Authors: Michael Meyer
“Americans,” Pearl Buck wrote in
1970
Buck, Pearl, 3, pp. 294–95.
“What if you land in the Chinese countryside?”
Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 175. She also told the men, “Perhaps the first Chinese phrase you ought to learn is ‘
Wo shi Mei-kuo ren,
’ or, ‘I am an American.’” (I hoped her lesson would continue on to one’s birth year on the Chinese zodiac, one’s height, and one’s ability to use chopsticks, but no.)
The nation was on a “global commodity hunt”
Romig. The purchaser of the Argentine soya was Heilongjiang Beidahuang. The company’s name was a combination of the northernmost province and Manchuria’s former nickname of “the vast northern wasteland.”
Its food and energy purchases
Barrionuevo.
The shift to overseas food sources
I calculated the equivalence. The area plowed under came from Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor of sociology at Renmin University of China in Beijing. (See O’Neill.)
“Chasing ever-higher output levels”
Chuin-Wei. Agricultural statistics, like budgetary numbers, made me cross-eyed as I tried to grasp the size of millions of hectares or how large a metric ton of rice was. Learning that 170 of them could fit in an average-size shipping container didn’t help; instead I held tight to comparative statistics that floated by, such as the average yield of a hectare of rice in China now at 6.3 tons, up from 1.5 tons fifty years ago. (The world average was 4.3 tons.) Yuan Longping, the “father of Chinese hybrid rice,” continued to break his own records with a 2013 yield of 19.4 tons in an experimental field, though seeds of his “super rice” were not yet commercially available. (Zuo 3 and Zhou.)
In 1949, when the Communist Party took power, China had 110 million hectares of cultivated land to feed a population of 542 million; now it has 122 million hectares to feed 1.3 billion. The area increased from reclaiming wasteland.
China classifies corn, wheat, and rice
Ibid.
Food accounted for nearly $
1
of every $
5
China spent
Wessel, and also Carlson.
An elated grower in Georgia
Wessel.
China kept outsourcing
Zuo 4. The project was reported to become China’s biggest overseas agricultural project. For decades China had aimed at being self-sufficient in grain production. Recently the target was lowered to 90 percent self-sufficiency.
It became China’s national anthem
Lyrics were changed to exult the Communist Party and Chairman Mao following his death, although now the original words have been restored. A 2004 constitutional amendment finally decreed it as China’s official anthem.
It was sung from the perspective
Shao, p. 289. I used the excellent translation that appears here.
Chapter 12: Puppets of Manchukuo
The two-story museum looked more like a workers’ sanatorium
Before the Japanese installed Puyi here, the building had been the Bureau of Salt and Tobacco Taxation.
In a memoir, his childhood English tutor
Johnston, p. 166. The tutor’s name was Reginald Johnston.
(In his memoir, Puyi wrote of the stay)
Puyi, p. 129.
“Although he was now thoroughly Westernized”
Johnston, p. 241. An excellent recounting of Puyi’s in-between years can be found in Scotland, pp. 37–39. In Tianjin, one can imagine him feeling a sense of freedom unlike any he had felt—or would feel again. Looking back on the twelve years he lived in the Forbidden City after abdication, he wrote, “I lived an aimless and purposeless life . . . While others could enjoy modern ways, I continued to breathe the air of the nineteenth century and before. My life was an anachronism, a leftover of the type of life which had already become dust by that time” (Puyi, p. 37).
“My body,” he recalled, “would emit the combined odors”
Puyi, pp. 154–55.
From around the world arrived letters
Johnston, p. 241.
“My heart smoldered with a hatred I had never previously known”
Puyi, p. 146.
In a private letter, an Australian journalist wrote
Donald, letter to Harold Hochschild, February 14, 1927. In the It’s-a-small-world Department, I found Donald’s archives at Columbia University, began reading his correspondence, and then realized his most intimate letters were addressed to the father of Adam Hochschild, cofounder of
Mother Jones
magazine and author of books such as
King Leopold’s Ghost
and
To End All Wars
. The younger Hochschild was my professor at Berkeley, a mentorship that continues.
The correspondence halted in late 1941 and resumed on May 19, 1945, when Donald wrote to Harold: “I was in an internment camp, and remained there three years.” He had wasted away, surviving on foraged weeds, wishing, like many of his fellow starving prisoners, to die. “That I escaped is a marvel.”
In May 23, Harold replied, in part, “I was married on November 26, 1941, and the marriage has been, as you assume, a great success. We have a boy [Adam] who is now going on three years old.”
That autumn in 1945, aged seventy and frail, Donald begged off invitations to Manhattan speaking engagements. “As between friends, I do not want to talk any more about China” (September 9). He urged his friend not to cooperate with his biographer and returned to Shanghai, where he died the next year in the hospital. The Nationalists then ruling China gave him a state funeral.
But it was more than just a train
A succinct overview of the SMR can be found in Young, pp. 31–33. The “one-third” figure comes from p. 33, where she adds that “a large fraction of the rest were involved in commercial operations indirectly dependent” on the railroad. See also Fogel, pp. 124–25.
Under the slogan “Military Preparedness in Civilian Garb”
Fogel, viii. Goto said, “We have to implement a cultural invasion with a Central Laboratory, popular education for the resident populace, and forge other academic and economic links. Invasion may not be an agreeable expression, but [language] aside we can generally call our policy one of invasion in civil garb.”
Researchers collected the minutiae of Manchurian life
It took the American researcher John Young eight years to track down surviving copies of South Manchurian Railway reports. In a seven-hundred-page bibliography published in 1966, Young documented 6,284 titles scattered in the Library of Congress, Stanford’s Hoover Institution Library, and libraries at the University of California, Berkeley; Johns Hopkins; Harvard; Michigan; Columbia; Oklahoma; Penn; and twenty-five universities in Japan. Many had been discovered by a Japanese-American soldier in the Occupation Army packed on a pier, where they had arrived from Manchuria. “Startled by the bulk and great value of the materials [including Russian and Japanese-language documents] he sent them hastily to the United States just as they had been packed for evacuation.”
In a dispute over irrigation
The village was named Wanpaoshan, and the event is called the Wanpaoshan Incident. The killing of the Japanese spy, Captain Nakamura, is known as the Nakamura Incident.
It didn’t even disrupt rail traffic
Within an hour an express train from Beijing traveling fifty miles an hour passed the blast site.
“There was no way we could win”
Chang and Halliday, p. 120.
Officially, it was the army’s sole initiative. On a visit to Tokyo’s Yushukan—the war museum on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to soldiers who died fighting for the emperor—I understood why contemporary Chinese (and many Japanese) are angered by Japan’s official narrative of the war. The museum’s Manchukuo exhibit said the “Manchurian Incident” occurred because “resentment toward the overtly anti-Japanese polices of Zhang Xueliang’s government, and dissatisfaction with the Japanese government’s conciliatory approach to China, smoldered among Japanese residents in Manchuria (especially within the Kwantung Army). Chinese nationalism developed into a campaign for the removal of foreign interests, in violation of the existing treaties. The campaign spread to Manchuria, where anti-Japanese harassment and terrorism erupted. Under such circumstances the Kwantung Army resorted to force.”
Manji Ishiwara, the lieutenant colonel who was the incident’s co-plotter, thought he would be dishonorably discharged for it. Instead, he was returned to Japan and promoted to chief of operations for its entire army. On returning to Manchukuo six years later, Ishiwara was so disgusted with Japan’s blatant colonial occupation that he denounced the Kwantung Army commanders before being put out to pasture near Kyoto. Free of charges, he testified as a witness at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. His co-plotter, Seishiro Itagaki, who surrendered Japan’s Southeast Asian forces to Mountbatten in Singapore in September 1945, was found guilty of war crimes and hanged—as was Kenji Doihara, the intelligence officer who oversaw the plot, and would control Manchukuo’s prostitution and opium traffic, including the secret insertion of the drug into the popular Golden Bat brand cigarettes, addling unsuspecting consumers.
“But there was one big problem that worried me”
Puyi, p. 160.
Unbeknownst to him, a large drum of gasoline was on board
Yamamuro, p. 97.
“
Without waiting for the interpreter to finish translating”
Puyi, p. 172.
“These words, when relayed to me”
Ibid., p. 173.
“Even before the train had stopped”
Yamamuro, p. 93. This was translated from the Japanese edition of Puyi’s memoir. It noted that Puyi arrived at 3:00 p.m. Unlike today—when all clocks are set to Beijing time—the nation then had five time zones. Changchun ran on Changbai Time, named for the Ever-White Mountains at Jilin province’s east. In the English edition of his memoir, Puyi said of this time: “Since I had already openly appeared in public there was absolutely no turning back, and besides, I thought that if I could maneuver the Japanese well, they would perhaps support my restoration as emperor” (Puyi, p. 180).
Puyi was inaugurated in a ceremony
Yamamuro, p. 105.
But one of the masterminds of the September
18
bombing
Ibid., p. 97.
“I soon discovered that my authority was only shadow”
Puyi, pp. 181–82.
Tokyo means “Eastern Capital”
At the time, the romanization of the Xinjng’s name was Hsinking.
It would be unlike other planned capitals
“Capital Punishments,”
Economist,
December 18, 1997. In 1792, George Washington fired the District of Columbia’s planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, for refusing to water down his extravagant blueprint. The area around Delaware Avenue remained a swamp as late as 1850, while the National Cathedral wasn’t finished until 1991.
Around the time of Xinjing’s inception, an English reporter wrote
Ibid.
Planners drew clean lines, circular plazas
Buck, David, pp. 74–89. His article gives an excellent overview of the planning and construction, but also of the men who were drawing its lines. In 1906, Japan appointed Goto Shimpei as the first president of the South Manchurian Railroad. Born into a samurai family but educated in Germany as a physician, Goto planned freshwater and sewage systems for Japan, then Taiwan. As its appointed governor, Goto also oversaw a plan for Taipei that differed from the tangle of dense, narrow lanes that characterized Japanese cities, where urban planning did not exist as a field of study. After arriving in Manchuria, he oversaw the importation of the design in Mukden (Shenyang) and Changchun, whose planners bypassed the Russian and Chinese settlement areas and planned a settlement from scratch. These cities’ maps show his fingerprints today, with a grid pattern of streets bisected by diagonal boulevards that lead to plazas and parks.
Buck notes that Changchun’s first designer was Kato Yonokichi. Xinjing was drawn up by Sano Toshikata. Both were disciples of Goto Shimpei. Other architects who worked in Xinjing include disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright (who was in Tokyo, designing the Imperial Hotel) and Le Corbusier. See also Young, Louise, pp. 249–50.
See DuBois for a fascinating side note on the urban plan that built the city’s main road around a “filial son” tomb, evincing Manchukuo’s embrace of Confucianism.
Inside, schoolchildren stared up at the skeleton
It looked like a smaller, upright brontosaurus. Fittingly, the validity of the
Mandschurosaurus
as a genus has been debated internationally, with some paleontologists branding it a nomen dubium, a scientific name of doubtful application, since only a partial specimen exists.
The buildings look unlike any other in China
These ministry buildings were completed in 1936, a year before Japan launched attacks against greater China, and five years before bombing Pearl Harbor and attacking Hong Kong and Singapore, drawing the United States and its allies into war.
David Buck translates the style’s name as “Developing Asia,” but other authors, including Victor Zatespine, call it “Rising Asia” (p. 66).
“I have just heard that the League of Nations”
Powell, p. 189.