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WRITING WAR: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MODERNITY AND WARTIME NARRATIVE IN NATIONALIST CHINA, 1937–1946*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Rana Mitter
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Abstract

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one a biji (notebook) written immediately after the war's end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the war's ambiguous role in modernising China. Du's work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xu's suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 18 , December 2008 , pp. 187 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2008

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who commented on this paper, including the audience at the meeting of the Royal Historical Society where it was presented in September 2007. Other colleagues, including Glen Dudbridge, Akira Iriye, Chloe Starr and Hilde de Weerdt were of invaluable assistance in the revision of earlier versions. I am particularly grateful for a Philip Leverhulme Prize which enabled me to visit China and the USA and obtain materials for this paper which are unavailable in the UK.

References

1 Originally in Dikang (Resistance) (6 Oct. 1937), in Huan wo heshan: Du Zhongyuan wenji (Return Our Rivers and Mountains: Collected Essays of Du Zhongyuan), ed. Du Yi and Du Ying (Shanghai, 1998) [hereafter DZY], 270.

2 Wancheng, Xu, Chongqing huaxu (Chongqing gossip) (Shanghai, 1946), 36Google Scholar.

3 See Coble, Parks, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), ch. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dryburgh, Marjorie, North China and Japanese Expansion, 1933–1937: Regional Power and the National Interest (Richmond, Surrey, 2000), ch. 5Google Scholar.

4 Eastman, Lloyd E., ‘Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War’, in Eastman, L. et al. , The Nationalist Era in China, 1927–1949 (Cambridge, 1991), 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The classic popular history statement of this viewpoint remains Tuchman, Barbara, Sand against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. Tang Tsou's America's Failure in China (Chicago, 1963) remains a standard scholarly account of the aftermath of the war, and a powerful revisionist view of the ‘Stilwell myth’ is Hans van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (2003), ch. 1.

6 A very useful review essay is Pepper, S., ‘The Political Odyssey of an Intellectual Construct: Peasant Nationalism and the Study of China's Revolutionary History – A Review Essay’, Journal of Asian Studies, 63, 1 (2004), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, for instance, Brook, Timothy, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Chinese Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar, and van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China. The most important Chinese outlet for the new scholarship is Kang-Ri zhanzheng yanjiu (Research on the War of Resistance), published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1991–).

8 Stephen MacKinnon points out that the numbers of refugees are still highly disputed, and cites numbers from 3 to 90 million (‘Refugee Flight at the Outset of the Anti-Japanese War’, in Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, ed. Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (Vancouver, 2001), 119). However, the majority of estimates place the number at the much higher end of this scale.

9 Among recent articles on China's changing attitude toward its own wartime history are Waldron, A., ‘China's New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang Zizhong’, Modern Asian Studies, 30, 4 (1996), 945–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitter, R., ‘Old Ghosts, New Memories: Changing China's History in the Era of Post-Mao Politics’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38, 1 (2003), 117–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coble, P., ‘China's “New Remembering” of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance 1937–1945’, China Quarterly, 190 (June 2007), 394–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Jianchuan, Fan, Yi ge ren de kangzhan: cong yi ge ren de cangpin kan yi chang quan minzu de zhanzheng (Beijing, 2000)Google Scholar. This and other first-person contemporary texts are discussed in Mitter, Rana, ‘China's “Good War”: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan’, in Ruptured Histories: War and Memory in Post-Cold War Asia, ed. Jager, Sheila and Mitter, Rana (Cambridge, MA, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 But see Scars of War, ed. Lary and MacKinnon.

12 See for instance Laughlin, Charles, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, NC, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 On this question, see the essays in The Nanking Atrocity: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob T. Wakabayashi (Oxford, 2007).

14 Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, trans. Patrick Camiller (2000), 2.

15 One point of entry into this debate by a prominent Chinese political philosopher is Hui, Wang, ‘Zhang Taiyan's Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity’, in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Yeh, Wen-hsin (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar.

16 On the NRC, see Yi, Xie, Guomin zhengfu ziyuan weiyuanhui yanjiu (Research on the Nationalist Government's National Resources Commission) (Shanghai, 2005)Google Scholar.

17 On Du Zhongyuan, see Mitter, R., ‘Manchuria in Mind: Press, Propaganda, and Northeast China in the Age of Empire, 1930–37’, in Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, ed. Tamanoi, Mariko Asano (Honolulu, 2005)Google Scholar, and Mitter, Rana, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

18 Zheng Zu'an, ‘“Diaochajia” Xu Wancheng’ (The ‘investigator’ Xu Wancheng), Dang'an yu shixue (2001/3), 58–60.

19 The concept of xiao shimin is detailed in Lu, Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 2000), 61–3Google Scholar.

20 Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, ch. 2.

21 On reportage as journalism, see Hung, Chang-tai, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, 1994), 39–48Google Scholar; on reportage as literature, see Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 1–36.

22 Orig. Dikang (23 Sept. 1937), in DZY, 257.

23 But for the persistence of the classical tradition in twentieth-century bureaucratic examinations, see Strauss, J., ‘Symbol and Reflection of the Reconstituting State: The Examination Yuan in the 1930s’, Modern China, 20/2 (Apr. 1994), 211–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983).

25 There is very little scholarly work on the biji as such, although there is plenty on specific biji; this may be because it was not a canonical literary genre in traditional China. For an explanation of the genre, see Wilkinson, Endymion, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar, ch. 32 (‘Biji’). For a stimulating discussion of limitations of the traditional genres of Chinese literary writing, see ‘A thousand years of literary narrative in China’, in Dudbridge, Glen, Books, Tales, and Vernacular Culture: Selected Papers on China (Leiden, 2005)Google Scholar.

26 Xu, Chongqing huaxu, 1.

27 White, Theodore and Jacoby, Annalee, Thunder out of China (New York, 1946), 1Google Scholar.

28 Orig. Kangzhan (24 Apr. 1938), in DZY, 276.

29 See ‘Introduction’ by the editors in In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation, ed. Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh (Cambridge, 2004).

30 Zhongguo kangzhan huashi (Pictorial History of the Chinese War of Resistance', ed. Shu Songqiao (Shanghai: Zhongguo shudian, 1947), 236. I am very grateful to Graham Hutchings for the loan of this rare item.

31 P. Pickowicz, ‘Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance’, in Becoming Chinese, ed. Yeh, 396.

32 Xinsheng 1/1, 10 Feb. 1934, 1. There is a further discussion on Du's use of Confucian norms in public writing in Mitter, R., ‘“Life” as They Knew It: Du Zhongyuan's editorial strategies for the Xinsheng (New Life) Weekly, 1934–35’, in Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse, ed. Berg, Daria (Leiden, 2007)Google Scholar; and in the contemporary context in Mitter, ‘China's “Good War”’.

33 Xinsheng 1/1, 10 Feb. 1934, 11.

34 Wu, Pei-yi, The Confucian's Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 6–7Google Scholar.

35 Xu, Chongqing huaxu, 2.

36 Ibid.

37 Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, chs. 3 and 4. See also Imre Kertesz's novel Fateless (‘Sorstalanság’) (New York, 1975); the protagonist, Gyuri, repeatedly seeks to make rational explanations for the increasingly irrational events around him that eventually lead to him being sent to Auschwitz. On Holocaust fiction, also see Clendinnen, Inga, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar.

38 Xu, Chongqing huaxu, 6.

39 Chinese modernity is a huge topic and only a few indicative works can be named here; on literary performativity, see Lee, Leo Ou-fan, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; on the links between modern consumerism and the ‘exhibitionary complex’, see Gerth, Karl, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the creation of modern citizenship, see Harrison, Henrietta, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

40 See, for instance, Lean, Eugenia, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, ch. 4.

42 Henshui, Zhang, Shanghai Express, trans. Lyell, William (Honolulu, 1997)Google Scholar.

43 On these wars, see Waldron, Arthur, From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point, 1924–5 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

44 Orig. Dikang (26 Sept. 1937), in DZY, 260.

45 Ibid.

46 Orig. Kangzhan (29 Sept. 1937), in DZY, 264.

47 Orig. Dikang (3 Oct. 1937), in DZY, 267.

48 Orig. Kangzhan (6 Oct. 1937), in DZY, 269.

49 Ibid. (21 Aug. 1937), in DZY, 271. ‘Blah blah’ is not a literal translation: I have tried to bring over in the translation the way that Du's Chinese seems to express dismissiveness of the businessman's words.

50 Orig. Dikang (29 Sept. 1937), in DZY, 266.

51 Orig. Kangzhan (29 Sept. 1937), in DZY, 266.

52 Ibid. (6 Apr. 1938), in DZY, 274.

53 Ibid. (6 Apr. 1938), in DZY, 275.

54 Fussell, Paul, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York, 1989), 174Google Scholar.

55 Xu, Chongqing huaxu, 1.

56 Ibid., 4.

57 Ibid., 5.

58 Ibid., 6.

59 Ibid., 8.

60 Ibid., 30.

61 Ibid., 34.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 23.

64 Ron Leshem, Beaufort (2008), 304, 310.

65 Xu, Chongqing huaxu (appendix), 8.