CHAPTER 9
THE second phase of the war began in an obscure skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops at Lukouchiao, ‘Black Moat Bridge’, a site not far from Peking, better known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge, after the Venetian explorer who had regarded it as one of the most beautiful in the world. During the night of 7 July 1937 some of the 15,000 Chinese troops in the region of Peking exchanged rifle-fire with a portion of the 550-strong Japanese garrison at Fengtai, which was carrying out night manoeuvres in open territory north of the bridge, an area long favoured for such purposes by the foreign garrisons guarding their respective legations in Peking under the terms of the Boxer Protocols. The Japanese reported the incident to the mayor of Peking, General Ching Teh-chun, at around midnight and expressed particular concern about the fate of one Japanese soldier who appeared to be missing and was presumed to have been taken captive.
Formal permission was requested for a company of Japanese troops to conduct a search for the missing man in the little fortified town of Wanping, which was also an important railway junction on the main line to Paoting and Hankow (and thus to Central China). Ching, however, denied this request and offered instead to send a joint investigating commission into Wanping to make any necessary inquiries. This was agreeable to the Japanese and suitable arrangements were made. In the meanwhile, Ching took the precaution of ordering the Chinese Army town commander at Wanping to repel any Japanese troops who might attempt to take matters into their own hands. These precautions were well-taken, for eight truck-loads of Japanese troops turned up outside Wanping at 3.30 a.m. in an effort to enter the town and were forcibly repelled by the Chinese. While these events were in progress, it is said that the missing man, whose fate was ostensibly the main source of concern, added to the embarrassment of the Japanese by turning up at his unit two hours after his absence was first discovered, apparently having been led astray that night by nothing more than his sexual desire.
In response to the fighting at Wanping, however, each side rushed a battalion of reinforcements to the scene. The Japanese reinforcements, only a few hundred men strong, came not from Tientsin, fifty miles away, where the main elements of the Japanese North China Garrison Army were based, but like the Japanese troops already on the scene, were drawn instead from the 450-man Japanese Legation Guard, which was the only other Japanese force in the Peking area apart from the battalion based at Fengtai. All parties concerned recognized the gravity of the situation, which threatened to erupt into another Manchurian Incident.
The Japanese were in a particularly vulnerable position: virtually the whole of the North China Garrison Army, which altogether comprised little more than a single infantry brigade, had been deployed away from their various depots in field exercises ever since 6 June and was therefore in no immediate position to render practical assistance to the detachment at Wanping. Moreover, the asthmatic Commander-in-Chief of the North China Garrison, General Tashiro Kan’ichirō, had fallen victim to a serious heart-attack a fortnight before (from which he died on 16 July). In Tashiro’s absence, his Chief of Staff, General Hashimoto Gun, exercised effective control of the North China Garrison and gave clear instructions to Major Ichiki, the battalion commander sent to Wanping, that no action must be taken pending a thorough review of the situation. Hashimoto also made it known that he intended to seek a peaceful resolution of the matter without delay.
And as hindsight soon overlaid the confusing reports issued at the time, the myth grew that the China Incident, as it came to be called, was the product of the same kind of conspiracy as had provoked the Manchurian Incident six years before. On the contrary, Japanese policy on the eve of the China Incident had been in a state of flux. Even the Kwantung Army was hesitant at taking action in China Proper, for as the Chief of Staff of that Army, one Tōjō Hideki, advised Vice-Minister of War Umezu Yoshijirō and Vice-Chief of the Army General Staff Imai Kiyoshi in June 1937, the Japanese Army’s greatest concern remained Russia, not China:
Judging the present situation in China from the point of view of military preparations against the Soviet Union, I am convinced that if our military power permits it, we should deliver a blow first of all upon the Nanking régime to get rid of the menace at our back.
If our military power will not permit us to take such a step, I think it proper that we keep a strict watch on the Chinese Government that they do not lay a single hand on our present undertakings in China until our national defence system is completed. We will thus wait for the Chinese Government to reconsider.
We should not take the initiative to become friendly with the Nanking Government, which has no intention whatsoever of adjusting diplomatic relations with Japan, for, judging from their national characteristics, such a step will only aggravate their disdainful attitude towards Japan.∗
The Chinese, in fact, desired peace no less than did the Japanese but were determined to resist any further Japanese aggression on a major scale, and on 8 July Chiang Kai-shek ordered four Nationalist divisions into the area. Although the evidence suggests that this move was probably designed as a precautionary step, it was regarded by the local Japanese commander at Wanping as highly provocative. Unfortunately, despite efforts by the Japanese representative on the ad hoc Sino-Japanese joint commission to restrain him, Ichiki threw caution to the winds and committed his battalion to a charge against the Chinese positions on 9 July. The attack failed. Three days later, six Kuomintang divisions were moving northwards. The situation was complicated by the fact that under the Ching–Doihara Agreement reached with Japan in June 1935, no troops under Kuomintang command were supposed to be in the North China provinces of Hopei and Chahar, which formed an autonomous buffer between Manchuria and the Nationalist Chinese further south.
Although Japan had intended for some years to establish political control or at least economic hegemony in North China, neither the Japanese military command in China nor the authorities in Tokyo were intent on seeking any trouble at that moment. The Japanese Government in Tokyo and Japanese military commanders in China made herculean efforts to isolate the conflict and avoid further provocations. Meanwhile, cool heads prevailed elsewhere. Hashimoto himself ordered his top aides to open negotiations with senior Chinese officials in Peking and flew there himself the next day, determined to put an end to the trouble. The Army General Staff in Tokyo backed up Hashimoto with orders to settle the matter; agreement was reached by bureau chiefs from the Navy, War and Foreign Ministries on the policy to be adopted in handling the dispute; and the recommendations made by these bureau chiefs were approved by the Japanese Cabinet as early as 8 July. On that basis the Chinese and Japanese negotiators soon achieved an interim local truce agreement.
Troops from other Japanese garrisons in North China, including every available man at Tientsin, were brought into the area, but rumours of major reinforcements from Japan’s Kwantung and Korean Armies were without foundation. On 11 July the Japanese Cabinet announced the mobilization of three divisions in response to Chinese troop movements, but late that evening the plan was cancelled when news came of Hashimoto’s satisfactory agreement with Ching. For the next month the Japanese sent no fresh troops into the area from outside China. But a stalemate developed in negotiations for a withdrawal, and matters were not helped by Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘Kuling Declaration’ on 16 July, in which he effectively tore up the Ching–Agreement and proclaimed his determination to re-establish China’s historic territorial unity and sovereign rights. The thousands of Japanese troops and civilians legally present in China under existing treaties were at risk of being massacred by the many times more numerous Chinese regular and militia forces moving forward.
In ‘efforts to save the situation’, another far-reaching agreement was hammered out between the Head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s East Asiatic Affairs Bureau, the Chief of the War Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau and the Navy Ministry’s Chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau on 23 July. Like other documentary evidence from the period, it puts paid to the suspicion of onlookers that Japan’s string of military victories in the early stages of the China Incident stemmed from a well-laid plot to take over the whole of China in one fell swoop:
1. As long as there is no big change in the situation, we stick to our policy of settling the incident on the spot and of non-expanding the incident, and stop further sending of troops.
2. To voluntarily and speedily evacuate our reinforced troops out of the Great Wall when we see for sure the possible conclusion of a local agreement and feel safe.
Remark: We consider we can be sure of the possible carrying out of the local agreement when the forces of Feng Chi-an [a local Chinese commander] have completely been moved to Paoting.
3. To declare the purport of No. 1 and No. 2 at a good opportunity.
4. To begin negotiations with the Nanking Government for adjusting our relations with China immediately after the time for evacuating our troops is fixed.
5. In the negotiation for adjusting the relations of both countries, matters will not be biased by past circumstances, and these matters should be rapidly considered by the three ministers [Foreign, War and Navy Ministries] to work out a good plan.∗
Unfortunately, even these extraordinary efforts were unavailing. By late July further incidents were occurring with increasing frequency and seriousness. In many of these exchanges, the Japanese came out much the worse for wear. Within the space of a few weeks, at first sporadic, later general, fighting spread through all North China, and reached Shanghai. As far as can be discovered, none of the main Japanese generals, and certainly not Chiang Kai-shek, wanted war at this particular moment: and peace efforts were made constantly. But the situation was out of hand. The Chinese communists, who were now formally reconciled with the Kuomintang, used every opportunity to drive their allies on to war. The decision was forced by relatively junior officers in command in the field. The situation became virtually irretrievable after 25 July, when the Chinese, manning the ancient defences of Peking, trapped three hundred Japanese troops as they passed between the inner and outer gates of the city while returning from Fengtai to the Japanese Legation in the city: some of the Chinese guarding the gates found the temptation irresistible, swung the gates shut behind the Japanese, and raked their victims with withering grenade and mortar fire. Order was soon restored and the surviving Japanese were permitted to continue on their way, but this incident naturally provoked further outrages on both sides. Three days later, the Japanese Forces at Fengtai exacted their revenge, marched into Peking and made short work of Chinese resistance. Compulsively the fighting spread. The top commanders on both sides saw this and made futile efforts to check it, and excused themselves from all responsibility.
The situation became so tense by early August that the Japanese Cabinet agreed to take the precaution of sending an expeditionary force into China with the intention of protecting Japanese property and covering the withdrawal of Japanese civilians. It must be stressed that Japan did not intend to open a larger campaign at this stage, although obviously these reinforcements would be essential if Japan should find itself at war with the much larger forces that China was now bringing forward. Nevertheless, Japan’s reinforcements had an electrifying effect on the Chinese, who were enraged at what they understandably interpreted as a Japanese design to extend the conflict. Too many Chinese and Japanese preferred to go to war rather than endure insults to their respective national honour.
The two years which followed were the chief phase of slaughter in the war between China and Japan: then came a renewed period of lull. The conflict was still separate from the Armageddon which was being prepared in the West, and at first remained a separate war when the explosion occurred in Europe. Naturally both sides followed with care the events in Europe, and at times they adjusted their policies accordingly. But the two wars were not to merge until December 1941. There were four years to go before that.
The history of these first years of fighting is fairly simple. As was expected, Japan quickly overcame the organized resistance in the north, and occupied the railway lines and the cities. Following a separate incident at Shanghai on 9 August, when two Japanese marines were shot and killed by a Chinese sentry, the Japanese and Chinese both sent in reinforcements to support their existing garrisons, and the history of the landing there after the Mukden Incident was repeated. In Shanghai itself, the Chinese resisted for seven weeks, and there was jubilation in China. The stakes were high: Shanghai, the largest city in China with a population in excess of 31/2 million people in normal times, was swollen with refugees. Overhead the two sides waged the first air war on a major scale that had taken place since the First World War (although the effects of Italian aerial attacks on Abyssinian tribesmen had already been observed and the destructive power of air bombardment on undefended civilian targets had been proved by German aviators at Guernica as recently as April 1937). The lessons of this air war were watched keenly by occidental observers in China with less than dispassionate detachment: their general attitude was voiced by a senior British naval officer at the scene whose own personal association with China went back to his birth in Shanghai as the son of a British physician:
We on the spot share the disgust with which all the foreign inhabitants view the Chinese and Japanese for fighting their main battle here.
It is humiliating for the white man not to have the power to prevent these inferior yellow races from damaging and making use of the fine city which he, and most especially the British, have laboriously built up and which is such an asset to the Far East. There are signs, however, that both sides have attempted to spare foreign property. On the other hand, both use the [International] Settlement as a ‘base of operations’.∗
At this point the undeclared hostilities suddenly exploded into a Total War of appalling ferocity. By the end of the month, Japanese armies began pouring into China, smashing the inefficient and often corrupt Chinese forces. Gradually the truth about the Chinese Armies became known in the outer world, which had at first been inclined to credit that China had become better organized than it was in fact. The Chinese command organization went to pieces. Soldiers went into battle as part of a modern military formation, but this usually broke under strain, and they became pockets of fighting men. Hence came much of the nightmare quality which made this one of the most awful periods of China’s recent black record. Administration was primitive, corruption was extreme and pervasive. Army medical services and hospitals scarcely existed, and soldiers who were only slightly wounded usually perished. Volunteer medical aid began to appear from the sympathetic countries of the West, but all that its doctors could do was to add to the swelling chorus of lamentation.
Improvising a guerrilla warfare, the Chinese discovered in one or two isolated battles a military prowess which China’s friends afterwards took too much for granted. But at Shanghai, on breaking through in the end to open country in early November, the Japanese advanced rapidly up the Yangtze River Valley and converged upon Nanking, 200 miles to the west. Swinging southward, they captured the important river port of Wuhu, fifty miles upstream. On 13 December they occupied the Chinese capital without difficulty.
Chiang Kai-shek and his Government had withdrawn to Hankow. In the last fortnight of December 1937, after they had lost Nanking, the slaughter and atrocities were far worse than in 1931. It was the history of an earlier time, of the Mongol ravages of Asia, of Timur and the cold terror he spread – a horror which his name can even now evoke in Central Asia. There are lurid tales of Timur sacking a city. If an army dared to oppose him, Timur built up a pyramid of skulls of those he slaughtered. He camped in a tent of scarlet canvas outside the towns he besieged, thus symbolizing the massacres he intended to carry out. The ferocity of the Japanese likewise amazed the world. The massacre was done for the most part by Japanese conscripts, unfamiliar with war, perhaps neurotically working out of their system the extreme repressions in which they had passed so much of their lives. Some Japanese officers in other centres wept with shame and indignation when they heard details of the carnage.
Chinese burial parties afterwards counted upwards of a quarter of a million dead: some of the dead may have been tallied more than once, and more accurate estimates, if indeed they do exist, are no less subject to controversy. In any case, the burial rolls that were compiled are a sufficient measure of the extent of the catastrophe. There were many eye-witnesses who survived: against all odds, there generally are survivors of such events. They told of scenes of systematic arson, of looting on an unbelievable scale, of mass rapes in hospitals, in exclusive Chinese women’s colleges, in many of the twenty-five refugee camps dotted round the city, in residential districts. And there was worse, as Captain Liang Ling-fang of the Chinese Army Medical Corps, for instance, was to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal after the surrender of Japan:
We were given orders to stay in Nanking and take care of the Chinese wounded, and stay there after the Japanese took the city. We found that the Red Cross was no protection, and therefore dressed in civilian clothes, and we were in a refugee camp when the Japanese took the city. On the sixteenth, we were ordered by the Japanese to proceed to Shsia Kwan, on the bank of the River Yangtze, in Nanking. I estimate there were above 5,000 who were marched four abreast, and the line was a 3/4 of a mile long. When we arrived there we were placed in a line near the River, and on either side of the line there formed and in front of [the] line were machine-guns and Japanese soldiers, with the machineguns pointing at the line. There were two trucks carrying rope, and men were tied five in a group with their wrists tied below their backs, and I saw the first men who were shot by rifles in such groups and who were then thrown in the river by the Japanese. There were about 800 Japanese present, including officers, some of whom were in sedan automobiles… We [had] started from the refugee camp about five o’clock in the evening, arrived at the bank of the River about seven o’clock, and the binding of the prisoners and shooting kept up until two o’clock [in the morning].∗
Liang’s body still bore the marks of his ordeal; his testimony was corroborated by other witnesses. The episode that he described was by no means an isolated occurrence. In post-war Japan, there has been an observable tendency to regard tales such as Captain Liang’s as exceptional or exaggerated. At the time, Japanese who were there had no such illusions.
The effect was profound in other countries of the world. At first the news of the outrage was censored, but ultimately it got into the world’s press. Anxious though they were to avert their gaze from Asia, because of their preoccupations in Europe, the countries of the West found themselves distracted first by Shanghai, then by the events at Nanking, and were appalled by seeing a foretaste of what might soon be everywhere. From then on, the Japanese Army was held to be uncivilized, savage and terrible. The incident became known as the Rape of Nanking, and frenzied atrocities which the Japanese Army committed there, although no different in kind from what was to happen elsewhere, were on a scale quite unmatched anywhere else during the Greater East Asia and Pacific Conflict.
World opinion had favoured the Chinese side from the beginning of the war, but even those who most admired China or most despised Japan came to wonder how long China could endure the Japanese onslaught. Foreign condemnation was ineffectual in these early years, however. Without the benefits of Germany’s substantial military mission and supply programme to China, and without Britain’s amorphous but indispensable economic empire within China, which provided, respectively, the basis of Chinese defence and financial stability in the early years of the war, there seems little doubt that Japan would have won the China Incident absolutely.
The Japanese Cabinet itself was bitterly divided over future policy almost from the very beginning: there were suddenly vast new territories to administer, a frightening financial outlook, and a war which patently neither the War Ministry nor the Army General Staff could control. In a sense Japan’s policy-making machinery went to war with itself. The Army repeatedly promised the Cabinet and the Emperor that the military advance would halt at one specified objective after another. Each time it was found that additional territory was desired to protect previous gains, and each time it was clear that immoderate elements within the Army were set to act as they themselves determined.
The Japanese certainly believed that they gave China generous opportunities to negotiate a peace settlement. The war was nearly six months old before the Government in Tokyo abandoned the limited aims which they had held when the fighting had started. A considerable number of peace feelers were extended either directly to China or indirectly through serious approaches to Germany, Britain and America. The Americans showed a marked reluctance to become involved, but the British, and more especially the Germans, took their opportunities far more seriously. Even Italy and France occasionally served as intermediaries in the furtherance of peace negotiations. But if Japan was eager to conclude a peace settlement, its leaders were rarely prepared to offer genuinely conciliatory terms to the Chinese once Japan’s ascendency in the war became clear. The often hamfisted quality of the Japanese proposals was itself a product of the political turmoil that existed within the upper reaches of the Japanese military and political leadership: those who offered such proposals not only had a natural tendency to adopt positions which would be acceptable to most of the Japanese policy-making élites but also had to take account of the damage which any offer of over-generous concessions would do to their continuing political influence at home.
While the frustrations experienced by the Japanese began to manifest themselves in an increasing unwillingness to treat with the Nanking Government at all, the Japanese began to explore the possibility of linking the Japanese and Korean domestic economies with those of Occupied China and Manchukuo. On 22 December 1938 Prime Minister Konoye Fumimaro made a major radio broadcast to the world in which he proclaimed Japan’s determination to create a ‘New Order in East Asia’: ‘The spirit of renaissance is now sweeping over all parts of China and enthusiasm for reconstruction is mounting ever higher,’ he declared, and he went on to urge the people of China to embrace a three-fold programme based upon ‘neighbourly amity, common defence against communism, and economic cooperation’. He utterly failed to anticipate that in demanding the right to station Japanese troops at predetermined places throughout China and in the designation of Inner Mongolia as ‘a special anti-communist area’, the Chinese understood that he intended nothing less than the complete domination of China. One must appreciate the elements of continuity that existed between this manifesto and the historical trends of Japanese military campaigns and political schemes north of the Great Wall prior to the outbreak of the China Incident. Not for the first time was the Japanese definition of ‘cooperation’ profoundly different from the meaning which other countries ascribed to the word. Most foreigners – including the Chinese – were utterly amazed that the Japanese Prime Minister could close such a speech with what appeared to be sentiments of either unsurpassed self-delusion or unmitigated hypocrisy:
If the object of Japan in conducting the present vast military campaign be fully understood, it will be plain that what she seeks is neither territory nor indemnity for the costs of military operations. Japan demands only the minimum guarantee needed for the execution by China of her function as a participant in the establishment of the new order.
Japan not only respects the sovereignty of China, but she is prepared to give positive consideration to the questions of the abolition of extraterritoriality and of the rendition of the concessions and settlements matters which are necessary for the full independence of China.∗
Yet in efforts to explain his motives to American interrogators after the Pacific War, Prince Konoye insisted that he had intended his speech as a genuine contribution to mutual understanding and goodwill: it was not Japan’s purpose to annex China. Japan, as the stronger economic, military and even political power, naturally expected ‘to take leadership in the development of a unified Far East’. But that was not regarded by the Japanese as tantamount to the destruction of Chinese sovereignty. His broadcast had been intended as no more than an enunciation of moral or political principles. The objectives set out in his speech could have been achieved with goodwill and good faith on both sides through cultural and economic ties rather than by armed conquest. In the end, he declared, the high principles underlying his speech were betrayed firstly by his own military, which corrupted his benevolent political aims by means of military force, and secondly by the Government of Chiang Kai-shek, which proved equally unresponsive to his overtures. Whether this rather confused but popular Prime Minister ever truly expected anything less, however, must remain something of an enigma. What is clear is that Konoye’s ‘New Order in East Asia’ projected nothing less than the alignment of the entire political and economic resources of China in support of the domestic and international aspirations of Japan. Expressed in terms of Total War, that could have provided Japan with an incalculable increase in strength against any of her potential adversaries.
China managed, just barely, to withstand wave after wave of Japanese attacks during the first two years of the China Incident. Despite losing her principal cities, rivers and thousands of miles of territory, China survived. As each successive catastrophe was endured, China’s self-confidence in itself emerged to strengthen China’s historic contempt for its barbarian invaders. The few Chinese voices raised in support of a negotiated settlement with Japan found precious little favour. They were either eased out of positions of authority or isolated by Chiang Kai-shek. By the end of 1937 there was no possibility of a return to the status quo ante bellum: the human cost of the fighting had become too terrible for that. It became evident that the very success of the Japanese armed forces was acting as an impediment to peace. When Prince Konoye, the unhappy Japanese Prime Minister, decided in January 1938 to offer no more peace compromises after the collapse of a particularly important German mediation attempt, he laid particular stress on the bitterness which the Chinese must feel after having lost 700–800,000 soldiers in barely six months of war. Japan’s own war dead were thought to number only 50,000. This may have been an over-estimate of the losses of the one, and an underestimate of the other. Yet there was a great gap between the losses on both sides. Later Prince Konoye, one of the most remarkable ditherers ever to hold the premiership of Japan in the twentieth century, changed his mind several times and made further peace efforts, but he and other Japanese leaders remained anxious about the effects which possible peace negotiations would have on Japanese Army and civilian morale: with an Army of 1,600,000 men fighting on behalf of the Emperor, it was argued that the nation had an obligation to the tens of thousands of Japanese war dead, who would never rest until Japan gained victory. Moreover, so far as Prince Konoye and his intimates were concerned, offering to come to terms would only be interpreted as an admission of Japan’s underlying weakness which would create financial panic in the Japanese money markets and would inflict a major blow to Japanese morale. To this argument Prince Chichibu, the Emperor’s younger brother, retorted, ‘How much longer do they think that Japan’s financial strength will last anyway?’∗
The death toll grew, and the Chinese continued to lose many times the number of casualties that the Japanese suffered. Looking back, the British Embassy in China observed in an annual report: ‘Measured in terms of human anguish, there has probably never been, even in the long history of Chinese suffering, such a year as 1938.’† The spirit of China was transformed in the process; an angry and increasingly resolute China faced Japan with implacable hatred.
Worries about the threat of Soviet mischief-making on the northern frontier, concern about Japan’s relations with the Western Powers (and particularly Britain), and mounting evidence that the military and economic strength of Japan was unequal to the conquest of Chinese resistance all brought home to most members of the Government, to virtually the whole of the General Staff and to the War Minister, as it did to other influential circles such as the zaibatsu, that some kind of rapid settlement of the China Incident was imperative for Japan’s well-being. But it did not happen. Chiang had set his face against peace; he was prepared to endure a long war because he and his supporters could have survived nothing shorter, and so the war dragged on. The American Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, likened Japan’s war with China to the fable of Brer Rabbit’s struggle with the Tar Baby: the more fiercely the Japanese forces thrashed the Chinese, the more firmly the Japanese attached themselves to their victim, and when the Japanese did try to disengage themselves, they found themselves ensnared, stuck firmly to the Chinese.
In 1938 there was much fighting in North and Central China. The fighting tended to concentrate along the main arteries of the country, which were its railways, rivers and canals. China possessed 225,000 miles of canals, and as one well-qualified western scholar observed in the mid-thirties: ‘If forty canals were dug across the United States from east to west, and sixty from north to south, their total mileage would be less than that of the canals in China.’∗ In the spring, in an effort to halt the Japanese advance, Chiang ordered the breaching of the Yellow River dykes. This slowed but failed to halt them, but it was estimated that a million peasants drowned in the flood which resulted. It began to be clear what torment had been let loose on the world. There was heavy fighting: the Chinese engaged in positional warfare, and did not use guerrilla tactics.
Some divisions showed the result of their having received German training from Chiang Kai-shek’s German advisers. In the Battle of Taierchwang, near the border between Kiangsu and Shantung Provinces, the Chinese won a temporary triumph in April which purchased a six-week delay in the advance of the Japanese upon Hsuchow, the junction of the important two Tientsin–Pukow and Lunghai railways, but the moral and strategic effect of this solitary victory were minor in comparison with the fighting that began to distract the world in the next few months at Changkufeng against the Russians. While fighting raged at Changkufeng, the Japanese advance through Wuhan Province in Central China slowed down but did not falter. After the Changkufeng Incident came to an end, Japanese reinforcements hastened to the Central China front, and the Japanese juggernaut, to no one’s surprise, once more picked up speed.
In October, the Japanese, in the south, took Canton and its hinterland. Canton was the original base of the Kuomintang; its capture was significant, as it seemed to symbolize striking at the root of the Kuomintang. It also left the Japanese in possession of the hinterland surrounding Hong Kong, hitherto the principal avenue for German and other western arms imports intended for the Chinese Republic.
In the same month the Japanese, advancing up the Yangtze, had taken Hankow, last of the fabled Three Cities of Wu. This was not an easy victory, as many successes had been. Chiang Kai-shek’s administration, with all the impedimenta of government, was forced to withdraw once more. This time, having learned something at least, the Kuomintang moved a thousand miles up the Yangtze to Chungking, the principal town (though not the capital) of the remote province of Szechwan, which bordered on Tibet, and which since 1935 had been prepared by Chiang as the national capital in an emergency. Chiang was now following what proved to be his masterplan for the war: to trade space for time; to care little for losses of territory (or manpower) provided the centre of resistance remained intact; to put faith in the huge distances and population of China, and to hang on in spite of defeats (and administrative incompetence or malfeasance).
Chungking was well beyond the gorges in the Yangtze, which are one of the beauty spots of China. To attack Chungking was to involve the Japanese in such problems of logistics that Chiang was safe there. The Japanese did not follow him further.
A very, long pause set in. Japanese communications and supply lines grew lengthy and cumbersome. The prospect of a stalemate once again brought fear to the Japanese. There were few signs of public discontent, and official misgivings were muted. Despite deep gloom in Japan’s Imperial Household and the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs, ways seemed to be found to avoid the great threats of bankruptcy and international economic or armed intervention in the war by outside Powers. Senior naval officers, especially Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa and Navy Vice-Minister Yamamoto Isoroku, had opposed the war from the beginning and were unflagging in their efforts to moderate excessive Army demands for the commitment of more and more of the nation’s resources to the military conquest of Chinese resistance. But beneath this thin crust of sensibility lay a core of middle-ranking naval officers who had control of the Naval General Staff and who were altogether too eager to exploit the war in China through a desire to support their common cause with their counterparts in the Army and through a wild ambition to ‘facilitate future air-raids’ against Hong Kong and other bastions of western power in East Asia. Even the Japanese Army found these Navy hotheads somewhat frightening and recognized that such men might bring the Army into conflict with Britain and America as well as the Army’s traditional foes, China and Russia. A compromise was reached. Thus far the Army had been successful on the battlefield even if victory proved ever elusive. So long as naval appropriations suffered no harm, the senior naval leadership of Japan tolerated the maintenance of the Japanese Army’s war in China until such a time as a truly favourable opportunity to end it might appear.
Japan took stock of what it had gained. After only a few months of war, the Japanese had captured most of the important river systems which formed China’s economic arteries. By the end of 1938 they also possessed nine-tenths of the Chinese railway system and controlled the entire coastline of China under a tight blockade. In a technical sense little remained of China worth conquering by Japan at the end of 1938. Such heavy fighting was not to happen again, even when this war was eventually swallowed up in the Second World War, and when China’s weapons were much strengthened by aid from its allies, mostly flown over ‘the hump’ of northern Burma. All the important battles appeared to have been fought and won. Japan could be content with consolidating her position and mopping up isolated pockets of resistance. Japanese morale predictably reached dizzying heights, and so did Japanese political ambition.
Superficially Japan had conquered territory which contained 170 million people. China had lost its principal seaports, the Chinese Navy had ceased to exist, and the Japanese mounted very effective naval patrols round the entire seaboard of the country from Manchukuo to French Indo-China. China depended henceforward for foreign supplies on two routes. The first was an earth road from Russia through the huge province of Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan), which had been used for centuries as part of the ancient Silk Route linking China with Central Asia; in more recent times it had been used by the bandits of Sinkiang, a no man’s land, and by Chinese communists as their back alley to the Soviet Union. The other was a new road, 350 miles long and completed only in 1938 by 200,000 coolies, from the city of Kunming (formerly Yunnanfu), provincial capital of Yunnan and the communications hub of” south-west China, to the south, where it ended at Lashio in northern Burma, providing access to roads leading south to the Bay of Bengal at Rangoon. Both roads were very long, poorly constructed, virtually impassable by motor vehicles during the rainy season between June and November, and liable to traffic blocks at the best of times. The difficulties of the logistics and terrain were formidable. When pack animals instead of motor vehicles were used, it took about sixty days to transport military supplies from Rangoon to Kunming via the Burma Road. For a time China had been able to use the port of Haiphong, in Indo-China, but the French authorities ran hot and cold depending upon the attentions of the Japanese, and the bridges were destroyed which carried the French-owned railway line linking this port with its terminus 550 miles away at Kunming, where it connected with roads and canals to Chungking and the whole of South and Central China.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the stalemate in China which had emerged in late 1938 grew more serious during the next year as the Nationalist régime continued to survive. By 1939 Japanese military forces seemed to have reached the limits of their power in China. No appreciable advances were made in the central regions of China, and events on the periphery had a significance far larger than the war against the Nationalists. Hainan Island was taken after an unopposed invasion on 10 February, which frightened the French into reducing the trickle of war supplies which flowed north from Haiphong in Indo-China to Kwangsi Province in Free China. A larger expedition all but completed this object in November after landing north-west of Hainan on the Chinese mainland at Pakhoi and easily advancing north to Nanning. Neither of these campaigns materially advanced Japanese efforts to end the war in China, but the seizure of Hainan marked an important step towards the Pacific War. It was occupied in the vain hope of satisfying the ambitions of activists in the Japanese Naval General Staff who wanted to wrest control of the South China Seas from the British and so pluck from European hands the fabulous riches of Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China. Thus the move into Hainan revealed how far the authority of moderate, pro-western senior leaders of the Japanese Navy had slipped. The advocates of Japan’s ‘Southern Advance’ wanted to secure Asia’s back door against the West, but in pursuing that strategy the Japanese invited more trouble than they could handle.
The notorious arrogance of Japanese soldiers, while often not much greater towards foreigners in China than towards Japanese civilians at home, inevitably led to international incidents. As Japanese casualties in China reached approximately half a million men during 1939, scapegoats were sought. Although Japanese officials never ceased to bicker among themselves, they found common cause in blaming Britain, France and the United States for Japan’s failure to achieve victory in China. The expeditions to Hainan and Pakhoi reflected this general tendency, and so did crude reprisals against western property and commercial interests in Occupied China. These measures were effective locally but encouraged Britain and the United States at least to resist further encroachments on their treaty rights in China. There were frequent incidents on the Yangtze River involving confrontations between Japanese and western gunboats, and a particularly alarming confrontation occurred at the International Settlement on Kulangsu, an island lying off Amoy in the vicinity of Formosa. Japanese troops landed there on 23 May 1939 in search of Chinese terrorists. This resulted in a rapid concentration of British, American and French warships at Amoy, and all three countries promptly landed separate shore parties each equal in size to the Japanese contingent. Tension lessened only when the British and French forces withdrew at the outbreak of the European War. The Japanese and Americans then negotiated a mutual withdrawal of their marines in mid-October.
Notwithstanding the Kulangsu Incident and provocations on the Yangtze, Japan discounted the danger of armed intervention by the West. Indeed, the Japanese Army had developed no contingency plans for war against either Britain or the United States at this time, and the Japanese Navy had no detailed plan, yet, for war against an Anglo-American coalition. The Japanese had the satisfaction of believing they knew how Britain and America would react in the event of a war. The Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC, had secured a copy of War Plan Orange, the United States contingency plan for a war against Japan, and the Japanese Government knew the substance of British naval war plans, which had been obvious in general outline ever since construction of the Singapore Naval Base had begun in the aftermath of the First World War. Japanese cryptographers had cracked the British diplomatic codes and had the benefit of monitoring, among other things, how far apart the British and Americans were.
So long as Japan left Hong Kong to the British and avoided all but the occasional outrage against British or American nationals in China, the Anglo-Saxon Powers seemed unlikely and indeed unprepared to mount the kind of combined effort necessary to impose their will by naval means against Japan. Short of a world war, the Japanese Navy was capable of defending Japanese interests and even extending Japanese influence in the waters of the Western Pacific Ocean and South Seas. The China Incident did not adversely affect Japan’s naval strength in the Western Pacific. On the contrary the training received by Japanese naval airmen under combat conditions in China was invaluable and allowed the Japanese to improve their aircraft far more rapidly than would have been possible in peacetime. Likewise, the war in China gave Japan the opportunity to develop amphibious operations into a new art several years ahead of any other nation. In traditional areas of naval construction, Japanese naval architects had managed to evade the restrictions of the Washington and London naval limitations treaties, which expired in 1936, and by means of four naval replenishment plans kept pace qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, with rapid British and American naval expansion programmes. The result was that by 1939 Japan was impervious to either (but not both) of the British or the United States navies in the Western Pacific and most of the China Seas.
Nevertheless, Japan had a well-justified fear of Anglo-American economic encirclement. There was disturbing evidence very early during the China Incident that Britain wanted American support for a programme to impose an early end to the war at Japanese expense through joint economic countermeasures against Japan. Later, strong pressure groups in the United States lobbied for similar ideas. Tokyo could not hope to resist such a programme for long.
Over 40 per cent of Japanese exports and more than half her imports were with the United States. Japan’s balance of payments’ situation was precarious, and her financial future was a hostage to the vagaries of American public policy. Although Government controls in Japan succeeded in limiting Japanese imports to essential materials, the trend over the first two and a half years of the China Incident was for Japanese exports to fall sharply while imports from the United States continued to rise. Traditionally, Japan had been dependent upon the British Empire and the United States for vital strategical raw materials ranging from tin, nickel and zinc to oil, iron and steel. The British calculated that a bilateral embargo on Anglo-Japanese trade would hurt the British Empire more than Japan, but it was evident to all that confiscation of Britain’s considerable assets in Japan would not begin to compensate Japan for the losses that Japan would suffer if Britain and America both imposed sanctions against the Japanese economy. This difficulty for Japan increased substantially when the European War began in September 1939: alternative sources of supply for some strategical goods vanished along with an important segment of the Japanese export market. Meanwhile, Yen-bloc countries such as Formosa, Korea and Manchuria absorbed an increasingly high proportion of Japanese industrial output while contributing a disappointingly low proportion of Japanese war production requirements. Self-sacrifice by Japanese consumers permitted the war to continue indefinitely, but it was universally accepted that Japan had no margin of safety against the firm application of Anglo-American economic sanctions.
Within China Proper, however, there was no more large-scale fighting of transcontinental dimensions for five years. For much of that time it might have been supposed that the war had petered out. Yet a staggering 40 to 50 per cent of Japan’s entire national budget was appropriated for defence purposes, and the nation was resolved to fight for victory.
Japan suffered its first reverses in the occupied districts in the north. Its control of the railways and towns did not give it control of the rural areas. It began to feel severely the effects of communist guerrilla warfare. At first the Japanese generals had supposed that they had the measures for repressing the communists, and, for a time, little was heard about the communist armies. This was to the dismay of the friends of China who had built up extravagant hopes on the reconciliation between Chiang and the communists. Eventually, though, the stubborn resistance of the communists began to take a toll. To have overcome it, to have attempted a stricter control which would have eliminated this, would have cost many millions of troops, which the Japanese could not afford. China had begun to draw the advantages from one of its assets, size. Because the Japanese could not pacify the vast area of Hopei, Shantung and Shensi provinces, which they had overrun, they constituted themselves as a target for guerrilla action.
Chiang Kai-shek sat in his fortress at Chungking and waited. The city, though not beautiful like Chengtu, the capital of Szechuan, was fitted for its purpose. Rainfall was heavy, and the clouds which overhung it for weeks on end, together with surrounding mountains which made it difficult to approach, prevented it from being an easy target of attacks from the air. It was bombed heavily for a time, but later was left in peace. The city was large, and had once been affluent. Chiang’s task was to keep his Government in existence, to survive the plots against him, to plot against others – to continue to be regarded as the symbol of nationalism. Alas, though wartime propaganda made the reputation of Chungking as a heroic centre of resistance, a long, slow demoralization set in among the Kuomintang establishment, the inevitable result among an army and bureaucracy condemned to too much idleness, and this proved in the long run too much for Chiang Kai-shek to combat. The Chinese of the Kuomintang and the Army staff were a different people from the particularist Szechuanese, who resented their impact on their ancient provincial culture. Relations between them and the local people deteriorated steadily. ‘Down-river gangsters’ was the term used for Kuomintang officials by the Szechuanese people. Internal rot was the price the Kuomintang paid for the tactics of masterly inactivity.
Chiang Kai-shek was resting his hopes, not on the Kuomintang Army, but chiefly on foreign aid, principally American aid, which his diplomats in the United States tirelessly sought. Certainly there was abundant American goodwill to China, based chiefly on the vast American missionary enterprise there. It seemed that China, before the war, had been willing to reconstruct its society according to American ideas, and this seemed to impose on the United States the obligation of protecting it internationally.
As far as China was concerned, Japan for a time now turned its back on battles and daring campaigns, and engaged in political warfare and in political intrigue. The only military action was a single attempt in June 1940 to force the Yangtse gorges, which ended at Ichang. Japan decided that to carry on the war was to bring complication after complication, and, from now on, explored ways to end it. From this time, 1939–40, the Japanese Army sought peace in China as constantly and assiduously (though maladroitly) as it had once welcomed war. It was out of the question to arrange to annex the vast territory it had overrun, and to rule it directly as the British used to rule India. The need for civil servants would be immense, beyond anything which Japan could supply. It turned in consequence to indirect rule, to organizing North China as a puppet state (similar in general shape to Manchukuo), which would be under the rule of a single man or body of men upon whose loyalty they could rely, because it would be clear that, with Japanese aid removed, they would collapse.
Their first thought was to use Chiang Kai-shek himself. If they could have detached him from his nationalism, and made it worth his while, Chiang would have proved an excellent puppet. He would have had a full and apparently contented life hunting down communists. Realizing how greatly an alliance with Chiang would serve them, understanding that this was indeed the crisis of the war, the Japanese used the utmost finesse to bring it about. But neither the secret emissaries whom they sent tirelessly to visit him, nor the German and British Ambassadors who proposed mediation, brought the Japanese any hopeful news. Chiang had little room to manoeuvre in. He had made his way to the top of the Kuomintang, but he had become a prisoner of the national movement, which would have broken him if he had sought to betray it. Chiang, who knew the dark corners of China’s political life, and availed himself of the services of its inhabitants, knew well what agents it would employ.
Furthermore Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was the heart and soul of Chinese unity against Japan, probably never expected any peace to emerge from these discussions. Chiang demanded nothing less than Japan’s unconditional withdrawal from China: he only departed from this basic position when he evidently hoped to throw Tokyo off course while Japanese armies were sweeping towards one particularly important objective or another. For the most part, Chiang disdainfully rejected Japan’s efforts to seek a compromise based on present realities, and he made use of western good offices to further China’s international propaganda campaign rather than to achieve a negotiated end to the war. Not only did the Chinese mistrust the Japanese peace offers but they had also come to regard resistance to Japan as a necessary precondition for the survival of Chinese nationalism. In addition, the Japanese terms were often poorly expressed due partly to the vagaries of the Japanese language and partly to fears that enemy morale might recover if it became known beforehand how small were Japan’s fundamental desiderata.
Reluctantly the Japanese decided on alternative plans. After several experiments with Chinese puppet régimes of little significance, they set themselves to persuade certain respected nationalists, who were opposed to Chiang Kai-shek, to form a Government which had all the outward shape of the Kuomintang, and which the Japanese could substitute for the official Kuomintang. They had resort to one of the most distinguished members of the Kuomintang, who had been almost a founding father of the party.
This man, Wang Ching-wei, one time Vice-President of the Kuomintang republic, had previously built a career on the leadership of the left wing. He had never exhausted the fame which he had gained by being involved in a plot in the days of the Empire to murder a Manchu grandee. In private, his views were anything but radical and he had married a very wealthy wife, who came from a family of Singapore millionaires. But his political talents had been acceptable to the revolutionary branch of the Kuomintang. After the fall of Canton and Hankow he seems to have accepted the Japanese argument that further resistance was useless, and to have argued that China, by recasting its foreign policy, could still come to terms with Japan which would be mutually advantageous. At Chungking, he conferred at length with Chiang Kai-shek. Though no record exists of their conversation, it is known that the two men debated in full the Japanese peace offer.
In December 1939 he recognized his failure, and left the capital. The Japanese were willing to see in him the best substitute head of a cooperative Chinese Government. He had the aura of a major politician. He had the record of being a persistent rival of Chiang Kai-shek. Mostly Chiang had succeeded in keeping him out of office, and, when Wang Ching-wei had manoeuvred so that he compelled Chiang to share power with him, Chiang was suspected of a hand in the mysterious shooting which had removed him from office. The Japanese acted with resolution. Wang’s name, the prestige of Nanking city, the attraction of the Kuomintang – renamed by Wang the Reformed Kuomintang – all these were used to give the new Government such prestige as it could have in a Nanking which remembered vividly what it had been made to suffer.
The Government came into being in 1940. A fairly long list of landholders, industrialists, former officials, diplomats out of employment, politicians who had ruined their prospects with the official Kuomintang, came to see if the vistas opened up under the new administration appeared brighter for them. Many were recruited for the régime. Many of the more or less respectable Chinese nationalists had begun, to find the régime of the Reformed Kuomintang very beguiling, especially since it reconciled nationalism with the prospect of opting out of the war. Wang Ching-wei’s Government was a copy of the genuine Kuomintang. Its constitution was much the same; it contained the complications and intricacies which had puzzled all those who tried to follow Chinese politics. Its methods of administration were much the same.
In administration the régime was slightly less corrupt than had been expected. It did little that was outwardly disgraceful. As the head of a puppet Government, camouflaged for the general public in the colours of nationalism, Wang Ching-wei did neither more nor less than was expected of him: he fought for China’s interests while being ready in the last resort to yield to Japan’s superior strength. In China he played the same part as Marshal Pétain in France. But Wang’s Government never succeeded in living down the sense of national shame in which it was born; never managed to take independent life; it remained a creature of the Japanese; it never became a serious body internationally. From the point of view of a historian detached from these events, the chief points worth underscoring are that the Japanese did put a great deal of energy into cultivating local régimes as part of their search for a peaceful solution to the China Incident; that Free China’s sole unifying force in local as in national government was Chiang Kai-shek’s personality cult, and yet that there were many Chinese who took immense risks to seek some kind of compromise based upon a mixture of realpolitik, personal ambition and their sense of Pan-Asian brotherhood.
Meanwhile the pretence that the war was a joint one, of the Kuomintang and the communists against Japan, was wearing thin. The Chinese communists, in the regions which they had overrun in the north, maintained a lively propaganda against the Japanese. Guerrilla warfare was their special art. There was also activity by guerrilla bands who fought in the name of the Kuomintang. But the pretence, which had been built up immediately after the Sian Incident, that the armies of the communists were to be fused with the armies of the Kuomintang under some kind of common command, never became a reality. The communists had no intention of surrendering the sole command of their Army. That was their most effective instrument in Chinese politics, and they would hold on to it. The communists relied on their Army to win them new territory, and to retain what they had; and they could scarcely trust their old enemy, the Kuomintang, with any recognized power to dispose of this force.
A subtle, concealed, very bitter struggle was resumed between the Kuomintang and the communists. Everybody who was interested in Chinese politics saw the danger of revived civil war taking shape. The Kuomintang, without entirely dropping the mask of the common front, was alert to the spread of communist power, and tried to guard against it by maintaining, as far as it could, an inner blockade of the regions which the communists ruled, including an embargo on all medical supplies. The most competent and orderly section of the Kuomintang Army was in fact left permanently at Sian, where its sole duty was to watch and overawe the communists. The communists directed their fire equally against the Kuomintang and the Japanese.
Sometimes the struggle became too obvious for decency between apparent allies. Each side had its own territory. Sometimes the communists would move into a Kuomintang region: the Kuomintang would drive them out by force. At such times the hollowness of the partnership became plain. There was a particularly flagrant example of this in 1941 when the communist Fourth Route Army was ambushed by patent treachery, and fighting flared up on a large scale. The communists lost several generals in the course of this affair. But even at such times both the communists and the Kuomintang tried to put limits to hostilities. An important part in keeping peace at least formally was played by the communist representative at Chungking, who was Chou En-lai, saviour of Chiang, destined in the next decade to become Prime Minister of China. A competition was being fought out between the two Governments, to determine which of them, in the harsh conditions of war, had the better spirit to endure. The war was proving a hothouse, and had brought on the decision which otherwise might have taken half a century to deliver. All the data were to the discomfiture of the Kuomintang. The communists, who began as very much the weaker, became a steadily greater force.
Meanwhile a part of the horrors which had overtaken the Chinese people became known to the West – to a West which was bracing itself to face its own agony. The full terrors of war broke over the Chinese towns and countryside. They had gradually become accustomed to civil war during the thirty years of breakdown of ordered government. In much of the country, the old magistrates had left. The armies of the war-lords had harried the villages, seized their grain, and sometimes carried off the young men and women. But all this was as nothing compared with what befell in the years after 1936. One estimate puts the number uprooted from their homes by the war as 50 million. The Chinese are as a rule greatly attached to their villages, and will not forsake a home which contains the graves of their ancestors. Many of the cherished customs of the village – the sweeping of the family graves, ceremonial meals eaten over the tombs – are connected with tomb-rites. Now a great wrench had loosened the population from its hold. China dissolved from people living in orderly, extremely conservative patterns of life, into a maze of people wandering aimlessly from village to village. They sought food, protection, shelter. All China seemed to be restlessly on the move. Any representation of its people at this time shows them trudging from place to place, carrying their belongings with them. (A similar nightmare befell persons who were compelled to see the sights in post-war Germany.) How many perished in this time will never be known. Their plight made them powerless to escape the scourge of famine and the scourge of the other terror of the Chinese countryside, flood. One by one, the very ancient annual ceremonies in the villages, which gave Chinese life its admirable quality and its deep sense of continuity, were given up. Life became especially hard for the old, the class which Chinese civilization was notorious for revering.
Colour, richness and elegance disappeared from China. Everywhere people went dressed in simple cotton clothes, either because they had been impoverished, or because the slightest display of luxury was an invitation to plunder. The pleasantness and decorum of the life of the Chinese upper classes, which had already been much shaken for a hundred years by the impact of the West, descended to a new calamitous level, as society gradually disintegrated. Only in such protected centres as Chungking was the attempt made to live in accustomed Chinese style.
A similar break-up of society had taken place in France at the end of the Hundred Years War, and in Germany during the Thirty Years War.
Early on in this period there had taken place one of the most unlooked-for emigrations in history. As we have seen, the universities of China had a precocious development. In wealth, in their standing in society, by the personal eminence of their staff, both Chinese and also the core of expatriate foreigners, they were ahead of the standards which universities might have been expected to reach in the country, and were suited for a society such as China might have evolved two or three generations later. In consequence of this, much of the most advanced, the purest, and certainly the most disinterested nationalism of the day was nursed to life within their walls.
Most of the universities were on the seaboard in the path of the Japanese invasion. They were one of its special targets, because the Japanese, being themselves an East Asian people, understood (though Japan did not share this characteristic) the extraordinary influence which the Chinese intelligentsia had over the rulers of the nation. The Chinese student was alone among the student class of the world in not feeling, or feeling much less, an acute sense of frustration. Why should he? The nation hung on his moods, was willing to follow him in his attitudes to Ministers and public affairs. Since he was so influential, the student buoyed himself up: and the conditions he put up with in student life, the squalid poverty, were felt to be the necessary price of privilege. Besides it was spread equally over the whole student body. Let them reduce the pride and aspiration of the intelligentsia, the Japanese told themselves, and they would have gone a long way in subduing Chinese nationalism. Under Japanese domination, the universities knew that they would face a purge, and the conditions of the new life would be quite intolerable to them. Rather than suffer it, many of the university communities moved off by spontaneous resolution, and trekked from the coasts to new sites far in the interior.
Chinese learning was pulling up its stakes and seeking out a territory where it might exist in freedom; and, as the price to be paid for this, live a life less gilded than before. The professors and their assistants, the student body, and university servants, all sought a home where they could continue their life with less harassment. Previously, Chinese scholars had not taken kindly to manual work; now they voluntarily undertook the hardship of the journey, the uncertainties of what awaited them, and a life of toil. It was the more surprising because these learned societies had to leave palatial premises, which had been given them by millionaires and foreign philanthropists, and had to fit their academic life into camps which had been made available to them as exiles. Throughout their vicissitudes they had safeguarded their libraries and the equipment of their scientific laboratories. Many of them transported these across the rivers and mountains of inland China.
During the war years the Chinese intelligentsia continued their studies diligently. In view of the way in which learning was regarded this turned out to be the most useful thing which they could contribute to China’s war effort. They had firmly aligned themselves with the decision to resist Japan, and by their action in seeking voluntary exile they increased their prestige in the eyes of the people. The scholars and the mass of common people came closer together.
The universities, in deciding on their odysseys, were influenced by the example of the Chinese communists on the Long March. From this time there began to grow up the great sympathy of the Chinese scholar class for the communists. The scholars felt themselves being blown along by the same hurricane which had swept together the communist insurgents throughout China: and as the leadership of the Kuomintang began to falter, they began to look to the communists for an alternative. They did so with more eagerness because when they had migrated in the cause of freedom, they found that, when they eventually reached the security of the interior, they were regarded with suspicion by the Kuomintang, and that their freedom was interfered with by an irksome secret police. The campus was invaded by an army of spies.
The reliance on the secret police by Chiang Kai-shek to maintain his exaggerated political role was a departure from Chinese tradition. Before Chiang, China had known periods of despotism; but the despot had, to a remarkable degree, avoided the organization of a secret police as the instrument of tyranny. Even in the last years of the Manchus the Government, though repressive, had avoided the creation of an organ specially for Intelligence and coercion. Therefore the collisions which now became frequent between the literati and the secret police offered the more provocation because the Chinese had not been accustomed in the past to think of the police as a necessary evil.
The writings of Chinese academics became full of woe; they had exchanged the persecution of the Japanese for the supervision of the police. It was less efficient, less rigorous, but it was deeply offensive. The grievances thus sown were to bear fruit at the end of the war. Without the moral approval of the scholar class, the Chinese communists would never have been able to impose themselves so successfully on the Chinese nation.