The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
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The Japanese leadership may not have constructed elaborate plans to starve to death the people whose countries they occupied. However, their callous disregard for the well-being of the indigenous population, and their ruthless requisitioning of foodstuffs, were guided by a principle similar to that applied by the National Socialists: the indigenous population in the empire should go hungry before the Japanese. But while the Japanese proved themselves to be remarkably successful at exporting chaos and hunger to their empire, they demonstrated an extraordinary inability to reap the benefits and maintain food imports to the home islands.
*About one acre
12
China Divided
Ultimately all things, whether military or political, resolved themselves into a peasant, dressed in torn blue or grey gown, straining to supply the raw energy of resistance.
(American journalists Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby commenting on Nationalist China’s war effort)1
When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 catapulted the United States into the Second World War the people of China had already been fighting the Japanese invaders for four years. Although a deep divide ran between the communists and the Nationalists they had made an uneasy alliance in 1936 in order to form a united front against their common enemy, the Japanese. In the struggle between the two parties America had always supported the Nationalists (the Guomindang), and now President Roosevelt looked to their leader Chiang Kaishek as a key ally. While the colonial powers of France, Britain and the Netherlands crumbled in the face of Japanese attack, the Chinese, he told Congress in January 1942, ‘had already withstood [four and a half years of] bombs and starvation and have whipped the invaders time and again in spite of superior Japanese equipment and arms’.2 The United States provided funding and supplies to the Nationalist government throughout the war but the US administration became increasingly disillusioned by their Chinese ally and were disappointed by the fact that the Nationalists were never strong enough to launch a counter-offensive against the Japanese. In 1945 the US government condemned their erstwhile allies as corrupt and militarily incompetent. It cannot be denied that corruption was rife in the Nationalist bureaucracy by the end of the war. The Chinese government had presided over a fiscal and bureaucratic meltdown, lost control of much of its army, which had become a scourge upon the Chinese countryside, and helplessly stood by while millions of its citizens had starved to death. If the faults in the Nationalist government played a major contributory role in the development of this situation it was also attributable to the fact that China in 1937 lacked the economic, industrial, agricultural and political fabric to withstand the assault of total war.3
NATIONALIST COLLAPSE
When Chiang Kaishek established the Nationalist government of China in 1928 he had fought his way to power alongside members of the Soviet-funded Communist Party. But, distrustful of the Soviets’ motives and suspecting that they would oust him from his position as soon as they were able, he rounded on his former allies and murdered thousands of party activists.4 The remnants of the Communist Party retreated into the countryside in Jiangxi province in central China until, in 1934, Mao Zedong and 80,000 of his comrades set off on the Long March to settle in the north of the country, out of reach of Nationalist persecution.5
Once in power, the Nationalist government set about creating a strong, centralized state to counter the political chaos and turmoil of the preceding decades, and finally modernize China. They hoped to achieve this by encouraging industrial development and, with technical assistance from the League of Nations, they built 32,000 kilometres of highways and invested in industrial and development programmes.6 When the Japanese occupied Manchuria in 1931 the Nationalists were forced to begin to prepare for war and Chiang Kaishek concentrated on developing a strong state apparatus by building up an efficient administrative bureaucracy, which it was intended would preside over an integrated economic, fiscal and political base, with a modernized army at its core.7 But when the war eventually came in July 1937 the Nationalists had only been in power for nine years and much of what they had managed to build up was destroyed.
In 1937 the Nationalists faced a situation comparable to that in the Soviet Union in 1941. Forced into retreat, they abandoned their capital in Nanjing and fled to the city of Chongqing in the south-western province of Sichuan. By 1938 the Japanese had occupied the eastern portion of China, including the country’s wealthiest region along the eastern seaboard, and the Nationalists lost a major source of revenue in the form of the maritime customs service.8 In 1940 the Japanese captured the fertile Hubei plains, and free China lost 20 per cent of its rice-growing and 60 per cent of its wheat-growing regions.9 Like the Soviets, in a heroic effort they evacuated some heavy industrial plant, much of which was floated down the Yangtze river on barges, under heavy bombardment. But they had to abandon most textile plants and the majority of factories producing consumer goods.10 In the south-west they were never able to rebuild their industrial base to a level which could supply their troops with sufficient arms. The factories were only able to produce 15 million bullets per month, which amounted to five per soldier.11 At least 50 million refugees flooded into the Nationalist area, fleeing the savagery of the Japanese invaders, and this pushed the population in the unoccupied area up from 180 to 239 million (or about 60 per cent of China’s population).12
Chiang Kaishek made the mistake of thinking that because ‘China is an agricultural country and her agrarian foundation is resilient’ it would withstand the strains of war better than the highly industrialized countries ‘whose economies are more easily affected by war’.13 He was to be proved wrong. In order to withstand the strains of the Second World War a nation required a large and well-equipped army which could be fed with a steady stream of food, medicines and arms. It therefore needed a strong industrial base in order to produce these supplies and a flexible capitalized agricultural sector which could adapt to wartime difficulties and still produce increased quantities of nutritious food for the army and the industrial population. An infrastructure and logistical apparatus which could deliver the goods to the front was essential and on the home front a nation required a robust civilian economy, an efficient administration and a reasonably united population. Moreover, the government needed the money to finance the war effort. Free China had none of these things.14
During the first three years of war the Nationalists coped relatively well. Rather than placing the burden of financing the conflict on the rural population, they raised taxes on salaries and property and borrowed and printed money. To counter the inflationary effects of this strategy they cut down on state expenditure and tried to boost trade and commerce. In order to ensure a flow of goods around the country they carried on with their programme of highway construction and made strenuous efforts to ensure that the infrastructure of rail and river transport continued to function.15 They did look to the rural population for military manpower and, in the initial phases, men were impressed into the army, which caused a great deal of rural unrest. But by 1938 this had been brought under control and, in order to safeguard agricultural production, recruitment officers were ordered to apply the principle that no family should be left without sufficient labour to grow enough food to support itself. Attempts were made to make service in the army relatively attractive. War family support committees were set up, financed by local elites, and these provided grain and welfare for the poorer families with men away in the army. Soldiers’ wages were raised to enable them to send money home and in the first years of the war the Nationalists managed to recruit 2 million men a year to face an army of just over 1 million Japanese.16
Efforts were made to ensure that agricultural productivity improved. The area under cultivation was extended, winter ploughing was introduced and potatoes were grown as a winter crop. The peasants were encouraged to plant new, more resilient rice varieties and they were shown how to use bonemeal fertilizers and pesticides. Despite labour shortages, a lack of chemi
cal fertilizers and transportation difficulties, the climate was kind and yields of wheat, potatoes, peanuts and rape seed all improved. In the three years between 1937 and 1940 the agricultural sector managed well and food was quite plentiful.17
Then, in 1940, the Japanese occupied Yichang, a strategic town which linked Sichuan to the war zones. It was now difficult to get food and armaments through to the troops on the front line. In the south the Japanese invaded Guangxi and cut the railroad link between the southern province of Yunnan and northern Indo-China, which was used to import rice. They also cut off the major ports in the province of Fujian which supplied food to the southern province Guangdong, which did not grow enough food to feed its population. Free China’s link to international grain imports was now severed. In the south more than 2 million people were immediately threatened with starvation.18 Until late 1941 the blockade was surprisingly porous. An organized ring of Chinese smugglers bought gasoline, cloth and medicines from the Japanese army. In return they sold them tungsten and tin for the manufacture of Japanese arms. The Chinese communists were able to buy weapons in Japanese garrison towns, and the Guomindang army stationed on the border with Indo-China was fed with rice bought from Japanese dealers.19 However, the only official route by which international support and supplies could now enter Nationalist China was the Burma road, a tortuous single track along which lorries began to lumber day and night, carrying 30,000 tons of goods per day into beleaguered China.20 Despite laxity along their own border with China, the Japanese were determined to close this last lifeline to the Allies and achieved their aim when they captured Burma in early 1942. From then on China’s only source of Allied aid was by air over the ‘hump’ of the eastern Himalayas. This was a dangerous route over high mountains and deep gorges, and with unpredictable weather. The airlift brought into China 685,000 tons of war materiel and American foodstuffs between January 1943 and August 1945, but this was used mainly as a supply line for the US air bases which were established in China in order to launch bombing raids on Japan’s cities.21
Burmese road and ‘hump’ supplies made little difference to ordinary Chinese people and, to make matters worse, just as food imports ceased, the weather turned and it became clear that the harvest of 1940 was going to be much smaller than in previous years. The rice harvest only fell by 18 per cent but the wheat harvest was down by 40 per cent.22 A food panic ensued, in which the government participated. Chiang Kaishek made money available so that the government could buy up grain in Sichuan, and as prices began to rise landlords and speculators responded by hoarding rice.23 Just over half of all farmers were tenants and the payment of rent in kind meant that landlords, who before the war had hoarded opium, were well placed to speculate in rice. Tsung-han Shen, deputy head of a food division within the Nationalist government, was living in a rented house in the countryside. He observed that his landlord bought the rice he needed for his family’s daily consumption on the open market, while he put the rice he had been paid by his tenants into storage, waiting for further price rises.24 In 1941–42, as the Japanese launched their war against the United States, refugees from Shanghai and Hong Kong began to stream into Chongqing. They used the large quantities of cash which they brought with them to buy up as much food and as many consumer goods as possible, further fuelling inflation. Food prices in Chongqing rose by 1,400 per cent. The government was now irrevocably caught up in an inflationary spiral which lasted for the rest of their period in government.25 When, in 1945, Chester Ronning arrived in Nationalist China as the First Secretary to the Canadian Ambassador, he found that even though millions of Chinese were starving, speculators were still hoarding rice and that they would even allow part of their rice hoard to rot while they waited for the prices to rise.26
The white-collar workers in the vast civil bureaucracy, including thousands of lecturers, teachers and students who had accompanied their universities as they were evacuated from the Japanese-occupied areas, found themselves unable to buy food. By 1941 the purchasing power of their wages had fallen to less than 15 per cent of their pre-war level. The students survived on a diet of bean curd and noodles from cheap teashops, and many fell sick with tuberculosis.27 The government introduced rationing and subsidized the price of grain. But it now faced the problem that, with the price of food at astronomical levels, it simply did not have sufficient money to pay for the food it needed to feed the military and its civil service dependants. From July 1941 the government was forced to collect the land tax from the peasantry in food rather than cash. In July 1943 the government was sufficiently desperate to introduce ‘compulsory borrowing’ of food, an additional tax on top of the normal land tax, also to be paid in kind, but the reimbursement was to be deferred until a later date.28 These measures did slow down inflation as they meant that the government could acquire food without printing yet more money and, although it was extreme, the inflation of food prices remained lower than it was for other scarce items such as clothing and fuel.29 In this way the civil administration in the cities was fed, but the price was paid in the villages.
The decision to collect the land tax in kind shifted the burden of financing the war on to the peasantry. Indeed, the entire war effort came to rest on the peasantry, who provided the two essentials: manpower and food. ‘With the food [the peasant] raised, the government fed the army … the arsenal workers and the bureaucracy. With the manpower the peasant supplied, the government kept recruits trudging to the front, built the roads, moved essential tonnages … The building of an American airfield for B-29s, the construction of shelter, the organization of supply, all could be reduced to the number of peasant hands available and the number of sacks of rice they could produce to meet the crisis.’30 What placed an impossible strain on the countryside was not so much the food needs of the urban population as the voracious demands of the military. Throughout the years of the War of Resistance (1937–45) the Guomindang army grew from 420,000 soldiers to over 5.5 million in 1944.31 They ate between one-half and two-thirds of all the food the government was able to requisition, on a ration of 750 grams of rice per day.32 From 1939 the government had made efforts to accumulate grain reserves, and storage granaries had been built in the rear areas. A great effort had been made to sustain food production in Sichuan, which provided supplementary supplies for the front line. But, after the capture of Yichang, the northern war zones were effectively cut off from the capital. The now derelict transport system was incapable of bringing meaningful quantities of supplies in to the northern front along rutted cart tracks over the few mountainous routes that were still open.33
The army was forced to live off the land in its own country. In September 1942 Chiang Kaishek urged the troops to grow their own food, herd animals and even to weave their own cloth.34 In effect the centre lost control of the provinces and army commanders took over the administration of the districts where they were stationed, levying taxes and passing laws.35 Under these chaotic conditions the army command reverted to the corrupt practices which had been commonplace in the decades of warlordism and in-fighting before the Nationalist takeover. At the Xi’an Military Conference of 1942 Chiang Kaishek devoted a large part of his speech to a host of problems which had clearly become widespread throughout the army: ‘smuggling, opium consumption, engagement in commerce, joining secret societies, dependants of officers living close to army units, new soldiers beating Escort Officers, [and] mutinies among recruits’.36 On top of the official land taxes, the military commanders imposed extra incidental levies on the peasantry, demanding ‘food, animal feed, draft animals, wood, coal, clothing, transport equipment, and cooking utensils’.37 In addition, the locals were press-ganged into working as porters and cooks. In Henan more than a million farmers were conscripted to find fodder for the army’s animals, build roads, dig anti-tank trenches and construct dykes along the banks of the Yellow River. They were not paid and they were expected to provide their own food.38 Meanwhile, the local bureaucracies descended into corruption and at every lev
el officials would siphon off a proportion of the food payment for themselves, which they would then hoard. The social divisions which characterized rural China intensified as landlords and rich peasants found ways of evading taxes, while an increasing number of tenant and small farmers were driven to bankruptcy and hunger.39 Agricultural production, which was already under an immense strain due to the drafting of able-bodied men into the army, began to collapse.40
In Henan in 1942 the peasants were assailed by a series of biblical afflictions. Drought was followed by frost and hail and then by a plague of locusts. The harvest fell to three-quarters of its normal level.41 The peasantry might well have been able to tighten their belts and withstand these misfortunes if it had not been for at least 300,000 Nationalist troops garrisoned in the province.42 The commanders in the neighbouring provinces of Shaanxi and Hubei refused to release food from their own stocks to alleviate the food shortage. In order to meet their collection quotas tax officials relentlessly requisitioned food in the face of the peasants’ evident distress. ‘As they died the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … Peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax collector’s office.’43 Much of what they collected disappeared into the officials’ personal hoards. American relief organizations found themselves buying food from these bureaucrats to distribute back to the same peasants from whom it had been unfairly extorted.44 Three million fled the area. Others sold their land at discount prices to merchants, army officers and government officials, who mercilessly gained in wealth at their expense. Some peasants sold or murdered their children.45 Mr Jingguan lost his father to starvation in 1942. By 1944 his family were so desperate that they sold his sister, then aged fifteen, to an older man, but she too died.46 When the American journalist Theodore White visited the province in February 1943 he saw corpses by the sides of the roads. The desperate ate leaves, peanut husks, ‘the green slime’ from pools of water and even each other. ‘A doctor told us of a woman caught boiling her baby; she was not molested, because she insisted that the child had died before she started to cook it.’47 In the spring of 1943 the desperate harvested the wheat too early and ground the unripened wheat kernels to eat. Their bodies bloated and they died. Theodore White estimated in March 1943 that about 5 million people were dead or dying.48