damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist Party and helped it to win power in 1949.
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.
Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005) 130-161
The above passage, from Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938), describes a sequence of events in what Mumford calls the "war capital" or "war metropolis." The events constitute an emergency, clearly, but for Mumford they are more importantly a routine: the metropolis, in this account, is a space where the civil defense crisis has become ritualized, quotidien, a general rather than an exceptional case: the city, in other words, as battlefield or trauma ward. But more unnerving than this depiction of the routinization of emergency, more disturbing even than its vivid and primitivist take on urban terror, is Mumford's claim that "Whether the attack is arranged or real, it produces similar effects." The disaster that arrives and the disaster that may be about to arrive have equal powers here to engender a "collective psychosis"; the real war and the rehearsal for war become psychotically indistinct, nearly interchangeable backdrops before which the highly automated ritual of anticipation, dread, and mass-traumatization is enacted. By refusing to identify the event he describes as real or as rehearsal, Mumford suspends his reader, too, between the horror of the event and the horror of the drill in preparation for it, in the very space of future conditional anxiety inhabited by the war capital's citizens. In that space, the reader experiences at the hands of Mumford's tightly regulated prose a miniaturized version of what the citizen experiences in the air raid drill: "the materialization of a skillfully evoked nightmare" (275).
Entitled "A Brief Description of Hell," the section of The Culture of Cities that recounts the air raid alert does so in order to provide one example of a more general phenomenon: the assault on "all the higher activities of society" by what, masquerading as peacetime, is "equally a state of war: the passive war of propaganda, war-indoctrination, war-rehearsal: a preliminary maneuvering for position" (278; 275). In what follows I wish to take seriously Mumford's suggestion that a "collective psychosis" might be instigated by pre-war anxiety—that is, by the eventuality of a future conditional war as much as by the actual event of war. However, what is for Mumford only an example—the aerial bombardment of cities as a military practice that occasioned disciplined civilian rehearsals—will be my main ground. I argue that the memory and dread of aerial bombing not only figured prominently in interwar public discourse and the concurrent urban imaginary, but also constituted the locus classicus for a kind of proleptic mass-traumatization, a pre-traumatic stress syndrome whose symptoms arose in response to an anticipated rather than an already realized catastrophe. Making such an argument will entail treating the lexicon of futurity—terms such as premonition, prevision, prophecy, prolepsis, foresight, forethought, anticipation—in a non-magical fashion, or, better, as addressing the counterintuitive magic of the symptom rather than some mystified oracular power. I will suggest that among the symptoms of this pre-traumatic stress syndrome or...
How is high-technology consumed by societies that cannot shape technology but could only be shaped by it? As the first study of Egyptian aviation, this article examines the unique process through which Egyptians embraced aviation as an exemplar of high-speed modernity and as an instrument of social transformation. It illustrates how, under colonial circumstances, Egypt’s upper-class shaped a vision of aviation as a tool that could bring an array of utopian benefits to all Egyptians, including prosperity, freedom of movement, social status, equality, and ultimately, a smooth transformation to the happiness of the modern world. In reality, this vision was a self-serving survival strategy whose aim was to contain the frustrated middle class, or effendiyya, which did not profit from the process of modernization. After World War II and the gradual collapse of the upper class, the effendiyya entrusted the state with the mission of adopting high-technology and modernizing society on an equal basis. Beginning in the early 1950s civil aviation was arranged accordingly.
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1947 has not been sufficiently understood as a narrative in its own right, but rather, as a transitional conflict between Nationalist and Communist rule. The examination of the visual imagery of warfare disseminated through newsprint and books is one way to reinterpret the history of this period. Through a close reading of images printed in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, during the final days of the battle for the city in 1937, we see how the news was shaped to impose a narrative of order with a positive teleology at a time when China was plunged into chaos with no guarantee of the eventual outcome of the war. The nature of this narrative is explored through examination of images of the body, as well as the positioning of images in the context of the printed page. The conclusion then contrasts these images with a pictorial history of the Sino-Japanese War published during the Civil War, in 1947. It suggests that although this book is able to bring narrative closure to the earlier conflict, its own narrative is imbued with an unease caused by the reality of the new war that had broken out within months of the ending of the war against Japan, and suggests that narrative closure is never truly obtained.
This article examines how the Croix de Feu and the Parti social français (PSF) espoused “air-mindedness”—lobbying for better antiaircraft defenses, using airplanes in mass mobilizations, and, exploiting the recent membership of famous pilots like Jean Mermoz—in order to further their message of national reconciliation. A study of the use of aviation by the Croix de Feu and the PSF allows us to examine two crucial historiographical debates about these organizations, namely, their ideological valence and the significance of the transformation from league to political party in 1936. While Lieutenant Colonel François de La Rocque and his associates often demonstrated ingenuity in adapting the manifestations of their air-mindedness to a constantly changing political context, and although the concept of national reconciliation was also flexible, powerful continuities are also apparent, in both purpose and activity. The ideology of the Croix de Feu and the PSF is more readily subsumed into the category of authoritarianism than fascism, but both movements posed a serious threat to republican democracy.
- Hippler
“‘Are You Airminded?’ The Slang Of War.”
- Hu
“A Whole Nation Walking: The ‘Great Retreat’ in the War of Resistance, 1937-1945.”
- Liu
- Jordan
- Laughlin
“The Rural and Urban at War: Invasion and Reconstruction in China during the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance.”
- Lincoln
“The Critic Eye (piyan).”
- Rea
- Schoppa
“The Great Bombing of Chongqing.”
- Tow
“Xi’an 1900-1940: From Isolated Backwater to Resistance Center.”
- Will
“Zai shusan zhong yao jiajin jianshe nongcun” [Using Dispersal to Speed Up Development of Villages]
- Zhuang
“Bombs Don’t Discriminate? Class, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Air-Raid-Shelter Experiences of the Wartime Chongqing Population.”
- Chang
- Coble
- Moore
“Orphans in the Family: Family Reform and Children’s Citizenship during the Anti-Japanese War, 1937-1945.”
- Plum
“Chennault Fights to Hold the China Front.”
- Belden
“Bombing of Civilians and Open Towns.”
- Chiang
Zhanqian de Nanjing yu riji de kongxi [Prewar Nanjing and Japanese Air Raids]
- Jing
- Judge
- Mackay
“Kangzhan qian Nanjing guomin zhengfu fangkong jianshe” [The Nanjing Government’s Air Defense Preparations before the War of Resistance]
- Tan
- Lipkin