Around 8:00 p.m. on December 24, 1946, a group of American marines including 23-year old Corporal William Pierson and Private William Pritchard snatched Beijing University student Shen Chong off the streets near Dongdan in Beijing, dragged her to the adjacent Polo Grounds (what is today the Dongdan basketball courts) and raped her. A group of workers heard her cries for help but –intimidated by the American soldiers — they didn’t intervene and instead ran to report the crime to the joint Sino-American Police Force tasked with keeping order in the city. Pierson was arrested later that night.
The crime electrified the Beijing intelligentsia. The fact that the two soldiers were tried in an American military court with limited Chinese involvement recalled memories of colonial extraterrioriality. Moreover, the assault raised the question of why American troops were continuing to occupy key Chinese cities a year after the Japanese surrender. Many students, academics, and intellectuals, already predisposed to sympathize with the CCP and leftist groups at the expense of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, used the case of Shen Chong’s rape to call for immediate US withdrawal from China, accusing the Americans of being in league with Chiang and possibly planning to return China to colonial status: an American puppet or pawn in the coming war against the Soviets. Within a week, strikes and demonstrations involving thousands of people spread throughout China.
While rape and abuse of women by American (and other) soldiers was an unfortunate fact of life in many Chinese cities at the time, the intersection of imperialism, race, class, and gender practically guaranteed that Shen Chong’s rape would particularly touch a nerve with China’s educated elite. For the students in Beijing, Shen was one of them. When asked about the behavior of Chinese soldiers, a student association leader replied that those soldiers “bothered only peasants and did not molest Chinese intellectuals.” As in other times and places, there was a close relationship between class and the regulation of (female) sexual purity.
The idea of Shen Chong, the image of scholarly virtue and feminine purity, being held down and savaged by barbaric invaders in the heart of China’s cultural capital enraged Chinese, particularly young males. It’s not a stretch to see why. In colonial and conquest situations throughout Chinese history, there has been a pattern of men holding up elite women as symbolic vessels of virtue. In cases of violation/pollution, the anger against the invader/attacker is compounded by a sense of impotence felt by the society who failed to adequately protect the symbolic sanctity of the Women/state/nation.
On an international level, the case galvanized Chinese public opinion against the American occupation, especially among the intellectual classes, making it increasingly difficult for the US forces to play the role of liberator, a situation the Americans did little to help through their handling of the case. A US Navy doctor who examined Miss Shen suggested that had rape occurred, there would have been more (!) bruising on the thighs and buttocks. The US Consulate feared that compensating Shen would inspire similar claims against GIs from other Chinese women of ‘loose morals.’ There was an implicit assumption about “Miss Shen’s” reflected in the cartoons and stories of Asian temptresses which were common reading fodder for American servicemen in the Pacific. As in other colonial/wartime contexts, Chinese female sexuality was reduced to the insatiable dragon lady always on the prowl for new conquests because of the assumed impotence (military defeat equaling sexual impotence) of her ‘natural’ mate, the Chinese male. And who better to stand in than her (China’s) liberator, the American GI? Such images were depressingly common at the time, and still occasionally appear in popular culture today.
While no single incident can be blamed for the eventual failing of trust between the Chinese people and the American government, cases like the brutal rape of student Shen did not inspire confidence in American motivations in China. It is telling too that these issues of gender, class, and national sovereignty still hang heavy today in Japan, Korea, China, the Middle East, or wherever lingering fears of colonization and conquest intersect with issues of sex and sexual violence.
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Sources and further reading:
Robert Shaffer. “A Rape in Beijing, December 1946: GIs, Nationalist Protests, and U.S. Foreign Policy”
The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 31-64
Cook, James A. “Penetration and neocolonialism: the Shen Chong rape case and the anti-American student movement of 1946-47.” Republican China, Vol. 22 (1996), pp. 65-97.
Hong Yang, “The Shen Chong Rape Case and the Kang Bao (Anti-Brutality) Movement, 1946-1947,” in America Perceived: The Making of Chinese Images of the United States, 1945-1953 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002)
Interesting piece, Jeremiah.
I think what is still true today, more so I believe in China than elsewhere, is that a crime (be it sexually motivated or otherwise) where the assailant is non-Chinese brings to the forefront the spectre of China as the world’s victim. And nothing is likely to inflame tensions more than when that crime is rape.
China, more than any other country I’ve visited (I haven’t been Saudi Arabia, for example), seems to adopt an attitude of protection towards its women that goes beyond chivalry. I think it has more to do with a sense of ownership. Of course there are historical or cultural reasons for this, but the lingering racism inherent in such attitudes reflects one area at least where China is still struggling to open up.
Yes, most other countries would also display greater shock and anger towards foreign rapists than rapists from their own backyard; but not to the same degree, I suggest.
If such an incident with foreigners were to happen in China today (whether perpetrated by soldiers, engineers, students, or teachers), I’m certain that the media backlash, nationalistic fury, and violent demonstrations would make the 1946 reactions seem like a ripple on a pond.
I wouldn’t care to put a figure on the number of rapes that take place in China every day, but I’m sure if such a number were available it would make very sad reading. However, none would come close to inspiring the kind of outrage I described above. Why is this?
As a foreigner living and working here with a Chinese wife, I have run into resentment, indignation, and insults in every part of China we have visited together. When you engage with people on a personal level (e.g. talking to people while sharing a train compartment, eating in a restaurant, chatting to neighbours) ill feelings subside and acceptance is gained. But there remains an attitude on the street that treats me like the defiler of China’s heritage and my wife as a traitor to the Motherland. That attitude has often been lent a voice.
And no, I’m not paranoid.
I accept that China has had less time to get used to the idea of interracial relationships than the west, and that Britain too, for example, underwent a period of transition while it adjusted its attitudes towards mixed race relationships.
The corresponding adjustment in China is taking rather too long, something I attribute to deep-rooted feelings of a racist nature that the Chinese government does little to assuage.
Healthy and happy Xmas + 2009 to you and yours, btw.
Yep. You have my sympathy and best wishes, Stuart. When I was in Beijing, my Chinese born buddy saw a young Chinese woman with a foreigner and said, “She’s a whore, they’re all whores.” I know the stares. I get them all the time from Chinese here in San Gabriel, California, when I go out for lunch with my Chinese boss (nice lady, happily married to a Chinese guy).
Oh yeah, and rape goes with war. You train a bunch of 18-year-olds to kill and be prepared to die at any time then are shocked when they commit the occasional atrocity? Yes, I’m “shocked, SHOCKED”! I say, in my best Claude Rains voice…
The kind of stuff that goes on in every war. They just don’t talk about it on the TV. Might confuse the good patriotic citizens.
“The corresponding adjustment in China is taking rather too long, something I attribute to deep-rooted feelings of a racist nature that the Chinese government does little to assuage.”
Assuage? I would suggest the Chinese government would more likely inflame such feelings. After all, no one in China believes in Communism anymore, but there’s always the SACRED MOTHERLAND which needs to be loved and protected (just like “our” fair Chinese maidens).
Best of luck to you and your wife, and Happy Holidays to you too!
Stuart,
I understand where you’re coming from. YJ and I occasionally run into the same thing. The fact that she is a “good girl” (PKU grad, etc.) tends to flumox the less worldly observers who tend to assume that “only peasants” would date a foreigner…some things never change.
To some extent I alluded to this situation above.
That said, I might separate the situation surrounding this case, or any case of sexual violence, from issues of cross-national dating/marriage. I agree that there were specific circumstances (historical, political, military) which made Student Shen such a cause célèbre, but by the same token I don’t think it’s possible to overreact to a rape/abduction.
Greetings – Coincidentally, I just read an account of this crime and trial in Ronald H. Spector’s IN THE RUINS OF EMPIRE: THE JAPANESE SURRENDER AND THE BATTLE FOR POSTWAR ASIA, which does a very nice job summarizing the stationing of Marines throughout China after Japan’s surrender and Russia’s entry into Manchukuo. Recommended reading for those interested in war crimes, trials and broken truces.
“To some extent I alluded to this situation above.”
Yes, you did, which is what set me off
“…but by the same token I don’t think it’s possible to overreact to a rape/abduction.”
I agree entirely.
My point, before I got slightly sidetracked, was that the level of outrage at these crimes should be independent of the race, nationality, religion, or economic status of the perpetrators.
In reality such a society doesn’t exist, but China is lagging a bit further behind the curve than it ought to be.