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Authors: Antony Beevor
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It also isolated the Nationalist capital of Chungking and allowed Japanese naval aircraft to attack it with continual raids. There were no river mists at that time of year to impede visibility. As well as bombing towns and villages along the river, Japanese aircraft attacked steamers and junks overcrowded with wounded and refugees as they escaped upriver through the great Yangtze gorges.
Agnes Smedley asked a Red Cross doctor about the situation. He admitted that of the 150 military hospitals on the central front, only five had survived. ‘What about the wounded ?’ Smedley asked. ‘He said nothing, and I knew the answer.’ Death was all around. ‘Each day,’ she added, ‘we saw the bloated corpses of human beings slowly floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being shoved away by boatmen with long, spiked poles.’
When Smedley reached Chungking on its cliffs high above the confluence of the Yangtze and Chialing rivers, she was startled by explosions, but these were not bombs. Chinese engineers were blasting tunnels in the cliffs to make air-raid shelters. She found that during her absence muchhad changed, both good and bad. A provincial city of 200,000 inhabitants was swelling towards a population of a million. The growth of industrial cooperatives was very encouraging, but increasingly powerful right-wing elements in the Kuomintang saw them as crypto-Communist. Improvements had been made in the army medical services, with free clinics set up in Nationalist areas, but again Kuomintang bosses wanted to control the health services, most likely for their own enrichment.
Most sinister of all was the rise in power of the security chief General Tai Li, who was said now to have a force of 300,000 men, both uniformed and plain clothes. His power was so great that some even suspected that he controlled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself. General Tai was stamping down not just on dissent but on free speech in any form. Chinese intellectuals began to flee to Hong Kong. Even the most innocuous organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, were closed down in the atmosphere of crisis.
Foreigners in Chungking, according to Smedley, regarded the Chinese armies with contempt. ‘ China, they said, couldn’t fight ; its generals were rotten; its soldiers illiterate coolies or mere boys; its people ignorant; the care of the wounded an abomination. Some charges were true, some untrue, but almost all were based on a lack of appreciation of the fearful burdens under which China staggered.’ Europeans and Americans failed completely to understand what was at stake and did little to help. The only substantial aid for medical services came from expatriate Chinese, whether in Malaya, Java, the United States or elsewhere. Their generosity was considerable, and in 1941 the Japanese conquerors would make them suffer for it.
Chiang Kai-shek had continued with meaningless peace negotiations in the hope of putting pressure on Stalin to bring his military support back to earlier levels. But in July 1940 a change of government in Tokyo brought General TjHideki into the Cabinet as minister of war. These shadow negotiations were broken off. Tjwanted to starve the Nationalists of supplies by making a stronger agreement with the Soviet Union and cutting off their other supply routes. In Tokyo, military leaders were turning their gaze south to the Pacific and south-west to the British, French and Dutch possessions around the South China Sea. This would give them rice and deprive the Nationalist Chinese of imports, but above all Japan wanted the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Any idea of compromise with the United States which involved a retreat from China was unthinkable to the regime in Tokyo after the deaths so far of 62,000 Japanese soldiers in the ‘China Incident’ .
In the second half of 1940 the Chinese Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, launched its Hundred Regiments campaign in
Agnes Smedley asked a Red Cross doctor about the situation. He admitted that of the 150 military hospitals on the central front, only five had survived. ‘What about the wounded ?’ Smedley asked. ‘He said nothing, and I knew the answer.’ Death was all around. ‘Each day,’ she added, ‘we saw the bloated corpses of human beings slowly floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being shoved away by boatmen with long, spiked poles.’
When Smedley reached Chungking on its cliffs high above the confluence of the Yangtze and Chialing rivers, she was startled by explosions, but these were not bombs. Chinese engineers were blasting tunnels in the cliffs to make air-raid shelters. She found that during her absence muchhad changed, both good and bad. A provincial city of 200,000 inhabitants was swelling towards a population of a million. The growth of industrial cooperatives was very encouraging, but increasingly powerful right-wing elements in the Kuomintang saw them as crypto-Communist. Improvements had been made in the army medical services, with free clinics set up in Nationalist areas, but again Kuomintang bosses wanted to control the health services, most likely for their own enrichment.
Most sinister of all was the rise in power of the security chief General Tai Li, who was said now to have a force of 300,000 men, both uniformed and plain clothes. His power was so great that some even suspected that he controlled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself. General Tai was stamping down not just on dissent but on free speech in any form. Chinese intellectuals began to flee to Hong Kong. Even the most innocuous organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, were closed down in the atmosphere of crisis.
Foreigners in Chungking, according to Smedley, regarded the Chinese armies with contempt. ‘ China, they said, couldn’t fight ; its generals were rotten; its soldiers illiterate coolies or mere boys; its people ignorant; the care of the wounded an abomination. Some charges were true, some untrue, but almost all were based on a lack of appreciation of the fearful burdens under which China staggered.’ Europeans and Americans failed completely to understand what was at stake and did little to help. The only substantial aid for medical services came from expatriate Chinese, whether in Malaya, Java, the United States or elsewhere. Their generosity was considerable, and in 1941 the Japanese conquerors would make them suffer for it.
Chiang Kai-shek had continued with meaningless peace negotiations in the hope of putting pressure on Stalin to bring his military support back to earlier levels. But in July 1940 a change of government in Tokyo brought General TjHideki into the Cabinet as minister of war. These shadow negotiations were broken off. Tjwanted to starve the Nationalists of supplies by making a stronger agreement with the Soviet Union and cutting off their other supply routes. In Tokyo, military leaders were turning their gaze south to the Pacific and south-west to the British, French and Dutch possessions around the South China Sea. This would give them rice and deprive the Nationalist Chinese of imports, but above all Japan wanted the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Any idea of compromise with the United States which involved a retreat from China was unthinkable to the regime in Tokyo after the deaths so far of 62,000 Japanese soldiers in the ‘China Incident’ .
In the second half of 1940 the Chinese Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, launched its Hundred Regiments campaign in
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