Rape in Peking: Injured woman, microhistory and global trial

Abstract

In December 1946, college student Shen Chong was raped by an inebriated US Marine in Peking. Although the initial trial by the court martial in China found the Marine guilty, the verdict was overturned by Judge Advocate General of the Navy in Washington. Student protests quickly turned into a nationwide anti‐American movement. In contrast to previous studies that emphasise the event's political impacts from the perspective of American imperialism and Chinese nationalism, this article 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, investigating the particular mechanisms through which injustice towards a Chinese woman was executed in the US justice system. Probing along and against the ‘archival grain’ in both countries and languages, this article argues that such injustice was not only grounded in the political hegemony of the US military empire, but also resulted from a flawed legal system steeped in racial and sexual biases against Chinese women. This article further suggests that in order to understand this key chapter of Sino–US history, we must bring back to the centre of our study the injured woman, a figure that has remained largely invisible in the grand narratives of conventional political and diplomatic history.