Introduction

Part 1: Perspectives on statelessness

Section 1: An introductory dialogue: Statelessness and the refugee predicament

1. Jay Winter, Statelessness and the burden of our times
2. Peter Gatrell, A Response

Section 2: Telling the tale of refugees and the stateless

3. Peter Balakian, Some Poems: Statelessness and refugees
4. Mary Behrens, RUN
5. Eva de Jong-Duldig, Nobody’s children: Families, internees and refugees from Singapore to Australia during the Second World War
6. Joy Damousi, Family memories of war and displacement: primary sources for the making of an historian

Part 2: Refugees and the stateless in Asia and the Pacific in the global Second World War

Section 3: Varieties of refugee life and statelessness in China

7. Rana Mitter, War, memory, the state and statelessness in China
8. Meredith Oyen, The International politics of refugee settlement in Shanghai, 1937-56
9. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Statelessness and its (sometime) benefits: The case of Russians in Harbin in the 1930s and 1940s
10. Peter Gatrell, ‘I have been a refugee all my life’: Refugees in China in the era of the Second World War – Evidence from UNHCR Individual Case Files

Section 4: Refugees and the stateless in Shanghai and beyond

11. Qian Zhu, ‘The right to the city’: The Nantao safe zone and humanitarian internationalism in Shanghai, 1932-40
12. Gao Bei, Chinese nationalists, Japanese occupiers and the European Jewish refugees in Shanghai, 1938-41
13. Sara Halpern, Statelessness, national sovereignty, and German and Austrian refugees in China during and after the Treaty Port era
14. Jay Winter, A moveable feast: The Odyssey of the Mir yeshiva
15. Kolleen Guy, Agents of empathy
16. Seumas Spark, Jewish emigrés to Australia in the period of the Second World War

Section 5: The End of Cosmopolitan Shanghai

17. Zach Fredman, The Rise and fall of U.S. military power in China
18. Christian Henriot, From Paradise to Hell: The downfall of French interests in Shanghai
19. Robert Bickers, Out of Shanghai

20. Kolleen Guy and Jay Winter, Conclusion: Statelessness in the global Second World War

This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables the volume to go beyond Hannah Arendt’s classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism.
To Arendt, statelessness was the product of a failed system of European nation-states. Statelessness after Arendt finds a very different story when examining the history of stateless people, many of them Jews, coming to Asia from Europe to escape persecution. In the turbulent world of the 1930s and 1940s, being stateless in Harbin or Shanghai was not the same as being stateless in Hamburg or Vienna. In China and elsewhere in Asia, statelessness was not a uniform experience, but a variety of possibilities reflecting the political structure of the states and cities in which refugees found shelter.
The volume breaks new ground in showing how the stateless managed to enter the political realm long before they reached the threshold of citizenship. They developed a discourse of displacement through which they expressed their political identity as members of collectives, as people living together, joined in a common cause, at a time of terrible uncertainty. They spoke to each other in their own language, in newspapers, cafes, soup kitchens, theatres, sports clubs, schools and synagogues, and thereby took over the authorship of their own narratives. By doing so, they helped forge their pathway back to freedom.