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Relocation and Dislocation: Civilian, Refugee, and Military Movement as Factors in the Disintegration of Postwar China, 1945–49

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

Rana Mitter Open the ORCID record for Rana Mitter [Opens in a new window]
Rana Mitter*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, St Cross College, Oxford, UK
*
Email: rana.mitter@orinst.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article argues that massive human displacement was one of the defining factors in China's immediate postwar period (1945–49). It shows that at least three distinctive groups were dispersed during the wartime years and needed to be resettled after the war ended in August 1945: civilian refugees, administrators who had been relocated to the temporary capital at Chongqing, and troops transferred in anticipation of an upcoming civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. The article argues that China's new sovereign status in 1945 was paradoxically a source of weakness when it came to resettlement and reconstruction, as China sought international funds to undertake its own reconstruction, but could not demit responsibility to an external actor to organise matters as the United States did for western Europe. A growing sense of anomie and unsettlement prevented resettlement and China remained a zone in which international and domestic conflict came together. Both sets of factors shaped the dislocation that destroyed the possibilities of a stable resettlement in China after the great displacement of wartime.

Keywords

ChinapostwarUNRRArelief and rehabilitationJiang TingfuChiang Kai-shekCNRRA
Type
Article
Information
Itinerario , Volume 46 , Special Issue 2: Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s , August 2022 , pp. 193 - 213
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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References

1 See for instance, Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch, and David Feldman, eds., Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945–1949, Past & Present Supplement 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Y Khan, “Wars of Displacement,” in Cambridge History of the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 277–97. For a transformative argument on this question, see Gatrell, P., The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 M. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 7.

7 Mitter, “State-Building,” 25–6.

8 Hans J. van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–45 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).

9 Liu, “A Whole Nation.”

10 Barnes, Intimate Communities.

11 Amrith and Clavin, “Feeding the World.”

12 D. Kurtz-Phelan, The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945–47 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).

13 Mitter, “State-Building,” 20, 23.

14 “UNRRA relief for the Chinese people: a report by CLARA” (Shanghai, 1947, typescript), UNRRA Files (box 2), Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University.

15 MacKinnon, Wuhan, 48.

16 Doc. 24, “Jiang Jieshi guomin zhengfu huandu” (Chiang Kai-shek broadcast on return to the capital), 5 May 1946, in Zhang Kaiyuan, Zhou Yong (ed.), Qiandu Dingdu Huandu [Moving the capital, settling the capital, returning to the capital] (Chongqing: Chongqing chuban jituan, 2014), 234.

17 On Wang, see J. H. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).

18 Su Zhiliang et al., Qu da houfang [Going to the interior] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2005), 153–4.

19 Doc. 2, “Guomin gongbao guanyu Jiang Jieshi” (Government Gazette on Chiang on returning officials), 14 Aug. 1945, in Zhang, Qiandu, 211.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Doc. 3, “Guomin gongbao guanyu Xingzhengyuan” (From the Executive Yuan, Shipping Authority, on the work of returning officials), 15 Aug. 45, in Zhang, Qiandu, 211.

24 Doc. 2, “Guomin gongbao,” 211; doc. 3, “Guomin gongbao guanyu Xingzhengyuan,” 211.

25 Doc. 8, “Jiaotongbu zhaoji youguan renyuan” (Transport department announcement re personnel), 2 Feb. 1946, in Zhang, Qiandu, 217.

26 Ibid.

27 Wang Taidong, Chen Bulei riji jiedu [Reading Chen Bulei's diary; hereafter CBLD] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2011), 281.

28 CBLD, 273.

29 “Yunnansheng shehuichu” (Yunnan provincial social affairs bureau short history of the period of the War of Resistance), 26 May 1947. In Zhang Kaiyuan, Zhou Yong, ed., Kangzhan shiqi de Yunnan [Yunnan during the War of Resistance era] (Chongqing: Chongqing chuban jituan, 2015), 923.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Mitter, “Classifying Citizens.”

34 “Yunnansheng,” 927.

35 Srivatsan, R., “Concept of ‘Seva’ and the ‘Sevak’ in the Freedom Movement,” Economic and Political Weekly 41:5 (4–10 Feb. 2006), 427–38Google Scholar.

36 “Yunnansheng,” 927.

37 Ibid.

38 “Yunnansheng,” 928.

39 “Yunnansheng,” 929.

40 Mitter, “State-Building,” 29.

41 Doc. 24, “Jiang Jieshi guomin zhengfu huandu,” 234.

42 Yaowu, Huang, Wode Kangzhan [My war of resistance] (Shenyang: Chufeng wenyi, 2010), 94Google Scholar.

43 On Japanese going back home, see Watt, L., When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Center, 2009)Google Scholar.

44 Huang, Wode Kangzhan, 99.

45 Ibid., 149.

46 Ibid., 150.

47 Reinisch, J., “Auntie UNRRA at the Crossroads,” Past & Present Supplement 8 (2013), 70–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 “UNRRA relief for the Chinese people: a report by CLARA,” 452.

49 “UNRRA report, 15 September to 31 December 1944,” https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2002/10/10/cf082c4c-608a-4e8d-b924-10946c1b7b61/publishable_en.pdf.

50 “UNRRA relief for the Chinese people,” 452.

51 Ibid., 455.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 457.

55 Ibid., 458.

56 Mitter, “State-Building,” 27.

57 “UNRRA relief for the Chinese people,” 460.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 461.

60 Ibid., 463.

61 van de Ven, Hans J., China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937–52 (London: Profile, 2017)Google Scholar, is a recent exception.