On that evening Japanese soldiers knocked on the gates of the small walled garrison town of Wanping, fifteen miles southeast of Peiping. Wan-ping is near the Marco Polo Bridge, a huge structure dating back to the thirteenth century (hence its name), resting on thirty arches and embellished by 108 stone lions. The Japanese complained that they could not find one of their soldiers. When the Chinese garrison commander replied that he had no information about the man, Japanese soldiers entered the town, roaring through the streets on motorcycles, searching for the missing soldier, knocking on doors, and threatening the residents. It was 2:30 A.M. before they found him—asleep in a brothel.
Within a week Japan had moved 20,000 troops into the area, and on July 10, it attacked Wanping, meanwhile spreading a story that the townspeople had kidnapped and killed its soldier. A week later, Chiang said that the Chinese “seek peace, but… not… at any cost. We do not want war, but we may be forced to defend ourselves.” Chiang’s peace terms, sent to the Japanese government, included guarantees of Chinese territorial integrity and freedom of movement for Chinese troops in the area of the capital. The commander of the Japanese forces in north China replied that he could not tolerate Chinese troops in Peiping, and he therefore intended “to chastise the Chinese for their outrageous behavior.”
The Japanese also attacked other garrison towns. A Chinese counterattack in the coastal city of Tientsin led to a four-hour bombardment of the city in which the major target was Nankai University. The Japanese told the press that this was necessary, since the school was the home of “anti-Japanese elements.” Attacks on educational institutions had become standard Japanese procedure, undertaken in order to keep students, traditionally the front line of national pride, from organizing demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, and agitating against the invader. After the bombing, the Japanese occupied both Tientsin and Peiping. On the road to the Temple of Heaven in the capital, they ambushed a large group of Chinese soldiers, leaving some five hundred to six hundred bodies and body parts scattered on the ground. The remaining citizens of one village said that the invaders had offered to let the soldiers go if they gave up their arms, but when they did so, the Japanese had slaughtered them with machine guns and grenades. The old capital of Peiping fell about a month after the original incursion, and within four days, all Chinese soldiers had been removed from the area.
Peiping under the control of what one American general called the “arrogant little bastards” was apparently an irritation to the soul. Japanese planes buzzed the U.S. Embassy at 150 feet just “to show us what they think of us.” As reported by the Americans still remaining in the legation quarter of the city—most had been told to leave by the U.S. government—the Japanese swaggered around the streets, striking the Chinese out of their way with the butts of their rifles and calling press conferences in which they delivered statements about Japan’s “divine mission” as the leader of Asia. The Japanese also floated balloons over the capital, announcing the capture of other Chinese cities along with the astonishing information that “The Japanese army preserves the peace of East Asia.”
A week before the fall of Peiping, May-ling addressed a group of delegates from various Chinese women’s organizations. Her speech, delivered in the Nationalist capital of Nanking, was supposed to be a call for courage in the face of war, but in the light of her husband’s disinclination to fight, it sounded more like an apologia. “We Chinese women are not one whit less patriotic or less courageous or less capable of physical endurance than our sisters of other lands,” she said, urging the women to “remember always that a final national victory, no matter how belated it may be in coming, will erase forever the ‘humiliation days’ that have for so long crowded our calendar and will remove the sorrow that for years past has bent our head and bowed our hearts.”
It is at this point in the story that no less an authority than Barbara Tuchman claims that Chiang Kai-shek, officially named generalissimo by an emergency resolution of the Kuomintang in August of 1937, purposefully drew Japan into a battle over Shanghai. He did this supposedly to build up Chinese resistance to the aggressors by luring them into the heart of China, but Tuchman believed that his actions were “more likely” aimed at engaging “foreign intervention. From first to last,” she maintained, “Chiang Kai-shek had one purpose: to destroy the Communists and wait for foreign help to defeat the Japanese. He believed battle at Shanghai, the international city with its large foreign investments, would lead to mediation and possibly even intervention by Britain and the United States and other powers.”
Shanghai was certainly the biggest, richest, and most exciting city in the country. The fifth largest port on the globe, it received 51 percent of China’s foreign imports and sent out 30 percent of its exports. “Hong Kong’s views might be more magnificent, Peking’s monuments more ancient, Yokohama’s climate more salubrious, and Singapore less expensive,” said one chronicler of the city, “… but ask any Orient-bound traveler his prime destination and the answer would invariably be ‘Shanghai!’ “
Shanghai was also China in extremis—“the glitter and wealth of the upper crust, and the grinding poverty of the lower classes.” Between the British Consulate, a fortress guarded by black-bearded Sikhs at one end of the Bund, and the Shanghai Club with its stone facade and pillared doorway at the other, the international community lived “like royalty,” erecting signs in so-called public parks that said “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed.”* Foreign banks, foreign firms, foreign hotels, and all the other symbols of the lavish colonial life occupied land that cost more than the best locations on Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Élysées. Reproducing many styles of Western architecture with no particular regard for consistency, these buildings seemed to have incorporated every available historical embellishment from the cupola to the clock tower. One of the most impressive was the mammoth Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. With its huge white dome and octagonal marble entry, it was guarded on the outside by two life-size bronze male lions, which were supposed to roar if ever a local virgin passed by. There was also the old Shanghai Club, said to have the longest bar in the world and some of the most potent drinks.
Alongside the old colonial establishments were the homes and businesses of the newly rich Chinese, whom no one could outdo in architectural extravagance. Although they each owned other homes in the city, the members of the Soong family (with the exception of Ching-ling) had established a good-sized compound on Dongping Road in the French Concession. On the corner was T.V.’s French château with elaborate iron railings, a large lawn, and decorative gardens. Next to it was the guardhouse for the Chiang residence—a two-story gray stone house with red trim and a high iron grating. Not a particularly welcoming building, the Chiang home looked out on very beautiful gardens, as did the Kung house next door, a more cheerful-looking establishment with white balustrades and lots of ornamental ironwork.
While the rich Chinese and the colonials lived like kings, life among the poor still counted for very little. During 1937, 20,000 Chinese died of hunger and cold on the streets of the International Settlement (the only place anyone kept count). Immigrants from the countryside still labored under appalling working conditions, while coolies in straw sandals and pants held up with string did the lifting and hauling performed elsewhere by animals or machines. According to one authority, only 2 percent of Chinese citizens had attended high school.
Tuchman said that Chiang Kai-shek sent his best troops from Nanking down to Chapei, the Chinese industrial section of Shanghai north of the International Settlement, home of factories, cheap cabarets, brothels, and opium dens. In doing this, she said, he was deliberately challenging the enemy at a site where “any fighting would be likely to produce an incident involving foreigners or foreign property.” According to her, the “Japanese had… filled the river with their warships whose menacing naval guns were intended not to fire but to overawe.… But the challenge of the Chinese advance on Shanghai provoked… the Japanese [who] suddenly found themselves thro
wn back under ardent attack. From then on a battle of suspense and tragedy was fought out under the eyes of the foreign bystanders.” Or, as Han Suyin put it, the foreigners in Shanghai watched “with detachment the bombardment and burning of Chapei across the Soochow Creek” and held “roof parties at night for the thrill of seeing the fire sweeping through densely populated streets of the Native City.”
“Under incessant bombing,” Tuchman said, “… the Chinese held their lines for three desperate months.… At a terrible cost in casualties, greater than any since Verdun and the Somme, they [the Chinese] were kept in position… after that position was hopeless. Chiang Kai-shek had no other military plan at Shanghai than that of the death stand, but he was playing for world opinion.… The last few days of the defense… wrecked the army.… Sixty percent of the force was lost including 10 percent of the entire trained officer corps.” Aside from soldiers, another author* estimates that 450,000 citizens were killed.
According to Tuchman, the fight for Shanghai did succed in making the world “China-conscious.… Journalists flocking to the drama and richly nourished twice daily at Chinese Government press conferences reported tales of heroism, blood and suffering. China was seen as fighting democracy’s battle and personified by the steadfast Generalissimo and his marvelously attractive, American-educated wife.” But in the words of one American reporter seriously wounded in the bombing of Shanghai, “Americans speak of our ‘great sister republic’ across the Pacific… without realizing that there is not an iota of democracy in all this great land.… China is governed by super-dictator Chiang Kai-shek.… Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang are the Chinese government.… Chiang is extremely Oriental in both thought and action and… has developed a marked preference for conservatism and compromise. Madame Chiang… has supplied that quality of daring which the Generalissimo has seemed to lack.… She is easily the world’s most powerful woman.”
Although May-ling spoke to the women of Great Britain and the United States about the “wholesale slaughter of non-combatants… which can go on unchecked when an aggressive nation [i.e., Japan] decides not to declare war,” warning them that the same type of warfare “might be started in their country at any time,” Tuchman said that “the primary object of American policy in the months after the Marco Polo Bridge was to keep out of conflict with Japan.” Mindful of old Delano family connections with the China trade, President Franklin D. Roosevelt constantly tried to think up ways to stop the Japanese, but American public opinion was at that time totally isolationist. After a speech in which the president suggested a “quarantine” of the nations that were fomenting “international anarchy,” one of the rightist members of Congress suggested he be impeached. “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead,” Roosevelt told a friend, “—and find no one there.”
In the middle of the battle over Shanghai, May-ling, Donald, and an aide-de-camp were on their way to the city, planning to visit wounded soldiers en route, when their open-topped car hit something in the road, blowing out one of the rear tires and veering out of control. The car careened off the road and turned over. The aide was not hurt. Donald was thrown out and saw May-ling being hurled over his head. He found her in a ditch nearly twenty feet away. She was unconscious, and her face was covered with mud. He picked her up, and as he carried her toward a farmhouse, she began to show signs of life. In his relief, he parodied the Chinese custom of shouting loudly to frighten the devils that come to claim the lives of the dying. “Oh, she flies through the air with the greatest of ease,” he sang lustily, “this daring young girl who fights Japanese.” He took her to the farmhouse to wash her face. When she came out, she was still weak and pale but insisted on continuing their journey. Many hours later, when they arrived in Shanghai, the doctor found that she had broken a rib and confined her to the house for a week.
Since the Japanese did not yet feel strong enough to engage the armies of England, France, or the United States, most of the battle for Shanghai took place in the Chinese quarters of the city, and thousands of Chinese refugees tried to escape into the relative safety of the International Settlement via the Garden Bridge,* the only entrance left open. “How the families stick together!” commented an American, also trying to get away from the fighting. “That ancient grandmother with the bound feet and face as old as the bark of a tree was assuredly being pushed along in the wheelbarrow by her youngest son. The smallest grandchildren… were rocking along in baskets swinging at the ends of carrying poles slung over the gray-haired eldest son’s shoulders. Two generations of sons and daughters of this family were… on the run with everything they possessed.… My feet were slipping… on blood and flesh,” he continued. “Half a dozen times I knew I was walking on the bodies of children or old people sucked under by the torrent, trampled flat by countless feet.”
At the beginning of 1937, there had been around 250,000 people living in the International Settlement; after the Japanese invasion, there were possibly ten times that number. Not everyone could be accommodated in the warehouses and theaters turned into temporary shelters, and many were forced to sleep on the streets. “For endless miles, the city’s sidewalks became the bedroom of a million refugees,” said the man forced to climb over corpses at the Garden Bridge, while veteran correspondents decried the “filth, disease, hunger and madness.” According to Time, among the refugees one baby was born every minute, one person died every three minutes, and twelve mothers died in childbirth every hour.
The International Settlement also came in for a share of mayhem or, as one cool Englishman put it, “bodies and bits.” In trying to sink a Japanese ship, Chinese bombers accidentally dropped a bomb in front of the pink-and-gray-marble Cathay Hotel, another through the roof of the Palace Hotel next door, and two more at the intersection of Avenue Édouard VII and Thibet Road, where many of the refugees had gone to get handouts of rice and tea. More than 1,700 people were killed in these incidents of friendly fire, and over 1,400 were injured. It was, according to one author, “the worst civilian carnage in a single day anywhere in the world up to that moment.”
On September 12, May-ling spoke on the radio to the American people, apologizing for the inadvertent killing of foreigners and moving on to a plea for help:
You can see by what Japan is now doing in China that she is sinister, ruthless, well armed, well organized and acting on a preconceived plan. For years she has been preparing for this venal attempt to conquer China even if she has to annihilate the Chinese to do so. Curiously no other nation seems to care to stop it.… It was to avert such a catastrophe that the Great Powers signed the Nine-Power Treaty,* which was specially created to safeguard China from invasion by Japan. They signed the Kellogg Peace Pact† to prevent war, and they organized the League of Nations to make doubly certain that aggressive nations would be quickly prevented from inflicting unjustified harm upon their weaker fellows. But strange to say all these treaties appear to have crumbled to dust.…
The militarists of Japan have already shown the world their contempt for any codes of international honor.… Look at the square miles of bloodstained debris heaped with dead. Look at the fleeing thousands of Chinese and foreigners, screaming, panic-stricken, running for their lives… from the horrors of Shanghai.… Thousands of them a few days ago were crowded on the South Station to get into a train when Japanese bombers came overhead, dropped bombs upon them and blew three hundred of them to ghastly fragments.… No soldier was anywhere near the station, and there was no justification for the terrible massacre.… Perhaps you can hear over the radio the noise of the cannonade, but hidden from your hearing (though I hope ringing in your hearts) are the cries of the dying, the pain of the masses of wounded, and the tumult of the crashing buildings. And from your sight is hidden the suffering and starvation of the great army of wandering, terrified, innocent homeless ones; the falling tears of the mothers and the smoke and the flames of their burning houses.
If the pictures drawn by the gene
ralissimo’s wife were dramatic, so was her sign-off. “Good-bye, everybody,” she said as the conclusion to her speech.
By the end of the battle for Shanghai, the entire district of Chapei, formerly housing some 1 million citizens, had been set on fire—a wall of flames that extended for six miles. This was done by the Chinese themselves in accordance with Chiang’s directive to leave nothing behind that the Japanese could use. By this point in the conflict, close to 350,000 Chinese had left the city, and some 5,000 British and Americans had done the same. Shanghai’s trade had been diverted to other Chinese ports, and its silver had been sent to Hong Kong, where many rich Chinese moved during the Japanese occupation. Those who remained were required to bow to the Japanese sentries who stood at the Garden Bridge. If their bows were not sufficiently low, they risked being kicked, beaten, or thrown into the river. Even the trams that ran on the bridge had to stop while their Chinese passengers descended and paid obeisance to the conquerors.
“In this city—conquered, yet unoccupied by its conquerors—the mechanism of the old life is still ticking, but seems doomed to stop, like a watch dropped in the desert,” wrote Christopher Isherwood when he visited Shanghai the following year. “In this city the gulf between society’s two halves is too grossly wide for any bridge… we ourselves, though we wear out our shoes walking the slums… belong, unescapably, to the other world.… In our world, there are the garden-parties and the nightclubs, the hot baths and the cocktails, the singsong girls and the Ambassador’s cook. In our world, European business men write to the local newspapers, complaining that the Chinese are cruel to pigs, and saying that the refugees should be turned out of the Settlement because they are beginning to smell.”
The Last Empress Page 36
