Reproducing Dependency: Blinded Veterans and Family Life in a Rehabilitation Camp during Wartime China, 1942–45

Towards the end of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), China’s Nationalist government had established 32 rehabilitation camps in 10 provinces that housed over 70,000 military casualties. Managing this unprecedented number of wounded and disabled veterans in ways that reduced the economic burden on the wartime state became the primary goal for the national campaign to make “crippled but useful” (suican bufei) soldiers after their demobilization.

Drawing from a historical sociological survey of one of the largest rehabilitation camps that housed about 500 blinded veterans and their dependents (wives, children) in Sichuan, the wartime Nationalist Great Rear Area (Dahoufang), this paper investigates how the war’s production of a sensory disability reshaped the relationship between veterans and the state.

In the scheme of rehabilitation, disability became a corporeal asset for veterans to claim financial supports from the state by undergoing a mandatory process of training that included manual skills and braille literacy. In practice, however, blinded veterans and their dependents (wives, children) used disability to justify a wide range of survival strategies, such as singing, fortune-telling, which deviated from the goal of rehabilitation and hence compromised the wartime effort to strengthen the link between soldiers and the state through rehabilitation. Locating disability in the veteran community, this research aims to shed light on the intertwined relations among work, welfare and war in twentieth-century China.