1. Robert E. Bedeski argues that the Guomindang achieved some degree of success in recentralizing its power on the eve of the war; see "China's Wartime State," in China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937-1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 33-49.

2. Besides Defend the Marco Polo Bridge, other noted titles bearing the name of the bridge include Tian Han's The Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao), Hu Shaoxuan's The Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao), and Zhang Jichun's Shedding Blood for the Marco Polo Bridge (Xuesa Lugouqiao). See ZGHJYD 2:98-104; GM 3.4 (25 July 1937): 260-267; XWXSL 2 (February 1979): 27.

3. A feeling of loss and alienation was particularly evident among college students. See Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. 229.

4. In his Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), Thomas G. Rawski argues that China's economy did not stagnate but grew substantially before the war. See esp. chap. 6.

5. GM 3.4 (25 July 1937): 213-214.

6. Zang Kejia, "Chule kangzhan shenme dou mei yiyi," in Kangzhan song, ed. Tang Qiong (Shanghai: Wuzhou shubaoshe, 1937), p. 37.

7. Mu Mutian, "Yong zhanzheng huida zhanzheng," in ibid., p. 52.

8. Xiang Zhongyi, "Yujiu Zhongguo bixu kaifa minzhong yundong," Xin zhanxian 3 (1 January 1938): 75-76.

9. In recent years, Japanese scholars have been paying increasing attention to this incident. See, for example, Hora Tomio, ed., Nitchu senso Nankin daizangyaku jiken shiryo shu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1985); Hata Ikuhiko, Nankin jiken (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1990); Furuya Tetsuo, ed., Nitchu sensoshi kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1984); and Ienaga Saburo, Taheiyo senso, 2d ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), pp. 230-232. Ienaga, for one, argues that the Japanese military commanders should bear the responsibility of the atrocities committed during the incident.

10. For a brief history of the early war years, see Hsi-sheng Ch'i, Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937-45 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), chap. 2; and Lloyd E. Eastman, "Nationalist China During the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 13: Republican China, 1912-1949, pt. 2, ed. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 547-580.

11. The literature on popular culture is abundant, a recent offering being Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). Other influential works include Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974); C.W.E. Bigsy, ed., Approaches to Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976); and Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, Calif.: Pacific Books, 1961). Two important books on this subject in the China field are David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); and Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989).

12. See Natalie Z. Davis, "The Historian and Popular Culture," in The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France, ed. Jacques Beauroy, Marc Bertrand, and Edward T. Gargan (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1977), p. 11. I am indebted to Davis for her discussion of these two approaches, which she dubbed "anthropological" and "literary-sociological" (see esp. pp. 9-12), though I think the term literary-cultural is better and more inclusive than literary-sociological.

13. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 12: 124-125, S.V. Popular, definitions 4 and 6.

14. This is demonstrated clearly in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China.

15. See Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University), chap. 1.

16. See Bigsy, ed., Approaches to Popular Culture, chap. 1; and Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society, chap. 2.

17. David Welch, "Introduction," in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. David Welch (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 2.

18. Symbols represent many things, and their meanings can be interpreted differently in different contexts. Symbols, as the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld puts it, "do not stand for fixed equivalences but for contextually comprehensible analogies" (quoted in Robert Darnton, "The Symbolic Element in History," Journal of Modern History 58.1 [March 1986]: 219).

19. For a concise discussion of image, see Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 59, 67-68.

20. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 5, 89.

21. See Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, esp. chap. 7; Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), esp. chap. 6; and Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

22. Of course, the Geertzian interpretive method is not without its problems. Although Geertz's theory offers historians a unified framework within which to study human experiences, how these experiences change over time is not addressed. His emphasis on the deciphering of meaning tends to ignore causal laws of explanation and diachronic analysis, a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the evolution of political culture in wartime China. Moreover, the assumption of a unified cultural system ignores conflicting interests and appropriations by the people involved. Thus, a more objective interpretation of wartime culture is possible only when change and conflict are taken into account. Chapter 6, on the Communists' experiment in creating a new social order in the territories under their control, is an attempt to address some of the differences and conflicts in this period.

23. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 140.

24. See Keith M. Baker, "Introduction," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith M. Baker, vol. 1 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), pp. xi-xviii.

25. This book therefore differs from works that focus heavily on the political and diplomatic history of the period, for example John H. Boyle's China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972) and Lloyd E. Eastman's Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). Japanese historical studies on the China war, though few for political and emotional reasons, likewise center largely on military and political aspects, as in the case of Hora Tomio's Nankin daigyakusatsu (Tokyo: Gendaishi suppankai, 1984). It is only in recent years that historians and students of literature have begun to study the complex intellectual changes and cultural upheavals of these turbulent years. Notable works in this area are Edward M. Gunn's Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and John Israel's "Chungking and Kunming: Hsinan Lienta's Response to Government Educational Policy and Party Control," in Kangzhan jianguoshi yantaohui lunwenji (Taibei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1985), pp. 343-376. Scholars in Taiwan and mainland China have independently developed a similar interest. The 1987 publication in Taiwan of a threevolume set of materials on wartime literature (comprising Qin Xianci, ed., Kangzhan shiqi wenxue shiliao; Li Ruiteng, ed., Kangzhan wenxue gaishuo; Su Xuelin, et al., Kangzhan shiqi wenxue huiyilu, all published by Wenxun Monthly Magazine [Wenxun yuekan zazhishe] in Taibei), for example, indicates a growing fascination with this period. The scholarly activities in mainland China are even more visible and vigorous, including studies on wartime drama and fiction by such scholars as Liao Quanjing ( Dahoufang xiju lungao [Chengdu: Sichuan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1988]) and Wen Tianxing (Wen, Guotongqu kangzhan wenxue yundong shigao [Chengdu: Sichuan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1988]), and the publication of a twenty-volume set entitled Zhongguo kang-Ri zhanzheng shiqi dahoufang wenxue shuxi (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1989). Encouraging as this research is, so far it has been limited in focus and conventional in approach.

26. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, p. ix.

27. Just how many wartime films actually survive is still a mystery. In the past few years I have made several attempts to secure China's wartime films through official as well as personal channels in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, including a visit to the Chinese Film Archives (Zhongguo dianying ziliaoguan) in Beijing in October 1989. But the effort proved unproductive and frustrating.

28. It is now widely known that, although Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen discussed wartime films in detail in their two-volume History of the Development of Chinese Film (Zhongguo dianying fazhanshi) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1963), they based their research largely not on actually seeing the films but on reading the printed materials (such as scripts and reviews) published at that time.

29. Recent works focusing on Communist base areas other than the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region (where Yan'an is located) and on local specificities have warned against looking at those regions as a homogeneous entity. See, for example, Yung-fa Ch'en, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); also Lyman Van Slyke, ''The Chinese Communist Movement During the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, pt. 2, pp. 609-722.