China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Chiang Kaishek and Mao Zedong met for personal discussions on the afternoon of 10 October and again the next morning. But these failed to break the deadlock. Mao left Chongqing on 11 October ‘looking thinner than when he arrived’.54 Back in Yan’an, he reported to a CCP Party congress that ‘“the ruling cliques of the Kuomintang” were preparing for civil war after the evacuation of the Japanese’.55 Churchill’s personal representative in China, the one-eyed, one-armed General Carton de Wiart, who had met Mao during the negotiations, reported back to the British Cabinet that ‘Mao is quite a good type of man, but a fanatic, and I cannot believe he really means business.’56 Mao had told him that he had tried to cooperate with Chiang, to which Carton de Wiart had responded that ‘it was quite true that both Mao’s and the Generalissimo’s forces had fought the Jap, but the whole time they were looking over their shoulders at each other and hoping they might have a chance to deal each other a crippling blow. I pointed out that in my opinion cooperation was only effective if both parties trusted each other.’ That trust did not exist.

  Japan’s surrender did, however, solve some of the problems the 1911 Revolution had thrown up. Where China was geographically located was now clear, by and large, with the Allies accepting that it included Taiwan and Manchuria, and the Nationalists abandoning claims over Outer Mongolia. But the deeper questions, such as how China should be governed, what it should stand for and how it should be positioned in international relations remained unresolved.

  Surviving Momentous Times

  Chi Pang-yuan’s memoir is an important reminder that for most ordinary people the question was less about who would win the War of Resistance, the Japanese or the Chinese, or who on the Chinese side would emerge as the most powerful party, the Nationalists or the Communists. For them the aim was to survive an ordeal over which they had no control while hanging on as best they could to the loves, friendships and values they treasured most. Some of the most poignant passages in Pang-yuan’s memoir record her response to Japan’s surrender.

  ‘In my whole life I never saw such ecstasy as in Chongqing when Japan formally surrendered,’ she wrote. ‘People abandoned their normal reserve and embraced on the streets. They danced and laughed. They sang patriotic songs such as “Our mountains and rivers are beautiful, our flags flutter in the wind” … all streets were lit up by people marching with big torches and cries of “Long Live the Republic of China” resounded through the heavens.’57 Chi Pang-yuan joined the throngs with her brother and cousins. But soon she was overcome with grief and ran home, tears streaming down her face. ‘To my startled mother I said, “I can’t stand this wild partying.” I spent the night of our victory in inconsolable grief.’58

  Chi Pang-yuan was grieving for Zhang Dafei. After he had joined the Chinese air force, when Pang-yuan was young, she had written him a weekly letter out of a sense of semi-sisterly obligation. Dafei spent his leaves with the Chi family; his stoic acceptance of his likely fate and Pang-yuan’s pride in his service in the one branch of the Chinese armed forces that could claim to be successful ensured that during their walks along the Jialing river their friendship deepened into love. Dafei confessed his feelings only once. He embraced Pang-yuan briefly, but withdrew immediately, realising that ‘I can only cause her grief, both while I am alive and while I am dead.’59

  While Zhang Dafei was away fighting, Chi Pang-yuan was studying well out of danger at Happy Mountain (Leshan) in western Sichuan. There she read a great deal and studied with Zhu Guangqian, a famous professor of literature, who had studied at Edinburgh University, University College London and the University of Strasbourg. He had run literary salons in the 1930s attended by some of the great literary lights of the period, including Zhu Ziqing, Zheng Zhenduo, and Shen Congwen. Under Professor Zhu, Pang-yuan developed a special fondness for Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats – as many romantic teenagers do.

  The Wuhan University officials who decided that Happy Mountain should be its wartime locale made an inspired choice. Happy Mountain was where one of China’s greatest poets, Du Fu, had found respite during an equally unhappy time in Chinese history, the eighth-century Tang Dynasty, when the Dynasty’s fate was hanging in the balance because of rebellion, famine, floods and wars with the Tibetan Empire, which then occupied a vast swath of what we now think of as China. Du Fu aspired to a civil service career but failed the examinations and, from the mid 750s, lived a life turned upside down by war, moving from one place to the next, witnessing close-up all the suffering that came with the upheavals of his time, to which he bore witness in his sensitive, sombre and wise poetry. It was also at Happy Mountain that Du Fu found quiet and rest; his poetry of the time focuses on his peaceful time there. When they chose Happy Mountain, the Wuhan University officials were reminding their charges that they lived in a place where someone of no less a stature than Du Fu, one of whose poems provides an epigraph to this chapter, had found escape from the horrors of his own time, thus providing them with a meaningful and evocative link with China’s past, and telling them that even in war studying and writing had a place.

  ‘When you read this letter, I will be dead’, Zhang Dafei’s last letter to Pang-yuan began. He was right. He died in the skies above southern Henan on 18 May 1944, during the Ichigo offensive. He had prepared the letter beforehand and made arrangements for it to be sent to Pang-yuan’s brother together with, in an act of gentlemanly decency, all the letters she had sent to him in two bundles. In the letter he reiterated his love for Pang-yuan, but also noted that the two had set off on such different paths, he serving in the army, prepared to die for China, while she enveloped herself in literature at Happy Mountain.

  In retelling this history, Chi Pang-yuan shows us how war drove two intelligent, sensitive, serious and well-meaning young people, who had much in common and were deeply in love, in two completely different directions, one to defend their country in the here and now against the aggressor, and the other into a life of study of the great literature of China and the West, to make sure that those who survived could pass on the deeper values of human civilisation, including, of course, an appreciation of learning, art and beauty but also of mutual respect, dignity and affection.

  On 15 August Pang-yuan grieved not only for the death of Dafei but also because she, too, sensed from her father that peace was unlikely and the future might well bring more suffering: ‘While the whole country celebrated, my father was in a sombre mood, not saying anything while in deep thought.’60 He was thinking about Manchuria, the place of his birth, where the Soviets had now replaced the Japanese. ‘Disregarding our sovereignty, Stalin on August 23 declared “Manchuria has been liberated”.’ At university, she had personal experi ence of the spread of Communism, which was tearing the student body apart. One day a fellow student gave Pang-yuan a political dressing-down: ‘Someone’s father is a big shot in Chongqing but still collects a monthly stipend. Very brazen, this. Always reciting “Ode to a Skylark”, but ignoring the suffering of the people. Shameless.’ The next day the same student said: ‘Someone doesn’t want others to know she is establishment scum … a daughter of a corrupt official. Get lost. You’re nothing special.’61 ‘For the next sixty years,’ writes Pang-yuan, ‘I never involved myself in politics, not even campus politics when I was teaching.’62

  Guo Moruo, the author of ‘1644’, now offered the services of his learning and his pen, or brush, to the Communists. But ‘1644’ was not a simple endorsement of the Communists; it also contained a warning to Mao, one that Mao could not fail to have grasped. Guo Moruo, who, incidentally, hailed from Happy Mountain, described Li Zicheng as a great peasant movement leader. He had started out with a small force but in the space of ten years had built up a vast following. He was personally brave but had resisted the temptations that came with his growing power and fame, eating unpolished rice and refusing to indulge himself. He had suffered severe defeats but had re-emerged undaunted every time. But, Guo pointed out, Li Zicheng’s fortunes had truly taken off only
after he had accepted on his staff a highly educated, morally upright and principled son of a high Ming official. That man had warned Li Zicheng: ‘in gaining all under Heaven, the foundation is winning the hearts of the people. Do not kill.’ Whereupon Li Zicheng had scaled down his use of violence. The good words spoken about him by this educated young man had helped him gain a wide following.

  Once victorious, Li Zicheng had cast the young man aside. Li Zicheng’s inner circle had become drunk with victory. They had spent lavishly on celebrations, but had also extorted money from all and sundry, imposed harsh punishments on the vanquished and divided into factions, fighting among themselves for appointments after their victory. They had been blind to the danger emerging at the frontier, with the result that within a few weeks they had lost the empire for which they had struggled so hard. Guo was warning the Communist leadership, including Mao, not to give in to their worst instincts, not to cast aside the educated elites who were now speaking up for them, to be generous to others in victory and, especially, to behave less violently. This was a complex message, self-serving to a degree, but also expressing fears for the future which would prove all too prescient. Men like Guo knew their history.

  PART IV

  THE NEW CHINA

  — TWELVE —

  CRASH AND BURN

  When one is losing, the first thing that strikes one’s imagination, and indeed one’s intellect, is the melting away of numbers … Next comes the break-up of the original line of battle, the confusion of units, and the dangers inherent in the retreat … Once that begins, you have to leave stragglers and a mass of exhausted men behind; among them generally the brave … The feeling of having been defeated, which on the field of battle has struck only the senior officers, now runs through the ranks down to the very privates. Worse still is the growing loss of confidence in the high command, which is held more or less responsible by every subordinate for his own wasted efforts. What is worse, the sense of being beaten is not a mere nightmare that may pass; it has become a palpable fact that the enemy is stronger.

  Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)1

  Just after Japan’s formal surrender in Tokyo, Chiang Kaishek once more addressed his countrymen through a radio broadcast. He made two pledges and issued one appeal.2 His first pledge was a tax holiday for rural China. Areas previously occupied by Japan would be exempt from taxes for the first year after the war and the rest of the country the year after. His second promise was what he called ‘the return of political power to the people’. ‘Our goal in carrying out a revolution and fighting the War of Resistance was not simply to vanquish the enemy, but to establish a new China based on the Three Principles of the People.’3 One-party rule would be brought to an end after the adoption of a new constitution by a national convention. He had promised this before; now was the time to make it a reality. The appeal was for unity: ‘for the future of the country and the prosperity of our people … I call on my fellow countrymen to commit to the nationalization of all armed forces and the creation of a single national administration.’4 This admonition was addressed to all those whose military strength had grown during the War of Resistance, not just the Communists.

  Before making his speech, Chiang Kaishek led senior officials in a ceremony ‘to pay homage from afar to the spirit of Sun Yatsen’.5 In the speech, Chiang stated: ‘we offer our thanks to Sun Yatsen, our teacher in heaven who established our Republic of China; to the martyrs who died for our national revolution; and to all heroes, civil and military, who sacrificed their lives in the War of Resistance’. Just as he had done in 1928 after the Northern Expedition, at his moment of triumph Chiang attempted to lift people’s gaze away from the harsh realities in which most Chinese struggled towards the uplands of a China rebuilt on the basis of nationalism, democracy and the people’s livelihood, that is, Sun Yatsen’s Three People’s Principles. Having made his speech, Chiang Kaishek stepped into an open car. A jubilant Chongqing hailed him as he drove through the city’s streets, leaving Chiang ‘moved beyond description’.6

  Not one ever to let down his guard, Chiang Kaishek was unable to surrender totally to the moment. ‘My mind was not fully free from old and new worries.’7 A few days earlier he had learned that some civil and military personnel dispatched to Nanjing to prepare Japan’s surrender ceremony had behaved atrociously. At Nanjing’s air field, Nationalist soldiers had ‘sacked warehouses’. Officers of advance units of the General Headquarters had acted ‘arrogantly and immorally’.8 A furious Chiang had scolded them, warning, ‘[D]o not forfeit our victory.’9 These incidents, minor as they were, proved to be straws in the wind. By the spring of 1947, less than two years after Japan’s surrender, demoralisation, economic disaster, the USA’s withdrawal of support and the burgeoning Communist revolution led many to predict that the days of the Nationalists were numbered.

  Demoralisation

  With the help of the US 10th and 14th Air Forces, as well as US naval vessels, Nationalist officials and troops made their way to Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Canton, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Taiyuan, Ji’nan, Zhengzhou and Hefei, that is, strategic cities along the Yangzi river and on China’s coast as well as key cities in central and northern China. The Nationalists also incorporated a large number of forces recruited and armed by the Japanese, while Japanese troops were ordered to stay and maintain control over the main transport links. In this way, the Nationalists hoped to recover control over the areas they had given up to the Japanese before the Communists could seize them.10

  For civilians, the journey home was an education in disappointment. A few made the trip by aeroplane, more did so by train, boat and bus, but many made large parts of the journey on foot. Only 10 per cent of China’s rail network was operational, much shipping had been destroyed and many rivers had been mined.11 Troop movements always had priority over civilians. Various routes ran from the Great Rear, as it was called, back to coastal China. One expensive route led south, to Canton and Hong Kong, and then by ship back to the nearest port to home. Another went north, through the mountains ringing Sichuan province, to Xi’an, and then back home by train if there was space available, or else by bus or on foot.12 Agnes Norman had been the head statistician of the Shanghai Municipal Council before the war and afterwards worked in China for the Far East Division of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. She wrote that ‘one of the major human problems resulting from wartime dislocation is the creation of armies of homeless, wandering people … the migration of 50 million people is the greatest trek in history.’13

  If people found the journey home arduous, arriving there was often shocking and disorienting. Feng Zikai, the Buddhist artist whose wartime propaganda posters had made him a household name, was able to complete his return to Shimenwan, a small town in the Yangzi delta, only in the spring of 1947. His essay ‘Returning Home in Victory’ records his experience: ‘When our small boat moored at the dock near the bridge of the southern bank of Shimenwan, I looked up. I thought that we had ended up in the wrong place.’14 Little remained of the prosperous town he had left behind. Along once bustling streets, ‘there was nothing but grass huts, ruins, and unfamiliar faces … I felt like Rip van Winkle in Irving’s Sketchbook. I was overcome and said to no one in particular: “Here was the rice shop of the Yangs”, “Here abouts was Yin Family Alley”, and “Wow, look, the stone pier is still there”.’ He left the next day. The village China of before the war, which many had thought about with affection and longing, was no more.

  In the first year after the war Chi Pang-yuan remained at Wuhan University’s wartime campus on Happy Mountain. Because of the lack of transport, the Nationalists had ordered universities which had moved away from Japanese-occupied areas to stay put for a year. In the summer of 1946, Pang-yuan was fortunate. She hitched a ride on the aeroplane of a US pilot who was courting her then-boyfriend’s sister. Her first stop was Shanghai, where she stayed in the home of her boyfriend’s family. They had suffered little during the war.
In modish Shanghai, Pang-yuan felt ‘vulgar’ in her ‘Chongqing outfit’, which consisted of a baggy cotton dress and ‘round leather shoes with soles made of tyre’.15 Unwilling to be seen with Pang-yuan in her wartime dress, her boyfriend’s sister took her clothes shopping. When Pang-yuan looked into a shop mirror, ‘I saw someone I did not recognize.’

  Pang-yuan did not stay long in Shanghai, but travelled on to Nanjing. Her father, in Nanjing as an official of the Manchurian Affairs Bureau, came to collect her. When she returned to the city where she had spent her happy youth, she found that ‘following eight years of occupation by a foreign people, the capital … had become dilapidated’, with rubble and bricks from bombed-out buildings everywhere. ‘Even young persons like me had to walk with caution.’ Only the Drum Tower was still clearly recognisable. Pang-yuan attended a church service to commemorate the life of Zhang Dafei. Her grief re- awakened, she turned against what she regarded as self-indulgent Shanghai and let her relationship with her Shanghai boyfriend peter out.16

  After the summer, Pang-yuan travelled to Wuhan, where her university was now relocated, to finish her education. In a quiet act of defiance, she took a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy. University officials had wanted to cancel the course because her fellow students all preferred Soviet literature. But Pang-yuan was persistent, the teacher of the course made no objection, and so for a year she and her teacher studied the Divine Comedy, meeting at her teacher’s home, which inevitably gave rise to rumours.