{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021835677276091783, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007772020725388601, 'mean_word_length': 5.271461716937355, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions And Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak (review)

page) as the characteristic medium of Chinese twentieth-century mass communication; they served as propaganda tools during WWII, the ensuing civil war (1946-1949), and the Mao era, until they were replaced by mangas, imported from Japan, and have now become prized collector’s items. The second section presents the results of the quantitative analysis of 360 predominantly visual and 22 verbal narratives, most of them celebrating the heroic deeds of male Communist protagonists and their battles against the Japanese troops. The changing political, social, and cultural dynamics become apparent in the third section, which presents thematic analyses of the words and images of individual works: They all serve the mobilization against the Japanese or the legitimization of the Communist Party. In the fourth section, Chen uses interviews with older women from Zhejiang to contrast the local female view of events with the written accounts of the male-dominated discourse. The fifth section features the analysis of literary representations of the Chinese experience of WWII in thirty-one children’s books published in the United States between 1937 and 2007. The size and make-up of this corpus—all titles were written by white authors, and no mention is made of Japanese crimes of war—are disappointing; the result is a rather short but telling chapter. In her conclusion, Chen recognizes a common pattern in the representation of memories of the Sino-Japanese War, serving the changing political agendas of the interested parties. The need for representing individual experiences or for verbalizing personal traumas is not recognized. The oral accounts of female witnesses to this history, however, shift the focus from heroism, patriotism, and the blessing of the Communist Party to the suffering and the struggle for survival of Chinese victims. The author convincingly argues that American media have failed to critically reflect this military conflict and that the collective memory of the war can be held accountable for many foreign policy actions of China. Concluding, however, that the texts document the effects of a hidden Anti-Japanese sentiment which had been repressed for decades does seem far-fetched. It remains to be seen whether the recent surge in youth literature on the Sino-Japanese war should be contributed to this latent consciousness or to a concerted political manipulation of public opinion. Chen’s book is an interesting, much needed study opening up an important interdisciplinary field of research.