2-WWII+China+HF

====1. How may the Home Front’s awareness of the war’s objectives and nature be characterized? How did propaganda affect the mindset at home? ====

====When declared the Republic of China on October 10, 1911, China embarked on 40 years of internal struggle and civil war. Warlords quickly took over sections of the country and ruled them as individual fiefdoms. Fifteen years later, in 1926, took control of the Kuomintang Party and the Army. He began a campaign to overthrow them. He was allied with the Communist Chinese until the conquest of Shanghai. By October 1928, the Communists and the Kuomintang were engaged in open warfare. From 1930 to 1934 the Kuomintang tried repeatedly to encircle and his communists, driving them 6,000 miles to the Yenan Province. ====

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 their burning cities.
For the Chinese, war began in 1931, when Japan, seeing China embroiled in internal strife, invaded northeastern China, setting up a Japanese state called Manchukuo. By 1938 Japan occupied much of China and had taken Nanking, longtime capital of China. During World War II, China was one of the Allied nations that fought alongside the “Big Three:” the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. They were at war against the Axis; Germany, Japan, Italy and other collaborating enemy nations. As the Japanese advanced across the Chinese mainland, the Chinese resisted with a National army under command of Chiang Kai Shek and a Communist army under the command of Mao Zedong. Unfortunately, the two political sides tended to fight each other much more than they did the Japanese. Both sides coveted power after the eventual Japanese defeat. Chiang, in particular, seemed to fear the Communists more than he did the Japanese. The home front believed that it was America’s hope of establishing China as a great power despite its grave internal divisions and the insistence of the Soviet Union on dominance in Manchuria.

Support for the Chinese people was urged in posters. Even prior to the United States' entry into the war, many Chinese figures appeared on the cover of Time. Japanese propaganda attributed this not to any disgust Americans felt for Japanese atrocities in China, but simply to more effective Chinese propaganda. Frank Capra's Why We Fight series included The Battle of China. It depicted the brutal attack on China by Japan as well as atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking, which helped galvanize Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation. The film also depicted the building of the Burma Road, which helped keep China in the war as the Japanese had occupied most Chinese ports. Even prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, accounts of atrocities in China roused considerable antipathy for Japan. This stemmed from as early as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Such books as Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and Freda Utley's China At War aroused sympathy for the Chinese. As early as 1937, Roosevelt condemned the Japanese for their aggression in China. The Rape of Nanking, due to the large number of Western witnesses, achieved particularly notoriety, with Chinese propagandists using it to cement Allied opinion.

2. What were the direct contributions of the Home Front to the war effort? This needs to go beyond a cursory statement of, “They supplied soldiers, grew food, made armaments, etc.” You should consider support not only in patriotic or industrial terms, but also political, social, economic, cultural/intellectual, moral/religious, emotional, etc., terms.

Life on the home front during World War II was a significant part of the war effort for all participants and had a major impact on the outcome of the war. Governments became involved with new issues such as rationing, manpower allocation, home defense, evacuation in the face of air raids, and response to occupation by an enemy power. The morale and psychology of the people responded to leadership and propaganda. Typically women were mobilized to an unprecedented degree. The success in mobilizing economic output was a major factor in supporting combat operations.

Information on the Chinese home front is very limited:
 * Access to luxuries was severely restricted, although there was also a significant black market. Families also grew victory gardens, and small home vegetable gardens, to supply themselves with food. Many things were conserved to turn into weapons later, such as fat for nitroglycerin production.
 * Labor shortages were felt in agriculture, even though most farmers were given an exemption and few were drafted. Large numbers volunteered or moved to cities for factory jobs. At the same time many agricultural commodities were in greater demand by the military and for the civilian populations of Allies. Production was encouraged and prices and markets were under tight federal control.
 * Patriotism became the central theme of advertising throughout the war, as large scale campaigns were launched to sell war bonds, promote efficiency in factories, reduce ugly rumors, and maintain civilian morale.
 * The Chinese government spent over twice as much money fighting World War II as it had spent on all previous programs since its creation. Tax rates were raised to generate revenue and control inflation. Some people paid 90% of what they earned toward taxes.
 * Due to the emphasis on the war effort, many people qualified for active military service despite possibly being too young, too old or simply not physically qualified for the job. Some would join student cadet corps or reserve military units in order to carry out evening and weekend services while still living their “normal” lives. Many community and religious groups also volunteered to assist by knitting warm clothing, collecting literature for entertainment for the troops, and even baking goods to send to those fighting.

3. What were the costs & benefits of the war to the Home Front, to include but not limited to goods/services/resources? Use a case study to illustrate.

China suffered the second highest number of casualties of the entire war. Civilians in the occupied territories had to endure many large-scale massacres, including that in Nanking. In a few areas, Japanese forces also unleashed newly developed biological weapons on Chinese civilians leading to an estimated 200,000 dead. Tens of thousands died when Nationalist troops broke the levees of the Yangtze to stop the Japanese advance after the loss of the Chinese capital, Nanking. Many of China's urban centers, industrial resources, and coastal regions were occupied by Japan for most of the war. China suffered a large death toll from the war, both military and civilian. The Chinese Nationalist army suffered some 3.2 million casualties, and 17 million civilians died in the crossfire. After the war, China became one of the main victorious countries and gained one of the permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council. After the war ended, the Chinese Civil War resumed between the Nationalists and the Communists. The Nationalist government, with its military strength greatly reduced and its economy devastated by the war against Japan, was defeated by the Communists in 1949. The Republic of China retreated to Taiwan while the communist People's Republic of China was established on the mainland.

4. How can life for women and youth on the Home Front be characterized? Use case studies to illustrate.

The Rape of Nanking was a mass murder and war rape that occurred right after the Japanese capture of the city of Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese women and children were murdered and raped by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for women, young girls, and even children, with many of them taken captive and gang raped. The women often were killed immediately after being raped. There are also accounts of Japanese troops forcing families to commit acts of incest. Sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape their daughters. Young children were not exempt from such atrocities; both women and children were living in constant fear and helplessness. “One eyewitness, Li Ke-Hen, reported: 'There are so many bodies on the street, victims of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their intestines spilling out alongside them.’” (Cheng, 19) Historians and witnessed have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. No woman or child was safe from vicious rape and exploitation and probable murder thereafter. Many families went out of their way to hide the women and children. They could never be alone and children were never allowed out. After the Rape of Nanking, things were never the same in China. It caused a decrease in women interaction in the nation because the repercussions of the inquisition upon women and children rendered them almost incapable of going out of their way was immensely much. Many of them refused to be active citizens for almost 20 years after the Japanese had left. Despite the steep decrease in the number of women and children active in the home front, some joined the labor force. World War II did not thoroughly transform the workplace for women since discrimination in hiring, wage discrepancies, dress codes, and unemployment policies still favored male employees.

Murdered Chinese women and Children are <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">strewn across the steps of a Nanking Building.

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<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif;">Citations:
===="Manchuria: invasion by Japanese army". Video. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. <[]>====

Ferrell, Robert H. "The Journal of Modern History." The Mukden Incident: September 18-19, 1931 27.1 (1995): 66-72. The University of Chicago Press. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.
<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Ferrell, Robert H. "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang." The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 96.1 (1998): 107-11.Kentucky Historical Society. Web. 18 Nov. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/23383679>.