China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (12 page)

The scholar
John K. Fairbank lived in the country in the early 1930s and remembered how he would be greeted in villages by “
the barking of ill-fed dogs and the stares of children covered with flies.” Scalp and skin diseases due to malnutrition were common. The farmers grew their crops on “strips of dusty farmland” with “few trees and little water.” Irrigation was done by hand, “laboriously, bucket by bucket.”

If a kind of medieval destitution was normal in China through the first half of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to imagine what the effects of seven and a half years of war on the thousands of poor villages of China would be, not only the wounds inflicted by marauding armies but the foraging for food and supplies of rival bands, the forced conscription, the banditry born of desperation, and the disappearance of able-bodied men. Only a slight disturbance was enough to put the Chinese peasant under water, and the war was far from slight. As one scholar of the period has put it: “
The magnitude of the rural misery was completely beyond imagination.”

The worst came, paradoxically perhaps, during a relative lull in the fighting, between 1941 and 1943, when one of the twentieth century’s worst famines occurred in North China. It was caused by a drought in 1942 and by locusts in 1943 and intensified by the dislocation of war, the destruction of the transportation networks, and by Japanese requisitioning of merchant ships. Three million people died of starvation as a result of the famine while another three million became refugees. White, who traveled to Henan in the spring of 1943, described scenes of sickening horror—children sucking at the breasts of their dead mothers, women who killed their babies rather than hear them cry, people chipping bark off of trees and making a kind of soup out of it, people who survived by eating other people. “
There were corpses on the road,” he later wrote. “A girl no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death, her eyes were open and the rain fell on them.” The famine was a coup de grâce for the provincial capital, the city of
Zhengzhou, which had already been reduced largely to rubble by earlier Japanese bombing. “
We stood at the head of the main street, looked down the deserted way for all its length—and saw nothing. Occasionally someone in fluttering, wind-blown rags would totter out of a doorway. Those who noticed us clustered round; spreading their hands in supplication, they cried ‘K’o lien, K’o lien’ [mercy, mercy] till our ears rang with it.”

The famine in Henan was so vast and so terrible that few took notice
of a similar famine in fertile Guangdong province, though a million and a half people were said to have died in it. Guangdong, the coastal province bordering on Hong Kong, a British colony then, was a scene of only intermittent fighting, especially after the
Japanese seized Canton and tightened the blockade of China. In 1940, two years after the fall of Canton,
Graham Peck slipped into Guangdong from Hong Kong in a smuggler’s boat that ran the maze of canals at the estuary of the Xi, or West, River. The first real town he saw was Tam Shui Ko, which, though it had not been invaded, was nonetheless “
a tomb of a city,” most of whose inhabitants, rich and poor alike, had fled in the panic after the fall of Canton. “Weeds and bushes were growing in the little white-colonnaded streets … and the windows and doors which were not bricked up gaped upon the blackness of charred rooms or the dazzle of the open sky.” Peck remembered anti-Japanese murals and slogans scrawled on the sides of the public buildings, signs of an earlier spirit of resistance, but now “in most streets the only living creatures besides the wild dogs and cats, and strangely tame rats, were a few ragged sidewalk peddlers with trays of flyblown wares,” which they hawked clamorously “in rough raincoats of palm fiber, like a herd of shaggy beasts among the ruins.”

In 1938, in a desperate effort to stop the Japanese advance in North China,
Chiang ordered that the dikes of the Yellow River, not for nothing known as China’s Sorrow, be broken. This only delayed the Japanese advance while it created an inundation of the vast North China plain, with two or three feet of water sweeping over whole counties in several provinces. The flooding caused widespread crop failure such that at the worst of it ten thousand starving people each day were gathering in major cities seeking relief. In the end, 800,000 people died either directly of flooding or of starvation. In 1945, five million refugees were still in the places they had fled to.

In her account of China’s wartime suffering, the scholar
Diana Lary has attributed these actions to a combination of “
grandiloquent patriotism at the top and incompetence on the ground.” As any war unfolds, especially a long one, constraints are loosened and the wantonness of the destruction increases. World War II marked the era of total war, mass bombings of cities in the West as well as in the East, civilian slaughter on a mass scale. And yet the sheer numbers of the dead and displaced in the Sino-Japanese War suggest an imperial willingness on both sides to accept severe misfortune on the part of the faceless and
replaceable masses when the misfortune is deemed necessary for the sake of the national good. After he took power, Mao used to applaud China’s cruel first emperor of more than two millennia before, even though his signal achievement, the construction of the Great Wall, not only cost innumerable lives but also failed to stop invasions of the Celestial Empire from the north. On both sides of the Sino-Japanese War, the willingness to accept and even to encourage death on a vast scale bespoke a frenzied, fanatical attachment to the national aspiration, a sense universally shared that death and destitution were always preferable to defeat. Some students of the war have attributed this cult of willing sacrifice to the experience of Japanese military academies, where many future Chinese officers studied alongside their Japanese counterparts in the waning days of the last dynasty and where they were identically imbued with the glory of dying rather than surrendering or being taken prisoner. In any event, there was a striking absence of prisoners of war.
Martha Gellhorn attributed this to the ferocity of the hatred the Chinese felt for the invader. “
A Chinese soldier,” she wrote, “gets one thousand national dollars for any Japanese prisoner captured alive. Despite this huge sum of money, the soldiers shoot any Japanese troops they can lay hands on, as an immediate personal vengeance for the misery of people like themselves in villages like their own homes.”

A few weeks after the outbreak of the war,
The New York Times
interviewed Japanese army and navy spokesmen in Shanghai on the complete absence of captured enemy soldiers in a conflict that by then had already involved hundreds of thousands of troops. The army spokesman readily acknowledged that “ ‘
almost no Chinese war prisoners have been taken’ and smiled broadly when told of the Chinese claim that one Japanese soldier had been imprisoned.”

China’s vast size and population have led other rulers besides Chiang to sacrifice vast numbers for the sake of the national purpose, or to see large numbers of dead as an inescapable element of the national experience. The
Taiping Rebellion, in which twenty million people were killed, was by far the world’s costliest conflict in the nineteenth century, though the American Civil War was a worthy rival for that distinction. Later, after the Communist takeover, Mao used to boast that a nuclear attack on China would cost it much less than a similar attack on other countries because China could afford to lose tens of millions of its people and still be the most populous country on the planet. Mao
accepted without any apparent remorse the death of more than forty million people in the famine of 1959–1962, which was a direct result of his economic policies. He was willing to endure the loss of thousands of China’s intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, and technicians in the campaigns for political purity that he waged throughout his time in power. There were always enough people in China for a fresh start. The population was fungible.

There was something of that in Chiang as well, as the Yellow River flood indicated. After appeasing Japan for years on the grounds that his armies were too weak to offer effective resistance, Chiang took on the anti-Japanese fight as a great national purpose for which no sacrifice and no amount of suffering was too great. In the battle for Shanghai, because of furious Japanese bombing of the Chinese part of the city, the population of the International Settlement and French Concession, which were exempt from attack, rose from 1.5 to 4 million. “
Tens of thousands of homeless clogged the streets and hundreds of thousands more slept in office corridors, stockrooms, temples, guild halls, amusement parks, and warehouses,” the historian
Frederic Wakeman has written. “By the end of the year 101,000 corpses had been picked up in the streets or ruins.” The Chapei district, the city’s largest Chinese residential area, was, as another historian has put it, “
the epicenter of devastation.” A French journalist arriving in Wusong, a city north of Shanghai, wrote that “
the entire town and the villages all round it had been horribly destroyed, burned, and razed to the ground by the bombing.” In Wuxi, seventy miles to the northwest, the population dropped from 300,000 to 100,000. The county seat of Jiading, west of Shanghai, was inspected by
Kumagai Yasushi, a Japanese officer in charge of what was called pacification for the South Manchurian Railway. “
What an awful scene of desolation it was,” he wrote later.

To resist the Japanese attack on Shanghai, Chiang ordered whole divisions to stand and fight, even though it meant that they would be wiped out, rather than withdraw them so they could survive to fight again. The resulting losses were ruinous and unrecoverable.
The estimates of Chinese military casualties ranged from a low of 187,000 to a high of 300,000, with the main losses suffered by Chiang’s best German-trained and -equipped divisions—a catastrophe that would directly affect China’s military effectiveness for the rest of the war. To western eyes, this sacrifice was senseless from the military point of view, even though, as
Theodore White put it, “
in a political sense it was one of the great demonstrations of the war,” proving as it did “how much suffering and heroism the Chinese people could display in the face of hopeless odds.”

There were two main periods of intense fighting during the war, the first in 1937 and 1938 when, following the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan executed its two-pronged full-scale assault on China. One prong was aimed at seizing the provinces
north of the Yellow River and incorporating them with Manchuria into a Japanese-controlled North China that would have been larger than Western Europe. The second prong aimed at the rich Yangzi River Valley. Both assaults involved the merciless firebombings of civilian concentrations, from Shanghai on the coast to Guilin in the southwest. Along the way looting, mass killings, and rape were common, as the Japanese pursued a policy aimed at terrorizing the population into submission and forcing the government to surrender. What has come to be called “the rape of
Nanjing,” in which some three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were killed and innumerable women and girls raped, was one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II.
As a result of the desecration of Nanjing, some 80 percent of the population was gone, either through death or escape. Seventy-eight percent of the Chinese population that remained in the massacred city had no income, and, in most cases, no possessions, not even bedding.

The rape of Nanjing was hardly the only atrocity in China, where, as we’ve seen from the example of Changsha, many cities and villages were left in ruins, virtually without inhabitants.
Yanwo was a town on
the slope of a hill about thirty miles southwest of Xuzhou, a railway junction in Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. On May 20, 1938, Japanese troops charged into the town and, within an hour, had killed two hundred people on the streets. “
Then they herded 670 men, both locals and refugees, into the courtyard of a house just outside the village,” one historian has written. “The buildings around the courtyard were set on fire from outside; men who tried to escape the flames were gunned down by soldiers surrounding the house. All but five of the 670 were killed.” In weeks of fighting in the northern railway junction of
Taierzhuang,
the population of twenty thousand was reduced to seven people, an eighty-five-year-old man and six women, the
North China Herald
reported.

Most places, of course, did not suffer that kind of total devastation, but many places experienced a ongoing, almost routine kind of damage. Gellhorn arrived by air in Kunming one night in January 1941 after twenty-seven Japanese bombers had hit the city during the day. One street on which virtually every house had been struck was