Public Lecture – Chinese Jeep Girls and American Soldiers (Prof. Chunmei Du, Associate Professor, Lingnan University)

Between 1945 and 1949, up to 113,000 American soldiers were stationed in China for various missions. This talk analyzes the vibrant debate over “Jeep girls” (吉普女郎), a term coined to describe Chinese females who socialized, sometimes intimately, with American soldiers during and after World War II, revealing key features of gendered Chinese nationalism.

Dr. Chunmei Du is an associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Lingnan University.

With a Ph.D. from Princeton University, she is the author of Everyday Occupation: American Soldiers and Chinese Civilians after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Gu Hongming’s Eccentric Chinese Odyssey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), as well as articles in The Journal of Asian Studies, Gender & History, Diplomatic History, and Journal of World History. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Hong Kong Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme.