This article examines the correlation between union activism, crime, and violence in the shipping industry in wartime China. Drawing on diplomatic and police records, shipping manifests, periodicals, and newspapers, the article deals with self-employed unskilled steamship attendants called “teaboys.” With insight into Chinese civilians’ underground struggle, the article contends that, steamship teaboys sustained their livelihoods during World War II by operating as everyday low-level spies for rival regimes. As workers, steamship teaboys pragmatically, without evidence of politico-ideological considerations, accommodated the needs of different belligerents in exchange for their own survival. Moreover, this article argues that the drastic socio-political upheaval in wartime China made these marginally employed shipboard attendants increasingly inclined towards a utilitarian patron-client relationship, originally forged in the mid-1920s when unionization began, and continued at the expense of their native-place ties and fictive family bonds. Impacted by the patron-client relationship in a climate where workers’ interests were protected by the armed forces of various regimes, the teaboys viewed unions as competitive sellers of muscle power in a market for crime and violence in industrial unrest.

Although the Geneva Conventions have been successively revised since 1864, norms regarding the protection of medical care have been frequently disregarded. Despite current claims of international humanitarian law in crisis, comparing historic levels of violations with contemporary incidents is quantitatively challenging. Reviewing past reactions and justifications used by perpetrators of attacks on medical care can, however, be revealing. Based on a series of emblematic cases, qualitative analysis of perpetrator discourse can contribute to a better understanding of why the protection of medical care in armed conflict continues to be problematic to this day, notably through the rationales given for attacks, which have remained remarkably consistent over time.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

Although the Second Sino-Japanese War (the “War”) ended many decades ago, hostilities between China and Japan are still raw in the memory of many Chinese people, even though most of them did not directly experience the War. In particular, the Great Bombing of Chongqing—the indiscriminate, sustained bombing of the Nationalist provisional capital by Japanese warplanes from 1938 to 1943—has been retrieved from the archives as a significant event. Subsumed under the narrative of the Great Bombing, Chongqing's Great Tunnel Disaster (the “Disaster”), following a prolonged Japanese air raid on June 5, 1941, resulted in some of Nationalist China's heaviest civilian casualties. This article discusses the Disaster in detail, suggesting that at the time, it was viewed more as a human-induced “stampede” than as a Japanese “war atrocity” when the Chinese public took to the press and condemned the Nationalist government for its inability to prevent, manage, and mitigate the Disaster's effects. Chinese civilians were attempting to renew and revise a traditional social contract of disaster, according to which the state was responsible for providing adequate relief to victims, by accusing the Nationalist government of callousness, incompetence, and negligence.