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Introduction
The US Office of War Information (OWI) was one of the most far-flung organizations of propaganda and intelligence in wartime China during the period of the Pacific War (1941-1945). Originally the propaganda division of the better-studied Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the OWI's formal task was to disseminate information within the US and those areas under US military control.1 In time, its Overseas Branch became a sprawling bureaucracy devoted to mass manipulation, which even sympathetic observers regarded as wielding dangerous influence over the political process of foreign countries.2 As the 'largest and in many respects the most influential of the United States government agencies operating in the field of overseas information prior to 1945', the OWI represented part of the broad effort by the US Executive Branch to bring a sprawling information structure with pre-war origins to bear on the problem of sustaining domestic and international support for an increasingly costly global conflict. Within China, and the Far Eastern war zones more generally, the OWI's influence was first felt in the form of its broadcasting efforts (based in San Francisco) to 'transmit war propaganda programs to East Asian theatres of war'.3 By war's end the OWI Overseas Branch, China Division would control a growing informational network stretching from Chongqing and Chengdu to Kunming, and ultimately to Yan'an.
Because it touched the lives of so many people within China, the OWI Overseas Branch deserves mention in any account of the War of Resistance (1937-1945) which attempts to grapple with the tremendous cultural changes unleashed by total war and mass-mobilization. One reason why it is entirely absent from such accounts is that it was not, and is not, considered a Chinese entity, and as such is not eligible for inclusion within the master narrative of Chinese nationhood. The OWI did not contribute to China's cultural unification, or to the politicization of popular culture by intellectuals sympathetic to either the Communist- or Nationalist-led war effort.4 While they may have galvanized people for--or, in the case of its anti-Japanese psychological warfare programmes, against--the war effort, OWI policies reflected US national interests and in some cases alienated the Americans' Chinese allies. Nor have the records of the OWI,...