Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (31 page)

After the raids of May 1939, the authorities recruited professional body-carriers to deal with the corpses of people killed in the raids, and they would be paid the equivalent of one
jin
(half kilogram) of rice per body carried. The corpses would be buried together at a spot named the “new coffin mountain,” having been transported on one of the boats shipping bodies out of the city. (At the height of the raids, more than a hundred boats operated at a time.) The boatmen would take whole bodies but, after a while, would dump partial corpses overboard or bury them at the riverside. This was not callousness or superstition, but practicality. At the bottom of each boat, the fluid from the corpses could flow a foot deep. For workers without rubber boots, just sandals, it was neither pleasant nor hygienic to work with their feet soaked in the body fluids of the dead. The stack of corpses also attracted hordes of flies, against which the workers were protected only by a thin face mask. When the stench became too horrific, whole corpses might even be buried by the side of the river.
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Chongqing’s air-raid defenses remained weak, largely because the alternative would have required a swift increase in China’s aerial warfare capacity, as well as antiaircraft weapons and other equipment that the country simply did not possess. Chiang’s wife Song Meiling addressed the problem in 1937 by recruiting one of the more remarkable figures to work in wartime China: retired US Air Force Major General Claire Lee Chennault. A strong advocate of airpower, Chennault took over the training of China’s still minimal air force (the official number of 600 aircraft was probably an exaggeration). As well as giving combat training to the small cadre of Chinese pilots, Chennault also recruited pilots from the US who might be better able to take on Japanese fighters. The group was officially known as the American Volunteer Group (AVG), but it soon became much better known by its nickname, the “Flying Tigers.” The group was a real morale-booster for the beleaguered capital, even though the Tigers never actually flew in combat over its skies. But the real significance of Chennault’s presence and views would not be made clear for several more years.
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However, even if it could not prevent the frequent air raids, the state did start to cope with the aftermath. In doing so, it began to remake the relationship between the government and the people in China as it developed a new system of social welfare provision, partly through planning and partly through improvisation in the face of sheer necessity.

The National Government knew that its techniques of mass mobilization were impressive in appearance but not always convincing in practice. The rhetoric of China’s resistance to Japan was based on genuine popular feeling. However, it also raised expectations among the wider population that, having followed their government into the interior of China, they would be supported by that government through the troubles that war brought with it. The National Government used the circumstances of war to continue the project of modernization that had begun when it was in Nanjing. In particular, it gathered information. As the war situation disintegrated, the feeling of control that came from having statistics and data was at least some comfort to those who were trying to make the state work. It became important to stress that even if air raids could not be prevented, the government was competent in dealing with the aftermath.

The effort had already begun during the months that the government had spent in Wuhan, and figures such as the Nationalist activist Shi Liang became central to the hasty construction of relief provision.
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However, the arrival of the government in Chongqing enabled the system to become more clearly organized. A major innovation was the establishment of an identity document (ID) scheme for refugees. Different types of ID allowed different levels of access to assistance, including assignment to jobs. The regulations showed concern about the potential that the new system allowed for corruption: refugees were forbidden from using their IDs to do “dubious deals.”
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As well as refugee work, the city authorities in Chongqing sought to find a more systematic way of dealing with the aftermath of air raids. On January 16, 1939, representatives of bodies including the Chongqing city Public Works Office and the city Relief Committee discussed the most important preparations needed for the air raids. Organizations including the local New Life Movement and the Red Swastika (the traditional Buddhist relief organization) were to be brought into the arrangements.
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Police reports also recorded air-raid damage after the terrible raids of May 1939.
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Other public servants were also given more incentives: one proposal was that the authorities should offer the sum of a month’s salary upfront to employees of the Public Works Bureau, as an incentive for valued staff not to leave Chongqing.
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Another, yet more comprehensive suggestion, argued that even greater provision of facilities and services had to be made for employees who were air-raid victims. First, employees of the Public Works Bureau who were injured in air raids should be granted free treatment in a hospital, although it was specified that treatment should not cost more than 100 yuan. The family of an employee killed in a raid whom it could not afford to bury, or an employee needing to bury a spouse or child who had been killed, should be given up to 200 yuan to cover costs.

The total scale of Nationalist government refugee assistance was well beyond anything previously seen in China. Prior to 1937 there had been relatively little officially sanctioned government welfare provision. Now the demands of wartime made it imperative to create such a system. Between 1937 and 1941 the government’s national-level Development and Relief Committee (DRC, or
Zhenji weiyuanhui
), established in 1938, assigned some 214 million yuan to relief work, as well as creating jobs for 90,000 refugees. The DRC’s identity-card plan created a network of transit stations that enabled the evacuation of refugees to take place even under the most unpromising conditions: by the end of 1941 there were 38 general stations and 1,059 substations, which had been used by 9.2 million registered refugees. The relief may have been inadequate to the need, but it was not trivial.
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The government knew that its treatment of refugees was being judged in comparison with the Communists and with the Japanese. For many in the middle class, particularly those of a progressive frame of mind, the clear alternative was the Communists. The refugees from poorer rural backgrounds were more inclined to consider living under Japanese occupation. To do so would mean at least enjoying the familiarity of home, and in some cases the Japanese may have seemed no worse—or even better—than the many militarists who had rampaged through China in previous decades. The Nationalist government was therefore reluctant to let refugees return home, not only for reasons of national pride, but also because the returnees might prove an excellent source of intelligence about conditions in Free China. The Japanese in turn made sure to offer incentives to return. One report from 1940 declared that refugees were being tempted by rumors of a bumper harvest in the occupied zone, and were being assisted by road maps and instructions being smuggled to them by agents of the Japanese, with very specific advice on where to obtain free vehicle rides, or how to find smugglers’ boats to make the tricky journey downriver from Yichang to Wuhan. “If we do not root this out,” noted one concerned government report, “this will have a grave effect on the War of Resistance.” In response, the Nationalists put more resources into propaganda as well as relief efforts, trying to prevent the newcomers from being “deceived by the enemy.”
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The propaganda effort was not simply aimed at the refugees. Beyond Chongqing itself, immense demands were now being made on the local population, including army recruitment and the growing of food to supply the cities and armed forces. The government tried to combine modern propaganda techniques with the reality that much of the countryside was still very traditional. One Sichuan county report from January 1939 described torchlight parades, political plays, and music (including traditional flower-drums and bamboo instruments) as ways of rallying the local population, some 3,000 of whom attended the public performance. On another occasion, the midautumn “Lantern Festival” was adapted so that the poetic couplets traditionally composed for the occasion were written to reflect wartime goals: “Our lights on the night of the lantern festival can reach even as far as [Japan],” read one couplet, “and set up the foundation for 10,000 years of the [Chinese] Republic.”
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Yet there were many signs that the message of mass resistance was only patchily successful at best. Confidential reports complained that efforts to redistribute rice to reward the families of men called up to the army were not being organized fairly.

Recruitment was key to the government’s efforts to continue resistance. But initially conscription had been haphazard, and little had been done to explain to the wider population the significance of their participation in the war. As a result, there had been widespread desertion, as well as corruption by local officials who accepted government recruitment fees but then failed to sign up the troops as promised. In January 1938 new regulations were introduced that tried to regularize recruitment, which set monthly recruitment targets and (at least on paper) forbade forced enlistment. While recruitment was never popular, and continued to be plagued by endless numbers of abuses at the local level, in the first few years of the war it managed to hold steady (total recruitment to the Nationalist armies remained broadly steady at between 1.7 million and 2 million men a year between 1938 and 1941). In the initial years of the war, the system did not engender widespread, endemic social unrest.
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Another report attacked the failure to enthuse a huge section of the population: rural women. “Women are conservative, and their outlooks are rooted in clan and countryside,” it declared. “They don’t understand the meaning of the War of Resistance.” The writer believed that the war provided an opportunity to mobilize women and increase their national consciousness, making use of the fact that the Japanese had “kidnapped children, burned property, and raped women.” The role that was envisaged for women was not necessarily a liberating one—nursing wounded soldiers or making clothes for the troops—but the report acknowledged that women needed to be included in any modernization of society. War was supposed to create a nation-state from all of China’s citizens.
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The Nationalist wartime economy did show promise. Prior to the outbreak of war, China had not been self-sufficient in food, and had regularly imported millions of tons of grain and rice, largely from Southeast Asia. During the first years of the war, rice imports were increased, the purchase price of rice in major cities in Free China remained broadly stable, and farmers were reasonably prosperous. Luck played some part in this; for the first two years of the war, fine weather meant plentiful harvests. However, the government also instituted reforms that contributed to productivity, including the use of refugee labor, the application of modern pesticides, and the supply of loans for agricultural collectives. The result was relative stability in food supply: up to 1940, crops of rice and wheat, as well as many other major crops, remained constant.
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Still, the Nationalists’ efforts to create a state with welfare responsibilities while fighting a war were expensive, and Chiang’s government was cash-strapped. Between 1937 and 1939 annual government revenues fell by 63 percent, whereas expenditure increased by 33 percent. Many of the major sources of state revenue, most notably import duties collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs, were lost when the National Government retreated from the east of the country. Instead, a new interport duty was established that taxed the movement of goods within China. Although a barrier to the free market, it proved a reasonably effective means of replacing a small proportion of the lost Customs revenue in the first two years of the war.
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The industrial economy of Nationalist China was also in a worrying state. Beginning in 1932, the government had concentrated on creating a “defense state,” involving central government control of new military-oriented enterprises such as steel production and the manufacture of machinery. However, the new industries had not yet been fully constructed when war broke out, and most of the factories that were transferred upriver to Sichuan were privately owned. The region had just 4 percent of China’s total electrical power-generation capacity; it held a similar tiny percentage of China’s industrial capital. Sichuan lacked the railways, modern steel production, and highways developed elsewhere in the country in the decade before the war broke out.
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This was therefore a pitifully small base on which to try to mobilize a wartime industrial economy. To make matters worse, the loss of eastern China meant that the only way that further industrial materials could be brought to Sichuan was to bring them in by sea from the south, or else to fly them in via the dangerous route over the Burma “Hump” from India to China. The alternatives to imports included ingenious but increasingly desperate measures such as refining industrial alcohol as an alternative to gasoline.
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The government responded in the way that would become typical of all societies in the modern period of total war: a major increase in the level of state control of the economy. A new Ministry of Economic Affairs was created, which incorporated the prewar National Resources Commission and was headed by that body’s energetic chairman, Weng Wenhao. In 1938 Weng’s ministry was given the power to nationalize crucial industries. By the end of the year, the ministry was running some sixty-three enterprises either by itself or in cooperation with other state organizations or private capitalists. Yet however great the efforts, the growth in wartime production was severely limited by the resources available in the underdeveloped southwest; even in the last years of the war, the total amount of electricity that could be generated in the Nationalist areas was only around 8 percent of what the occupied areas could produce.
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The oil lamps would be a constant, dim glow through Chongqing’s wartime years.