China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (13 page)

When air raid warnings sounded during the day, Gellhorn noted, people just left, because there were no bomb shelters in the city and no protection in the buildings. “They take to the hills and watch the Japanese bombers working over their empty city.”

When the Chinese
didn’t fulfill the prediction of the Japanese commanders that they would quickly surrender, Japan found itself in the kind of quagmire that later became familiar to the United States in
Korea and Vietnam, locked into a conflict that couldn’t be decisively won but from which it seemed impossible to withdraw. By the end of 1938, after a year and a half of warfare on a vast scale, the Japanese gave up on the idea of a quick victory, or, indeed, on a purely military victory at all. Rather than seek the annihilation of the KMT, they tried to make the Chinese government irrelevant by building up an alternative. They found a compliant former leader of the left wing of the Kuomintang named
Wang Jingwei (a name that has lived in universal infamy in China ever since) to head a puppet government installed in Nanjing.

Meanwhile,
Chiang Kai-shek moved the government inland beyond the forbidding gorges of the Yangzi River to
Chungking, formerly a sleepy, backward city of cliffs and hills. A long period of stalemate ensued, though it was a very sanguinary stalemate.
One historian of the period has determined that in the year and a half before December 1942, casualties were nearly 50,000 per month, which are 10,000 fewer than those incurred between the battle of Shanghai and the fall of Wuhan in 1937. According to the Nationalists, there were nine major and 496 minor battles in this period, as well as more than 20,000 smaller clashes.

The year 1940 was an especially bad one. In the winter of 1939, the Nationalists had attempted a general counteroffensive with as many as eighty divisions involved in a nationwide series of attacks. While this took place, the Communists expanded the areas under their control and recruited new troops, both at the cost of KMT strength. But Chiang’s troops, to his bitter disappointment, performed badly, their commanders frequently refusing to follow orders to go on the offensive, instead settling down into
a treasonous sort of modus vivendi, more often trading with the enemy than fighting it.

From the failure of the winter offensive of 1940 to the recapture of the Burma Road at the beginning of 1945, the KMT never attempted another major offensive. Instead it reverted to Chiang’s preferred “defense in depth,” hoping that the enemy would exhaust itself through overextension until, finally, a counterattack was feasible. Meanwhile, in 1940, the Japanese advancing down the coast of China toward Vietnam took Guangxi province, tying down more Chinese troops and causing
numerous casualties. There were political setbacks as well as military ones. Previously, when the Soviet Union signed its notorious non-aggression
pact with the Axis, it freed
Japanese troops in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia to concentrate on China. In July 1940, the British, submitting to a Japanese demand, stopped supplies from coming to China through either Hong Kong or Burma. The French, now under the collaborationist Vichy regime, allowed a Japanese military mission to Hanoi. The bridges on the Hanoi-to-Yunnan railroad were destroyed. Even before Japan’s actual seizure of Burma, the blockade was virtually complete.

The situation, in other words, a full year before the entry of the United States into the war, was calamitous.
By 1940, the Japanese had 1,000 first-line aircraft in China, compared to about 150 second-rate planes for China, which lost both its main flying school and aircraft factory in the conquest by Japan of Hangzhou and Nanchang. All Chinese planes defending Chungking were destroyed months after the Nationalists moved the capital there, and cities including Chengdu, Xian, Changsha, and even Lanzhou, at the gates of Central Asia, were subjected to frequent air assaults. Between May and September 1940, during the supposed stalemate,
the Japanese flew 5,000 sorties and dropped 27,000 bombs on Chinese population centers, this despite often effective harassment by Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Finally, the Japanese seized the Yangzi River port of Yichang, the gateway to Sichuan province, and a junction for railroad lines going further west. This gave the Japanese a base for its bombing campaigns as well as control of the rice-basket territory of Hubei province.

Though the absolute number of Japanese troops in occupied China seems high, they were actually spread thin in so vast a territory. Japanese policy was to control strategic points, especially along China’s railroads, and to set up local administrations by inducing local Chinese to collaborate with them. This made them susceptible to enemy infiltration, resistance, and guerrilla action, in central and south China, by armed bands under Nationalist control and more famously in the north by forces belonging to the Communist Eighth Route and Fourth Route armies. Years after the war, Japanese veterans testified that starting in 1942, in an attempt to cope with this difficult situation, Japan carried out what came in China to be termed the “
Three Alls” policy—kill all, burn all, loot all—which meant savage reprisals against villages for harboring guerrillas and against any individuals suspected of opposing
Japanese rule. Japanese scholars have estimated that 2.7 million Chinese were killed as a result of that policy.
Herbert Bix, Emperor Hirohito’s most recognized American biographer, concludes that the atrocities carried out as a result of the Three Alls policy were “
incomparably more destructive and of far longer duration than either the army’s chemical and biological warfare or the ‘rape of Nanking’ ” in 1938.

Life was deformed in numerous ways by the war, twisted into strange, unrecognizable shapes, as the Chinese people, like people in occupied Europe, coped in their numerous, various ways. Some became collaborators, or were able to exploit the situation to their economic advantage. Others became martyrs. Thousands of youths from urban areas were drawn to the Communists’ headquarters at Yenan, believing that to be the center of real patriotic activity. Millions fled their homes and remained refugees for years. The withdrawal of the central government from big cities like Shanghai left a vacuum to be filled by secret societies, criminal gangs, and black-marketers. “
There was nothing they would not do and no evil they would not commit,” a Shanghai resident wrote to what was left of the municipal government, “with the result that good people vanished without a trace and bandits arose in great number, committing murders and rapes every day.”

“
During the resistance,” a Shanghai doctor named
Chen Cunren wrote in a memoir, “those who suffered suffered all the more; those who were enriched made their fortunes in strange and inexplicable ways.” The interactions of collaborationists, patriots, and the vast majority simply trying to survive created pungent tales of helplessness, exploitation, and revenge. In Hong Kong, seized from British control by Japan in 1941,
a Chinese policeman named Tse, a squat, fat man who had expropriated the house of an Englishman languishing in an enemy detention camp, formed a partnership with a Japanese gendarme named Nakajima. They arrested Hong Kong Chinese on trumped-up charges and released them on payment of ransom by their families. Naturally, Tse was a feared man in Hong Kong. In one incident, a man of mixed Portuguese-Chinese background,
Dominic Alves, disappeared into a private jail maintained by Tse in Kowloon, possibly because Dominic had once bested Tse in a real estate deal. But this story had a fairly happy ending. Dominic’s Chinese-Portuguese wife, Miriam, went to the Japanese authorities in Kowloon, where she filed a complaint against both Tse and Nakajima. She was supported by a Japanese colonial official who actually took seriously Japan’s claim to have invaded and
occupied most of the rest of Asia to liberate the continent from western imperialism and bring about better lives for its people. Miriam’s effort brought both a reward and punishment. She was given eight lashes for her temerity in going to the Kowloon gendarmerie. But her husband was released and Tse disappeared.

In some areas that had been the scenes of vicious early fighting but had long been part of the puppet state set up by Japan in 1938, a kind of collaborationist decadence coexisted with extreme poverty and desperation. The historian
Frederic Wakeman describes a fancy mansion on the Rue Dupleix in the French Concession of Shanghai “
frequented by movie starlets, opera divas, and café society social butterflies” whose cars could be seen parked on the roadway outside. The place was owned by one
Pan Sanxing, who had a monopoly on passenger steamers plying the Yangzi River from Shanghai to Hankou about two hundred miles to the west. He maintained Chinese, Japanese, and western kitchens, and the best of Shanghai’s prostitutes “ready to be fondled by Japanese officers tipsy after two or three drinks of expensive foreign liquor and looking forward to opium-drugged orgies in the tatami-floor rooms … where they were free to stay until dawn.” This “collaborationist highlife” included a creative entrepreneurship that exploited shortages and desperation. Dr. Chen writes about a black market in antibiotics, a dose of which could cost as much as a villa, operated by underground gangs that sent runners to Indochina to collect them. Among the best-known of Shanghai’s doctors was
Ding Huikang, a specialist in tuberculosis who found a clever and profitable way to overcome a shortage of the x-ray film normally used to diagnose the disease.
Ding used just one machine, without film. A patient would stand in front of it for a minute while a technician examined the live reflection. The technician would stamp an impression of the patient’s lung on his palm with a red circle designating where he thought he had seen a tubercular spot. Then Dr. Ding used a long, thick needle to inject air into the infected spot. He also employed antibiotics for those wealthy patients who could afford them. Ding used the fortune he made during the war to buy rare Chinese antiques and entice women, especially actresses.

But most life under the Japanese occupation was not the high life. By 1945, thanks to the scarcity resulting from the years of conflict, the Japanese had imposed a strict regime of rationing on both the cities and the countryside; in Shanghai, for example,
electricity use was restricted to the point that most families had only enough power to burn a fifteen-
watt lightbulb for a few minutes a day. And, needless to say, there was censorship of all anti-
Japanese sentiment. On the day after
Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over the foreign settlements that had been established in Shanghai a century earlier and where Chinese sovereignty did not apply, and immediately ordered the burning of all newspapers, journals, and books that dealt with contemporary history. There were bonfires in front of every lane. Orders went out for every household to turn in its radios, and all men between eighteen and thirty years of age were required to join local neighborhood vigilance committees and to be part of eight-hour shifts of block-to-block surveillance. watt lightbulb for a few minutes a day. And, needless to say, there was censorship of all anti-Japanese sentiment. On the day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took over the foreign settlements that had been established in Shanghai a century earlier and where Chinese sovereignty did not apply, and immediately ordered the burning of all newspapers, journals, and books that dealt with contemporary history. There were bonfires in front of every lane. Orders went out for every household to turn in its radios, and all men between eighteen and thirty years of age were required to join local neighborhood vigilance committees and to be part of eight-hour shifts of block-to-block surveillance.
Torture of opponents was practiced at police headquarters, and included spraying water in the nose, pulling out fingernails, and something called the sesame roll, where a victim was stuffed into a tightly knotted hemp sack and kicked back and forth.