Henrike Rudolph

Time and Place: Thursday, 01.07., 15:05–15:25 – Room 2
Session: Biographies and Careers in China

When Japanese occupation drove Chinese intellectuals out of their classrooms, campuses, laboratories, and the comfort of their coastal city live in the late 1930s, a generation of professors, professionals, and students regathered in the provisional capital of Chongqing. This paper explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploited the elite’s growing distrust in the Nationalist (Guomindang) government and tried to strategically forge networks that brought left-leaning intellectuals closer to a CCP alliance. A network approach helps us detect and disentangle the complex web of overlapping memberships in scholarly and political associations in Chongqing and thus uncovers many of the CCP’s strategies to secure popular support before 1949 that have been hidden from official party histories.