Her Voice: Recounting Japanese Military Sexual Slavery in Chinese Literature and Film

Xian Wang (East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Notre Dame)

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of young women across Asia were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military as so-called “comfort women.” Long after the end of the war, the victims of the “comfort women” system remained silent due to social and
political pressure that stigmatized raped women as unchaste and viewed them as shameful traces of national pain. Since Kim Hak-sun, a Korean victim, first broke the silence in 1991, more voices have emerged. However, Chinese victims’ voices remain mostly unheard by the wider public beyond Asia.

This talk examines the voices of “comfort women” as a motif in Chinese wartime literature in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as recent documentary films Thirty Two (2013) and Twenty Two (2015), which focus on the daily lives of the dwindling number of “comfort women”
survivors in China. This talk explores how personal testimonials of “comfort women” can be included in collective memory and how women’s wartime sufferings can be remembered within
and without a nationalist framework.

Engendering China is the theme of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative spring '23 lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Learn more about Fulbright opportunities for graduate students that fund your international research or teaching from a Fulbright advisor at Cornell.

Fulbright at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor works with you to create and submit a competitive application for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program or the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Stop by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' Minors Open House to learn about adding an international minor to your degree.

The Einaudi Center offers minors in migration studies, international relations, European studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. The Department of Asian Studies will join us to share information about minors in East Asian studies, South Asian studies, Southeast Asian studies, Sanskrit studies, and global Asia studies.

Snacks will be provided!

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Infrastructure is at the heart of China’s growing, controversial presence in global development. In addition to economic considerations, observers see infrastructure projects as important cogs in China’s pursuit of international influence. However, debates on Chinese global infrastructure are remarkably devoid of historical and comparative context, and China’s infrastructure-influence nexus remains conceptually and empirically unclear. Dr. Austin Strange provides a comprehensive account of Chinese global infrastructure since 1949, showing that high-profile infrastructure has been a tenacious feature of China’s development cooperation. It then discusses how high-profile infrastructure creates both intended and incidental sources of influence by serving as a unique form of political capital as well as a distinct source of political risk for China’s government and host country governments. Contemporary Chinese global infrastructure, both traditional and digital, has important historical and comparative contexts that help illuminate how China’s global infrastructure drive has injected major risk into its pursuit of international influence.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the speaker

Austin Strange is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines China’s contemporary and historical roles in the world economy and global development. He is co-author of Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Austin earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.A. from Zhejiang University, and a B.A. from William & Mary.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.