Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (32 page)

As the Japanese pushed deeper into eastern China, the American missionary Katherine Hand remained in Yizhou, in Shandong province. The Chinese soldiers had retreated hastily. Now the city was in the hands of the Japanese. “The army is passing through our city in thousands,” Hand observed. Yizhou was captured with little initial violence, but the fear of it was always there, as Hand noted on May 2, 1938:

It is most uncanny to stand guard in an empty street, with nothing to be seen but destroyed buildings, in front of the ruins of a house, the only sound odd bits of tin flapping in the breeze, knowing that there are men inside searching for grain or money in the ruins, and that any moment a band of soldiers may come up . . . We are probably safe so long as I am around with the [American] flag, but civilians have been shot without provocation in the city, and the men would not be safe for a moment without identification. We have also escorted groups of our refugees part way to places they can scatter in the country.
³²

Hand used the word “uncanny” more than once to capture what it felt like to be in a state of war but not in the midst of a battle. She was not alone. As more and more of eastern China fell under Japanese control, the region’s Chinese population waited—with a mixture of terror and resignation in the face of Japan’s seemingly inevitable victory—to discover the nature of the new regime.

The Japanese were almost as unprepared for the responsibilities of occupation as the Nationalists were for governing in retreat. The invaders had not expected the events of July 1937 to turn into an all-out war, and they had few concrete plans in place to deal with the extent of their sudden new conquests. There were precedents, however. In particular, the occupation of Manchuria in 1931–1932 had forced the Japanese to find ways to deal with the politics and economics of occupation. Their general technique had been to find collaborators, preferably people of some standing, to run local government for them. The Japanese wanted their conquests to pay for themselves, or better still, to provide revenue for Japan, but realized that in the short term they would have to spend money to restore order and gain the trust of the local population. These techniques had been easier to carry out in Manchuria, where there was little serious military resistance to occupation, in comparison to central China in 1937–1938, where the fighting had devastated the local infrastructure. Bringing order back was the best chance for the Japanese to claim legitimacy for their new regime.
³³

Strong government was necessary, yet no such government was available. The suppression of “banditry” became a common theme for the occupiers and their collaborators. This was not always simply a pretext. A middle-class Chinese Christian woman who had fled from a small village near Suzhou in January 1938 gave an account of being kidnapped by local Chinese criminals. After a month of negotiation, in which a ransom of 30,000 dollars was whittled down to 1,000, the woman and her two daughters were freed. All of the ransom demands were dealt with by the local community; there was no authority left to which they could appeal.
³⁴
Kidnapping was not uncommon before the outbreak of war, but the withdrawal of the National Government from eastern China cleared the path for banditry. As the war went on, the Japanese and local authorities would blur the issue by using the term “bandit” to refer to groups ranging from criminals simply out for ransom to anti-Japanese partisans. Chiang, of course, had done the same thing by referring to the CCP as “Communist bandits.” And it was also true that many of those who used the title “resistance fighters” were, in practice, bandits, or at any rate accustomed to living off the exploitation of the locals (although in many cases, they may have had little choice).

While banditry was more a phenomenon of rural China, criminality and disorder also reigned in the cities. In Shanghai the first Japanese-controlled government was instituted on December 5, 1937, in the part of the city that had formerly been under Nationalist control. The “Great Way government”
(Dadao zhengfu)
lasted only until April 28, 1938, but it was the first attempt in the city to provide an alternative to the now-retreated Nationalist government.
³⁵
A more ambitious replacement regime was the Reformed Government of China
(Weixin zhengfu)
. On March 28, 1938, the government was officially formed in the Great Hall of the National Government in Nanjing, and headed by Liang Hongzhi, who had been prominent in militarist politics in the 1910s and 1920s, but whose political career had been eclipsed under the Nationalists.
³⁶
Having publicly declared their status in Nanjing, the entire government got on a train and returned to the New Asia Hotel, Shanghai. From there, they ran what became known to detractors as the “Hotel government” for the next two years. (A couple of years later, the Vichy government in France would go one better, commandeering not just a hotel but an entire spa resort). Very few people in Shanghai knew anything about the shadowy leaders who came and went at the top of their government.

With the weakness of the government in the occupied parts of the city, it fell to the rich network of other social organizations that China had built up over the centuries to deal with the aftermath. One such group, the native-place association
(tongxianghui)
, was an organization with branches in many cities: members of the Wuxi native-place association who found themselves in Shanghai on business, or migrating to seek a better life, could call on local members to provide them with financial or other assistance. Another source of relief was the powerful network of religious philanthropic organizations. One of the most prominent was the Red Swastika (which, as noted earlier, had no connection to Nazism, but rather used the traditional symbol of Buddhist practice), the equivalent of the Red Cross (which also had a powerful presence in China by this stage). Their documents from Shanghai in 1938 declared that they had no interest in politics, but rather, their most important desire was to relieve suffering in the wake of the outbreak of fighting in Shanghai.
³⁷

Meanwhile, even though the foreign concessions continued to operate as oases of neutrality, the war still forced itself into their imposing buildings and spilled out onto the streets. A natural instinct was to help the thousands of refugees who had flooded into the safety of the concessions and were now the charge of the British-dominated Shanghai Municipal Council or the French Concession authorities. “Camp No. 100,” a typical temporary shelter in Shanghai, was based in an old isolation hospital that had been evacuated during the battle for Shanghai in the autumn of 1937, and held some 1,300 people. Conditions were clearly appalling: one volunteer’s task was to help prevent the spread of disease because of the close proximity of so many displaced people. Her day involved trying to sterilize milk bottles for displaced refugee children, dealing with the distribution of new clothes, and bathing the refugees themselves. “Poor things,” she observed, “they haven’t had a real bath for months and months, and incidentally, it is astonishing, considering their lack of facilities, how clean their skins look.”
³⁸

For the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) that ran the International Settlement, however, the provision of space and facilities for the refugees was a highly unwelcome task. SMC official R. C. Robertson drew up a report on September 6, 1937, noting with condescension that there was a continuing evacuation to the countryside, but that it was “chiefly the better classes of refugee who have gone, leaving a large number of refugees who are very difficult to evacuate . . . A glaring example of this is the ‘squatter’ type of Kompo low class population, who have practically commandeered the dilapidated foreign-style houses in the terrace on Sinza Road.” He went on: “These refugees are apparently self-supporting by casual labour, thieving, etc. They have no desire to be evacuated. They keep the premises in a state of filth and are a menace to public health. The only measures to deal with this group are Police measures.”
³⁹
But Robertson realized that this was not the whole story. “This influx was of refugees who had been throughout the hostilities in hiding among shell-torn ruins, and had been exposed to all the terrors of fire and war fare [
sic
],” he noted. “From the medical point of view we had thus a shell-shocked and nerve-strained addition to our refugee population.”
⁴⁰
The arrival of refugees, and the disease that they brought with them, threatened to upset Shanghai’s sense of itself as orderly, rational, and modern.

Suggestions were made for supplements to the refugee diet, including mass deliveries of cod-liver oil, but the “very large number of refugees in each camp” made this an expensive plan. The SMC also wished to encourage public donations: they did not see the provision of mass refugee welfare as part of their role.
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By April 1938 the French Concession authorities had to write to Sterling Fessenden, secretary-general of the SMC, to let him know that “since April 1, 1938, the number of persons who have arrived seeking refuge in the Settlements exceeds 150,000.”
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The French authorities suggested that no further ships be allowed to arrive in Shanghai, but the SMC police pointed out the practical difficulties in shutting down shipping to China’s largest port. The Commissioner of Public Health, however, continued to stress that “the 80,000 refugees registered in Settlement camps are a mass of rather uniformly primitive and uneducated people from the country and from the poor suburbs of Shanghai which for this reason are unable to understand and to comply with the various necessities essential for a sound and orderly community.”
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Terms such as “primitive” are revealing of the authorities’ near-panic. It seemed that events were going to spiral out of control. Shanghai’s status as an enclave of foreign privilege rested on its connection to a growing and prosperous China outside the Settlement borders, whether a weak imperial China or a Nationalist China growing in strength. But the “moonscape” of the battered Chinese city, or the refugee flight that destroyed the region’s marketing and transport networks, or the collapsing Nationalist government, spelled doom for the huge financial—and emotional—investment that the Westerners had made in Shanghai.

Nor was Shanghai the only place where the Japanese assault had created chaos. On February 12, 1939, Katharine Hand reflected on the first year in Yizhou under Japanese occupation:

The Japanese garrison is still here in the city and the guerillas [
sic
] in the country. Friction is frequent and inevitable. We never know when or where there may be a more or less serious battle. The bandits are taking advantage of the situation. The country people are in terror, frequently fleeing hither and yon. We still have so many refugees that we can’t take all the students we would like into the dormitories. The refugees are many of them city people who have absolutely no place to go. The city remains a sort of military fortress, mostly in ruins, with no local business, and few inhabitants except the soldiers. The hospital is filled almost to capacity, but few can afford to pay for their treatment. Many of the people would have starved if we had not had relief funds to give to them. Many, who were doing well before the war, are without jobs or the prospect of them . . .

What is the end and when? Would we be happy if we knew?
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When they wrote their memoirs, the outsiders who visited the Communist capital at Yan’an in Shaanxi province came back, over and over again, to the subject of food. Mealtimes were at 8:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m., and consisted of millet porridge or dried millet as a staple. In winter, there were no eggs, as it was too cold for the chickens to lay.
⁴⁵
Food was rationed carefully and there was little variation, although mothers with children were given extra meat. The privilege system by which certain people in high standing with the party got better provisions meant that there could be discrimination within families: the writer Ai Qing got the medium-quality meal, whereas his wife and child obtained only basic-level food.
⁴⁶
The meal regime was one facet of a larger way of life. Wartime Yan’an was stark and regimented, particularly for those who had accepted the discipline of the party. Even more than in Chongqing, Yan’an was the testing ground for a new social contract. The party and state promised deeper commitments to social provision, but demanded complete obedience in return.

Two years earlier, in 1935, a group of 9,000 soldiers, bedraggled and exhausted, had reached this northwestern hill town. Their arrival marked the end of the Long March, an event that would become a legend in Chinese Communist mythology. In reality, the Long March had been a retreat, a reaction to the growing strength of the Nationalist campaigns against the CCP, as well as the party leadership’s vicious infighting in Jiangxi. Yan’an became a symbol of an alternative political future for those who were increasingly angered by the dictatorial tendencies of the Nationalists. But the Communist experiment in government was in profound danger by the mid-1930s.

The threat of approaching war changed the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party. No longer a band of rebels on the run, they were now officially regarded as a junior partner in the United Front against Japan. The development of Communist political policy in the years of the war was inexorably shaped by the demands of warfare itself.