The Role of Manual Labor in China’s War against Japan, 1937–45

This paper examines both Nationalist and Chinese Communist strategies of mass local mobilization during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Because wartime China lacked modern infrastructure, menial labor–the construction of roads, bridges and dykes, and the use of human carriers to transport provisions–played an outsized role in enabling military mobility and keeping economies afloat. The paper explores three major programs of labor mobilization: the Nationalist armies’ use of local civilian transport labor to compensate for military logistical incapacities; the construction of airfields in southwestern China; and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP’s) policy of tapping into refugee populations as major sources of paid labor (yigong daizhen).

Moving away from the emphasis on combatant conscription in studies of China’s war against Japan, the paper highlights, instead, how civilian manual labor shaped both strategic decision-making and quotidian life. Programs of mass mobilization enabled Chinese belligerents to sustain prolonged resistance against the Imperial Japanese Army and the collaborationist Nanjing government. However, they could also be exploitative and coercive, and badly disrupted livelihoods. Despite their mutual ideological animosity, the Nationalist government and CCP bore striking similarities in their organization and promotion of menial work. Both coated these programs in the rhetoric of duty and patriotism and viewed them as a means of enhancing their political presence among marginalized communities. Proponents of these wartime programs were at pains to differentiate them from the corvée labor practices of earlier dynastic periods, rooting their iterations instead in modern conceptions of nationalism, citizenship, and revolution. The rhetoric of duty coated labor mobilization with a veneer of glory, downplaying the backbreaking, exploitative nature of such work.