Runaway Wives Urban Crimes And Survival Tactics In Wartime Beijing 1937 1949

Download or read book Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937-1949 written by Ma Zhao and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1937 to 1949, Beijing was in a state of crisis. The combined forces of Japanese occupation, civil war, runaway inflation, and reformist campaigns and revolutionary efforts wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, upset the political order, and threatened the social and moral fabric as well. Women, especially lower-class women living in Beijing’s tenement neighborhoods, were among those most affected by these upheavals. Delving into testimonies from criminal case files, Zhao Ma explores intimate accounts of lower-class women’s struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife. By uncovering the set of everyday tactics that women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with predatory policies and crushing poverty, this book reveals an urban underworld that was built on an informal economy and conducted primarily through neighborhood networks. Where necessary, women relied on customary practices, hierarchical patterns of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal entrepreneurship to get by. Women’s survival tactics, embedded in and reproduced by their everyday experience, opened possibilities for them to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, allowed women to subtly deflect, subvert, and “escape without leaving” powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics during and beyond wartime Beijing.

Download or read book Women and Their Warlords written by Kate Merkel-Hess and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the complex history and legacy of elite wives, concubines, and daughters of warlords in twentieth-century China. In Women and Their Warlords, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the female relatives of the military rulers who governed regions of China from 1916 to 1949. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not merely advance male rulers’ agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political partners in modern China, the wives and concubines of Republican-era warlords changed how people viewed elite women’s engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources, including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism, domestic life, and state power in this insightful new account of gender and authority in twentieth-century China.

Download or read book Intimate Communities written by Nicole Elizabeth Barnes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Living and Working in Wartime China written by Brett Sheehan and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2022-07-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Not Just a Man’s War written by Yihong Pan and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1931, Japan began a brutal occupation of Manchuria, and in 1937, China and Japan entered a full-scale war that ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945. The War of Resistance became the Chinese experience of the Second World War. Yet women scarcely get a mention in most accounts of the fourteen-year conflict. Through interviews, published reminiscences, and oral histories, Not Just a Man’s War uncovers the extraordinary stories of ordinary Chinese women during the war. Communist women speak of fighting as soldiers for “a good war” and contributing to the party’s rise to power. Nationalist women attribute their survival to the strength of the human spirit while acknowledging tremendous suffering. Women from the working poor and the middle classes describe the hardships of Japanese aggression and in their narratives refuse to be ignored as passive beings. In speaking up, the victims of sexual violence become survivor activists demanding justice. These women demonstrate a striking autonomy regardless of political association, socioeconomic status, or education. By attending to their insights, Not Just a Man’s War produces a multi-faceted, inclusive narrative of China’s War of Resistance.

Download or read book Women and China's Revolutions written by Gail Hershatter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them? Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible and invisible labor. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped China’s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China’s transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse. What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful? Drawing on decades of Hershatter’s groundbreaking scholarship and mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history.

Download or read book Dreaming the New Woman written by Jennifer Bond and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on seventy-five oral history interviews, Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the voices of Chinese women who attended Protestant missionary schools for girls in China in the early twentieth century. By focusing on the experience of women who attended these schools, Jennifer Bond provides fresh perspectives on the role of Christianity in the emergence of the Chinese New Woman. The book explores how girls negotiated overlapping school, patriotic, Christian, gendered, and Communist identities during China's turbulent twentieth century of wars and revolutions.