Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (5 page)

One crop that grew particularly well was the opium poppy, which produced a sticky black paste that could be smoked for a powerful narcotic effect. The drug quickly took off when introduced to China. Opium had in fact been known in China for centuries, used largely as a medicine and aphrodisiac by elite consumers. Mass-market opium was a British innovation. The imperial court became convinced that a powerful and destructive force was being unleashed upon the population, and Lin Zexu, a high official of the Qing, was sent to the port of Guangzhou (Canton) to destroy the stocks of the drug held by the British traders there. Lin was successful in the short term, capturing the opium after besieging the traders in their “factories,” but he unwittingly provoked a war. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, authorized the use of force to punish the Chinese for their supposed insolence toward the British Crown, and the first Opium War (1839–1842) began. Chinese defenses turned out to be no match for destructive British firepower, backed up by gunboats, and the court was forced into humiliating surrender.

In 1842 representatives of the Qing dynasty signed the first of what are still known today as the “unequal treaties,” the Treaty of Nanjing. It forced open new ports for foreign trade, including Shanghai, and ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain, without any reciprocal benefits for the Chinese themselves. The treaty marked the start of the “century of humiliation,” during which China lost control of its sovereignty and was at the mercy of foreign powers; even today, the phrase has the power to call up collective memories of a dark period in China’s history. Over the next few decades the Western powers—first Britain, then the United States and France—would launch further assaults against China, each victory gaining them greater concessions and territory. For the Chinese, the greatest source of resentment was the establishment of “extraterritoriality,” a provision designed to overcome the supposed inadequacies of Chinese law. It decreed that foreigners from nations covered by the treaties could not be forced to settle legal disputes or face criminal charges in Chinese courts, even if the events in question had taken place on Chinese soil. Instead, the two sides would have to go to a “Mixed” court under foreign authority.
⁶

Shanghai was the key. A small trading city for most of China’s history, and eclipsed for all that time by nearby Nanjing and Yangzhou, modern Shanghai was created by imperialism. Trading rights there were granted under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which had followed the first Opium War. Although the treaty was a humiliation for the Chinese, it allowed the growth of a unique port. At the center of the city were two “concession” areas (that is, territory under foreign sovereignty). The French Concession was a small French colony within the city. The International Settlement was more complex. Not a formal colony, it was controlled by the Shanghai Municipal Council, to which until 1928 no Chinese could be elected; the majority of its councilors were British (although Americans, and then Japanese, also served). The settlers, who called themselves “Shanghailanders”(as if the city were its own country), were not directly accountable to London but were widely identified with British interests. Outside the concessions, the Chinese government of the day had control. Gangsters took advantage of the split sovereignty of the city to maximize revenues from drugs, prostitution, and gambling, most famously the notorious Green Gang under Du Yuesheng. Yet the city’s colonial history also provided an opportunity for young nationalist Chinese to see modernity at close quarters. The neon lights and fancy department stores of Shanghai became legendary, even many thousands of kilometers inland.

The Qing dynasty had to reconsider its whole strategy of dealing with the Western world. Two years after the Treaty of Nanjing was signed, the senior courtier Qiying tried to reinterpret the situation for the Daoguang emperor in terms suited to the old imperial world. The foreigners “are constantly making arbitrary interpretations of things,” he explained, “and it is difficult to enlighten them by means of reason.” The court must not “fight with them over empty names,” but rather aim to “achieve our larger scheme” of making them behave according to Chinese norms.
⁷
Qiying hoped that the British could be conciliated as previous foreign invaders from central Asia and the steppes had been appeased in centuries past. But it became clear that this tactic underestimated the fundamentally different nature of the new threat. The imperialists sought to occupy not just land, but minds.

The treaties allowed Christian missionaries to travel extensively in the interior of China. Missionaries were not always welcome, as their presence was often backed (implicitly at least) by the presence of foreign gunboats. Yet Christianity did find many converts in China, particularly as the faith also brought new educational and medical teaching in its wake.

However, nobody could have foreseen the terrible consequences of one particular conversion in the 1850s. A young man named Hong Xiuquan from Guangdong province had repeatedly failed the examinations for the civil service bureaucracy. After his fourth failure, he fell into a trance, in which he recalled various Christian tracts distributed by an American missionary many years previously. Hong’s visions led him to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to earth to drive the Manchus from China and establish the
Taiping Tianguo
—the “heavenly kingdom of great peace.” Hong founded a movement that became known as the Taiping, and despite its unpromising beginnings, it snowballed into the greatest civil war that China, and perhaps the world, has ever seen. Between 1856 and 1864 the Taipings established what was effectively a separate state within China; its capital was at the great city of Nanjing, and millions of people lived under its rule. The Taiping was nominally a Christian regime, but it espoused variations in doctrine (such as acknowledging Hong Xiuquan as Jesus’s younger brother) that put off most missionaries and other foreigners from joining forces with it. The Taiping also enacted strict reforms such as the abolition of opium and made moves to redistribute property and land. “Nowhere will inequality exist,” one Taiping notice declared, “and no one not be well fed and clothed.”
⁸

The Qing dynasty was desperate to put the rebellion down. But decades of atrophy meant that the official Qing armies, inheritors of the Manchu warrior tradition, were no longer capable of defeating a large and fanatical rebel group. Instead, the court decided to contain the problem by putting it in the hands of trusted local officials, who raised “New Armies” to defeat the Taiping. The New Armies were highly successful, and the rebellion was finally defeated, although not without massive bloodshed: some 100,000 people were reported killed at the last Battle of Nanjing, in 1864. The Qing had also exacerbated another weakness in their rule. Although the immediate problem of the Taiping was solved, the devolution of military authority from the center to the provinces had laid the grounds for a culture where autonomous militarists, often known as “warlords,” rather than a central Chinese government could lay down the law.
⁹

This fractured, militarized China would become more and more vulnerable, creating a political system that opened the way for the eventual war with Japan. Without the diffusion of power in the years after 1860, it seems far less likely that Japan would have invaded in the 1930s. Militarization and the loss of control by the central government led to a wider culture of violence that rocked the country for the last fifty years of the Qing dynasty’s rule. That violence found one target in the increasingly resented foreign imperialist presence. Although China never formally lost its own sovereignty, foreigners were free to roam across its territory with little fear of legal consequences for actions they took, and this led to many troubling encounters between the Chinese and the intruders. In the streets of Shanghai scenes of rickshaw drivers being abused by British customers were everyday occurrences. In 1900 the Boxer uprising broke out, a peasant rebellion that gained its name from the religiously influenced martial arts practiced by its proponents. The rebellion was spurred on by a great drought that came on top of widespread, grinding poverty, and it saw immense violence against foreigners and Chinese Christians in the villages of north China, culminating in a two-month siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. The rebels whipped up feeling in drought-ridden districts with xenophobic slogans such as “When the foreign devils have all been killed, a heavy rain will fall.”
¹⁰
Drought and famine also increased the level of local violence, as militias formed in communities that no longer trusted the state to defend them against marauding bandits or corrupt officials.

It was into this vulnerable, post-Taiping China that Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887. Chiang remained an enigma even to many of his closest associates for the whole of his life. He was stubborn, manipulative, and callous, but also had firm commitments coming from his experience as a Bible-reading Confucian firmly committed to revolutionary anti-imperialism. From his earliest years, he was seized by the conviction that China must be reunited, and that the power of foreign imperialism must be eradicated from its territory. All his military and political life was spent in pursuit of this goal. But his tactics could lead him to adopt intricate and often deceptive strategies: Chiang was a master at playing off his colleagues against one another. Chiang, observed one British journalist in the 1930s, “has never hesitated to forgive his enemies . . . or to betray his friends.”
¹¹
Born to a family of salt merchants near Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, the prosperous central coastal area around the Yangtze delta, Chiang received an education which was highly traditional in many ways, and learned the values of the Confucian system of thought, including ideas of propriety, righteousness, and shame. But he would also be shaped by a very new institution in the early twentieth century, the military academy. In addition he would be China’s first leader to have experience of the outside world: a youthful visit to the newly formed Soviet Russia shaped a lifetime of visceral hatred for communism, and a Japanese military academy gave him insights into the enemy he would face one day. During the Second World War itself, his visits to India and Egypt would shape his conviction that a postwar China must fight imperialism and stand tall among the family of nations. Li Zongren, an ally with whom Chiang would have a turbulent relationship, confirmed that he had one key quality for leadership: “he loved to make decisions.”
¹²

In the second half of the nineteenth century, while China floundered, its traditional “little brother” had taken a very different path. After the first Opium War, it was Japan’s turn to confront the West, this time led by the United States. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, requesting that Japan abandon its centuries of near-isolation and open itself to a wider range of trading partners. Perry’s demand was politely issued, but it was backed up by the force of gunboats. The next decade and a half saw a major crisis in Japan as the shoguns, the Tokugawa family who acted as regents on behalf of the emperor, found they had no solutions to offer to ward off the foreigners. One scion of the family, Tokugawa Nariaki, advocated all-out war. “If we put our trust in war the whole country’s morale will be increased,” he claimed, “and even if we sustain a defeat we will in the end defeat the foreigner.”
¹³

But few agreed with him, and the political turmoil caused by the foreign threat led not to a war against the Americans but to a coup against the shoguns. After a short civil war in 1868, the Tokugawas were replaced by a very different sort of aristocratic elite, who decided that the way to repel Western imperialism was to embrace wholesale modernization. “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world,” declared the Charter Oath of the new regime, “so as to invigorate the foundations of imperial rule.”
¹⁴
The reformers carried out their actions in the name of the emperor, whose reign title was Meiji (“brilliant rule”), and the period has therefore become known as the “Meiji restoration.” In reality, it was nothing less than a revolution. Japan had been a feudal aristocratic society, largely agrarian, with little foreign contact. Christianity and firearms, both dangerous influences that might upset the social order, had been outlawed. By 1900, within just three decades, Japan had been transformed. It had a disciplined, conscripted army, and a constitution and parliamentary system. It was Asia’s most heavily industrialized society, exporting goods around the world. By the start of the twentieth century, Japan had nearly 60,000 kilometers of railway tracks and 700,000 tons of shipping. Its leaders had created a modernized, industrialized state in record time.
¹⁵

Japan had also secured another essential element of a powerful modern nation-state in the late nineteenth century: an empire. In 1894–1895 Japan took on China for control of the Korean Peninsula, traditionally an area of Chinese influence. Twenty thousand Japanese troops made a daring assault on the fort of Weihaiwei, on the coast of China’s northern Shandong province, and turned their guns on the ships of the Chinese navy, sinking five of its finest vessels. China had to send diplomats Prince Gong and Li Hongzhang to the city of Shimonoseki in Japan to sign a humiliating treaty; as Gong put it, he was “piecing together the cup which the present ministers had smashed to the floor.”
¹⁶
The Japanese not only claimed control of Korea (which they annexed formally in 1910), but the island of Taiwan as well (which remained a Japanese colony until 1945). In 1904–5 Japan pulled off an even greater coup. It fought for influence in Manchuria, the northeastern province of China, where Russia had established a colonial presence. Japan paid a heavy price: over 80,000 of its troops were killed by wounds or disease. But thanks to Japan’s military skill, the war ended with Russia’s defeat. It was the first time that an Asian power had overcome a European one, and the achievement drew admiration from colonized and vulnerable peoples around the world.
¹⁷