Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China’s war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, government officials, professionals, and merchants flocked into India for training, business opportunities, retreat, and rehabilitation. This book is about how the activities of the Chinese sojourners in wartime India caused great concerns to the British colonial regime and the Chinese Nationalist government alike and how these sojourners responded to the surveillance, discipline, and check imposed by the governments. This book provides a subaltern perspective on the history of modern India-China relations that has been dominated by accounts of elite cultural interaction and geopolitical machination.

Cao Yin is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Tsinghua University. He works on modern Indian history, global history, and inter-Asian connections. 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, 2018). 

Introduction by Tansen Sen, Professor of History Director of the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai.