Anti-Japanese War and China's Social Change (ePub)

This book consists of three parts: Part 1 Demographic and Social Structural Change, Part 2 Economic Life in Wartime, and Part 3 The Intellect Community in the Rear Area of the War. As pointed out in the first part, the population migration during the period of full-scale Anti-Japanese War was one of the collective migrations in human history, in which about 10 million residents in the east coastal area and along the Yangtze River moved westward. The majority of refugees were peasants, but intellectuals, workers and personnel from the industry and commerce field made up a large proportion among those who fled to the rear area. It is stated in the second part that the Japanese invasion caused great damage to the urban and rural areas of China, and the rear areas and the anti-Japanese bases took various measures to ensure the supply of the war of resistance against Japan. The Japanese invasion caused serious inflation, making people's life intolerable. In the last part, vicious development of wartime inflation led to a sharp downgrading of living standards of intellectuals in the rear area, air strikes, running for air-raid shelter, diseases and death had become part of everyday life, populism was rapidly expanding among intellectuals and caused estrangement from Kuomintang administration, and social democratic ideas had become the mainstream in the area of ideology.