Although it is easy to lampoon the New Life Movement – as indeed it was at the time – it has had a long influence. Even today many schools and offices in China display ‘civility certificates’ in the same way that those in the West display hygiene and health and safety certifications. Today, President Xi Jinping’s administration has again imposed limits on entertainment allowances and continues to campaign against extravagance. New Life ideals have sufficiently broad appeal that their promotion bolsters the standing of those in power.
Building a national system of primary and secondary schools, as well as universities and research institutions, was a priority project. The aim was to nurture a common national identity around Sun Yatsen’s Three People’s Principles to ‘enable us to achieve national independence, the spread of citizen’s rights, and the development of the people’s welfare’.12 In December 1934, the Nationalists promulgated a programme for the gradual implementation of a four-year compulsory education system with the aim of eradicating illiteracy. Training colleges were established to train up the required teachers.13 The Nationalist government also strengthened China’s research culture. It supported the Academia Sinica, the Geological Survey, the Peiping Research Academy and the Nankai Institute of Economics, which were set up partly to increase knowledge of China within China but also to enhance China’s international academic status. One of the most astonishing achievements was the archaeological excavation of the ancient Shang capital at Nanyang, until then considered mythical, and adding half a millennium to China’s recorded history. It restored belief in the reliability of China’s own historical record.
In the decade before war broke out, the Nationalists built 6,000 kilometres of public highways, laid 3,300 kilometres of railway lines, improved ports and opened airports. Along China’s rivers and coast, steam and diesel vessels began to replace sailing boats. Bus companies provided motorised transport between cities. The Nationalists also introduced a new national currency. The economy grew at an annual rate of over 8 per cent and industry at an annual rate of 6.7 per cent, while electric power increased at an annual rate of nearly 10 per cent.14 Vast engineering projects that aimed to tame rivers, build reservoirs and generate massive quantities of hydropower were instigated. The first plans for the Three Gorges Dam were drawn up at this time.15
The Nationalists also revitalised the baojia, a traditional system by which households were grouped into a nested hierarchy of networks whose members assisted and policed each other. The policy, regarded by Chiang Kaishek as of ‘the greatest priority’, was implemented in rural areas, especially in those in which Nationalist rule had only recently been established. Officials who neglected the baojia faced stiff penalties. The aim of the system was to keep China’s farmers firmly in place in order to dampen refugee flows, draw settled societies into fighting banditry and strengthen control over predatory local officials.16 Although presented in traditional terms, this too was a ‘dual use’ project. The Minister of War, He Yingqin, noted in a report that, besides its immediate role in restoring order and disciplining local officials, the baojia was a useful tool for spreading compulsory military service.17
Not everything, of course, was about preparing China for war. Real estate developments sprang up, with Western-style houses for the rich, while factories, department stores, restaurants, cinemas, shops and the demand for hired help pulled the rural poor into the country’s burgeoning towns and cities. The number of cities with populations of more than 50,000 expanded from 140 in 1919 to 191 just before the war. The population of Shanghai reached 2.5 million, while those of Beijing, Tianjin and Wuhan grew to more than 1 million.18 This was the modern world of light, speed, clocks and movement; of the modern girl with her closely cropped hair and sporty outfits; and of self-help books for an anxious audience eager to know how to behave in this new world. Radio stations played jazz as well as Chinese music, magazines reviewed the latest European fashion trends, and journals published experimental modernist writing. The 1930s in China was part of what historian Frank Dikötter has called China’s ‘age of openness’, an openness only relative to what had gone before and would come later, but nonetheless offering genuine opportunities for debate, creativity and enterprise.19
Foreign Policy
Military strategy shaped the Nationalists’ foreign policy as much as their domestic policy. They made sure that Japan was seen as the aggressor – not a hard thing to do – and that China was perceived as an internationalist state. When Japan seized Manchuria, Nanjing appealed to the League of Nations, which in 1932 sent an investigative team, led by Victor Bulwer-Lytton of Great Britain and including representatives from the USA, France, Germany and Italy. They met both Japanese and Chinese government leaders and visited Manchuria. By this time the Japanese had already inaugurated the new Manchu puppet monarchy of Manzhouguo and flattened parts of a Chinese section of Shanghai, both as a warning to the Nationalists of worse to come if they tried to fight and as a display of strength to the many foreign countries with a presence in Shanghai. Japan also sent forces into Rehe, a Chinese Mongolian province.
The Lytton Report to the League of Nations, published in October 1932, was even-handed to a fault. It described Chinese misrule in Manchuria and stressed that Japan had legitimate treaty-based claims in the region, but also argued that the actions of Japan’s Kuantung Army could not be construed as acts of self-defence, denied that Manzhouguo had any popular support, and insisted on the withdrawal of the Kuantung Army into the South Manchurian Railway zone, as prescribed by treaty.20 Even before the report was made public, the Japanese delegation at the League, led by Ambassador Matsuoka Yosuke, walked out. In March 1933, Japan formally withdrew from the League. Japan may have gained control of Manchuria, but it was now internationally isolated, leaving the field wide open for the Nationalists. The Nationalists also learned that appealing to international institutions gained them sympathy but not concrete assistance. They would have to rely on their own military strength.
In 1934, Chiang Kaishek published anonymously an article with the title ‘Friend or Enemy?’ in Foreign Affairs, a journal of the Foreign Ministry. In it he anticipated ‘war between Japan and the USA or the USSR, or even a second world war’.21 He also warned that, although China wanted peace, war was inevitable if Japan persisted in creating ‘second and third Manchurias’ by establishing a ‘North China Country’ and a ‘Mongolian Nation’. If Japan wanted an ‘East Asia for the Asians’, its best course, Chiang advised, was to negotiate with China for the reinstatement of Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria, in return for which China would promote Japan’s readmission to the League. He argued that Japan would be unable to conquer all of China: ‘more than 100,000 Japanese troops have been unable even to establish or maintain order in so-called Manzhouguo.’22 And even if Japan seized all of China’s major cities and railway lines, that did not mean that they had won; the Nationalists would simply continue to fight from the countryside.
The Nationalists courted the USA. Many of their leaders, although not Chiang, had been educated there and greatly admired the country, especially its anti-colonialism. In 1933 Song Ziwen, Chiang’s brother-in-law, who served as China’s Finance Minister until October 1933, went to the US. Here he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other political leaders, and in his public speeches stressed US–China friendship and cooperation. With the USA mired in depression and American isolationism intensifying, Song took to the airwaves. He mentioned that after the American Revolution, trade with China had been important to the US economy. He praised the USA for not being an imperialist country and, at a gala dinner also attended by the bestselling Pearl Buck, he refuted ‘the assertion that Japan had to intervene in north China because there was no central and authoritative government there’.23 Song secured a US$50 million loan for the purchase of wheat and corn on the open market to reduce shortages in China.
After finishing his meetings in the USA, Song Ziwen moved on to London, whe
re he attended the World Economic Conference. Here, Song stressed that China did not ‘exclude Western cooperation in the name of “Asia for the Asiatics”’ and rejected ‘national or regional isolation’; instead ‘we welcome Western capital and skill. We desire to maintain a fiscal policy which will not prevent entry of foreign goods.’24 Song made no concrete gains from his visit to the UK, seeing his proposals for a new banking consortium as well as for a loan from the British government rejected, but two years later the Treasury despatched Frederick Leith-Ross to assist the Nationalists with currency reforms and draw China into a sterling area. Nationalist diplomacy aimed to make clear to potential allies that China was a reasonable and internationalist country which welcomed trade and investment, while Japan was bent on kicking Western countries out of east Asia.
If the Nationalists received sympathy from the UK and the USA – but little else – until well after Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union, threatened directly by Japan in Manchuria, would provide critical aid in the first two years of the War of Resistance. The cooperation between the Soviets and the Nationalists was purely pragmatic. The Nationalists had thrown Soviet advisors out of China during the Northern Expedition and executed thousands of Communists. Even so, after Japan’s capture of Manchuria, Japan was a common threat. The two sides initiated secret negotiations in Geneva to restore diplomatic relations. In December 1932, Yan Huiqing, the Nationalist negotiator, and Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet negotiator, exchanged public diplomatic notes to announce that diplomatic relations had been resumed. But Chiang wanted an alliance, and sent the diplomatic historian Jiang Tingfu to Moscow to begin discussions to that end. Jiang was profoundly suspicious of Soviet intentions, fearing – rightly – that their policy aimed to entrap Japan in China, but he was also convinced that China needed Soviet aid and that national interest rather than ideology should determine foreign policy. His diplomatic views were shaped by his belief that the Qing Dynasty’s less-than-adroit policy towards Britain had been a cause of the First Opium War. Appointed ambassador in August 1936, Jiang Tingfu masterminded negotiations that led a year later to a treaty of non-aggression, under which the Soviets delivered a vast amount of military aid once war broke out and extended China a credit line worth US$100 million.25
In the half decade between Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and the beginning of large-scale fighting in 1937, the Nationalists followed a coherent policy of preparing their country for confrontation with Japan. They extended Nanjing’s authority into provinces that had been virtually independent in 1932; they started building up an elite military force; they improved the economy year on year; and the New Life Movement began to instil a new sense of national identity and prepare the population for the sacrifices to come. They worked hard to position China as a peace-loving internationalist country.
Worldwide, China enjoyed a new respect. The Times of London published a positive article about ‘progress in China’ after Frederick Maze, the head of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, gave a speech about railway construction, road building, irrigation projects and social and public works.26 An exhibition of Chinese art organised a year later by the Royal Academy of Arts in London attracted over 400,000 visitors. In the US, newspapers reported on the resumption of international debt payments, the creation of a direct telephone link between the USA and China, and the high number of aeroplane exports to China. The Washington Post cheered a radio address by Song Meiling, Chiang Kaishek’s wife (‘China’s Wellesley-educated “First Lady”’), which was broadcast around the world. Madame Chiang announced that ‘China’s “warlord” era, with its attendant civil strife, is nearing an end because public opinion opposes those who want to settle differences by the sword.’27 The New China was beginning to command international attention.
Nonetheless, many problems remained, especially in the countryside, where only a minority of the population prospered from the Nationalists’ nation-building. While the cities had their shanty towns, rural societies remained desperately poor. China’s rural crisis, economists now argue, appears to have become acute in the course of the 1920s, when, estimates suggest, the country’s food supply fell short of demand by 5 per cent. This only deepened in the 1930s, as the effects of the worldwide depression set in, warfare continued after the Northern Expedition, and extra local tax levies and rent-seeking by landlords depressed rural incomes still further. Widespread opium cultivation also reduced the production of food crops. The 1933 diary of a research team investigating conditions in the countryside makes for shocking reading:
Shijiamo has irrigated land; the water comes from a small river. When drought occurs, the stream dries up, and the irrigated land becomes dry land. Opium is cultivated on this irrigated land, and the county administration taxes this land. In March of this year the peasants had to eat grass and bark … Death from starvation, death from sickness, flight, selling oneself into bondage are common occurrences.
Xiaotang village is much poorer than other villages. The peasants in this village starved to death in the autumn of 1928 … The gates of the county seat are closed to prevent the peasants from entering.28
Drought struck north China in 1928–9. The Sino-Western Relief Organisation reported 20 million casualties, including 6 million deaths, and the Chinese press reported instances of cannibalism. In 1930, the Yellow river burst its dikes in Shandong province, and 1931 saw severe floodings of the Yellow, Yangzi and Pearl rivers, leading to a death toll of 2 million people. The Shandong typhoon of 1935 killed around 50,000 people and may have destroyed 2 million homes.29 In 1926, Walter Mallory, the Secretary of the China International Famine Relief Commission, wrote his famous book China: Land of Famine. In the foreword, President John Finley of the American Geographical Society noted that, although ‘every inch of soil is in cultivation, carefully manured, well and professionally tilled’, nonetheless ‘nearly a fourth of the people of the globe live in a land of famine’.30 Rural conditions did not improve in the following years. In 1931, Pearl Buck published her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth, which tells the story of a rural family who, despite working hard, fail to beat the drought and famine.
The Nationalists developed several programmes to deal with the crisis. The baojia system was one. They also supported – or at least did not stand in the way of – local initiatives, such as the rural reconstruction efforts in Shandong province of Liang Shuming, memorably called the ‘last Confucian’, and at Ding county in Henan province by Princeton-educated Jimmy Yen, who had worked for the YMCA.31 Both stressed local self-reliance and combined literacy campaigns, collaboration among farmers, health and hygiene improvements and technical advances, such as better-quality seeds, with political measures on security and rent reduction. The Nationalists promulgated laws to reduce rent and taxes and facilitated the purchase of land by those who worked on it. Rural cooperative societies provided credit and fostered the sharing of scarce resources such as tools. Refugees were resettled on fallow land. Perhaps in part because of these developments, but also because of improved climatic conditions and a decrease in warfare, from the mid-1930s rural conditions improved. In 1936, the harvest was up by 45 per cent compared to the average of the three years before.32
Nonetheless, the success of these efforts was limited. In 1937, large famines were reported in the provinces of Henan and Sichuan. The New York Times revealed that in Sichuan ‘near famine conditions existed in wide areas of this province with 55,000,000 inhabitants’, with ‘two hundred persons dying from starvation daily in Chungking [Chongqing]’.33 The China International Relief Committee reported that ‘2,000,000 residents of Western Honan have been stricken by a famine that has created 3,000 square miles of silence’.34 Smuggling had become such an art that customs officers in Tianjin were issued with gas masks because smugglers used ‘gas bombs to render them unconscious’.35 Day-to-day conditions in China were improving but the country remained ill-prepared to face the might of a modern industrialised army.
— THREE —
NANJING, NANJING
During that year Nanjing underwent startling expansion. The city government encouraged people to build new, modern, custom-designed houses in the remote northern section of the city. Just a few years before, the Drum Tower, which now rests in the centre of the city, had been one of the northernmost points in the city.
Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2004)1
Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists chose as their capital Nanjing, a city in Jiangsu province on the Yangzi river some 300 kilometres to the west of Shanghai. They had good practical reasons for doing this, including the fact that their power did not extend much beyond the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. They also had good reasons not to choose other cities. Beijing was dangerously close to Manchuria, which was virtually independent and where Japanese influence was strong. Beijing had also been the home of, first, the Mongols, and then the Manchus – alien invaders. One strike against Canton was that Hong Kong, the British colony, was nearby. Also, although Sun Yatsen had made the province his base, the tax hikes the Nationalists had implemented there to finance the Northern Expedition and their suppression of a series of local rebellions had left a lasting legacy of resentment. The Northern Expedition was as much an effort to escape Cantonese hostility as to reunify China; virtually throughout the entire decade before the War of Resistance a rival Nationalist faction governed Guangdong province.
China at War Page 6
