Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China

Alan Baumler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317235880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China covers the evolution of Chinese society from the roots of the Republic of China in the early 1900s until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

The chapters in this volume explain aspects of the process of revolution and how people adapted to the demands of the revolutionary situation. Exploring changes in political leadership, as well as transformation in culture, it compares the differences in experiences in urban and rural areas and contrasts rapid changes, such as the war with Japan and Communist 'liberation' with evolutionary developments, such as the gradual redefinition of public space. Taking a comprehensive approach, the themes covered include:

• War, occupation and liberation

• Religion and gender

• Education, cities and travel.

This is an essential resource for students and scholars of Modern China, Republican China, Revolutionary China and Chinese Politics.

Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY)] 4.0 license.

1
Japanese goals, Chinese realities at the grassroots

The Japanese Occupation in northern Zhejiang, 1937–42

R. Keith Schoppa

The horrific three-month Battle of Shanghai (August 13–November 12, 1937) was the backdrop of the Japanese bombing of northern Zhejiang market towns and county seats. A Japanese force of 100,000 landed on the northern shore of Hangzhou Bay on November 5, and, with lightning speed, conquered the counties to the northeast of Hangzhou and the provincial capital itself on December 24. The strategy of the bombings was to terrorize and weaken urban centers, after which the Japanese seized and torched them—fire, being another favorite enemy weapon of terror.¹

They came not as colonists but as occupiers. Conquest is, of course, the sine qua non of occupation—military strategy and tactics were thus the pre-eminent initial focus. But apart from a general scheme for occupation, the Japanese seemed to lack specific plans for how the occupation would proceed. Given the necessity of establishing control throughout the vast Chinese territory, the Japanese had to have considered strategies for promoting Chinese collaboration; for it was obvious that “there could be no occupation state without co-operation between Chinese and Japanese”.² A crucial issue for the Japanese military was legitimacy, given their already infamous military reputation as brutal terrorists. One way to foster legitimacy among the Chinese was to transform the military system into a civil administration, and, if possible, to utilize institutions that had been common in Chinese society before the invasion. Rebuilding institutions and political systems that were already familiar to the Chinese would “presumably mask to a degree the daily reality of the Japanese army in the default political position”.³

Occupation strategy thus focused (and this chapter focuses) on two issues during the occupation of northern Zhejiang from the winter of 1938 roughly to the end of 1942: establishing public security with a concurrent move to a civil administration; and adopting a system of commodity controls to provide Japanese military with their food and supplies before Chinese civilians. It encompasses four periods of changing political institutional contexts: the Peace Maintenance Committee (January–February 1938); the Self-Government Committee (March–June 1938); the restoration of traditional local structures and institutions under the Reformed Government (June 1938–June 1940); and two and half years of Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government in Nanjing (June 1940–December 1942).

The search for security

The most powerful military institution in Hangzhou’s daily life was the Special Services unit (tewu jiguan), which often teamed with the military police (xianbing dui).Special Services was in charge of surveillance, intelligence, public security and economic decision-making. Less than a week after Hangzhou’s seizure amid considerable social chaos, the commander of Special Services contacted Xie Hucheng, chair of the municipal Chamber of Commerce and director of Zhejiang’s Pawnbrokers’ Bank. Xie headed the Peace Maintenance Committee (PMC), which Special Services selected to take responsibility for maintaining local peace and assisting refugees. Whereas Timothy Brook finds that most PMCs in the Yangzi Delta “were made up of political unknowns” and “marginal elites, the very people with whom [the Japanese] would have preferred not to work”, the composition of Hangzhou’s PMC was markedly different.⁴ Of the seventeen board and secretariat members, at least seven were members of the Hangzhou Chamber of Commerce; all (but one) had significant careers in government (Zhejiang provincial and Hangzhou municipal ministries, magistrates, diplomats and lawyers) and business (bank managers; leaders of the rice, cotton textile and silk industries; and heads of important newspaper bureaus and journalists).⁵ All were Hangzhou natives or had lived in the city for many years.

Given their careers and interests, they focused on maintaining order, thereby protecting their interests and the city’s economic viability, aims coinciding with Japanese goals. Most crucial was setting up a police or community system that promised security. In the words of Pacification Agent Kumagai Yasushi in nearby Jiading, Jiangsu, “as long as security in the county cannot be guaranteed, nothing [else] can be done”.⁶ In the immediate aftermath of the territory seizure, the obvious Japanese effort was to utilize local Chinese as peacekeepers until the Japanese military could learn “the lay of the land”. Chamber of Commerce Chairman Xie arranged with Wang Wuquan, the city’s fire chief, a member of the PMC and the city’s wealthiest silk entrepreneur, to lead his firemen as local patrolmen. Sprinkled among Wang’s many public successes was a reputation for corruption and as a reported leader of a crime-ensnared secret society. Consequently, during this patrol period, allegations were rampant about firemen’s shakedowns of city residents and about frequent looting, robberies and extortion of stores, warehouses and residences.

As a start to dealing with this lawlessness, the PMC established a police office, part of whose functions was to recruit a competent force. By the end of February, 215 men had taken exams as a prerequisite for a brief period of study and training; and 118 had been trained and reported for duty.⁷ Even though the invasion had caused about 80 percent of the city’s population to flee, leaving only about 100,000 in the city, it was a pitifully small force (one policeman for about every 850 people.) Because of the slowness in developing a force, near the end of February the Japanese military police stepped in to assist police stations and men on patrol. Such use of Japanese troops in the long term was not feasible: the Japanese had to fight a war, not police local society; but the Japanese thought they knew the secret to establishing public security.

At a PMC meeting sometime before February 27, 1938, the heads of Special Services and the Military Police came to “admonish subordinates” (Chinese collaborators). The first admonition spoke to the issue of security in terms, not of police work per se, but of a community system. “Today, you, who labor hard in your local service, keep working until worthy ones in each township and village can supervise the establishment of a community system to bring about security.”⁸ A homegrown community-based baojia system of surveillance, law enforcement and civilian control, based upon grouping the population together into mutual responsibility units, seemed to be the key. Invented by Wang Anshi in the Song dynasty, the system’s central regulations were first set down in the Ming period; and its use was widespread under the Qing regime. In the Republic, Jiang Jieshi tried to utilize the system to deal with local problems. Brook explains: “As a model [the baojia system] enthralled the Japanese colonialists, who hoped that this vast agrarian realm could somehow administer itself, at no cost to themselves”.⁹ It was the responsibility of the Self-Government Committee (SGC), coming to power on March 1, 1938, to set up the use of Chinese civilian collaborators both the grassroots baojia and commodity purchasing co-operatives—“the two institutions the Japanese planners regarded as critical to making the occupation viable”.¹⁰

The composition of the SGC was essentially the same as that of the PMC, but the name change was significant—moving from the function of simply maintaining peace to a shift (at least in name) to civilian rule. On March 15, the SGC decided (with Japanese support) to reinstate the pre-war system of a district (qu) office and its subdivisions of wards (fang) in the metropolis. Newspaper reports the following days included bureaucratic guidelines, regulations and description of baojia formation, but they seemed to exaggerate the speed and success of the effort.¹¹ By the middle of May, local “worthy ones” (working allegedly to “the point of exhaustion”) reportedly had already within a single month completed baojia registration and named and organized the jia, bao and lianbao (amalgamated bao).¹²

Despite these inflated claims, all was not working as reported or as the Japanese had planned. An official Japanese spokesman clarified the situation in July 1938.

Now the forces protecting Hangzhou in the face of bandits, rebels, and lawbreakers are weak. Maintaining attitudes of optimism and peace is difficult. But we really cannot go back as before or slow our plans. Therefore, apart from more widespread registration (the first step toward baojia establishment) and setting deadlines, you must rigorously enforce the baojia system. You must practice baojia methods [despite the troubles in law enforcement we face now].We assume we can reverse the current course. In the future, if baojia is completed, Hangzhou city will be even more peaceful.¹³

[I have italicized if for emphasis to show that the official was not at all certain that the baojia system would be completed.] This statement only underscored the continuing ineffectiveness of establishing baojia units.

The other perhaps unexpected problem thwarting Japanese baojia policies was that the Chinese had apparently armed themselves with “weapons of the weak”.¹⁴ These were weapons of non-co-operation: foot-dragging, evasion, feigned compliance and ignorance, pilfering and sabotage. It is thus not strange that so many of the admonition sessions of the PMC and SGC repeatedly called for harder and more energetic work. The head of Special Services noted as the SGC was being established: “Now, as we have moved from PMC to the SGC, you must work increasingly hard; these political units (baojia) must have a very wide scope... . you must work tenaciously”.¹⁵ In his study of the town of Jiading in the Yangzi Delta, Brook quotes the Pacification Agent Kumagai on some specifics of baojia units’ non-co-operation and dilatory tactics.

Subcommittees were organized in the various districts throughout the county. Because of the security situation along with various internal difficulties, we lost contact with those subcommittees on several occasions. Under certain conditions we had to “supervise” them into becoming healthy self-government organizations. More than a few times we were at a loss to know what to do.¹⁶

With the passage of time, as the routines and life in the city seemed to approach greater normality, the potential for disorder ironically increased. More and more refugees were returning to the city, creating an even greater need for security forces. Merchants had generally opened up shops in all areas of the city, with hawkers and peddlers’ stalls again lining some streets—giving rise to disturbances and more difficulty in controlling the flow of commodities. In addition, the bane of the occupation continued: the corruption of some Chinese collaborators, their fleecing of the city’s residents and feigned compliance with Japanese orders. The power of Wang Wuquan, the fire chief, is illustrative. He headed two municipal departments, one of which was the Assorted Tax Department. He managed refugee work and charitable rice distributions. He wielded substantial economic and political power in his role as issuer of licenses to business and industry. From March 27 to May 10, his office issued 421 licenses, of which 231 were restored businesses and 190 were new. In less than a month, from March 20 to April 16, he licensed 7,960 stall-keepers, of which 7,498 were new.¹⁷ How much money he siphoned off these “ventures” is unknown.

In the face of being unable to insure Chinese adherence to Japanese public security policies and plans, in mid-1938, the Japanese, with the goal of instituting stricter bureaucratic control over cities and localities, instituted the Reformed Government of the Republic of China in Nanjing. During the tenures of the PMC and SGC, there had been no provincial government in Hangzhou: the PMC and SGC (behind which the Japanese military always loomed) were the municipal government, predominantly composed of Hangzhou natives and long-time residents. The new Reformed Government, led by Liang Hongzhi, of the late warlord Anhui clique, installed both formal provincial and municipal governments composed mostly of non-Hangzhou men. While training more police was a continuing Japanese objective, the numbers remained relatively few, and, even worse, the quality of police leadership seemed to be declining. Whereas in the PMC-SGC periods the training period was three weeks, the training period under the Reformed regime was only one week. With men (often ne’er-do-wells, incompetents and crime-prone ruffians) so quickly and poorly trained, their driving motive seemed to be to stash as much loot in their personal coffers as possible.¹⁸

In the fall of 1938, the Reformed Government began to establish county-level regimes with the appointment of county magistrates and mayors in key cities. Hangzhou’s was He Can, a nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Japanese goals, Chinese realities at the grassroots: the Japanese Occupation in northern Zhejiang, 1937–42
• 2 The rise of the Chinese Communist military-fiscal party-state in Shandong Province, 1937–45
• 3 New China Daily: social change and the class project in wartime Nationalist China
• 4 Liberation: a view from the Southwest
• 5 The search for a Socialist everyday: the urban communes
• 6 Changes in the rural land system and power structure in the countryside
• 7 “There is no crisis and it is going to go away soon, anyhow”—propaganda, denialism and revisionism in debating the Great Leap Forward famine
• 8 Gospel light or imperialist poison? Controversies of the Christian community in China, 1922–55
• 9 A (wo)men’s revolution? Small feet, large hands and visions of womanhood in China’s long twentieth century
• 10 The afterlife of Sun Yat-sen during the Republic (1925–49)
• 11 The New Life Movement and national sacrifice
• 12 Learning the new culture: rural literacy education in Shanxi in the 1930s and 1940s
• 13 Making Taiwan Chinese, 1945–60
• 14 Chinese professions, the nation and revolution, 1895–1965
• 15 Roles of the beautiful nation in the making of a revolutionary Middle Kingdom
• 16 Closest model, rival and fateful enemy: China’s political economy, law and Japan
• 17 Ambiguous paradigms: the Russian model and the Chinese Revolution
• 18 All rivers flow into the sea: the making of China’s most cosmopolitan city
• 19 Public space and public life: transformation of urban China, 1900–2000
• 20 The nationalization of the hardship of travel in China, 1895–1949: progress, hygiene and national concern
• 21 Chinese revolutions and the ebb and flow of revolutionary historiography
• Index