The War of Textbooks: Educating Children during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945

Abstract:The Second World War has been understood as a war of production, not only in instruments of assault and defense but also in the civic imagination of the nation-state. Mass mobilization for war fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the state and the knowledge industry. In China, the retreat of the Nationalist government from Nanjing to Chongqing saw China’s worst refugee crisis, but it also resulted in the country’s most dramatic growth of publicly funded education for primary and secondary schools and caused a shift in how knowledge came to be embodied in the materiality of wartime textbooks. Based on archival research, this article tells the story of the Second Sino-Japanese War by tracing the lives of textbooks produced and consumed during this period, and it assesses how the wartime experience fundamentally changed the textbook industry.