After she graduated in 1947, Pang-yuan travelled to Beijing to stay with her mother, who had set up the new family home there. Accompanying Pang-yuan on the ship taking her down the Yangzi river on the first leg of the journey were ‘nearly a hundred young boys – fresh army recruits – tied together to the railing’. They appeared to be extremely thirsty, but when Pang-yuan sneaked them some water ‘an officer … asked us not to give them water to maintain military discipline’.17
At the end of the summer, Chi Pang-yuan moved to Taiwan. She had applied for a position at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department of Central University in Nanjing, but, like most universities, it hired only its own graduates. A friend of the family who was an academic suggested that she should try applying to the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of Taiwan University. ‘They have nothing, just two Japanese professors awaiting repatriation.’ Others counselled against the move because of the February 28 Incident of 1947 – an uprising against the Nationalists resulting from the deep anger felt by the Taiwanese towards the Nationalist occupation of the island.
Most Taiwanese did not share the Nationalists’ hostility towards the Japanese, as Taiwan had prospered under the Japanese occupation. Inevitably they were angered when the Nationalists not only took the most important government posts for themselves, but also requisitioned many buildings and residences, ousted Taiwanese from their positions in government sugar, tobacco and tea monopolies, and seized their businesses. Inflation skyrocketed when the Nationalists drained commodities from Taiwan in order to support the war effort on the mainland. Living standards for the Taiwanese plummeted while Nationalist officials lived it up and Nationalist businessmen made huge profits. When a tobacco monopoly enforcement team mistreated a pedlar of contraband cigarettes, Taiwan erupted, with protesters – some of whom wore Japanese uniforms – attacking police buildings, occupying radio stations and trying to seize military installations. The crackdown, conducted by troops shipped in for the purpose, left thousands dead, including many members of Taiwanese elite families. Despite these events, Chi Pang-yuan decided to try her luck in Taiwan. ‘All of China is in a political maelstrom. Either you are left or right, with not even a small hole for an ostrich in which to stick its head.’18
By 1947 Chen Kewen, too, was looking to the future with foreboding. His career went from triumph to triumph, but many Nationalist officials were losing heart. ‘When senior officials meet,’ he wrote in his diary on 21 February 1947, ‘the first thing they say is “What do we do?” The value of gold and dollars is rising so fast, the markets are in such disarray. How are millions of soldiers and teachers, plus hundreds of thousands of students, to survive?’19 Chen was put in charge of implementing a rationing system for civil servants, but it failed. ‘Prices have gone through the roof, rice riots are taking place everywhere, and people are panicking,’ he reflected. For wont of a better idea, the decision was made to double the salaries of civil servants in the full knowledge that this would only worsen inflation: ‘this is like drinking poison to quench a thirst.’20 Chen Kewen had enjoyed being in Nanjing before the war. Now ‘every day all that I hear and see, both about public and private affairs, causes me to despair. Nothing gives me a sense of satisfaction. I groan in my sleep.’21
Chen Kewen did, however, derive a quiet sense of dignity from visiting Chen Bijun, the widow of Wang Jingwei and the torch-bearer of the doomed peace movement. The Superior Court of Jiangsu province had found her guilty of collaboration in April 1946. At her trial she had been defiant, arguing that she and her husband had helped many people in occupied areas and calling those who had fled the real cowards. In a statement that elicited applause from the audience, she charged those who were now back in power in Nanjing with selling out the country to the Americans and running a regime of astounding corruption and incompetence.22 In jail, however, bravado gave way to despair. Chen Bijun became addicted to daily injections of an expensive tranquilising drug. After her death in 1959, the Communists allowed a relative from Hong Kong to collect her ashes. They were scattered over the waves of the Pacific Ocean from the southern edge of Hong Kong Island, the thought being that, Wang Jingwei’s remains having floated down the Yangzi into the Pacific, this famously devoted couple might be reunited in death.23
One movie released in 1947 caught the public mood perfectly. A Spring River Flows East told the story of a poor young couple driven apart by the war against Japan, with the husband rising from poverty to wealth in Chongqing while his wife slaves away in a Shanghai refugee camp to earn enough money to feed their one child. After the war, the husband returnes to Shanghai with a new wife plus a mistress. His first wife drowns herself after she discovers the truth at a party at which she is a servant and he a guest. The title of the film references a famous tenth-century lament by Emperor Li Yu, the third and last ruler of the Southern Tang Dynasty, a leftover of one of the most glorious eras of Chinese history. The two most famous lines of Li Yu’s poem read ‘You ask how large my sorrow is/Like a river in spring flowing east’.24 Spring River was a hit, watched by millions of people, many of whom will readily have associated their own times with those of the Southern Tang.
Relief and Rehabilitation
The Nationalists’ demise was partly the result of circumstance, of decisions by others over which they had no control, and of developments that took everyone by surprise. Things might have turned out differently had the Soviets not seized Manchuria in the last week of the War of Resistance, had Japan surrendered earlier, had the Americans and the Soviets found a way to collaborate, or had the world economy revived more quickly. In history, nothing is ever really inevitable; chance and contingency play critical parts.
Even so, deep-seated structural problems existed. One was the lack of a sound fiscal basis. Before 1937, the Nationalists depended on revenue derived from international commerce, excises on alcohol and tobacco, and taxes levied on industry and on the salt trade. The war destroyed that financial foundation. It also destroyed the monetary system, in part because the Japanese military and the Wang Jingwei government had issued their own currencies, but also because the Nationalists had relied on printing money to fund the very large armies they believed they needed. Nothing is quite as effective in bringing out the worst in people as the debilitation of the monetary system.
Another serious issue was that the Nationalists were made up of a small elite with no deep tradition of government and without extensive social networks, especially in the countryside but also among elites outside their core region of the lower Yangzi provinces. Even so, they were internally divided, as the frequent rebellions against Chiang Kaishek’s rule in the 1930s demonstrated. The War of Resistance had added new enmities to old grievances, including a deep resentment between those who had gone with the Nationalists to Chongqing and those who had stayed behind. This riven elite not only faced the task of re-establishing Nationalist rule in its core region and reviving its economy, but also of incorporating Manchuria, which had been part of their world for just a few years and then only nominally, as well as Taiwan and Tibet, which had never even been that. Nor were the Nationalists only intent on recovering their pre-war position. They were determined to push ahead with the project of building their version of a New China.
As the history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) in China shows, just restoring China to a minimal level of functionality was a gargantuan task, let alone achieving the Nationalists’ more ambitious aims. In 1943, the Allies, well aware that the destruction caused by the war was already so deep that many countries would need help getting back on their feet, established the UNRRA. Its purpose was to ‘plan, coordinate, administer, or arrange … the relief of victims of war in any area under the control of any of the United Nations through the provision of food, fuel, clothing, and other basic necessities’.25 The United Nations in this case referred not to the UN as we now know it, which did not yet exist, but to the forty-four countries that made up the Allie
s.
Organisationally the UNRRA reflected President Roosevelt’s vision of a new world order. Its main business was carried out by a central council made up of representatives of the USA, the Soviet Union, the UK and China. The Allies met twice a year for a general meeting to frame policy. To respect national sovereignty, the UNRRA would deliver supplies to the country of destination, where that country’s partner agency – in the case of China, the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Agency – would take over. With 70 per cent of its funding provided by the USA and many Americans serving in its programmes, the UNRRA was both an expression of American generosity and an exemplar of a new ‘can do’ form of humanitarianism. But it was only given a year and a half to complete its mission. This timescale was put in place to reassure the US Congress that a cap existed on the financial commitment it was making but also reflected a determination not to have any country become dependent on foreign aid, a state of affairs that could easily slide into colonialism, which President Roosevelt was determined to avoid.
In the first half of 1944, a UNRRA mission visited China to draw up an estimate of the country’s relief and rehabilitation needs in ‘health, social welfare, displaced persons, transport, Yellow River flood control, food, clothing, agriculture, industry, and shelter’.26 The mission’s September 1944 report held that China required ‘ten million tons of relief and rehabilitation supplies at an estimated cost of US$ 2.5 billion’. The priority was feeding ‘seven million people on the point of starvation and another 33 million on a diet barely above starvation’.27 The commission proposed that the UNRRA pay for slightly under US$ 1 billion of this amount, with China to supply the remainder. The final agreed allocation for relief and rehabilitation in China was US$ 518 million, making China the largest recipient of UNRRA assistance in absolute terms, if rather less in relative ones. Poland received US$ 477 million and Italy received US$ 418 million.28
The China Office files of the UNRRA make for grim reading. They are important because they give insight into conditions in urban and rural China at the conclusion of the War of Resistance from a politically neutral source. The UNRRA’s Tianjin office reported in early 1946 that in Hebei province ‘large scale starvation’ could be prevented only if hundreds of thousands of tons of grains were imported.29 Japan’s collapse had brought with it the disintegration of the grain supply network on which the province, a chronic food deficit area, depended. ‘Before the war this deficiency was made up by large scale flour imports from the US and Australia.’ The Japanese had switched to sourcing grain from Manchuria, north Jiangsu and Shandong, but ‘the Japanese food control and collection system broke down completely during late summer and early fall’. The continuing violence in the province made the situation worse: ‘livestock [is] being taken by warlord armies’ and ‘passing troops’ helped themselves.
Guangxi province in south China had a population of around 15 million people. A UNRRA report estimated that 5,000 of the 24,000 or so villages in the province had been ‘almost completely destroyed’, agricultural production had fallen by 50 per cent and ‘4 large cement plants, several sugar refineries, an established tung-oil industry, and various tanneries and other industrial developments’ were in ruins. The province’s transport network was unusable: ‘over 1,000 kilometres of main highway are practically impassable’ and ‘the lack of normal dredging and maintenance during the war years’ was making ‘transportation by river extremely limited, difficult, uncertain, and slow’.30
So it went on. In Jiangsu province, one of the wealthiest in China, the grain shortage from the beginning of April to the end of July 1946 was estimated at 404,700 tons of rice.31 The problem was made worse by refugees from Commun ist areas. ‘The total number is variously estimated at one to three million, with up to one fourth of them crowded in makeshift camps.’32 The annual surplus production of rice in neighbouring Jiangxi province normally reached 1.3 million tons. The UNRRA Jiangxi regional office estimated that the 1946 crop would not be sufficient to feed the province’s population of 13.5 million people, let alone to export grain to other regions. Land was lying idle because of a severe shortage of oxen, used in rice paddy fields for ploughing.33
The UNRRA estimated that China had lost 24 per cent of its oxen, 30 per cent of its donkeys, 22 per cent of its sheep and 33 per cent of its pigs.34
The UNRRA did much good. In China, the food, clothing and shelter it provided to refugees as they made their long and arduous journey back home along a chain of 50 principal, 100 secondary and 350 support stations were very welcome. The seed, fertiliser, drought animals, pesticides and tractors distributed to rural China helped many areas restart agricultural production. Without the food the UNRRA distributed to large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan and Canton, their populations would have starved very quickly. Its most eye-catching achievement was the re-diversion of the Yellow river back to its pre-1938 course. Just closing the breach at Huayuankou involved the mobilisation of 50,000 workers and consumed ‘1,000 pine pilings and 800,000 board-feet of lumber from Oregon, 2,300 rolls (300 tons) of iron wire mesh, and 43 tons of steel cable’.35 According to the US engineer who oversaw the project, the re-diversion would ‘increase the world’s food supply by an estimated two million tons annually through the rehabilitation of nearly two million acres of good farmland’.36
Nonetheless, the UNRRA’s impact in China was limited. Transport was the key problem. By December 1945, 200,000 tons of supplies were stacked high on the Shanghai docks with nowhere to go. The ‘the take-away capacity of vessels still plying the Yangtze River was limited to 10,000 tons a month’, as one analysis commented.37 The railways could not take up the slack because ‘Chinese dismantled or destroyed railroads in many areas as they retreated [at the beginning of the war] … [at the end] bridges, shops, locomotives and rolling stock were chief targets for US air forces’.38 Dorothy Borg, later a leading historian of American–Asian relations but then a Far Eastern Survey correspondent, reached the depressing conclusion that ‘China could not absorb a large amount of economic aid’.39
Money was another issue – not just the total amount that was available, but the politics of its allocation. The Nationalists promised the CNRRA the equivalent of US$ 105 million per year. But Song Ziwen, who was premier at the time, feared that the CNRRA was ‘building up to become the biggest single economic force in post-war China’ and would undermine his domination of China’s economic affairs.40 The CNRRA was a subordinate organisation of the Executive Yuan, of which Song as premier was in charge. He starved it of funding until he had established full control of it.
The UNRRA’s record in China shows just how difficult the clean-up after the War of Resistance was. The same was true in Europe. After a few days of carnivalesque celebrations following the end of the Second World War, Europe’s people had to come to terms with a reality that was grim, and would remain so for years. In France average daily rations after the war were just 1,000 calories.41 The situation was similar or worse in most other places. Diseases associated with malnutrition ripped through the weakened populations. Waves of ethnic cleansing crashed through Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere.42 Political violence in France and Italy and outright civil war in Greece and Yugoslavia meant that the savagery did not stop once the politicians declared that peace had returned. Recovery in Europe began in earnest only after 1948, in no small measure due to the US$ 5 billion pumped into the European economies by the Marshall Plan.
The lesson to draw from the devestated condition of post-war China is not that the Nationalists were irredeemably venal and corrupt, even if that was often true, but that industrialised war leaves behind it a wreckage from which recovery is difficult, takes time and is costly. For Clausewitz, the transition to peace was not much of an issue. That is unsurprising, given that in most wars before the twentieth century, normality returned after negotiations that followed a battlefield clash led to the payment of an indemnity, the adjustment of a border or the reali
gnment of a succession. The destruction of total war is too deep and too widespread for that; in the same way that military histories should look at the transition to peace, so should military planning. If Clause-witz needs updating, it is not just by including naval and economic warfare (a point that is often made), but also by including transitions to peace, which is as much a military as a political issue.
A Cold War Kiss of Death
Japan’s surrender was celebrated around the world, of course. Japan’s collapse, however, left a booby-trapped peace in its wake. In east, south-east and south Asia – descriptors that only then gained some meaning – a return to the status quo ante was impossible. Where France, Britain and the Netherlands attempted to re-assert their pre-war positions in the region, the outcome was violent processes of decolonisation. In China, having signed new treaties with the USA and the UK on the basis of equality, a return to a situation in which foreign powers had a large say in Chinese affairs was impossible. Popular national independence movements, based in the countryside and armed during the war, strove to overthrow old elites with close connections to Western powers, not just in China but also in French Indochina and across south-east Asia. Adding yet deeper complexities to these new instabilities was the drift towards competition between the USA and the USSR. In China, these developments came together in a toxic mix in Manchuria, the Balkans of east Asia. Developments there would shape the post-war order fundamentally.
The historian Melvyn Leffler characterises the US policy in east Asia at the end of the war against Japan as driven by the concern that the Soviets ‘would ensconce themselves in Manchuria, northern China, and Korea, integrate the resources of this region with the Soviet Far East, and establish a power complex in East Asia that resembled in its force and threat the one that the Japanese had created’.43 Increasingly concerned about Soviet behaviour in eastern Europe, even before the end of the war with Japan the Americans had tried to keep them out of east Asia. President Truman approved the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to shorten the war and so save American lives, but also in the hope that Japan’s surrender would take place before Soviet armed forces entered Korea and Manchuria. However, the Soviets had their own fears, including a revival of Japanese militarism and concern about the Americans’ ultimate objectives. The Soviet Red Army entered Korea and Manchuria in the last week of the war, drew Outer Mongolia into its orbit and sought to build up its influence in Xinjiang.
China at War Page 33
