Displacement, Place, and the Experience of the Long War in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959

Displacement, Place, and the Experience of the Long War in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959 Rebecca Nedostup [email protected] Bio: Rebecca Nedostup is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, and a Shelby Cullom Davis Fellow at Princeton University for 2014-15. She is the author of Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), and several articles on the reinvention of Chinese religion in the modern era; ritual and politics; and the relationship between national cultural policy and local social dynamics and conceptual and literal landscapes. She is co-organizer of the collaborative project "The Social Lives of Dead Bodies in Modern China", and is writing the monograph Living and Dying in the Long War: Tales of Displacement in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959. The paper she is presenting at the colloquium is an exploration of some of the underpinning concepts of that book, drawing on material from several chapters. Abstract: How can we understand the experience of prolonged civilian mobilization for wartime footing across multiple, overlapping conflicts? How do longstanding patterns of displacement change with the rise of total war? The severe social upheaval in China and Taiwan during the “long war” connecting the Second Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil Wars and the tense early Cold War period is still making its way into the global history of twentieth century conflict, but it offers some insight into these ongoing issues. In terms of displacement (which at times involved up to one quarter of the population), part of the explanation lies in the politics that narrowly defined the “refugee” in China and globally, a classification that included strategic utility as well as philanthropic care. More pervasively, the period 1937-1959 was one in which demobilization for civilians in China and Taiwan was perpetually postponed, creating conditions of emergency and uncertainty even amid attempts to raise prosperity and rebuild community. WORKING DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR RECIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION At its most elemental, this paper aims to bring forth two ideas for discussion, with the conviction that they can only be examined and developed as part of a collective effort. The first is that the long-term effects of military mobilization and action on the civilian populations of China and Taiwan is a topic that deserves concerted scholarly attention. The second is that in order to accomplish this, it often helpful as an intellectual exercise and also as a matter of research strategy that historians experiment with periodizations that push beyond the boundaries of conflicts as determined by nation-states, treaty signatories, regional armies, or other “official” combatants. Since the participants (human, animal, environmental) in twentieth century history often experienced multiple conflicts, considering discrete encounters (the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, the Cold War, or earlier militarist wars) in isolation – however felicitous to the researcher, and necessary as a stepping stone -- runs the danger of obscuring important through-lines of human experience. To take a step back and consider a bigger picture, on the other hand, poses risks as well, Many of these will be apparent in the paper that follows, which places together disparate empirical examples extracted from the detailed local contexts in which they will appear in a monograph. This is done in the hopes of beginning to limn a greater whole, and to open up fruitful lines of conversation with colleagues in other fields where – frankly – the experiences of total war, postwar, and prolonged war have been theorized more extensively than they have in the modern China field, driven as it has been by frameworks of revolution and modernity. That conflict is malleable and continuous is in part very much an idea abetted by our current age, a possibility that Mary Dudziak takes up for the twentieth century American experience in her 2012 book War Time.1 One wonders whether the case of the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – namely, the gradual encroachment of the technologies and impact of a constant state of war that is distant from some lives but entirely influential on others, in disproportionate ways – is not in some ways a case of the American case coming to resemble more closely one version of a range of situations that already prevailed in many parts of the globe. Indeed, one of the vexing problems in thinking through the relationship between cases outside of Europe and North American and the suggestive theory of the “state of exception” that suspends law in times of declared and undeclared war, civil war 1 Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford, 2012). Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 2 most particularly, is the overlapping layer of anti-imperialism, decolonization, and self- determination that characterizes many such conflicts. Thus the state of exception might coexist with state-building, constitutionalism, local self-government, and dictatorship – this was very much the case in 1940s China.2 In struggles of national self-determination – which underneath their civil conflict, the Nationalists and Communists were mutually engaged in, along with millions of fellow citizens with other affiliations or none at all – the distinction between public and private that Agamben so prizes as a mark of law often evaporates. The challenge for the historian is to discern where the willing blending of public and private life in an age of violent struggle ended, and the excessive demands of state mobilization began. Part of that task is to determine the rhythms of war amid everyday life. In her recent book The Gender of Memory, Gail Hershatter offers two considerations that may aid us here. One is her remarking on the frequency of warfare as a catalyst in the lives of the northern Chinese women she studies: as a determinant of living place, food supply, and general security, and of course as a shaper of family structure and personal politics. The other is her observation on the nature of time as lived by her interviewees: in addition to being shaped by family and community milestones and the cycles of the rural and ritual everyday, a new influence emerged in the form of political mobilization, resulting in what Hershatter calls “campaign time”. As CCP political campaigns intensified in the countryside during the 1950s and 1960s, the most important of these emerged as markers of the passage of time and – importantly -- as shapers of personal as well as collective memory.3 2 This does not seem incompatible with Agamben’s articulation of the state of exception, which he is careful to point out “is not a dictatorship (whether constitutional or unconstitutional, commissarial or sovereign), but a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all determinations – above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated.” State of Exception, 50. 3 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 3 In a related but slightly different vein, I want to consider how conflict shapes time and experience for people in many parts of China and Taiwan during many parts of the twentieth century. In particular, I find it useful to think of the period 1937-1959 – comprising the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the “hottest” part of the Cold War between China and Taiwan, concluding with the aftermath of Second Taiwan Strait Crisis – as a “long war”.4 My interest is in displaced persons, with a focus on communities in Jiangsu, Sichuan and Taiwan. I look at how displaced people became emplaced – through politicization, through land and shelter, and through burial. This era did bring death and especially displacement in unprecedented numbers. The civil conflict generated its own refugees, a matter which, aside from the flight to Taiwan or other destinations, scholars have barely been able to grasp in its entirety. Part of the difficulty stems from the availability and clustering of sources. Moreover, the same patriotic and humanitarian appeal that allowed Chinese refugees of the anti-Japanese war to grip the popular imagination worldwide in their time also makes them of great interest to scholars now. The narratives of civil and Cold war refugees, by contrast, are precisely clouded by politics of the wrong sort (albeit in the final analysis no less complex.) Even the strongly emerging reevaluation of early PRC history, for example, continues to center on frameworks of revolution (even insofar as studies deconstruct the concept), which diminishes the possibilities of framing the late 1940s as a period of civil war, and engaging in active comparisons with the vibrant field of postwar Taiwan history. When one starts from a topic such as displacement, however, the picture changes somewhat. Examining both the developing political and social rhetoric surrounding refugees, and the schema for settling them, the putative division between the wars becomes less apparent. 4 I conclude my study in 1959 in recognition of the decisive shifts in ROC military policy toward the PRC that took place that year in the aftermath of the Second Strait Crisis: for my purposes, most notably a completion of the loosening of restrictions on marriage and settlement for military personnel that had begun in 1955, and which signaled not only an abandonment of the idea of “retaking the mainland”, but a turning point in relations between “mainlanders” and Taiwanese. Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 4 Rather, the heavy politicization of the refugee and the movement and deployment of displaced persons not simply for the purposes of relief but for the strategic ends of state-building, militarization and expansion is clear from the first stages of the Japan conflict, if not earlier.

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