Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Asia: From the Taiping Rebellion to the Vietnam War (The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series: Daily Lives of Civilians during Wartime)

281 Pages·2007·3.92 MB·English

by  Stewart Lone

d aily lives of
Civilians in
Wartime Asia
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d aily lives of
Civilians in
Wartime Asia
F rom the Taiping Rebellion to the
Vietnam War
E DITED BY STEWART LONE
T he Greenwood Press “Daily Life Through History” Series
D aily Lives of Civilians during Wartime
D avid S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Series Editors
G REENWOOD PRESS
W estport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daily lives of civilians in wartime Asia : from the Taiping Rebellion
to the Vietnam War / edited by Stewart Lone.
p. cm. — (The Greenwood Press daily life through history
series, ISSN 1080–4749)
Includes index.
ISBN–13: 978–0–313–33684–3 (alk. paper)
ISBN–10: 0–313–33684–9 (alk. paper)
1. Asia—History—19th century. 2. Asia—History—20th century.
3. Asia—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Asia—Social conditions—
20th century. 5. War—Social aspects—Asia. I. Lone, Stewart.
DS34.D35 2007
950.4—dc22 2006030405
B ritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
C opyright © 2007 by Stewart Lone
A ll rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
r eproduced, by any process or technique, without the
e xpress written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006030405
I SBN–10: 0–313–33684–9
I SBN–13: 978–0–313–33684–3
I SSN: 1080–4749
F irst published in 2007
G reenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
A n imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
w ww.greenwood.com
P rinted in the United States of America
T he paper used in this book complies with the
P ermanent Paper Standard issued by the National
I nformation Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Acknowledgment
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials
in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and
publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete
acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime
extend their apologies for any omissions.
C ontents
S eries Foreword vii
A cknowledgments xi
I ntroduction xiii
C hronology xix
1. Daily Life in China during the Taiping and
Nian Rebellions, 1850s–1860s 1
R . Gary Tiedemann
2. Life in a War of Independence: The Philippine
Revolution, 1896–1902 29
B ernardita Reyes Churchill
3. The Wars of Meiji Japan: China (1894–1895)
and Russia (1904–1905) 65
S tewart Lone
4 . Urban Life in China’s Wars, 1937–1949:
The View from the Teahouse 95
D i Wang
5 . Daily Life of Civilians in Wartime Japan,
1937–1945 127
S imon Partner
vi Contents
6 . Daily Life in Wartime Indonesia,
1939–1949 159
-
S higeru Sato
7 . Korean Civilians North and South,
1950–1953 191
A ndrei Lankov
8 . Remembering Life in Urban South
Vietnam, circa 1965–1975 219
S tewart Lone
I ndex 247
A bout the Editor and Contributors 251
S eries Foreword
F ew scenes are as poignant as that of civilian refugees torn from their
homes and put to plodding fl ight along dusty roads, carrying their pos-
sessions in crude bundles and makeshift carts. We have all seen the
images. Before photography, paintings and crude drawings told the
story, but despite the media, the same sense of the awful emerges from
these striking portrayals: The pace of the fl ight is agonizingly slow; the
numbers are sobering and usually arrayed in single fi le along the edges
of byways that stretch to the horizon. The men appear hunched and
beaten, the women haggard, the children strangely old, and usually, the
wide-eyed look of fear has been replaced by one of bone-grinding wea-
riness. They likely stagger through country redolent with the odor of
smoke and death as heavy guns mutter in the distance. It always seems
to be raining on these people, or snowing, and it is either brutally cold
or oppressively hot. In the past, clattering hooves would send them skit-
tering away from the path of cavalry; more recently, whirring engines
of motorized convoys push them from the road. Aside from becoming
casualties, civilians who become refugees experience the most devas-
tating impact of war, for they truly become orphans of the storm, lack-
ing the barest necessities of food and clothing, except for what they can
carry and, eventually, what they can steal.
T he volumes in this series seek to illuminate that extreme example of
the civilian experience in wartime and more, for those on distant home
fronts also can make remarkable sacrifi ces, whether through their labors
viii Series Foreword
to support the war effort or by enduring the absence of loved ones far
from home and in great peril. And war can impinge on indigenous pop-
ulations in eccentric ways. Stories of a medieval world in which a farmer
fearful about his crops could prevail on armies to fi ght elsewhere are
possibly exaggerated, the product of nostalgia for a chivalric code that
most likely did not hold much sway during a coarse and vicious time.
In any period and at any place, the fundamental reality of war is that
organized violence is no less brutal for its being structured by strategy
and tactics. The advent of total war might have been signaled by the
famous l evee en masse of the French Revolution, but that development
was more a culmination of a trend than an innovation away from more
pacifi c times. In short, all wars have assailed and will assail civilians in
one way or another to a greater or lesser degree. The Thirty Years’ War
displaced populations, just as the American Revolution saw settlements
preyed upon, houses razed, and farms pillaged. Modern codes of con-
duct adopted by both international consent and embraced by the armies
of the civilized world have heightened awareness about the sanctity of
civilians and have improved vigilance about violations of that sanctity,
but in the end, such codes will never guarantee immunity from the rage
of battle or the rigors of war.
I n this series, accomplished scholars have recruited prescient colleagues
to write essays that reveal both the universal civilian experience in war-
time and aspects of it made unique by time and place. Readers will dis-
cover in these pages the other side of warfare, one that is never placid,
even if far removed from the scenes of fi ghting. As these talented authors
show, the shifting expectations of governments markedly transformed the
civilian wartime experience from virtual noninvolvement in early mod-
ern times to the twentieth century’s expectation of sacrifi ce, exertion, and
contribution. Finally, as the Western powers have come full circle by ask-
ing virtually no sacrifi ce from civilians at all, they have stumbled upon
the peculiar result that diminishing deprivation during a war can increase
civilian dissent against it.
Moreover, the geographical and chronological span of these books is
broad and encompassing to reveal the unique perspectives of how war
affects people, whether they are separated by hemispheres or centuries,
people who are distinct by way of different cultures yet similar because
of their common humanity. As readers will see, days on a home front far
from battle usually become a surreal routine of the ordinary existing in
tandem with the extraordinary, a situation in which hours of waiting and
expectation become blurred against the backdrop of normal tasks and
everyday events. That situation is a constant, whether for a village in Asia
or Africa or in Europe or the Americas.
Consequently, these books confi rm that the human condition always pro-
duces the similar as well as the singular, a paradox that war tends to amplify.
Series Foreword ix
Every war is much like another, but no war is really the same as any other.
All places are much alike, but no place is wholly separable from its matchless
identity. The civilian experience in war mirrors these verities. We are certain
that readers will fi nd in these books a vivid illumination of those truths.
D avid S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, S eries Editors