China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  On 25 November 1938, Chiang Kaishek convened a meeting of 200 senior officers for a three-day conference at Nanyue in Hunan province. The main purpose of the conference was to announce the outlines of a new approach to the war, by which the Japanese occupation would be contested from various war zones, in which guerrillas would play a prominent role and for which the Nationalists would train up new armies. Chiang defended his ‘trade space for time’ strategy, maintaining that he had wanted to avoid fighting the Japanese in north China but instead had aimed to lure them deep into the hinterland of central China and take them on there.133 He did acknowledge some mistakes, however, including the failure to anticipate the Japanese landings at Hangzhou Bay near Shanghai and at Canton, and the mismanagement of the defence of Nanjing. Nevertheless he maintained that the overall strategy in what he called the first phase of the war had worked: the Japanese were over-stretched and China could now begin to fight back.

  Chiang Kaishek chose Nanyue as the meeting place for this conference for its historical resonance. ‘We are meeting at Nanyue … the place where seventy years ago Zeng Guofan trained soldiers after he had led his Hunan Army to its first major defeat in a battle with Taiping forces.’134 Zeng Guofan was a Confucian general who had masterminded the ultimately victorious campaign against the armies of the Taiping during the Taiping Rebellion. He had twice attempted suicide after military setbacks such as at Nanyue, but ultimately defeated the rebellion and saved Confucian civilisation. By holding the meeting here, Chiang made the point to his top generals that no matter how bleak the situation, hope should not be abandoned and that, like Zeng Guofan, they were fighting for a great and just cause.

  — SEVEN —

  REGIME CHANGE

  Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for instance, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience.

  James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)1

  On 3 November 1938, Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye spoke on the radio to deliver a message meant largely for consumption in China. In the full flush of Japan’s victory at Wuhan, and retreating from the declaration made ten months earlier, on 15 January, that Japan did not regard the Nationalists as acceptable negotiation partners, he announced that his government was willing to begin talks with the Nationalist government if it ‘abandoned past policies, changed its personnel, seized rich new possibilities, and joined in the construction of a new order’ in east Asia.2 If China failed to embrace the opportunity, he warned, then he would treat the Nationalists as just another local government as Japan created a new political order in China – and crush them if they stood in his way. Thus began Japan’s campaign for regime change in China. Still fearful of the Soviets and unwilling to spend the resources required to pursue the Nationalists all the way to Chongqing, the Japanese abandoned their hopes for a decisive victory and instead pursued a limited victory and a negotiated settlement.

  In his memoirs, Lieutenant Colonel Horiba Kazuo, chief of the War Direction Section of the Imperial General Staff, explained that Konoye’s November 1938 China declaration was an attempt to draw a line under controversy about Japan’s China policy. A group of hardliners insisted that the Nationalists should be forced to surrender and that Chiang Kaishek should be excluded from any negotiations. Others, Lieutenant Colonel Horiba vocally among them, protested that the likely consequence of this approach was the disintegration of China, leaving a patchwork of local governments much like the warlord satrapies that had emerged after the 1911 Revolution. As then, some were likely to have close relations with Western countries, thus undermining Japan’s strategy in China.3 Some sort of central government had to remain in place for Japan to work with.

  Prime Minister Konoye attempted to frame a new positive narrative for Japan’s actions. In this, Japan’s new order would emerge from an alliance between the Japanese empire (including Taiwan and Korea), Manzhouguo and a China organised along federal lines. That alliance would have the manpower, the economic resources and the space to enable Japan, as the head of the empire, to triumph in a new global conflict and end Western imperialism in east Asia. The new order was presented as based on the principles of ‘good neighbourliness, the common defence against communism and economic cooperation’4 in order to foster solidarities and restore east Asia to its rightful place in the world. This narrative, Konoye hoped, would replace alternatives such as that of the Nationalists, who talked of China being on the path towards becoming a unified modern nation state independent of both the Western empires and Japan; that of the Communists, who saw China as part of a global revolutionary process leading to a Communist world order; and the constructions of liberal Western-oriented elites who envisaged China’s future as a modern state organised along Western lines.

  Japan had set to work to establish regional governments immediately after the fall of Nanjing. On 14 December 1937, a Provisional Government for the Republic of China was inaugurated in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, a beautiful garden complex west of the Forbidden City, now the home of the PRC leadership. Its leader was Wang Kemin, who had studied in Japan, served several times as Minister of Finance, and was no friend of the Nationalists. Indeed, they had issued a warrant for his arrest after they came to power. Formally Wang was the chair of the executive council of the Provisional Government. The presidency had been left deliberately vacant as an enticement to figures of greater national stature. In March 1938, a Reformed Government was established for the provinces of the lower Yangzi region, headed by Liang Hongzhi, who, like Wang, had served in various pre-Nationalist governments, including as premier. In Mongolia, Prince Demchugdongrub established a Mongolian Alliance in Zhangjiakou in November 1937. Made up of various Mongolian leagues, in the Japanese scheme of things this constituted a third regional government.

  Even before their forces had taken Wuhan, the Japanese established a ‘joint committee’ of the representatives of these three governments in preparation for the creation of ‘a truly new central government’.5 According to the principles the committee adopted, each region would be ‘broadly self-governing’ with respect to ‘transport, communications, postal affairs, finance, the Maritime Customs Service, the consolidated tax, the salt tax, education and ideology’. Only ‘foreign affairs’ would be a central government prerogative.6 After the Battle of Wuhan, Japan’s political strategy was to inject life into this new federal structure for China and induce, or compel, the integration of the Nationalists within it.

  North China, as we have seen, had an important place in Japanese thinking. The Japanese thought the region critical to the safety of the rear of the Kuantung Army in Manchuria after the Nationalists began to consolidate their rule. They also believed that access to its natural resources would finally deliver the material benefits of empire-building that had so far proved illusory to them, and so guarantee the economic health of the Japanese empire. They planned to import iron ore, coal and raw cotton from north China and export cotton textiles, sugar and rayon to it.7 The industrial economy, the sound infrastructure and the excellent health and educational facilities to be created there would also showcase the advantages of being part of the Japanese empire to the rest of China.8

  Behind this ambitious vision to remould China lay Japan’s acute need to reduce its military operations there in order to free up resources to prepare for war with the Soviet Union. For military purposes, China was divided into several secured areas and one combat region. In the former, Japanese forces were to garrison major cities and lines of communication. Japanese forces would undertake further offensives only in central China, and then only to the extent necessary to prevent the resurgence of Nationalist military power and in a clearly delimited area of operation. This new strategy, it was hoped, would allow Japan to reduce troop numbers. The savings made would free up resources for a military build-up that would see the country have sixty
regular and thirty temporary divisions and an air force of 250 squadrons by late 1939 or early 1940.

  One can see why Japan could convince itself that reshaping China politically was a feasible undertaking. A provincial self-government movement had enjoyed widespread support as a solution to warlordism in the 1920s. The rebellions against the Nationalist government in the 1930s illustrated that the Nationalists were far from widely admired, even if they had begun to stabilise their rule after 1935. In China, regional differences are strong and regional loyalties are powerful. Federalism was not an illogical option for the country, nor one that lacked an intellectual or historical basis.

  Foreign intervention was unlikely. In September 1938, Britain and France infamously acquiesced to Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia when they signed the Munich Agreement. If they were this weak-kneed in their own backyard, it was unlikely that they would act with greater firmness in east Asia, where they had already accepted Japan’s creation of Manzhouguo. Japan had left foreign concessions in China well alone, and nor had it taken over the Maritime Customs Service, which collected 50 per cent of Nationalist revenue, crucial to China’s foreign debt, which was held mostly by Western countries. Stanley Hornbeck, the most influential State Department official supervising China policy, did not believe that Japanese aggression was a serious threat to US economic interests.9 Germany had recalled its military mission to China and had recognised Manzhouguo.

  The Soviet Union also declined to become directly involved in the war in China, although it did provide a good deal of assistance to the Nationalists. The Soviets delivered 348 bombers, 542 fighters, 82 tanks, 2,118 vehicles, 1,140 artillery pieces, 9,720 machine guns and 50,000 rifles, paid for by Nationalist deliveries of raw materials during the first few years of the war.10 If Japan hoped to trap the Soviet Union in a European quagmire, Stalin tried to do the same to Japan in China, with much greater success. But his refusal to despatch forces into China even as the Japanese marched on Wuhan indicated that he had no desire to involve ground forces in China’s war with Japan.

  The politics of regime change dominated events in China from the Battle of Wuhan until the outbreak of the Pacific War. It gained a major boost when Wang Jingwei, whose hopes to succeed Sun Yatsen after his death had been destroyed by Chiang Kaishek’s 1926 coup, began a peace campaign in December 1938, just after the end of the Battle of Wuhan. Both the Nationalists and the Japanese spent much energy and effort on dealing with this development, the former to minimise its consequences and the latter to support it, including through a strategic bombing campaign, which was at its most intensive during the summers of 1940 and 1941.

  Puppetry

  On 20 December 1938, following a two-day delay caused by bad weather,11 Chiang Kaishek flew to Xi’an to bolster morale in a war zone responsible for defending the northern approaches to Sichuan province and thereby preserving Nationalist control over a region important for its wheat and cotton production and for containing the Communists. Unsurprisingly, the Xi’an Incident of two years before weighed on his mind.12 The next day he learned that Wang Jingwei had flown to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. General Long Yun, the strongman of Yunnan province, informed him that Wang ‘has an agreement with the enemy and is travelling to Hong Kong to negotiate a peace deal’.13 Chiang Kaishek was shocked to his core: ‘This shameless renegade is the cause of all misfortune of the party and the country.’14 Xi’an was not to hold many happy memories for Chiang.

  Wang Jingwei’s departure from Chongqing was a huge blow to the Nationalists. After Chiang and Wang reconciled their differences following Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, Wang had become head of the Executive Branch, which made him China’s premier. In effect, he fronted the ‘first unification, then resistance’ policy, while Chiang Kaishek focused on military affairs. In the second half of the 1930s, a personality cult developed around Wang Jingwei. Three collections of his essays about revolution were translated into English, as was a poetry collection, which presented him as the ‘foremost man in the Nationalist Government … known in his own country also as a distinguished scholar and a classical poet of high merit’.15 The cover of the 18 March 1935 issue of Time magazine carried a drawn portrait of ‘Premier Wang Chingwei’.

  In the weeks before Wang Jingwei’s departure from Chongqing, his associates had worked out the contours of a deal with Japanese officials in Shanghai. In return for the recognition of Manzhouguo, permission to station Japanese troops in Inner Mongolia and the granting of most favoured nation rights to Japan in the economic exploitation of north China, the Japanese agreed to the withdrawal of their forces from areas occupied since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, recognition of China as an equal, respect for its sovereignty, the abolition of extra-territoriality and the eventual return of its concessions.16 While Prime Minister Konoye was aware of the negotiations in Shanghai, the agreement did not reflect settled Japanese government opinion, but was more in the nature of a kite-flying exercise, launched by officials working on their own initiative in the hope that it might lead to something, but easy to disown if it did not.17

  On 22 December, four days after Wang Jingwei left Chongqing, Konoye made a further statement about Japan’s China policy at a press conference hastily convened when Wang Jingwei’s departure from Chongqing was confirmed. Wang had gone to Hanoi in Vietnam rather than to Hong Kong, in contrast to what General Long Yun had told Chiang Kaishek. Presumably Wang had provided false information to General Long to keep his real destination secret for as long as possible and to throw any would-be assassins off his tail. Konoye declared that Japan was willing to work with ‘far-sighted Chinese’ on the basis of equality to foster economic cooperation and jointly defend themselves against communism.18 Fearing a domestic backlash and caught between two camps in Tokyo, Konoye had been reluctant to go public, but Wang Jingwei’s move had forced his hand.19 For the same reason, he omitted a commitment to troop withdrawal from his statement as had been agreed by Japanese negotiators, thus greatly weakening Wang’s case.20

  Rather than turn back, Wang Jingwei ploughed on. On 30 December, he published a telegram he had sent to Chiang Kaishek the previous day in the South China Daily, Wang’s main mouthpiece, published in Hong Kong. Presenting himself as a loyal KMT member making the case for a new direction in policy, he argued that Konoye’s statements indicated that Japan would respect China’s sovereignty, return ‘north China and all occupied areas’ and refrain from ‘intervention in domestic military and political affairs’. He went on: ‘the goal of the War of Resistance is our country’s survival and independence’. His agreement with Japan promised that, and hence, he submitted, now was the time to begin negotiations. Wang stressed that no deal should be signed unless it included an unambiguous commitment to troop withdrawal.21

  Wang Jingwei’s agreement with the Japanese grew out of discussions begun soon after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Before the outbreak of war, he had expressed publicly, including in radio broadcasts, his doubts about the wisdom of going to war with Japan, which he feared would cause massive destruction and most likely end with the Communists as the main beneficiaries. When push came to shove he had voted in favour of war,22 standing up when Chiang Kaishek asked all those in favour to do so when they met back in August 1937 in Nanjing, just before the Battle of Shanghai. But he also joined the Low Key Club, which had a branch in Hong Kong for back-channel discussions with the Japanese.23 As one member put it, the aim was to make sure that ‘the war should end at the right point’.24 Members included Zhou Fohai, the KMT’s deputy propaganda director,25 and Gao Zongwu, the head of the Asia Desk of the Foreign Ministry. In early 1938, after resigning from his post, Gao shuttled back and forth between Shanghai, Hong Kong, Wuhan and Tokyo, meeting Japanese businessmen and officials keen to end the war, including advisors to Prime Minister Konoye.

  Besides disagreeing with Chiang Kaishek that China would outlast Japan ‘by some fluke’ in a war of attrition,26 Wang Jingwei wanted an end to
the war because he was horrified by Chiang’s scorched earth strategy. After he learned that Canton had been abandoned without much of a fight but nonetheless had been turned to ruins, he commented that ‘not to fight and yet to implement a scorched earth policy will do the Japanese no harm but incur us the hatred of our people.’27 After the Battle of Wuhan, Chiang Kaishek stated that Japan ‘will only find scorched earth and empty cities’. Wang criticised him, saying that such an approach had ‘few advantages and many disadvantages’, including forfeiting popular support for operations in the enemy’s rear.28 Following the Great Fire of Changsha, he went public, asking in an article in the Central Daily News, ‘how can we fight if we destroy everything in places near battle zones?’

  Wang Jingwei began his peace campaign in the anticipation that leading political and public figures and some of the main generals of southern China would rally to his side, either as public supporters of the campaign or, as some accounts have it, as members of a new administration to be established in the region.29 Before leaving, Wang had been in contact with many of them, including generals Long Yun, Xue Yue, Chen Jitang, He Jian and Yun Hanmou. General Long Yun had apparently assured Wang: ‘I am prepared to follow you to save us from disaster.’30 But only a handful of officials and not one general, not even Long Yun, followed Wang.31 Wang Jingwei asked China’s ambassador to the UK, Guo Taiqi, to circulate a message rallying support among China’s diplomatic missions. Guo’s response was to implore him to retire to France.32 The ambassador to the USA, Hu Shi, told Wang, ‘[Y]ou know very well that I opposed war for six years [since the occupation of Manchuria]; I now oppose peace talks as against the long-term interest of the country.’33 After praising Wang at length, Minister of Finance Kong Xiangxi, who was himself involved in peace negotiations, declared his opposition: ‘your sudden departure has perplexed all colleagues in the party and the government. We fear that the enemy will exploit it to sow dissension.’34