University of Technology Sydney
Wednesday 10 April 3–5 pm
University of Technology Sydney, Building 10, Level 2, Room 470
An obsession with reclaiming the “rivers and mountains” of the motherland animated Chinese resistance propaganda during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). However, “collaborationist” regimes, i.e. those administered by Chinese under Japanese control, also emphasised various aspects of the Chinese landscape to fit specific political aims during the war. This can be seen most clearly in the Reorganised National Government (RNG) of Wang Jingwei 汪精卫, which nominally ruled much of east China from 1940 through until the end of the war. With its main centres of power sited in the Lower Yangtze Delta, this administration celebrated the Yangtze River, and other waterways, throughout its existence, especially in visual culture. Riverscapes featured prominently in its pictorial propaganda. The RNG’s river-based navy played an almost entirely symbolic role in the political culture of this regime. And in the watered landscapes of Jiangnan―celebrated in everything from landscape photography to film―the RNG images overlapped with early wartime Japanese conceptions of a “pacified” China, yet also presented a different homeland from the “rugged China” celebrated in Resistance lore. This paper examines how the RNG developed a vision of occupied China which remained, for almost the entire occupation, entirely riparian.
Supported by the European Research Council project, Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia (COCTA), Horizon 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant 682081.
About the Speaker
Jeremy E. Taylor is an associate professor of modern Asian history at the University of Nottingham. He is the founder of the “Enemy of the People” digital archive (https://www.dhi.ac.uk/chiangkaishek/) and the author of Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Routledge 2011) in addition to more than 25 peer reviewed journal articles on the cultural history of the Chinese-speaking world, including papers in Twentieth Century C hina, the Journal of Modern Chinese History, and Gender & History.