China’s War Reporters

The Legacy of Resistance against Japan

Parks M. Coble

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674967670
• eBook ISBN: 9780674425552
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

When Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937, many Chinese journalists greeted the news with euphoria. For years, the Chinese press had urged Chiang Kai-shek to resist Tokyo's aggressive overtures. This was the war they wanted, convinced that their countrymen would triumph.

Parks Coble recaptures the experiences of China's war correspondents during the Sino–Japanese War of 1937–1945. He delves into the wartime writing of reporters connected with the National Salvation Movement—journalists such as Fan Changjiang, Jin Zhonghua, and Zou Taofen—who believed their mission was to inspire the masses through patriotic reporting. As the Japanese army moved from one stunning victory to the next, forcing Chiang's government to retreat to the interior, newspaper reports often masked the extent of China's defeats. Atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing were played down in the press for fear of undercutting national morale.

By 1941, as political cohesion in China melted away, Chiang cracked down on leftist intellectuals, including journalists, many of whom fled to the Communist-held areas of the north. When the People's Republic was established in 1949, some of these journalists were elevated to prominent positions. But in a bitter twist, all mention of their wartime writings disappeared. Mao Zedong emphasized the heroism of his own Communist Revolution, not the war effort led by his archrival Chiang. Denounced as enemies during the Cultural Revolution, once-prominent wartime journalists, including Fan, committed suicide. Only with the revival of Chinese nationalism in the reform era has their legacy been resurrected.

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EUPHORIA

The War They Wanted

JAPAN’S INVASION OF CHINA in the summer of 1937 inaugurated a deadly conflict that would last for eight years and become part of the Second World War. Total military and civilian deaths in China undoubtedly surpassed 20 million; perhaps 90 million became refugees, at least temporarily; and countless Chinese cities and towns were ravaged. Nearly half of China’s population would live for a time under an often brutal occupation regime. As part of the larger world war, the carnage on the China mainland was surpassed only in Eastern Europe. After a skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937, escalated into a major conflict, Japanese forces occupied Beiping (the old capital Beijing) and the key northern city of Tianjin by the end of the month.¹

When fighting spread to Shanghai on August 13, 1937, the result was the bloodiest battle on earth since World War I, with nearly five hundred thousand Chinese forces and two hundred thousand Japanese forces engaged. Fought in one of the most densely populated areas in China, the fighting around Shanghai claimed nearly three hundred thousand military casualties and an untold number of civilian losses. When thirty thousand Japanese marines landed near Hangzhou in November and outflanked the Chinese positions, a gradual retreat turned into a rout. China’s capital of Nanjing was abandoned in early December; the atrocities known in the West as the “Rape of Nanjing” followed. In a century filled with violence and revolution, the six months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident would constitute one of the deadliest periods in modern Chinese history.

One might suppose that Chinese intellectuals and journalists would have greeted the outbreak of war with horror and dread, stunned by the shock of untold casualties and humiliating retreat. Yet an examination of the writings of most Chinese intellectuals, particularly leftist writers, reveals instead a near celebration of the onset of conflict. Some of the most bombastic reporting emerged in the journals associated with the National Salvation Movement. These leftist writers had long pressed Chiang Kai-shek to abandon his appeasement policy in the 1930s, to suspend the civil war with the Chinese Communists, and to unite to resist Japan. When war actually erupted, they reacted with near euphoria. For them, it was “the war they wanted,” to borrow a phrase from John Israel and Donald Klein.² The Salvationist journals celebrated China’s glorious resistance even as the military lost key cities such as Beiping, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Nanjing.

Within just a few days of the eruption of fighting in Shanghai, the Salvationist journal Nahan (War cry) proclaimed, “Look to the front! There is artillery fire; there is blood. There is suffering; there is the tragedy of mankind destroying mankind. But amidst this blood, this suffering, this tragedy, glory and happiness have been produced, the Chinese people’s freedom and liberation!”³

Another journal, Kangzhan sanri kan (The war of resistance published every three days), expressed similar views as the fighting intensified. “The sacred war of resistance has spread from North China to Shanghai. Under a rain of bullets on the front line, the heroic warriors sacrifice their blood,” wrote one reporter who covered the front line in Zhabei, a section of the Chinese portion of Shanghai.⁴ In its inaugural issue, even before the fighting was a week old, Kangzhan sanri kan referred to the “victory” of the battle of Shanghai. The victory was simply to deny Japan another bloodless conquest: “Without fighting a shot, the Japanese got the northeast. With a limited war they got the north. Without a doubt, these increased their arrogance, strengthened their dreams of destroying China. At the same time there were some people within China who did not believe that China had the ability to resist invasion.… At Shanghai the present stubborn resistance of our nation’s land and air forces had already struck a great blow at this dream and their erroneous thinking.”⁵ Chinese forces had indeed surprised many observers in putting up a ferocious if ultimately unsuccessful struggle at Shanghai.

CHIANG KAI-SHEK AND THE POLICY OF NONRESISTANCE

The war euphoria of the summer of 1937 can only be understood as a reaction to a series of humiliations inflicted on China by the Japanese and a policy of nonresistance followed by Chiang Kai-shek. The question of China’s relationship with Japan had been a major issue in China since at least the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Japan’s actions in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War (fought largely on Chinese territory), the Twenty-One Demands, the Shandong issue at the Versailles Peace Conference, and the Ji’nan Incident of 1928 were just some of the many events that provoked strong anti-Japanese reactions in China. Yet for all the concern with Japan, prior to September 18, 1931, the Japanese issue was but one of many public issues debated in China—British imperialism, class inequality, and warlord depravations were equally important.

All of this changed on the night of September 18, 1931, when the Japanese military initiated the Manchurian Incident and seized northeast China. From that point until the outbreak of all-out war in the summer of 1937, the Japanese issue became the major topic of public discussion in the news media. Chinese forces did not actively resist the Japanese in the autumn of 1931. Neither Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing nor his ally in Manchuria, General Zhang Xueliang (“The Young Marshal”), felt that their forces could measure up to the Japanese Guandong (Kwantung/Kanto) army. Chiang appealed to the League of Nations but to no avail. The League did not take effective action. Northeast China was converted into Manchukuo (Manzhouguo), a Japanese puppet state nominally headed by the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Puyi.

Tension spread to Shanghai, where fighting erupted on January 28, 1932, between Japanese forces and the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army. Japanese Rear Admiral Shiozawa Koichi dispatched marines to Shanghai, and several weeks of intense fighting followed. Zhabei, a working-class neighborhood in the Chinese sector of the city, was reduced to a smoldering ruin by Japanese use of incendiary bombs. Fearful of a wider war, the Nanjing civilian government relocated temporarily to Luoyang in north China. But Chiang Kai-shek wanted to avoid a larger conflict with Japan and signed a formal truce agreement on May 5, 1932, which set up a demilitarized zone around Shanghai into which Chinese forces could not enter.

For many educated Chinese, especially the urban young, the events of 1931–1932 were deeply humiliating. The Japanese had seized a sizable chunk of territory from China, whose leaders had not resisted. The League sent the Lytton Commission to the region, but this provided little solace for Chinese who felt the nation had been humiliated. Many newspapers and journals in China called for the Nanjing government to take a stronger stand. One of the most strident was the periodical Shenghuo (Life), edited by the leftist Zou Taofen, who became one of China’s most widely read journalists and a leader of the National Salvation Movement. On the first anniversary of the Manchurian Incident, his journal editorialized: “The first anniversary of September 18 has arrived. This past year has been the darkest page in the history of modern China. It has been a most humiliating and painful year for the Chinese people.… As for our government, except for relying on the League of Nations, it seems to have no other method of coping.… Although everyone clamors for the use of force to regain our lost territory, do you see the government dispatching troops to Shanhaiguan?”⁶ The frustration with the nonresistance policy of the Nationalist (Guomindang) government was evident.

Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nanjing government and military, had a keen sense of how formidable the Japanese imperial forces would be. He sought to delay fighting with Japan, focusing instead on pacifying China internally and defeating his archenemies—the Chinese Communists. Chiang announced a policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance.” He would deal with the foreign threat only after the Communists had been destroyed. In a speech on December 14, 1932, Chiang stated that “today we can say that the Japanese are not truly our enemy. At the present our enemy is still the red bandits. If we could eliminate the menace of the red bandits internally, then there would be no problem with regard to Japan.”⁷

Chiang Kai-shek’s policy would perhaps have found greater acceptance had the Japanese made no further provocations. But that was not to be. On January 1, 1933, the Japanese attacked and quickly seized Shanhaiguan, the strategic pass where the Great Wall reaches to the sea. In late February they attacked the province of Rehe (Jehol), whose capital, Chengde, had been a special retreat for the Qing emperors. This was added to Manchukuo. Finally in March 1933, Chinese and Japanese forces clashed in a serious conflict along the Great Wall to the north of Beiping and Tianjin. Seeking once again to avoid a wider war, Chiang sent a trusted diplomat, Huang Fu, north to negotiate with the Japanese. Huang had become a close friend of Chiang Kai-shek at the time of the 1911 Revolution. Although he served in the Beijing government, Huang moved south to join Chiang’s movement in 1927 and enjoyed his confidence. After negotiating with the Japanese, Huang arranged the Tanggu Truce, which was signed on May 31, 1933. It created a demilitarized zone in the area between the Great Wall and Beiping, but under terms that rendered any Chinese defense of the area virtually impossible.⁸

The fighting in the first months of 1933 rekindled all the emotion of the Manchurian Incident and the Shanghai fighting of 1932. Once again many leftist writers took aim at Nanjing’s nonresistance policy and in particular Chiang Kai-shek’s decision to focus on domestic enemies first. In January 1933, as fighting spread along the Great Wall, the leftist Shanghai journal Chunqiu (Spring and autumn) wrote: “The enemy attacks but our government does not resist. Nonresistance not only expresses weakness … it actually invites the enemy to attack.… The earlier Manchurian question has broadened into the north China question. When it broadens further, it will be the imperialists actually cutting up the Chinese melon. This is not a sensationalistic alarm; this is an actual reality.”⁹ Chiang Kai-shek also faced regional rivals within the Nationalist Party itself. Sensing weakness, many attacked his Japan policy in hopes of political gain. Some of the most strident criticism came from Guangzhou (Canton), a center of Guomindang resistance to Chiang’s control of the government and party.

In April, as the fighting spread in the area north of Beiping, the writer Zhang Chao attacked Nanjing’s policy in Qingnian junren (Young soldier), a journal based in Guangzhou:

At present there are two major questions facing our nation—the anti-bandit campaign and resisting Japan. The anti-bandit campaign is seen by our government as the more serious issue. The Japanese imperialists attack in Rehe, and advance to Chahar and Suiyuan. They scheme to attack Beijing and Tianjin.… The communists in Jiangxi have captured a small xian (county). Compared to that, the enormous area in north China seized by Japanese imperialism is a thousand, ten thousand times more serious.… If the Chinese people seek to be free and independent, if the people want to continue to survive … there is only one road, that is to firmly resist Japan. Naturally people do not oppose suppressing the bandits but under the invasion of Japanese imperialism, resisting Japan is much more important than anti-bandit campaigns.¹⁰

Although one might question the motives of Chiang’s enemies in Guangzhou, safely located hundreds of miles from the fighting along the Great Wall, their arguments resonated with many in China, even within the Guomindang itself. The Communists seemed a minor threat compared with the reality of the vast territory already seized by Japan.

The signing of the Tanggu Truce did little to stem the criticism. The published terms of the truce were unfavorable for China as Japanese forces remained south of the Great Wall as part of the Boxer Accords, and Japanese gained the right to fly over the demilitarized area. Moreover, many commentators assumed that the treaty contained secret and even more unfavorable provisions that were damaging to China’s sovereignty and therefore had been suppressed by the government. Zou Taofen’s journal, Shenghuo, wrote, “In looking at the five published conditions, this truce agreement is full of deceit and contradictions.… Naturally because the newspapers are strictly censored and the talks are absolutely secret, no one believes the agreement only includes the publicly announced five provisions.”¹¹

Unpopular though it was, the Tanggu Truce did provide a brief respite. Chiang Kai-shek could focus his attention on the anti-Communist campaigns, eliminating the Jiangxi Soviet and forcing the Communists to begin their famous Long March, as well as building up his military and developing an arms industry. By the early months of 1935, however, Japan began to put new pressure on north China. On December 7, 1934, the Japanese Okada cabinet had adopted a policy that called for a reduction of the authority of the Nanjing government in north China. Many Japanese military and civilian leaders then began to call for autonomy for north China, which they felt should become a new Manchukuo. Two additional agreements were forced on the Chinese, both relatively secret. The first, the He-Umezu agreement, concerned north China, while the Qin-Doihara agreement dealt with Inner Mongolia, and both further compromised the Chinese position in the north.¹²

These agreements set off another wave of discussion in the press, much of it hostile to Chiang Kai-shek. One leftist journal wrote, “The sides in the Sino-Japanese question are fundamentally Japanese imperialism and the multitudes of anti-Japanese Chinese people. It isn’t the Guomindang—the traitorous party that would sell out the nation. They clear the way for Japanese imperialism, sell the nation’s territory and the people’s rights.… Whatever the Japanese want, the Guomindang gives it to them.… This traitorous government does not dare issue publicly the terms of this truce and only publishes the goodwill edict orders.”¹³ Nanjing had agreed to issue the “Goodwill Edict” as part of the agreement, which prohibited attacks on the “friendly neighbor” (that is,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Euphoria
• 2. Coping with Retreat
• 3. Coping with Atrocity
• 4. Wartime Movement
• 5. Despair and Bitter Victory
• 6. Legacies of War
• 7. Recovering the Memory of the War
• Conclusion
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Index