Remembering 1942

by Liu Zhenyun

  1. What the refugees were wearing and carrying: “They had fled in their best clothes, and the old bridal costumes of middle-aged women, red and green, smeared with filth, flecked the huddle with color. They had fled carrying of their best only what they could—black kettles, bedrolls, now and then a grandfather clock.”2 All this was a sign that they had lost faith in their hometown, as they left without a backward glance, even packing up time—their clocks. White and his traveling companion spent a night in the Tongguan railroad station, which, according to his records, stank of urine, feces, and body odors. To ward off the cold, many people wound towels around their heads, while those with hats covered their ears with the flaps. They were all waiting for westbound trains, even though the wait was aimless and pointless.

  2. Their methods—mainly train hopping and walking. Obviously the former was highly risky, and White said he saw many bloody corpses along the way. Some managed to get on trains but died when Japanese bombs blew them up. Some climbed on to the top of a train and fell off at night when they lost their grip in the freezing air. Others were crushed to death by the moving train, but that was not the worst that could happen. The most horrifying was those who survived the fall. White said he once saw someone lying by the tracks, screaming in pain, with a broken leg, the bones exposed like a white corn stalk. The crushed hip of another person, still alive, was a bloody mess. The blood didn’t bother him, White confessed; he was troubled by the incomprehension of the scenes he witnessed. What was going on in such a disorderly, undisciplined migration, and where were the government officials? Obviously White knew nothing about China.

  Those who could not get on the train or lost hope on the train put their faith in their own legs and aimlessly, blindly moved westward. All day, White said, along the tracks “I saw nothing but endless lines of people traveling in groups comprised of family members.” It was spontaneous and unorganized, prompted by the famine and the desire to survive. It takes little imagination to see that they showed no emotion, for they had no inkling of what awaited them. The only faith they had was a hope that whatever lay ahead could be better and that things would be fine once they managed to get to the next stop. That is the philosophy of Chinese, something White could not understand. The column of refugees trudged, and if they fell from cold, hunger, or exhaustion they did not get up again. Fathers pushed and mothers pulled handcarts containing all they owned, followed by their children. Old women with bound feet stumbled along. Men carrying their mothers on their back struggled along, but no one stopped. If they came upon children crying atop the bodies of their parents, they quietly walked on, for no one would give a thought to adopting the children.

  3. Human trafficking. The refugees quickly went through the little food they carried and were reduced to eating bark, weeds, and kindling. White saw people stripping trees with knives, scythes, and cleavers. It was rumored that the trees had been planted by Wu Peifu, a warlord who loved trees. The elms died after the bark was gone. When there was no more bark, weeds, or kindling to eat, people sold their children, family members with say-so selling off those over whom they had control. At times like this, compassion, kinship, customs, and morality no longer mattered, as the only thing on the people’s mind was food. Hunger reigned supreme. A nine-year-old boy could fetch four hundred yuan, two hundred for a four-year-old boy. Young women were sold into brothels and young men like my uncle were press ganged, which they welcomed, since that meant they would eat.

  4. Dogs feasting on dead bodies. So many people died on freezing days that the starving survivors were too weak to dig graves, leaving a vast quantity of corpses out in the wild, food for hungry dogs. You could even say that dogs fared better than humans in the disaster areas of Henan during 1943. Dogs ruled. With his own eyes, White saw a woman’s corpse on snow-covered ground less than an hour from Luoyang. Dogs and vultures were about to devour what appeared to be the body of a young woman. As many refugees as dogs slowly regained their wolfish nature, fattening up on the ever-present corpses in the wild, the source of their survival and reproduction. The dogs even dug up corpses buried in sandy soil, and they became picky, choosing only young and tender bodies, especially women. Some were half eaten, while others had been gnawed clean, including the flesh on the heads, leaving only a skeleton behind. White took many pictures, which later worked to help those who managed to escape the maws of the dogs.

  5. Cannibalism. People were turning into wolves. With nothing left to eat, they ate other people, just like the dogs. White said he had never seen anyone kill another human for food before then; his trip to Henan was an eye-opener. Now he was convinced of the existence of cannibalism. It was understandable if they were eating a dead person’s flesh, since that was no different from dogs consuming corpses. But there were increasingly more instances of people killing others for their flesh or people feasting on family members. White saw a mother boil her two-year-old to eat, and a father who strangled his two children before cooking them for food. An eight-year-old boy who had lost his parents to hunger during the flight bumped into Tang Enbo’s army, which forced a peasant family to adopt him. He later disappeared. An investigation exposed the boy’s bones, gnawed clean, in a vat by the peasant’s thatched hut. People swapped children or wives to eat. As I wrote, I felt that it would be a waste of their cannibalistic courage if they did not turn into bandits, commit murder, or join murderous gangs. Seen this way, I felt relief and admiration for those starving people who, instead of fleeing for their lives, took over one of my landowner uncle’s buildings, where they raised an army and slaughtered his pigs and sheep. A nation who ate their own instead of raising a fighting force to plan for revolt was a hopeless nation. These rebels, led by Wu De-an, eventually were burned to death by sorghum stalks doused in gasoline, but they formed the backbone of the nation and heralded hope.

  5

  The Ta Kung-pao was suspended for three days. That was the fault not of the newspaper’s, but of the failings of the thirty million famine victims, including the families of my grannies and aunts, those who fled and those who stayed, those who starved to death and those who rebelled, as well as those who were eaten by dogs and those who were consumed by other humans. None of them had ever seen a copy of the Ta Kung-pao, whose Chongqing edition published their sufferings on February 1, 1943. The story so enraged the Generalissimo that he ordered the three-day suspension. Granted, the paper took its action partly because it was a newsworthy item, and partly out of the compassion that Chinese intellectuals traditionally feel for suffering masses. There might also have been some political intrigue involved, but this we will never know. The reporter sent by the paper to the disaster area was Zhang Gaofeng, whose personal history, experience, emotions, personality, and social connections greatly interest me, though I could learn nothing from the material at hand. The only thing I know about him is the portrait I gathered from his stories, which show him to be a well educated, decent, middle-aged man. After traveling to many places in Henan, he wrote the story, “A factual account of famine in Henan,” which I cited earlier. Roughly six thousand words long, it raised a huge outcry in China. Every one of thirty million victims deserved tens of thousands of words to recount their suffering; Zhang used only six thousand, which, divided by thirty million, meant that each victim received an average of 0.0002 words, virtually zero. But it outraged the Generalissimo, who ruled over hundreds of millions of people, because many of them blamed the disaster on his bureaucracy. As I said earlier, Chiang did believe the news, but he simply had more urgent and important foreign and domestic problems to deal with. He could not let the thirty million victims influence his thinking, for they would not affect his rule over China, while he could lose his grip on power, even lose his position if he mishandled even minor details of these important issues. He was clear on what was serious and what was not, and that is not comprehensible to bookworms or ordinary people like us. Three million deaths out of thirty million meant only one death in ten. Besides, more would be born a
nyway; why should he worry when the cycle of birth and death was irreversible? That was what so fundamentally displeased him about the newspaper and what skewed the story. They misunderstood each other, and that was the cause of the tragedy. The author of the article held on to the belief that the Generalissimo, still in the dark about the severity of the problem, refused to investigate. Since the Generalissimo could not divulge the true reason behind his outrage, he took the simplest step to deal with a complex matter by ordering the three-day suspension.

  Zhang’s report, in addition to describing the suffering of famine victims, also recorded what the refugees experienced during their flight, much like Theodore White’s Time article. By comparing the two, we gain a true picture of the famine and of the victims. Zhang wrote about the thousands of people trying to getting on trains heading to Shaanxi along the Shanghai-Shaanxi line; the daily stories of parents abandoning their children; the common occurrences of people falling to their death by losing their footing. In attempting to board trains, people were often severed in half and thus eternally separated from their family. It seemed just about everyone was turned into a cadaver for an anatomy class. Some chose to walk, with old and young stumbling along, or father and son pushing and pulling a handcart, or old couples in their sixties or seventies panting to keep up. “I haven’t had a thing to eat for five days, Master.”

  He wrote, “I kept my eyes tightly shut, quietly listening to the creaking sounds of the handcart, which seemed to roll over my body.”

  He also wrote about dogs devouring people and people eating each other.

  What he reported was all true, but the Ta-Kung Pao would not have been suspended if it had carried only true stories. The trouble came when, after publishing the “true account” on February 1, the editor-in-chief, Wang Yunsheng, used the “true account” to summarize the government’s attitude to write a commentary titled “Looking toward Chongqing and thinking about the Central Plain.” That disrupted Chiang’s reasoning; put another way, it hit a sore spot, and he was livid.

  From the commentary:

  ∆ Our readers have read “A factual account of famine in Henan” published in this paper yesterday. After reading it, even a hard-hearted person would shed compassionate tears. By now, everyone knows of the severity of the famine and the people’s suffering, but readers probably do not have a clear sense of exactly how terrible it is. Few know about the thirty million people who have been plunged into the abyss of hunger and death. The bones of the dead litter the fields, their flesh picked clean. Those who fled have to care for the old and the young, but often ended up losing family members. They squeeze into a crowd and suffer a beating, but not all manage to get a registration card from the relief committee. Some die from eating poisonous weeds while others suffer throat and stomach pain after gnawing on bark. Taking their wives or daughters to a distant meat market does not guarantee that they receive a few bushels of grain. Who can finish reading such ghastly descriptions?

  ∆ Worse is that, even with the rampaging famine, the people still have to pay grain taxes. The Yamen continues to arrest people to extract taxes, so they starve and then sell their land to pay up. I recall how I had to keep closing my book and sigh when I read Du Fu’s poem “The Clerk of Shihao.” Who could have imagined that I would be witnessing a similar situation today? The teletype from the Central News Agency in Lushan reported that “the taxation and requisition of grain in Henan has been going well even during the ongoing, severe famine.” And, “according to the head of the Provincial Land Management Bureau, the requisition has progressed nicely, as people everywhere offer everything they have to serve the nation.” Blood and tears must have been shed in order for them to write about “offering everything they have.”

  The commentary continues with details on skyrocketing prices in Chongqing, where people are in a buying frenzy in the midst of price fixing, and the rich continue to live in luxury.

  ∆ In Henan, victims of the famine have to sell their land and their family members, even starve to death, with no tax exemption. Why doesn’t the government confiscate the property of the super rich and limit the purchasing power of the wealthy, who could care less about prices? When looking at Chongqing and thinking about the Central Plain, one will surely be besieged by painful emotions.

  The Generalissimo read the commentary on the day it was published. That evening, the order to suspend the paper for three days was issued by the KMT’s military committee and sent from the news inspection center. Tao-kung Pao did not print anything on February third, fourth, and fifth.

  There is little available material on Wang Yunsheng, as with Zhang Gaofeng. Judging from the limited material, I sensed that he had a fairly good relationship with authorities and socialized with Chen Bulei, Chiang’s close ally, even knew Chiang himself. But I am sure that he was just a journalist who was clueless regarding the Generalissimo’s situation and frame of mind. On the other hand, even by today’s standards, we must admire his naïve courage in writing the piece. He was puzzled by the suspension, for he thought that writing commentaries was one of his many responsibilities, so why would it have angered the Generalissimo? As a promoter of democracy and freedom, wouldn’t the Generalissimo be violating his own beliefs in openly suppressing public opinion? Wang put the question to Chen Bulei, whose response I quoted earlier. Since Chen was close to Chiang (the head of one of his guard units), this response is worth quoting in full to illustrate the Generalissimo’s loneliness and quandary:

  “The Generalissimo does not believe there is a famine in Henan … the provincial report of one is a fraud, one with exaggerated claims, and has ordered that taxes are to be collected as usual.”

  So it would seem that even Chen was in the dark, stunning Wang, who could not believe that the Generalissimo would not care about the people. As mentioned earlier, it was not really his fault; Wang was to blame for not understanding what was going on in the Generalissimo’s mind. On the other hand, Chiang likely despised Wang, and had nothing but contempt for the journalist’s naiveté and inexperience. At the end of 1942, before the piece was published, the OSS of the American State Department extended an invitation for Wang to visit the US. With the consent of the KMT government, Wang was issued a passport and bought US dollars, even enjoyed a farewell dinner hosted by Chiang and his wife. Then, after his flight schedule was settled, Wang read Zhang Gaofeng’s report and wrote his commentary. Two days before his departure, Wang received a call from Zhang Daofan, the propaganda chief of the KMT central committee:

  “The Generalissimo would like you to cancel your trip to America.”

  Wang did not go. Given the difference in understanding and ideas, as well as the unequal power status, Wang and Chiang waged an outrageous, yet laughable and senseless battle that might have appeared quite animated to an outsider.

  One thing is certain: the report and commentary did nothing to alter Chiang’s entrenched views and carefully formulated approach. He solved the problem through criticism and an order to stop publication, a long-standing and highly effective means of dealing with intellectuals. It is easy to break their spirit. Now that the criticism had been made, the newspaper had been suspended, and Wang’s American trip canceled, there would be no serious repercussions, except that these intellectuals would learn to behave themselves. As a result, neither I nor the countless victims of famine would express any gratitude toward Zhang’s report or Wang’s commentary, since the noise they made had absolutely no effect. On the contrary, provoking the Generalissimo could lead to adverse consequences. So we must dispense with Zhang and Wang; instead we should thank the foreigner, Theodore White, who aided the poor during the famine of 1942–1943. His help made a difference, while the “aid” that produced no real effect could only put everyone through another cycle of torment as high hopes again turned to despair. That was why the Generalissimo adopted different approaches with different people. He was not excessively obstinate; in fact, he knew when and how to be flexible. With the numerous
Chinese under his rule, he could upset a few, even execute a couple without affecting the larger picture. Chinese intellectuals considered themselves above the victims of famine, but in fact they were not that much higher in the mind of the supreme leader, who treated the foreigners differently. Every foreigner counted; he could upset a government if he mistreated one of its citizens, so he trod carefully. Such was the intricacy of foreign relations, where dealings between the people and their government was concerned. As an American intellectual, Theodore White felt the same compassion and outrage as his Chinese counterparts at the sight of the rampant suffering; he, too, published articles, not in China but in the US. And that was where the difference lay. The Generalissimo could order a paper suspended if it was published in China but Time magazine was beyond the reach of his authority. As White pointed out, the anarchistic situation would have continued in Henan if it not for actions taken by the American press. In a word, the Americans lent us considerable assistance, so I don’t think we ought to have forgotten this page of our history when we later shouted “Down with American Imperialism,” at least not for those two years.