Reviewed by Dr Diya Gupta, Lecturer in Public History, City St George’s, University of London
Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019, ISBN 9781138080645, £119.48 hardback
“I do not know what is leftist and what is rightist. I have always believed in peace, independence, democracy and freedom for my country, no matter whether it means that I am a leftist or rightist.” (p. 194) These words were spoken in 1947 by the Chinese female politician Tan Tiwu, who served as both a Kuomintang (KMT) legislator and a left-wing activist founding the Nanjing branch of the China Women’s Association (CWA). They are quoted by Vivienne Xiangwei Guo in her important book Women and Politics in Wartime China: Networking Across Geopolitical Borders (2018), which foregrounds an enlightening yet marginalised aspect of Second World War history: the role of women as agents and actors during the Second World War in China.
Guo here is pushing against our conventional assessment of political engagement and influence in China along party lines. The book, instead, draws attention to the power of networks, situating them in the geographical, political, social and cultural spaces of wartime China. It reveals how women’s political ideas and identities developed through these networks, beyond their affiliations to the KMT or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Guo examines the shifts in women’s political engagement that altered with the dynamics of the KMT and the CCP, and between the countries involved in the Second World War, mainly the USA and the Soviet Union.
Wartime, as Guo rightly points out, was a formative period for Chinese history. She observes that the Anti-Japanese United Front that was created in the country from 1931 onwards generated a ‘relatively tolerant, inclusive political milieu for elite women […] to work together despite their diverse political backgrounds.’ (p. 3) Because of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chinese intellectuals began to migrate from Nanjing and Shanghai to the hinterland, including Hong Kong and Singapore, and this geographical expansion further enhanced their networks. Studying such networks is crucial, Guo argues, because they ‘facilitated women’s participation and leadership in various wartime political movements’ (p. 4). This was the national salvation movement in China in the 1930s, which changed to the constitutionalist movement of the early 1940s, followed by the desire for peace and democratic process in the post-war years.
Elite women form the focus of Guo’s study, and she arrives at this categorisation by combining two Chinese terms – ‘upper-class women’ and ‘well-educated intelligent women’ who were professionally employed as teachers, writers, journalists, artists, lawyers and civil servants. These women carried considerable cultural capital with them as China became embroiled in the Second World War. Guo notes, ‘as suffragists, feminists, KMT women leaders, communist activists, democratic personages, and even spies and informers, they affiliated themselves with a variety of political forces and women’s organisations, lending their support to national resistance, democratic reforms and women’s emancipation.’ (p. 5) In lucid prose, Guo helps to redefine both Chinese political and gender history.
Who were these women? Cao Menjung developed a women’s reading society for political studies in Nanjing in the 1930s. Menjung had joined the CCP in 1925 but Guo stresses that her relationship-building wasn’t confined to party lines. Xia Bengying went to Wuhan in 1938 to work for the New Life Movement Women’s Advisory Council (WAC) led by Madame Chiang – Song Meiling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek – and the National Association for Refugee Children, protecting refugee children who found their way to Wuhan from the war in east China. And Li Wenyi worked alongside the communist leaders Deng Yingchao and Cai Chang at the CCP, when the KMT and CCP were collaborating during 1927. Afterwards, she was persecuted by the KMT for being communist and then expelled from the CCP, never to be reinstated as a member.
These are only a few examples from the rich and varied accounts of Chinese women’s lives that Guo provides in the book. The chapter divisions are chronological and clear, even to a reader unfamiliar with this history. Chapter 1 looks at elite women’s networks at a time of national resistance before the war and during its early years; Chapter 2 considers the integration of the networks from Shanghai and Nanjing into the WAC in Wuhan in 1938, where Guo draws attention to parallels with Spanish women defending Madrid; and Chapter 3 takes up the narrative from the fall of Wuhan in 1938 to the Japanese and the reconstitution of these networks in Chongqing to promote both cross-party and transnational connections. This constitutes the first part of the book.
In the second part, Chapter 4 examines the dislocations and fractures of these networks, but reveals how new diaspora networks were being established in Hong Kong and Singapore, while in Chongqing, personal bonds and relationship-building cemented cross-party interactions. Chapter 5 explores how elite women gradually formed a left-wing political network, supported by the CCP. Guo here observes how Soviet women’s roles during the Soviet-German war influenced Chinese women in aligning with the political left towards the end of the Second World War. Chapter 6, constituting the third part of the book, highlights the role of local networks in Kunming, drawing upon the intellectual and student societies that had been relocated there because of the war.
In the conclusion of the book, Guo thinks about the final destiny of these women in the post-war Maoist era, when their activism was brought to an abrupt halt, and prominent female leaders were imprisoned until death. She wonders if they continue to serve as inspiration and enlightenment to later generations, or if their history remains suppressed and unremembered, vanishing like ‘a puff of smoke’. (p. 195) Women and Politics in Wartime China ensures that this significant history is recovered for twenty-first-century readers in all its textures, nuances and complexities.
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