Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (46 page)

Zhang Zonglu was one of those who saw the result. In 1942 Zhang was head of Henan’s construction ministry. He was one of the new generation of foreign-educated technocratic Chinese on whom the Nationalist government had pinned its hopes for development during the Nanjing decade, and had graduated from the University of Missouri and Columbia University. His career advanced rapidly and he served a term as the president of Henan University. But his international education and experience in the Nationalist hierarchy had done little to prepare him for the trials that his province would face in wartime.

Zhang later reflected that a variety of factors had come together early in that year to produce terrible results. Much of the province had been invaded and occupied by the Japanese during the Battle of Southern Henan in early 1941.
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In the spring of 1942 there had been no rain, and the harvest that season produced only some 10 to 20 percent of the normal yield. “After the harvest, people were very uneasy and panicked, so they hoped for the autumn harvest,” recalled Zhang. “But there was no rain all summer, and the early autumn crop all died.” Even places that could escape the drought because they had wells were not immune, because “locusts came and ate everything.”
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The problem was not lack of food, but the lack of a system to bring the food where it was needed. There was grain in the neighboring provinces of Shaanxi and Hubei, but the authorities there refused to transport it to Henan. This was not pure selfishness. Now that the grain tax was being imposed in kind, huge amounts of grain were being levied or confiscated to feed the armies, and a provincial authority had no interest in selling its precious grain for increasingly worthless government currency. Chiang did announce a reduction of the grain quota for Henan, but in practice the head of the Henan grain administration collected even more than the quota demanded.
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Venal officials were making a natural disaster into a man-made one as famine began to sweep across Henan.

In the summer of 1942 the Chongqing government sent out officials to see the situation in the countryside for themselves, and also to check that the grain tax was being collected. Zhang Zonglu was one of those sent out as an inspector. The head of Gongyang county, Zuo Zongnian, was in tears as he told Zhang that he could not manage to complete the grain collection. In Zheng county, county head Lu Yan told Zhang about a family named Li who gave their last grain to the tax collectors, then all killed themselves by jumping in the river. “Then he began to weep,” Zhang added, “lost his voice, knelt down and knocked his head on the ground, and begged for exemption from the grain tax.” The more Zhang saw, the worse it was:

During our trip, starving people were digging up grass roots, taking leaves, and stripping bark from the trees. Going south from Zhengzhou, an unceasing stream of refugees begging for food was so misery-inducing that you couldn’t bear to look.
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These scenes took place very early in the famine, just after the main autumn harvest had failed. There was worse yet to come. As he journeyed on, Zhang saw desperation at every turn. Just outside Fangcheng, there was a market for people to sell themselves. Zhang saw a married couple whose only hope of survival was to sell off the wife. When they had to part, the wife called out, “My trousers are better than yours, you take mine.” Hearing this, the husband cried out “I can’t sell you—let’s die together.”

For many, the only other answer was flight:

Wherever I went, there were refugees fleeing south, begging for food and those who couldn’t move any more just dropped dead by the side of the road. You could exchange a child for a few steamed rolls. When I went to Luoyang, all around the station there were refugees, groaning and crying—hearing them was unbearable. If a train came, they would fight to get on it, hanging from the roof—they didn’t care how dangerous it was. Those who couldn’t get on the train . . . wept and sold their children—no matter what the price, they just handed them over. When the train went west, when it entered a tunnel, because the people on the roof were piled up, countless numbers of them were crushed against the roof of the tunnel, and fell down dead.
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The historian Liu Zhenyun’s father was one of those who fled the famine in 1942. Liu’s uncle carried the children in baskets along the road, while Liu’s father pushed a cart with all their possessions. But on arrival at Luoyang, as he exited a rice kitchen run by Catholic nuns, Liu’s father was seized for the army. Liu’s parents had no idea what had happened to him after that: “They thought I’d been kidnapped. The next time I saw them was several years later.” His parents then joined the hundreds riding on train roofs. A cousin made it too, but Liu’s little sister did not. She was never seen again.
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Zhang Zonglu mentioned that he had heard that villages beyond his tour of inspection had become so desperate that people had turned to cannibalism. Li Shu also encountered a man who had been imprisoned for eating and trafficking in human flesh.
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These acts were rarely reported, so great was the taboo on this ultimate transgression, and accounts may have been exaggerated in some cases. Yet over time evidence did emerge of the lengths that people went to during the famine. Early in China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, during the interrogation of three locals in Duanzhang, a small village in Henan province, a man named Wang Jiu, described as short and with protruding eyes, confessed to an act that had taken place in the winter of 1942, “during the great famine disaster.” An old refugee who had turned to beggary lived in a broken-down house at the east end of the village. Wang Jiu, with two friends, killed the old man, cooked his flesh, and ate it. They then started to lure travelers in and killed and ate them one by one. Then they committed an act that surpassed even their previous crimes. A woman aged over forty, who had a little girl with her aged seven or eight, was staying overnight at Wang’s house. With no other travelers to be found, Wang and his friends strangled the woman and her daughter. Wang had to be questioned repeatedly before he would describe how the victims had been eaten. Eventually he confessed: the others had eviscerated and eaten the mother; Wang himself took the girl home and ate her.
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The war was destroying the very fabric of humanity.

Over and over again incompetence and corruption were revealed as the prime causes of the famine. Li Shu exposed the case of an official who had been in charge of the granary in Shijiudian village in Runan county. The county had a grain storage system that was supposed to operate in times of famine, and the stores had not been touched since the outbreak of war in 1937. Now, in a time of need, the granary was opened, as it was supposed to have sufficient resources to support some 15,000 people. But local officials had never actually stored the grain, instead using it to make private deals.
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Restaurants did still operate in cities within the famine zone, including in Luoyang and Zhengzhou, but only those with money could afford them.

The major newspaper
Da gongbao
had sent correspondents to cover the famine. It published a report in February 1943 which gave frank details of the disaster, and led to the paper being banned from publication for three days.
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Fewer constraints operated on Theodore White, although his reports from China were toned down by order of Henry Luce, owner of
Time
magazine, who wanted to maintain the good image that Chiang Kai-shek enjoyed in the United States. However, the anger in White’s report of March 22, 1943, blazed through even the editing at
Time
. All of the horrors noted by Chinese observers were seen by White too: “dogs eating human bodies by the roads, peasants seeking dead human flesh under the cover of darkness, endless deserted villages, beggars swarming at every city gate, babies abandoned to cry and die on every highway.” Among the sights White saw were of a refugee whose leg had been cut off by a train; crowds of supplicants begging foreign missionaries for food; and a woman on trial for eating her baby, who gave as her defense the claim that the child had died first. White reported the conjunction of events that had caused the famine: the demand for grain to feed the armies and civilian officials, along with the delay in supplying food to the famine areas, exacerbated by the appalling state of the roads that made it even harder to provide the grain needed. White was not permitted to make direct criticisms of Chiang, but he made his view clear. “Most terrible of all is the knowledge that the famine might have been averted,” he wrote. In the final words of his dispatch, he described the feast that local officials had offered him at the end of his two-week journey, with delicacies including chicken, beef, water chestnut, bean curd, and “three cakes with sugar frosting.”
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White’s disputes with Luce ultimately led him to resign from
Time
. In the book he published after the end of the war,
Thunder out of China
, White could make his indictment of Chiang clear. White described the horror that famine had wrought in one of his most memorable images: “A girl no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay upon the damp earth, her lips blue with death.” White again recounted his journey through Henan, complete with callous officials and starving peasants, and concluded, “We knew that there was a fury, as cold and relentless as death itself, in the bosom of the peasants of Honan [Henan].”
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At the time he published this, he knew what he could not have known for certain in 1943: that within a year the peasants would have their revenge on the state that had extorted so much from them, and whose negligence had led to the deaths of some 4 million people.

One official above all seemed to take little account of the unfolding catastrophe. People said at the time that there were four disasters, recalled Zhang Zonglu: “flood, drought, locusts, and Tang Enbo.” General Tang Enbo, who had played such an important role at the Battle of Taierzhuang in April 1938, was still a close ally of Chiang Kai-shek. Concerned about a possible Japanese advance, at the height of the famine Tang compelled several hundred thousand peasants to work on building roads. The peasants were assured that their labor would be taken into account as part of their tax burden (a throwback to the
corvée
system of labor that had existed even under China’s very earliest empires). Zhang declared that few believed those promises, accusing Tang of building roads for his own convenience rather than as military priorities. Tang’s officials also became known for their illegal, often violent, means of recruiting soldiers.
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“I heard that the Henan famine was serious,” Chiang wrote in his diary in April 1943, “and that the officials were ignorant of it.” A week later he showed more alarm: “In the Henan famine area, people are starving, dogs and animals are eating corpses. It’s unbearable to hear about this dreadful situation.” He added that if the war dragged on more than a year, then China might not be able to sustain the situation much longer.
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Yet Chiang took only limited, inadequate measures. His diary reveals how stretched he was by the spring of 1943. “I really have been feeling dizzy . . . The economy is weak, the military and political situation is depressing, and the worst time is now. During the six years of the War of Resistance, my strength has been exhausted and my mind has been dulled.” A few days later he observed: “Our social reality is covered in scars. We are exhausted after six years of the War of Resistance.”
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The toxic mixture of dubious internal allies, a stretched economy, and the conflict with Stilwell was distracting Chiang from the unfolding disaster in Henan.

Chiang’s sympathy for the victims of the famine, at least in the abstract, was not in doubt. However, the ramshackle system which held Nationalist China together was now under intolerable strain. In Chongqing and in Sichuan province the structures of the modern warfare state had been established, and continued to operate, albeit in the most stretched of circumstances. A combination of revenue (much of it from foreign donors), fear of international criticism, and a genuine sense among at least some of the elites (such as the American-trained technocrats Weng Wenhao and Jiang Tingfu) that the war should be the occasion for a rebirth of the Chinese Nationalist revolution, meant that developments in and around Chongqing remained relatively stable. But the further east one traveled from Chongqing, the harder it became to believe that the Nationalist state had real authority beyond words on paper or devalued banknotes. The delicate balance of power that underpinned the state prevented cooperation across boundaries. Refugee relief programs in Sichuan were inadequate, but at least they were under development. In Henan, an area where control had passed back and forth between the Nationalists and the Japanese, with the Communists always present in the rear, the relief programs lacked substance. In Zhejiang, where the lines of control were even more blurred, refugee relief existed more in name than in reality.
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Chiang’s regime must be held responsible for the famine in Henan. Actions directly attributable to the government, such as the switch to grain tax in kind, the failure to send grain rather than paper money to relieve the situation, and corruption, place the blame squarely at the feet of decision makers in Chongqing. However, Chiang’s was not the only government to make the same errors. Just a few months later, from July to November 1943, another famine of approximately equal severity (around 3 million deaths) took place some 640 kilometers to the west, in Bengal province in India. Following a cyclone off the coast on October 16, 1942, the supply of rice, which had already become restricted after the loss of Burma, started to shrink—in part because of rumors of shortages, which encouraged hoarding—leading to the widespread inability to obtain and purchase food. By the middle of 1943 the haunting images from Theodore White’s descriptions of Henan were echoed throughout the Bengali countryside. Unlike Nationalist China, British India was not under intense active assault (there were serious air raids over Calcutta, but nothing like the destruction wreaked on Chongqing), and although it was a colonial state, it was governed under a system that was supposed to draw its inspiration from parliamentary democracy. Yet just as with
Da gongbao
, the province’s newspapers, including the Calcutta
Statesman
, were censored to prevent their reporting the famine. As with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, there were plenty of accounts of incompetent officials lacking either initiative or energy, and concerned more with patronage than governance. As in China, grain was taken away from Bengal even while people were starving, because it was needed to feed troops overseas. The British War Cabinet refused to divert wartime shipping to send supplies to the starving. Leading politicians, including Churchill and the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, displayed attitudes toward the Indian population ranging from detachment to outright hostility, the latter a product in part of the Quit India movement (which Chiang had tried to persuade Gandhi and Nehru against), but also of the prime minister’s long-standing dislike of Indians.
²⁸
But unlike the administration of British India, Chiang did not have the resources of a global empire behind him, or a subcontinent under his control and out of the line of fire.