"A Lifeline for China: Building Wartime Connectivity Along the Burma Road (1938-1942)," a Zoom Talk by Prof. Andres Rodriguez
ABOUT THE EVENT: China’s Burma Road (1938-1942) acted as a channel for wartime material to move between British Burma and China during the initial years of the Sino-Japanese War. Prof. Rodriguez will examine how the development of this lifeline for China forged a powerful wartime narrative that helped consolidate support among Western nations to counter Japan’s invasion. The Burma Road gave rise to new ideas of connectivity that positioned China’s southwest region as a vital hub connecting the nation with Southeast Asia, India, and the rest of the world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Andres Rodriguez (PhD Oxford) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of “Frontier Fieldwork. Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands, 1919-1945” (University of British Columbia Press 2022).
ABOUT THE MODERATOR: Cao Yin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Peking University. He works on infrastructures, multispecies ecologies, technological circulation, and state formation in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of "Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942–45" (Oxford University Press, 2022) and "From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945" (Brill, 2018).
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