China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  It had been first enacted in Shanghai. As Hallett Abend reported on 9 November 1937, when the Nationalists withdrew, ‘the Chinese set fire to the large Japanese-owned Toyoda cotton mills … several factories, scores of houses, and two large coal yards were set ablaze’.93 The next day ‘civilian refugees … with fires at their backs set by retreating troops, stormed the bridges and river bank of the French Concession in search of safety’.94 ‘Foreign military observers,’ according to Abend, ‘are amazed by the extent of the Chinese destruction of everything within the zones they still control. Most of this destruction is said to be purposeless.’95 At the same time that Shanghai was being set ablaze, in Qingdao, the port city in Shandong province, ‘Chinese military mobs … destroyed during the past 24 hours a large part of the Japanese mill area of this great German-built port city.’96

  The policy was not only applied to cities. A December 1937 battle plan formulated by the Military Affairs Committee ordered that ‘roads in each war zone must be immediately destroyed (up to 30 kilometres from front lines and 100 from rear areas) to slow the enemy’ and ‘all walls surrounding cities and towns must be dismantled. They are no use in resisting the enemy, while the enemy might use them to resist our attacks.’97 It is not clear to what extent this part of the policy was implemented.

  During the Battle of Xuzhou, Chinese defenders burned the provincial capital of Shandong, Ji’nan, to the ground. When the Japanese finally entered Xuzhou itself, they found a flattened city, where ‘two tremendous fires, apparently started in munitions storehouses, blotted the city out from the air under a blanket of smoke and shot flames hundreds of metres in the air’.98 Zhengzhou, to the west of Xuzhou, was also razed.99

  The Yellow river carries the nickname ‘China’s sorrow’. For vast stretches, the riverbed runs well above the surrounding countryside, with the result that devastating floods occur if its dikes are not maintained. Following the Battle of Xuzhou, Japanese forces pursued retreating Chinese units, prompting Chiang Kaishek to unleash the Yellow river against them. The logic was as impeccable as it was merciless. As one local commander wrote in a message to Chiang:

  Xuzhou has fallen and the enemy’s main force has gone deep into eastern Henan and western Shandong. Unless we break the cauldrons and sink the ships to show our determination, the Central Plain cannot be defended. We intend to divert the Yellow River’s waters to submerge the enemy. It is clearly well known that the sacrifice will be heavy, but with the urgent need to save the nation the pain must be endured.100

  This commander would not have written in such a way unless he knew that Chiang agreed.

  Chiang Kaishek’s order to break the Yellow river dikes was all the more tragic because it was based on a fear of what the Japanese might do next rather than what they actually did.101 Chiang anticipated that after the capture of the railway junction at Zhengzhou, the Japanese armies would use the Beijing– Wuhan railway to attack Wuhan before the Nationalist retreat into Sichuan province was complete. However, both the General Staff in Tokyo, the Japanese Central China Area Army at Xuzhou and the local commanders had issued orders to these forward units to halt their advance. The historian Ma Zhonglian, a researcher with the Chinese Military History Museum, concludes from his review of the evidence that ‘Japanese forces stopped their westward advance of their own volition. There is no evidence to show that breaking the dikes at Huayuankou caused them to halt their advance.’102

  The floodwaters advanced at an average rate of 16 kilometres per day, inundating everything in their way.103 The Yellow river changed its course, no longer flowing north-east to Shandong province, but south-west, overflowing into vast stretches of productive agricultural land in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, before adding its waters to the Huai river and the great lakes of north Jiangsu. The best estimate is that 800,000 people, who were given no warning, were killed outright and 4 million became refugees.104 The floods wrecked the harvest of that year and many subsequent years. Their impact was long- lasting because they deposited large quantities of silt over the area and because emergency dikes thrown up across the region further disturbed an already fragile drainage system. The degradation of the environment, the destruction of farming communities and the weakening of human bodies contributed to the great Henan Famine of 1942 and 1943, when perhaps as many as 2 million people starved to death and another 2–3 million became refugees.105 The dike at Huayuankou was not repaired until 1947, as a project of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.

  Wuhan, too, suffered much damage. When the Japanese marched into the city through its Baoyang Gate, according to the Washington Post, ‘near panic prevailed because “destruction units” had begun dynamiting strategic buildings’.106 The next day ‘explosions still rocked the three Wuhan cities … and flames stabbed the sky as unchecked fires spread a trail of ruin and ashes for the invader to seize.’107 Chiang Kaishek regretted that the destruction had not been more thorough. The local commander, he moaned, ‘had retreated early without authorisation so that not all plans were implemented’.108

  The city of Changsha was not so lucky. After the Battle for Wuhan, the Nationalists thought that the Japanese’s next target would be Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. According to the recollection of General Zhang Zhizhong, the provincial chairman, he received a message from Chiang Kaishek on 12 November stating that ‘if Changsha falls to the enemy, the city must be destroyed. Make all necessary preparations beforehand.’109 Together with local security forces, Zhang Zhizhong organised a hundred teams equipped with kerosene and firewood and instructed them to set the city ablaze if the alarm was given. That happened, it appears, as a result of a false report that the Japanese had crossed a nearby river. They had not, but 10,000 people died as a result and a further 300,000 became homeless following the Great Fire of Changsha.110 Once again no public warning was issued.

  Hallett Abend visited Canton in the spring of 1939. This metropolis of 1.5 million people, once full of noise, light, and life, had, he said, become ‘a dead city’. Less than half a million people remained, mostly as employees of the Japanese. True, the Japanese had hit the city hard, bombing it from the air, as Abend had seen for himself when he visited it the year before. But ‘The greatest havoc and loss, fully ten times that occasioned by Japanese aerial raids,’ he concluded from his 1939 visit, ‘was caused by the Chinese dynamiting and setting fire to the city at the time of evacuation.’111

  The crisis, so Chiang Kaishek appears to have thought, justified extreme measures. For a country facing an overwhelmingly superior enemy, a scorched earth policy was one of the few genuinely effective methods of resistance. In war, the most horrible things might need to be done, as General William Sherman insisted when during the US Civil War he made the south feel ‘the hard hand of war’ by leaving a trail of destruction, an ocean of chimneyvilles, in his wake. Yet General Sun Yuanliang, who had been the commander of the 88th Division at Shanghai which had led the attack on the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces, had a point when, in his retirement in Taiwan, he told an interviewer:

  When we implemented the scorched earth policy in the beginning of the War of Resistance, we encouraged the population to move inland and disperse. But we did not make any appropriate arrangements for our loyal compat-riots, we extended no helping hand to refugees with no place to go; we just let them scatter like rats, to survive or die. This probably was the beginning of us losing the trust of the people in the mainland.112

  That was said with the benefit of hindsight. The historian Wang Qisheng has argued that, while a good deal of support existed for a settlement with Japan after the Battles of Shanghai and Nanjing, a year later, after the fall of Wuhan and Canton, that was no longer true. The great liberal intellectual Hu Shi, for one, stated that ‘in 1937, peace was possible at any time, but this is no longer the case. Then to advocate war was damaging to our country. But to surrender now would be much worse.’113 The enormous sacrifices may in reality have had a somewhat paradox
ical effect, on the one hand strengthening the national will to resist Japan come what may, but also undermining the legitimacy of the Nationalists.

  Another historian, Lei Haizong, believed that China had entered a new, inspiring epoch. Having been educated at Qinghua and Chicago universities, Lei had taught at Central University in Nanjing and had moved inland with the Nationalists, first to Wuhan and then to Kunming in south-west China, where he spent the war teaching at Southwest Associated University. He had become famous before the war for a series of articles, written in an accessible no-holds-barred style, in which he excoriated his colleagues for shoehorning Chinese history into a Western scheme of periodisation, with a classical, medieval and modern period. Instead, he argued, China was a civilisation that, uniquely, had gone through two cycles of growth and decline, the first ending in the fourth century ad and the second in his own time. If the influx of talent and energy from south China at the end of the first cycle had enabled that second flowering of Chinese civilisation, Lei’s depressing conclusion was that his own day was one of fatal decline. But in December 1938 Lei Haizong wrote another essay, entitled ‘National Reconstruction: Anticipating a Third Cycle’.114 The strength of China’s resistance, he now argued, showed that he had overlooked something important: China’s vitality.

  Lei concluded from China’s refusal to give up and to keep fighting that it would revive once more, not quickly, but in a process that would take decades, perhaps centuries.115 He urged all to embrace this unique historical moment: no matter how much suffering there would be, and no matter how much pain the war was bound to cause, ‘to resist the enemy and revive the country’, and so speed up China’s third revival, constituted ‘an unprecedented privilege’.116 ‘We now often talk about living in “momentous times”,’ he noted, ‘this is its real meaning.’117 Not everybody agreed, as shown by Wang Jingwei’s departure from Chongjing, which I will return to later. But the failure of his peace campaign to gain broad traction suggests that Lei’s judgement, that these were ‘momentous times’, had become broadly shared. There was a widespread determination to resist Japan.

  That does not mean, though, that Sun Yuanling did not have a point. Morale on the Nationalist side collapsed quickly and comprehensively when the Nationalists went on the offensive against the Communists after 1945. Conditions then were of course different, but the sacrifices that people had been asked to make and, especially, the little that the Nationalists had been able to do to support those affected by the war may well have been remembered, and fuelled the forces of disenchantment with their cause.

  Flight

  Japanese ground offensives, the scorched earth policy and bombing explain why the first two years of the war saw the greatest number of refugees.118 For some, their refugee existence was short: they moved out of the way as the Japanese tsunamied their way through their neighbourhoods and then returned. For others, becoming a refugee was traumatic, but often involved leaving the towns and cities in which they had been working to return to the places where they had grown up and where their families offered support. This was the case for Chen Kewen’s family. His position meant that duty required him to stay with the government. Before leaving Nanjing, he sent his mother, wife and children back to his home province of Guangxi. Immediately upon his arrival in Wuhan, he was able to call his wife Zhenjie, who assured him that all were safe.119 For others, flight meant exhaustion, fear, hunger and death.

  So it was for Chi Pang-yuan. In the middle of October, Pang-yuan’s family, including her ill mother, were evacuated from Nanjing, together with more than 1,000 students from her father’s Sun Yatsen High School. They travelled in groups, first by train to either Wuhu or Anqing (75 and over 200 kilo metres respectively up the Yangzi from Nanjing) and then by ship to Wuhan. Pang-yuan’s father, Chi Shiying, had secured a hundred rifles; older students were trained in their use in order to protect the groups as they made their way inland.

  Refugee life was a crowded experience. Even the roof of the train in which Pang-yuan travelled was packed with people. ‘When we went through a tunnel, someone on the roof shouted, “People have been swiped off, they have been swiped off!” but no one in the carriage helped them.’120 Because of the Japanese bombing, travel on the Yangzi was dangerous. Pang-yuan boarded her ship in the dark of night at a dock where all lights had been extinguished. As crowds fought to get on board, people fell in the water and drowned. When the ship pulled away, people continued to try to climb on board. ‘The cries for help of those fallen in the water, the screaming of the drowning, the shouting by those on board for their sons and daughters in that dangerous and terrifying night mixed with the cries of those knocked from the roof of my train carriage during the day has stuck with me throughout my life.’121 Pang-yuan’s ship only sailed at night. During the day it moored under overhanging branches of trees along the shore to hide from Japanese aircraft.

  Pang-yuan’s mother was already ill when she left Nanjing and her condition deteriorated during the voyage. Upon their arrival in Wuhan, she was rushed to a hospital run by the Catholic Church. Pang-yuan’s sister, still breastfeeding, had also fallen ill and was diagnosed with acute gastroenteritis. She did not recover. After doctors told her uncle that there was little hope, either, for Pang-yuan’s mother, he bought one small coffin, made a reservation for an adult one and purchased mourning clothes for Pang-yuan and her brother. But her mother did pull through. Her father arrived in Wuhan on 7 December, having stayed in Nanjing with Chiang Kaishek until Chiang’s departure. He was thin, filthy and exhausted. ‘Truly, the country is wrecked and the people are ruined,’ Pang-yuan recollected her father having said when they met up in Wuhan.122

  When Zhang Dafei, the young man whose father had been the Shenyang police chief and who the Chi family had taken under its wings, heard that Pang-yuan’s mother was critically ill, he rushed to the hospital. There he gave Pang-yuan a Bible and told her that he had joined the Chinese air force, telling her that, despite his pacifist instincts, it was his duty to fight Japanese brutality.123 He too had concluded that these were momentous times during which the Japanese evil had to be fought.

  When the Nationalists ordered Wuhan’s evacuation, Pang-yuan’s father arranged for his students and family to move to a large memorial hall in Yongfeng, a remote town 500 kilometres away in Hunan province. This time the group had to walk, although they had one car which carried Pang-yuan’s mother and two other women. Along the way, the students slept in the class rooms or on the sport fields of local schools, with local military forces providing their meals and bedding. As they travelled, they sang ‘At the Songhua River’, whose first line runs ‘My home is at the Songhua in the Northeast’124 and concludes with ‘September 18, September 18, since that miserable day/I’ve left my homeland, discarded the endless treasure/roam, roam the whole day I roam inside the Great Wall/When can I go home?’125 ‘September 18’ refers to the date in 1931 on which the Japanese began their occupation of Manchuria. In Wuhan, Pang-yuan’s father had told her mother that he had found a safe home for their baby daughter; only now was she told the truth. Pang-yuan, her family and the students stayed at Yongfeng until October 1938. Although the local dialect was strange to her, the beauty of the town’s lush, hilly surroundings, the warmth of its climate and the fecundity of the local agriculture made a deep impression on Pang-yuan.126

  In October 1938, the Sun Yatsen High School once again had to pack up, first moving to Guilin, a city in north-east Guangxi province by now jam-packed with refugees, where Pang-yuan attended a local school for about a month. During air raids, its population scattered to the countryside, where Pang-yuan witnessed the downing of a Japanese aeroplane, welcomed with applause by the spectators.127 Soon, though, they were on the move again, this time all the way to Chongqing, travelling some 600 kilometres, once again largely on foot,128 though Pang-yuan rode on a luggage car, tied to cases stuffed with textbooks, chemistry sets and other school equipment to prevent her from falling off.129 Having made th
eir way through narrow mountain passes alongside throngs of other people making their escape, Pang-yuan and her companions arrived in Sichuan a whole year after they had set off from Nanjing. While Pang-yuan attended the famous Nankai Middle School, which had moved from Tianjin to Chongqing, the Sun Yatsen High School was accommodated at the Jingning Temple in central Sichuan.

  For Pang-yuan, the journey was an education in itself, during which she came to admire the great beauty of south China’s countryside but also saw much suffering. What impressed her most was the dedication of her teachers, who travelled with their students – children still – from Manchuria, for whose survival they were responsible. They taught classes wherever and whenever there was an opportunity: ‘I came to feel that they represented the hopes and faith of China’s intellectuals.’130 By this she meant Chinese civilisation and its values, which her teachers saw it as their task to embody and transmit, especially in such troubled times. ‘Besides their classes, they passed on devotion and love, especially self-respect and self-belief.’131

  By the end of 1938, Japan and China had both run out of stamina. The Japanese had incurred huge losses, spent a vast amount of money, called up reservists and put their country on a war footing.132 But the Nationalists had not caved in, although they now faced the gargantuan task of bringing order to the areas they had occupied. Despite enormous sacrifices, the Nationalists had been compelled to retreat all the way to south-west China, many of their strongest forces had lost their combat-worthiness, government offices and armies were scattered all around, and millions of people had to be found a place to live and work. Both sides needed a period to regroup and decide what to do next.