Restless Empire (35 page)

Many overseas Chinese, even those who have never set foot in China, hope one day to go to the country of their ancestors. Many Chinese who have gone abroad have returned to China and tried to settle there. Even though the relative numbers have been declining over the past two generations, there is reason to believe that China’s economic upturn will tempt more to go back. The problem is of course that it is not easy to return to a country you think you know but whose reality turns out to be very different from what you imagine. Although many returnees have become successful in China, quite a few have gone there full of optimism and patriotism, only to find that their country spurned their advances and, in some cases, made their and their families’ lives hell.

The generation that returned in the early twentieth century mostly did well in China, but toward the end of their lives they saw much of
what they achieved destroyed by war and revolution. The Guos and the Mas, the sojourners in Australia who came back to found Wing On and Sincere department stores, survived into the 1940s and died under Japanese occupation in Hong Kong. Their businesses on the mainland were confiscated by the Communist government. Rong Yiren, who inherited one of China’s largest textile companies with roots back to the late Qing era, saw his inheritance seized in the 1950s and became a target during the Cultural Revolution—he was beaten and forced to work for eight years as a janitor. In 1978 Deng rescued him and asked him to use his know-how to develop industry and corporations that would make China rich. Rong founded Citic as a state enterprise. His son Rong Zhijian is among the richest people in China.

But some returning Chinese did not bounce back from persecution. Zheng Nian, who married her husband when they both were students at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, went back to work for Shell in China and stayed on after the 1949 revolution. In the 1960s all they owned was confiscated, her daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, and Zheng herself was imprisoned and tortured for six years on the charge of being a British spy. When she tried to defend herself against the charge of having studied abroad by mentioning LSE’s Fabian socialist background, her jailers laughed in her face: “Lenin denounced the Fabian socialists as reformers,” one of them told her. “They were not true socialists because they did not advocate revolution by violence. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with us. . . . All the senior staff of foreign firms are spies.”
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The Western-trained architects who returned to help build new socialist Beijing also suffered in the Cultural Revolution. French-born Hua Lanhong (Leon Hoa), a modernist who had worked with Le Corbusier in the 1930s, went to a China he had never seen to become deputy head of the city planning bureau in Beijing in 1949. Hua oversaw much of the destruction of Ming-dynasty city in the 1950s. He was later purged as a promoter of Westernization, and spent twenty years
building outhouses for rural communes when he was not brought out to be publicly humiliated as a representative of “deviant architecture.” Hua was finally able to go back to France in 1977. Ironically, his daughter, the French architect Hua Xinmin, has now emerged as a key defender of what is left of old Beijing after the ravages of the plan her father helped implement in the 1950s.
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Some returnees were protected by the Communist Party even during the darkest years of the Cultural Revolution. Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s missile program, who had worked in the United States, and the German-trained nuclear physicist Wang Ganchang, who had also served as deputy director of the Soviet Bloc joint nuclear research institute at Dubna, were both spared public humiliation. Qian’s deputy, however, the brilliant German-trained engineer Zhao Jiuzhang, was hounded to commit suicide by the Red Guards in 1968. Even some of the Cultural Revolution activists themselves had foreign background. Brooklyn-born Tang Wensheng (Nancy Tang), a third-generation American, went to China with her parents in the 1950s and became Mao’s English-language interpreter. In the Foreign Ministry she became a leading Cultural Revolutionary. Together with Mao’s niece, Wang Hairong, she helped set the tone for China’s foreign policy in the early 1970s.

Today’s returnees are less exposed to disaster than their predecessors, though even now they know to keep their options open. Many have American green cards or other forms of permanent residence permits abroad. Even those who have never lived outside China like to have the foreign option. Zong Qinghou, the founder of the leading beverage company in China, Wahaha, and reputedly the richest man in the country, has a green card. But even though some who return from overseas are viewed with suspicion by their countrymen, this is based more on envy than on politics. The half million or so overseas students who have returned home during the past thirty years generally do very well, and some of them have become rich and famous in their home country. The
only field in which they are definitely underrepresented is in politics. The Communist party still distrusts those with foreign connections. China’s former president Jiang Zemin received his engineering training at the Stalin Automobile Works and former premier Li Peng studied hydroelectric engineering at the Moscow Power Institute, but today’s Harvard or Oxford MBAs rarely are let close to power in China.
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T
HE EIGHT-YEAR WAR
with Japan is the founding event of modern China’s international history. The country had not exactly been peaceful during the previous hundred years, but from 1937 to 1945, many Chinese felt that they were fighting an enemy intent on eliminating China from the map. From the 1830s to the 1930s, war against foreigners had been localized and sporadic, but in the resistance against Japanese occupation, war was everywhere. Peasants in the Shaanxi and Fujian countryside were affected by the war as much as city dwellers in Shanghai or Beijing. For the majority of Chinese, their first-ever encounter with a foreigner was in the form of a Japanese officer barking out orders in a language they could not understand. No wonder that China’s initiation into world politics was an unhappy one, and that it created myths and dogmas that have lasted up to today.

The war with Japan came at a point when the slow development of Chinese nationalism, begun in the late nineteenth century, had reached a peak. Although China’s government, under Chiang Kai-shek, would for strategic reasons have preferred to put off fighting Japan, Chinese public opinion gave it no choice but to fight back as soon as large-scale hostilities began. Forms of Chinese nationalism had been sharply on the rise since the mid-1920s, but it was the Japanese attack in Manchuria in 1931, and Tokyo’s subsequent transformation of the region into
a separate state under Japanese tutelage, Manzhouguo, that set Chinese hearts racing for a unified military response to Japan’s aggression.
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In this sense, many of Japan’s policies up to 1937—and indeed after the outbreak of war—were based on a misunderstanding: The Tokyo government feared Chinese nationalism but did not realize that it was its own actions that more than anything else fueled a new sense of self in China. From its very beginning, Chinese nationalism as state policy was aimed at resisting Japan.

In this second Sino-Japanese war, begun in 1937, two very different images of China came into conflict. One, held by most Japanese, came out of the nineteenth century and saw China as less a state than a geographic region with different power holders: Rival governments, local strongmen, and foreign representatives combined in different ways to keep some semblance of order, while advanced powers, such as Japan, promoted development within China. It was the advent of a nationalist central government, in the form of the Guomindang, with the stated purpose of resisting Japanese policies, that imperiled the image of a quiescent, pragmatic Chinese approach to international affairs. And this resistance came at a time when many Japanese felt that they and their country were under pressure from the Western great powers (including the Soviet Union) and from the global economic crisis, which the Western world had unleashed. The other image of China was one held by increasing numbers of young urban Chinese and their offshoots in the Chinese countryside and abroad: China was the state representing the Chinese nation. Its natural and legitimate borders were those of the Qing empire. Its enemies were foreign countries that would not recognize this China as an equal, and especially Japan, which seemed intent on carving out ever larger chunks of Chinese territory for itself. China, in their view, had to unify to fight Japan.

When war came, it had disastrous effects for China. Large numbers of soldiers and civilians died, and much of the country’s infrastructure
was destroyed. China lost at least two million men in battle, and twelve million Chinese civilians died as a direct result of warfare. Others died from starvation, destruction of dams and dikes, and disease and mistreatment in the Chinese army. Japan lost 400,000 men fighting in China (and 1,500,000 more in the other wars that the war in China started). Japan also lost 1.2 million civilians in World War II, including 300,000 in prisoner of war camps after the war, mostly in Manchuria and in the USSR. In addition, 400,000 Chinese were killed fighting together with the Japanese army in China or elsewhere in Asia.
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These are staggering figures. Their effects were to be felt in China and in Japan for two generations as a misery of loss, blame, and guilt.

Politically, China’s first big foreign war on its territory since the Manchu conquest in the 1630s and 1640s changed the landscape forever. The war broke the back of the GMD, which had represented Chinese nationalism for thirty years. The damage was in part due to the fighting itself, of course. But it was also because of the civilian challenges of war, which the state the GMD had set up was barely able to handle. The CCP had the chance first to survive and then to expand, sheltered by the war the GMD had to fight against Japan. And the war meant dislocation on a grand scale within the country, both socially and politically, with the power of traditional elites broken, the power of the state questioned, and millions of people displaced. War, as often, became a catalyst for modernity, but not necessarily the form of modernity that most people had wanted to see.

A
T THE BEGINNING OF THE
1930s Japan was an inherently unstable state. Its political system has been called “government by assassination.” Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was shot in 1931, and his successor Inukai Tsuyoshi a year later. Both were killed by young right-wingers who wanted a more autocratic regime at home and a more expansionist policy abroad. By 1936 right-wing terror had succeeded in totally immobilizing Japanese democracy. Part of the reason for this
sharp turn to the right was the Great Depression, which hit the Japanese economy severely, causing the first deep crisis in the country’s modern economy. Some politicians and intellectuals, and not least many officers, viewed the Depression as a deliberate attempt by the West to damage Japan’s economic rise. Japan had agreed to many Western proposals for arms limitations, tariffs, and international institutions in the 1920s. Now its rivals were attempting to make use of Japan’s self-imposed restrictions to sabotage its economy. Japan, the right believed, needed to throw off the political system it had taken over from the West, reorient itself toward “Asian values,” and expand its zone of control on its own continent.

The first step in this Japanese expansion was Manchuria. There, in September 1931, officers from Tokyo’s imperial army made use of the political chaos in Japan to attack Chinese forces at Shenyang and then move swiftly to occupy the rest of the region. Neither the Japanese government nor the high command of the army acted to stop this conquest by mutiny. Instead, Tokyo gradually gave way to the wishes of the radical officers in its army in China, the so-called Guandong Army. In the war that followed the Japanese attack, Chinese forces in Manchuria were quickly put on the defensive, and within five months Japan had taken control of most of China’s northeastern provinces. Unlike before, this time Tokyo did not give in to international pressure to withdraw. Instead, when the League of Nations defined its actions as aggression, Japan withdrew from the League in March 1933. Even before its break with the West, Japan had begun setting up a separate state in China’s northeastern provinces, which it called Manzhouguo—Land of the Manchus. Most of the former Chinese power holders were forced out, and a new administration fully beholden to Japan was put in place, led by the hapless Puyi, the last Qing emperor, who now became the Kangde emperor in what he considered his ancestral homeland. The Manzhouguo emperor’s role in the East Asian system that Japan was putting in place was clear: At one point Puyi performed an elaborate quasi-Japanese
ritual from which he emerged as the younger half-brother of Hirohito, the Japanese emperor.
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The construction of Manzhouguo contributed to several key international developments of the 1930s. It pushed Japan’s weak civilian governments toward accepting a new form of state organization dominated by the military and aimed at overseas expansion. It intensified Chinese nationalism and convinced a younger generation of Chinese that they had to aim for a unified and centralized state. And it destroyed all attempts at international cooperation in East Asia, making the new powers in the region, the United States and the Soviet Union, concentrate, each in its own way, on dealing with Japanese expansionism. In spite of Soviet unwillingness to stand up to Tokyo and US inability to do so without the backing of the European powers, it did not, by the mid-1930s, take prophetic gifts to understand that East Asia was heading for war. What held the shaping of an international coalition against Japan back was the focus that all main powers had on the situation in Europe and the rise of Nazi Germany. And Japan was watching closely what Germany was doing on its continent: creating hegemonic forms of integration that could help it resist great power attempts at keeping it down.