'In this rich history of everyday encounters between US soldiers and Chinese civilians, Chunmei Du explores their entangled relations from the end of World War II to the founding of the People's Republic of China. Drawing upon official, popular and personal accounts from both countries, Du examines the sensorial, material, and symbolic exchanges that took place between GIs and ordinary Chinese people-stall vendors, pedestrians, rickshaw pullers, 'Jeep girls,' and suspected thieves. Through the conceptual lens of the everyday, this book reveals how interactions such as traffic accidents, sexual relations, theft, and black-market dealings, impacted larger political dynamics during this pivotal era. Du shows how mundane struggles made imperialism and sovereignty tangible, fueling anti-American sentiment. Meanwhile, these encounters fostered informal diplomacy, shaping identities and forging new bonds that left a lasting imprint on both countries. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.'

‘This sophisticated book connects everyday offenses and geopolitics into a broad historical argument about the limits of ideology, policy, and propaganda to grasp popular outrage. The Jeep transitioned from a symbol of Allied victory to a representation of American imperialism in postwar China when the U.S. military occupation of North China let loose soldiers who bullied, raped, disregarded traffic signs and offended ordinary people. Reconstructing a complex history of the U.S. Marine III Amphibian Corps (IIIAC)’s fifty-thousand-man force sent to help end the Japanese occupation, Du creates a detailed account for another explanation for how the U.S. ‘lost’ the People’s Republic of China. Deftly wrapping macro-politics (the rise of the U.S. Empire and Cold War) around a regional struggle to capture the Chinese state, this book clarifies how it is still possible to write about the people as a motive force. Beneath abstraction, Du argues, is the terrain of everyday experience where we decide to act or not.’

Tani Barlow - Rice University

‘Compelling, affective, and marvellously delightful to read, Everyday Occupation ingeniously places the postwar US occupation of China under a microscope and reveals a rich texture of sociocultural reality in a volatile historical era. This is microhistory at its best.’

Yunte Huang - University of California, Santa Barbara

‘A remarkable study of the Chinese response to US soldiers who lingered too long in their country after 1945. With research both broad and deep, Chunmei Du demonstrates that the everyday sociologies of encounter - involving all the senses and including speeding Jeeps, American sexual misconduct, and ‘halt or shoot’ orders that resulted in the deaths of scores of Chinese - had direct, and devastating, impacts on China-US relations.’

Andrew Rotter - Colgate University

‘This well documented study of Sino-American encounters over women, food, and material objects foregrounds young American soldiers as accidental emissaries of a postwar global empire of liberal democracy. A multifaceted analysis made possible only by time, Du compellingly delineates the original dilemmas that structured the forgotten beginning of contemporary Chinese anti-Americanism.’

Wen-hsin Yeh - University of California, Berkeley