‘To Cleanse the Countryside We Must First Cleanse Hearts’: The Culture of Rural Pacification in Japanese-occupied China

Contributing to a growing literature on the transnational history of ‘collaborationism’ under wartime occupation, this paper examines ‘Rural Pacification’ – the counterinsurgency campaigns that were prosecuted from 1941 to 1943 in Japanese-occupied China – from the perspective of culture. In this paper, I argue that, despite being initiated as a military project, the ‘political work’ of Rural Pacification, and particularly the use of cultural production to spread government ideas to rural communities in the Lower Yangtze Delta, marked a crucial part of these campaigns. Rural Pacification was not purely about the eradication of communist resistance in China, but also about ‘cleansing hearts’.