Chongqing's Most Wanted: Worker Mobility and Resistance in China's Nationalist Arsenals, 1937–1945

Abstract

Historians of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) have concentrated on rural China to explain how the Communists mobilized the peasantry as a revolutionary force. Although clarifying the CCP's ascension to power in 1949, this focus has impeded our understanding of social change and conflict in the Nationalist controlled territories, especially the wartime capital of Chongqing. Thus, it is difficult to understand how the Nationalists exacerbated the alienation of urban social groups during the 1940s or how the CCP began to find consensus in the cities after 1946. Even standard explanations for the Nationalist collapse—government factionalism, hyperinflation, military blunders, and malfeasance—with their focus on government elites and institutions have rendered invisible the role of social classes as agents of historical change. The few studies of wartime labor have instead emphasized the patriotic contributions of workers and their relative passivity under the four-class bloc envisioned by the united front.