Zach Fredman awarded the Spring 2016 Shotwell Fellowship
Graduate student Zach Fredman was awarded the spring 2016 Shotwell Fellowship for his dissertation, “From Allies to Occupiers: Living with the U.S. Military in Wartime China, 1941–1945.” Drawing from new and overlooked sources in China, Taiwan, Myanmar, Great Britain, and the United States, his project explores the tensions that emerged when large-scale U.S. forces were deployed to China during the Second World War. He argues that the complexities of the Sino-American alliance cannot be fully explained or understood without examining the experiences of ordinary American servicemen and the Chinese with whom they interacted while posted in Asia. Scholars have thoroughly explored the wartime actions of American diplomats, generals, and Chinese high officials. This project, however, shows that the challenges of alliance building involved a far larger cast of characters, from interpreters and GIs, to prostitutes and thieves. The power asymmetries between these various actors permeated all levels of Chinese-American interaction, creating a relationship of domination and subordination that undermined the Chinese government, exacerbated American feelings of cultural superiority, and made these allies adversaries long before Japan surrendered. In the eyes of ordinary Chinese, their American allies became occupiers.
Other scholars have attributed the alliance’s deterioration to the clash between Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek and U.S. Theater Commander Joseph Stilwell, or to conflicting wartime or postwar aims. But the deterioration Fredman discovered came about because the U.S. military established a military-territorial foothold in China that left a deep and scarring footprint. The U.S. military’s legal, cultural, economic, political, and sexual impact on China turned the alliance into and occupation and set precedents that followed U.S. forces around Asia throughout the Cold War and beyond, stirring up trouble from Seoul, to Saigon, to Subic Bay. By resituating the wartime alliance as an inflection point on America’s rise to global power, this project raises broader questions—not just specific to China in the 1940s—about the imperative to better understand the enormous complexity of alliance building in times of war.