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Item The Problem of Listless Lovers in al-Qushayri’s Lata’if al-isharat(2010-10-01) Sands, Kristin ZahraThis talk explains how Qushayri (d. 1074) uses the theme of the “listless lover” in his commentary on the Qur’an to illustrate the relationship between spiritual desire, practice, and knowledge of God and the Qur’an.Item Divided City, Divided State: Conscription in Chongqing, 1938-1945(2014-03-01) Landdeck, KevinOur understanding of the Nationalist (KMT) government during WW2 has been deeply shaped by descriptions of rural press-ganging and colorful contemporary accounts of Chongqing, the wartime capital. In contrast, this paper uses conscription cases from the city archives to explore dimensions of the urban experience of the war and Chiang’s regime; the mosaic that emerges distills the contours of the draft normally obscured by the frequent changes in procedure and institutions. Socially and politically transformed by the war, the city’s honeycombed socio-administrative structure hampered conscription. “Downriver” people and institutions, refugees from coastal China, dominated the city. Sichuan locals retained prominence only in the police and Citizen Militia, and perhaps neighborhood administration (baojia) too, the bodies most concerned with the draft. These local men were hamstrung in dealing with the dense and fractured institutional landscape; in order to protect their human resources, outsider agencies and war-related enterprises stymied attempts to extract manpower from them. Such recalcitrance was justified by the imperatives of national survival. Modern “total” war collapsed the distinctions between front and rear and imparted to workers a feeling that they contributed vitally to the war effort and were fully the equal of front-line soldiers. Such feelings and the protection that their bosses extended to them were behind the sometimes violent clashes between workers and draft officials that rocked Chongqing streets. Conflict around urban conscription, thus, shows the fractures and divisions within the war effort, the city, and the Nationalist state itself.Item Of Pen and Gun: Political Practice and Identity in the Nationalist Youth Army, 1944-45(2012-01-01) Landdeck, KevinItem "Conscripts and Citizens: The Political Project within Nationalist Military Service, 1928-45"(2015-06-01) Landdeck, KevinAt the heart of CHIANG Kaishek's Nationalist regime lay military power; this paper examines the political hopes that the Nationalists pinned on military service as a lens on state-building and citizenship. In the wake of the Northern Expedition (1928), General HE Yingqin proposed compulsory military service for the new national government. Inspired by late nineteenthcentury intellectuals and European examples, HE and other leaders believed the draft could transform Chinese men into citizen-soldiers, with militarized bodies and politically engaged minds. Implementation was delayed, but such fantasies were bolstered by National Salvation advocates, who suggested conscription would inspire popular patriotism and loyalty. With Japan's invasion (1937), a hastily assembled draft system supplied the bodies for the Resistance War, but, as is well known, conscription was so corrupt and ill-managed that it alienated communities and became an emblem abroad and at home of the Nationalist state's shaky legitimacy. CHIANG Kaishek himself was so disappointed with conscription's failure to achieve its political aim as a training ground in citizenship that he ordered the arrest and eventual execution of CHENG Zerun, head of the draft administration until 1944. When Japan's Ichigo Offensive (1944) carved through Nationalist territory, CHIANG and his generals finally turned to voluntary service, launching a recruitment drive among educated youth to form the elite Intellectual Youth Army. Here, the political project of building politically active citizen-soldiers was realized, but only in a form that depended upon elitism and an self-ascripted identity unavailable to draftees.