The mausoleum was put to work, too. Before every KMT party congress, executive committee plenum, national conference organised by this or that ministry or national convention of one of the many professional associations, attendees would conduct a pilgrimage to the mausoleum. On the mornings of public holidays, Nationalist leaders conducted a public sacrifice in the sacrificial hall, laying a wreath in front of Sun’s statue after performing the proscribed ceremony.
Chen Kewen’s and Chi Pang-yuan’s Roads to Nanjing
In order to become the true capital of China, Nanjing needed to be more than a centre of government and ritual. It had to bring together a great variety of people from across the country for all kinds of activities. In the course of the 1930s, Nanjing began to evolve into such a place, attracting hordes of people attending the many meetings organised by the KMT, government ministries, the army and professional associations. Its sports stadium hosted national sports meetings. Its universities, including the new Central University which trained government personnel, its military academy and its aeronautical academy recruited students from across the country. Academia Sinica, its prestigious research institute, attracted some of China’s most famous scholars. New businesses, such as the electronics firm Panda, founded in 1936, brought in engineers, electricians and businessmen. The roads to Nanjing were many and varied, as will become clear from the circuitous trajectories by which Chen Kewen and Chi Pang-yuan, our guides to a more personal history of wartime China, ended up in the capital.
Chen Kewen was born in 1898 into a family of educators in a small village in south China’s Guangxi province at a time when village feuds racked the area. Kewen’s family had fallen on hard times after the early death of his father, leaving his mother without a stable source of income, which led to her strangling Kewen’s twin brother at birth. That twin’s existence would be remembered in the family in that Kewen would become known as Fifth Uncle rather than Fourth Uncle, while he used Number Five in his pen name. Kewen was a child of the May Fourth Movement and, like many youths energised by the movement, he joined his school mates in raids on temples to trash religious icons. At the age of sixteen, he was married to the daughter of a local landowner. Unlike others of his generation, he never rejected this arranged marriage, but he did give his wife a new name, National Resurgence. This may sound strange to Western ears, but the name would not have seemed at all odd to Kewen and his family, as personal names in Chinese are made up of regular words and in modern times have often reflected the values, aspirations and concerns of the age, as here.
The May Fourth Movement created the pathways that landed Chen in Nanjing as a Nationalist official. He attended the Great Renewal School his older brother had founded and then studied at the provincial middle school. In 1919, he passed the entrance examinations of the Guangdong Teachers University in Canton. When the Nationalists made the province their revolutionary base, Chen became an activist. After graduation, he taught at a school he founded with friends, edited the party newspaper Citizen News and became Secretary of the Farmers Department of the Central KMT Party Headquarters. Chen joined the Northern Expedition, travelling through the provinces of Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei. He worked with none other than Mao Zedong in the Peasant Movement Training Institute and helped write the ‘Draft Programme for Reform of the Land Ownership System’. Most importantly, he became a close associate of Wang Jingwei. Following Chiang Kaishek’s victory in the struggle for power between the two, Chen moved to Hong Kong, where he edited Wang Jingwei’s mouthpiece, the South China Daily, and published a translation of F. J. C. Hearnshaw’s An Outline Sketch of the Political History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, which emphasises the benefits of an elite meritocratic ruling class dedicated to maintaining peace, security and morality in a hierarchical social order.13
Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1932 prompted Chiang Kaishek and Wang Jingwei, whose prestige remained high, to work together in government again, with Chiang in charge of military affairs, which included oversight of civil affairs in the many areas where there were ongoing military operations, and Wang Jingwei heading the Executive Branch. This reconciliation enabled Chen Kewen first simply to visit Nanjing without fear of trouble, as he did in that year, and then, in 1935, to move to the capital full time, where initially he took charge of the General Office of the Executive Branch and then of a section overseeing the affairs of overseas Chinese. Although Chen Kewen suffered the loss of a child at this time, nonetheless he would appear to have entered a prosperous phase in his life. In the spring of 1936, he purchased a plot of land in the Lucerne Garden New Village in the foothills of Purple Mountain, using a loan of 6,500 yuan from the New China Trust and Savings Bank to finance the building of a new home.
Living with his wife and mother, Chen Kewen adopted a modern Chinese lifestyle. He enjoyed watering his plants, weeding his lawn, going on walks, hosting gatherings with his friends, their wives and children at his new home, and watching sunsets. He was glad, too, that he could take his mother to the Central Hospital where Western-trained doctors alleviated her arthritis and dentists cured her inflamed gums by pulling out most of her teeth. Chen enjoyed meeting the great and the good of Nanjing, including Wang Jingwei himself, of course, but also Liang Shuming, the ‘last Confucian sage’, then busy working on his rural reconstruction movement in Shandong province,14 and south China military top brass such as Generals Zhang Fakui and Yu Hanmou. Chen and his wife went to watch movies and theatre performances, including of the great Peking Opera singer Mei Lanfang. At Sun Yatsen memorial ceremonies, he listened to speeches by General Chen Cheng, then masterminding the construction of fortresses in central China; the economist Weng Wenhao, who was pioneering central planning in China; and the Confucian nationalist and Chiang confidant Dai Jitao.
Having taken the views espoused by Hearnshaw as well as the New Life Movement to heart, Chen Kewen was determined to behave as a rational, responsible, dedicated and honest civil servant. He was infuriated when he saw a woman put curlers in her hair at a meeting at the City Hall auditorium, when others were dressed slovenly, and when the proceedings were brought to a halt after twenty minutes for a group photograph. He criticised a speaker at a meeting of the Guangxi Fellows Association for being ‘immature, flippant, and exaggerated’. He criticised colleagues for being ‘absent on holiday’ and not taking their work seriously. He also worried that, at a meeting to commemorate the tenth anniversary of a new city government, he found the rosy speeches difficult to take because ‘agriculture is bankrupt and there are natural disasters everywhere’. Despite such criticism and worries, Chen Kewen’s diaries of the time reveal a man who believed that China was making a hopeful new beginning.
Chi Pang-yuan was from a younger generation. She was born in 1924 at the opposite end of China, in a village near the town of Tieling in northern Liaoning province, where winters were bitterly cold, with the temperature regularly sinking to –20 to –30 Celsius, and the summers commensurately short. A physician who saved her life after her birth, when all her family except her mother had abandoned hope, named her ‘the beauty of the country’, a learned reference to the Confucian classic The Book of Odes.
Pang-yuan’s family had risen from obscurity to become one of the most prominent households in Manchuria. Her grandfather, unwilling to look after the family’s farm, had attended the Baoding Military Academy, where Chiang Kaishek had also studied, and after his graduation had joined the Fengtian Army of General Zhang Zuolin. General Zhang did well during the 1911 Revolution and rapidly became the military strongman of Manchuria. Pang-yuan’s grandfather rose with him, becoming a brigade commander in General Zhang’s army.
Pang-yuan’s father, Chi Shiying, was a child of his time just like Chen Kewen. In an important gesture symbolic of his republican sympathies, he cut off his queue, a sign of obedience to the Qing Dynasty, soon after the 1911 Revolution. As a young child, he had travelled with his father and mother, living in the barracks to which his father was assign
ed, thus gaining a much wider knowledge of the area than most young men of his time. At the age of fifteen, he enrolled in an English missionary secondary school in Tianjin, and so became familiar with all the new Western ideas that were flooding into China at the time. He successfully competed for a government scholarship to study in Japan, where, besides learning English and German, he developed a lifelong interest in philosophy, the subject he studied at Tokyo Imperial University a year later.
After his grandmother died, the family insisted that Chi Shiying, who was by then nineteen years old, should return home to marry a local girl from a wealthy family. When he refused, an uncle was dispatched to fetch him. He agreed to return home and marry on condition that ‘there would be no kneeling and kowtowing, they would not wear red bridal clothes … he would ride a horse rather than a sedan chair, and he and his wife would go to study abroad together’. These conditions ‘were accepted, but except for allowing him to ride a horse, everything else was done in accordance with old customs’.15 Chi Shiying was only at home during the summers, spending the rest of his time abroad, leaving his wife to face the hard, lonely life of the traditional daughter-in-law, subject to her mother-in-law’s every whim and having to do myriad chores without complaint. She frequently fled to a nearby pasture to cry her heart out.
Chi Shiying moved to Germany after he completed his studies in Tokyo, study ing philosophy and sociology first at Berlin and then at Heidelberg University, where he read Karl Marx while being taught by Heinrich Rickert, a philosopher of history, and Alfred Weber, one of the founders of human geography (and Max Weber’s younger brother). Chi concluded that ‘only true understanding and rational education could begin to save backward and degenerate China’.16 Returning home in 1924, committed to promoting modern education in Manchuria, he became acquainted with a young, idealistic general in the Fengtian Army, Guo Songling. General Guo, whose thinking had been shaped by the May Fourth Movement, invited Chi Shiying to take charge of a new middle school for Fengtian Army children.
The connection to General Guo Songling changed the fate of the Chi family. In 1925, General Guo, by now convinced that civil war should stop and that General Zhang Zuolin should focus on reconstructing Manchuria, rebelled against General Zhang’s attempt to assert his influence in north China. The rebellion soon collapsed. By this time Chi Shiying was serving in General Guo’s foreign affairs office. The Chi family feared not just for Chi Shiying’s life, but also for that of his father, who was still employed in one of General Zhang’s armies. General Zhang chose to be magnanimous: ‘The father is one generation, the son another. The kid is a scoundrel, messed up by his study abroad, but his dad should be spared.’17 General Guo and his wife were captured and executed, with their bodies left to rot in a Shenyang market for three days before relatives were permitted to bury them. Chi Shiying, with six colleagues whose task it had been to rally foreign support for the uprising, found refuge in the Japanese consulate, where Consul Yoshida Shigeru refused to hand them over to Zhang’s men, treating them as political refugees. A few months later he facilitated their escape via Korea and Japan to the Japanese concession in Tianjin. Consul Yoshida will reappear in the last chapter of this book as Japan’s first post-war prime minister, agreeing a peace treaty between China and Japan.
By now well known in Manchuria, Chi Shiying was to become useful to the Nationalists, once they won him over. They courted him assiduously, ensuring that he met many prominent figures in the party, including Chiang Kaishek. Chi took his time to make up his mind, reading material published by the Communists as well as the Nationalists, but concluded that Sun Yatsen’s Three People’s Principles offered China its best hope. When Japanese forces occupied Manchuria in 1931–2, Chi agreed to take on the dangerous task of liaising with anti-Japanese resistance forces in the area and facilitating the move south of Manchurian refugees. After the Japanese routed the Manchurian resistance, Chi went back south, taking up residence in Beijing, near the action in Manchuria and in contact with the Manchurian resistance. His family, for whom staying in Manchuria was also no longer an option, joined him in Beijing. They moved house and changed their name frequently to avoid arrest, with the result that on many a morning Chi Pang-yuan asked her mother, ‘Mummy, what is my name today?’18 When life became too difficult in Beijing, they moved to Nanjing.
Chi Pang-yuan remembered the Nanjing Decade as ‘a golden decade for our country, and for my father’.19 Her family lived in safety, first in a cramped old apartment near Xuanwu Lake in the centre of Nanjing and then in a house in a new development area ‘with Nanjing highest mountain, Purple Mountain, visible from the second floor bedroom’.20 Chi Pang-yuan would look back in nostalgia to this period ‘because Mummy was no longer a fragile young woman. She and my father formed a strong bond of affection in this tumultuous period. She felt fortunate to share his many hardships. Her wholehearted acceptance of and dedication to her lot gave me a strong sense of security while I was growing up.’21 Pang-yuan’s father did make more covert trips to Manchuria but, having concluded that little good would come of them, he decided that his efforts would be better spent looking after refugee families, lobbying the Nationalists and ensuring that the youth of Manchuria would get an education.
With financial support from the Nationalists, Chi Shiying established North-east Zhongshan Schools – ‘Zhongshan’ being Sun Yatsen’s personal name as pronounced in standard Chinese when rendered in pinyin, and ‘the North-east’ being the term the Nationalists used for Manchuria, as do the Communists today. Chi first established North-east Zhongshan Schools in Beijing and elsewhere in north China, and then in Nanjing. Pang-yuan was happy at school and made friends, while her parents entertained refugees from the North-east every weekend for dinner. One of these dinners, held just after a New Year, made a deep impression on Pang-yuan. Her brother invited a friend from school, the son of the head of the Shenyang Police Department whom the Japanese had doused in petrol and burned to death in public as punishment for the help he had provided to the Manchurian resistance. The rest of the family had fled and dispersed, leaving this young man essentially an orphan. What impressed Pang-yuan was that ‘with all the dignity that an 18-year-old young man could muster to hold back his tears, he told the story of his family’s destruction in front of the warm stove in our comfortable home’.22
In 1928, enemies of the Nanjing government far outnumbered its friends. Not only were Chiang Kaishek’s warlord competitors in China’s regions hostile to Nanjing, so were others, including many public intellectuals, such as twentieth-century China’s greatest author, Lu Xun. However, especially after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, a good number of these made their peace with the new order, regarding the Nationalists as offering the best hope for resisting Japanese aggression. Nanjing also gained the not-uncritical support of substantial sections of the urban financial and entrepreneurial elites, overseas Chinese community leaders (especially in south-east Asia) and the growing professional classes of lawyers, Western-trained medical practitioners, architects, engineers and teachers. There were many ways by which people found their place in the new order. Contingency, fate, misfortune, ambition, idealism and money all played their roles.
Nanjing was a Nationalist statement of intent. The city functioned as a showcase of the New China. The ritual practices they initiated, the Sun Yatsen suits in which they dressed and the invented Chinese palace-style architecture in which they built their public buildings were indications of the New China they aspired to establish. In time such initiatives might have taken on a patina of durability, naturalness and inevitability and gained a compelling force of their own. But that point had not been reached when the War of Resistance with Japan began.
— FOUR —
TO WAR
And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in
various places.
Matthew 24:6–7
On 27 December 1936, China erupted in jubilation. Two weeks earlier Chiang Kaishek had been taken prisoner by his supposed allies in what became known as the Xi’an Incident and had been at serious risk of being put to death. But he had been released and returned safely to Nanjing. As the news of Chiang’s return spread and the implication sank in that another round of civil war had been avoided, ‘firecrackers made Shanghai like a battlefield of the Western Front. Hundreds of thousands turned out to celebrate the Generalissimo’s release. Similar demonstrations are reported from many important centres throughout the country.’1 The New York Times reporter Hallett Abend, who was no great admirer of Chiang Kaishek, reported a day later that ‘many cities are busy sweeping up the debris of the fireworks celebrations, and telegrams congratulating the generalissimo on his safety are filling all wires’. Chiang’s popularity, ‘at a low ebb eight months ago, now has risen to extraordinary heights’.2 A coup attempt can do wonders for one’s political career – if one survives.
Chiang burnished his new status with a somewhat haughty show of magnanimity, issuing a public statement that told his captors: ‘as you no longer try to make any special demands or force me to give any orders, it marks a turning point in the life of the nation … and as you both admit wrongdoing, you may remain my subordinates.’3 One of the main coup plotters, General Zhang Xueliang of the Fengtian Army, accompanied Chiang on his flight back to Nanjing. He was to spend much of the rest of his life as Chiang’s prisoner, mostly under a loose house arrest. In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, he was allowed to leave Taiwan. The plight of General Yang Hucheng, the second coup leader, was worse: he was executed in 1949, along with his wife and children, just before the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan.
China at War Page 8
