From the Home Front to the Battlefront: New Research on China's World War II Experience

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents the "China's War with Japan" project.

Rana Mitter, Helen Schneider, and Sherman Lai, University of Oxford

Rana Mitter and his research team from the "China’s War with Japan" programme at the University of Oxford, which has been in operation since 2007,  examine new aspects of the history and significance of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45.  Professor Mitter will introduce the project, and two postdoctoral researchers will give short talks highlighting topics in social/gender history and military history.

“The Women’s Advisory Council, Resistance, and Reconstruction during China’s War with Japan”
Helen Schneider
The Women's Advisory Council of the New Life Movement was a significant umbrella organization for women's mobilization work during the Sino-Japanese war in Nationalist China. Using aspects of the council's wartime activities as a case study, this ongoing research shows how educated women formulated and conducted resistance and social construction programs that addressed issues of education, production, life improvement, and national consciousness. It highlights both the gendered and class-based aspects of wartime mobilization in 1930s and 1940s China, showing that mobilization was serious and important even outside the Communist areas of control.

“General Archibald Wavell and the Defeat in Burma in 1942”
Sherman Lai
Were the British to blame for putting China in danger in 1942?  General Archibald Wavell, the commander of the Allied forces in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the Pacific War, has been blamed for the Allied defeat in Burma in 1942. He was said to be too proud to accept Chiang Kai-shek's offer of help and let the Chinese army be deployed in Burma in time to save it from Japanese invasion. My revisionist research on the Chiang Kai-shek diaries, however, now suggests that two figures - Chiang Kai-shek and American commander Joseph Stilwell - must take a significant portion of the blame.

Rana Mitter is professor of history and politics of modern China at the Institute for China Studies,University of Oxford.