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part iii The War and Gender’s Political Impact Prologue Since the early 1980s, historiography on China’s wartime politics has evolved from Jiang Jieshi’s personal dictatorship and the ccp and gmd rivalry to state building and multiple political parties contending for power.1 Nevertheless, most of the existing works on Chinese wartime politics were confined to a master narrative of masculine political actors, namely, the state and the political parties. As Louise Edwards pointed out in her 2007 study of the women’s suffrage movement, during the war years, women activists consciously became contenders in national politics in the Chongqing region because three decades of previous women’s suffrage movements had set up the political stage for such participation.2 Whereas Edwards’s study revealed the elite women leaders’ political actions during the war, women’s stories in this book shed light on how the rank-and-file women transformed this political consciousness into practice in China’s wartime politics and worked in the war mobilization at the grassroots level. China’s War of Resistance against Japan required the support of all Chinese; to enlist people’s support and win the international community’s sympathy, the nationalist government had to accept a mass movement for war mobilization. The total war mobilization brought not only Chinese elites but also ordinary people into public spaces and political arenas, thus greatly expanding political participation in the gmd-held Chongqing region to include traditionally marginalized political groups such as ordinary women and tolerating a relatively more participatory political atmosphere. The oral i-xii_1-220_Li.indd 128 8/13/09 3:19:28 PM the war and gender’s political impact · 129 recollection of Ren Zaiyi, Bai Herong, Zhu Shuqin, Luo Zhiyong, and Chen Guojun testified that wartime political activism among women was not only real but also far beyond the contention of political parties and leading elite women in the urban center of the wartime capital. Wartime political mobilization was carried out by school students and other civil societies, including women’s organizations, and reached millions of ordinary people in the surrounding rural areas in the Chongqing region as well. Noticing young women students’ contributions in mobilizing rural population for the war effort, a foreign observer commented: “It would be hard to estimate how many tens of thousands of women and children have had their first opportunity to learn to read and write given to them by a team of zealous young women sent out by some clubs or larger organizations. Simple people in the distant villages have had the causes of the war and the building up of the new China explained to them; thus their intelligent support and greater energy have been added to the nation’s struggle.”3 The interviewees who were students during the war all recalled their weekly trips to the nearby countryside to mobilize peasants to support the war efforts and the large audience they drew. Their war mobilization activities drove home not only patriotism and anti-Japanese nationalism but also the importance of political participation. Louise Edwards rightly pointed out that the war against Japan provided “a patriotic cover for feminist unity among women activists” and enabled them to play an active role in China’s wartime politics in the ppc and the movement for promoting a real constitutional government in China.4 Ordinary Chongqing women’s oral recollection in this book suggested that the grassroots war mobilization was equally important and served as the foundation for the elite-led wartime political movement for constitutional reform and democratization of Chinese politics in the gmdheld Chongqing region. Oral histories in this book showed that the wartime grassroots political mobilization was heavily manifested in the form of popular culture, as Changtai Hung argued in his 1994 study.5 Popular culture as a vehicle for political mobilization had a long history in China. During the years leading to the 1911 Revolution, popular culture played an important role in disseminating anti-imperialistic and anti-Qing sentiments in the Chongqing region.6 During the war years, popular culture in the forms of street drama, songs, and wall bulletins (newspapers and journals published on a wall because of the shortage of paper) played an important role in war mobilization and personal empowerment for women in the Chongqing region. Singing and acting became popular media through which educated young women such as Ren, i-xii_1-220_Li.indd 129 8/13/09 3:19:28 PM [18.119.133.228] Project MUSE (2024...

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