Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (20 page)

During the constant air raids, my employees and I seized every minute to take apart and ship things. We put the machine parts in a wooden boat, and camouflaged them with wood and sticks. Then along the way, we met enemy air raids, so we hid in the reeds along the side of the river; then we came out and went on, all the way through Zhenjiang to Wuhan.
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Another former refugee remembered the practical difficulties of the river voyage. As they moved upriver, refugees needed to move to smaller boats, particularly where there were dangerous shoals, which required towlines and great rowing skills. There were other perils, too:

One day, on the eve of Chinese New Year, it was very cold; we were travelling to Shibaozhai (village), in Wan county, when we met two warships that caused big waves and made the wooden ships bump into rocks and sink . . . only the tops of the bargepoles were still above water. Later we asked around and found that about 30
li
[i.e., about 15 kilometers] away there was an old man who was very skilled in the water. He had a lot of apprentices who were known as the “water-rats.” They specialized in getting back property from sunken boats . . . they took turns diving in, hooking and clipping wooden boxes, and then the people on the surface would pull them up, and as the weight reduced, the boat would slowly begin to float up . . . after ten days, they floated it to the surface, but the hole was too big to repair, so we had to hire another boat to go west.
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In later years, Mao never wished to commemorate those who had gone to Chongqing, only those (rather fewer) who had traveled to the Communist headquarters at Yan’an. That situation finally changed after Mao’s death. In a 1991 interview, former refugee Yan Yangchu declared, referring to the transfer of the factories: “This was Chinese industry’s Dunkirk,” and Xu Ying, a former journalist for
Da gongbao
, declared that “there was no difference between our Dunkirk and the British one—ours may have been worse.”
²³
Another historical comparison also stands out. Both the Long March and the move upriver were retreats in the face of a stronger enemy. But the Long March was carried out by a party, the Communists, that would finally come to rule all China, and as a result, their retreat became a world-famous legend. The equally wrenching retreat to Chongqing, associated with Chiang Kai-shek, was wiped out of the official memory.

The refugees who had followed Chiang’s government upriver would soon prove the greatest organizational problem to face the Nationalist government in exile. Some 9.2 million were officially registered with government relief agencies during the war years in Sichuan province alone.
²⁴
Many knew that they would have to live in squalid conditions for years on end, with no assurance of return to their former homes, and no guarantee that China would even win the war.

For centuries, the Chinese had experienced refugee flight. Every conquering dynasty had scattered thousands of terrified civilians in its path. But the twentieth century allowed movement at high speed for the first time across the vast distances of central China, and this changed the way the Chinese people imagined their own geography. For many, these internal migrations would in turn help forge a national consciousness that would shape the country for decades to come. In happier days, Du Zhongyuan had worked as a travel writer, reporting to the readers of
Shenghuo
[
Life
] magazine on parts of the country that he had reached on the ever-expanding railway. Now, he used his experience of travel writing to craft one unified narrative of China’s torment out of the stories of numberless local disasters. Mrs. Yang, fleeing from Wuxi, also observed that “the man [sic; that is, her traveling companions] had meetings everyday and studied the map in such a way that they never had since they could remember.” In the later stages of her journey, on the boat from Guilin, she even mused ironically, as she looked out at the scenery along the Yangtze, “I wonder whether we should be thankful to the Japanese for they made us travel so far and see so much.”
²⁵

Mrs. Yang’s journey also ended in a way that was very different from the narrative of defiant exile that the National Government was propagating. For she and her family made their way to Hong Kong and from there took a roundabout trip back to Shanghai. In the end, Mrs. Yang had ended up essentially where she had started some three months before. She was not alone. Now that eastern China had been conquered, it was no longer an area at high risk from bombing. The Japanese did not bomb areas that they controlled. And the continuing presence of the foreign settlements in Shanghai meant that there was at least some brake on destructive behavior by the Japanese. However, her choice was not a popular one either for the government or for her many fellow countrymen and -women, for whom even the thought of returning to live under enemy occupation was unacceptable. Du Zhongyuan observed an aspect of this phenomenon that would become common across China during the war: the attempt to root out collaborators, or
hanjian
, implying that these people had lost the right even to be seen as Chinese. He was told in Taiyuan about squads whose job it was to root out traitors:

One day they brought forward eight collaborators, and each collaborator was wearing a high paper hat, on which was written clearly each one’s name, personal details, and his treacherous behaviour. They were placed in a vehicle and taken through the streets, and the squad used a really big drum, beating it as they went along . . . The streets were full of people watching these collaborators, and all of them with one voice yelled and cursed them.
²⁶

Suddenly, the circumstances of war made the concept of the nation, and personal identification with it, more urgent and meaningful for many Chinese. At the same time, it also painted people’s choices—in particular, whether to resist or collaborate with the Japanese—in black-and-white moral terms. This tendency was an intensification of the already strong sense of crisis in early twentieth-century China. The politics of that era had been modernizing and progressive in various important respects, but the early Nationalists had failed to build on the atmosphere of relative political freethinking that had surrounded the May Fourth Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Partly as a consequence of the many crises that China faced, the politics of the time became polarized and confrontational, with neither side willing to allow that disagreement could be productive or even legitimate. Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists sought a genuinely pluralist political culture, although they both made gestures toward allowing minor parties that would not undermine their rule.

In addition, the culture of constant warfare had led to a deep and pervasive violence permeating Chinese society. The outbreak of war with Japan, where the stakes were perceived to be immensely high, exacerbated these tendencies. The public humiliation of criminals was common practice in China, but the use of it during wartime created a stark division between brave resistance and cowardly collaboration that obscured the more complex realities facing many Chinese, such as the dilemma of whether to leave family, property, and businesses.

Yet the war also provided an opportunity for successful mobilization of society at a level that had not previously seemed possible in China. From this point on, mass mobilization would become the norm. The endless campaigns in Maoist China, from the public humiliation and killing of landlords in the land-reform campaign of the 1950s to the ritual public torture of teachers and doctors in the Cultural Revolution, had their roots in practices forged in wartime, turning the indifferent and unsure in society into true believers.

During his visit to Taiyuan, Du had been invited to speak to the troops:

[I] told them how we had united and unified the country, how great the valour of our armies had been at the battle of Shanghai, and how the enemy’s bravery had been reduced . . . And then I talked about how during a long war, China must organize the whole of the masses to resist the enemy, and we people of the lost provinces [Manchuria] would do well to take the opportunity to return beyond the Great Wall and act as guides, uniting with the national army to form a rearguard to cause chaos for the enemy . . . After I had spoken, everyone was very excited, and their clapping was like thunder. They weren’t welcoming me; they were welcoming the war of resistance.
²⁷

Du was from a borderland region of China and had seen for himself what the fracturing of Chinese identity had wrought. When Manchuria was invaded in 1931, there had been a swell of popular outrage, at least for a while, but it was still politically feasible for the government of Chiang Kai-shek to pursue a policy of nonresistance. Du’s overriding commitment was to create a sense in the population that China was one entity, united by the war. Later in the war, he would become head of an academy in the remote northwestern province of Xinjiang, inspired by the vision of a stronger, centralized China, where air and road networks served to bring the country together (as well as his strong affinity with the CCP). Du’s aspirations reflected Chiang’s intentions. Chiang believed that Chinese society would come through the war more united and better governed. But were these hopes realistic? It was true that the call of national unity allowed the Nationalists to consolidate rule in parts of the country where they were still in control (and the majority of territory, at least technically, remained part of what the Nationalists called “Free China” throughout the period). But the Nationalists found it hard to make good use of their greater authority. In reality, the disintegration of China in the autumn of 1937 seemed like a deadly blow to their hopes.

By the end of 1937 the cities of north China lay in Japanese hands: Tianjin, Beiping, Taiyuan, Datong, and Ji’nan had all fallen. The invaders had less control in the countryside, where guerrilla fighters, many controlled by the CCP, ambushed and harassed them. Central China lay vulnerable, but Wuhan, the city where the temporary Nationalist military command was located, remained secure for the moment. Still, the fear that the Japanese would conquer yet more of the country meant that the numbers of refugees continued to grow.

No robust statistics have ever been put forward for the number of Chinese who became refugees during the war. So many people fled in so many directions, and the governments under which they lived were so consumed by the struggle for survival, that keeping meaningful records became a secondary task. Nonetheless, the best estimates put the number very high: at some point during the war, some 80 million or even close to 100 million Chinese (approximately 15 to 20 percent of the entire population) were on the move.
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Not all of them spent the whole war in exile; many returned home soon after they fled. But the mass migration had destabilized society in ways that would reverberate throughout the war period and beyond. Nor was the worst over as 1937 ended. In the first winter of war there would occur an incident so shocking that it still shapes the relationship between China and Japan more than seven decades later.

Chapter 7

Massacre at Nanjing

O
N DECEMBER
1, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek and Song Meiling celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Nanjing. It was not an auspicious occasion. “We’ve been married ten years,” wrote Chiang, “but the future for the party and the country looks very difficult. In the next ten years, I don’t know what changes there may be.” Chiang also noted that the city itself looked deserted.
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In fact, for some months, an eerie quiet had blanketed the capital at Nanjing. In mid-August the war had taken the city by surprise:

Nanking had its first taste of aerial warfare when twelve Japanese machines appeared at two this afternoon to bomb the capital and were engaged by ten Chinese planes . . . Sirens throughout the city sounded the alarm half an hour before the arrival of the Japanese planes . . . Since the capital had never been subject to an air raid before, the populace were unaware of the dangers, and many people were talking and laughing in the streets while the aerial engagement was in progress.
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But people learned quickly. Du Zhongyuan passed through Nanjing in late August, just a few days later. Already, he reported, much of the city’s population had gone. He stayed at the Central Hotel, where because “the catering staff were frightened of [bomber] aeroplanes, most of them had resigned.” Du was reduced to searching for snacks in the kitchen, then heading out to beg a meal from friends in town. The fears of the hotel staff were well founded. Du recorded, as he headed to Datong:

I’d stayed three nights in Nanjing, and every night, the enemy’s aircraft had invariably lit up the sky three or four times. But fortunately Nanjing’s air-raid shelter facilities were still good, and when [the planes] came, there was a warning siren which wailed. They used searchlights to shine into the distance. When the light lit up the aircraft’s body, they fired high-altitude mortars, or sent out a squadron in pursuit. In the night, it was fiery all around . . . the brilliance was unbelievable. I had the strong emotions I get seeing the lights at New Year.
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While the night sky lit up over the capital, 260 kilometers to the east, Shanghai was in the middle of a pitched battle as the Nationalist armies carried on their doomed defense of the great port city. As Nanjing came under fire, Zhou Fohai also had to get used to the frightening new world of constant bombing: as his house had a basement, various of his friends ran to visit him whenever an air raid took place, and those underground meetings soon led to more organized activity based on disillusionment with the progress of the war.
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But Zhou would not stay long in Nanjing. Chinese and foreigners alike had made the same decision that he had, and begun to leave the city for Wuhan or other points inland.