Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (30 page)

A cartoon depicting Wang Jingwei on the date of his inauguration as president of the collaborationist government, March 30, 1940. Wang is portrayed as a giant radiating light to his grateful people at the moment when Chinese resistance seemed most futile.

PART III

RESISTING ALONE

Chapter 10

“A Sort of Wartime Normal”

T
HE THREE YEARS BETWEEN
the fall of Wuhan in late 1938 and Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 may at first glance give the appearance of a stalemate in the history of the Sino-Japanese War. It is true that the three major parties settled in for a long war, a strategy acknowledged by both Chiang and Mao. But there was nothing calm or stable about China’s situation during those three years. For a start, China had to fight practically alone without any assurance that help from the outside world would be forthcoming. It took massive military commitments on all sides to maintain a division of China among the Nationalists in the south and center, the Communists in the north, and the Japanese in the east. The nature of the war changed from offensive to defensive. The dramatic battles of the first year of the war were fewer in number: instead, China’s fate became tied up with shifting alliances, diplomatic intrigues, and social change that would permanently alter the country’s course. Central to those changes were new ideas of social provision. Traditionally, the Chinese state had taken little responsibility for the direct day-to-day welfare of its inhabitants. Now, the circumstances of war forced the new regimes into competition with each other. Nationalists and Communists would strive to demonstrate that as the state demanded more of its people, so they should demand more of their government. Meanwhile, the regimes under Japanese occupation would show that the new masters would have to confront many of the same old problems.

The people looked first to Chiang Kai-shek’s new capital, Chongqing. As millions of refugees fled west, the city became a microcosm of the nation itself.
¹
“I had been to Chongqing seven years previously,” Du Zhongyuan reflected. “It was an utterly feudal place full of opium and gambling.” So he was impressed at the transformation. “The roads have been newly repaired,” he noted, “the face of the city has changed, and government agencies have filled up the town.”
²
Many of the “downriver people” who had come from prosperous eastern China were disparaging of what they saw as a backward and filthy place. The writer Lao She recalled the experience of smoking local cigarettes made with inferior tobacco:

The first puff gave off yellow exhalation—I thought that it was a firework! But I didn’t hear an explosion, so I kept smoking. After four or five exhalations, I saw mosquitoes fleeing, so I was very happy. Smokable
and
drives away insects—truly valuable!

But over the course of the war years, representatives of every province found themselves forced to work and live alongside each other. The very location of Chongqing itself was also important in changing China’s sense of its own geography. For years, the west of the country, particularly Sichuan province, had been at the outer edge of what was considered to be China, and had never been properly under Nationalist control. Now it was the center of government operations while the eastern heartland was under occupation. Rather as the invasion of another borderland region, Manchuria, in 1931, had helped to stimulate a much stronger sense of centralizing nationalism, the forced move west turned the government’s mind to solidifying unification with areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, both of which had edged out of Chinese influence because of the weakness of the republican governments.
³
Anthropologists at the universities in the Nationalist areas began to study the peoples of the western borderlands, bringing them (at least ideologically) into the wider embrace of Chinese nationalism.
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Moving the entire government 1500 kilometers up the Yangtze River helped to consolidate ideas of a united China that spanned the whole of the country’s landmass.

It was not just the Chinese themselves who now looked at the wartime capital as a beacon of resistance. Theodore White, who would become one of Chiang’s most trenchant critics in the last days of the war, noted of “Chungking” that it was a “moment in time,” when people fought to “hold the land” through a belief in “China’s greatness.”
⁵
The English-language magazine
China at War
, managed by the shrewd head of Nationalist propaganda, Hollington K. Tong, told tales for a neutral American public of brave Chinese fighter pilots seeking to land on Chongqing’s precarious Shanhuba airfield, a sandbar exposed only at high tide. (These magazines anticipated a very similar effort by British propagandists to tell tales of London during the Blitz in an effort to persuade isolationist Americans to enter the war.) The selling of the resistance was evident in the name given to the provinces of western and central China that Chiang ruled from Chongqing: “Free China.” This was a geographical designation primarily for foreign consumption.

Although within China and in the outside world Chongqing was painted as a fierce center of resistance, roaring defiance at the Japanese invaders from the top of the cliffs that sat above the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers, the reality was rather less impressive. The city was ill-equipped for the massive refugee flight and quickly became dotted with different types of temporary housing. Some were structures made of bamboo poles tied together with steel wire, around which wooden boards were placed. Mud and clay were slathered on the outside, and a thin roof of tiles or straw covered the top. Another type was made of clay, with up to three layers of wooden boards. The famed literary critic Hu Feng (who would later be the victim of one of Mao’s most vicious campaigns in the 1950s) lived in one of the latter, which proved little protection when an air raid punched a hole in the top, nearly killing him.
⁶

Such hastily built dwellings were hardly a surprise in a desperately poor city suddenly thrust into national and international prominence. Chongqing’s population had soared as refugees poured into Free China: a city of nearly 474,000 people in 1937 had expanded to over 700,000 by 1941 and would rise to some 1.05 million by the end of the war.
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Sichuan province served as a major base for the government’s plans for resistance and reconstruction, and its population (at its highest point in 1944) was some 47.5 million people.
⁸

The newcomers were not used to their new conditions of life. Many were from the emergent middle class that had been growing up in China’s cities in the republican era, and were used to a higher standard of living than they could find in war-torn Chongqing. Drinking water was often scarce: citizens would sometimes have to travel several miles to find spring water, and during droughts, particularly during Sichuan’s scorching summer, there would be lines. Even when water was available, it was often highly polluted, needing chemical treatment. For dwellings that were not on the electricity grid, there was no household power, and therefore no light at night. Instead, people would put out plates of oil with wicks in them, perhaps adding a wick or two when the children were doing their homework.
⁹

Still, the city’s transformation was remarkable. The other great wartime capitals all had decades of experience as seats of government, as well as a long-standing cadre of trained politicians and bureaucrats; Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo were cities used to the pressures of ruling. Chongqing was not even the capital of Sichuan, the province where it was located. (The provincial seat of government was in Chengdu, some 160 miles away to the northwest.)

Because of its mountain topography, Chongqing is enveloped in fog for most of the autumn and winter, a deterrent for any enemy aircraft seeking to raid the capital. The lack of reliable power supplies also meant that there were few bright lights to attract the attention of visitors from above. But spring brought with it warmer weather and an end to the protective mist. The city then became a clear target.

Many aspects of life in the city were beyond the Nationalist government’s control, and none more so than the terrifying new reality of constant bombings. In the winter of 1938 there were a few “trial raids” on the city. The attacks began in earnest from the spring of 1939, and it was the destruction that rained down on May 3 and 4 that year that really marked the arrival of a new campaign of terror. Yet the “great raids”
(da hongzha)
that had so cruelly marked the twentieth anniversary of the nationalist May Fourth demonstrations were just the start of a stream of destruction from the sky that would be part of everyday existence for years to come.

A new communal space entered Chinese consciousness: the air-raid shelter. For many, everyday routine had to be reshaped around the need to run suddenly for protection. “Your everyday plans were decided by the weather,” remembered one inhabitant of the city. “If you needed to travel a long way, then you’d choose a cloudy day. If it was a clear day, you would get up early before it got light.” People became used to carrying air-raid emergency packs: they might contain food, water, and perhaps essential medicines. Richer families might store their valuables in such a way that they could be moved quickly. For the shelter itself, some people had chairs and stools ready so they would not have to spend long hours standing.
¹⁰

Like so much else in wartime China, the rhetoric of shared distress concealed the reality of class differences. Richer or better-connected citizens of Chongqing had access to better shelters. Government officials were given special access to reserved shelters, and were given certificates that allowed them to take their immediate families also. For those who could afford true luxury, at some 2,000 yuan a year, there were top-of-the-line shelters. For most, however, there were basic shelters carved out of the rock cliffs.
¹¹

The raids happened in spring and the height of the summer, when the city was at its hottest, with temperatures reaching more than 40 degrees Celsius. In the shelters, as the Chongqingers awaited the raids, the atmosphere was stifling, and people brought hand fans to keep themselves cool. When the bombers were still miles away, people chatted away normally, and children called out to their parents. Some of the more casual even put their chairs out to sit at the shelter entrance, waiting in the cooler air until the police forced them inside.

Then the planes came. People felt “a very strange wind” which foreshadowed the impact to come: after the bombs were released from the aircraft’s fuselage, they created an airstream that would force its way into every empty space. People had to be very careful: if they were unprepared, the force of the pressure could throw them violently against the wall of the shelter. “Then,” recalled one local, “you’d hear a noise . . . like the sky and the earth being smashed, like thunder on your head.” Sometimes an enemy aircraft would be shot down; if it was, then the silence in the shelters could be broken by cheering and clapping. The whole experience made the population intensely fatigued. Day after day waiting for the air-raid sirens, and then the all-clear signal, meant disruption to patterns of work and family life. As the May 1939 raids showed, even if the all-clear had sounded, another raid might be imminent, and people became used to the idea of settling down in the hot, dark shelters for days at a time. Their emergency kits and toilet arrangements would last for a couple of days, but after that, they were at the mercy of enterprising vendors who were willing to brave the raids to sell overpriced essentials to the families trapped in stifling, lightless conditions. Emerging after five or six days in the shelter was a painful process for some, as their eyes simply were not used to the bright sunshine.
¹²
The authorities tried to reshape regulations to accommodate the new realities. On days when the all-clear was sounded after midnight, workers’ hours were reduced for the next day. Some shops which sold essential goods were ordered to stay open, and were given government subsidies for doing so.
¹³
“For months,” wrote Theodore White in
Time
, “Chungking merchants have done their business late in the afternoon, opening shop at 4 p.m., in order to limit the danger from air raids.” Adjusting to the possibility of sudden peril from the sky, he wrote, had become “a sort of wartime normal.”
¹⁴