Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (45 page)

The Burma debacle also set the tone, only a few months into the global war, for a shared Western understanding of the Chinese war effort. Western officers (primarily Americans, and Stilwell above all) were seen as making an ever more futile effort to motivate China to fight—against the wishes of a corrupt and unwilling leader, Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang understood this very well. Stilwell’s reports on the Chinese military are “contemptuous and blacken our name,” wrote Chiang. “They are lukewarm about helping us. Thinking about this angers and pains me.”
⁷⁴

Chiang’s troops in Burma had done little to raise China’s military prestige—although, with the British in retreat all around the region, it was not as if China’s performance was exceptionally poor in comparison. The Allies blamed Chiang for putting China’s interests first, but it is hardly surprising that he wished to do exactly that. They also blamed him for not acting as if he commanded a strong and disciplined army of the British or American type, even while they labeled him insignificant precisely because his regime was weak. The circumstances that made the Nationalist armies so weak—in particular the four years of sustained warfare—were not understood as justification for extra assistance to Chiang, but instead were treated as a kind of failing.

As the Burma campaign ground on, another incident took place which showed the low status that China held in the minds of the Western Allies. On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS
Hornet
and raided military and industrial targets in cities including Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. They did relatively little damage, but the raids showed that Japan was now vulnerable to attack from the air. The sortie became known as the “Doolittle Raids,” after their commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. The news of the attack was a huge propaganda boost for the American war effort. But it appalled Chiang. On their return the fighters were supposed to land at airfields in the Nationalist-held parts of Zhejiang, in eastern China. In fact, none of them did so; they all crash-landed at various points in eastern China, bar one that landed in Vladivostok on the Russian coast and was then interned for a year. However, the Japanese reacted with fury. They attacked and destroyed all the airfields in Zhejiang which Chennault had built up, and committed atrocities against the local population in the surrounding areas. What went down very well with the American public had a hugely negative effect on the Chinese war effort.
⁷⁵

Over the next year, the presence of American fliers would continue to cause tension between the two sides. One US military attaché wrote with some dissatisfaction that his Chinese counterpart had said that “the Chinese are beginning to hate the Americans” because of the air-raid warnings that had to be called whenever American planes flew overhead. (Until the approaching planes arrived, villagers would not know whether they were friendly or not, and village headmen frequently found themselves having to scatter the local population in case they were bombed, disrupting everyday life.) Chennault had replied that he could only warn them “when the Chinese proved to him that there was not one single Japanese spy in unoccupied China,” which was clearly impossible.
⁷⁶
The Americans were justifiably worried that letting the Chinese side know when the raids were taking place would expose their pilots to terrible danger if the enemy got hold of the information. But refusal by the Americans to take senior Chinese officers into their confidence inevitably highlighted the inequity between the two sides.

Additionally, Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was being undermined from within. And the culprit was neither a rogue general nor an uncertain ally, but disastrous natural and social forces that would set him at odds with his own people.

Chapter 14

Hunger in Henan

T
HE JOURNALIST LI SHU
visited Henan province in central China in February 1943. The region has a particularly important place in Chinese history, for the Yellow River that flows through it nurtured China’s earliest civilizations, and cities such as Luoyang and Zhengzhou have histories reaching back thousands of years. The fertile soil of the region produced grain that fed millions of Chinese every year, and its huge population had swelled the ranks of China’s military for the past five years of the war. In 1938 there had been dreadful suffering in parts of the province when Chiang Kai-shek had ordered the dikes destroyed to prevent the Japanese advance. Now rumors were spreading about a terrible famine that was devastating the population. Official censorship made the story obscure and difficult to verify, and Li wanted to find out more about conditions on the ground in the province.

“As I was traveling from Yinjingpu to Yanshi,” Li Shu wrote, “I saw three corpses by the side of the road. One of them was an old white-haired man, and someone had stripped off all his clothes. His face was down in a field of grain.”
¹
Li Shu traveled further into the interior. At one point he asked an old man why so many people had gathered at the banks of the Luo River. The answer came that they were gathering up bird excrement. (At one time, geese must have been plentiful nearby.) They would then rinse off the feces and release the precious morsels that lay embedded in them: undigested, edible grains of wheat.
²
However horrible this story was, it was not the worst experience that Henan’s people would endure in that spring of hunger.

As China’s role in global politics suddenly expanded, the situation at home began to change too. After Pearl Harbor, Chiang’s time was filled with ever more negotiations with Stilwell, Roosevelt, Wavell, and Churchill. The Burma debacle showed how far those alliances had yet to go to become genuine partnerships. Meanwhile, Chiang’s eyes were not always fixed on the rapidly changing situation much closer to home. In China’s provinces, far from the influence of the capital, the hastily implemented system of bureaucracy, relief provision, and military administration was vulnerable to pressure—not only from the ever-present Japanese threat, but also from the growing social tensions within Chinese society as the government and its allies asked the people to endure more and more despite dwindling resources.

Although China had gained its longed-for alliance with the Western powers, there were also multiple signs that all was not well with the wartime state. Graham Peck’s job for the US government agency the Office of War Information (OWI) was to accentuate the positive about the American alliance with Chiang, but he swiftly became convinced that the immediate response had been “cynical gaiety . . . and the Kuomintang’s [Nationalists’] growing alienation from reality.”
³
The new determination in Chongqing could not hide the fact that the Nationalist grip on power outside the southwest of the country was becoming very precarious.

One person who could give Chiang firsthand information about the degeneration of Nationalist rule was his son Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo). The relationship between the two had always been a somewhat distant one. Ching-kuo had gone to the USSR in 1927, and remained there for a decade, marrying his Belarussian wife Faina in 1935. He returned to China in 1937 and was placed in charge of a prefecture named Ganzhou, in the impoverished Jiangxi province. While he was there, he kept a diary in which he recorded numerous instance of how far the Nationalist attempts to modernize and centralize had penetrated (or failed to penetrate) the more remote provinces.

In June 1940, early in his stay at Ganzhou, Ching-kuo visited a shabby local primary school, one of whose “students” was actually a thirty-year-old draft dodger. Ching-kuo fired questions at the students, but got no answer to his query “Where is the national government?” (The question “Where is Wang Jingwei?” received the answer “In Japan,” but when he asked “And where is Japan?” a long pause ensued, with one student finally replying “It’s in Japanese imperialism.”) Other institutions were equally depressing. A hospital had nothing but rice porridge to offer its patients. In one messy county office, the already dreary atmosphere was not enhanced by the discovery of a large pot full of urine that had been left there. Ching-kuo discovered that the county magistrate was using a pile of household registration forms as a pillow; when asked why he had no blanket, the magistrate replied that it was locked up in case someone stole it.
⁴
Ching-kuo remained in Ganzhou throughout the war, and the area became well known for the social reforms that he was able to implement there. But even after a couple of years in the area, Ching-kuo was still struck by the desperate poverty of the locals, whether it was a sixty-six-year-old woman who complained that in the three years that she had been using it, the local soup kitchen never gave her enough rice, or the humble house in which he noted a “strong stench”; this was because the owner had to work by collecting dog excrement, which he stored (“in twelve jars and three toilets”) before weighing it out and selling it.
⁵
National unification was a concept that had little meaning in places as remote as this.

To create the new China he wanted, Chiang had to defeat Japan, and to do that he needed a military alliance. Finally, he had been able to form one after Pearl Harbor. Yet the immediate consequence of that alliance was that Chiang’s regime was now even more cut off from supplies from the outside world. And since supplying the Army was essential to maintaining China’s resistance against the Japanese, this made it yet harder to keep both society and the economy stable.

Arthur Young also saw the effects of the new alliance, both as a chronicler of China’s wartime finances and a participant in controlling them. He had worked for the US State Department as an economic adviser, and was then invited in 1929 to become financial adviser to Chiang’s government. When the war broke out, he remained in China and became a trusted figure as the country’s nightmare deepened. As early as September 11, 1937, Young had suggested “new taxes in kind . . . payable in foodstuffs needed by the military forces.” The policy seemed less urgent in the early days of the war, when harvests were abundant. But the poor harvest of 1940 prompted the Executive Yuan (a major Cabinet-level body of the government) to adopt a resolution that the land tax should be collected in kind—that is, in grain—rather than cash, a policy supported by Laughlin Currie, Roosevelt’s special representative in China. On July 1, 1941, collection in kind began, followed soon after by new rules allowing the compulsory purchase of both rice and wheat.
⁶
(In the northern provinces such as Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, wheat was the staple grain; in the southern provinces, including Yunnan and Guangxi, it was rice. Sichuan supplied both.)
⁷

The policy was not irrational. The armies were diseased, poorly motivated, and hungry, and, without significant grain supplies coming from British India, grain requisitioning was essential. Otherwise, the large Nationalist standing army could not have existed at all. General Stilwell complained that China was doing little fighting against Japan in China, but this complaint was misleading for several reasons. The Allied strategy was focused on the European and Pacific Theaters. To open up a full-scale campaign in China itself would have stretched resources well beyond even the capacities of the US and the British Empire. The only thing preventing Japan from advancing further into central China was the very existence of the Nationalist armies. A decision by the National Government not to defend its territory might well have led to a successful Japanese invasion in 1942 or 1943.

Nevertheless, the policy of grain requisitioning did real damage to an already vulnerable economy. When Wang Jingwei’s government was established in Nanjing in March 1940, his Japanese sponsors issued a new currency and used terror tactics to force the population to accept it. The Nationalist-linked Bank of China became a particular target. On March 24, 1940, a bomb went off at the bank’s branch in the French Concession of Shanghai, killing seventy people; there were numerous other incidents of arrests and intimidation of bank employees in the following months.
⁸
People who still had Nationalist
fabi
currency had to find ways to use it in the areas still controlled by the Nationalists, leading to a sudden influx of banknotes there.
⁹
To make matters worse, this happened just at the moment when food was becoming scarcer, as the supply routes to Free China were being cut off one by one. Inflation became rife.

The grain-tax policy did reduce inflation, because the army no longer had to purchase so much food on the open market. From 1942 onward the Chongqing government was able to collect some 60 million
shidan
(one
shidan
is around 50 kilograms) of grain per year. However, the burden now fell heavily on the most fertile provinces under the control of the National Government, particularly Sichuan. The policy also provided multiple opportunities for corruption and speculation.
¹⁰
Above all, the new system shifted an even greater responsibility for the war effort to the countryside. From the earliest days of the war, the rural areas had borne a heavy burden as targets for conscription, but farmers had not suffered major food shortages; good harvests and no land tax in kind meant that they had been able to supply themselves when necessary. Suddenly, the burden of feeding the armies fell directly on the peasants. In Henan, a traditionally fertile province on the frontline of control between the Nationalists and the Japanese, this would become terrifyingly clear in the summer of 1942.

In the first years of the war, harvests had been particularly good. But the rice harvest of southern China dropped from 753.3 million
shidan
in 1939 to 618.9 million in 1940, and in fact would never again reach the heights that it had attained in the first three years of the war. The wheat harvest in the north, which had hit 201.1 million
shidan
in 1940, dropped to 165.1 million in 1941.
¹¹
Variable harvests had been known before. But the combination of a poor harvest with other wartime constraints was deadly.