Jeep Girls and American GIs: Gendered Nationalism in Post–World War II China

Abstract

Over a hundred thousand US servicemen were stationed in post–World War II China, resulting in the largest grassroots interactions in Sino-US history. Reexamining this unprecedented encounter in the context of American global military empire, this article investigates the sociocultural tensions caused by GIs’ sexual relations with Chinese women between 1945 and 1949. While conservatives maligned “Jeep girls” out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. In contrast with previous studies highlighting how Communist propaganda led to new anti-American sentiments, this research, by uncovering the complexities of Chinese women's experiences and their stories—which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas—foregrounds the key role of gendered nationalism in Sino-US relations.

Rape in Peking: Injured woman, microhistory and global trial

“…9 Despite drastically different political situations, US servicemen in post-war China, almost all white, displayed racist and sexist attitudes towards Chinese women similar to the attitudes displayed in occupied Japan and Korea, perpetuating the image of the hypersexual Oriental women that had been prescribed by American cinema and law for decades. 10 The racialised sexualisation of Asian women as 'villainous temptresses' in history and in representation made women in China more vulnerable when facing American soldiers, who took prostitution for granted, perpetrated sexual violence and enjoyed immunity from local laws. 11 This article provides an investigation in the form of a global microhistory of a single rape case and shifts both the focus and scale of inquiry from the macro of national and international politics to the micro of a Chinese woman's body.…”