Professor%20Rana%20Mitter: List of publications

Post-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 2nd edition(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Negotiating China's Destiny explains how China developed from a country that hardly mattered internationally into the important world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered through five wars with European powers as well as American imperial policies resulting in economic, military, and political domination. This shifted dramatically during WWII, when alliances needed to be realigned, resulting in the evolution of China's relationships with the USSR, the U.S., Britain, France, India, and Japan. Based on key historical archives, memoirs, and periodicals from across East Asia and the West, this book explains how China was able to become one of the Allies with a seat on the Security Council, thus changing the course of its future.

An Economist Book of the Year A Financial Times Book of the Year “A book that has long cried out to be written.” — Observer (UK), Books of the Year In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese ...

Benjamin H. Kizer arrived in December 1944 in the wartime Chinese capital of Chongqing (Chungking) as the head of the China Office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), itself established only a year previously. Kizer wrote at some length of the difficulty of the journey, having been warned more than once that it was one of the worst postings possible: Chongqing was hot, hilly, and lacking in any workable transport network. The buildings he was assigned were better than many, however. ‘On clear days, which are rare at this season’, Kizer noted, ‘they command a fine view of the river and the hills beyond’.2 Even clear days had their own hazards: in summer, temperatures in Chongqing reach 40 degrees Celsius and more. Nor were the surroundings much to gladden the heart. After seven years of war, and constant Japanese aerial bombardment, wartime Chongqing was a mixture of rubble and hastily thrown-up buildings, reflecting the fact that the city had expanded its population by several hundred thousand in just a few years. Still, Kizer had not come to Chongqing for the weather, or the scenery. He was coming to manage what was the largest single-country programme of the whole UNRRA project. There was an immense amount to do. Ever since the war with Japan had begun in the hot July of 1937, China’s painfully acquired modernization under its Nationalist (Guomindang or Kuomintang) government, led by Chiang Kaishek, had been largely destroyed. Both physical infrastructure, including railways and roads, as well as the institutional infrastructure of government, were shattered by the forced move of the government inland.3 Kizer’s main interlocutor was Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the newly established China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRRA), an American-educated former historian and diplomat who would later …

One hundred years after the 1911 Revolution (Xinhai Revolution) in China, its meaning continues to be highly contested. Paradoxically, the more time that passes, the less certain either political actors or scholars seem to be about the significance of 1911 for the path of Chinese revolutionary history. This essay examines three phenomena: the appropriation of 1911 in contemporary political and popular culture; the use of 1911 as a metaphor for contemporary politics by PRC historians; and the changing meaning of 1911 over the past ten decades, particularly during the years of the war against Japan. The essay concludes that it is precisely the “unanchored” nature of 1911, separated from any one path of historical interpretation, that has kept its meaning simultaneously uncertain and potent.

China's long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China ('the War of Resistance to Japan') to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the war's legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.

China's long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China (‘the War of Resistance to Japan’) to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the war's legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society.

This book explores the 'mental maps' of leading political figures of the era of two world wars.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one a biji (notebook) written immediately after the war's end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the war's ambiguous role in modernising China. Du's work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xu's suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

In recent years citizenship has emerged as a very important topic in the sciences, mainly as a result of the effects of migration, population displacements and cultural heterogeneity. This book focuses on educational enterprise and how it affects national ambitions, cultural preferences and political trends. It also examines the major effects of globalisation, the large-scale movements of populations, and the impact this all has in terms of education and citizenship. With contributions from an array of international scholars including Etienne Balibar, and featuring various international case studies, Manufacturing Citizenship will be extremely interesting to the education academic community as well as many readers within cultural studies and politics.

This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference 'Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century,' held 27-29 April 2006 at the Asia Society, New York, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,...

Crossed Histories represents a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to "Manchuria" under Japan’s influence from the turn of the twentieth century to 1945. The contributors, who represent the fields of history, literature, film studies, sociology, and anthropology, unpack the complexity of Manchuria as an effect of the geopolitical imaginaries of various individuals and groups shaped by imperialism, colonialism, Pan-Asianism, and the present globalization. Manchuria is thus examined in the imaginations of a Chinese journalist and his Shanghai readers in the 1930s; prewar Japanese city planners and architects; a Manchu princess later executed by the Chinese nationalist government; various audiences of Japanese "goodwill films" of the 1930s and 1940s; the seven thousand Poles who immigrated to northern Manchuria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the state makers of Manchukuo (which included both Japanese and Chinese leaders) and North and South Korea during the Cold War era; and a student of Manchuria Nation- Building University in the mid-1940s.

A powerful element in twentieth-century Chinese politics has been the myth of Chinese resistance to Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Investigating the shifting alliances of key players in that event, Rana Mitter traces the development of the narrative of resistance to the occupation and shows how it became part of China's political consciousness, enduring even today. After Japan's September 1931 military strike leading to a takeover of the Northeast, the Chinese responded in three major ways: collaboration, resistance in exile, and resistance on the ground. What motives prompted some Chinese to collaborate, others to resist? What were conditions like under the Japanese? Through careful reading of Chinese and Japanese sources, particularly local government records, newspapers, and journals published both inside and outside occupied Manchuria, Mitter sheds important new light on these questions.