Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (6 page)

In September 1905 the two powers met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to sign a treaty mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt (who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts). Russia had to hand over the rights to the Liaodong Peninsula, a strip of land on the east coast of Manchuria that contained the strategic port of Dalian. The Japanese then built on their gains by setting up the South Manchurian Railway. Much more than a transport network, this was a commercial semi-governmental organization modeled in part on the British East India Company. It gave Japan a strong foothold on the Chinese mainland. The Russo-Japanese War also had a powerful impact on the Japanese public. Songs such as “Comrade” became popular hits, with lines such as “Here, many hundreds of leagues from home,/The red setting sun of distant Manchuria/Shines down on a stone at the edge of a field,/Beneath which my friend lies.”
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Such songs fueled a growing feeling that Japan had earned its territories in China at a high cost and that this sacrifice gave the Japanese a special role in their neighbor’s land.

This special status was spelled out most clearly by the stationing in Manchuria of the Kwantung Army. This force, initially made up of some 10,000 men, was supposed to protect the interests of Japanese citizens and business interests in the region, in particular the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR, or
Mantetsu
), which was the primary instrument of Japanese colonialism in the region. By 1933 its numbers had increased dramatically to over 114,000, and it gave Japan a powerful advantage in its quest to control north China.
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By the early twentieth century, Japan was an Asian power that had remodeled itself as an empire with continental ambitions. In stark contrast, China had been thoroughly humiliated. It had lost its first all-out war with its “little brother,” and then had to accept that rival imperial powers, including Japan, could occupy large parts of its territory with impunity. Feelings of resentment at Japan’s actions were mixed with respect for that nation’s ability to regenerate itself. Even the Chinese Guangxu emperor expressed his admiration for the Meiji reforms in a conversation with Japanese prime minister Ito Hirobumi in 1898: “The government of your honorable country has been praised by all nations . . . we request Your Excellency [Ito] to tell our princes and great ministers . . . the process and methods of reform, and give them advice.”
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Just a few decades earlier, it would have been unthinkable that the emperor, the “Son of Heaven,” would ask an official from the small islands to the east for advice on any topic whatsoever.

The growing strength of Japan led many Chinese intellectuals to think of new ways out of the crisis, drawing on the political philosophy of the West, the region that had dominated China so successfully. Yan Fu, who studied naval technology in London, became the first translator into Chinese of Herbert Spencer, the Victorian social scientist who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Spencer argued that races and peoples, not just species, were competing for mastery. His central ideas were later characterized as “social Darwinism” and are now dismissed as pseudo-science, but they proved very popular in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they seemed to provide a rational explanation for the decline of the Asian powers, as well as a potential solution. (The young Mao Zedong, among others, was deeply influenced by such ideas. He used them to voice his opposition to the traditional Confucian respect for order, harmony, and hierarchy, instead embracing the idea that violence might be the necessary transformative power that would drag China into modernity. What China needed was a man who would “charge on horseback amid the clash of arms . . . to shake the mountains by one’s cries.”
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)

Despite such new thinking, the Qing’s grip on power became ever weaker even as Japan gained strength. Attempts at reform were halfhearted and were stymied by conservative figures at court, including Cixi, the empress dowager who acted as a force behind the emperor’s throne and was vehemently opposed to political change. The Boxer uprising of 1900 had proved a disaster for the dynasty: Cixi and the court had come out in support of the rebels and their antiforeign campaign, only to see the Boxers crushed by a 20,000-strong force made up of the soldiers of eight nations (including Japan). The dynasty was made to agree to a massive indemnity payment to the foreign powers. There was a final effort to turn things around in the first decade of the twentieth century. From 1902, the dynasty instituted the Xinzheng (New Government) reforms, which drew strongly on the Japanese example. These were designed to turn China into a constitutional monarchy, with elections steadily being introduced at a local, then provincial, then national level.

The reforms late in the Qing might have had some chance of success in a country that was already more unified and prosperous. However, the dynasty was running low on people who had a vested interest in its survival. There was a serious agricultural crisis in the countryside; military power had now been diffused to the local level; and the newly emergent middle classes, visible in new institutions such as chambers of commerce, formed a locus of power that owed little to the central government. For nearly a thousand years, Chinese dynasties had held sway through their control over the bureaucracy, entry to which was dependent on a series of examinations. But the examinations themselves had become ossified, demanding knowledge of classical precedents that seemed to have little relevance to the pressing problems of the day. In 1905, in one of its boldest moves, the Qing abolished the traditional examinations in favor of a new system demanding study in sciences and foreign languages. However, this alienated large numbers of elites who had spent years—in some cases, decades of their lives—studying for the bureaucratic examinations, and now found their ladder of opportunity snatched away.

The end of the old system created new opportunities for learning that had never been available to an older generation of Chinese. Some 30,000 Chinese students traveled to Japan for further study in the three decades leading up to 1937. This was a sharp reversal of past practice: Asians had always come to China to learn, but now Japan was the mentor. Chiang Kai-shek, for instance, attended the Shimbu Gakkô in Tokyo, a school set up to enable Chinese students to study military strategy. Among his fellow students was He Yingqin, who would become his minister of war during the conflict with Japan. Chiang was not a popular student, regarded as aloof and withdrawn, but he was respected for his capacity for sheer hard work. Chiang’s three years in Japan would instill in him admiration for that country’s sense of order, discipline, and commitment to modernization; but its imperialist intentions would also make him deeply wary.
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By the late nineteenth century, many Chinese despaired of the possibilities of gradual reform and began to plot nothing short of an overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. A new political philosophy was on the rise, personified in the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, a Hong Kong–trained physician who was also a practicing Christian. Sun became convinced that the Qing would never revive China’s fortunes, and spent much of the 1880s and 1890s moving among Chinese communities overseas and forging links with traditional secret societies, fomenting opposition to the dynasty. He even led a secret organization in China, the Tongmenghui, aimed at overthrowing it. The Qing, in turn, put a price on his head, forcing him to flee to Japan. He failed to ignite an uprising, but his patriotic credentials and charismatic presence inspired many Chinese nationalists, including the young Wang Jingwei.
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Wang Jingwei is less well remembered today than his contemporaries Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong, who would also seek to lead China during the war with Japan. Yet in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was better known than either. When he met individuals, Wang often appeared diffident, but in front of a crowd he was transformed. A Japanese journalist who knew him declared: “He always spoke in a very, very low voice in small groups . . . But in a crowd of three thousand, he was just like a crazy lion! He was a great orator!”
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Wang was born in 1883 in Guangdong province, although his family originated from Zhejiang, the same province as Chiang. Like his two contemporaries, Wang was seized by an early conviction that China needed salvation and that he was the man to do it. In 1905 Wang joined the Tongmenghui and quickly rose in influence. Unlike Chiang or Mao, he gained national prominence early with his daring public persona, and his public-speaking skills brought him great fame. Wang enjoyed his glamorous image: he was startlingly handsome and would build on his charismatic good looks by writing poetry in which he portrayed himself as a selfless patriot who cared little for his own life. Wang Jingwei likewise chose Japan for his further studies, arriving in 1904 for a course in law and politics. While there, he served as one of the editors of the
Minbao
newspaper, whose passionate rhetoric called for revolution in China, and one of whose readers was the youthful Chiang Kai-shek.

Aged only twenty-two, Wang had emerged from his Japanese experience as a fully committed revolutionary comrade of Sun Yat-sen. Sun and Wang both hailed from the southern province of Guangdong, and throughout his life Wang would associate with other figures from this region, which had always looked askance at rule from the northerners in far-off Beijing. Wang traveled extensively with Sun in Southeast Asia, using his rhetorical skills to inspire the region’s ethnic Chinese to support the overthrow of the dynasty. But revolution seemed unlikely. In 1910 Wang decided that he would substitute action for words: he masterminded a plot to assassinate the prince regent, Prince Qun, with a bomb timed to go off under his carriage. He was assisted by a young woman named Chen Bijun. Chen was the daughter of a trader from Southeast Asia, and she was a feisty and provocative figure as dedicated to revolution as Wang himself. Soon after meeting, they were married, and Chen took a full role in all Wang’s activities. Some years later Wang would remark, “She is my wife, but she is also my revolutionary comrade, and for that reason, I don’t find it easy to make important decisions without considering her views.”
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The plot was discovered, and Wang was arrested and sentenced to death. His sentence was then commuted to life in prison. The reasons for his reprieve remain unclear, but one factor must have been the extraordinary fame that his action brought him. (Some more fanciful suggestions hint that a highly placed lady at court was swayed by his extraordinary good looks.) To many patriots, the assassination attempt gave him the status of a true national hero, and the dynasty could not afford to have him become a martyr. Wang wrote poetry that burnished his own image as a patriot willing to die to save China from the dynasty which oppressed it.
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To explain his turn to violence, Wang referred to the newspaper editorials he wrote as a young man studying in Japan. “These articles were written in ink,” declared Wang; “I wanted to translate them into blood.”
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The combination of melodrama and commitment was typical of the man. Driven, ambitious, vain, and also shaped by a streak of recklessness, Wang’s willingness to throw the dice when the odds were long would shape his political life all the way into wartime.

Young Chinese like Wang took great inspiration from the activities of the Russian nihilists and terrorists, with their anarchistic philosophy. Not all Russian anarchists were violent, but those who were glorified their use of violence. Sofya Perovskaya, the Russian revolutionary who had masterminded the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and was subsequently executed, was so much an inspiration to the young Chinese writer Ding Ling in the 1920s that she named the lead character of her most famous story, “The Diary of Miss Sophia,” after her. Wang Jingwei, as a thrower of bombs at Manchu princes, was a direct inheritor of Perovskaya’s legacy, although he was fortunate enough to escape her fate.

Despite the upheavals in society in the late Qing, there was no certainty that revolution was in the wings. Few could have foreseen the consequences of events in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in the autumn of 1911. The city was alive with rumors that the Qing government wished to sell railway rights in the region to foreign interests. In this atmosphere of unrest, a small group of revolutionary soldiers in the local garrison were discovered (but not captured) in the midst of their bomb-making preparations for rebellion. They had been planning attacks on local officials, but realized that they must seize their moment or be arrested. They marched to the military headquarters and held up the commander at gunpoint. They gave him a choice: be shot, or announce on their behalf that on that day, October 10, he was declaring the city’s independence from the Qing dynasty. He did so, and within days there was a chain reaction as city after city declared independence from the regime. Provincial assemblies, filled with the representatives of the new, politically empowered merchant class, all declared themselves part of a new republic and named Sun Yat-sen as their chosen president. (Sun himself was not in China but in America on a fund-raising trip when the revolution broke out.) The news quickly spread among young patriots ready to bring down the dynasty. Chiang rushed home from Japan and gained his first experience of combat by commanding hastily assembled revolutionary troops in his home province of Zhejiang.

The rule of the Qing proved highly brittle. A local uprising quickly ignited and was sufficient to bring the whole system down. By the end of the year, the dynasty was on the brink of collapse. Yuan Shikai, the warlord who controlled the Beiyang army, the biggest in north China, went to the court with a proposal. In return for the abdication of the six-year-old emperor, Puyi, Yuan would ensure that the imperial household was given suitable accommodation and an income. On February 12, 1912, the last emperor of China abdicated, and China formally became a republic.