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Reviewed by:
  • In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War by R. Keith Schoppa
  • Stephen R. MacKinnon (bio)
R. Keith Schoppa. In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 346 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 978-0-674-05988-7.

There is a debate about the impact of the great war of 1937–1945 on Chinese society emerging from studies that have appeared over the last decade. The Sino-Japanese War has become a growth industry for PhD dissertations, conferences, edited books, and monographs like the one under review. There is a center for the study of the war at Oxford led by Rana Mitter that is dedicated to examining the war in a multidimensional way. Recently, Joseph Esherick devoted an entire graduate seminar at University of California San Diego to the year 1943.

The long pause after the pioneering work on the war by Lloyd Eastman and Ch’i Hsi-sheng in the 1970s and 1980s has ended. Eastman’s influential assessment of the war’s impact and its importance, later enshrined in the Fairbank-edited Cambridge History of Modern China series, is now being seriously challenged. Eastman saw the war chiefly in negative terms: besides the absolute chaos and utter destruction of the war, Chiang Kaishek’s mismanagement of the war, widespread corruption, and military failures led to the disintegration of the state and the creation of the vacuum that was filled by the Communists.

Keith Schoppa’s new book, In a Sea of Bitterness, builds on a lifetime of research into the social history of Zhejiang province. Schoppa knows the province well, with his narrative moving effortlessly in geographical terms from north to south and east to west (coast into the interior). The detailed maps are superb and helpful (one wishes also for a glossary of Chinese terms and names as well as a bibliography). The narrative itself is built on a mountain of data that statistically records refugee movement back and forth across the province. Interjected between the charts and statistics are personal stories of the miseries endured by refugee families. Most notably and referenced throughout the book are the experiences of the family of the famous artist and cartoonist Feng Zikai.

Schoppa’s focus is on the refugee experience of the Zhejiang population. The book is structured topically. The narrative runs back and forth chronologically across the war period with each topic. The opening chapter describes the mounting scale of the refugee crisis in Zhejiang as the Japanese ruthlessly bombed and then invaded region after region. The Doolittle raid and use of airfields in particular brought heavy retribution in terms of death and destruction during the spring and summer of 1943. The second chapter tells the story of inadequate government attempts at refugee relief. And worse still was the woeful absence of significant private philanthropic efforts by merchant, clan, and place-name associations of the traditional nature that David Rowe and Bryna Goodman have written about. Chapter 3 seemed to this reviewer to be the heart of the book in terms of its larger themes. It is a moving portrayal drawn from detailed diary accounts of the suffering and movement of artist Feng Zikai and his family. Well known from the translation [End Page 542] by Geramie Barme, Schoppa embellishes the account in An Artistic Exile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Basic themes emerge about the refugee experience: the importance of place (localism), pragmatism, and family associations in a kind of local collective suffering. These findings clash with the paradigms offered in recent scholarship that emphasize, in the midst of war, a widespread rise in nationalist sentiment that transformed institutions.

The remaining two thirds of the book flesh out the Feng Zikai story for the province as a whole. Schoppa chronicles the terrible kidnapping of civilians and mistreatment of women. There is a chapter on how the provincial government was forced to move repeatedly ever deeper into the hinterland and away from the richer coastal cities. Local revenues as well as subsidies from Chongqing dropped in the face of increasingly overwhelming demands of resources. The governor, Huang Shaohung, emerges as one of...

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