Gendered and Generational Archetypes

The role of women in resisting or “collaborating” with the Japanese in wartime China is a lively realm of inquiry, and the topic has already inspired a significant literature. The important contributions of scholars such as Liu Jiurong and Yun Xia have highlighted the gendered ways in which “collaboration” was and continues to be condemned by its critics.1 While our understanding of the gendered discourse of collaboration has improved as a result of such scholarship, however, there have been far fewer attempts to address gendered archetypes that developed, or were imposed, under occupation. Nicole Huang’s analysis of the image of urban Chinese women in wartime Shanghai’s print culture is one of the few examples we have of scholarship that seriously addresses such questions.2 Contrast this lack of research to the rich literature on gender in the historiography of occupation in modern Europe and the Middle East. On wartime France, scholars such as Francine Muel-Dreyfus have suggested that the transformation of the image of French women under occupation, achieved through the mobilization of older, prewar icons of motherhood, was one of the central pillars of the Vichy project; the “Vichy mother” was equal in importance to the creation of the personality cult around Marshal Pétain.3 Similarly, gender historians have shown how American occupation authorities and their allies in Iraq in the early 2000s sought to grant agency to women through the creation of new female archetypes, as a means of downplaying notions of female victimhood.4 This chapter draws on such scholarly innovations from other contexts as it traces the recycling of older gendered archetypes and the invention of new ones—both male and female—under the RNG. The RNG encouraged new debates about gender and the role of both women and men following its return in 1940. Such debates were not limited to the written word, however. They found their way into imagery and iconography. Gendered archetypes served not simply to provide normative messages about how men and women might behave in Wang Jingwei’s China; they also became outlets