China gained much sympathy, but no practical help from France and the UK, let alone the USA, which remained isolationist. Previously, following its acquisition of Manchuria and the attack on Shanghai in 1931–2, Japan remained ‘widely seen to have a strong case against China’, according to John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary.68 Many treaty port foreigners believed that a strong dose of Japanese would sort out Chinese disorder and civil war; some diplomats were convinced that cooperation with Japan offered the best hope of stabil-ising east Asia and protecting their colonial assets.69 The Battle of Shanghai changed such attitudes. Japan stood condemned in the court of public opinion, while China came to be seen as standing up for adherence to international treaties, international cooperation and open access to markets and standing up to aggression and militarism. The books published in subsequent years by journalists who had witnessed the Battle of Shanghai sustained that reputation.70 ‘China alone has for 25 months fought single-handed and against tremendous odds to uphold the right of a nation to live its free and independent life,’ as one put it.71 In 1941, China officially became one of the Allies.
Adversaries into Allies?
‘To fight a foreign force is straightforward but to pacify the interior is difficult.’ So Chiang Kaishek worried on 12 August, just before the Battle of Shanghai. He feared that ‘the Communists, political opportunists, and the warlords will exploit war with Japan to make threats, issue demands, let their ambition run wild, and activate their plots’.72 The Nationalist aim at Shanghai was not only to defeat the Japanese but also to use the battle domestically to forge unity out of rivalry. Chiang’s deployment of his best forces at Shanghai virtually compelled his domestic rivals, especially those who had long called for resistance to Japan, to make their own contribution and join him.
The Chinese forces at Shanghai formed a rainbow coalition of armies that had beaten chunks out of each other during the previous decade. They became allies – of a sort. The Guangxi Clique, which had the second-strongest force in the country, hedged its bets. When Chiang Kaishek asked for its backing after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Li Zongren publicly vowed his support for Chiang but privately declined an invitation to come to Nanjing.73 His deputy, General Bai Chongxi, did accept Chiang Kaishek’s invitation. He was to serve as vice chief of staff of the Nationalist army throughout the war.74 During the Battle of Shanghai, he regularly visited the front and his suggestions about personnel and tactics were implemented.75
Chiang Kaishek’s first appointee as commander-in-chief at Shanghai was the Christian General Feng Yuxiang. Following his defeat in the 1930 War of the Central Plains, General Feng had lived in Nanjing, studying, writing and making himself popular with speeches calling for resistance to the Japanese. Chiang Kaishek appointed General Feng to Shanghai to illustrate that bygones were bygones and that the battles in the north and at Shanghai were linked. But Feng proved unpopular at Shanghai with his subordinate field commanders. General Bai Chongxi ridiculed him in his memoirs, saying that Feng’s fear of Japanese bombing had led him to place his HQ impossibly far from the front.76 Whether true or not, it is clear that long-held animosities did not evaporate overnight.
Different armies competed for glory. The counter-offensive by four Guangxi Army divisions towards the end of the battle was in part a genuine attempt to turn the tide in the fighting north of Shanghai; however, it was also designed to show up the Nationalists and enhance the reputation of the Guangxi Clique. The plan backfired, though, seemingly because, in an effort to seize the limelight, Bai Chongxi rushed his preparations. One of his subordinates charged him with extreme negligence, arguing that the operation had been planned in a hurry on maps whose scale the general had not understood.77
Had the infighting stayed at this level, it would have been containable, but while agreeing to send their armies to Shanghai, the generals of the regional armies also exchanged secret codes among themselves and continued to hatch alliances which excluded the Nationalists.78 One of these, between the Sichuan and Shandong generals, nearly prevented the Nationalists from being able to enter Sichuan province after the fall of Wuhan.79 This lack of unity undermined the combat effectiveness of Chinese forces throughout the war.
The inclusion of the Communists proved the most difficult issue. The day after the outbreak of the Marco Polo Incident, they issued a circular telegram, proclaiming: ‘Beijing and Tianjin are in danger. North China is in danger. The Chinese nation is in danger. The whole nation must unite.’80 In a telegram of the same day to Chiang Kaishek, their leader Mao Zedong declared that ‘we are ready to sacrifice our lives for the nation under your leadership … and follow your army to fight the Japanese dwarfs to the bitter end’.81 Despite the stirring language, deeds did not follow words without some tough negotiations. Only on 23 September, after Chiang Kaishek had bowed to Communist demands, did the two parties announce their new united front.82
No Communist unit fought at Shanghai. Throughout the battle Mao Zedong insisted that his forces would not engage in anything but ‘autonomous, dispersed guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines’.83 The only concession Nationalist negotiators were able to extract from the Communists was an agreement to confine their operations to a limited area of Hebei and Chahar provinces, a concession which the Communists were well aware the Nationalists had no hope of policing. As the historian Yang Kuisong says, ‘the two parties were deeply suspicious of each other … the CCP naturally hoped to wage war in the enemy’s rear to achieve independence and autonomy’; they also took good care not to encroach on Nationalist areas so as to avoid clashes with them.84
Surviving units of the Fengtian Army – of Xi’an Incident fame – were deployed at Shanghai, not at the front but at China’s Hindenburg Line, between Shanghai and Nanjing. The retreat of Chinese divisions from Shanghai turned into a chaotic rout when, according to the Washington Post, ‘certain Manchurian [Fengtian Army] units, regarded as poor fighters, were ordered to defend a relatively safe sector. General Liu, in command of these troops, refused to order his troops to the front, and the Japanese pierced the line in this sector without encountering any resistance.’85 China’s Hindenburg Line collapsed, allowing the Japanese to storm towards their next target, Nanjing.
Although there were clearly limits to the cooperation among China’s generals and their armies, despite the discord and the backstabbing, the coalition held – and would do so by and large for the duration of the war. Without the Battle of Shanghai, in which Chiang demonstrated his commitment to resisting Japan, this would not have happened. If the broader story of China at war is that of China evolving a new sense of unity and shared destiny, then the Battle of Shanghai stands as a significant turning point in that story, despite the flaws the fighting pointed up in its military preparedness and wavering levels of enthusiasm for war afterwards.
Rallying the People
In a country where there is no public opinion polling, a true assessment of the public mood is impossible. We can only take soundings. The educated and newspaper-reading youth, who had made their views loud and clear during the protest movements of the previous decade, broadly welcomed the war. However, there were also those who had grave doubts about the course on which Chiang Kaishek had set their country. And great numbers of people living in village China had no idea what was happening.
Historian Parks Coble wrote that ‘the Battle for Shanghai was greeted with near euphoria by much of the informed public. They were ready for war.’86 The Dagongbao, or ‘L’Impartial’ ’ as its masthead would have it in French, was one of the most prestigious newspapers in China. The battle, it proclaimed, signalled ‘the first time that the entire nation’ had fought together against a common enemy, thus marking the birth of a new age: ‘Children of China! We ought to congratulate you. You have been born into this great age!’87
One Dagongbao staff writer, the Sichuan-born Fan Changjiang, became one of China’s most famous war reporters. He rushed first to north China to cover the fighting there, a
nd then to the Shanghai front, combining battle accounts, human interest stories and travelogue into reports that made him famous across China.88 War euphoria grabbed many young writers and journalists who had joined the National Salvation Movement, established in the aftermath of the loss of Manchuria and which opposed Chiang’s ‘first unity then resistance’ policy. One such writer, Qian Yishi, wrote a month into the Battle for Shanghai that ‘before, people said China was the sick man [of Asia]. Now the sick man is well and has taken up arms to resist the enemy.’89 In an article published on 18 September, the anniversary of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, the Communist Mao Dun, who was also one of twentieth-century China’s greatest novelists, proclaimed that ‘this year the whole nation has lit the beacon fire of the struggle for our freedom’, adding ‘the nation’s shame of 18 September is forever gone’.90
The Shanghai defeat came as a heavy blow to Fan Changjiang. Reporting after the battle, he detailed the city’s destruction, the chaos that overwhelmed its normal routines, and the misery felt by its refugees.91 But Fan remained determined to inspire. He reported, for instance, about a young truck driver he met as they fled Shanghai. The young man battled with mud, bad tyres and breakdowns, but he also spoke excitedly about his desire to become a pilot or a tank driver. China’s future, Fan suggested, depended on mobilising the energy of such young people. ‘All our compatriots must understand that we have just started our great enterprise. For this to be completed might take three years, five years, or even ten years of struggle,’ wrote Wang Yunsheng, another prominent journalist, indicating that no one should give up just because Shanghai was lost.92 Reporters linked with the Salvationists responded to the defeat by deciding that their duty now was to rally the country. They became propagandists.
The war met with other responses. Peking University historian Wang Qisheng is probably right that ‘although the media burst with articles enthusiastic about resisting Japan, privately many favoured peace’. 93 Chen Yinke, one of China’s greatest twentieth-century historians, stated just after the outbreak of the war that ‘the Chinese lower classes are ignorant and the elites are just pretending … Neither north China nor the central government really wants to fight. If we resist Japan, we will be destroyed.’94 Wang Jingwei, the Minister of Finance Kong Xiangxi, and Hu Shi, a liberal public intellectual with a towering reputation, were all peace advocates.95
A particularly interesting reaction to the outbreak of war was that of Feng Zikai, a writer, musician and painter, who produced some of China’s most famous, and subtle, wartime cartoons. These featured Buddhist temples and school houses destroyed by Japanese bombing; a soldier with his rifle next to him taking a quiet moment to play his erhu, or two-stringed fiddle; another soldier admiring a flower; and, harrowingly, a child feeding from its mother’s breast although a bomb has already decapitated her. With his cartoons, Feng, a Buddhist, drew attention to the realities of war, to Japanese brutality and Chinese heroism, but also pointed to the existence of another reality in which nature, life, beauty, family, art and peace are treasured. ‘To cast down the pen and take up arms’, to quote the title of one cartoon featuring a soldier marching proudly with a rifle flung over his shoulder, suggests that the war against Japan was necessary and just, but also that other, better realities should not be forgotten.96
Chen Kewen’s attitude reflected his May Fourth beliefs. He shared the initial euphoria when the Battle of Shanghai commenced, writing that ‘everybody is excited’.97 On 10 October, the anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, Chen stood in front of his home, sang the KMT party anthem, recited Sun Yatsen’s Last Testament and launched into the national anthem. This was an act of defiance. Japanese bombing raids had caused the cancellation of a mass gathering.98 After Shanghai was lost, he joined a mass rally of up to 20,000 people in commemoration of Sun Yatsen’s birthday. As Chen prepared to leave Nanjing in late November, he was downcast, comparing the moment to the Song Dynasty’s abandonment of north China to invaders in the twelfth century. Chen’s diary suggests a man committed to serving the government that had given him the opportunity to use his talents – a viewpoint which accorded with both traditional concepts of loyalty and duty and notions of modern nationalism.
It is difficult to assess to what extent the war was supported or even known about in rural society. Fan Changjiang reported that he met farmers, even some who were tilling their plots of land in earshot of battles, who had no idea that there was a war going on. When making his way from Shanghai, he travelled through a village in rich Jiangsu province whose schoolmaster and students did not know that China was fighting Japan.99 In places beyond the reach of radio broadcasts and newspaper distribution networks, this may have been a common reality. Like Wang Yunsheng, Fan Changjiang saw it as his mission, his contribution to the war effort, to take the war to China’s broader population.
The Battle of Shanghai did not end with a great Chinese victory; indeed, it pointed up the many ways in which China’s armed forces were inferior to Japan’s. They were badly equipped, poorly trained, indifferently commanded and followed tactics that had become outmoded by the end of the First World War. Divergent loyalties frequently hindered effective coordination. And yet, the Nationalists made several important gains. Japan’s use of bombing may have been effective militarily, destroying Chinese supply lines, putting entire command centres out of action and killing large numbers of troops usually deployed too close together. But it also strengthened anti-Japanese sentiment not just in China but elsewhere, including in India, a development that undermined Japanese appeals to Asian solidarities. Japan stood condemned and internationally isolated – important when no nation could win the war on its own but had to fight as a member of an alliance.
China’s stock, on the other hand, had risen. At the turn of the century China had been regarded as important internationally – hence the Allied Expedition at the time of the Boxer Uprising – but by the end of the First World War it had ceased to matter. Its recurrent civil wars and horrendous famines made it seem truly like the Sick Man of Asia. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, few paid much attention to what was happening in China. The Battle of Shanghai suddenly changed all that. Just as importantly, the battle also ensured that the War of Resistance became regarded as a national war. What began as a conflict between the Nationalists and the Japanese became a war between China and Japan.
— SIX —
TRADING SPACE FOR TIME
The defence has a natural advantage in the employment of those things, which – irrespective of the absolute strength and qualities of the combatant force – influence the tactical as well as the strategic result, namely, the advantage of ground, sudden attack, attack from several directions (converging form of attack), the assistance of the theatre of war, the support of the people, and the utilising of great moral forces.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)1
After the Battle of Shanghai, their previous war plans were no longer much help to either the Nationalists or the Japanese. The Japanese had assumed that the war in China could be wound up once they had taken north China and Shanghai, but this now proved not to be the case. In one of their two war plans, the Nationalists had allowed for a long war of attrition, even for a withdrawal all the way to Sichuan province, but only in vague terms. In order to convince their followers, their armed forces, their allies and China’s population at large that they were capable of defeating the Japanese, they needed to substantiate their ideas.
War plans are suggestive of a high level of state control over war, featuring rational planning, calculation and preparation. But now the war moved, as Clausewitz would have put it, into ‘the realm of probability and chance’, in which ‘courage and talent’ and ‘the particular character of the commander and the army’ were what would shape events.2 This was as true for the Japanese, whose field commanders acted with a high degree of autonomy, as for the Chinese, over whom Chiang Kaishek’s authority had been reduced following the destruction of some of h
is own forces.
The year between the fall of Shanghai and the fall of Wuhan in late October 1938, marked by one Japanese massacre, the two battles of Xuzhou and Wuhan and a series of horrific self-inflicted wounds, was one of the most terrible in modern Chinese history. By the end of 1938 the Japanese controlled much of north China and the Yangzi river valley all the way from Shanghai to Wuhan. The retreating Nationalists’ scorched earth policy, however, ensured that they held not thriving commercial centres and a productive countryside but piles of rubble and flooded fields.
The human toll was enormous. China’s losses during the Battle for Wuhan alone amounted to 250,000 men, while Japan’s were 100,000.3 The official Chinese figure for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre is 300,000.4 While that number is hotly disputed, there is no doubt that a terrible massacre did take place. One instance of the damage caused by the Nationalists’ scorched earth policy, the breaking of dikes on the Yellow river, although hardly reported at the time and mentioned only briefly in most accounts of the war, caused a loss of life which must be counted in the millions.
China at War Page 13