Cowards, Criminals, and Scapegoats: The Forgotten History of Desertion in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Deserters were society’s rejects but also those who rejected the state and its laws. Studies of desertion provide a unique view of the world from the margins. By placing deserters in the center of the narrative, this panel travels across political and ethnic boundaries, through military and social battlegrounds, and from the emperor’s court to the bandit’s hideout. This panel takes deserters from the margins to the center of East Asian social, legal, and military history, from the tenth-century to today’s PLA.
Elad Alyagon studies desertion among the convict-soldiers of the Song dynasty. For Alyagon, the story of criminals and traitors is also a story of soldiers’ quest for survival and lower class resistance to the state and its agents. Eugene Gregory studies desertion among Green Standard troops during the failed Burma campaign of the late 18th century. Gregory argues the Qing’s Manchu rulers created the myth that desertion among Han troops was the cause for the campaign’s failure. Theodore Cook studies deserters in the Japanese Imperial Armies during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a phenomenon hidden by the Japanese army’s claim that these soldiers were simply “lost.” The numbers of Japanese deserters were, in fact, so great that the Japanese army made surrendering an official crime. June Teufel Dreyer brings the discussion of desertion to the present with an overview of positive and negative assessments of the People’s Liberation Army. While some experts stress the PLA’s technological advances, others focus on the human factor: low morale and endemic corruption.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Elad Alyagon, University of California, Davis

Chair

• Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Rational Traitors, Honorable Cowards: Desertion in the Song Dynasty - Elad Alyagon, University of California, Davis

• The Discursive Construction of Green Standard Deserters during the Burma Campaign - Eugene Gregory, West Point

• Enemies Unknown: Desertion in Japan's "Sacred War" in China - Theodore F. Cook, William Paterson University

• The People’s Liberation Army: An Assessment - June Teufel Dreyer, University of Miami

Discussant

• Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt University