Home and Land: Profiting from the Displaced during Wartime

• In Event: Recruiting Bodies and Minds: Nationalist Party Politics and China's Wartime Ideology, 1937-1949

Abstract

Displaced persons during wartime provide a moral – and morale – opportunity as well as a logistical problem. While not restricted to Nationalist China during the Second Sino-Japanese and Civil Wars, these truisms find particularly vivid expression in these historic instances, wherein strategic decisions coincided with the political aims of total warfare. In the early period of retreat to the interior, many Nationalist officials and citizens believed that settling the displaced on newly-cultivated land would not only stave off social instability among refugees who might gather in urban centers, but would transform the needy into the backbone of the wartime economy. A number of such farms in Sichuan were not charitable ventures, but run for profit by limited liability corporations invested by the well-connected. In order to achieve such goals, however, displaced persons had to be convinced to cast off ties to their war-torn homes, as much for military stability and state expansion as for the moral lesson they provided their fellow citizens. After 1945, land cultivation again emerged in former occupied areas in Jiangsu as a solution for emplacing both demobbed soldiers and homeless returnees. But a new flood of refugees from the KMT-CCP conflict meant that resource competition was even more intense in the supposed “postwar”, as was the battle for moral superiority. For the continually displaced of the long mid-twentieth century war, “home” remained an elusive quantity, but the idea of turning political and economic profit from their displacement persisted.

Author

• Rebecca Nedostup, Brown University