Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China (review)

Does the name “Chungking” look more familiar? The somewhat awkward Romanized modern name created after World War II may seem bizarre to many, comfortable only with seeing a “q” followed by a “u.” My first encounter with the name Chungking involved a brand of canned Chinese foods popular when I was a kid. “Oriental” cuisine was a rare, exotic treat back then, as were pizza, tacos, and pesto.

Later the name became a central stage, a key city, for example, in Barbara Tuchman’s epic 1971 biography, Stillwell and the American Experience in China (New York: Macmillan). Though Chongqing was almost totally destroyed during the war due to heavy aerial bombardments, new skyscrapers of recent decades have replaced even what was not leveled. The city, with over thirty million residents, has become one of the largest municipalities in the world. Such rapid urban development contrasting with the dire conditions of the war makes Echoes of Chongqing a valuable contribution to Chinese and World War II history.

Those who have some experience in recent Chinese history can best appreciate this study. Typical for a scholarly monograph, the introduction describes recent research on the war’s effects on Chinese civilians. Danke Li describes how she and her students from Fairfield University in Connecticut carried out some fifty interviews in the Chongqing area on the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict. Their goal was to uncover aspects of the city’s resistance as experienced by women, a topic which had received little official attention in commemorative accounts. The bulk of the study focuses on three chapters containing edited transcripts with sixteen of the interviewees. The author remarks that most of the informants had never been interviewed before, and now in their 80s and 90s, felt they had nothing to lose by voicing disturbing events from their youth. While these accounts share a somewhat bland tone, they offer a horrific reminder of modern combat’s effects on civilians:

From my fellow Hubei people I learned that when the Japanese troops took over Yichang, a Hubei city that was close to Sichuan, they killed many Chinese, including babies. The Japanese soldiers even paraded with dead babies dangling on their bayonets

(Cui Xiangyu, 64).

The first group of short transcripts deals with gender and social role change; the second focuses more on economic impact. Only in the third chapter, dealing with the political impact of the war, do the transcripts become more detailed, longer than one thousand words or so. These four interviews suggest how the changes brought on by so many refugees flooding into the city and several competing political ideologies created new opportunities:

Participation in propaganda for the War of Resistance also aroused our gender consciousness. We became much more conscious about our female identity. We realized that participation in the war effort allowed us not only a way to engage in activities and express ourselves publicly, but also provided a platform for us to discuss women’s issues . . .

(Ren Zaiyi, 135).

Much of what the informants recalled was inspired in part by the general positive feelings all, as residents of contemporary Chongqing, feel about improvements in their lives since the war. Thus, their remembrances become political statements. But some aspects of their memories transcend what was considered proper or acceptable political dialogue when Chairman Mao was still in power. For example, several speakers discuss the Wartime Child Welfare Protection Association that was supported by both the Communists and Nationalists, who had an uneasy truce during the latter part of World War II. Several speakers also discuss an experimental economic zone in rural Chongqing, the Women’s Directive Committee of the New Life Movement in Sonji, Yongchuan County. This woman-developed zone had large factories, farms, and schools that led rural economic development into the post-war years.

This and other aspects of women’s roles in the wartime economy of The Great Rear (as areas outside the battlefront were known) suggest threads...