Profiting from Wartime Displacement in Twentieth Century China and Taiwan

Event time: 
Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Luce Hall (LUCE), Room 203 See map
34 Hillhouse Ave.
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Displaced persons during times of war provide a moral opportunity as well as a logistical problem. Some of the most vivid material examples underpinning such truisms come from the period ranging across the Second Sino-Japanese, Civil, and Cold Wars in mid twentieth century China and Japan. Plans for the development of the wartime economic engine overlapped with desires to pacify floods of refugees. Plans for rural cultivation mixed military and civilian personnel in experiments of territorial control and patriotic education. Government appropriation of land enacted through refugee bodies often shifted local balances of power. In order to achieve such goals, however, displaced persons had to be convinced to cast off ties to their war-torn homes and stay (and work) on the land provided them, as much for military stability and state expansion as for the moral lesson they provided their fellow citizens. This strategic secondary displacement – a kind of forced migration amid wartime refugee conditions – departed from the ideal of governmental aid in late imperial times, which was predicated on pacifying the realm by restoring emplacement. It also strongly contrasted the actions of many of the displaced themselves. And yet, the idea of the strategic settlement of the displaced persisted and developed across conflicts. For the continually displaced of the long war of the mid twentieth century, “home” remained an elusive quantity, but the idea of making political as well as economic use of their displacement persisted.

Free