China's international wartime capital

Chongqing is a major metropolis with some 30 million inhabitants in China's fast-developing west. As one of China's five national central cities and four direct-controlled municipalities, the only one situated inland, this sprawling megalopolis on the upper reaches of the Yangtze has since 1997 enjoyed the same privileged status as its well-known counterparts on the eastern seaboard including Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. With its economy continually topping national growth charts in recent years, this inland boomtown—dubbed the fastest-growing city on the planet—is set to become western China's leading international hub and a major node along Beijing's envisaged ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’.

With gleaming towers of glass and steel today defining the central peninsula's ultra-modern skyline, it is difficult to picture the city's primitive appearance in late 1937 when China's Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek designated this remote treaty port as China's temporary government seat. Known then as one of the country's poorest and dirtiest cities, ‘Chungking’—as the city was called according to the Postal Map Romanization system—features in historical first-hand accounts as a gloomy collection of dilapidated grey buildings and shacks, crumbled walls, broken streets, and open sewers, hardly worthy of being called a city, and much less a national capital. The intense chaos, poverty, and filth in the overcrowded streets appalled all newcomers to town. Upon arrival ‘at the end of the line’ in China's last upriver treaty port, ‘downriver’ folks—Chinese refugees from central and eastern regions—and foreign visitors alike were invariably shocked by the city's dreadful appearance, which contrasted so strikingly with China's modern coastal cities then under Japanese occupation. A local manager of an American oil company, who moved from Qingdao to Chongqing in March 1938, gave the following description of China's wartime capital in his diary:

This description is typical of numerous similar accounts of wartime Chongqing handed down by the many new arrivals from China's coastal regions during the early war years.Footnote ² Visiting the capital around this same time, the American journalist Edgar Snow, who had recently gained fame with Red Star over China, his best-selling book about China's Communist Party, in his next work introduced Chongqing as ‘a place of moist heat, dirt, and wide confusion, one of the most backward holes on earth’.Footnote ³ The Beijing-based American military attaché (and future four-star general) Joseph Stilwell, during a visit that same year, found Chongqing a ‘sloppy dump’, while New Zealander Rewi Alley cynically referred to the Nationalist capital as ‘the city of rats of all kinds’.Footnote ⁴ Stalin's future star general, Vasilii I. Chuikov, with substantial prior experience in China too, was likewise shocked by the scores of ‘rodents scurrying past your feet’ in wartime Chongqing, observing that ‘dogs and cats meant nothing to them’.Footnote ⁵

Yet, for all its backwardness—a theme that dominates both contemporary accounts and the scant recent studies about wartime Chongqing—the city was to take up a pivotal role during China's War of Resistance against Japan. As the country's temporary national capital, Chongqing for nearly a decade formed the nation's political, military, diplomatic, and cultural nucleus, and between 1942 and 1945 served as regional command centre of the Allied powers united in a global struggle against the Axis. Following the ‘apocalyptic’ spring of 1942, when regional linchpins Hong Kong, Singapore, Batavia, Rangoon, and Manila one by one fell into Japanese hands, the city of Chongqing gained universal fame as the last free capital in the Far East and a ‘lone beacon of freedom and democracy’ in Asia. All of a sudden, as the American information officer Graham Peck noted in his compelling 1950 work, Two Kinds of Time, ‘all desirable roads in the continental Orient led to Chungking, for the lucky few who could find them’.Footnote ⁶ Thus, ‘Chungking’ took on its role as a major international centre and—along with London, Moscow, and Washington—became one of the four great wartime capitals.

While foreign advisers, diplomats, military officers, reporters, intellectuals, and special agents gathered in China's bomb-torn capital between 1938 and 1946 to engage in wartime duty, a series of groundbreaking events unfolded, opening up a brand new page in China's modern history and reshaping its relations with the rest of the world. During this momentous episode, lasting only eight years, the major Western powers surrendered their long-held extraterritorial privileges in China, ending a century of ‘national humiliation’ of the Chinese people and marking the dawn of modern diplomacy in China. By late 1945, China had emerged from the long war a victor, had recovered several territories previously lost (Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Taiwan), and had assumed its new role as major actor on the world stage exclusively represented as a permanent member of the new United Nations Security Council. In short, during this brief but epochal period, China transformed from a dismembered and besieged de facto colon to a first-rate global power with a firm seat at the top table.

When viewed from an international political perspective, it was ‘backward’ Chongqing—rather than any of China's historical capitals or other wartime centres—that became the first fully fledged, modern capital of a reawakened China. For, despite Sun Yat-sen's national revolution, the imperial capital of Beijing still remained the home of the Legation Quarter—a foreign enclave fortified, policed, and defended by foreign troops, rejecting all Chinese authority. Even when, in 1927, the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek established Nanjing as the new capital of the Republic of China, the former imperial capital—then renamed Beiping—was unable to rid herself from this humiliating symbol of foreign domination in the very heart of the ancient city. Moreover, though the Nationalist government succeeded in swiftly securing international recognition, the foreign diplomatic missions in China effectively disregarded the new capital throughout most of the ‘Nanjing Decade’ by remaining within the privileged comfort of their enclaves in Beijing and Shanghai and posting only low-ranking diplomats in Nanjing. Although this began to change in 1938 in Wuhan, where several countries posted senior diplomatic representatives, it was not until the final relocation to Chongqing later that year that this anomalous practice situation completely ended. The major diplomatic missions soon joined the Nationalist government at its inland provisional seat, while, in due course, notably after Pearl Harbour, the other missions followed suit. In all, between 1938 and 1946, some 20-odd diplomatic missions set up their headquarters in Chongqing. During this period, the majority of the foreign legations were upgraded to embassies, reflecting the highest level of modern diplomatic representation, and the old system of extraterritoriality was discarded. All this marked the beginning of a new era of China's dealings with the outside world, which henceforth were to be based on equality and reciprocity. Meanwhile, amid these radically changing international tides, the Chinese Communists made their debut on the global diplomatic scene, realizing several major breakthroughs and laying the groundwork for China's future foreign ministry. As these milestone events transpired first and foremost in the temporary capital of Chongqing, the city can be viewed, in retrospect, as a principal cradle of China's modern diplomacy.

To those foreign expatriates who, during these eight eventful years, sojourned in China's wartime capital, it would have been difficult to believe that today, seven decades later, little has remained in the Western collective memory of Chongqing's erstwhile fame and legendary wartime spirit. In her 1944 book, China to Me, the American journalist and writer, Emily Hahn—like Graham Peck a resident of wartime Chongqing—wondered how many books of memoirs would be written about ‘the Chungking of those days’, considering that ‘almost everyone who has ever published an article gets himself sent into Szechuan [Sichuan province] sooner or later’.Footnote ⁷ While many such memoirs have indeed appeared over time, this has not prevented Chongqing's one-time glory as a leading international capital from virtually slipping into oblivion.Footnote ⁸ To date, there are very few English-language scholarly studies to recount Chongqing's unique wartime story.Footnote ⁹ Apart from generic, loosely defined references to the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, not even a custom phrase exists, comparable to that of the ‘Nanjing Decade’ preceding it, by which historians refer to this particularly significant episode in China's modern history. This article is an attempt to redress this deficit and to reappraise wartime Chongqing's unique historical legacy.

Wartime urbanization and internationalization

Perched on high cliffs at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing Rivers, the ancient city of Chongqing is surrounded by water on three sides and shrouded in dense fog for almost half of the year. These natural qualities combined with the city's geographical situation beyond impregnable mountain ranges and steep gorges that separate China's seaboard from the western hinterland made Chongqing fit in perfectly with the ‘trading space for time’ strategy that the Chinese leadership was compelled to adopt after the disastrous ending of the Battle of Shanghai in October 1937.Footnote ¹⁰ From a military point of view, Chongqing was virtually inaccessible from any direction.Footnote ¹¹ As early as 1935, when Chongqing had briefly served as strategic base against the marching Communists, Chiang Kai-shek had already identified resource-rich Sichuan province as the ultimate, natural stronghold in China's struggle for ‘national revival’.Footnote ¹² At a meeting of the Supreme National Defence Council on 29 October 1937, as Japanese forces occupied Shanghai and prepared for their subsequent advance to Nanjing, Chiang first proposed to shift the government's seat inland to Chongqing. The proposal was formally adopted on 15 November. When, five days later, the decision to move the capital to Chongqing (‘qian du chongqing’) was publicly announced, President Lin Sen, Chairman of the Nationalist government, was already on his way there, arriving in the ‘Mountain City’ on 26 November. On 1 December 1938, the first echelon of government staff officially resumed their work in the new capital.Footnote ¹³

Several key government functions, however, initially moved to the tri-city of Wuhan, roughly halfway between Shanghai and Chongqing, where Chiang Kai-shek had set up his temporary headquarters once Nanjing's fall became imminent. Serving as de facto capital throughout the first ten months of 1938, Wuhan became the vibrant centre of the Second United Front—the fragile alliance between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists formed in September 1937 to jointly resist Japanese aggression—and a powerful international symbol of China's single-handed resistance against a superior invader.Footnote ¹⁴ But this elated atmosphere did not last long. In the summer of 1938, Wuhan's defence was broken. The remaining government offices were shifted further inland to Chongqing. Here, building on the ‘Wuhan spirit’ of unity and hope, China entered into the final and most redefining stage of the war.

In the early 1930s, Chongqing's main urban area had been home to around 260,000 people.Footnote ¹⁵ With the transfer of the national government's seat to Chongqing and the massive influx of government officials, merchants, industrialists, factory workers, literati, students, and other ‘downriver’ refugees from late 1937 onward, the city's population figure soon doubled. As Chongqing, in 1939, became a special municipality under the direct control of the central government, and subsequently an auxiliary capital, its municipal limits were extended to cover an area three times larger than before.Footnote ¹⁶ By late 1942, following the outbreak of the Pacific War, the old city walls had largely made way for new roads and buildings, while the city's registered population reached the one-million mark.Footnote ¹⁷

In step with the general population growth, Chongqing's foreign community also witnessed unprecedented expansion during these early war years. On the eve of the war, Chongqing's rather insignificant expat community had totalled little over 100, mainly comprising consular officers,Footnote ¹⁸ naval officers,Footnote ¹⁹ local branch managers of commercial firms,Footnote ²⁰ and missionaries,Footnote ²¹ thus reflecting the usual blend of foreigners traditionally found in China's smaller treaty ports. With the onset of war, as shipping on the Yangtze gradually ceased, most of these treaty porters took their leave, except for a small number who chose to join their country's diplomatic, military, or intelligence missions in China. In the subsequent course of events, these few remaining foreign residents were suddenly joined by large groups of fellow expatriates, including government advisers, diplomats, military officers, reporters, and others engaged in wartime duty in China's new capital. Thus, Chongqing's foreign community not only experienced substantial growth during these years, but also saw a definite shift from a typical treaty-port composition to a more diverse and cosmopolitan mix. In several ways, the Chongqing episode signified the end of the treaty-port system as it had existed in China for nearly a century. As foreign business men and gunboat officers quietly left the stage, the old warehouses and naval barracks in Chongqing were turned into embassy offices and the like.

The enormous influx of foreigners in China's war capital can be broken down into three stages, which jointly defined Chongqing's unique wartime image and, to a significant extent, China's changing international standing. The first surge in Chongqing's foreign establishment occurred in 1938, when the central-government institutions began to shift inland, and the first batch of foreign diplomats, advisers, and war correspondents followed suit. During this early stage, when China was resisting the invader single-handedly, the ‘City Built on Rock’ came to symbolize the ‘indomitable spirit’ and unwavering will of a nation heroically at war against massive odds, much like the preceding period had defined Wuhan. According to monthly statistics of the Chongqing Police Bureau for the year 1940, the number of registered foreign nationals during that year varied between 309 and 448, with an average of 384. The six largest expatriate groups, jointly accounting for approximately 92 per cent of Chongqing's total foreign population, included the British, the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and the Koreans, who, under Syngman Rhee, had set up an exile government in China. Approximately 69 per cent of Chongqing's foreign population was male; women accounted for the remaining 31 per cent.Footnote ²²

The next high tide of foreign arrivals in Chongqing came in late 1941 and early 1942, when the threat and subsequent onset of the Pacific War made Western powers reach out to China with renewed interest. This second stage, characterized by heightened optimism and mutual goodwill, saw a substantial increase of Chongqing's foreign population. During the first ten months of 1942 alone, in the direct aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbour, the number of registered foreign residents in Chongqing approximately doubled, rising from 538 in January to 1,008 in October that year. Some 27 nationalities were represented in China's war capital by late 1942. By now, there were five major nationalities that jointly accounted for 90 per cent of the city's foreign population: the Koreans (264); the British (255; including Australians and Canadians); the Americans (207); the Russians (122); and the French (71). As a result of the war, only 13 German nationals were still registered in Chongqing in October 1942. Women accounted for 30 per cent of the expatriate population.Footnote ²³

The sudden boost to China's external relations resulting from the common wartime cause was short-lived. As China's new Allies embraced the ‘Europe first’ strategy, the Far Eastern theatre became a backwater of the global war, and the initial optimism and hopes were soon replaced by mutual feelings of deception and cynicism. These negative sentiments continued to mark the third and final stage in Chongqing, lasting from 1943 to 1946, when China's faltering war effort made way for renewed domestic strife. Yet, it was during these final stages that the Mountain City, capitalizing on its previously attained standing, witnessed the largest inflow of foreign residents.

By mid-1944, the official number of registered foreign residents in Chongqing approached 1,500. The same five nationalities still accounted for the greater majority of the city's expatriate population, although their order and relative shares had changed. In August 1944, the top five was constituted as follows: Americans (443); Koreans (420); British (279—by now excluding Australians (6) and Canadians (5)); Soviet Russians (179); and French (30).Footnote ²⁴ In reality, however, Chongqing's foreign population was much larger than the above figures suggest. When including all transient and non-registered foreign nationals, the number of expatriates in the war capital seems to have run well into the thousands.Footnote ²⁵

Chongqing's ongoing urbanization and internationalization added a novel, cosmopolitan touch to the city's appearance. English shop signs gradually became a normal sight in the war capital, giving rise to foreign media reports on attempts ‘bordering on the ludicrous’ by venturesome Chongqing shopkeepers to lure foreign customers.Footnote ²⁶ British influence, which had traditionally dominated China's foreign establishment, gradually diminished as Americans became the largest expatriate group in Chongqing. A practical yet telling manifestation of growing American influence in China was a traffic-rule change that took effect on New Year's Day of 1946: from that day onwards, traffic ran to the right of the road, and no longer to the left.Footnote ²⁷

On 1 May 1946, amid growing domestic tensions and ill-fated American mediation attempts, the Nationalist government moved its official seat back to primary capital Nanjing. The resulting exodus of foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations marked the end of an eight-year chapter of international prominence unprecedented in Chongqing's history. In the autumn of 1949, during the final tremors of China's civil war, the city again briefly served as the provisional seat of the Nationalist government-on-the-move until Chiang Kai-shek's ultimate retreat from the mainland in December 1949. For the city of Chongqing, decades of relative obscurity followed, lasting until 1997, when the inland metropolis regained its privileged province-level status and set out on its current path of development.

The foreign diplomatic body

As the principal agents of interstate dealings, foreign diplomats were among the first expatriates to arrive in wartime Chongqing in 1938 and among the last to leave when the capital was shifted back to Nanjing eight years later. The gradual expansion of diplomatic presence in Chongqing roughly reflected the three-stage immigration pattern mentioned above. By 1940, about 30 diplomats representing nine countries were permanently stationed in Chongqing. Some three years later, following the collapse of the Allied resistance in South East Asia, the number of foreign diplomats in China's war capital had nearly quadrupled, totalling some 100–120. After the war, in late 1945, the total number of foreign diplomats in the city reached 170–180.Footnote ²⁸

The first diplomats to arrive in Chongqing were those newly appointed senior envoys who presented their credentials to the Chinese head of state during the first half of 1938. At the time, the foreign diplomatic missions were still exclusively based in the major cities on China's eastern seaboard, although a number of countries had posted representatives in the de facto capital Wuhan.Footnote ²⁹ The first foreign envoy to call at Chongqing was the new Soviet ambassador to China, Ivan Louganetz-Orelsky, who flew from Wuhan to Chongqing on 19 January 1938 and presented his credentials to President Lin Sen four days later. This precedent was followed in April by his British colleague, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. After brief stays in the war capital, both diplomats returned to Wuhan.

When, in late July 1938, China's Foreign Minister, Wang Chonghui, moved his offices to Chongqing, the small diplomatic corps at Wuhan followed suit. On 10 August 1938, the American ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, together with several members of his staff, disembarked at Chongqing's South Bank after a hazardous 800-mile upriver trip aboard the Yangtze patrol flagship USS Luzon and the smaller gunboat USS Tutuila. Five days later, the French steamer Fook Yuen, carrying among its numerous passengers a handful of Dutch, French, German, and Italian diplomats, arrived at Chongqing's ancient docks of Chaotianmen. Around the time of Wuhan's capture by the Japanese in October 1938, they were joined by a Belgian colleague and by the British and Soviet Russian ambassadors.Footnote ³⁰

The newly arrived diplomats spread out quickly over the overpopulated wartime capital securing provisional housing and office space wherever possible. Those whose governments maintained consulates in Chongqing temporarily moved in with their consular colleagues, while others found provisional lodgings in residences of fellow countrymen or in the few hostels around town. The Soviet embassy set up its offices in an imposing castle-like structure overlooking the Yangtze from the highest point on the Chongqing peninsula, while the Americans secured several old treaty-port houses situated on the South Bank. At a tea party at the newly established Chungking International Club, the new diplomats in town were welcomed by senior Chinese cabinet members and high-ranking municipal officials.Footnote ³¹

In early 1938, Chongqing witnessed its first air raid. The following year, Japanese forces launched a massive, protracted campaign of terror bombings over the capital, known in China as the ‘Great Bombing of Chongqing’ (Chongqing da hongzha). For a while, Chongqing became the most bombed city on Earth.Footnote ³² The foreign diplomatic missions in Chongqing all suffered considerable damage in the course of these devastating attacks (even though the diplomats would suffer far less than would the local populace). During the particularly brutal raids of 3–4 May 1939, when half the city was reduced to rubble, the British embassy compound suffered a direct hit, injuring a British staff member and killing several Chinese citizens who had sought refuge on the tennis court. The nearby French consulate was also damaged, and even the adjoining German embassy despite the huge Swastika emblem sported on its rooftop was in flames. Whereas the German diplomats had timely secured protection in their tailor-made one-man dugouts, scores of unfortunate Chongqing citizens were scorched to death when they got trapped in a fire between the embassy compound and the ancient city wall against which it was built. In another raid, the Soviet embassy was hit, but its inhabitants had found safety in the embassy air-raid shelter, the most luxurious in town, completely equipped with working spaces, telephones, radio, a bathroom, bedrooms, a kitchen, a bar, and air-conditioning.Footnote ³³ During a July 1939 raid, the American embassy counsellor and his wife narrowly escaped injury by taking shelter under a veranda when a bomb smashed the windows of their house on the South Bank. During these same raids, the British gunboat HMS Falcon was shaken up heavily by bombs that also damaged the British Navy Club on the nearby shore. The Belgian and British embassies suffered severe damage the next month from demolition bombs and incendiary missiles.Footnote ³⁴

Despite the widespread destruction caused in Chongqing's diplomatic quarters by the terror raids of 1939, it took an even more devastating round of attacks before the more centrally located diplomatic missions evacuated to safer grounds outside the city proper. In the spring of 1940, after the foggy season had lapsed, Japanese forces resumed their aerial attacks on Chongqing with renewed appetite. That summer, as ‘Operation 101’ reached its destructive climax, Japanese bombers appeared in Chongqing's skies virtually every day, dropping more than 10,000 bombs over the city. These intense carpet-style raids coincided with the introduction of the ‘Molotov Bread Basket’, a new incendiary bomb that, after exploding, propelled flaming small bombs over a wide area.Footnote ³⁵ During these attacks on China's wartime capital, two-thirds of the city centre was bombed out, and several foreign diplomatic missions were damaged or levelled to the ground.Footnote ³⁶ With few other options left, the embassies one by one evacuated to the so-called Safety Zone on the South Bank, where they would stay during the summer months until the bombings came to a complete stop in 1944.

The final rupture between Allied and Axis Powers in 1941 and the onset of the Pacific War gave rise to several major mutations in Chongqing's foreign diplomatic corps. On 2 July 1941, the German and Italian embassies in Chongqing were closed when China severed diplomatic ties with both countries. Sino-Danish relations suffered the same fate in August when German-occupied Denmark recognized the puppet regimes at Nanjing and Manchuria. Around this same time, Australia, Canada, India, and Mexico established new diplomatic missions in Chongqing, while many of the older embassies and legations were expanded.Footnote ³⁷ In the ensuing years, several other Allied and co-belligerent states exchanged diplomatic envoys with China, bringing the total number of foreign missions in Chongqing by early 1946 to 22. Simultaneously, many of the foreign legations were upgraded to the level of embassy.Footnote ³⁸

A major historic task shouldered by the reinforced diplomatic body in Chongqing during the final stages of the war was the negotiation, conclusion, and implementation of new bilateral treaties between their respective governments and the Chinese government, ending a near-100-year practice of extraterritoriality in China under the system of the ‘unequal treaties’. Between 1943 and 1946, the Nationalist government saw its persistent efforts to such end finally rewarded with the surrender by several Western powers of their longstanding special rights and privileges in China.Footnote ³⁹ The first to relinquish extraterritoriality in China were the Americans and the British, who jointly announced their historic decisions on 10 October 1942, the national holiday of the Chinese Republic. Several other Western allies, caught off-guard by this unexpected American-British goodwill move, hastened to make similar announcements.Footnote ⁴⁰ The practical consequences of these steps, however, were limited, since all foreign-controlled territories in China had come under Japanese occupation and most foreigners in wartime China continued to be exempt from Chinese laws due to their official or military status. Still, the event was hailed by Chiang Kai-shek as marking a ‘new epoch’ in Chinese history, which placed ‘an independent China’ on equal footing with Britain and the United States. Some 30,000 people gathered at the public square in Chongqing to celebrate the news.Footnote ⁴¹

The new Sino-American treaty was concluded in Washington on 11 January 1943. That same day in Chongqing, the new Sino-British treaty was signed.Footnote ⁴² Both treaties came into effect on 20 May 1943, the day of the exchange of treaty ratifications in Washington and Chongqing, respectively. To mark the historic event, the Nationalist government proclaimed 11 January as ‘Justice Day’. The traditional lunar New Year, which had been abolished as a public holiday, was converted into a special three-day celebration in honour of the new treaties.Footnote ⁴³

Several other Western powers followed the American-British example during the final years of the war. By the time the foreign diplomatic body, in the footsteps of the Nationalist government, left Chongqing for Nanjing, a total of 11 countries had formally relinquished extraterritorial rights in China.Footnote ⁴⁴

Special envoys and personal diplomacy

The year 1941 saw a substantial rise in the number of special foreign emissaries being sent to China's war capital on all sorts of political, economic, and military fact-finding missions and ad hoc assignments. Early that year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dispatched one of his closest aides, the Harvard-trained economist, Lauchlin Currie, to Chongqing as his personal representative to investigate China's economic and financial situation and explore possible terms for American aid. Upon Currie's recommendation, the American sinologist, Owen Lattimore, was subsequently posted in Chongqing to serve as Chiang Kai-shek's personal political adviser and special liaison with the White House. October 1941 saw the arrival in Chongqing of an American-British joint economic mission to investigate possibilities of economic assistance and other means to strengthen China's war effort. A year later, the American former presidential candidate, Wendell L. Willkie, called at Chongqing during the final lap of his ‘One World’ international goodwill trip. Visiting China's wartime capital as Roosevelt's personal emissary, Willkie was hailed as the highest-ranking American envoy to visit China since President Ulysses S. Grant in 1879.Footnote ⁴⁵

The final stages of the war saw a continued trend of Allied leaders dispatching special envoys to China. Late in 1943, following the Cairo Summit, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart to Chongqing as his personal representative. This charismatic, one-eyed, one-handed First World War veteran of Belgian-Irish descent was to serve in Chongqing for three years as London's special military representative and as personal liaison between Chiang and Churchill. But, when it came to personal diplomacy, no state leader surpassed the American president, who seemed to make a habit of bypassing his ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, a career diplomat and ‘China hand’ with 30 years’ experience in the country. In May 1944, Roosevelt sent Vice President (and concurrently Chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare) Henry A. Wallace to China. During his four-day sojourn in Chongqing, Wallace persuaded Chiang Kai-shek to accept the establishment of a United States of America military observation mission at the Chinese Communists’ headquarters in Yan'an. Among Roosevelt's many personal emissaries during the final stages of the war was also Patrick J. Hurley, the flamboyant Oklahoman general who, following the Stilwell crisis, succeeded Gauss as the American ambassador in China. Hurley would resign again within a year, charging forces within the State Department (and the embassy in Chongqing) of supporting the Chinese Communists and obstructing his attempts to mediate a Kuomintang (KMT)–Communist Party of China (CCP) deal. Following Hurley's resignation, President Truman sent George C. Marshall, former Army Chief of Staff, to China as special envoy with the rank of ambassador to resume Hurley's unsuccessful mission of bringing truce and a united government to China. Arriving in Chongqing in December 1945, Marshall moved with the Nationalist government several months later to the primary capital Nanjing, where his mission too would end in failure.Footnote ⁴⁶

Foreign military missions

Another factor contributing to the rapid expansion of Chongqing's foreign community was the surge of Allied military missions in unoccupied China. Shortly before Chiang moved his military headquarters to Chongqing, the German advisers who had helped to modernize China's national army and had provided crucial strategic support in early battles against the Japanese were recalled from China. After repeated orders by the Nazi government, backed by threats of deprivation of their German citizenship and confiscation of their personal assets, the German military delegation to China, headed by Chiang's top military adviser, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, reluctantly left Wuhan in July 1938.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the German advisers were going home, a 27-headed delegation of Soviet military experts arrived in China to take their place. Even earlier, Moscow had sent large amounts of weapons to China and set up a nominally volunteer Russian air force to aid China's defence under the secret ‘Operation Zet’. This time, several high-ranking Red Army officers were sent in to serve as chief military advisers directly under the Chinese supreme command. The first such adviser, operating in the guise of military attaché at the Soviet embassy, was General Michael I. Dratwin. His successors included General Alexander I. Cherepanov, serving in China from August 1938 to August 1939; General Kuzma M. Kachanov, from September 1939 to February 1941; and, last but not least, Stalin's future star general, the Chinese-speaking Vasilii I. Chuikov, who served in Chongqing as Chiang's top military adviser from February 1941 to February 1942.Footnote ⁴⁸ At the same time, the Russians established a military mission under their Chongqing embassy, headed successively by Kombrig N. P. Ivanov, General Major Pavel S. Rybalko, Chuikov, and Colonel (later General) Nikolai V. Roschin, who would later serve as Moscow's last ambassador to Nationalist China and first ambassador to the People's Republic following its proclamation in October 1949.Footnote ⁴⁹

Several other Western powers established a military representation in Chongqing prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War. Accompanying their respective embassies and gunboats inland, the first such foreign military representatives arrived in Chongqing in 1938. Among these early pioneers were several old army China hands who would play important roles in China affairs throughout the war. One of them was the American military attaché, Major (later Colonel) David D. Barrett, who later became the first commander of the United States of America Army Observation Group in Yan'an, better known as the ‘Dixie Mission’. Serving as assistant naval attaché at the American embassy during these early stages was Major James M. McHugh, a former marine intelligence officer who had spent 15 years in China and maintained close ties with the Chiangs. The British embassy meanwhile reinforced its Chongqing staff with an air attaché, Wing Commander James Warburton, and an assistant military attaché, Major K. E. F. Millar. Serving as the French military and air attachés in Chongqing were Colonel Louis Yvon and Commandant Thibaud de la Ferté Sénèctere, respectively.Footnote ⁵⁰

Early in 1941, Britain stepped up its military representation in Chongqing through the appointment of Major General Lancelot E. Dennys as military attaché. His principal, top-secret task, prior to direct British participation in the war, was to set up a special operations project by the name of ‘Detachment 204’, which involved the training of Chinese guerrilla squads by British and Australian commandos. Before this could materialize, however, in March 1942, Dennys was killed in a plane crash near Kunming, one day after Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Burma, flew in for a visit to the Chinese war capital. Subsequent British military attachés in China, joined by their counterparts from the British Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, included Major General J. C. Bruce, Major General Gordon E. Grimsdale, and Brigadier General Leonard F. Field.Footnote ⁵¹

In late 1941, the Americans established a new military mission in Chongqing, code-named AMMISCA and headed by Brigadier General John Magruder, an Army ‘China hand’ who had served as (assistant) military attaché in China throughout most of the 1920s. As Washington's last-ditch diplomatic efforts to reach a modus vivendi with Tokyo were still underway, the mission's main objective was to prepare possible allied cooperation and plan Lend-Lease matters in China. Around this same time, Claire L. Chennault, a retired United States Army Air Corps captain retained by the Chinese Air Force in early 1937, set up his headquarters at Kunming to prepare his American Volunteer Group for future aerial combat. The legend of the ‘Flying Tigers’, as they would soon become known, was born in December 1941 when Chennault's fighters, in their first clash with Japanese warplanes, took down four enemy planes in the Yunnan skies, without a loss to themselves.Footnote ⁵²

Early in 1942, following the outbreak of the Pacific War, General Joseph W. Stilwell was named Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek, who was now the nominal supreme commander of Allied forces in the China theatre. Succeeding Chuikov as Chiang's top foreign adviser, Stilwell arrived in Chongqing in March 1942, where as theatre commander he also took charge of the American military mission (and control over Lend-Lease help). Following Stilwell's dramatic dismissal in October 1944, General Albert C. Wedemeyer was reassigned to Chongqing to assume command of the China war theatre. Throughout the remainder of the war and the period immediately thereafter, the Americans would continue to have the largest foreign military presence in Chongqing. In late 1945, about half of the 40 accredited staff members of the American embassy were enlisted by one of the armed forces.Footnote ⁵³

The French military representation in Chongqing also witnessed significant changes due to the wartime course of events. Before China broke off diplomatic ties with Vichy France in August 1943, the ‘Fighting French Forces’ had already established an unofficial military mission in Chongqing. When, on 28 August 1943, the Chinese government recognized the French Committee of National Liberation, the French appointed Major General Zinovi Pechkov as their new chief representative in Chongqing, a Russian-born general who had worked as a secretary to the exiled writer Maxim Gorky before volunteering for the French army in the First World War. Arriving in China's war capital in March 1944, the one-armed veteran presented his credentials to Chiang Kai-shek on 1 May. Several months later, when China recognized De Gaulle's provisional government, Pechkov was nominated French ambassador to China. On 9 January 1945, Pechkov presented his letters of credence again, this time as his country's senior diplomatic envoy, using the occasion to decorate Chiang with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Soon afterwards, the French mission in Chongqing was joined by new military and air attachés.Footnote ⁵⁴

In March 1942, in a symbolic move signifying a definite farewell to their erstwhile ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in China, the Americans and British formally handed over their Yangtze warships in Chongqing to their new oriental ally. The ships, which, aside from offering transport and protection, had handled radio communications for the embassies, were now incorporated into the Chinese fleet. At this historic occasion, the USS Tutuila was renamed the Meiyuan, with a dual meaning of ‘American origin’ and ‘beautiful origin’, while the British gunboats HMS Falcon, HMS Gannet, and HMS Sandpiper were incorporated in the Chinese navy respectively as Yingde, Yingshan, and Yinghao, containing similar honorific references to their foreign roots.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the autumn of 1944, in a goodwill gesture modelled on the American-British precedent, the French mission in Chongqing presented their Yangtze gunboat Le Balny to the Chinese authorities. The ship had served on the Yangtze for years until it had been decommissioned and immobilized with the outbreak of the war in Europe. Unmanned and neglected after a mutiny and switch-over of the Vichy crew to the side of the ‘Fighting French’, the Balny had become a curious sight on the shores of the South Bank. Despite its suboptimal state, the Chinese renamed the former warship Faku, or ‘French Treasury’, before scrapping it soon thereafter.Footnote ⁵⁶

These four major foreign powers (the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Britain and France) had an important say in wartime Allied operations and post-war planning—a privilege later reflected by their exclusive nomination as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In addition to these four, several other countries aligned or allied with China also set up military missions or assigned military representatives to their wartime embassies in Chongqing, including such co-signatories of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations as Canada, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, and Mexico, and last-minute joiner of the Allied coalition, Argentina.Footnote ⁵⁷ After war's end and the subsequent relocation to Nanjing, most of these military missions were terminated.Footnote ⁵⁸

Foreign spies and intelligence outfits

Those countries with major colonial and trade interests in the Asia Pacific region—notably Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States of America—all maintained intelligence functions in wartime China. Since their respective interests in Asia traditionally diverged and often conflicted, their dealings in China were never free of antagonism. This deeply rooted mutual mistrust directly affected their national foreign policies, for intelligence field operations tended to precede or even dictate official policy, rather than the other way around. Shortly after his arrival in Chongqing in late 1944, General Wedemeyer noted that the tendency of foreign agencies in China to operate ‘independently and uncoordinated, running at cross purposes’ constituted a major weakness in the Allied war effort in China.Footnote ⁵⁹

Right from the earliest stages of the war, foreign spies had appeared in China's wartime capital to engage in secret operations on behalf of their undisclosed sponsors. One such remarkable lone spy, operating within the inner sanctum of China's supreme power, was Captain Walther Stennes, a former Brown Shirt leader from Berlin heading the Generalissimo's 3,000-strong elite bodyguard in Chongqing. The tall, blond German was actually a KGB agent, spying on German and Japanese military plans for the Russian secret service.Footnote ⁶⁰ It has been suggested that it was Stennes who briefed Chiang Kai-shek on Hitler's secret preparations for Operation Barbarossa, German's sudden attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Presumably, Stennes had obtained the vital intelligence during a meeting in Chongqing with Richard Sorge, a compatriot and fellow KGB agent who operated under the guise of correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung in Tokyo and maintained close ties with the German ambassador there.Footnote ⁶¹ Around the same time, the Chinese Communist master spy, Yan Baohang, operating under cover in the highest echelons of the Kuomintang leadership, also learned of the impending German attack. Yan at once notified Zhou Enlai, the highest-ranking Communist Party of China intelligence officer in the wartime capital. On 16 June, details of the planned attack were forwarded to Communist Party of China headquarters in Yan'an, and from there onto Moscow, where Stalin dismissed them as fabrications meant to tarnish the German–Soviet bond. When, six days later, the Chinese intel proved to be accurate, Marshal Voroshilov expressed his appreciation in a telegram to General Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Red Army. Sometime later, following another remarkable espionage feat by the Communist top spy, Stalin sent a personal message through his military attaché in Chongqing to thank Yan Baohang for his excellent work.Footnote ⁶²

Another spy in Chongqing's early international community, and one of the few foreign agents known to have worked in Chinese wartime service, was an American cryptologist named Herbert Osborn Yardley. In 1931, Yardley published a book about the successful code-breaking operations under his direction of the American ‘Black Chamber’, which had included intercepting and decoding of top-secret Japanese diplomatic communications during the Paris Conference and Washington Naval Conference after the First World War. The book caught the attention of China's military attaché in Washington, who had it translated into Chinese and forwarded to General Dai Li, the notorious head of the Chinese military secret police (juntong). In 1938, Dai Li invited Yardley to set up and oversee a large-scale code-cracking project in Chongqing. Arriving in the war capital in the autumn of that year, Yardley served under the Generalissimo's ‘Number One Hatchet Man’, as he privately called his new sponsor, until July 1940. Posing as a merchant of leather and hides, Yardley was a familiar face in the international crowd of the Chungking Hostel, where, in his own words, ‘sooner or later one sees everyone worth knowing—foreign advisers, correspondents, businessmen, diplomats, as well as spies, crooks, whores, and expatriates’. Yardley's presence caused deep divisions among the regular crowd of the hostel, as those who enjoyed the company of this ‘amusing, delightful man of broad humor and unrestrained enthusiasms’ found themselves in disagreement with others less charmed by this ‘American with a loud manner of talking’ whose major enthusiasms came down to ‘drink, gambling and women’.Footnote ⁶³

Another spy worth mentioning in this context, though technically not a foreigner anymore was a military officer by the name of Willem van Lennep. A Dutch national upon his arrival in China in 1932, Van Lennep acquired Chinese citizenship soon after completing his military training at the prestigious Whampoa Academy in Nanjing. Fully embracing the Chinese way of life, he married a Chinese wife, joined the Kuomintang, and repudiated his Dutch patrician family name, thenceforth only responding to his self-styled Chinese name: Liu Yuantao. As a lieutenant colonel in the national Chinese army, Liu fought at several battlefronts during the earliest stages of the war. In Chongqing, he worked at the Bureau of Public Relations of the Ministry of National Defence and the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda, and also served as informant of the Foreign Affairs Investigation Group, a covert intelligence unit controlled by Dai Li's juntong, where he was charged with the task to keep an eye on the members of the foreign press corps in Chongqing.Footnote ⁶⁴

The second stage of Chongqing's wartime internationalization, marked by the outbreak of the Pacific War, saw a gradual expansion and institutionalization of foreign spy operations in Chongqing, and a shift from single agents functioning individually to fully fledged foreign intelligence outfits. In December 1941, the Coordinator of Information, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, established an outfit in Chongqing, referred to interchangeably as the Office of War Information, the American Information Service, and (later) the United States Information Service. Formally operating under the embassy in Chongqing, the Office of War Information's principal task was to assist the American military mission in Chongqing with counterpropaganda operations against the Japanese by disseminating excerpts from American publications, performing radio broadcastings into actual or projected areas of military operations, and preparing psychological warfare leaflets for aerial drops. Soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Office of War Information drafted the United Press correspondent in Chongqing, Francis McCracken Fisher, to oversee the American news output in Free China. Graham Peck, cited above, joined the small Office of War Information staff early in 1942 as editor of the weekly news review, American Digest, while war reporter Israel Epstein took up a job at the Office of War Information during his second stint in Chongqing.Footnote ⁶⁵

Around this same time, the British set up a Far Eastern counterintelligence unit for anti-Japanese psychological warfare and, though it was headquartered in India, its agents regularly showed up in China's war capital. The ‘D-Division’ (Deception Division), or ‘Force 456’ as the unit was later called, was headed by Peter Fleming, a Scottish journalist and writer, and the older brother of the naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, who afterwards would draw from his wartime experience to create the legendary character James Bond. From Delhi, Peter Fleming operated a network of secret agents, many of whom were double agents ostensibly working for the Japanese or the Germans, but in fact supporting the Allied cause. Despite the fact that the China war theatre had been designated as ‘American’ territory by the Allies, Fleming made several trips to Chongqing and even posted his men from the D-division as permanent liaison officers at the British military mission there. Two successive visits to China's war capital in 1942, following an inter-Allied military council held there between Allied representatives, resulted in a most secret operation, code-named Purple Whales, which involved the passing to the Japanese of forged transcripts of meetings of the Joint Military Council. The channel, established with the help of Dai Li's men, was used a total of six times during the war for leaking false documents of seemingly top secrecy to the Japanese.Footnote ⁶⁶

Meanwhile, the United States Navy was also seeking a foothold in China. In April 1942, the American naval officer Milton E. Miles arrived in Chongqing under secret orders to establish weather stations and a system of coast watchers to support the Pacific Fleet and, ultimately, prepare for naval landings on the Chinese coast. Nicknamed ‘Mary’ after the pre-war motion picture actress, Mary Miles Minter, the ambitious naval officer linked up in Chongqing with secret police chief Dai Li, and soon agreed with him to create a joint intelligence unit. Operating under the name of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) in a framework approved personally by Roosevelt and Chiang, the unit was to provide training to Chinese guerrillas, intelligence groups, weather groups, saboteurs, and raiding squads, while supplying them with equipment for fighting the Japanese. When the first United States Navy contingents arrived in September 1942 to participate in training and clandestine operations, Miles set up a training base several miles outside Chongqing proper in a valley surrounded by green hills and terraced rice paddy fields. Throughout the rest of the war, ‘Happy Valley’, as they christened the place, would serve as the headquarters of the controversial spy unit. By the end of the war, Miles's ‘rice paddy navy’ counted more than 2,500 American officers and many more Chinese guerrilla forces.Footnote ⁶⁷

To the Coordinator of Information, setting up the Office of War Information in Chongqing had only been a first step in a grander scheme. The ultimate goal envisaged by General William J. Donovan, known as the ‘Father of American Intelligence’, was to establish a secret intelligence network in China that operated independently from the Chinese and from all American agencies in China. To this end, Donovan instructed the Far East Division of the Office of Strategic Services, a sibling of the Office of War Information, to set up secret intelligence operations in China. Authorized to conduct unorthodox warfare, Donovan liberally utilized his unusually wide budgets and discretion to recruit an unorthodox cast of ‘thugs, artists, murderers, scientific geniuses, movie stars, cocky college professors’ and other remarkable characters.Footnote ⁶⁸ Many top agents of the Office of Strategic Services’ were sent to China during the war. Among these fascinating figures were Saul Steinberg, cartoonist for the New Yorker; George Devereux, a psychoanalyst specializing in exploiting superstition and mental weaknesses; Count Ilya Andeyevich (‘Bill’) Tolstoy, a grandson of the famous Russian novelist who completed a year-and-a-half trek from India to China on a military mission to Tibet; John K. Fairbank, a professor of Chinese history from Harvard working under multiple covers in wartime Chongqing; and ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan himself, who made several secret trips to Chongqing during the last two years of the war.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Office of Strategic Services soon became the largest sponsor of foreign espionage operations in China. After the Nazis were defeated in Europe, its agents virtually flooded the China theatre, reaching a peak in July 1945 when the intelligence outfit employed a total of 1,891 agents in China alone.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unable to operate fully independently from the start, the Office of Strategic Services associated with several factions within the American intelligence bureaucracy to further its aims, collaborating (and competing) with virtually all major players in wartime China at one stage or another. Initially, the Office of Strategic Services had placed its China operations under the Sino-American Cooperative Organization set-up headed by Miles and Dai Li but, once it had a foot in the door, the ambitious new agency deserted its host and pursued an independent path, to some extent duplicating Miles's efforts. When the Office of Strategic Services was still under the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, it once oversaw a French secret mission, sponsored by the American-backed French General Henri Giraud and tasked with organizing clandestine operations into Japanese (and Vichy France)-controlled Indo-China. Heading the mission was a French submarine commander by the name of Robert Meynier. But the most intriguing member of the group was the latter's wife, Katiou Meynier, a half-Annamite princess and one-time beauty queen, who had been freed from a German concentration camp in occupied Europe by British and French commando troops on Donovan's orders because of her political connections among the indigenous Indo-Chinese. Accompanied by a group of Annamite soldiers posing as Philippine army troops, Madame Meynier travelled to Chongqing in the autumn of 1943 under the guise of a United States Army Women's Army Corps, pretending to suffer from a sore throat so as to conceal her heavily accented English. In Chongqing, the group was assigned a house in the Sino-American Cooperative Organization's ‘Happy Valley’, while the Meyniers were lodged at the ‘Fairy Cave’, one of Dai Li's villas that had previously housed both Yardley and Miles. After some minor initial accomplishments, the Meynier group encountered the increasing obstruction from a competing French military mission in Chongqing led by General Pechkov and representing the British-backed De Gaulle faction. Following repeated British protests to General Stilwell, the Meynier mission was terminated. A simultaneous Thai mission led by one Colonel Kharb Kunjara, also supervised by the Office of Strategic Services in Chongqing, suffered a similar fate.Footnote ⁷¹

At several instances during the war, the Office of Strategic Services explored avenues of cooperation with the Chinese Communists. As early as January 1943, the the American spy unit started to explore the possibilities of sending agents into Communist areas in northern China. Elite teams were trained and prepared for a secret mission to Yan'an, but the project was aborted due to concerns in the Army of duplication of the ‘Dixie Mission’, which was being set up by John Paton Davies in New Delhi and John Service in Chongqing. Eventually, five agents from the Office of Strategic Services were included in the original group of eighteen observers of the ‘Dixie Mission’. Among them were the former Tokyo bureau chief for The Wall Street Journey and ‘super agent’ specializing in Japanese order of battle, Major Raymond Cromley; special operations man and film documentary expert, Captain John C. Colling; and the eccentric adventurer and naturalist, Captain Brooke Dolan II, who had recently returned with Bill Tolstoy from a mission to Tibet where they had met with the Dalai Lama.

After Stilwell's tumultuous downfall in November 1944, both the Office of Strategic Services and the Chinese Communists showed renewed eagerness for mutual cooperation. Willis Bird, deputy chief of the agency's China operations, travelled to Yan'an in late 1944 for a series of secret high-level meetings with the Communist leadership. Ambitious plans were drawn up and deals were struck that remained undisclosed even to the new American ambassador, Patrick Hurley. In Chongqing, meetings took place between the Office of Strategic Services and the Chinese Communists as well. In early August 1945, during Donovan's third trip to China, Soong Qingling arranged a secret meeting at her Chongqing residence (next to the Dutch embassy) between the American agent David Shaw and several Communist representatives including Wang Bingnan, the deputy Communist Party chief in Chongqing; and Gong Peng, Zhou Enlai's top aide in charge of international intelligence matters. Among the matters discussed during the conference was a proposal to set up a meeting with Mao Zedong in Yan'an. But no follow-up was undertaken, for the sudden end of the war, transpiring days later, dramatically changed the stakes again.Footnote ⁷²

Old and new ‘China hands’

Setting up special missions and secret service agencies were important aspects of foreign intelligence operations in wartime China. But key intelligence functions were also performed on a permanent basis by the embassies and affiliated military bureaus in Chongqing. Political and military reporting, by their nature, required the continual collection and analysis of all kinds of information, and each of the major embassies had one or more members on their staff tasked with intelligence gathering. Often these officers had ties with intelligence agencies at home or simply used their diplomatic ranks as covers for secret activities in China. Examples of foreign service officers operating in Chongqing's wartime espionage circles include James McHugh, the American naval attaché in Chongqing, who cooperated with British intelligence services and was even based at the British embassy in Chongqing for some time; John Magruder, a former intelligence officer with intricate international espionage ties in China who headed the American military delegation in 1941; Morris B. DePass, Jr, successively serving as American military attaché in Chongqing and commander of the ‘Dixie Mission’ in Yan'an, who played an important role in the Office of Strategic Services operations in China; and Lieutenant Colonel W. Gordon Harmon, who was in charge of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service in China under the guise of press attaché at the British embassy and later served as first embassy secretary and head of the British military liaison office in Chongqing.Footnote ⁷³

Yet another type of special service officers in wartime Chongqing were foreign businessmen who had spent many years in China's coastal cities and were regarded as experts on China. Two prominent examples of this type of British-styled ‘old China hands’ were Valentine Killery, former president of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in China, and John Keswick, a scion of one of the most powerful Western families in the Orient which headed the Jardine, Matheson & Co. emporium. Shortly after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the British business tycoon arrived in Chongqing to serve as chief of British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in China under the cover of first secretary at the British embassy. By carefully utilizing his powerful connections within China's officialdom—particularly his intimate friendship with the Soong family—Keswick managed to secure control of the China Commando Group, a special forces unit with British-sponsored personnel initially under Chinese army command, set up in August 1941 after the failure of ‘Detachment 204’. Expanding rapidly under Keswick's control, the guerrilla group subsequently met with the increasing opposition from Dai Li's secret police, who rightly suspected that the unit was used by the British for clandestine missions in China. In April 1942, after Hong Kong and Singapore had fallen and British prestige in China was at an all-time low, the China Commando Group was quietly expelled from China.Footnote ⁷⁴

The onset of the Pacific War saw a new type of China hands joining the ranks of the diplomatic missions in China's wartime capital—a trend that would last throughout the third stage of the Chongqing episode. These ‘new’ China hands were erudite sinologists and scholarly experts enlisted by the Chongqing embassies and related foreign agencies for providing assistance in the scientific, cultural, and political fields. Among these learned men were the British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham, serving as counsellor at the British embassy and director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office established in Chongqing in 1943; British author, John E. Blofeld, serving as cultural attaché at the British embassy; Dutch orientalist and writer, Robert H. van Gulik, serving as first secretary at the Dutch embassy; and John King Fairbank, serving as special assistant of the United States of America ambassador with the task of establishing a publications procurement programme for the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Periodicals.Footnote ⁷⁵

Engaged in a mix of cultural liaison work, political reporting, scientific research, and intelligence activities, these foreign intellectuals blended in smoothly with China's most prominent academics and celebrated scholars, writers, poets, playwrights, calligraphers, artists, musicians, philosophers, thinkers, and educators that had gathered in China's provisional capital following the outbreak of the war. A popular meeting point in Chongqing's intellectual circles was a bookstore and literary salon called Boshuizhai, located initially in the northern suburbs of Beibei and later in the city proper. In places like these, and at the many cultural and literary societies in the war capital, these ‘new’ China hands gathered with such eminent Chinese intellectuals as Yu Youren, Guo Moruo, and Xu Beihong, to name just a few, over a cup of tea or game of chess, to exchange calligraphy, recite ancient poetry, or play the classic Chinese lute.Footnote ⁷⁶

Robert van Gulik, who later gained worldwide fame both with his unconventional sinology research and his popular Judge Dee detective series (based on an eighteenth-century Chinese novel about the historical Tang magistrate Di Renjie), described the unique appeal of China's war capital to intellectuals like him in his private memoirs:

Like their elder peers, this new generation of China hands also engaged in intelligence work in Chongqing. Primary ‘suspects’ included John Fairbank, who supposedly performed undercover work for the Office of Strategic Services in Chongqing, and Robert van Gulik, who had been loaned to Fleming's ‘D-Division’ prior to his arrival in China, and presumably continued his intelligence work in Chongqing.Footnote ⁷⁹ Chinese counterintelligence agencies, well aware of such dual activity within Chongqing's diplomatic circles, sensibly kept a close watch on foreign officers in the city. All the major restaurants and hotels in the capital, including the Victory House, where van Gulik and many other foreigners were based, maintained on their staffs numerous secret police ‘runners’ controlled, of course, by Dai Li's special agents.Footnote ⁸⁰

The foreign press corps

Prior to the war, the foreign press in China had been centred at the major treaty ports, most notably Shanghai, where 23 (of a total of 58) foreign news agencies were based in early 1937. The outbreak of the war dramatically changed the nature and scope of foreign reporting in China, which became more important and more elaborate. Reporters, photographers, and publicists flew in from all over Europe and the United States to cover the Far Eastern front, which was catapulted to centre stage in the democratic fight against fascism after Franco claimed victory in Spain. While the Japanese were advancing inland, occupying China's major cities and treaty ports, a rejuvenated and invigorated foreign press corps joined Chiang Kai-shek in Wuhan, where some 55 foreign correspondents were officially registered by late 1938.Footnote ⁸¹

The subsequent move to Chongqing was not uniformly welcomed among the members of the foreign press corps in China. Living and working conditions in the ‘Mountain City’ were primitive compared to those in Shanghai and even Wuhan, and many reporters initially refused to leave the occupied coastal cities. Still, after Chongqing's formal designation as China's provisional wartime capital, the inland city became the principal news centre in the country. With the subsequent onset of the Pacific War, several countries established press services in Chongqing under their diplomatic missions, while major international news agencies including Reuters, United Press, Associated Press, Tass, Havas, and AFP dispatched representatives to Chongqing and set up offices there. In all, over 20 foreign press associations, newspapers, radio companies, and related organizations established a presence in China's war capital. The number of foreign correspondents normally based in Chongqing almost doubled from under 20 in early 1942 to well over 30 by the end of 1944.Footnote ⁸²

Except for the Russian reporters from the Tass News Agency, who had their separate quarters nearby the Soviet embassy, virtually all foreign correspondents in wartime Chongqing stayed at the Press Hostel, a basic structure built in July 1939 on the compound of the International Publicity Department of the Ministry of Information.Footnote ⁸³ The hostel's initiator was Hollington (‘Holly’) K. Tong, then Vice Minister of Information, who held a journalism degree from the University of Missouri. As the head of the International Publicity Department, he also served as the chief international censor during the war—a task he combined with a formal advisership at the foreign ministry. Tong frequently accompanied and translated for Chiang Kai-shek during meetings with foreign officials, effectively serving as a foreign affairs spokesman. He later became Chiang Kai-shek's ambassador in the United States.Footnote ⁸⁴ In his posthumously published memoirs, Tong recalled the Press Hostel as a ‘picturesque hostelry’, though wartime foreign residents tended to describe the hostel in much less favourable terms, emphasizing its ‘exquisite’ discomfort, which at least partly must have been due to the continuous air raids to which ‘Holly's Hotel’ was subjected during the war years.Footnote ⁸⁵

Among the foreign reporters at the Press Hostel in the early days was Theodore (‘Teddy’) H. White, the American journalist perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-Prize-winning accounts in the 1960s of the United States presidential elections. Fresh out of Harvard with a summa cum laude degree in Chinese history (as one of John Fairbank's first students) and a round-the-world travelling fellowship, White arrived in China in April 1939 aged 23. In Chongqing, he first worked as adviser to the Chinese Ministry of Information—a job, as he would recall later, that came down to manipulating Western public opinion and practising ‘whatever deception was needed’ to persuade America to enter the war with Japan. In 1940, White resigned from this job to join the China staff of Time magazine as Far Eastern correspondent—a position he kept until the end of the war.Footnote ⁸⁶

White was not the only foreign editor engaged by the Chinese government for wartime propaganda work. Several other foreign journalists had joined the ranks of the Chinese Ministry of Information especially during the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War. Among these foreign ‘advisers’ were such colourful figures as Maurice E. Votaw, former dean of the St John's University School of Journalism in Shanghai; W. A. ‘Buzz’ Farmer, an Australian reporter who had worked for the British-owned North-China Daily News and later wrote several books about China under the name Rhodes Farmer; Melville Jacoby, a young American reporter who later served as Time magazine's Far East bureau chief but died in the line of duty in 1942; Betty Graham, the only unmarried female journalist in Chongqing at the time, who also worked for Reuters, Associated Press, and Havas before becoming a partisan of the Chinese revolution; John McCausland, an eccentric, six-feet-tall Irishman-turned-Chinese educated at Oxford, who dressed like a classical Chinese scholar and styled himself as Ma Pin-ho (Ma Binhe); and Israel Epstein, a stateless Jew born in Poland who later acquired Chinese citizenship and as a long-term ‘friend of China’, in the 1980s, became a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).Footnote ⁸⁷

Other early-bird foreign journalists in wartime Chongqing working at the Press Hostel under Holly Tong's watchful eye—and censorship—included the American reporters Tillman Durdin and his wife Peggy Durdin, for The New York Times; Jack Belden, for United Press; Danish correspondent Karl J. Eskelund for Associated Press; and German journalist Julius Eigner for National Geographic.Footnote ⁸⁸ Aside from these Chongqing residents, several other foreign reporters at the front or based in the occupied regions also frequented the war capital. Thanks to these and other journalists in China, first-hand reports on the wartime events in faraway China and its last-stand capital of ‘Chungking’ made their way to the Western public.Footnote ⁸⁹

In late 1939, Emily Hahn, who had been based for some time in Shanghai as a writer and freelance correspondent, arrived in Chongqing to work on a biography of the Soong Sisters. Not rating as a newspaper correspondent, she was happy to avoid the Press Hostel, lodging instead at the Chungking Hostel, which she described as ‘just mildly awful’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In China to Me, the eccentric American author of many books on China described pre-1942 Chongqing as follows:

During these early days, while the ‘Wuhan spirit’ of national unity and hope still lingered, the foreign press in Chongqing operated in relative freedom, with little formal restrictions on their movement and reporting. Starting from 1940, however, when national unity began to waver and the threat of civil war became acute, the Nationalist government imposed a highly restrictive censorship regime on foreign reporting (which, after Pearl Harbour, was confounded with United States Army press censorship). At the same time, notably after the New Fourth Army Incident in early 1941, government communiqués became increasingly superficial and unreliable. These developments caused many foreign reporters to turn to the Chinese Communists in Chongqing for newsgathering and information. At Zhou Enlai's liaison office in Chongqing, they were able to obtain detailed accounts of developments in China's interior, either directly from Zhou, who served as the party's chief spokesman in foreign affairs, or from his close aide and charming public-relations head, Gong Peng. Among the many notable figures that had private (and often secret) audiences with Zhou Enlai in Chongqing were Jack Belden, Carl Crow, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong, as well as the newlywed celebrity couple Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn.Footnote ⁹²

The outbreak of the Pacific War heralded a new stage in the continuous expansion of the foreign press corps in Chongqing, which was joined by a new generation of correspondents from various Allied countries. With the Japanese occupation of the international settlement in Shanghai, those foreign reporters who had initially stayed in the occupied areas finally moved to China's war capital.Footnote ⁹³ Other new arrivals in Chongqing came fresh from their home countries, including Dosabhai F. Karaka, the first Indian correspondent ever to report from China.Footnote ⁹⁴ Prominent newspapermen and publicists also continued to visit China's war capital during this period. Shortly after the Hemingway-Gellhorn couple had left in April 1941, Henry R. Luce, editor and founder of the American Time-Life-Fortune magazine empire, called at Chongqing with his equally famous wife, author and playwright Clare Boothe Luce (who was to become the first female ambassador in the American diplomatic service). Hailed with the highest honours, the Luces were deeply impressed by all that was carefully laid out for them during their ten-day trip to Chongqing. Back home, the influential publisher, born in China to missionary parents and known for his strong pro-Chiang sinophilia, published an article in Life magazine about his recent experience in China in which he advocated stronger support for China's war cause and praised Chiang Kai-shek as the greatest ruler Asia had seen since Emperor Kangxi, 250 years earlier.Footnote ⁹⁵

Throughout the wartime years and beyond, foreign reporters in China, particularly Americans, maintained close working relations with the members of the American diplomatic and military missions in Chongqing. This intimate relationship was seen as a natural and necessary interdependence, born of wartime conditions that required the exchange of information to an unprecedented degree.Footnote ⁹⁶ John Service, a young diplomat in Chongqing who would be among those ‘China hands’ to be blamed later for the ‘loss’ of China, explained this fruitful collaboration as follows:

The third and final stage in Chongqing saw a number of major developments that illustrate the efficacy of this partnership in the context of growing tensions between the foreign press corps in Chongqing and the Chinese authorities. In May 1943, a group of foreign journalists at the Press Hostel established the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Aimed at furthering the common interests of the foreign press corps in China, the club came to represent some 25 foreign news organizations in Chongqing in their dealings with the Nationalist government. The club's initiators, all critics of the Nationalist's central administration, included The New York Times correspondent, Brooks Atkinson, as its first chairman, and Reuters’ Thomas Chao, Tass News’ Michael Yakshamin, and Time magazine's Theodore White (who would succeed Atkinson as the club's chairman in late 1944) as vice chairmen. Coinciding with Hollington Tong's temporary absence from the war capital, the club's formation signified a sharpening of relations between the international press in China and the Chinese press authorities. Apart from continual controversy over the scope of wartime press censorship, which was finally abolished after the war's end, the major point of contention was the issue of permission for a press party to visit the Communist Party of China headquarters in Yan'an.Footnote ⁹⁸

Thanks to the powerful backing of General Stilwell and other American officers, the foreign correspondents ultimately obtained clearance for a visit to the Communist areas in the north, albeit under highly restrictive conditions. After a long battle with national authorities on the group's composition, a first batch of journalists finally left Chongqing in May 1944. This initial party consisted of 15 Chinese journalists and six foreign reporters, including Israel Epstein for The New York Times, Time magazine, and Allied Labor News; Harrison Forman for London Times and United Press; Günther Stein for Christian Science Monitor and Associated Press; N. E. Proshenko for Tass News; Maurice Votaw for the Baltimore Sun, Reuters and Toronto Star; and Father Cormac Shanahan for The Tablet and other Catholic Church publications. Sometime later, following further American pressure on official quarters in Chongqing, Theodore White of Time magazine, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, and Harold R. Isaacs of Newsweek also received permission to go to Yan'an. Despite vigorous efforts on the part of the Nationalist government to ‘fix’ the closely chaperoned tour, the press party returned to Chongqing deeply impressed by the Yan'an experience. Even the Ministry of Information-employed Votaw and the strongly anti-Communist Father Shanahan, both of whom had been added by the Nationalist authorities to ‘adjust’ the group's balance, wrote favourably of the Communist-run areas at a time when ‘Chungking’ had come to embody the Nationalist regime's chronic misrule and unbridled corruption. As things turned out, the foreign press corps, thanks to their close ties with American government agencies in Chongqing, proved instrumental to a major, unexpected public-relations triumph for the Chinese Communists.Footnote ⁹⁹

After the end of the war, the international press in China returned to the major cities in the east. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club was initially relocated to Nanjing, and later to Shanghai. In June 1949, the club moved to Hong Kong. Today, seven decades after its historic foundation in wartime Chongqing, the famous press club lives on as an important international media hub and social centre in central Hong Kong.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Changing tides

In diplomatic terms, the wartime episode in Chongqing marked the pinnacle of Republican China's development as a modern nation-state, as epitomized in its phenomenal metamorphosis from a dismembered ‘semi-colony’ unable to uphold its own sovereignty to a first-rate nominal world power with a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. This extraordinary transformation can hardly be deemed the result of acute changes in China or Chinese society during these eight years. Rather, China's re-emergence on the global scene resulted from a series of developments on a far grander scale, driven by the war and the global shake-up it caused. As such, China's transformation was essentially much less a change from within than one of changing external perceptions and attitudes towards it.

The major trends in China's wartime foreign circles clearly reflect the changing tides that characterized this unique episode. As this article has shown, Chongqing's foreign establishment went through unprecedented change during the war, marked by a departure from the old treaty-port mentality based on imperialist notions of Western supremacy to a fairer and more accommodating attitude towards the host country befitting that of equal partners with a common cause. Meanwhile, as the old-style China hands were replaced by a new generation of diplomats, officers, and reporters in China's wartime capital, the nature of their trade also changed.

These changes have been most clearly visible in wartime China's diplomatic circles. The fact that so many foreign diplomatic missions joined the Nationalist government at its actual seat was a first manifestation of the forward trends that materialized during this period and, as such, was unprecedented in the history of Republican China. Yet, the foremost groundbreaking event in terms of China's foreign relations during the Chongqing episode was the abolition of the system of extraterritoriality and special privileges, which, for a full century, had served the imperialist aims of foreign powers in the country. The final disbandment of the foreign treaty ports, concessions, and settlements in China came hand in hand with the upgrade and deepening of diplomatic ties, underlining China's newly attained status as one of the ‘Big Four’ powers (brief though it lasted). The icing on the cake for the Chinese Republic came in 1945 when, spearheaded by the United States, it was included among the five permanent members of the newly established United Nations Security Council. Viewed in a wider context, these historic developments signified a radical change in the very notion of China's foreign diplomacy, which was no longer confined to the dealings of Western powers in China, but had come to cover the entire domain of international matters of concern to China.

Structural changes also came over China's foreign military circles. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, the early formula of (often covert) foreign aid to China's defence through military adviserships made way for a formal inter-Allied command structure with a permanent presence in Chongqing. Nominally at least, China and its new Allies institutionalized a cooperation of equal partners, reflected inter alia by Chiang Kai-shek's designation as supreme commander of the Allied forces in the China theatre and several mutual exchanges of military missions with Allied countries. Reality on the ground often proved different, to be sure, but the surrender by the three major powers of their Yangtze gunboats to their Chinese ally during the later stages of the war did in fact signify a definite break with former common practices by Western powers in the Far East.

Another signal development during this episode was the definite entry onto the international diplomatic scene of the Chinese Communists. Operating a quasi-foreign ministry in Chongqing under China's future Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai, their successful efforts in the war capital eventually culminated in the establishment of a United States of America Army Observation Group at Yan'an and a historic milestone in the Communist Party of China's relations with the West. Finally, a parallel development was visible within the foreign press corps in China, which saw a notable swing to the left as the nature of China reporting became increasingly political. The very reporters who, early in the war, whether in Chinese service or working for major Western media, had sung the praises of the ‘Last Free Capital in the Orient’ now abandoned the ‘beacon of freedom and democracy’ they themselves had helped to create, instead turning to Chinese Communist quarters, initially those in Chongqing and finally—with the help of the Allied governments—those in Yan'an.

A recurring theme in each of these changing lines of work in Chongqing's wartime foreign circles is that the agents effecting these historic changes as part of their wartime duties had also stood at the very basis thereof. Or, to turn it around, the bright young men and women once stationed in Chongqing's foreign embassies, military missions, and the Press Hostel not only helped reshape their country's national China policies, strategies, and public opinions, but also were tasked with, or simply keen on implementing, executing, upholding, and, in some cases, abandoning these. As such, their efforts, as well as their dramatically changing perceptions and attitudes, went hand in hand with China's rise to world-power status. In the final analysis, the epoch-making transformation that befell the Chinese wartime nation-state under construction was inseparably and closely linked, in both cause and effect, with the winds of change that blew through China's wartime capital during this extraordinary episode.

As this all happened, the inland city of Chongqing evolved from an obscure inland treaty port to a world-famous international capital and a unique, if somewhat curious, cosmopolitan centre. In terms of material comfort and social life, there was no way the ‘Mountain City’ could compare favourably with China's gleaming, modern coastal cities that had traditionally harboured the fortified and privileged foreign enclaves in China. Yet, in utter contrast to the city's social and economic backwardness, both actual and perceived, stood Chongqing's historical role and symbolic importance as the first modern-style international capital of a rejuvenated China and of a global power in the making. The significance of this can hardly be overestimated. While the Nationalist regime was not to stay on China's mainland until long after the war, this extraordinary change of tides, as well as its deep psychological effect on the post-war global order, would prove long-lasting, and its legacy can be clearly seen even today.