On the night of 7 July 1937, Japanese troops conducting exercises near an ancient stone bridge southwest of Beijing reported one of their soldiers missing, and demanded entry to the nearby walled town of Wanping to search for him. The Chinese garrison of the 29th Army refused. Shots were exchanged in the dark. The missing soldier, who had simply wandered off, turned up within hours, unharmed, but by then the local commanders on both sides had lost control of the thing, and within weeks Japan and China were at full war. The bridge was the Lugouqiao, the Marco Polo Bridge, seven hundred years old, its parapets lined with carved stone lions that the Venetian had admired in the thirteenth century. The war that began among those lions lasted eight years, killed somewhere between fourteen and twenty million Chinese, displaced close to a hundred million, and did not end until the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. It was the war the whole nineteenth century had been building toward, and it made, more than any revolution, the China we know.
This is the eighth essay in a series that began with the Macartney embassy and has followed China through the opium trade, two wars with the West, the self-strengthening, the fall of the dynasty and the warlord wilderness. Here the story reaches the crucible. To understand the war you need, first, the decade that preceded it, because between 1927 and 1937 the Nationalist government at Nanjing came closer than any regime since 1842 to building a modern Chinese state, and the Japanese army watched it happening with growing alarm.
The decade that almost worked
The Nanjing decade, as historians call the years of Chiang Kai-shek’s ascendancy, was a real attempt at national construction, and its achievements were genuine. The government recovered tariff autonomy, the treaty-era loss that had shackled Chinese finance since 1842; it unified the currency in 1935, taking China off silver into a managed national banknote just before the world’s silver markets convulsed; it built highways, railways, universities and research institutes; it cultivated a new urban middle class and a Shanghai modernity of cinemas, department stores and publishing houses that remains, in retrospect, a golden age. Chiang himself, abstemious, Methodist, married to the Wellesley-educated Soong Mei-ling, launched the New Life Movement, an odd blend of Confucian rectitude and paramilitary hygiene that exhorted Chinese to straighten their collars, stop spitting and be worthy of the new age. Yet the government’s foundations had two fatal gaps. Its writ ran deep only in the lower Yangzi provinces; elsewhere it rested on bargains with provincial armies that retained their own loyalties. And in the countryside, where four-fifths of China lived, it did almost nothing for the tenant farmers whose rents and debts were the era’s buried explosive. That was the opening its enemies used. The Chinese Communist Party, driven from the cities after the 1927 massacre, had regrouped in the hills of Jiangxi under Mao Zedong and Zhu De, and built there a rural soviet with its own army, land reform and taxes. Five times Chiang sent armies to exterminate it. The first four campaigns failed; the fifth, in 1934, with German advisers and a strategy of blockhouses, succeeded. In October 1934 some 86,000 communists broke out and began the Long March, a fighting retreat of six thousand miles across the whole of western China, over snow passes and the deadly grasslands, through warlord country and across the Luding bridge, arriving in the loess hills of Shaanxi a year later with fewer than one in ten of those who had set out. At a wayside town called Zunyi, in January 1935, the survivors held the conference that made Mao Zedong the party’s leading man. Militarily it was a catastrophe; politically, retold ever after, it was a founding epic, and the epic was true enough: the party that reached Yan’an had been tempered to a hardness the Nationalists never matched.
The immediate threat, however, came from the east. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in September 1931, staged by officers of the Kwantung Army who blew up a stretch of their own railway near Mukden and blamed Chinese saboteurs, had shown that the army, not the cabinet, now made Japanese policy in China; when Prime Minister Inukai resisted, young officers shot him dead in May 1932, and party government in Japan effectively ended. Manchuria became the puppet state of Manchukuo, with the ex-emperor Puyi installed as its ceremonial sovereign, and through the early 1930s Japan pressed southward into north China while Chiang, determined to destroy the communists first, traded space and humiliation for time. The policy was rational and politically intolerable, and it broke in December 1936 in the strangest way. Chiang flew to Xi’an to energize the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang’s armies for a final anti-communist campaign; Zhang, whose father the Japanese had murdered and whose Manchurian troops wanted only to fight Japan, kidnapped him instead, and held the Generalissimo for two weeks while the communist negotiator Zhou Enlai helped arrange his release. Chiang emerged committed, on his word, to the Second United Front: the civil war suspended, the two parties allied against Japan. Seven months later the shooting started at the Marco Polo Bridge, and the alliance was tested by eight years of total war.
Three months at Shanghai, six weeks at Nanjing
Chiang chose to fight the opening battle at Shanghai, and the choice was deliberate: in the international city the whole world would watch, and Japan, drawn into street fighting, would spend its best divisions away from the north. From August to November 1937 the Chinese army, including its German-trained elite divisions, held the city for three months against naval gunfire, air attack and amphibious assault, losing a quarter of a million men, the cream of the Nationalist officer corps, in a grinding urban battle the world’s press covered from the safety of the International Settlement, whose residents watched the fighting across the creek like theatre, until stray shells and a bombed department store brought the war to their own streets. The photograph of the burned baby alone on the tracks of the bombed South Station ran in newspapers across the world. Then the line broke, and the army’s retreat up the Yangzi became a rout that opened the road to the capital.
What happened at Nanjing in December 1937 and January 1938 remains, nearly ninety years on, the central atrocity of the war and an open wound between the two countries. The Japanese army, taking the abandoned capital, spent six weeks in an orgy of killing, rape and arson that contemporary foreign observers documented in real time. The dead number in the tens of thousands by the most conservative scholarly counts and three hundred thousand in the Chinese accounting that is now a matter of national memory. The one bright line in the darkness was improvised: a small group of Western residents, missionaries, professors and businessmen organized an International Safety Zone that sheltered some two hundred thousand Chinese civilians, and its chairman, improbably, was a German Nazi Party member and Siemens executive named John Rabe, who used his swastika armband to bluff Japanese soldiers away from massacre sites and whose diary, published decades later, became one of the indispensable records of the atrocity. The war then rolled on. The Nationalists, trading space for time on a continental scale, fought the great battle of Wuhan in 1938, the largest of the war, and lost it; and in June 1938, to slow the Japanese advance, Chiang’s engineers breached the dikes of the Yellow River at Huayuankou, deliberately drowning their own countryside. The flood bought months and cost, in drowning, famine and displacement, hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives, an atrocity committed by a government against its own people in the name of their defence, which the government then concealed. The capital fell back up the gorges to Chongqing, in Sichuan, and from 1938 to 1943 the Japanese air force bombed the wartime capital in one of history’s first sustained campaigns of terror bombing, while its citizens moved their offices, schools and factories into caves carved from the rock.
The long war
After 1938 the war settled into a vast, ragged stalemate that consumed both sides. Japan held the cities, the railways and the coast; it could not hold the countryside, and into that countryside the communists moved, building guerrilla base areas behind the Japanese lines, organizing the villages the Nationalists had never reached, and growing, under the cover of the national war, from a ragged remnant into a mass movement with its own government, army and tax base. The Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940, Peng Dehuai’s great spoiling attack on the Japanese railway net, proved the communists could fight at scale, and provoked Japanese counterinsurgency of genocidal ferocity, the “three alls”, kill all, burn all, loot all. The united front, never real, frayed into open fighting by 1941, when Nationalist troops destroyed the communist New Fourth Army’s column in Anhui, the incident Zhou Enlai mourned in a famous blank-verse protest. Meanwhile the puppet question, the perennial nightmare of occupied countries, produced its great tragedy: Wang Jingwei, Sun Yat-sen’s oldest comrade and the Nationalist movement’s number two, defected to the Japanese in 1938 and in 1940 accepted the presidency of a collaborationist government at Nanjing, arguing that peace on any terms was mercy. He died in 1944 before the reckoning, and his name entered the language as the byword for traitor.
Everything changed in December 1941. Pearl Harbor made China’s war the world’s war, and China became, on paper, one of the Big Four. The reality was a desperate logistical thread: with the coast blockaded and the Burma Road cut, the Allied airlift over the Himalayas, the Hump, flew supplies from Assam into Kunming through the world’s most dangerous air corridor. The American general Joseph Stilwell, sent to advise and reform the Chinese army, fought a four-year war of attrition with Chiang, whom he despised as corrupt and militarily inept, until Chiang’s ultimatum forced his recall in 1944. The Americans learned the war’s cruellest arithmetic in 1942, when the Japanese response to the Doolittle Raid, searching for the American airmen whom Chinese villagers had hidden, killed a quarter of a million Chinese civilians in Zhejiang and Jiangxi. And still there were real victories in the ledger: in January 1943 the United States and Britain signed new treaties with China formally ending extraterritoriality, closing, almost exactly a century after the Treaty of Nanjing, the legal architecture of the unequal treaties that this series has traced since the beginning. At Cairo in November 1943 Chiang sat with Roosevelt and Churchill, and the declaration promised that Taiwan, seized in 1895, would be restored to China. Then, in 1944, came Ichigo, Japan’s largest offensive of the war, a half-million-man thrust that smashed through Henan, Hunan and Guangxi, seized the American airbases, and exposed, to Chinese and foreigners alike, the rot in the Nationalist war machine: the starved, beaten conscripts, the sold rice, the generals’ private accounts. In the same years the Henan famine killed millions while officials levied grain taxes on the starving, and Life magazine’s Theodore White wired home the photographs that destroyed the government’s American reputation. Victory, when it came in August 1945, came from the sky over Japan and the Soviet armies pouring into Manchuria, not from the Chinese battlefield; but China had done the indispensable thing. It had not collapsed. Eight years of resistance had pinned down the better part of the Japanese army, and the price, fourteen to twenty million dead, a hundred million refugees, an economy in ruins, was paid almost entirely in Chinese flesh.
The peace that wasn’t
On 9 September 1945, in the auditorium of the Central Military Academy at Nanjing, the Japanese commander in China signed the instrument of surrender, eight years and two months after the shots at the Marco Polo Bridge, in the city whose name still meant atrocity. Taiwan was retroceded in October. China took its seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. And within the year the country was back at civil war, because the war’s deepest political result had been hidden in plain sight: the Nationalists had held the cities and lost the countryside, and the communists had done the reverse. The party that had entered the war with a remnant in the loess hills emerged from it with a million troops, ninety million people in its base areas, and a reputation for discipline and honesty that the inflation-rotted, conscription-brutal Nationalist government could not match. George Marshall’s peace mission in 1946 tried to split the difference between two armed parties that each intended to rule, and failed.
The ledger, then, one more time. Napoleon had warned that to attack China was to teach it, and that the immense empire, once taught, would not be beaten twice the same way. The eight-year war was that lesson’s final examination, and China passed it at a price that staggers arithmetic: the country that had lost every foreign war since 1839 fought the greatest military power in Asia to a standstill and outlasted it. But the war also decided the question the broken republic had left open, which transformation, Nationalist or Communist, would inherit the country, and it decided it not at the negotiating table but in the villages of north China, where the coming revolution had spent eight years organizing the people the old China had never reached. The last act of the series’ first century, the civil war of 1946 to 1949 and the proclamation on Tiananmen’s rostrum, is the next essay: the war the Nationalists won abroad and lost at home.
