Here is a great picture of Madame Chiang Kai-shek via Getty
it’s an interesting picture, at least for me, since it ties in with a couple of interesting things. One, it’s from an Indian woman, and very little has been done with GMD attempts to connect with Indian nationalists during the war, although they were definitely doing that. 1 More interestingly it is jewelry. Drives to collect jewelry were common in lots of wartime societies, but I am not quite sure how to understand this. Is giving up your jewelry and act of giving up your frivolity and modern female unseriousness? Maybe. On the other hand, jewelry was a common store of value for women in traditional societies. Maybe this is a sign that even the most traditional of peasant women are mobilizing their wealth for the nation? Maybe someone can dig up the text of what she said and find out how she explained it.
The only work on this topic I know is Yang Tianshi “Chiang Kai-shek and Jawaharlal Nehru” in Ven, Hans van de, Diana Lary, and Stephen MacKinnon, eds. Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. ↩
