Chinese Comfort Women

Peipei Qiu is a professor of Chinese and Japanese, Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair in Modern Languages, and the director of the Asian Studies Program at Vassar College. Su Zhiliang is a professor of history, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Communication, and the director of the Research Center for Chinese "Comfort Women" at Shanghai Normal University. Chen Lifei is a professor of journalism, the chair of the Department of Publishing and Media Studies, and the deputy director of the Center for Women's Studies, both at Shanghai Normal University.

This is an important book that signals fundamental shifts in understandings of the Japanese military's use of "comfort women" in Asia during the Second World War. To date, most discussion of "comfort women," the English translation of the Japanese euphemism ianfu, has focused on roughly 200,000 Korean and Japanese nationals. This volume sheds light on the suffering of an approximately equal number of Chinese women who were forcibly drafted by the Japanese military and whose experiences were silenced for decades. It is the first English-language monograph to record the memories of Chinese women at the "comfort stations" and it does a fine job of introducing these important findings to international audiences..One of the great strengths of this work is the demonstration that these women's suffering continued long after the Japanese military was defeated and the war ended...Chinese Comfort Women does an excellent job of linking these women's lives to forces that darkened much of China's tortuous twentieth century yet remain far too little understood.- Norman Smith, University of Guelph (Pacific Affairs)

• IntroductionPart 1: The War Remembered1 Japan's Aggressive War and the Military "Comfort Women" System2 The Mass Abduction of Chinese Women3 Different Types of Military "Comfort Stations" in China4 Crimes Fostered by the "Comfort Women" SystemPart 2: The Survivors' Voices5 Eastern Coastal Region6 Warzones in Central and Northern China7 Southern China FrontlinesPart 3: The Postwar Struggles8 Wounds That Do Not Heal9 The Redress Movement10 Litigation on the Part of Chinese Survivors11 International SupportEpilogue; Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index