Henry Woodhead, editor of the Peking and Tientsin Times, had invited Pu Yi to join his bridge club, the illustriously named Tripehounds, after he had given General Feng’s guards the slip in Peking and made his way to Tientsin. When Woodhead went to Manchuria in September 1932 to see what conditions were like under Japanese rule, he met Pu Yi in his palace at Changchun. Asked whether it was true he had been kidnapped by the Japanese and taken to Port Arthur in a Japanese destroyer, Pu Yi threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Kidnapped!’ he said. ‘Kidnapped! No! No!’ Manchuria was his ancestral home, he said, and he was a willing collaborator because General Feng had kicked him out of the Forbidden City and confiscated his property, and then the Kuomintang had cancelled his pension and treated him with ‘studied insolence’.27
What infuriated Tokyo most was the refusal of the United States to recognise their new state. The Stimson Doctrine, named after President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, declared that the United States would not recognise any territorial arrangements imposed on China by force of arms. Despite that assertion, the United States turned down a Moscow proposal that the USSR, the United States and China form a common anti-Japanese front.28
The British, however, rushed the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and No. 1 Mountain Battery up from Hong Kong in HMS Berwick to form a full brigade of 3500 troops with the 1st Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, the 1st Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
Sir Howard Kelly, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s China Station, was in the Dutch East Indies when the fighting broke out. He returned to Shanghai at full speed in his flagship HMS Kent and entered into negotiations with his Japanese naval counterparts. ‘One of the popular night amusements,’ he noted, ‘was to go to the top of the tower of the Cathay Hotel to watch the war in which one was practically taking part.’29
Kelly succeeded in arranging a ceasefire between the two sides on 3 March after a new thrust higher up the Yangtze estuary enabled the Japanese to turn the Chinese flank. Having saved face, the Japanese were willing to find a way out of the imbroglio. Sir Miles Lampson, who had been on six months’ leave in Britain, had missed most of the war. Over the next two months, the ambassador was able to broker the ceasefire into a formal agreement under which a demilitarised zone was set up around the city.30
The Manchurian question reached the League of Nations in Geneva, which sent a commission headed by the Earl of Lytton, former acting viceroy of India and hence an expert on the rights of subject peoples, to Manchuria to investigate China’s claim of Japanese aggression. The five-man Lytton Commission spent six weeks in Manchuria in the spring of 1932 on a fact-finding mission after meeting with government leaders in China and Japan. It was hoped the Lytton Report would defuse the growing hostilities between Japan and China and thus maintain peace and stability in East Asia.
Wellington Koo was attached to the commission as assessor and Bill Donald went along as his adviser. He took Irina with him on the six-week assignment. ‘I was with the League commission in Manchuria recently and during that time others did a bit of worrying because there was an idea about that the Japanese would try to assassinate some of us,’ Donald wrote to his sister Florence Orr in Sydney.
We had a hectic time of it, being shadowed by detectives and harassed by police. Any Chinese who came near me was arrested. One fellow merely asked if I stayed in the Yamato Hotel at Mukden and for his pains was arrested and held by the Japanese incommunicado for 6 weeks – until the Commission left Manchuria.
‘Mr Donald has an exceptional knowledge of the Manchurian situation,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported, ‘and was therefore of great assistance not only to Dr Koo, but also to the commission.’31 However, he could do nothing to solve the problems that bedevilled the league in its peacekeeping efforts. General Frank McCoy, the American representative on the commission, told Joseph Grew, the United States ambassador to Japan, that the commissioners were unanimous in finding that Japan’s actions in Manchuria were based on two false premises: the argument of self-defence and the argument of self-determination. ‘Neither argument is considered sound,’ Grew reported to his Secretary of State, Henry Stimson. ‘The Commissioners have proved to their satisfaction that the blowing up of the railway and every subsequent incident in Manchuria since 18 September 1931 were carefully planned and carried out by the Japanese themselves.’32
Donald flew between Peking and Shanghai six times in three weeks to liaise between the Young Marshal and Nationalist commanders. ‘Once I crashed in a storm at Newchwang in a small two-seater,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘We ended up on our nose with a broken wing, propeller and undercarriage – but that was all the damage. I am organically sound and surviving all the trials and tribulations which beset this country and all who are in it. The redeeming feature about the tribulations is that we have no monotony here: There is always excitement. Wars do not worry us. We are used to them.’
When the Lytton Report was published on 2 October 1932, the commissioners had dodged the main question: the cause of the Mukden Incident. It simply restated the Japanese claim that the Chinese had been responsible, without adjudicating on whether that were true or false. Although there was no doubt as to Japan’s guilt among the five commissioners, General Henri Claudel, the French representative, insisted Japan should not be portrayed as the aggressor. As an Asian coloniser herself, France was anxious to avoid angering the Japanese; she was also concerned lest her conquest of Cochin China (Vietnam) attract unfavourable comparison with Manchuria.
Despite the objections of Japan’s chief delegate in Geneva, Yosuke Matsuoka, the report was placed before the assembly for its consideration on 24 February 1933. The Chinese delegate, Dr Yen, accepted it, while Matsuoka rejected it on principle. With Siam (soon to become Thailand) abstaining and Japan’s negative vote disregarded because she was a party to the dispute, the report was unanimously adopted. Clenching an unlit cigar between his teeth, Matsuoka gathered up his papers and led the Japanese delegation in a dramatic walkout from the assembly’s chamber. Japan gave formal notice of its withdrawal from the League of Nations on 27 March 1933.
Meanwhile, Chapei and the other devastated districts of Shanghai were being rebuilt. On 3 January 1933 Eleanor Hinder was appointed chief of Shanghai Municipality’s new industrial division responsible for applying the new Factory Act relating to child labour and the employment of women. She approached her task with characteristic vigour. As she feared, diehard conservatives on the Municipal Council refused to pass the necessary bylaws enabling her to enforce the Nationalists’ legislation.
The immensity of her task was not lost on the British scholar and aesthete Harold Acton who described the Shanghai of 1932 as ‘the most cruel and merciless of cities’ in which ‘the Japanese textile mills ground the bodies and souls of the girls who toiled in them. Having been bought by contractors and sold to factories, these girls were practically slaves.’33
Acton noted that Japan used Hongkew as a base from which to ‘spread her tentacles over Shanghai’. He was astonished that few foreign businessmen – ‘Old China Hands pickled in alcohol who prided themselves on never mixing with the “natives”’ – were perturbed about this. ‘Those who had lived here free of taxes, amassing comfortable fortunes, had little to say in favour of the Chinese,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘The tone of conversation in the Shanghai Club with its longest bar in the world was intensely anti-Chinese, and when I ventured to protest I was told I wasn’t qualified to have an opinion.’34
Despite the limitations on her powers, Eleanor Hinder launched a propaganda campaign on health and safety issues, and created the nucleus of a strong factory inspectorate. She was fortunate in the council’s choice of Fire Officer Rewi Alley as chief factory inspector. Eleanor and the secret Communist hired Bruno Hader, an Austrian engineer, to examine machinery in text
ile mills and suggest safety measures, and Chris Bojesen, a Danish electrician, to check electrical circuits. Other inspectors taught Chinese workers how to operate industrial boiler systems.35
Rewi Alley described Eleanor as ‘an extremely efficient woman who had vision, ability and gave good leadership’. Together, they laid the foundations for safer, cleaner factories. ‘We did have some success with things as they were,’ he said, ‘though only to a limited extent.’ One improvement was to persuade silk manufacturers to install central boiling systems in the filatures to eliminate the need for individual boilers that filled each room with steam.
Eleanor admitted many of the problems were insurmountable. Even if she were given powers to enforce reasonable standards, she wrote, many of the factories had no space in which to install machine guards or the money to improve sanitation. Was it right to close down such premises knowing the workforce would face starvation? ‘Saving lives by closing dangerous trades means destroying a source of meagre livelihood,’ she wrote. It was a bitter decision to have to make and one that caused her immense grief.
At the beginning of 1933 the Japanese claimed to have found two Chinese bombs at one of their posts at Shanhaiguan, the border crossing point in North China. At the same time, Tokyo announced that Jehol, the rich province north of Peking, was part of Manchukuo. The provincial governor, General Tang Yu-lin, pretended to be in league with the Japanese, while conspiring with the Young Marshal to attack the Japanese with his 140,000-strong army.
As the Kwantung Army advanced into Jehol on 23 February, Chang Hsueh-liang and Bill Donald drove through a blizzard from Peking to the capital of Chengtu to see the situation for themselves. The only troops they could find were guarding General Tang’s drug-making factory in the grounds of his palace. Rather than fight the Japanese, Tang’s main force had fled north with him to safer parts of his mountainous fiefdom.1
By 4 March, the Japanese conquest of Jehol was complete and it was painfully clear the Young Marshal had lost control of the military situation in North China. It was also clear his drug addiction would soon kill him – he could go nowhere without a couple of flunkeys carrying a briefcase containing syringes and other drug paraphernalia.
Four days later Chiang Kai-shek relieved him of his command. ‘We came into China proper to effect unification, but the result is that we are now homeless,’ the Young Marshal told his troops. ‘Although our sacrifice is great, it is worthwhile. After my departure, you must obey Generalissimo Chiang’s orders and support the government unanimously. You must be aware of the fact that in permitting me to resign the Generalissimo wishes me well.’2
Chang Hsueh-liang’s dismissal provided Donald with a golden opportunity. Overriding all objections, he admitted him to a German hospital in Shanghai under the care of Dr Harry W. Miller Jr to undergo treatment for his drug addiction. Miller was a Seventh Day Adventist who had studied medicine at the American Medical Missionary College at Battle Creek, Michigan. He had come to China shortly after the Boxer Uprising. Dressed in Chinese robes and wearing a pigtail, he travelled widely in remote areas of the Celestial Kingdom. He learned a great deal about the effects of opium and over the years had developed a radical treatment for addiction.3
Miller put Chang and his two wives, who were also addicted, to sleep for three days with anaesthetics and injected their arms with fluid drawn from blisters induced on their stomachs to cleanse their blood. Miller was delighted when Chang woke up and ordered his execution by firing squad. ‘That means we’re making progress,’ he chuckled.4 The treatment was successful and Chang and his wives walked out of the hospital drug-free. Chang was then 32; he would live to be 100.
Once he had built up his strength through exercise and a healthy diet, Chang set sail for Europe in April 1933 with Bill Donald, his Scots friend Jimmy Elder, one of his wives and two secretaries – Edith Zhao (his lover and future wife) and Irina, plus a number of nurses and servants. Irina recalled many years later that her role on this trip was to act as secretary to Chang’s wife, although it is quite likely that it was Donald who wanted her there, not least because of her linguistic skills.
In May the party arrived in Rome. Chang was introduced to Benito Mussolini and formed a strong impression of Italy’s ‘national revival’ under the blustering Fascist dictator. He gained a similar impression during a tour of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The best England could offer was the former prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, a discredited figure who compared unfavourably in Chang’s eyes with the strutting European demagogues.
Chang rented a house in Brighton, played golf and hosted parties. While he was a social success, people who drank his champagne sniggered behind his back that he was ‘the drug addict who lost Manchuria’. In London he took a suite at the Dorchester and met up with T. V. Soong when he arrived on 5 June for a conference on China’s economy. Compared with Chang, the thick-set, bespectacled Soong was highly regarded. The Times welcomed him as ‘a visitor of exceptional distinction’ and added, ‘Since he took his degree in economics at Harvard University in 1917 Mr Soong has had a remarkable career, as a banker and business manager, as a politician and diplomatist, and for the last five years as the defender of the Chinese Treasury against revolutionary extravagances and militarist depredations.’5
If Chang was expecting some of T. V.’s stardust to rub off on him, he was disappointed. Donald later accused Soong of attempting ‘to keep the Young Marshal in the background in order that his popularity might not detract from Mr Soong’s prominence’.6 Unfortunately for the Young Marshal, his popularity depended largely on his free-spending habits whereas Soong was seen as the financial wunderkind who had balanced China’s budget without recourse to yet another foreign loan. Yet it was Soong who fell from grace soon after his return to Shanghai at the end of August and the Young Marshal who would make a dramatic comeback in China’s affairs.
His revival began when he received a cable from his headquarters in Shanghai: ‘revolt has broken out in fukien stop there is movement under way to get us to join factions against chiang kai-shek stop come back at once.’ Chang’s natural inclination was to pack his bags and take the first ship back to Shanghai. Donald, however, persuaded him to remain in Europe while he went ahead and assessed the seriousness of the situation.
When he reached Shanghai in December 1933, he discovered that the Nationalist government was in disarray. T. V. Soong had resigned as finance minister in protest against Chiang Kai-shek’s decision to spend a huge proportion of China’s revenue on his anti-Communist campaign. His resignation triggered a long-brewing revolt in which Eugene Chen backed General Tsai Ting-kai, commander of the 19th Route Army, in setting up an anti-Chiang regime in Fukien.
In a hastily compiled manifesto, the so-called ‘People’s Revolutionary Government of China’ belittled T. V. Soong’s efforts to sort out China’s financial problems and accused Chiang Kai-shek of cowardice over his reluctance to jeopardise his personal military power in the struggle for national independence. Furthermore, it alleged he was committed to supporting Japan’s expansionist policy in China.7
Donald decided that it would not only be safe for the Young Marshal to return to China but highly desirable. There was a real chance here of mending his relationship with the Generalissimo and at the same time repairing the damage to his reputation. Donald met Chang’s ship at Manila and escorted him to Shanghai with a bodyguard of 200 Manchurian warriors to ward off assassination attempts.
Shortly after his return Donald had lunch with W. Langhorne Bond, operations manager of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), and Mayling Chiang. ‘What does the Young Marshal want?’ Mayling asked. ‘Madame,’ Donald replied quietly, ‘as strange as it may seem to you, the Young Marshal only wants to serve China in the best way he can.’8
Mayling reported this conversation to her husband and a reconciliatory meeting between the two commanders was arranged at a resort on
the West Lake at Hangchow. Things got off to a shaky start when Chang Hsueh-liang launched into a personal attack on the Generalissimo, telling him how impressed he had been with Hitler and Mussolini as national leaders, and adding, ‘Europe doesn’t think much of you or China.’
As Chiang sat stony-faced and silent, Donald took over. With Mayling interpreting, he lectured the Generalissimo on the shortcomings of his leadership. ‘You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you,’ he said. ‘Goddamn it, sir, you’ve all become insufferably stupid!’ The country was riddled with graft and corruption, he continued, while millions of ordinary Chinese people died of flood and famine. ‘Above all, where is the decency and nobility for the common man?’ he demanded. ‘China should be ashamed . . . There is the obesity of wealth on the one hand – the hog wallow of poverty on the other. The rickshaw man and the wharf coolie are worse off than the horse and camel in many another lands.’9
Mayling was delighted with Donald’s outburst. ‘You were wonderful,’ she told him later. ‘Why don’t you work for us? We need a brain like yours.’ Donald the male chauvinist was unmoved. ‘I don’t work for women,’ he said. ‘Why should I try to advise one of heaven’s whimsies? They can’t take it.’ If that were true, Mayling retorted, she wouldn’t have dared to translate everything he had said to Chiang. The Young Marshal nodded. ‘She even put in our Goddamns,’ he said.10
Chiang restored the Young Marshal to his former post as second-in-command of the Kuomintang forces and appointed him head of ‘bandit suppression’ – a euphemism for Communist eradication – in the provinces of Honan, Hupeh and Anhwei.
As Chiang had hoped, the Nationalists’ crackdown had had a devastating effect on Mao Tse-tung and his followers. Driven out of Kiangsi and Fukien, they headed west on the famous 9000-kilometre Long March that would take them to a new base at Yenan in the remote north-western province of Shensi. For the next 12 months, Chiang’s air force bombed and strafed the marchers, while crops and villages in their path were destroyed in an attempt to starve them into submission. Of the original Communist force of 80,000 men and 2000 women, just 5000 survivors made it to Yenan.11
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