ABSTRACT

Focusing on Chinese elite women as a special socio-political group, this book places the sophisticated networks they formed in the shifting geographical, social, cultural and political spaces of wartime China, where their political engagement, knowledge-making, and network-building in support of 'national resistance and reconstruction' (kangzhan jianguo) unfolded. By examining the emergence, development, integration, and transformation of these networks as an unsettled, fragmented process - a process that lasted through the extended wars and upheavals in China from the 1930s to the 1950s and that moves beyond party ideologies and geopolitical borders, the book seeks to explore the dynamics of war, politics, and gender in the broader context of the Second World War.

chapter 1|22 pages

Introduction

part |54 pages

Part I

chapter 2|27 pages

From Shanghai to Wuhan and to Madrid

An enlarging space 1

chapter 3|25 pages

From Wuhan to Chongqing and to Yan’an

Cooperation and expansion

part |58 pages

Part II

chapter 4|28 pages

From Chongqing to Hong Kong and to Singapore

Divisions, departures, and dislocations

chapter 5|28 pages

A left-wing women’s network

Survival and development

part |28 pages

Part III

chapter 6|26 pages

A local story

Li Wenyi’s network in Kunming

part |34 pages

Part IV

chapter 7|24 pages

From Chongqing to Beijing

Post-war political reorganisation

chapter 8|8 pages

Conclusion