Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chongming people have a “glorious revolutionary tradition,” including anti-
Japanese combat and peasant rebellions, and the island was an incubator of
early grassroots Communist Party organizing. One government website extols
this revolutionary history: “During the long period of revolutionary struggle
. . . Chongming people contributed their lives for the revolutionary cause of
the Chinese People.” Part of this “revolutionary struggle” is documented in
one of the few English-language studies of Chongming. Timothy Brook's
Col-
laboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China
explores the mean-
ing of resistance, complicity, and collaboration against the backdrop of the
Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. Chongming Island is his fi nal case
study and the one chapter focused explicitly on resistance. He provides impor-
tant basic information about Chongming: the swampy north shore, the modest
commercial value of the agricultural economy, the network of canals, dikes,
and seawalls, the regular destruction of this infrastructure from typhoons,
and the minimal industrial sector comprising two cotton-spinning mills.
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h is wartime history explains why Chongming Island was the recently
proposed site of a memorial to Japanese atrocities. During the occupation,
the military tested comfort stations here to which the soldiers were sup-
posed to direct their sexual urges, later rapidly expanding their use through-
out Asia. More than two hundred thousand comfort women were used for
sexual slavery for the Japanese military, and there were more than one hun-
dred comfort stations in Shanghai alone. h e largest among them, where fi ve
hundred women were regularly raped, is now a bank building. In the past
decade, the building boom, including the expansion of “greenbelts,” eradi-
cated many of these sites in Shanghai.
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When the Japanese descended on
Chongming Island, soldiers created havoc, including:
looting property and rounding up women for sexual service. h ose unfortu-
nate to get caught were dragged to makeshift brothels, though some were
raped in the open air. . . . h e youngest, who was bayoneted by the soldier
who penetrated her, was an eleven-year-old girl in the town of Changxing,
