Creating Gendered Images of the Soldier Figure in Literary Works

The fourth chapter operates as a deviation from the previous chapter by looking at a literary perspective of the soldier image through works by writers with direct army or combat experiences. Moreover, this chapter also aims to examine how these writers managed to assert their own influence as social critics, to achieve personal independence, and to advocate for women’s political participation. Xu offers a close reading of three different literary works, including one by a female soldier who had studied at Whampoa Military Academy, in order to critically inspect the gendered images of soldiers and advocate for the participation of women within the political and social sphere of the time.

Introduction

The introduction first provides a historical background for the book during the period from the 1924 establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy to the 1945 end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu goes on to introduce the major themes that the book aims to engage with, namely state-building and state-society relations in modern China, war and soldiers in Chinese military history and literature, as well as social emotion and mass mobilization in the Chinese Communist Revolution. Xu argues in the introduction that her book focuses on both social and cultural impacts of war in order to treat war as a cultural event for the people it influences rather than simply an analysis of politics and strategy. Xu ends this section by introducing the chapter structure and primary sources of the book.