Violence of the Invalid: Displaced “Wounded Soldiers” in China’s Long Second World War

How could the wounded soldiers, a cared community with presupposed invalidity, become a major threat of public security? The arriving “wounded soldiers” during the long Second World War of China was an infamous force of disruption, often involved in armed clashes against local law enforcers and crimes that targeted the civilian population. This chapter will investigate the identity of the “wounded soldiers”. As a group which claimed respect and prioritized welfare provisions given their battlefield sacrifice, the identity of wounded soldiers was an often target of forgery attempts by their comrades. Meanwhile, the wounded soldiers suffered from the degradation of healthcare infrastructure, displacement and predatory behavior of their healthier compatriots as resources were drained by the protracted war. Their resettlement in provisional military hospitals had also deteriorated their relationship with the civilian population. This chapter will examine the alleged misbehavior of the “wounded soldiers” against this social background. While relying on materials from different localities across China, the situation in post-1945 Tianjin would be investigated with specificity. As a metropolis with a hyper-complicated postcolonial legacy, the Nationalists had only assumed its full sovereignty after their quick collapse in 1937. The Nationalist return to Tianjin was accompanied by a rise in crime committed by the “wounded soldiers”, up to more than eighty cases in a month in 1946. This chapter will also record the reaction of the civilian inhabitants under the shadow of this paradoxical violence of the “disabled”, leading to an interrogation of the concept of disability in the context of postcoloniality and wartime hiatus.