“To Cleanse the Countryside We Must First Cleanse Hearts’: The Culture of Rural Pacification in Japanese-occupied China

Taylor, Jeremy E.

Abstract

Contributing to a growing literature on the transnational history of ‘collaborationism’ under wartime occupation, this paper examines ‘Rural Pacification’–the counterinsurgency campaigns that were prosecuted from 1941 to 1943 in Japanese-occupied China–from the perspective of culture. In this paper, I argue that, despite being initiated as a military project, the ‘political work’ of Rural Pacification, and particularly the use of cultural production to spread government ideas to rural communities in the Lower Yangtze Delta, marked a crucial part of these campaigns. Rural Pacification was not purely about the eradication of communist resistance in China, but also about ‘cleansing hearts’.

Citation

Taylor, J. E. (2022). “To Cleanse the Countryside We Must First Cleanse Hearts’: The Culture of Rural Pacification in Japanese-occupied China. Cultural and Social History, 19(3), 265-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2069205

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 20, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Apr 27, 2022
• Publication Date: Apr 27, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 21, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 21, 2022
• Journal: Cultural and Social History
• Print ISSN: 1478-0038
• Electronic ISSN: 1478-0046
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 265-282
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2069205
• Keywords: Sociology and Political Science; History; Cultural Studies
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/7784938
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14780038.2022.2069205