Movement and Work in Times of War: Cosmopolitan Women and Global Chinese Resistance, 1930s–40s

This paper considers experiences of wartime work with a focus on multilingual Chinese women. China’s War of Resistance against Japan generated momentous transformation in the country. Amidst the mass destruction and displacement inflicted by the Japanese occupation, the war also represented a period of unprecedented opportunities for many women. Whilst women’s participation in relief activities, welfare provision and guerrilla warfare has merited some scholarly attention, and the national dimension of women’s political mobilisation has been highlighted by several historians, the prominent role women played in harnessing global support for Chinese resistance has been surprisingly overlooked. The presentation will zoom in on the case study of Guo Jingqiu, also known as Helena Kuo, a Macau-born, Guangzhou-educated woman who had a stellar, albeit forgotten, career as a journalist, writer, public speaker and translator in China, Britain, France and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. In her articles, novels and autobiographies, Guo Jingqiu presented China and the significance of its wartime resistance to global audiences through intimate narratives of her personal journey of education, work, travel, and interaction with a range of multinational actors. This paper pays particular attention to her complex experience of work in Europe and America as a single woman and her creative representations of a sophisticated and resilient China that challenged colonialist and racist prejudices to mobilise global audiences in support of Chinese resistance. Guo’s wartime writings merged the national and the global, the individual and the collective, interweaving ideas of women’s and national liberation with a cosmopolitan sensibility forged during a time of multiple displacements. More broadly, the paper aims to recover the crucial role of multilingual Chinese women in China’s cultural diplomacy in World War Two, contrasting their highly visible wartime careers with their relative invisibility from post-war histories of China at war.