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part ii The War and Gender’s Economic Impact Prologue In the West, the existing studies on China’s wartime economy and its social and political impact on the gmd-held areas have been mainly focused on the macro level.1 While we know theoretically and abstractly that ordinary people endured tremendous economic hardship and were profoundly affected by the scarcity of goods and high inflation, we cannot put a finger on their day-today plight. The Chongqing women’s wartime stories in this book provide us with concrete information not only on some aspects of the region’s economic life but also on ordinary women’s economic situation and to what extent they contributed to and were affected by the wartime economy. The women’s wartime stories in this book tell us that the state-controlled economy was only part of the reality. Since the Nationalist government’s main concern was to keep the state and the war machine afloat with limited resources, policies and economic measures designed to help ordinary people cope with the war in the gmd-held region were insufficient, and in most cases ordinary people were left alone to struggle for their own survival. The informal economy played an important role in sustaining ordinary people’s everyday lives in the Chongqing region, and women, because of their socially assigned responsibility of feeding and caring for their families, to a large extent relied on the informal economy to keep themselves and their families alive. They invented many informal economic activities. For example, they cultivated crops in their front or backyards, salvaged food from fields and garbage dumps, made goods by hand and sold them on the streets, and i-xii_1-220_Li.indd 94 8/13/09 3:19:23 PM the war and gender’s economic impact · 95 bought and sold cooked food in order to make a small profit, to name just a few. Without the women-driven informal economy, China would not have been able to survive the war. When we study China’s wartime economy in the Great Rear, scholarly attention must be paid to the informal economy and women’s roles in it. The war also created opportunities for women in the Chongqing region to be part of the formal economy. Wu Shuqun, for example, reveals that after Chongqing became the wartime capital, new jobs, such as telephone operator, became available to young women with some education. The stories of Xu Chengzhen and the textile factory workers tell us that, like what happened in Europe and the United States during World War II when women had to work in factories to fill the vacancies left by men entering the military, the anti-Japanese war in China also provided opportunities for young women to work outside their homes. In Europe and the United States, women’s services in the home front production during World War II created a political and socioeconomic environment that promoted a more emancipatory atmosphere for women, even though scholars disputed whether the atmosphere was long lasting.2 What about China in the anti-Japanese war? Did women’s participation in the war economy enable them to gain sustainable improvement in their status? Chinese women’s stories in this book tell us that there is no simple answer to this question because women’s wartime experiences varied according to their social, economic, and political backgrounds, and we must recognize the complexity. The account of textile worker Ye Qingbi alone is not sufficient to inform us about women and work in wartime Chongqing. Nevertheless, workingclass women on the home front in wartime Chongqing is an intriguing future research topic for scholars. Together with other women’s accounts in this section, we do get a glimpse of reality about the war and the economic impact of gender in the Chongqing region. During China’s War of Resistance against Japan, Chinese women such as Xu Chengzhen had to do what millions of European and American women did during World War I and World War II—work outside their homes in factories. For many unmarried Western young women, such as British women munitions workers during World War I, working in the factories had turned them into “modern girls” because being away from their families and the control of their parents gave them social and personal freedom, being able to earn a wage granted them economical independence and buying power, and being skilled in a trade for the war effort rewarded them with patriotic pride...

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