Not Just a Man’s War
Not Just a Man’s War
Chinese Women’s Memories of the War of Resistance against Japan, 1931–45
In September 1931, Japan began a brutal occupation of Manchuria. In July 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.
Not Just a Man’s War uncovers the extraordinary stories of ordinary Chinese women who lived through the war. Through interviews, published reminiscences, and oral histories, Yihong Pan gives voice to their experiences. 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.
Not Just a Man’s War treats women’s memories not only as sources for a deeper historical understanding but also as a subject worthy of critical analysis. Although the women rarely speak of feminism, they demonstrate a striking autonomy regardless of political association, socioeconomic status, or education. Attending to their insights produces a multi-faceted, inclusive narrative of China’s War of Resistance.
This vivid, comprehensive account of the lives of Chinese women in war not only fills a gap for scholars and students of Chinese history, Asian studies, women’s studies, and sociology but will also engage keen readers of Chinese and military history.
Not Just a Man’s War is a vivid and comprehensive picture of the lives of many different Chinese women as they lived through a long and brutal period of warfare. It fills a yawning gap in the global study of women in war. Pan knows her subject inside out.
Not Just a Man’s War is a significant revisionist corrective to histories of war that centre on men. Yihong Pan masterfully details and analyzes ‘ordinary’ Chinese women’s memories of the War of Resistance from an exceptional array of routinely muted voices.
Yihong Pan is professor emerita in the History Department of Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and Its Neighbors and Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: China’s Youth in the Rustication Movement. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Research on Women in Modern Chinese History.
Introduction
1 Representations of Wartime Women in the People’s Republic of China
2 Self-Writing by the Women Soldiers of the Communist New Fourth Army
3 My Journey of the Revolution: Oral Narratives of Five Communist Women
4 Those Turbulent Years: Memories of Women Associated with the Nationalist Party
5 Surviving under the Enemy: Oral Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Japanese-Occupied China
6 I Want to Speak Up before I Die: The Testimonies of China’s “Comfort Women” and the Oral Narratives of Working-Class Women
Epilogue
Appendix: Interviews; Glossary; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Chinese Comfort Women
Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves
By Peipei Qiu, with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei
