Session 8: South China
Peter Merker, Leipzig University
“Jiangxi”
Merker noted the complex history of Jiangxi during this period: the Northern part of the province was occupied by Japan in 1938-9 and later administered by the government of Wang Jingwei. The Japanese-controlled territories were used as guerilla zones by the retreating GMD troops, in rivalry with the Communists who were also operating in the area.
The front-line moved several times.
Jiangxi also had a no-man’s land where gangs were continually on the rampage.
Merker said that his paper focused on the southern part of Jiangxi, the hinterland that was the only part of the province where the Guomindang remained relatively solidly in control – and where Jiang Jingguo served as special commissioner in the far south.
Jiang pushed a reform program, which carried his trademark, and stood in harsh contrast to policy enforced in other GMD-governed areas. The last Japanese attacks in 1944-5 finally led to the loss of a large part of the GMD hinterland. Many of the fruits of the reconstruction program that had been achieved with a supreme effort were destroyed.
Merker said he concentrated on the question of how the provincial government adapted itself to the special requirements of the war and what the results were.
During the first phase of the war—from its outbreak till the forced withdrawal from Nanchang in Spring 1939—governmental accomplishments as far as mobilization for war were concerned were insufficient. The government had to sit and watch as huge investments were destroyed in no time, or even worse, fell into the hands of the Japanese. Protection of people living in the biggest cities was organized but never fulfilled demand – and in the face of advancing Japanese troops ended in total chaos.
Especially promoted at that time were efforts at effective propaganda work. This happened against a difficult backdrop, because outwardly the GMD was working hand in hand with the Communists – while in practice it was anxious not to let the Communist influence grow too far.
However, after the withdrawal into the hinterland, a relatively efficient policy was organized by the new administrative center in Taihe. In particular this involved:
· Tightening of the administrative structure through the reorganization of the districts and extension of the control of the baojia system. Even though these measures came at considerable cost and had without exception a repressive character, they ensured the GMD of an indispensable power base.
· Persecution of Communists was intensified, leading to the almost complete destruction of all Communist organizations in Jiangxi. By the end of the war the CCP, in their former stronghold Jiangxi, only played a meager role.
· The province met the demands of the Chongqing central government, which consisted of food and troops. On neither of these scores did the provincial government disappoint Chiang Kaishek, Merker said. Aside from Sichuan and Hunan, Jiangxi was one of the main suppliers of grain, supplying the GMD troops with approximately 300 million jin every year. Still, Chongqing overestimated Jiangxi’s capacities, leading to conflicts between Jiangxi and Chongqing as well as putting an enormous burden on the peasants. The same was true of conscription, where Jiangxi ranked 3rd place in terms of providing recruits. Every day life was marked by forced recruitment, which led to a further population decrease.
· A very focused economic development policy was put in place, focusing on the tungsten and other ores that were rich in the region and paving the way for their modern exploitation. This was very profitable. In the mid-1930s development plans for a center for heavy industry had mostly fallen prey to Japanese aggression. It was only under the changed circumstances of the war that modern industry came into being in Jiangxi for the first time.
· In southern Jiangxi, Jiang Jingguo pursued a very successful policy which was very much admired by foreign observers. In the face of the almost complete destruction of the two main railway lines, traditional means of transportation— including land and water—had to be developed. In this field, remarkable results were achieved by the provincial government. In contrast, less help was provided to the traditional crafts industry, of which the pottery industry in Jingdezhen is one example.
Merker finished with an assessment of the effects on the hinterland of the war. At that time the GMD government made a list of the losses caused by the Japanese, with a commission assembling all available data. A differentiation was made between direct and indirect losses. There had been more than half a million victims of the war in Jiangxi. For material damage there was also concrete data. Indirect losses were harder to estimate. “One thing is for certain, the war was a big bloodletting for Jiangxi, and brought about much grief and misery,” Merker said. The economy prevailed during the period 1939-1944 – even though the price of development was an enormous one. Only the Japanese attack in 1944-45 and the renewed outbreak of war led to a complete collapse.
Comments:
Stephen Mackinnon noted that Merker has been pursuing the study of Jiangxi during the Republican period “exhaustively,” and that a great deal more would come out of this research. He described Merker’s as a survey paper that brought out very clearly the context of chaos of the war: the warfare, the campaigns that were devastating to different parts of Jiangxi and especially the northern part. Jiangxi played a major role in the battle of Wuhan in the spring of 1938. Nanchang was an airbase that suffered tremendous Japanese reprisals for the American bombing missions that hit Tokyo in 1942.
The paper focuses on the tremendous chaos, destruction, disruption, and the movement of people. Other issues dealt with included refugee problems and forced recruitment of soldiers.
The paper also showed the importance of regions within regions, Mackinnon said. Jiangxi was a province where the North/South/East/West were totally different worlds. Some parts were, for a long time, totally unaffected by the war.
Questions: Though this isn’t the subject of the study, Mackinnon said it would be helpful to get an idea of what was going on in the non-GMD controlled areas in the North. He’d also like to know more of the history of Jingdezhen specifically, on which Merker is an expert.
Diana Lary,
University of British Columbia
“The Regional Impact of War: Guangxi, 1937-45”
Lary pointed out the sad nature of the war story for militaristic Guangxi: it started on a high note, with Guangxi troops going North to fight against the Japanese in the Xuzhou campaign, and then slowly spiraled downwards with things getting worse and worse. A well-run province before 1937, the province made greater and greater sacrifices—its armies, its agricultural economy, the ravages of inflation—even though there was no sustained occupation or collaboration. Entering the war in good shape with strong leadership, it came out ruined, its two major cities, Nanning and Guilin, destroyed. There was a brief happy story when Guilin became a cultural center for writers and artists from all over China, but mostly Guangxi’s was a story of loss and decline, and the erosion of the idealism and sense of resistance that was present at the beginning of the war. There was also a sense that Guangxi leaders felt they did not have the kind of influence they should have had at the strategic level.
In terms of looking at the course of the war, Lary pointed out that the end of the war was much the worst period for Guangxi and the South: in contrast to the North where things improved.
Lary noted that more narratives are needed for the war – that more needs to be found out about what actually happened. We need to ‘seek truth from facts,’ she suggested. Many topics of the wartime period are still quite thin in facts and narratives: the topics discussed in the conference so far are very important but almost the tip of the iceberg, she suggested. They needed to be replicated for other parts of China, and different topics.
For Guangxi, Lary also pointed out the long-term impact of the Sino-Japanese war – because it never really recovered, and went straight into the civil war, which didn’t end in Guangxi until 1953. The very people who had fought the Japanese were imprisoned, killed or were re-educated. She pointed out the irony that the Guangxi people who went North to fight the Japanese ended up being enemies of the people in the early 1950’s.
She noted, however, that since the 1980’s there has been a rectification, the Guangxi clique are again the local heroes in Guangxi and their houses have been turned into museums. There are a large number of films about them, books, records and every kind of praise has been heaped upon them. In a sense the identity of the province has been restored, associated with them and with military prowess, Lary said.
She finished by noting that the question of memory is still a very haunting one. She told the anecdote of Vicky Zhaowei, a young starlet/singer who last year chose a new costume for a performance: a dress with a rising sun on it. She then discovered to her horror that this had associations for many people in China of her parents’/grandparents’ generation. She was bitterly attacked and had to recant as much as she could, calling attention to the fact her own grandfather had been killed in the war. The story is indicative of the sense that some people who went through the war have that it has been completely forgotten by the younger generation and that it’s no longer relevant. But one only had to scratch the surface and it’s still all there. This period, 60 years ago, for many people is still very, very present indeed, Lary concluded.
Comments:
Paul Cohen noted that in contrast to other papers Lary’s was very much a ‘tour of the horizon,’ touching on many aspects of wartime, and post-war Guangxi.
He pointed to the importance of regional differences in talking about the Sino-Japanese war: for example, one of the most interesting aspects was that Guangxi’s pre-war history, especially the 1930’s, was very important in shaping its reaction once war broke out. Cohen suggested that the fact that Guangxi forces fought as a Guangxi army was a carryover from the warlord period when armies were formed on a regional basis.
The recruitment method of the Guangxi army was also of interest: unlike the press ganging in other parts of China, Guangxi had a militia system in place since the early 1930’s (which also had social welfare dimensions) and that served as a vehicle of recruitment for the Guangxi army.
Cohen pointed out that Lary’s paper noted the effectiveness of the propaganda system—that had been developed since the 1930’s as an important part of the Reconstruction Movement—in the mobilization process, and the patriotic fervor, the spirit of sacrifice that gripped the province, and that brought much admiration for the Guangxi army. Lary said this made it “appear” that the Reconstruction Movement had been a great success.
Question: “Appear” sounds ambiguous. Was it actually a success? If it wasn’t a success, what was responsible for the effectiveness of Guangxi mobilization? And if it was a success, why so hesitant? A key issue here is propaganda which played a major role in mobilizing the province both militarily and non-militarily. How exactly did this propaganda system work?
The regional specificity came through again in looking at the economic effects of the war, Cohen said. The first effect was the evacuation of the military to fight elsewhere during the war, leaving a major vacuum in terms of able-bodied, male agriculturalists. Cohen said this raises the very interesting question of what happens to an agrarian economy when a war breaks out and a substantial percentage of the male population goes off and fights. This would be a marvelous issue for comparative analysis, he suggested – not just to other regions of China but other wars in other countries. The kind of war that was being fought and the kind of agrarian system that existed would generate a lot of variation in how things actually worked out on the ground, Cohen suggested.
In terms of the conference as a whole, Cohen said he hoped that all the wonderful empirical work being done by Japanese and Chinese scholars could lead to some systematic comparative analysis. There had been a lot of discussion on labor recruitment, labor export, coerced labor. This was happening not just in China but also in Germany and the Soviet Union, Cohen pointed out.
Another example is the whole issue of ‘memory of war’ – where there is also a lot of scope for interesting comparative analysis, Cohen said. A lot of work has been done on the European side, and it has become a major industry in France, he pointed out.
Cohen also suggested that in dealing with the issue of memory distinctions have to be made between those that have been individually experienced, those read about in books later, heard about from parents, learnt in school etc. There’s also a difference between locally constructed history, local commemoration and history constructed at a national level – often for a quite different set of objectives.
He noted that the Vicky Zhaowei story at the end of Lary’s paper illustrated well the loss of memory of youth, and the horror that is expressed at this kind of loss of memory. But there are two kinds of horror and they are of a quite different nature, he said:
· One is the horror of personal family members of the older generation who do remember the war and are horrified at the forgetfulness of the young.
· The other is the horror of a government in Beijing which recognizes that the luster of Communist support for the legitimacy of the government has dulled considerably in recent years and that it is necessary to shine up an alternative source of legitimation which is the very important role the Communists played in eliminating direct imperialism from China.
Comments/questions from the floor:
US:
· Suggested the need for a broader canvas (such as the works which are available about World War II in Europe), in discussing the Sino-Japanese war. So far, studies are mainly isolated, points of light – and it would be good if the microstudies of certain regions and larger studies (of issues like migration) could be drawn into a comprehensive map to enable us to grasp the totality of this experience. To make this easier, it would be great if agreement could be reached, especially between Chinese and Japanese scholars, on the standardization of data – so that the massive empirical work will make a final product that is accessible and available to us all.
· Noted also the massive changes in China over the course of the war – it’s a totally different place at the beginning than at the end. It will be very important in future studies to put more focus on the internal hinterland, and especially internal cities and the cultural dimension as a way of understanding the total impact of the war on China and the occupiers themselves.
US: [Adding to previous point] In regional studies of the war there are areas that have been left out—such as those further West like Yunnan, Sichuan and Gansu—that weren’t so directly touched by the war. In these areas it’s noticeable how if one looks at any one of a number of important measures—such as road-building, development of transport infrastructure, the industrialization of the interior—the changes that took place in the course of the war. Lary downplays the fact that during eight years Guangxi industrialization increased by a factor of four. But I suspect that that probably was a significant transformation of the economy and endured past the war.
There was also the issue of state penetration in these areas, with the institution of the baojia system much more effectively than before, especially in Sichuan, and the use of that for conscription. There was also a spectacular increase in educational infrastructure – primary/secondary schools.
There were also things that were fundamentally important in bringing about a sense of national consciousness, and transforming the cultural environment in which people lived. Communications spread with the quite widespread use of radios, and the ability of the GMD to bring propaganda. Hence, while Lary stresses the destruction, if we look further inland, it helps us look at GMD areas not just as a regime in collapse and so much burdened by corruption and factionalism – but a regime which was very significantly transforming a very large area of the interior of China in ways that would have a very lasting impact on the future history of China.
These areas in China have to be brought more into focus as we look at the total impact of the war.
US: In Jiangxi, for the area that Jiang Jingguo controlled, it would be great to have a comparative study on this remarkable example of successful local leadership under the GMD – which achieved legitimacy and a type of moral authority that the GMD was not able to achieve overall. What was it that Jiang Jingguo was able to bring to his administration, what advantages did he have that other administrators didn’t? For example he had a unified government not available to other administrators – everything was under his control other than intelligence operations. What were the advantages that he enjoyed and what were the aspects of his leadership that could have been duplicated?
Japan: The history of the provincial areas is not the main focus of the conference, but when we carry out our research many of the documents and material is written for each province – it’s on a provincial scale. From the political/social/economic point of view, the province is one unit. We look at larger administrations but if research could be done on other provinces as well, they could all be put together and analyzed, and we wouldn’t have to just look at central government, it could be a two-layered approach.
US: Part of the reason the historiography of the war in China is different from the historiography of World War II in Europe is that the war in China lacks the foundation of a shared or broad understanding of the military history of the war. The history of wartime China is being studied without too much attention to the actual war – the battles, the strategy, the military map which is in some sense the foundation or template for every thing else.
The greatest military organizational effort of Chiang Kaishek was to create a national army, separate from the existing provincial armies. But in his catastrophic gamble to fight the Japanese in Shanghai, he lost 70% of the national army’s officer corps. So after that he had to rely on the provincial armies whose loyalty had to be bought at virtually every turn.
The military question is a bit ignored in Merker’s paper when answering the question of why was Jiang Jingguo in Southern Jiangxi at all? Did his father not want him in Chongqing? Actually it was because it was the single most valuable part of eastern China in strategic military terms. That’s where the tungsten was mined that served as a guarantee for American and Russian loans – the one thing that China had that could keep it in the war economically. So it was extraordinarily important to defend this area militarily. It would be interesting to know more on how it was defended, why the Japanese did not put more effort into putting this area out of the war, and how the military history of this region really intersects with the political/economic history.
Taiwan: I like Lary’s paper, especially the part on memory of war. After 1949, there was a very different memory of the Sino-Japanese war among the ordinary people in Taiwan, compared to on the Mainland. The memory was heavily influenced by the governments in each place. A comparative study of the Mainland and Taiwan in this regard would open the door to a lot of interesting subjects. [He also told an anecdote illustrating the differing memories of Japan among different generations of Taiwanese. Some are nostalgic about Japan and others hate it].
Merker: How to combine micro- and macro- studies of the war will require a lot of thought; it’s very important. It was very hard to study the situation in Northern Jiangxi because a lot of archives were not open to the public. In the past, there has been a problem of lack of materials. Sometimes there’s more than enough material, but in most places, materials are still insufficient. There’s also contradictions – for Jingdezhen, documents published later on indicate it was a place where the Communist underground was very, very active. But when you interview the locals, according to them there was no Communist activity there! So how are you going to combine and compare all these materials?
Lary: Lots of armies remain very localized – it’s true in the British army today and it’s true in Canada, so not too much should be made of the fact that Guangxi armies fought as a unit. Creating a national army is hard.