Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (44 page)

The white-collar workers in the vast civil bureaucracy, including thousands of lecturers, teachers and students who had accompanied their universities as they were evacuated from the Japanese-occupied areas, found themselves unable to buy food. By 1941 the purchasing power of their wages had fallen to less than 15 per cent of their pre-war level. The students survived on a diet of bean curd and noodles from cheap teashops, and many fell sick with tuberculosis.
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The government introduced rationing and subsidized the price of grain. But it now faced the problem that, with the price of food at astronomical levels, it simply did not have sufficient money to pay for the food it needed to feed the military and its civil service dependants. From July 1941 the government was forced to collect the land tax from the peasantry in food rather than cash. In July 1943 the government was sufficiently desperate to introduce ‘compulsory borrowing’ of food, an additional tax on top of the normal land tax, also to be paid in kind, but the reimbursement was to be deferred until a later date.
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These measures did slow down inflation as they meant that the government could acquire food without printing yet more money and, although it was extreme, the inflation of food prices remained lower than it was for other scarce items such as clothing and fuel.
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In this way the civil administration in the cities was fed, but the price was paid in the villages.

The decision to collect the land tax in kind shifted the burden of financing the war on to the peasantry. Indeed, the entire war effort came to rest on the peasantry, who provided the two essentials:
manpower and food. ‘With the food [the peasant] raised, the government fed the army … the arsenal workers and the bureaucracy. With the manpower the peasant supplied, the government kept recruits trudging to the front, built the roads, moved essential tonnages … The building of an American airfield for B-29s, the construction of shelter, the organization of supply, all could be reduced to the number of peasant hands available and the number of sacks of rice they could produce to meet the crisis.’
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What placed an impossible strain on the countryside was not so much the food needs of the urban population as the voracious demands of the military. Throughout the years of the War of Resistance (1937–45) the
Guomindang
army grew from 420,000 soldiers to over 5.5 million in 1944.
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They ate between one-half and two-thirds of all the food the government was able to requisition, on a ration of 750 grams of rice per day.
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From 1939 the government had made efforts to accumulate grain reserves, and storage granaries had been built in the rear areas. A great effort had been made to sustain food production in Sichuan, which provided supplementary supplies for the front line. But, after the capture of Yichang, the northern war zones were effectively cut off from the capital. The now derelict transport system was incapable of bringing meaningful quantities of supplies in to the northern front along rutted cart tracks over the few mountainous routes that were still open.
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The army was forced to live off the land in its own country. In September 1942 Chiang Kaishek urged the troops to grow their own food, herd animals and even to weave their own cloth.
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In effect the centre lost control of the provinces and army commanders took over the administration of the districts where they were stationed, levying taxes and passing laws.
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Under these chaotic conditions the army command reverted to the corrupt practices which had been commonplace in the decades of warlordism and in-fighting before the Nationalist takeover. At the Xi’an Military Conference of 1942 Chiang Kaishek devoted a large part of his speech to a host of problems which had clearly become widespread throughout the army: ‘smuggling, opium consumption, engagement in commerce, joining secret societies, dependants of officers living close to army units, new soldiers beating Escort Officers, [and] mutinies among recruits’.
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On top of the official land taxes, the military commanders imposed extra incidental levies
on the peasantry, demanding ‘food, animal feed, draft animals, wood, coal, clothing, transport equipment, and cooking utensils’.
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In addition, the locals were press-ganged into working as porters and cooks. In Henan more than a million farmers were conscripted to find fodder for the army’s animals, build roads, dig anti-tank trenches and construct dykes along the banks of the Yellow River. They were not paid and they were expected to provide their own food.
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Meanwhile, the local bureaucracies descended into corruption and at every level officials would siphon off a proportion of the food payment for themselves, which they would then hoard. The social divisions which characterized rural China intensified as landlords and rich peasants found ways of evading taxes, while an increasing number of tenant and small farmers were driven to bankruptcy and hunger.
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Agricultural production, which was already under an immense strain due to the drafting of able-bodied men into the army, began to collapse.
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In Henan in 1942 the peasants were assailed by a series of biblical afflictions. Drought was followed by frost and hail and then by a plague of locusts. The harvest fell to three-quarters of its normal level.
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The peasantry might well have been able to tighten their belts and withstand these misfortunes if it had not been for at least 300,000 Nationalist troops garrisoned in the province.
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The commanders in the neighbouring provinces of Shaanxi and Hubei refused to release food from their own stocks to alleviate the food shortage. In order to meet their collection quotas tax officials relentlessly requisitioned food in the face of the peasants’ evident distress. ‘As they died the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … Peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax collector’s office.’
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Much of what they collected disappeared into the officials’ personal hoards. American relief organizations found themselves buying food from these bureaucrats to distribute back to the same peasants from whom it had been unfairly extorted.
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Three million fled the area. Others sold their land at discount prices to merchants, army officers and government officials, who mercilessly gained in wealth at their expense. Some peasants sold or murdered their children.
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Mr Jingguan lost his father to starvation in 1942. By 1944 his family were so desperate that they sold his sister, then aged fifteen, to an older man, but she too died.
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When the American
journalist Theodore White visited the province in February 1943 he saw corpses by the sides of the roads. The desperate ate leaves, peanut husks, ‘the green slime’ from pools of water and even each other. ‘A doctor told us of a woman caught boiling her baby; she was not molested, because she insisted that the child had died before she started to cook it.’
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In the spring of 1943 the desperate harvested the wheat too early and ground the unripened wheat kernels to eat. Their bodies bloated and they died. Theodore White estimated in March 1943 that about 5 million people were dead or dying.
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One of the cruellest aspects of the hunger and famine imposed on the peasantry in the name of feeding the army was that the troops themselves were frequently weak and malnourished. By 1942 the recruitment process had degenerated into a process of impressment. Gangs would forcibly round up peasants and sell them to the army. Many would die of starvation before they reached the military camp. ‘Of 40,000 conscripts arriving at a camp near Chengdu during one conscription drive, no more than 8,000 remained alive by drive’s end.’
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The officers would siphon off food to sell on the black market, leaving the soldiers with inadequate rations. It was said that ‘some units could not go even a short distance without many dying alongside of the road from disease or starvation’.
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In 1942 troops in the south were reported to be living on low-quality rice without vegetables, and one cup of boiled water per day. A second-class soldier’s pay of 50 yuan per month bought very little supplementary food, given that a pound of cabbage cost 30 yuan.
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Hunger increased the ferocity of the army’s wild requisitioning of food. In Hubei province in May 1943 troops evacuated an entire town and then set about plundering everything of value which the inhabitants had left behind. The elderly who had remained in their houses were murdered.
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In the province of Guangdong the army created a famine in which 1.5 million peasants died. Meanwhile, the rice which the army officers had requisitioned from the starving peasants was smuggled across the front line and sold to the Japanese at great personal profit.
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The army felt the peasants’ rage in the spring of 1944 when the Japanese launched their Ichigo offensive. The Japanese aim was to capture the air bases from which the Americans were launching bombing attacks on Japanese cities and to open a land route through to south-east Asia.
As they advanced, army officials in Henan began evacuating their families, along with cartloads of goods extorted from the peasantry. They even began to round up the locals’ oxen in order to pull the carts. The peasants responded with fury, at first disarming individual soldiers and then moving on to ferociously attacking the retreating Chinese troops with ancient guns and farm implements. As many as 50,000 Nationalist soldiers were disarmed by their own countrymen. About one-fifth of these were murdered, some buried alive by the peasants.
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The Japanese captured Henan, Hunan and Jiangxi with ease. Pressure intensified on the population of Sichuan but the situation was irretrievable. The Chinese paid the price of an Allied strategy which prioritized other areas of conflict. When the Ichigo offensive began, Nationalist China’s best divisions were away in Burma fighting for the British in order to retake Rangoon. In 1945, Albert Wedemeyer, the US Chief of Staff in China, refused to divert Chinese troops to recapture the valuable agricultural areas on the northern front and insisted that Nationalist forces should be concentrated in the south, it being a priority for the Americans that Japanese troops from south-east Asia should be prevented from retreating overland into China.
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The death toll reveals which groups in Chinese society bore the burden of the struggle against the Japanese. Two million Nationalist soldiers died and at least 15 million civilians, 85 per cent of them peasants, and virtually all of them the victims of deprivation and starvation.
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In allowing corruption and wild requisitioning to spiral out of control the Nationalist government could not have aided the communists more effectively. On returning from Henan, Theodore White commented, ‘We knew that there was a fury, as cold and relentless as death itself, in the bosom of the peasants of Honan [
sic
], that their loyalty had been hollowed to nothingness by the extortion of the government.’
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Throughout the Nationalist-controlled areas the seeds of bitterness and resentment had been sown among the peasantry.

COMMUNIST SURVIVAL

The War of Resistance destroyed the Nationalist government. It had the opposite effect on the communists, who were able to use the war
to renew their energies, consolidate their base in the north and expand the areas under their influence. The 4,000 survivors of the Long March established a base in the Shaan-Gan-Ning (Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia) border region, with their headquarters at Yan an in northern Shaanxi. During the war they expanded their influence further into northern and eastern central China. The Japanese did not have a firm grip on rural China and the communists would set up base areas behind the Japanese lines, surrounding the Japanese garrison towns with a communist countryside. These areas were widely scattered and varied from relatively well-consolidated control to guerrilla zones.
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The communists were by no means firmly established as a ruling power. They were thus in a position of trying to live off the land like an army of occupation rather than an army based in its own country. An additional disadvantage was that their base area was under-developed, agriculturally poor and prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and droughts.
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In the early years of its existence the Communist Party had adopted an aggressive policy of land reform which confiscated land from rich peasants and landlords. During the war, it seemed politic to adopt a more conciliatory approach which minimized the extent of social and economic disruption.
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Thus, rather than evicting landlords, they set about redistributing wealth by reducing the amount of rent landlords could demand and the interest which could be charged on loans. By giving the peasantry greater access to potential profits these measures provided them with an incentive to work hard and produce more food. A number of schemes which introduced labour teams, crop rotation, increased manuring of crops, as well as irrigation projects, all improved agricultural productivity. The great achievement of the communists was to use their only resource – labour – most effectively within the limits of agricultural under-development.
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Like the Nationalists, the communists relied on the villages for manpower for the army but they took care to minimize the potential alienation and labour shortages which were caused by military recruitment. Soldiers’ families were given special assistance during the harvest and the Red Army routinely helped to bring in the crops, reducing the harvest time by as much as half in Shaanxi in 1938.
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