This article explores the life of the professors of National Southwest Associated University during the Anti-Japanese War in detail, and tries to reveal their mental outlook and their enlightenment on how to live. The paper also describes the daily lives of Professor Zheng Tianting and his colleagues, including living and sleep, body care, diet and hobbies, family life, closeness to nature, appreciation of cultural artifacts, various cultural and entertainment activities, nostalgia for deceased relatives, communication and care within clans and social groups, diary writing, and self-cultivation. Zheng and his colleagues from National Southwest Associated University felt deeply that people living in social groups needed to take the initiative to find friends, make friends, and be critical friends. Friends can encourage each other, solve difficulties, promote personal development, enrich life interest, and improve quality of life, which makes an already active life more dynamic and colorful. The life of Zheng and his colleagues was in accord with the social conditions of the times. There are three aspects of consistency between them: the common experience of war, patriotic spirit, and confidence that China would definitely win; traditional moral benevolence and the inheritance of the spirit of the ancient Chinese intellectuals who cared about the country and the people before personal enjoyment; and maintaining the spirit of the times, which was a new awareness of independent personality and consciousness. There are many inspirations for life that can be drawn from the daily life of Zheng and his colleagues: People should have a rich and diverse life, every meal deserves to be taken seriously, and one should watch art performances, play mahjong and poker, appreciate art works, collect cultural relics, and so on. Such is what life should mean. Whether it was the willingness of the professors of National Southwest Associated University to “go Dutch” when they had dinner parties during the Republic of China or the novel experience of daylight savings time, these were considered new things in life. They are a reminder that we need to continue to supersede closed thoughts. The professors, who had both the essence of traditional morality and the modern sense of democracy, realized their desire to be their own “master.”
Since 1949, Chinese mainland historians and creators in film and television, novels, and reportage have continued to shape the heroic image of female groups in the base areas of the Communist Party of China (CPC) during the Anti-Japanese War. They participated in production, women’s mobilization, and reconstruction of the rural political order “like men.” They pursued the equality between men and women, marked by freedom of marriage, and also participated in regional guerrilla warfare to combat the Japanese puppet army “as men.” However, in the remote villages of north China at the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, it was not common for women to unbind their feet. In wartime, most women over twenty years of age were forever left with the “three-inch golden lotus” (sancun jinlian) feet. The damage of the war accelerated their acceptance of the CPC’s emancipation concepts and policies and presented them with an opportunity to actively implement them. The experience of survival drastically changed traditional aesthetics, ideas, and customs related to women. Physical and psychological changes occurred as a result of the war; women began to go out of their homes to participate in the work of the Women’s Salvation Association and the Youth Salvation Association, and a group of women achieved marriage equality between men and women in the form of “divorce her husband” (qi xiu fu). Due to pressure, women carried more physical and mental responsibilities, faced insufficient advocacy for their rights, and the aesthetics and mentality of womanhood underwent change.
During the period of the Japanese occupation, ordinary civil servants were the main force keeping the puppet municipal government of Tianjin functioning. In the first years of the occupation, the puppet municipal government mainly hired former civil servants who had served under the Nanjing National Government. After the situation was stable, the puppet municipal government also recruited civil servants by civil service examinations. The ranks of civil servants and the rules and regulations they observed were basically the same as those of the former National Government. Most ordinary civil servants came from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and were relatively young and well educated. They mainly relied on their salaries for their livelihood. For the first three years of the Japanese occupation they lived comfortably, because of their relatively high and stable incomes and the slow rate of inflation. After that, inflation soared, but their salaries did not increase correspondingly, therefore the living conditions of civil servants declined constantly. The Japanese puppet government exercised strict control over civil servants, physically and psychologically, and forced them to receive enslaving education. In short, they were in a distorted and struggling state both in their material life and their spiritual world.
Under the pressure of the national crisis in modern China, millennia-old traditional concepts have been broken and adjusted, and new trends and ideas have emerged in large numbers. In order to defeat local cosmetics, from the moment they entered China foreign cosmetics companies attacked the traditional Chinese cosmetics of eyebrow pigment (dai), lip pigment (gong), rouge (zhi), and face powder (fen). Corresponding to the enlightenment ideas of the early twentieth century, women could no longer pursue beauty in a way that harmed their bodies. In the movement to liberate women’s bodies in the 1920s, radical intellectuals developed a severe criticism of the bad habits of using corsets and applying powder, and the concept of “healthy beauty” came into being. However, in the context of the development of the women’s liberation movement and the respect for women’s consumer rights, the healthy beauty theory failed to suppress women’s consumption of beauty products, and “natural beauty” and “artificial beauty” ultimately coexisted in lifestyles of women in the modern era of Shanghai.