Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (9 page)

America’s missionary presence in China led to many fruitful cultural encounters. But there was a fundamental misconception at the heart of much of the American thinking about China, and one which is not entirely absent from political thought today: a widely held belief that the Chinese aspired to become like Americans, and that it was the job of the Americans to train them to achieve that goal, whether in systems of government, education, or religion. Wealthy American families including the Luces and the Rockefellers established universities, hospitals, and other institutions whose ethos was to encourage ideas of scientific modernity and democratization on a distinctly American model.
¹⁸
A positive view took hold that China was indeed a fledgling America, a Christian nation in the making, and a potential liberal democracy. The disconnection between the fantasy and the reality would, in time, lead to fundamental clashes between the US and China during the war with Japan. The Nationalists themselves, of course, were often guilty of playing to this view of themselves as Western liberals in the making, assuring American visitors that they were building a new China that could stand proudly among the free and democratic nations of the world. The Nationalists had a very weak hand to play—China had not been truly pacified, and imperialist power remained strong—and had an interest in telling a powerful sponsor such as the US what they thought it would want to hear.

Japan, the third great power whose fate would affect China in wartime, viewed the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in Nanjing with great alarm. During the 1920s Japan had appeared to take a more moderate attitude toward China. Tokyo had learned important lessons from the aftermath of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference that had followed it. The May Fourth demonstrations in 1919 showed that Chinese nationalism was an important force to be dealt with, and that Japan could not simply invade Chinese territory wholesale as it had done in the wars of 1894–95 and 1904–5. The international climate was changing; in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, elite opinion had begun to shift away from the notion of traditional empires. But Japanese delegates, including Prince Konoye, the man who would be premier when war with China broke out in 1937, learned a more cynical lesson from the West. Wilson’s internationalist talk was undercut by hypocrisy and racism: Japan’s desire for a racial-equality clause in the final peace settlement was rejected by Western politicians who could not bring themselves to declare openly that nonwhite peoples were formally equal. The attitudes of imperialism had not disappeared, only mutated.
¹⁹

These discoveries fueled a contradictory set of impulses toward China. At one level, Japan became an active participant in the interwar global economic and political order, supporting international financial reforms that were supposed to strengthen China and help it gain greater economic autonomy. At the time, Japan’s urban culture showed significant liberal trends, in everything from youth fashion to popular music and mass-circulation magazines. The country’s huge industrial-financial concerns
(zaibatsu)
had a vested interest in exporting to a global market, and a parliamentary democracy with the rotation of parties became institutionalized during the 1920s.

But not all trends were liberal or pro-Western. Many Japanese thinkers argued that Asian nations could not hope for fair treatment from the West, and that the region should seek its own destiny. The poet Noguchi Yonejirô observed that “A state is not a state . . . if it is merely being supported by other nations, unable to support others. Therefore, I always think and wish that Japan could support other nations, be that India or China.”
²⁰

At the same time, many politicians and military thinkers also became convinced that Japan was being surrounded by hostile powers that wanted to hem it in. Japanese intelligence agents used their network of trading and diplomatic posts throughout China to influence powerbrokers, financiers, and militarists to ally themselves with Japanese interests. If those allies showed too much independence, the results could be deadly: in June 1928 the warlord of Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin (“the Old Marshal”), was killed when a bomb planted by the Japanese military blew up his personal train. In general, the Japanese army was often much keener on hard-line measures than the Foreign Ministry officials, but for all of them, the Chinese mainland was both a buffer against invaders, specifically Russia, and also a source of vulnerability if it fell under the control of forces hostile to Japan. Memories of the victory over Russia in 1905 were still strong, and the term “lifeline” was used repeatedly to explain the region’s importance. As one writer put it, “Japan . . . buried 100,000 souls in the Manchuria plain . . . These are the victory prizes won with the priceless blood and sweat of the Japanese race.”
²¹

The Japanese elites saw Chiang’s Nationalist government, with its anti-imperialist rhetoric, as a hostile opponent. They refused to take the Nationalists seriously as a movement with popular legitimacy and an ideological agenda that demanded the eventual removal of imperialist power from Chinese soil. Instead, the Japanese acted as if Chiang was just another Chinese warlord to be bribed or browbeaten. Like the US in some ways, the Japanese were imperialists in China who thought of themselves as friends and mentors, rather than occupiers. Japan had indeed been a real haven for Chinese revolutionaries in the dying days of the Qing dynasty, and a refuge for Sun Yat-sen in 1913 after Yuan Shikai had destroyed China’s new Parliament.

Drawing on the idea that the Asian nations needed to cooperate, Japan began to propagate the ideology of pan-Asianism in the first decade of the twentieth century, arguing that the nations of the “spiritual” East should differentiate themselves from the “material” West. The term “pan-Asianism” played into the irrational, romantic streak in Japanese nationalism that drew on Zen and Nichiren Buddhism as well as German ideas of “blood and soil” to give meaning to the national quest for power and glory.

Chinese nationalism, however, did not share much of that spiritual element. It was rooted in a much more secular and civic model of citizenship, and the Nationalists’ propaganda, while fiercely patriotic and even xenophobic at times, did not stress ideas of spiritual purity in the way that Japan’s (or Nazi Germany’s) did. This distinction would prove crucial. China would not be ruled by ideologues who defined themselves by race or sought a system based on a fascist primordialism.

Japan’s rage at China was all the stronger because the two nations shared a common cultural heritage, as well as elements of their written language and religion, and yet were set on different paths in their quests for modernity. As Chiang took power in Nanjing, the difference between the two countries’ visions for East Asia foretold a deadly confrontation.

Chapter 3

The Path to Confrontation

O
N SEPTEMBER
18, 1931, a bomb exploded on a railway line near the city of Shenyang (then known better in the West under its Manchu name of Mukden). Robert Lewis, an American adviser to the Nationalist government who was stationed in Manchuria, sent a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nanjing saying what happened next:

On Friday night September eighteenth the Japanese Army sent from Korea into Manchuria through Antung seven army railway trains fully loaded with soldiers. On Saturday night September nineteenth [
sic
] Japanese army sent four additional trains loaded with soldiers in to Manchuria at the same point . . . [The Japanese] arrested superintendent of schools and forbad [
sic
] teaching of Dr Sun Yatsen’s principles . . . Troops and military cadets were disarmed when captured and the arms and munitions of the Chinese arsenal were removed by Japanese including modern rifles field guns heavy guns military motor trucks.
¹

The Japanese Kwantung Army, garrisoned in the region since 1905, declared that the blast had been set off by Chinese subversives, and that they had no choice but to launch an immediate military coup to protect Japanese lives and property. In fact, the Japanese had set off the bomb themselves. Two officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army, Ishiwara Kanji and Itagaki Seishirô, were behind the coup, which took place without the knowledge of the civilian government in Tokyo. Within weeks the Kwantung Army had occupied an area the size of France and Germany combined, placing 30 million people under their control.

The “Manchurian Incident” became one of the most notorious diplomatic crises of the interwar period, one of the first in a series of confrontational acts by militaristic governments that would shatter the fragile peace created after the Great War. But the events of September 18, 1931, would also forever change the fate of China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party.

After his bloody start, Chiang had made huge strides in his attempt to establish a government that could modernize China and end the stain of imperialism on its soil. During the first half of the decade, the Chinese economy began to improve markedly and indigenous businesses, from textiles to tobacco, thrived. Chinese diplomats began to take an important role in organizations such as the League of Nations. Infrastructure in the cities expanded: in the decade up to 1937, China’s paved roads doubled from 30,000 to 60,000 kilometers, and the railway system also improved. Still, Chiang’s regime at Nanjing had major flaws. The government abused human rights on a significant scale, regularly arresting or assassinating political dissidents, reserving particular venom for Communists. The Nationalist Party structure also became highly corrupt, particularly at local levels where officials used tax collection as a means of extorting all sorts of unauthorized extra payments from farmers. The government’s greatest failing—and one that gave the Communists a superb opportunity—was its failure to deal with the desperate poverty of the country’s rural regions. The Nationalists’ power lay in large part in its ties to wealthier elites, who had a vested interest in economic relationships not changing, whether in factories in the city or throughout the vast countryside.
²

One witness to the hardships endured by rural Chinese under Chiang’s government was the American Presbyterian missionary Katharine W. Hand, who lived for years in Shandong province in northern China. Shandong was a poor and drought-ridden place, which had been at the center of the Boxer uprising of 1900, and was the scene of horrific clashes between Boxer rebels and Chinese and Western Christians. Over thirty years later, there was little danger of an attack on Westerners stationed there, but the place was still remote. Hand wrote home to the US in 1935:

. . . I do wish I could give you something of the atmosphere of this back-of-the-world place. One can hardly say interior, when it is barely seventy-five miles from the coast, but it is still living the life [of] the Old Testament pictures. I look out on a little threshing field and watch the stone being pulled around and around by the ox and the ass . . . When the grain has been threshed in this way it is tossed in the air, a shovelful at a time, to be winnowed by the wind. And they are very expert . . . Naked children dance around and old women sit on the edge of the floor, possibly gleaning a few grains . . . I feel that I am back historically several centuries, and at the same time seeing the West just beginning to crash in—for better or worse it is sometimes hard to say.

Hand also observed the modernization that was changing China: she wrote of her trip out in a Ford V8 automobile on a “dirt road for such length the best I ever travelled—160 miles. Telephones, busses, bridges—all within so short a time.” Yet disaster was ever present:

Once we saw ahead of us in the road a great crowd—my heart somersaulted for a moment; then we learned that it was one of the groups of flood refugees that are being distributed throughout the province to be cared for—the government is trying to meet the situation as it has never done before, but of course it is a tragic drain on the people who must take them in and share with them their own next-to-nothing.
³

Despite the desperate poverty in much of the country, most outside observers regarded the strength of the Nationalist government as a positive development for China after the years of warlord factionalism. But the Japanese regarded events on the mainland with dismay. What worried them most was the Nationalists’ slow but steady move to reduce foreign privileges in China and become a more equal trading partner. In 1930 the government finally managed to restore tariff autonomy, the right to charge its chosen level of import taxes on goods coming into China. After nearly eighty years during which this right had been controlled by foreigners, a part of the “unequal treaties,” it was an important milestone. During the Nationalist period, the Customs service that handled these tariffs started to replace foreign employees with Chinese, evidence that China would soon move to take charge of its own finances.
⁴
That greater autonomy caused deep concern in Tokyo, where the government was becoming almost manic in its conviction that China should be regarded as an area of special influence for Japan.

In 1922, General Utsonomiya Tarô had lain on his deathbed and pointed to a world map, declaring, “That must all become Japan’s!,” indicating territory that stretched from Siberia to New Zealand. Yet in making such declarations, Japanese imperialists felt that they were merely learning from their Western counterparts. “Haven’t you ever heard of Perry?” asked General Ishiwara Kanji of an American prosecutor at the Tokyo war crimes trials in 1946, referring to the US commodore, Matthew C. Perry, who had forced Japan open in 1858. Japan “took your country as its teacher and set about learning how to be aggressive. You might say we became your disciples.”
⁵