by Emily Hahn
Poor Holly apologized to Madame; she said it didn’t matter, that she would stand by him. “After all, a little quarrel between husband and wife will not do any harm.”
She was unable to soothe her husband. Dr. Tong then appealed to Chiang’s secretary-general, who agreed with him. “This made the Generalissimo so furious that he called in Chen and told him that he was chicken-hearted and had no conception of state-craft.” Chiang turned on Holly and repeated the accusation, adding, “You cannot be a diplomat. Your action has made me very angry.”
He gave in at last on the matter of the British chargé, but Chiang has never, au fond, learned to love the British very much.
An important part of Chiang’s strategy of retreat was the “scorched earth” policy. (It was China, actually, who invented the phrase and the practice.) Shanghai escaped the last-minute torch because of those awkward foreigners whose property rights had to be respected. But in Nanking the Chinese started burning and breaking with ever-increasing enthusiasm. Such machinery as could not be transported inland, such rice as was still green and growing, such oil as was waiting in the tank, must be blown up or devastated or burned. Civilians? Let them come along inland with the Army, said the Kuomintang, and build anew behind the natural protection of Szechuan terrain.
A good many urban civilians did this, but the peasants did not take kindly to the idea. The scorched-earth policy made excellent propaganda for the occupying Japanese troops, and better for the Reds. But even they could not have hoped for the propaganda Changsha was soon to afford them.
Changsha was one of the important stopping places selected by Chiang in his plans for retreating to Chungking. He was confident that the city could be held a long time, if not indefinitely: its history showed how hard it was to capture. Unfortunately Chiang himself was not there when the rumor spread, soon after the Army had begun to settle in, that the Japanese were moving straight on from Wuhan and would soon be battering at the gates. The panicky order was given that Changsha must be put to the torch. “Scorched earth” was supposed to be applied to a locality after the Army was again on the march, not several weeks in advance, but those were the orders, and they were immediately carried out. The true folly of the act lay in its irony: the city need never have been destroyed at all. The Japanese never did succeed in taking its smoldering rubble. When Chiang arrived, heads fell for this stupidity—literally.
In January 1939 the Nationalists made their final retreat to Chungking.
The combined influences of events and pressure from returned travelers were bringing about a definite change of attitude in America toward the Japanese incident. Europe was still indifferent: Hitler claimed all their attention. But now the Americans began to worry about what was going on across the Pacific. Roosevelt sponsored an appeal in January 1939 to collect a million dollars for suffering Chinese civilians, and the sum was quickly acquired. Though the Chinese didn’t expect direct intervention, they hoped to head America off any more economic co-operation with Japan. They wanted to stop Japan’s purchase of scrap-iron, oil, gasoline, and above all shipping and weapons from Americans. As a result, at least enough public opinion was stirred up in the States to put across the idea of boycotting silk stockings. This was effective, as far as it went, but Japan continued to buy strategic materials.
Still working as one voice with the Nationalists was the leftist element. The Institute of Pacific Relations, strongly Communist in sympathy, kept tugging at American elbows, jogging American consciences, and talking loud about China. The party line was still ardently pro-Chiang: Japan was making headway far too fast to suit the Reds.
None of the clamor about oil and iron was likely to come to anything. American businessmen were jealous of British trade with Japan, and the English flatly refused to consider a mutual agreement to cut it off. They were not at war with Japan, they reminded America. Strictly speaking, nobody was. What was going on in China was still referred to, in Western diplomatic circles, as the Incident. Then came Wang Ching-wei’s final defection. It is no use denying that this looked funny to us. The constant changing about, playing for position of Chinese leaders always seems funny to the Western eye. Through the years Wang had been moving about like Punch with the policeman, popping up now in Canton, now in the Northwest with Feng Yu-hsiang: delivering his broadsides by wordy telegram and popping down again to reappear, perky and smiling, back with the Nationalist Government.
But this time it was not funny.
Other hardy perennial opponents to Chiang had forgotten their rivalry and jealousy. Li Tsung-jen, Pai Chung-hsi, and the rest rallied when they were convinced that Japan was a serious threat; all of them did but Wang Ching-wei. Wang had tried so often to get to the top and had missed by so little and was so convinced of his rights as Sun Yat-sen’s heir that he had become a monomaniac. Nothing mattered by that time except the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek and himself. He lost the ability to distinguish between allies. He was just as willing to take the help of Japan as that of some insurgent domestic general. What Japanese control of China—and himself—would lead to ultimately meant nothing to him. No doubt he was confident that when it came to that point he would be able to handle the Japanese: he would outguess them.
Wang had friends in Shanghai, people with connections in other countries, and they had told him in whispers, before his flight into the interior, that it was not too late. The struggle was not fundamentally between Japan and China, which were both, after all, Asiatic nations. It was a struggle between right-thinking men of both countries on one hand and this maddeningly tyrannical, inefficient clique on the other—the running dogs of Western imperialism. China would never be cured until Chiang was removed. What difference did it make, when you came right down to it, if it was Japan who helped the Chinese people to get rid of the tyrant …? For a while Wang moved on with the Kuomintang, discontentedly shifting from Nanking to Wuhan to Changsha to Chungking, but he thought about these matters, and he corresponded secretly with his friends.
The Japanese were encountering a difficulty that usually faces conquerors suddenly possessed of a lot of captured territory. How to govern the country and yet continue to pursue the war? An immediate show of self-confidence and efficiency was necessary. The Japanese didn’t mean to manage China like a colony; it would have been too big a job. They saw Asia of the future overseen by an omniscient Japan, divided by traditional borders yet united by international fervor; all the East was to be held together in the bonds of the Co-Prosperity Zone. To maintain this willing, loving spirit, the Japanese realized, they needed leaders from among the locals.
They tried for quite a while to find some leaders, but anybody who accepted a job of the sort was either assassinated very soon or turned out to be hopelessly incompetent or corrupt. It was a matter of education, the Japanese told each other wisely. In another generation that would all be arranged. At last, when their need was beginning to be genuinely awkward, they got Wang Ching-wei.
Everybody in Chungking seems to have been taken by surprise. For a long time no one had paid much attention to Wang. It was easy enough for him to get out. He went farther west, to Chengtu, on a routine trip; from there he flew down to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan, and after a brief, unsuccessful attempt to bring the Yunnan war lord round to his way of thinking, he continued his outward journey to Hanoi in Indo-China. By the end of the year he was in Hongkong.
He sent a telegram to Chiang suggesting that China accept Konoye’s peace terms. Chungking’s reply was a denunciation. In time Wang set up his own Kuomintang in Shanghai, with the tight sort of administration and secret-police activity that are so familiar to occupied communities. In 1940 he was formally installed as “Chairman of China.”
Lots of Russians came to Chungking. Those at the Soviet diplomatic headquarters were important enough, but the really interesting group stayed at an airfield a long way off, nearer Chengtu than Chungking, and trained pilots to maneuver the planes that had been brought from Moscow on a
n indefinite term of loan. They were all the outside aid China had.
Chiang’s attention was divided between maintaining a working government in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, keeping the peace with suspicious Szechuan dignitaries, holding on to his tenuous friendship with Yunnan’s war lord, Lung Yuen, upon whom so much depended, and carrying on what was left of the fighting war. As far as the West was concerned the international situation remained, for the time being, static; in Europe the dogs of war were growling, but in Chungking the worst had already happened. That sort of suspense, at least, was a thing of the past.
One of the inconveniences of life in the wartime capital was the lack of day-to-day supplies necessary for modern governments; telegraphic equipment, and typewriter spare parts. Things like this had to be flown in from Hongkong or brought across the Burma Road, and they were prohibitively costly. But such vexations were as nothing compared to the air-raid hazard. Chungking was placed in an excellent position as far as foreknowledge of the raids went; the city usually had an hour’s warning when Japanese planes were on the way. It was also well supplied with rock in which to tunnel for safety, and after the first few tragic raids had taught the populace what bombing meant there were caves dug for everybody. But the city had no effective defense, either in the air or on the ground. Coping with the Japanese became a grim routine of carrying valuables into the caves, sitting underground for hours, and then carrying the valuables back to where they came from if that place still existed.
North China was being “consolidated.” In Central China the enemy, by the end of March 1939, had penetrated as far as Nanchang and took over a burned, blackened prize of a capital city. By September he had attempted to capture Changsha, but failed. Japan’s lines were overextended and seemed likely to remain that way indefinitely. But change, as the Japanese high command was well aware, was on the way. War was declared in Europe in September, but in Chungking the only thing that mattered was the state of China. The Japanese got in as far as Ichang, just the other side of the Yangtze Gorges from Chungking itself. There they stuck.
In Europe things began to hot up, and suddenly nobody remembered the phrase “phony war.” Holland, Belgium, then France. But still the Chinese had their own troubles to think about. The Reds had begun to get restive again. When Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact he hinted that the attitude of Russia was likely to change in lots of other respects as well. As if at a signal, Chinese Communist unrest followed. The New Fourth Army in Anhwei fired the opening shot of the campaign.
The story as reported by indignant leftist foreign correspondents was that the Communists were being picked on, that they hadn’t had the square deal that was promised them in 1937 and were merely trying to call the world’s attention to their plight. They were disgracefully ill fed, it was said, and ill clothed, and kept short of ammunition just because they were Reds. The facts do not quite bear out this interpretation.
When the armies were reorganized after the agreements of 1937 the Reds were assigned to the “Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region,” the area comprising Shensi, Kansu, and Ninghsia borders. Using guerrilla tactics, they constituted an important defense against the Japanese, more effective than the Nationalists with their positional-warfare technique. In recognition of this fact their area of operations was enlarged and they established another region of their own at the borders of Shansi, Chahar, and Hopei. In both these places they set up their soviet type of government, with the Nationalists’ knowledge and even, in a grudging way, their approval. The government also paid them a subsidy. That was in the agreement.
Friction soon developed between Kuomintang and Communist troops over the matter of equipment. The Reds claimed that they outfitted themselves at the expense of defeated Japanese troops; the Nationalists soldiers said, on the contrary, that the Reds picked up their rifles and munitions after lost battles and kept them for their own use. Inevitably there were also charges and countercharges of slacking on the job. The clash between Nationalists and the New Fourth Army followed an attempt by the Reds to take control of an area that was policed by the Nationalists. Clearly and simply, the Reds were out of bounds. Chungking thereupon disbanded the New Fourth Army, but the struggle continued just the same.
The American writers who were given the Communist angle on the story forgot that according to agreement there should have been no separate Communist angle at all. If I seem to labor the point about American correspondents, it is not due to the common occupational disease that leads writers to write about writers. It is because their influence on international developments at this point can hardly be exaggerated. Except for the Institute of Pacific Relations, they were the West’s sole source of information on China. The shrill small voices of missionaries were ignored, because the missions, though they knew their stuff, weren’t organized to speak as one. But the Institute of Pacific Relations was, and so was the fourth estate.
The struggle went on and on, not as a violent civil war but on the scale of one of Chiang’s running battles with war lords in the old days. Red sympathizers among foreigners reported it as testimony to the tyranny with which the innocent victims were being hustled around. Kuomintang sympathizers among foreigners didn’t report anything about it because they weren’t permitted to do so from Chungking. The government stubbornly refused to allow anything at all to be sent out on the subject, assuming that if they ignored it so would everybody else. The adverse story, and only that, was printed abroad. It took a long time for Chungking officials to appreciate the uses and abuses of publicity.
One of the few men who could, perhaps, have shaken Chiang Kai-shek’s convictions on this subject, and the only one who would certainly have persisted in trying, was no longer there to do his job. William Henry Donald, faithful friend and gadfly, was a war casualty. As long as China versus Japan was the only war that impinged on his conscience, he had been all right in Chungking. He had his house and his typewriter and his daily work with the Chiangs, and everything seemed normal. But outside in the rest of the world life was not normal, and it got less so every day. Belatedly Donald began to remember that he was British. It riled him that the Germans of the legation in Chungking were free to go about like everybody else. Chiang still kept those few German military advisers who had survived the country’s vicissitudes and observed the customary diplomatic courtesies toward their compatriots.
“China is not at war with Germany,” Mayling would remind Donald in exasperation when he protested.
What with the constant battering air raids and suspense, tempers were running short, and as Donald grew older he was less and less easy to get on with. He had always prided himself on speaking straight from the shoulder, and very irritating this virtue could be. Now he took to picking up the gossip of discontented officials who complained about the Kungs’ alleged graft and brought it to Madame like a dog carrying into the house a particularly malodorous bone. It was not the sort of thing he would have believed in earlier days, much less repeated. Mayling didn’t like the bone and spoke sharply. Donald brooded.
During one of the long foggy periods in Chungking weather, when planes couldn’t get in to provide their own sort of release for taut feelings, Chiang retorted in writing to one of Donald’s complaints about the Germans, “I am not at war with Germany.”
“I am,” said Donald. Sorehearted, he left Chungking by way of Kunming and Indo-China and took to his yacht in Hongkong and started cruising in the South Pacific. Pearl Harbor caught him in Manila, but that is another story. Donald disappeared from the Chinese scene, and his understanding of Western-style publicity disappeared with him.
For the last year before Pearl Harbor, however, the Generalissimo’s good press more than balanced the bad. As the cold war became less chilly and finally melted and boiled up in the blitz, Chungking began to attract lively attention in America and England. In 1940 Britain had closed the Burma Road in deference to Japanese opinion. Three months later she thought the matter over and opened it again. Chiang’s op
inion of Britain correspondingly sank to an all-time low for that period of three months, and then came up a little.
The Chiang household was in turmoil. Just as Moscow had signified a new era of friendship and union by sending back Chiang Ching-kuo, so the entire Communist complex now hinted at a similar state of affairs by permitting Madame Chiang’s sister, Madame Sun, to make her appearance in the family, arm in arm and the best of friends, presumably, with Mesdames Kung and Chiang. She even allowed herself to be photographed at a reception with the Generalissimo, though it went against the grain to do it.
It took a lot of will power for her to remain in Chungking, even for the short time she was there, under a series of Japanese air raids. Chingling didn’t like the air raids. She liked them even less than the other Chinese, who had to get used to three years of them. But duty is duty, and in other ways she was able to do a lot of useful work, implying to the faithful that she found her position, living as she did in the Kung house in a hotbed of capitalism, most distressing. The circle of Chou En-lai held indignant meetings to discuss Chingling’s position among the enemy.
“Hardly more than a prisoner,” they told each other hotly. This was not true, but it was dramatic. At last she was permitted to go back to Hongkong, where it was quieter. The gesture had been made. Up in the Northwest the Communists went on, quietly spreading out.
For perhaps the only time in her post-revolutionary history Russia got a genuine shock when the Germans betrayed the pact and attacked her. It was one war she had not foreseen quite so soon. The Japanese attack on China and the later one on America were there plain and clear in her crystal ball. Only her own future was obscure. In the flurry that followed the West held Moscow’s attention for some months; Russia found herself allied with England and America, to the astonishment of all three, and the Far East naturally went by the board. This did not halt Mao Tse-tung, however; his program was always laid down well in advance, and in China infiltration, indoctrination, and sabotage went on as happily as ever.