Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

abuses at the local level, in the first few years of the war it managed to hold steady (total recruitment to the Nationalist armies remained broadly steady at between 1.7 million and 2 million men a year between 1938 and 1941). In the initial years of the war, the system did not engender widespread, endemic social unrest.25 Another report attacked the failure to enthuse a huge section of the population: rural women. “Women are conservative, and their outlooks are rooted in clan and countryside,” it declared. “They don’t understand the meaning of the War of Resistance.” The writer believed that the war provided an opportunity to mobilize women and increase their national consciousness, making use of the fact that the Japanese had “kidnapped children, burned property, and raped women.” The role that was envisaged for women was not necessarily a liberating one—nursing wounded soldiers or making clothes for the troops—but the report acknowledged that women needed to be included in any modernization of society. War was supposed to create a nation-state from all of China’s citizens.