The book is divided into four parts. Part I, Staking a Nation, follows Chiang Kaishek’s rise to power, examines the efforts of the Nationalists to construct a new Chinese nation and prepare their country for war against Japan, and ends with an analysis of the reasons for Chiang Kaishek’s decision to go to war in the summer of 1937. If primary responsibility for the War of Resistance must lie with Japan, it is also the case that Chiang Kaishek’s response to a crisis in north China set in motion the series of events that saw China and Japan fight each other remorselessly for seven long years.
Part II, Momentous Times, covering the period 1937–42, traces attempts by the Japanese and the Nationalists to prevail in a conventional war using conventional means as well as the initial expansion of the Chinese Communists and the emergence of war communism. These were momentous times in the sense that the zeitgeist changed. At first, although some segments of the population embraced China’s war with Japan enthusiastically, large numbers remained detached. That changed as the sacrifices mounted. By the end of 1938, Japan had captured many of China’s largest cities, but it also faced a population who would not settle for anything less than the departure of Japanese troops from Chinese soil, and who defined their own time as decisive for the future of their country and their civilisation.
Part III, The Acid Test, and Part IV, The New China, examine China’s War of Resistance after it became part of a globalised war, the Chinese civil war that followed the fall of Japan, and the emergence of a new Cold War during the Korean War. Part III focuses on the alliance aspect of China’s victory over Japan, emphasising that while militarily China benefitted little, politically it gained hugely, with important consequences for the world in which we live today. Part IV examines the overwhelming demoralisation of the Nationalists after the end of the War of Resistance, the triumph of the Communists, and the military and diplomatic events during the Korean War that led to the east Asian Cold War order that remains largely in place today.
My understanding of war is shaped in profound ways by my own family’s history, a history that has convinced me that there is a good deal of truth to the words of Deuteronomy, quoted at the opening of this chapter: it takes at least three or four generations for the ramifications of such a traumatic event as the Second World War to work themselves through before they can be genuinely consigned to the past.
I grew up in the Netherlands with parents who as teenagers had experienced the hunger winter of 1945, in which 22,000 Dutch citizens are estimated to have died of starvation. My mother maintained a basement with many shelves loaded with rows of tinned food well into the 1960s. I had nightmares for weeks after a family dinner at which an uncle talked about a bomb that had dropped through the roof of his family’s home into their kitchen. It was a dud but no one dared move for hours in case a slight tremor would make it go off after all. It is not because of this that the issues of food and bombing figure prominently in the narrative, and I know that I cannot know what bombing and hunger really mean – as my parents were in the habit of reminding me. But as a member of the second post-war generation, I do nonetheless have a direct personal connection to the Second World War.
The importance of the wartime past on my generation was brought home to me during the Easter weekend of 2014, when I travelled with two cousins, their partners, my wife and son to Germany in order to retrace the last journey that my maternal grandfather, Marius Jonker Roelants, made sixty-nine years earlier, in the final weeks of the war. Marius was from Schiedam, a typically picturesque small Dutch town with canals near Rotterdam, where Marius was regarded as a man of some standing. He ran a wine import business, while other members of his family managed the local gin distillery, a bookshop and a printing business.
The Germans had tried Marius for hiding weapons and, in order to keep the citizens of Schiedam in line, had kept him in jail, together with some other prominent locals – murdering a few whenever an act of resistance was carried out. Towards the end of the war, the Germans moved Marius to Germany, where they put him to work in an aircraft factory hidden in a mine. As the Allies advanced, the Germans fell back towards Berlin, dragging Marius along with them, forcing him to walk through the harsh winter. Marius managed to escape along with a Dutch compatriot and a German prisoner – no easy divisions along national lines here. In his letters home, Marius had stated again and again that his health was fine and that his diet was tolerable. Once he regained his freedom, he gorged on supplies found in a hastily abandoned military barracks, thus stilling a hunger that had obviously come to dominate his whole being. Marius was found by American forces shortly after, but he did not survive for long: he died of dysentery only days later.
My cousins and I, we discovered, had very different recollections of our grandfather. Marius had no sons but two daughters, my mother and my aunt. While my mother told many stories about Marius, always in an admiring vein, her sister never did so. One continued to live in the war, while the other wanted to move on. My cousin was even surprised when, at a family funeral, I referred to our grandfather as ‘Marius’; he had never heard that name used before for my grandfather, even though he had been named after him. Believing that his life had been affected by his mother’s silences, her refusals to recollect, he turned after his retirement to investigating Marius’s life. We now know where Marius was and what he did right up until the last day or so of his life. We still do not know, though, where he is buried. To that extent, he remains and will likely remain an unburied soul, or, as was traditionally believed in China about people who had not been properly buried, a wandering ghost who might come to harass his or her descendants.
I drew several lessons from this history at the sharp, personal end. Our journey into the past brought home to me the wisdom of the German President Richard von Weizsäcker, when he said in 1985 that no one should expect Germans to ‘wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans’. But he also stressed that ‘their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by the consequences and are liable for it.’15 Chinese ideas about wandering ghosts speak to the same issue of burdens being bestowed by one generation on the next, as did Deuteronomy. In Europe and the USA these days much of the potency of the Second World War has ebbed away: the war is confined to museums, commemorations, documentaries, movies and textbooks; Germany has apologised for its misdeeds and paid compensation; and the country is fully integrated into both the European and the international order. But it is also the case that Germany is not a member of the UN Security Council; that war memories revived quickly in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, dividing Serbs and Croats; and that Greece accused Germany of having failed to fulfil its Second World War reparations when the Germans demanded repayment of the Greek debt to the European Union in 2015. My generation of Dutch has turned its gaze, intellectually, culturally and economically, west to the USA, or, for our holidays, south to the Mediterranean, rather than east towards Germany – which was something that came naturally to our parents and we resumed doing only a decade or so ago. Traumatic events take generations to work themselves out.
The second lesson was that different generations live in different eras with different attitudes. My aunt and my mother grew up in what might be called momentous times, which have shaped their rememberings of the Second World War. They construed the war as an apocalyptic fight between good and evil, fought by giants. We live in less eventful times – and long may they last. Our concerns tend to be about the state of our hospitals, the education of our children, the promotions we might or might not be granted and the sturdiness of our pensions. We are less prone to think in black and white terms. If my mother perceived my grandfather as a resistance hero who could do no wrong, I will not hold it against him that he looted from a hotel a silver soup terrine, now in my possession, while Rotterdam burned from Germany’s first major aerial bombardment. If, as one historian has argued, he was the victim of a financial en
trapment scheme, in which donations were collected in the name of supporting the Dutch resistance only to disappear into someone’s personal bank account, I don’t think any the worse of him, but nor do I think any the better of the Germans who executed that person.16 I do, however, think him foolish for hiding weapons in his town house, where he lived with his wife and two teenage daughters, while the local German commander lived next door.
The histories of areas that have been under occupation are inevitably more complex than those that have not been so; the choices that were made were rarely straightforward, frequently unpalatable, at times simply misconceived, and often simply a choice between equally awful evils. Their histories are written not in D major, ‘the key of triumph, of Hallelujah, of war cries, or victory rejoicing’,17 but in the key of G minor, used for sadder and angrier music. That perspective has clearly shaped my understanding of China at war.
My attitude has been affected, too, by the fact that although my grandfather gained the status of resistance fighter, and was formally recognised as such by the post-war Dutch government, my father was a veteran of the misguided Dutch campaign to recover control over its Indonesian colony in the four years just after the war. If I have a different attitude towards the Second World War, it is because I am part of a second post-war generation, one that came of age in an occupied area and whose own fathers had fought the wrong wars. If we have no desire to refight old battles, we are still aghast at the horror of it all, in some ways with increasing incomprehension, a sense that probably results from the fact that we now know clearly the consequences of the paths that were taken, as those who took the original decision could not have done, and because the sharp dichotomies produced by the war have faded.
The next generation will develop its own views, and take issue with mine; we still have at least a generation to go, as Deuteronomy said, before the acts of the wartime generation will begin to impact upon us less. It is unlikely that even then we will simply forget or care less, but we will do so differently. ‘Lest we forget’ is an important admonition, but also a phrase too often abused, certainly in east Asia, to sustain legacies of hatreds.
The final lesson is a straightforward historical one. In our case, because my grandfather ended up in what would become East Germany, we had to wait until after the fall of the Soviet Union before we could gain access to the relevant archives. Local historians and archivists were eager to assist us in reconstructing what happened, digging through paper mountains and, when we travelled through Germany, showing us where this or that building was located, or in which bend of the road Marius’s escape took place. The recovery of local histories, less concerned with constructing nationalist narratives or staging politicised acts of remembrance, has barely begun in China, and continues to be constrained by the country’s politics. It will take a long time before the wounds caused by the silencing of history begin to heal.
If von Weizsäcker was brave when he declared that Germans, too, should commemorate 8 May – the date when Germany surrendered in 1945 – not as a defeat but as their day of liberation, perhaps it is time for us to acknowledge that the countries that defeated Germany and Japan were not unalloyed paragons of virtue. The British left-wing poet Cecil Day-Lewis, having broken with communism, worked for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Discomfited when pressed to defend the Allied cause in the heroic language preferred by British and US propaganda, he wrote: ‘That we who lived by honest dreams/Defend the bad against the worse.’ Thucydides would have sympathised.
PART I
STAKING A NATION
— ONE —
CHIANG KAISHEK: SAVING CHINA
Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and respect of self, in turn, is the chief element in courage.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BC)1
Chiang Kaishek was born in 1887 in Xikou, a town in a lush, mountainous area near the rich cosmopolitan city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province, one of the first Chinese cities to be opened to foreign trade in the nineteenth century and well known for its enterprising merchant culture. Chiang’s youth was spent as a scion of an affluent, locally well connected family of salt merchants – which was a financially rewarding occupation at the time. Throughout his life, Chiang would return to Xikou at moments of crisis, for escape and recuperation. For Chiang, Xikou was ‘home’.
Chiang came of age as China was falling apart. He was a young boy when in 1895 Japan defeated China both at sea and in Manchuria, an event that resulted in China’s loss of Taiwan and which came as a huge shock to all those who believed in China’s cultural superiority and in the progress its economy and military had made in the second half of the nineteenth century. The anti-foreigner, anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion of 1900 led to an invasion by eight allied countries, including Britain, France and the USA, and the occupation of Beijing. Five years later, China suffered the indignity of Russian and Japanese troops fighting their war on Chinese soil. And in 1912, the Qing dynasty finally collapsed, having ruled China since 1644. The first incarnation of the Republic of China dissolved within a few years into warlord satrapies. Like many young men of this period, Chiang searched for a way to play his part in reversing China’s decline.
He chose a military route, as indeed did many young men at the time, despite the traditional low standing of the military in Chinese culture. In 1906, he enrolled at the Baoding Military Academy, then one of China’s premier schools for officers. A year later he transferred to the Preparatory School of the Imperial Japanese Military Academy in Tokyo. Like others of his generation, he was convinced that much could be learned from the first Asian country to have beaten a Western nation. Japan was also geographically close to China.
In Japan, Chiang came into contact with reformers and revolutionaries living in exile. In particular he struck up a friendship with a fellow Zhejiang native, Chen Qimei, who facilitated his admission into the Revolutionary Alliance of Sun Yatsen. The éminence grise of China’s revolutionaries, best known for his Three People’s Principles of nationalism, democracy and the people’s welfare, Sun Yatsen is still revered in both China and Taiwan. But at this stage he was living in exile following a botched attempt at revolution in Canton in 1895. During his exile, he spent his time promoting the cause and raising money; in 1905, he established the Revolutionary Alliance, the forerunner of the Nationalist Party (KMT). Chen Qimei and Chiang became so close that Chiang was willing to commit murder for his friend. During the 1911 Revolution, Chen Qimei commanded the Shanghai Army and occupied Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang province. Once he learned of the 1911 Revolution, Chiang rushed to Chen Qimei’s side. When one of Chen Qimei’s rivals, Tao Chenzhang, was on the verge of being appointed military governor of Zhejiang province, Chiang assassinated him to ensure that the post would fall to his blood brother.2
As a youth, Chiang was an avid reader of tales about heroic brotherhoods and sacrifices for the nation. A favourite was The History of My Heart3 by Zheng Sixiao, a calligrapher and poet who lived during the transition from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271 –1368) and was famous for refusing to have any dealings with the Mongols. The provenance of The History of My Heart, full of stories and poems about loyalty, steadfastness and sacrifice is, however, shrouded in mystery. Zheng Sixiao supposedly hid his denunciations of the Mongols in a metal box in a well in a temple, where they were discovered first at the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and then, having been lost again, once more at the end of the Qing Dynasty. While a person’s youthful reading offers no definitive window into the adult mind, Chiang often wrote about sacrifice in his diary. In 1926, for instance, he announced: ‘in ancient times, the wise and the bold sacrificed themselves for the world … we now want to realise our Nationalist ideology and achieve the independence of China. Neither fame nor death are worth worrying about.’4
Chiang lost heart after Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic, became increasingly
autocratic, suppressing all opposition in 1913. What followed were Chiang’s wilderness years, when he spent a lot of time reading, including the influential radical magazine New Youth, founded in 1915, which called for the rejection of Chinese traditional thinking and introduced all sorts of new ideas; histories of the revolutions in Germany, France and Russia; books offering explanations and translations of Marxism and Leninism; and even The Communist Manifesto.5 Chiang became a radical: ‘businessmen are even worse than politicians, soldiers, and bureaucrats,’ he wrote in his diary.6 After an attempt to establish a new school at Xikou ran into stubborn resistance from the local elites, he concluded that ‘if our country’s gentry is not destroyed, the people will not be able to enjoy one happy day in their lives’.7 Chiang also blamed ‘selfish and profiteering large shareholders’ for his failure to raise money for the Nationalists on the Shanghai stock market.8 Revolutionary blood coursed through Chiang’s veins.
Chiang also delved into the writings of Zeng Guofan, Hu Linyi and Zuo Zongtang, the Confucian generals who in the middle of the nineteenth century had mobilised their home regions to see off the Taiping rebels, the suppression of whom cost at least 20 million deaths and probably many millions more. He read Wang Yangming, the Ming Dynasty neo-Confucian who had argued that virtue was innate in all of us, rather than something that could only be acquired through years of strenuous self-cultivation and diligent study of the Confucian classics. Historian Yang Tianshi is surely right when he says that Chiang ‘read but did not internalise the new learning. When reading the ancients, though, it was as if duckling found water: he used it to define the principles by which to conduct himself and relate to other human beings, as well as a source of models for managing military forces and doing politics.’9
China at War Page 3
