During World War II, thousands of Chinese soldiers were sent to India for training, but many of them ended up deserting from the army and starting new lives in India. Chen Ching Lin was one of these deserters, and this talk aims to trace his journey in India from 1943 to 1946. In addition to shedding light on the little-known story of the Chinese deserters in India, this talk also delves into how the Chinese Nationalist government’s efforts to discipline the Chinatowns in India conflicted with the British Raj’s colonial anxieties. Furthermore, it argues that a subaltern perspective can integrate the modern histories of China and India into a single narrative framework.

 

Speaker 
Prof. CAO Yin, Department of History, Tsinghua University
曹寅教授 | 清華大學歷史系
Cao Yin is Associate Professor and Cyrus Tang Scholar in the Department of History, Tsinghua University. He teaches global history, Indian history, and colonialism at Tsinghua. He is the author of Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) and From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2017). He has also published articles in journals such as Journal of World History, Modern Asian Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Indian Historical Review. He is now undertaking a research project that focuses on exploring the Malacca dilemma faced by British India during the late nineteenth century. The project aims to investigate how Yunannese Muslims and their mules in Upper Burma played a crucial role in assisting the Government of India to resolve this dilemma.