The fortification was so large that Long Bow Village labor was not enough to complete it. People were ordered there from other villages as well, some from two, three, or even ten miles away. They had to get up before dawn in order to get there on time. They had to feed themselves. Anyone who worked slowly or made mistakes was beaten and thrown in the moat. Since the water was not deep, they did not risk drowning, but it was nevertheless a cruel punishment because the weather was cold. Victims had to climb out and go on working in a wind that froze their clothes and brought pneumonia and death to many.
The labor service demanded by the Japanese was not always so close to home that the conscripts could walk back and forth each day. When the enemy decided to build a railroad from Taiyuan to Changchih, young men were rounded up from many counties. From hundreds of villages each family had to send one person. Landlords, however, sent their hired laborers instead of their own sons. This was the first time any of these wage workers had ever been considered a part of the family.
The conscripts, quartered in huts behind barbed wire, were marched to the building site under guard, and made to work 14 or 16 hours a day. Every detail of their lives was regulated, even the length of time for passing water. The men soon learned to wet as large an area as possible, whenever they had to urinate, for a small spot on the ground was regarded as proof of malingering and could lead to a beating. If anyone slowed up the pace while at work, he was tortured in ways invented on the spot by the guards. One of these was to make two men stand face to face and strike each other. Anyone who didn’t strike out with all his strength was promptly beaten by the guards.
Chinese guerrillas sometimes came near. Whenever the guards heard shots, they swept the whole countryside with machine gun fire. In their panic they killed more than one of the laborers who happened to get in the way. “In the evening when we returned to our huts we laughed and congratulated ourselves that we still lived,” said one survivor as he told me of those days. “But every morning as we went to work before dawn we trembled for what might happen that day.”
The wholesale terror of the labor gangs, calculated as it was to strike fear into the heart of every peasant, sowed hatred of the conqueror far and wide. The offhand brutalities—such as the wanton killing of Hu Hsueh-chen’s little son—and the incidental havoc wrought by the occupation burned this hatred even deeper.
One such incidental cruelty accompanied the expropriation of the land on which the fort at Long Bow was built. It was confiscated from an old man named Wen Tui-chin, called Lao (old) Tui-Chin by everyone in the village. He had inherited part of his meager holdings from his father. Another part, on which stood a house of 12 sections, he had bought only two years earlier with the savings of a lifetime of labor in Sheng Ching-ho’s distillery. In the enclosure around the house he had planted 30 trees.
One day in July 1942, Shang Shih-t’ou, the puppet village head, called Old Tui-chin in and told him his house had to be removed to make way for the fort. He gave him a week to tear down the structure or to sell it to someone who would. Before Tui-chin had time to do anything about the house, the labor gangs were ordered to begin work on the moat. He had to offer the structure to whoever would buy it at whatever price he was willing to pay. At that point—was it quite by coincidence?—three members of the puppet administration and the landlord Sheng Ching-ho suddenly stepped in, offered him 50 silver dollars per section, and tore down the house. But after they had hauled away the bricks and the timbers they paid him only half the price. They took his fruit trees for nothing. Old Tui-chin did not dare complain.
The site of the fort included his half-acre of crop land. On it he had planted millet that was already ripe for harvesting. He never had a chance to reap it. Puppet soldiers came in the evening, staked out the lines of the fort, and trampled his ripe grain into the mud. He begged them to wait until morning so that he could rescue his coming winter’s food, but they asked him, “Can you guarantee our safety tonight?” Afraid of the Eighth Route Army, they wasted no time digging in. Old Tui-chin received not one coin of compensation for all the land and the grain that he lost. He had to flee to his nephew’s home in South Temple to avoid starvation.
The village administration of Long Bow was more than usually effective as a recruiting office for the puppet armed forces. This was because several Long Bow men with long-standing ties to the dominant faction were among the commanders of the local puppet forces. Shih Jen-pao, a son of the landlord Shih La-ming, was an officer of the Fourth Column of the puppet garrison of Lucheng County. Shen Chi-mei, a middle peasant and erstwhile henchman of the “dog’s leg” Chou Mei-sheng, commanded the puppet security police of the Fifth District. Ch’ing T’ien-hsing, also of Long Bow, assisted him. Between them they were able to impress about 50 young men into the puppet forces as rank-and-file soldiers and policemen. These forces were used not only to garrison Long Bow itself, but also to hold down several nearby communities.
The above-named puppet leaders did not enter the service of the enemy in the first days of the occupation. On the contrary, when the Japanese entered Shansi, they were officers of a Nationalist army detachment commanded by Fan Pu-tzu’s son, Fan Tung-hsi. Fan Tung-hsi and Shih Jen-pao were brothers-in-law by parental arrangement. They were also schoolmates. Together they graduated from middle school in Taiyuan, won a reputation as intellectuals, and, what was more lucrative, commissions in the provincial armed forces under the over-all command of Governor Yen Hsi-shan. Since every ambitious officer who wanted to advance his career had to build around himself a loyal group of supporters, they naturally recruited Long Bow men as assistants.
When Yen’s old-style provincial armies crumbled before the Japanese advance in 1937, many units remained more or less intact and retreated into the hinterland. The unit officered by Fan Tung-hsi and Shih Jen-pao found its way back to Lucheng County and made the Fifth District its main base.
As long as Yen himself kept fighting they carried on a resistance of sorts, but when Yen shifted his policy to one of limited collaboration with the Japanese in return for aid in fighting the guerrillas who were carrying through social reforms and successfully organizing and arming the people for all-out war, his erstwhile officers had to make a choice. They either joined the guerrillas and accepted their program, or they worked out a modus vivendi with the Japanese. Fan Tung-hsi chose the latter course. Being no match for the Japanese Army that moved into the valley behind him, he avoided battle, was allowed to hold certain hilly areas unmolested, and set himself up there as a petty tyrant. His unit gradually disintegrated into a band of armed marauders—living off the land, robbing, looting, killing, and raping in the best tradition of Chinese militarism.
When Fan Tung-hsi’s troops needed grain, they descended on the villages in the valley and made collections in the name of the central government. In the famine year of 1942, when the puppet administration had already squeezed out all the grain that could be found in Long Bow and many people were already near death from hunger, Shih Jen-pao and Shen Chi-mei led over a hundred men into the village. Under cover of darkness they went from house to house, searched every courtyard and seized much grain that had until then been successfully hidden. They made off that night with many cartloads of corn and millet. Almost a third of the people later died of starvation.
When not looting villages, Fan Tung-hsi’s men preyed on commerce. They considered merchants on the highway fair game. One day they attacked 13 freight-laden carts traveling the road from Lucheng to Changchih. They threw the carters into a mountain gully, killed them with stones, and made off with their goods and mules.
They also had their way with local women, courting all who took their fancy. Those whom they could not win over with gifts and favors they forced into submission with threats and beatings. If their men resisted they dispatched them without mercy. In mid-winter Fan Tung-hsi raped a young woman in Li Village Gulch, a settlement three miles south of Long Bow. The girl’s fiance enlisted in the Japanese military poli
ce in order to get arms for revenge, but before he could carry out his plan he was ambushed in Long Bow, thrown into a dry well, and buried with rocks.
In Tung-hsi’s command was a man named Mao Tan who secretly courted the leader’s own favorite of the moment. Tung-hsi shot him in the back for his temerity.
Shih Jen-pao was equally ruthless. He seduced the wife of one village leader and later tracked the man himself into the mountains and killed him. He fired at, but missed, another man whose wife he had raped. He beat his own sister-in-law so brutally that everyone said he was responsible for her death.
Fan Tung-hsi, Shih Jen-pao, and their henchman Shen Chi-mei were particularly ruthless in dealing with their political enemies, the underground resistance forces that had progressive leanings. Many times they attacked small groups of guerrilla fighters when the latter were under the most severe pressure from the Japanese and least able to fight back. When they sacked a village for loot, their excuse always was that the place had been infiltrated by Communists.
By such acts as these the Long Bow trio won a well-deserved reputation as “local despots.” Had the Sino-Japanese War been a conflict of the traditional type, Fan Tung-hsi might well have become a powerful warlord in his own right, but in this war new social forces, forged in the fires of national resistance, made a traditional warlord career difficult, if not impossible. Fan Tung-hsi himself was killed by a detachment of guerrilla troops that included Long Bow men. Soon thereafter the group he had commanded took the final step to complete betrayal by going over, lock, stock, and barrel to the Japanese. With this move they sealed their fate.
When the ex-soldiers turned bandit went over to the enemy, they were reorganized as part of the Fourth Column of the Lucheng County Garrison, with Shih Jen-pao as commander. Simultaneously, Shen Chi-mei was appointed head of the district security police. He specialized thereafter in hunting down resistance leaders; responsible for the death of many people, he grew to be one of the most hated men in the valley.
The defection at Lucheng was by no means an isolated incident. In the later years of the Anti-Japanese War, years that were characterized by a stalemate on the regular battlefronts, the surrender to the Japanese of whole units intact with their arms was arranged over and over again by high ranking Nationalist officers. “The number of Kuomintang commanders above the rank of major general who put their troops under Japanese command was 12 in 1941, 15 in 1942, and 42 in the peak year, 1943. By early 1944 more than 60 percent of the puppet armies, then numbering about 425,000, was composed of former Kuomintang elements.”* In the Taihang Mountains General P’ang Ping-hsun, Commander of the 24th Group Army, went over with all his troops in May 1943, and was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Shansi-Hopei, Honan-Shantung Communist Extermination Army as well as of the 24th Group Army of Peace and National Salvation.
These shocking defections, which increased as world-wide victory over fascism approached, were part of a planned “Trojan Horse” strategy conceived by Chiang Kai-shek’s high command as the only means by which the Kuomintang could regain control of North China and the Yangtze Valley from the resistance forces when the war ended. Certain that victory would eventually be won by the hard fighting and sacrifices of the Allied Forces, particularly the Americans, Chiang and his clique turned their attention to the question of postwar control of China. With the approval of their own high command, unit after unit of the Nationalist Army went over to the enemy and took up garrison duty at strategic points where they would be in a position to take over control of all the occupied areas once the Japanese were finally brought to their knees by forces outside China. This was euphemistically called “national salvation by a curved path.”
As far as Chiang’s strategists were concerned, the Fourth Column was but a small pawn in this devil’s chess match, but in Lucheng County the men of the Fourth Column made up a formidable force. With their knowledge of the terrain and their intimate ties with the local people, especially the gentry who ran the occupied villages, they made the occupation many times more oppressive and ruthless than it might otherwise have been.
The whole collaboration apparatus in Lucheng County and in Long Bow—the commanders of the Kuomintang irregulars-turned-puppet, the gentry who stood behind the puppet village government, and the middle and poor peasants who staffed it and did the dirty work—was made up of Catholics. From the time that the Japanese arrived until they were finally routed in August 1945, Long Bow Village had a solidly Catholic administration under the dictatorship of the Japanese.
This make-up of the village administration and the puppet forces was not unusual. There seemed to be a definite correlation between collaboration and Catholicism throughout the Taihang and in the Catholic strongholds of Central Hopei. This, after all, was only the continuation of a situation long prepared by the methods through which these Catholic missions spread their influence and established their position in the first place. From the very beginning, as we have seen, Catholicism had advanced in China under the protection of foreign powers. During the Japanese War the tone for collaboration was set by the highest Church authorities, the hierarchy of the Cathedral in Changchih, the largest town in the area, and the hierarchy in Hsingtai, the largest city on the plain at the foot of the mountains.
To cite but one example: A leading priest, Father Kuo Lo-ts’ai, on his return trip from America in 1938, stopped off in Japan and obtained a letter of introduction to the Japanese ambassador in China from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This letter carried instructions to all whom it might concern to give special care and attention to the bearer. It was apparently effective for, upon his arrival in China, Father Kuo received a universal travel permit from the Japanese military headquarters and was permitted to move freely all over North China. After the Japanese surrender, more than 100 travel blanks of the kind issued only to top Japanese military personnel and civilian administrators were found in his effects together with many snapshots of his venerable personage standing with leading Japanese officials and the chief puppet of the Hsingtai area, one Kao Te-ling.
One reason for the shift to a Catholic administration in small centers such as Long Bow was the universal belief that the invaders would respect the sanctity of the Church, if not from fear of God, then at least from respect for the foreign powers that stood behind that Christian institution. A measure of safety was thus seen in Church membership and in good relations with the local priest and his entourage. Events confirmed this presumption. As they moved into the interior the Japanese troops did not, as a rule, enter churches. Therefore, on the eve of the arrival of the Japanese soldiers in Long Bow, most of the wealthy of the village and many of the poor took their valuable possessions to the Church for safekeeping. Many of them asked for personal protection as well. The local priest, quick to sense the full potential of the situation, coined the slogan, “protection for those who are members; no protection for those who are not.” To save themselves and their property, quite a few families joined the Church within a few days. Even so, the protection afforded the poor was minimal. Landlords and rich peasants and their families occupied all the available shelter, and most of the poor who crowded into the open courtyard, whether they were Catholic or not, were finally turned back into the street.
Those who remained did not get protection for nothing. While landlords and officials found the facilities of the Church open to them as a matter of course, it was understood that as a token of gratitude the poor would give 20 percent of all the property they brought with them to God.
After Pearl Harbor, the Dutch fathers of the mission all left, or were removed from the occupied regions. Then Father Sun, the Chinese priest who took over in their place, tried once more to swing the whole village into the Catholic fold. One day all the gentry of the village were invited to a Western-style banquet in the rectory. At the end of the feast the father called on his guests to help make every peasant a Church member. He argued that since the Church had given sanctuary when the Japanese came, they
should show their gratitude and faith in God by joining it themselves and recruiting others. Members of the Carry-On Society then went from house to house, smashed all the ancestral tablets and clay idols that they found, threw their remains into the deep outdoor toilets, and hung up pictures of the Virgin Mary. In one day every house in the village took on the trappings of Catholicism. Those who protested were scolded and told, “If the Japanese return in force you will not be allowed into the Church, and if you are killed that is your fault. We shall not care and we shall not come to your rescue.” Many of the pictures were later torn down without dire consequences, but the people never forgot this attempt at religious coercion.
8
Seeds of Change
Taihang mountains, high, oh high!
One hundred times ten thousand men
Take up the cry.
Young men of the soil
Fear not shell or knife.
Each shot we fire
Takes an enemy life.
Song of the Taihang Militia
SHANG SHIH-T’OU, the figurehead of the puppet administration, did not sleep easily at night. In spite of the hundred-strong Japanese garrison so close at hand, in spite of the expanded Peace Preservation Corps pledged to support his regime, in spite of the efficient police work of his henchman Kuo Fu-kuei, he was afraid of the people. Someone in the village—he had no idea who—was in touch with the resistance forces in the mountains. Every so often Shang Shih-t’ou found a stone lying in his courtyard with a letter wrapped around it. The letter described everything he had done in the previous few weeks, warned of swift and terrible retribution unless he changed his ways, and advised him to go to a designated spot for a conference with a certain Commander Liu to discuss ways of helping his country and atoning for his treason.
Fanshen Page 12
