Introduction
On 7 December, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist (Guomindang or Kuomintang) government of China, fled from his capital, Nanjing. The city had for a decade been the site of Chiang's dreams for a modernized, technocratic China: everything from grand boulevards to more sinister plans to remove the urban poor had reshaped the city.Footnote 1 Now, it was about to fall to an invading Japanese force. Chiang went on to Wuhan, in central China, and led the resistance there for about ten months. But the seat of administration had already been moved even further west, to the south-western city of Chongqing in Sichuan.
The cities of Chongqing and Chengdu, and the province of Sichuan which surrounds them, became the site of an extraordinary political and social experiment between 1938 and 1945. An entire government, and much of the population that it ruled, moved upriver from central China to escape the Japanese assault, and created a new state in the desperate circumstances of war. On 7 July, 1937, fighting had broken out near Beiping between Chinese and Japanese troops. The war swiftly widened and, within a few months, Chiang's government had been routed from eastern China: first the north around Beiping, then Shanghai, then central China, fell to the invaders. However, plans had been in development since the early 1930s to move the capital inland in case of war. The new temporary capital would rule not just over its home province, but also over the unoccupied western and central provinces of China that became known to the western world as ‘Free China’, and in wartime China itself as the ‘Interior’ (Da houfang). For seven years, from 1938 to 1945, the centre of gravity of Nationalist China would not be on the east coast, but inland in Sichuan.
This paper explores the period when the Nationalist government was in wartime exile, a period that gave rise to a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between Chinese state and society, the effects of which persisted into the Communist era. It deals with the first phase of China's war against Japan, from 1937 to 1941, the period when China was said, with slight but understandable exaggeration, to have ‘fought alone’, and suggests that the successes and failures of the Nationalist attempts to create a new idea of citizenship centred on two concerns that emerged very distinctly in the wartime years. The first was an imperative to provide material provision for the wider population, in particular, refugees; and the second was the attempt to mobilize the indigenous population in the western part of China (whether by conscription or through propaganda), associating that mobilization with material benefits. In both cases, the process was part of a modern politics, which involved engendering a mass consciousness of citizenship, and using the war as a means of raising that consciousness.Footnote 2 This paper will examine several of the key sites in which the relationship between state, party, and society help to reshape the idea of citizenship as a political status: these areas of obligation and entitlement include material provision, identity and categorization, conscription, and engagement with propaganda. It argues that there was considerable success in creating the instruments that would enable the creation of a mass, self-aware, mobilized citizenry in the early years of the war, and that later Nationalist failures should not obscure the reality of profound and directed social change by Chiang's government during wartime.
The relationship between war-making and state-making is a longstanding one. Theda Skocpol made a now-classic argument in which she examined revolutions in comparative perspective, the Chinese revolution among them, and analysed the failure of the Nationalists to consolidate their rule. In her account, the war with Japan merely exacerbated tendencies that were already notable in the peacetime party: the regime ‘became drained of all popular vitality and degenerated into a series of bureaucratically entrenched cliques’. In this model, ‘the forced retreat of the Nationalists away from the rich coastal agencies and into the hinterland only exacerbated all of the regime's inherent weaknesses:’ the Chongqing government extorted taxes and printed money in a vain attempt to stay afloat.Footnote 3
Skocpol's powerful comparative argument (on France, Russia, and China) reflected the state of the China modern history field accurately at the time of its publication. However, in recent years, there has been a considerable revisionist scholarship in both Chinese and English on the nature and importance of the Nationalist project in wartime exile. This scholarship is still rightly critical of the many failings of Chiang and his government. However, it has also granted more rationality to Nationalist policy choices both before and during the war, as well as allowing the government itself more agency, moving away from a characterization of it as simply venal, ineffective, or buffoonish.
Within the modern China history field, there has been a long-running debate between those who argued that Chiang Kai-shek's wartime government was merely a degenerate variant of an already unimpressive regime, and those who suggested that it might have been a promising experiment in modernizing government doomed by its own contradictions and wartime circumstances.Footnote 4 Until the 1990s, the weight of consensus was more on the negative side, a verdict aided by the inability of historians to gain access to archives within China, and the overwhelmingly hostile judgement of scholars from the People's Republic of China (PRC) on Chiang and his government. The past two decades, however, have seen a significant shift, driven as much by political change within China as by historiographical developments. The Nationalist record is now extensively analysed by Chinese scholars, and that development has also begun to reshape the research agenda of western analysts.Footnote 5 Much of this scholarship takes a very different tone from what came before.Footnote 6 It acknowledges the real and extensive failings of the Nationalist government in areas including economic justice, human rights, and political pluralism. However, it also considers the Nationalist record in context, and argues that the Nanjing decade (1928–1937) saw significant modernization: the country made significant advances under Chiang in road building, tariff autonomy, flood prevention, and, in some accounts, overall economic growth (until the global depression). In this narrative, the war with Japan becomes a catastrophic externality, out of the control of the Nationalists themselves, which blew their fledgling developmental state fatally off course. As part of this historiographical turn, the sharp contrast between Nationalist and Communist practice pre- and post-1949 has also become more blurred: Mark Frazier, for instance, has argued that the origins of the idea that the Chinese workplace should be the source of material benefits for its employees, a mainstay of post-1949 society, ‘began with the emergency measures that the Nationalist government undertook during the War of Resistance’.Footnote 7 The role of the war against Japan as a pivotal point in interpreting social history during the period has become much more clearly emphasized.
This paper draws on materials from Sichuan province, where the most important experiments in government were taking place, and which was also the scene of major changes in the relationship between the central government and the province. Until the mid-1930s, Sichuan had retained a great deal of autonomy in its dealings with the Nationalist government, but from 1935 Chiang's government had begun to exercise ever-greater influence in the province. The provincial chairman, the militarist Liu Xiang, found himself under increasing pressure and was forced to place his previously autonomous troops under national control. By the time the war broke out, Sichuan's provincial government was heavily integrated with the central government which had relocated to Chongqing. Liu's own still mysterious death in January, 1938, further empowered the central government at a time when it had designated Sichuan as the key base for its resistance. The materials used here show the ways in which the forced proximity of the two levels of government created a much more integrated sense of connection between the citizen and the state in a way that was particularly relevant for Sichuan but which indicates greater centralization throughout the Nationalist-controlled parts of China.Footnote 8 During the war years, Sichuan's population (at its highest point in 1944) was 47.5 millions, which made up 10.44 per cent of the country's population at the time; the province was by any standards a major base for the government's plans for resistance and reconstruction.Footnote 9
Chinese citizenship in peace and war
Robert Culp's article defining citizenship in late Qing and early Republican China argues that the term can best be understood as a ‘category of ethico-political action that could transcend perceived limitations in existing modes of political action and moral personhood while continuing late imperial commitments to social responsibility and political engagement’, with a particular stress on ‘action by all’ as constituting national citizenship.Footnote 10 Culp also suggests that an ‘appropriate cut-off date in terms of this discussion might be the start of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, for the onset of total war fundamentally altered many social and political dynamics that persisted from the 1910s into the 1930s’.Footnote 11 The war years did indeed change the dynamics of citizenship, although policies during those years drew on the past as much as they sought to create a new framework for the imagined post-war world. To understand the changes that came with the war years, it is important to understand the Nationalist project as the party, and Chiang Kai-shek himself, saw it—a revolutionary movement concerned with renewing and modernizing society. Much of his rhetoric expressed the hope that the disaster of the war might actually prove the catalyst that would bind the nation together in a way that had proved very difficult in peacetime: as he said at the crucial conference to make the decision for war on 7 August, 1937, ‘If we win, then we can begin to revive our country. . .if we lose, it may be decades before we can do so’.Footnote 12 Action during wartime was at the heart of constituting citizenship.
Yet from the late nineteenth century onwards, an activist conception of citizenship had become widely accepted by the political elite in China. During this period, terms such as ‘citizen’ and ‘nation’ became a site of contestation, as thinkers debated the question of just who constituted the minzu (the term generally translated as ‘nation’) and the guomin, gongmin, and shimin (‘citizen’).Footnote 13 Henrietta Harrison has analysed the progression of the idea of citizenship and Chinese identity in the early Republican period, before the ascendancy of the Nationalist government, arguing: ‘The Chinese people today are Chinese not because of their participation in the traditional rituals of birth, death and marriage, but because of their participation in the modern rituals of statehood’. Harrison's book ends in the late 1920s with the transition from the idea that the whole Chinese people comprise its citizenship to a Nationalist polity where ‘legitimacy as a whole was transferred from the people to the citizens who made up the party’.Footnote 14
At the same time as trying to conflate citizenship with Nationalist party identity, the party also tried to fulfil its vanguard role by widening the idea of political participation in a broader polity. The startling changes in national politics during the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), in particular, the invasion and occupation of Manchuria in September, 1931, contributed to the urgency of the task of creating a new citizen body. At the same time, the threat of class war from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also stimulated new thinking on how to create a sense of citizenship appropriate for a modern Chinese nationalist state. The New Life Movement (NLM) (Xin shenghuo yundong) was the most prominent vehicle to try and achieve this aim. Launched in Jiangxi in 1934, the movement was sponsored personally by Chiang Kai-shek and his powerful wife, Song Meiling, as a regime in which personal behaviour and hygiene would extend to regenerating the Chinese nation as a whole. Despite its transformative goals, the NLM suffered from a top-down approach that prevented it gaining traction, although recent research has suggested that the work done by the movement was much more comprehensive than earlier, more dismissive accounts have suggested.Footnote 15
The tension between wanting to make the Nationalist Party itself the source of legitimacy (a similar tension felt also in more recent years) and to incorporate the widest range possible of people in the project of citizenship was exacerbated hugely during the war years. If the Nanjing decade marked a period of consolidation of the idea of citizenship, as it did for the economy and foreign relations, then the war inevitably led to disintegration of what had been gained, but also provided new opportunities for reconstruction. The inclusion of the CCP and other smaller parties as partners in the war effort against Japan made it more difficult to define the Nationalists as the only source of political legitimacy. On the other hand, the broadening of the political spectrum did provide a much greater opportunity to use techniques of wider social mobilization to define the role of the citizen. The division of China after the outbreak of war in 1937 led to a political debate in which the very nature of citizenship was at stake because of the ideological stakes behind the competing definitions of the ‘people’ as a citizen body, and the question of which regime could best draw on that ‘people's’ legitimacy. The most obvious division was between Japanese-occupied China (eastern China and Manchukuo) and the parts that continued to resist (the Interior under the Nationalists, and the CCP base areas). However, there was also an important difference between the regimes that stressed an explicitly anti-modern and primordial conception of identity and those that embraced modernity and citizenship as fully imbricated within one another: the most notable example of the former was Manchukuo, and the latter included the Nationalists, the CCP, and the pretender regime of Wang Jingwei which was officially recognised by Japan and its allies in 1940 as the ‘reorganized’ Nationalist party with its capital at Nanjing. All these latter regimes constituted themselves in terms of attempting to redefine citizenship. They used the tools of modernity, in particular the use of statistics and bureaucratic organization to bring the state and wider society closer together. The Wang regime, which sought in many ways to echo the practice of Chiang's regime from which Wang had defected, produced a variant of the NLM which it called the ‘New Citizen Movement’ (Xin guomin yundong). This laid a very similar stress on ceremonies, education, and propaganda, although it was pan-Asianism rather than the war against Japan that lay at the heart of its political proposition: rather than finding self-actualization through independence, China was to find a role in a Japanese-dominated pan-Asian order.Footnote 16 In addition, the CCP offered an alternative model of citizenship based on class identity, which had become further legitimized by the entry of the CCP armies into the United Front from 1937.
Therefore, the Nationalists had to define their own identity in competition with the other wartime alternatives. They did so by raising their expectations of the wider population in a time of supreme existential crisis: if there was to be a ‘war of resistance to the end’ (kangzhan daodi), then the whole mass of China's population would have to take part in that struggle. Chiang Kai-shek used a particular discourse to frame the war's aims, justifying his strategies as a continuation of the revolution of 1911 and the mobilization of the population that had started with that set of events. This demanded greater contributions on all fronts: the conscription of able-bodied men; increased tax demands as the Nationalists lost control over large parts of their former, more prosperous eastern base; and exposure to an ever-greater level of propaganda about the need for national resistance. Much of the incentive provided to the population to respond to the government's call came in the form of material provision. But the context in which it was provided also stressed the obligations of state to citizen and vice versa. This differed from the relationship between the subject and the imperial state during the late Qing, and signified a profoundly modern type of politics in which state actions were aimed at creating a sense of citizen identity through mobilization.Footnote 17
From the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and then even more strongly from the outbreak of total war in 1937, the move to create a citizen identity was linked to a much stronger sense of a country under threat from an outside attack which would contribute to territorial and social disintegration. In this context, the urge to categorize and classify the population became very strong. This was not an innovation of the wartime period, as the Nanjing decade had been marked by a variety of technocratic developments in which issues from urban planning to population improvement were implemented by the party. For example, Zwia Lipkin has shown how the Nationalists tried to remove the indigent population of Nanjing to boost the city's image as a model city.Footnote 18 Nor was the interest in taxonomy purely state-driven. The idea of ‘social investigation’ animated many during the 1920s and 1930s as the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, informed by a longing for ‘science’ and ‘democracy’, encouraged a belief in reform of society through a scientific worldview. In adopting this classificatory worldview, the state conceded that ultimately it did have responsibility for issues such as welfare and rehabilitation in the wake of war damage. But the party-state therefore set a task for itself which would prove increasingly hard to fulfil, especially for a regime with limited resources and state capacity.
Refugees: coping and categorizing
The crisis that faced the National Government in the summer of 1937 can be summed up in two terms: ‘mobilization’ and ‘social cohesion’, both essential to the creation of a citizen body that would be fit for a long war against Japan. Sun Yat-sen had famously declared that organizing the Chinese people was like trying to organize a sheet of sand. In summer 1937 it was as if the government were trying to make the sand cohere while simultaneously transporting it hundreds of miles up the Yangtze river.
The move to the interior had been planned with some care in the mid-1930s for the elite: government, military, and some industrial plant had been earmarked for transfer to the Interior as ‘essential to a projected war effort’.Footnote 19 The move to Chongqing was announced in October, 1937, although Chiang's military command was relocated to Wuhan, where the attempt to defend central China would occupy him for ten months until September, 1938. But there was no such organized plan for the wider population, and this meant a huge and undirected spread of refugees.Footnote 20 This reality created a discursive, as well as a practical, problem for the Nationalists.
Modern politics in China has been in large part about creating narratives to valorize events which have involved mass participation.Footnote 21 The arrival of the National Government in Chongqing in 1937 quickly allowed the creation of a new, seemingly linear narrative of heroism, which also contained its own geographic imaginary. Just as the ‘Long March’ of CCP legend gained prestige in large part because of the sheer difficulty and distance of the terrain traversed, so the journey 1,900 kilometres upriver from eastern China to Chongqing was given a legendary status, being billed not as a retreat, but as a defensive act. Chiang Kai-shek had declared, in the aftermath of the retreat from Wuhan in September, 1938, that ‘we chose to withdraw from Wuhan’, and ‘our base area will not be on the coasts and rivers, but in the wide, deep hinterland’. More important than any specific retreat or advance, he suggested, was to maintain ‘national revolutionary consciousness of the Three People's Principles [of Sun Yat-sen]’.Footnote 22 It was bravado (prior to the withdrawal from Wuhan, he had stressed the city's vital importance in the war), but helped to create an effective atmosphere of purpose about the Nationalists’ policy of retreat. The American journalist, Theodore White, no friend of Chiang's, declared in Thunder Out of China that the experience of ‘Chungking’ [Chongqing] had been a collective one of people determined ‘to hold the land against the Japanese’ with a belief ‘in China's greatness’.Footnote 23 The Nationalists’ aim was to develop the idea of a shared citizenship through the highly-pressured experience of wartime evacuation and reconstruction. The strategic disaster in practice—the fact that the National Government had had to withdraw from its heartland in Eastern China—was turned into a discursive virtue: the very fact of mass movement to an unfamiliar territory (as with the CCP in Yan'an just a couple of years before) was constituted as part of political identity.Footnote 24 The Nationalists quickly created an official portrait of a defiant retreat into the Interior, and were quick to praise the patriotic actions of those who had come all the way to Sichuan: shortly after massive air raids on Chongqing on 3 and 4 May, 1939, Chiang declared that the mission of the government and population together was to ‘carry out the task of national survival and independent continuation, and to complete the great destiny of our war of resistance and national reconstruction (kangzhan jianguo)’.Footnote 25
However, the linear narrative of heroic retreat from the occupied zone into the interior was not so straightforward in reality. The geography of occupation, particularly in the early years of the war, was very patchy: the idea that there were clearly delineated zones between the Nationalists (‘Free China’), the Communists, and the occupation regimes was misleading, as barriers between the three were always changing and blurred. The railways also served to emphasize China's new geographic imaginary. Refugee-flight had been known for centuries in China: every conquering dynasty had caused thousands of terrified civilians to scatter in its path. But the twentieth century allowed movement at high speed for the first time across the vast distances of central China. Now, the endless local disasters of war could be joined together along the tracks of the railway and bound together in one narrative. One Chinese woman, a Chinese Christian named simply as ‘Mrs Yang’ from Wuxi whose refugee experiences were recorded by a missionary relief agency on her arrival in Shanghai in early 1938, recalled of the train journeys that had taken her west into China's interior ahead of the Japanese invasion that ‘the man [sic] had meetings everyday and studied the map in such a way that they never had since they could remember’. In the later stages of her journey, on the boat from Guilin further into China's interior, she even mused, as she looked out at the scenery, ‘I wonder whether we should be thankful to the Japanese for they made us travel so far and see so much’.Footnote 26 Nonetheless, the pull of home and the circumstances of communications and geography meant that she eventually finished her long journey very close to her point of origin. After the initial destruction that rained down upon Shanghai and the Yangtze delta, life was clearly calmer in some parts of the occupied zones or the foreign concessions of Shanghai, compared with the air raids that were beginning to bombard Chongqing.Footnote 27 That possibility of safety, much more than more abstract considerations of patriotism, inevitably influenced many refugee choices. For others, of course, refugee flight could involve a very short, if dangerous, journey: notably, from the Chinese-governed areas of Shanghai (which fell to Japan in November, 1937) to the International Settlement and French Concession areas (which struggled to cope with the influx).Footnote 28
The outbreak of war did not, then, automatically motivate refugees into choosing to flee from the Japanese; nor did arrival in Chongqing necessarily mean support for the Nationalists (although the government chose to interpret it in that fashion). However, many millions did make their way to the Interior. Chongqing itself saw the most startling increase in population: a city of 473,904 people in 1937 expanded to over 700,000 by 1941 and to 1.05 millions by the end of the war.Footnote 29 Refugee relief had become an urgent task and policy was refined in the frantic months after the outbreak of war in 1937: the period when the Nationalist military command moved to Wuhan also marked a significant shift towards the coordination of welfare efforts.Footnote 30 Liu Lu's important dissertation argues that the most crucial shift for the Nationalists in Chongqing was the move from a more traditional form of welfare relief based on the use of native-place associations, the local elite, and volunteers to a central state-directed welfare programme. Liu suggests that the turning point came on 23 April, 1938, when the National Government's Development and Relief Commission (DRC or Zhenji weiyuanhui) was established, providing a single agency that was supposed to oversee refugee relief in the unoccupied zone. Between 1937 and 1940, the DRC established a wide-ranging network of refugee evacuation transit stations under the most difficult conditions (by the time of Pearl Harbor, 38 general stations and 1,059 substations). Over the course of the period 1937–1941, the DRC assigned 214 million yuan to refugee relief; it also found employment for 90,000 refugees in welfare job-creation schemes; and by early 1941, 9.2 million refugees had made use of the DRC's transit system.Footnote 31
The changes in the government's responsibility for providing welfare were an important turning point in redefining the entitlements as well as the obligations of the citizen to the government, although the process was not simple or linear. Nor was it entirely new; there was a longstanding tradition of public relief in late imperial China in which the state had a clear role, and after natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, and the resultant famines, provincial authorities would act together with the local elite to provide immediate assistance to the stricken population.Footnote 32 However, the weakness of the Republican structure after 1911 meant that there was little possibility of a national-level system of relief coordination. This situation altered somewhat with the establishment of the National Government in 1928. As part of its efforts to create a modern technocracy, it made significant use of assistance from the League of Nations in areas such as disaster relief. In 1931, prior to such assistance, disastrous flooding on the Yangtze had led to 600,000 deaths. But by 1935, similar floods led to a much smaller number of fatalities because of technological advances sponsored by the League.Footnote 33 The centralized systematic creation of a disaster relief infrastructure in Nationalist China was another aspect of the modernity that underpinned the government and its authority.
The outbreak of war thrust the burden of relief provision, at least at first, onto the local elite and organizations once again, rather as had happened in post-Taiping China. In the immediate aftermath of the hostilities, much refugee relief had been provided by civil society organizations, including the Red Swastika organization. (During the battle of Shanghai, the Red Swastika had been called upon by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) to deal with the fallout of the sudden influx of refugees into the International Settlement). In the initial period of flight to the Interior, voluntary and non-governmental organizations also played a significant role.Footnote 34
In contrast to the triage role played by civil society in the occupied Yangtze delta, the Nationalists wanted to use the refugee crisis as a means of state-building. There were clear tensions between the Nationalists’ definition of China as a party-state (dangguo) and the inability of the government to take over many roles from the local elite whose influence persisted into the Republic even as their outward form changed (for instance, through the arrival in China of transnational organizations such as the Red Cross).Footnote 35 As the government sought to centralize efforts, it wanted both to associate itself more directly with refugee relief and still take advantage of the capabilities of organizations such as charities and native-place associations. One way in which it showed its intentions of standardizing relief provision was to regulate it through one of the most powerful tools of bureaucratic modernity, the identity document (ID). The use of such documents in the context of refugee relief had become more widespread around the world, particularly after ‘Nansen passports’ became the League of Nations’ means of identifying and processing stateless refugees from wars, including the Russian civil war. However, the wartime period provided the first circumstance in which formal refugee identity documents were used to deal with a national-level crisis in China.Footnote 36
The national and provincial authorities used the imposition of an ID system as a clear means of exercising control over disparate local actors, declaring: ‘All charitable and other organizations should send refugees to the office to obtain IDs’.Footnote 37 The government was also keen to standardize forms of ID: ‘all passes previously issued by other [organizations] should be collected and destroyed [e.g. from charities, baojia heads, same-place associations, etc.]’. The IDs were to be printed on cloth (presumably for durability), and they were to be verified by the police or the military, with a central register being compiled. One version of the card contained various pieces of key information including the social class of the refugee (shang, nong, xue, gong: merchant, peasant, student, worker), a mixture of traditional and modern categories.Footnote 38 The use of the cards came alongside a greater provision of governmental assistance. In 1939, as devastating air raids became a regular part of life in western China, the city administration in Chengdu received a message in Chiang's name (sent via the provincial government) indicating that it should be passed on to the Air Raid relief office: food and transport allowances were to be limited to 30 cents per day.Footnote 39 Once again, there was concern that the relief coupons (zhenpiao) should be unified in form, and it was noted that ‘evidence for reimbursement is very important’.Footnote 40 Processes were therefore to be put in place to formalize and categorize the list of claims for reimbursement so that corrupt or arbitrary grants of money could be avoided.
Militarily, 1940 was a very bad year for Chiang's regime, pinned down in its stronghold with no immediate prospect of foreign assistance. However, the refugee crisis of the early war years had also abated: by 1940 there were no longer huge influxes into the Nationalist zone. This enabled the system to bed down and adapt, serving the wider purpose of creating a welfare system characterized by rational distribution, yet not entirely rigid, and giving ballast to the idea that the National (guomin) government was in fact operating on behalf of its citizens. In 1940, an order from the provincial Relief Committee stated that previous rules had been ‘made over a year ago, things are changing, and the rules we use now do not match the environment so well’.Footnote 41 In particular, more attention was being paid to dividing up the refugees by age: the able-bodied, the young and old, and babies. Care was also being taken to deal with those who had ‘come recently from neighbouring combat zones’. Local organizations and charities were still to take the lead in spending their own money, but ‘at the end of the month, if there is proof with no errors, then they will be reimbursed by the Relief Committee’.Footnote 42 The problems associated with multiple IDs were still relevant: one order demanded that new refugees issued with a proper ID should not then try and claim again with their old IDs.
By 1940, refugees in Sichuan were being issued with two types of ID, type A (jia) and type B (yi). The former entitled refugees to more benefits than the latter, but also restricted their behaviour much more. ‘On arrival’, noted one document detailing procedures for the reception of refugees, ‘refugees should be given a type A ID, then wait for the Relief Committee to assign someone to help them find a job’. Seeking employment was the task of the committee members: ‘they should not find an excuse to give them money and send them away. The responsible person in the agency, if he doesn't [carry out the task], will be punished’. As for the refugees, ‘before they have a job assigned, they may stay in the reception centre, but for no more than ten days’. Refugees did not volunteer for jobs: they were assigned positions, and would be given a standard transport fee to take them to their assigned position: those who were late could be denied the job and be forced to return their IDs.Footnote 43
For those issued with Type A IDs, there were four main ways to obtain relief:
(1) the old and disabled should follow the methods described by the Provinces and go to the nearest relief centre;
(2) nursing mothers and children should go to the nursery and the Relief Committee will provide money;
(3) poor children should be sent to the children's welfare homes. The county and city level ones can ask for funding from the county or city Relief Committee (not the provincial ones);
(4) able-bodied refugees should got to work according to the temporary rules of Sichuan province.Footnote 44
If Type A refugees wished to find relatives or other organizations to assist them, they could be assisted by the Relief Committee, to whom they had to give assurances about how far they planned to go and how their travel fees would be met (ideally, the despatching Relief Committee would contact the Relief Committee at the receiving end to make sure that they were prepared for the travellers’ arrival). Refugees ‘who have their own money or have already received relief from charitable organizations must not ask for a Type A ID’, the rules noted. Type B ID holders could still ask for assistance (for instance, in trying to find accommodation) but were not entitled to financial help. Regulations also reflected the black market world that had grown up in the conditions of wartime. ‘Refugees must not use their IDs outside the regulations and must not use them to do dubious deals;’ also, they must ‘not give the ID to anyone else; violators will have to return their IDs and will be punished’.Footnote 45 The differences between the two types of ID give an indication of the changing relationship between state and society: acceptance of more assistance from the state would lead in turn to more obligations towards that state. At the same time, the identification of citizenship with entitlements to welfare was made yet more explicit.
Issues of integration
The desire to integrate all generations of society into the new citizen body meant that the treatment of children also became a cause of concern for the wartime government. One of the most iconic images of the Chinese war effort in the west would be the orphanages created to house and bring up the children whose parents had been killed by bombing.Footnote 46 Indeed, the tour of the ‘warphanages’ even attracted a certain amount of ridicule from outside observers who regarded them as part of Song Meiling's self-aggrandisement rather than a genuine welfare enterprise. Yet in fact, the need to care for refugee children (not just orphans) became an important part of the reconstruction enterprise in the Interior. A document dated not long after the formal move to Chongqing, as Sichuan filled up with refugees from the war zones, noted a proposal to build a centre capable of holding up to 10,000 child refugees. The writer observed that of all the tasks that the relief organizations had to accomplish, providing assistance for children was the single most important. It also recalled that as the flow of child refugees increased into the area, the previous plan had been to wait until sufficient resources were available, then build the facilities. However, the urgency of the task meant that it was now imperative to find ways to fund an expansion of provision as fast as possible, with a budget of 200,000 yuan. The proposals were to provide new provision for 500 nursing children (at 5 yuan per month per child), and to subsidize various organizations so that they could take up to 10,000 children (each child to be allocated 2 yuan per month). The problem was that, although the province had previously been allocated resources, there was no way without extra subsidy to guarantee that each child would in fact receive the allocation of 2 yuan.Footnote 47
As the scramble to reconstruct began in the Interior, a distinct problem for the Nationalists was to integrate refugees into the new wartime state, and persuade them that they had a place there. The continuing existence of alternatives always stood in the way. While return to the Japanese-occupied zones might not be attractive, for many, doing so was at least to regain the familiarity of home.Footnote 48 A report by the Sichuan provincial government from April, 1938, reports trouble with refugees from Changshou in the occupied Lower Yangtze region, who were asking to return to their home areas. The report notes that, ‘if they are allowed to return, they won't be safe and may leak information’. It went on to say that the refugees did not care about the consequences: ‘they just wanted to go home’. The report expressed understanding of the issue, but stated that it was too risky to allow such returns.Footnote 49
The government not only had to deal with the desire of many refugees to return home, they also found that the Japanese were offering active inducements to refugees to tempt them back. The government reported in January, 1940, that refugees wanted to return home, believing that there was a bumper harvest, and that their cost of living as refugees was too high, but also found that the refugees were being given instructions and road maps by the Japanese as an inducement. A copy of the Japanese advisory material gave very specific advice, including places where free vehicle rides could be obtained, or where a smuggler's boat could be ridden from Yichang to Hankou. ‘If we do not root this out’, the report noted with concern, ‘it will have a great effect on the War of Resistance’. The advice given was that propaganda teams should be sent out to explain the harshness of conditions in the occupied zones. Furthermore, it was important that they should maintain relief work so that refugees did not feel that they were ‘drifting’; even those who did not have official responsibility should work to prevent refugees being ‘deceived by the enemy’.Footnote 50
The local population were subjected to propaganda as the narrative of national resistance was insufficient to prevent at least some of the locals trying to exploit the new arrivals. On 3 March, 1939, another report noted:
More and more refugees are arriving daily; the locals (da houfang ren) are still asking them for rent, and this is causing difficulties. Therefore the mobilisation committees and relief organisations shall assist them—[areas where] there are no mobilisation committees should only use relief organisations. In principle, they should use temples, refugee relief centres, etc.Footnote 51
Nonetheless, the government also realized that total prevention was not practical because the porous nature of the wartime borders between ‘free’ and occupied China meant that, in practice, refugees could always leave if they really wished to. Furthermore, the immense financial and social burdens of the sheer number of refugees that had arrived in western China meant that the government could not realistically hope to maintain all of them. However, if some of them did return, this was rhetorically problematic although in practice useful. Therefore, one document provided detailed instructions on what to do when refugees absolutely insisted on returning. The reason for setting up the rules, ‘was to let refugees understand the meaning of the War of Resistance’, and to this end, there should be coordination in dealing with them between the relief agencies, the Party, and the military. The new systems of registration and categorization were to come into their own: point 3 of the regulations stated refugees should not be permitted simply to leave, but must register their names, destinations, and origins with the relief agencies and, pre-departure, they should be kept in special reception centres.
Point 5 was the most detailed about what was to be achieved with refugees returning home. They were to be subjected to ‘training’ that included ‘confidential tasks’, then they were to be grouped and despatched home. The training was divided into two levels: one for those with high levels of education, and one for those with lower levels. The contrast between the two proposed levels suggests the way that an ad hoc task of refugee management was being reshaped by language and ideas that came from a much longer-running debate on the creation of a modern citizenry and the importance of education to create it.
Listed below are rules for training those with high knowledge levels:
(1) explain our inevitable victory in the War of Resistance and our national reconstruction;
(2) admire the great leader [Chiang];
(3) recognize that the enemy are isolated;
(4) observe loyalty and piety towards the nation;
(5) adore the character of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor [Chinese];
(6) recognize the dangers of becoming a collaborator [hanjian];
(7) understand the techniques of not collaborating, and pass information back to ‘us’.
Rules for those with low knowledge levels included:
(1) admire the great leader;
(2) explain the suffering that comes with flight, and what the enemy will do to them;
(3) explain the dangers of becoming a collaborator;
(4) explain how not to collaborate with the enemy.
Training was to last one to two weeks, and particularly talented refugees were to be recruited as intelligence sources behind the lines.Footnote 52 There were also formal measures for arranging the groups in which they would be allowed to return home, and on the issuing of official passes. The ID card system had become part of the attempt by the state to regulate the dangerous and unpredictable flow of refugees across the borders, as well as to incorporate them within the wartime mobilization of the citizen body.
The arrival of the government in Chongqing, and the uneasy sort of stability that came with the re-establishment of the regime there, helped create a longer-term basis for relief provision. The new measures for relief and compensation clearly exceeded anything that previous governments had been able or willing to implement. Yet they remained partial: in some cases, they tended to favour those who had some previous connection with the Party (an indication here, as Harrison has argued, that the notion of ‘citizenry’ had become related more to the Party than to the population as a whole), and even when applied to the wider refugee population, the amounts disbursed were not equal to the massive demands (leading to the disillusionment and departure of at least some refugees).Footnote 53 It was probably not reasonable to expect that the National Government could have integrated a full and competent system of welfare provision in an unfamiliar part of the country with limited income and resources and a highly unfavourable geography. Yet the government's own behaviour made it more vulnerable to the demands of a citizenry being asked to make supreme sacrifices for a still fluid idea of the nation.
Persuading the local population
With refugees, the main obstacles to creating a sense of common citizenship were problems of cohesion and integration. For the indigenous population of Sichuan (and by extension, the residents of other parts of the Interior), the problem was to persuade them that they needed to be integrated into a new understanding of their roles as citizens of the nation. This was no abstract issue: much was asked of them, including recruitment for the army, as well as providing support (both personal and in terms of taxation) for the reconstruction and resistance efforts based at Chongqing. Unsurprisingly, the new obligations placed on the settled population by the state caused significant discontent. Major efforts therefore went into demonstrating that the indigenous population of Sichuan could and should be brought into the wider narrative of national resistance. Material not intended for public usage, however, gives a more complex account of such mobilization efforts, suggesting partial success as well as serious flaws. Chang-tai Hung's path-breaking work provides a lucid account of the way in which folk cultural forms were used by the CCP in their areas of control to create a revolutionary momentum among the wider population.Footnote 54 However, although the Communist techniques have received more attention, the Nationalists also promoted propaganda from the earliest period of the war.
A report filed on 5 April, 1939 gave an account of three months’ Nationalist propaganda work in Pengqi County, Sichuan, and as such is typical of much of the material documenting grassroots activism in the Nationalist areas. The county had been visited by a propaganda team, but even prior to that, plenty of activities (for instance, those carried out by teachers for their pupils) had been reported. The core of these propaganda activities was to provide an explanation for one of the most shameful episodes of the war so far: the retreat from Wuhan and Guangzhou in late 1938. Chiang had himself declared in a speech that the retreat from Wuhan should be considered a strategic success, and that the retreat had been planned. Yet there was an awareness that previous efforts to mobilize people using this argument had not been successful: ‘we did a lot of propaganda work (e.g. wall newspapers) but the results were very limited’. In this county, therefore, they turned to more proactive efforts to spread propaganda.
The first was a ‘farewell meeting’ (chuisong dahui) held on 13 December, 1938, for the able-bodied men about to go into the army. As part of the meeting, they sang a song entitled ‘If you're a good man, then join the army’. This was part of a wider process of trying to make sure that recruits, many of whom had been treated in a careless or brutal fashion after their enlistment, received an ‘accurate’ explanation of the war which would help them to ‘treat it as a glorious exercise’. They would also be influenced by having neat clothes and quilts, and this would unconsciously amend their view further. In the writer's view, this would be a ‘big gain’.Footnote 55
The propaganda effort found ways to link the recruitment of the military to wider social participation. This was an aim that had marked the Nationalist regime as a whole, but the fractured social relations of the Nanjing decade had meant that any militarization of wider society was limited, certainly in comparison with the creation of a ‘total defence state’(that is, a warfare state) in Japan.Footnote 56 The war against Japan now provided a context in which wider social mobilization could be undertaken. On 3 January, 1939, around 3,000 people were gathered for a big propaganda rally, including a torchlight parade (flagged as ‘an innovation’), during which various participants showed off their skills with musical instruments (flower-drums and bamboo instruments) and impersonation (playing collaborators). In addition, cadets were made to take a public examination on propaganda regarding the War of Resistance.
Propaganda activities in the county were also tied in to the other revived imperial-era social system on which the Nationalists had placed reliance: the baojia system where a named head would be responsible for the behaviour of a certain number of local households. Activists had gone down the very local level (the xiang): in this case, a Mr Yue had gathered baojia heads on a market day and asked them ‘questions about their political awareness’. The report suggested that this had ‘helped raise the knowledge level of many of the baojia chiefs, and resolved conflicts between the baojia and the people, and it has greatly established the government's beliefs among the people’. Naturally, the author had an interest in declaring the effort a success, but the report suggests that propaganda efforts did take into account the need to go beyond simply mouthing slogans at central level and hoping that they would filter down to wider society. This account's tone is reflected in the other propaganda techniques which are recorded. One was popular plays (xiju): propaganda workers in the country put on three solid days of plays, with titles such as ‘Under high pressure’, ‘If you have power, use it’, ‘Break the bridge’, ‘Blood debt’, and ‘Show us your true nature’. The plot of the latter concerned a deserter who returned to his village, but was ordered by his uncle to return to the army. The deserter refuses and tries to get away by dressing in women's clothing, but his little brother returns, blurts out the truth, and the elder brother is arrested and sent back to serve. Just in case the point was missed, the punishments that would be visited on deserters were read out in between the sections of dialogue. The report claimed that the play had been well-received in performance in a variety of places.
Another traditional form of entertainment used to serve war propaganda was the use of the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiujie), a traditional harvest festival generally held in September/October, also known as the Lantern Festival. The report argued that people were ‘taking meaningless customs and making them meaningful’—such as using them to celebrate a recent military victory. The entertainment included lantern couplets (traditional rhyming riddles) (dengdui). This explanation echoes the modernization agenda seen among Nationalist organizers in the previous two decades: in the 1910s and 1920s, the party had been at the forefront of the battle against ‘superstition,’ arguing likewise that ‘meaningless’ traditional customs had to be rooted out to allow modern citizenship to form.Footnote 57 By the Nanjing decade, the conservatism that took over much of the Nationalist revolution meant that there was no longer such a strong enthusiasm simply to root out the traditional, but the agenda of creating a concrete sense of modern citizenship was still very strong. Therefore, at the Lantern Festival, the couplets were reshaped according to wartime priorities:
Fully-spirited, all celebrating victory, lighting up 10,000 homes, everything is bright;
Making paper flowers, flowers of light, and fireworks, decorating the spring scenery, gathering manpower and finance for the county. . .
Our lights on the night of the lantern festival can even reach as far as [Japan] and set up the foundation for 10,000 years of the [Chinese] Republic.
In addition, the parade included lamps made up in the shapes of mortars, cannons, and aircraft. Theatrical lantern performances also took on a new meaning: in a piece of wordplay, the traditional story of ‘Hou Yi Shooting the Sun’ (Hou Yi she ri) was held to refer to Japan (represented by the same character ri). There followed a lantern performance of ‘bombing Mount Fuji’.Footnote 58
The Republican era had been marked by the creation of new days of remembrance for political purposes. As William Callahan has shown, the use of ‘national humiliation’ days in particular helped to rally ideas of a common citizenship united by a sense of victimization.Footnote 59 The wartime period also saw the use of newly constructed ceremonies as a means of trying to create a common bond. One observer, Zhang Yigui, reported back from Guangyuan County in Sichuan on 7 July, 1939, about the use of these techniques of public education on the occasion of the newly instituted ‘War of Resistance memorial’ day (Kangzhan jinian).Footnote 60 In the county, ‘national flags were at half-mast’, and the people of the county were reported as being ‘happy but concerned’. Very swiftly, there was reported to be a ‘war of resistance atmosphere’ as over 2,000 people gathered to be addressed by two generals.
Part of the political capital of the ceremony lay in the decorations and preparations made for the speech. As well as the use of standard imagery of Sun Yat-sen along with the national flag of the Republic, there was also an altar dedicated to the generals and soldiers who had died in the War since 7 July, 1937. ‘The atmosphere was sombre’, reported Zhang, as people laid fruit and flowers at the altar, and a platform being set up for cash donations. Following the altar ceremony, the generals addressed the crowd in terms that had become formulaic since the start of the war: they spoke about the comparative strengths of China and Japan, and one general declared his happiness that he had at last been given permission to go to the front, having (allegedly) been denied it previously.
Zhang Yigui noted:
After the speech, there was a parade: I went past a door and heard an old woman say: ‘Did we beat Japan’? So I said briefly: ‘This is the second anniversary of the outbreak of war. . .if we continue the war of resistance to the end (Kangzhan daodi), then surely we will beat Japan by this time next year!Footnote 61
The day's events ended with the showing of a movie: this was apparently highly popular, and latecomers found themselves being denied admittance.
The use of popular as well as modern entertainment forms to spread war propaganda has been explored for decades, but primarily from the point of view of the CCP.Footnote 62 The contributions of Nationalist propaganda have been less closely-examined, perhaps because it is assumed that they were paltry or ineffective. Yet clearly there were extensive propaganda efforts in Sichuan, towards which the CCP contribution was a minor one at best. Moreover, regardless of their effectiveness, it is clear that there was an active and directed attempt to mobilize the population in a way that would link the grassroots as citizens engaging with a state-defined national project of resistance.
Class and gender
The Nationalists, then, were serious in their attempts to deal with the crises of recruitment, refugee relief, and propaganda dissemination as part of an agenda of state-building and citizenship. County-level reports are a valuable supplement to the official propaganda that poured from Nationalist-controlled presses; they were not intended for public consumption and therefore had more leeway to be critical of problems, leaving the reader in no doubt that strenuous efforts were being made to spread propaganda, and to use traditional structures (such as baojia, market networks, and festivals).
Nonetheless, problems of implementation were very real. Some reports are more explicit about the continuing problems that dogged these efforts, in particular, in the fraught area of recruitment for the army. An activist named He Cigong, involved in local mobilization at the county level in Sichuan, wrote a report in 1939 ‘reflecting on certain issues in training’. His report started with a variety of the usual pieties about inevitable victory in the war, and also hedged about the reasons that he felt the need to report: ‘it's not because the government isn't doing well, nor because the peasants lack a concept of the state’. But there were still real obstacles in the way of creating a common sense of enterprise:
More than 80 per cent of the peasants recruited are illiterate, and have little knowledge of the link between individual, county and nation. Baojia are forced to pull them in when they try and avoid service, and tie them up with ropes, or else they take bribes not to recruit them, and even exploit the soldiers’ food money allowance, so they're hungry and cold and complain greatly. . .. Although they should use drawing straws on an equal basis [to choose who goes], [because] all Chinese are sons of the yellow emperor, in practice the sons of the local elites are eloquent and manipulate the baojia to avoid service. When we go to the county, people tell us this, and they doubt the law.Footnote 63
The situation in the report did not describe the picture everywhere in Sichuan: not all recruitment was enforced, and in the initial years of the war, there was considerable success in calling up troops for the Nationalist armies (which continued to bear the brunt of active fighting against the Japanese).Footnote 64 Among the incentives were the assignation of monetary and supply privileges to the recruits’ families, but in Sichuan, a major problem was the diversion of these privileges. ‘Once an able-bodied man has been recruited, his family ought to get 8 dan (1 dan = 100 litres) of grain’, says He Cigong. However, various counties had not kept to this norm, with many providing less, a few actually giving more, and in general, little standardized provision. Again, as part of the standardization of government procedure that the Nationalists were attempting to impose on aspects of wartime life (another aspect of the ‘flatness’ of provision that would help create a sense of common citizenship), certificates allowing food and other privileges were suppose to be issued to the families of recruits; but in some places ‘the relatives may have a certificate, but no privileges, and in some cases not even the certificate’. In general, baojia chiefs were reported to feel that ‘it's not hard to be a chief as long as you don't offend the big houses (i.e. major families)’, and they were disinclined to press the elite families, demanding military service or pay-offs from the ordinary peasantry instead.
He's proposed solution was that ‘we must force every bao and jia to donate various sums; the strongest case is in Xizhong county, which has lots of soldiers but has not [donated] a single grain of rice’. As he pointed out, this was strange because Xizhong was known to be a county with many rich traders; yet it was observed that military families were being given sweet potatoes (i.e. poor quality food) rather than rice. (This was contrasted with Peng'an county, which had distributed rice three times by that stage.) He noted that ‘if we want to carry out recruitment smoothly, we must solve this problem of privileges’. He also suggested that social cohesion was being directly affected by the lack of equal provision. In the same county, he reported the presence of banknotes from Manchukuo (the client Japanese-dominated regime in occupied Manchuria); in another county, there was reported to be a ‘woman who is pretending to collect donations but is actually a swindler and a spy’ and, in yet another, a woman who is ‘using a girl's school to spread reactionary slogans and songs’.
What He had observed in the countryside included a continuing division between social classes as well as a lack of shared common purpose. In every county, he declared, he saw at least some people ‘living idly in a dream world, with luxurious lives’: how, he asked, could they ‘carry out the New Life spirit’? He also warned that the ‘dwarfs’ (that is, the Japanese) were on the doorstep of the Interior, and that it was time to strive for ‘independence’ and ‘the nation’ during the ‘war of resistance to the end’, and in a phrase that would much later become a staple of Communist discourse, ‘seek truth from facts’ (shishi qiushi).Footnote 65 (The phrase had, however, been used previously by Chiang Kai-shek.)Footnote 66
In summing up, He Cigong declared:
In the second stage of the War of Resistance, we need money, people, and arms. We've already prepared food for the Interior in case of droughts and floods. Wasn't the question of victory or defeat in World War I and the Russo-Japanese War dependent on food supplies? Last year there was a bumper harvest and the government asked people to store grain; but baojia heads had no authority, so people both rich and poor all hid it, and their grain storage record booklets were all empty, but no one took responsibility for all this—they didn't even give priority to soldiers’ families—this is all very sad! Officials and ordinary people should all be aware of this.Footnote 67
As well as class divisions, gendered difference also emerged as another stumbling block to unity. From the late Qing dynasty onwards, Chinese nationalism and Chinese feminism had found themselves in a progressive embrace in which the priorities of the latter were nonetheless frequently subordinated to the former.Footnote 68 In the countryside in particular, the cause of women's rights had progressed only sporadically. But for some activists, the war provided an opportunity to mobilize where the government and party had previously stagnated.
One county report began by declaring ‘War of Resistance work is the hardest work;’ those who do it, declared the author, need to be prepared to ‘eat bitterness’ to go down among the ordinary people. In particular, the author noted, it was women who were hardest to recruit:
It's even more difficult to train women than regular [i.e. male] peasants. Women are conservative, and their outlooks are rooted in clan and countryside. They don't understand the meaning of the War of Resistance, or its future. Women's production work and work at home take up all their time. They have few chances to participate in social activities and national reconstruction based on the War of Resistance (kangzhan jianguo).Footnote 69
This activist wished to transform the role of women into active and mobilized citizens. One key role they could play was to persuade their menfolk to join up, and in general, their roles both in the war zones and outside them were to be seen as essential, rather than a decorative extra; he criticized those who suggested that a women's movement could simply be an add-on to a youth movement. Instead, the report stressed that, as with other aspects of national reconstruction, the war could be seen as an opportunity for redefining citizenship: ‘war has destroyed culture’, the writer admitted, but ‘it has also created culture’. Thus, the formation of a women's movement may have been harder during the Nanjing decade, ‘but in wartime, there have been so many lessons and experiences that it'll be easier to gain a bigger result’. Various strategies designed to appeal particularly to women could be put forward. First, it could be explained that the Japanese ‘have killed able-bodied men, kidnapped children, burned property, and raped women. . .this is understood by women;’ then, life in general had become very difficult for women because of the war, so this could be explained and taken advantage of by the party's political activists.
The report's (almost certainly male) author blamed the failure of previous attempts to mobilize women on the class differences between women activists and the rural women with whom they were trying to work, rather than on failures in party policy. This attribution of blame suggests that even a relatively progressive thinker continued to feel an ambivalence about the idea of the ‘New Woman’ in public life. He argued that ‘going down to the villages’ (dao nongcun qu) was not ‘just a pretty slogan’ but that,
[I]t's not something that ‘modern’ ladies like to do. Country women have never seen high heels or qipao, and they don't understand the term ‘Japanese imperialism’. After the War of Resistance broke out, a lot of city women went to the countryside, but their clothes weren't rustic enough, their words were not understood, and [so] they had to go home.Footnote 70
Therefore, cadres who would push forward the work of educating rural women about the War of Resistance were essential. The author of the report declared: ‘Women have a home life in the countryside, and they dislike and fear organisations (i.e. political organisations). But as their work becomes more complicated, they will ask for organisation and be more comfortable with being organised’.
Based on this premise, organizers were enjoined to use a variety of methods to bring women into the war effort.Footnote 71 Villagers in general, and women in particular, were said to dislike strangers. So, again, songs and performances were used to make them feel more positive about the activists. The activists were to try and explain the cause of the War of Resistance and to use drama and plays to ‘break their fatalism’; another variation would be to use traditional folk melodies to explain the War of Resistance and national reconstruction. Wall newspapers and cartoons could also be used: even though many women were illiterate, children should be educated and pass on knowledge to their parents. When lectures were held, women should be firmly encouraged to ask questions. Various other roles were posited to make the war effort more inclusive of women, although such efforts seemed largely to fit into a state agenda rather than empowering women in their own right: for instance, they were to be trained to nurse wounded soldiers, and to be encouraged to make clothes and then go to hospital to give them to soldiers sent there, a process that would enable women to ‘understand the war’. These women would then be asked to ‘give a talk on their return [to the village], so that they can widen their domestic viewpoint to a national one’.Footnote 72 In later years, the government would make greater efforts to include aspects of women's lives in their social programmes, for instance, through the promotion of public health initiatives.Footnote 73 Although it was the CCP which would make the greatest strides in changing traditional gender roles, the Nationalists were also aware of the need to change those roles and were active in trying to alter them.
Conclusion
Very early on in the war, the Nationalists’ propagandists created a narrative that was propagated both domestically and internationally: that the Chinese state and society were simultaneously retreating and resisting in the face of a cruel invader. In the post-war years, that narrative came in for severe criticism: the ultimate defeat of the Nationalists, and their unimpressive record in the years immediately preceding the CCP's victory in 1949, meant that there were few supporters to plead their cause. Yet archival evidence shows ever more clearly that the Nationalists did understand the nature of their task. The phrase ‘War of Resistance and national reconstruction’ (Kangzhan jianguo) summed up their hunger to make use of the disastrous destruction of the war for some greater purpose which would fit into the narrative of the revolutionary state. (Indeed, the choice of ‘national reconstruction’ as one of the slogans of Wang Jingwei's rival collaborationist Nationalist regime from 1940 shows the power of the term, even though it was combined with the idea of ‘peace’ (heping) rather than a ‘war of resistance’.) Furthermore, the record shows considerable success in some areas. Although refugee provision was never sufficient, structures, in particular modes of classification, were created that married modern governance with techniques drawn from more traditional civil society organizations. Propaganda did penetrate outside the major cities into rural areas. In some ways, the dilemmas faced by the government in Chongqing were entirely recognizable in the experience of the other wartime powers. Of the major Allied belligerents, the Republic of China was by far the least well-equipped to deal with the demands for social change and justice that arose in all the Allied states as part of their bargain with their own societies in exchange for victory. Yet that should not obscure the similarity in goals: reconstruction of the state after war was common to the major powers that fought in World War II.
One necessary point of comparison is, inevitably, with the CCP. Although the new emphasis on the Nationalist role in wartime is a much-needed shift of attention from the previous heavy concentration on the CCP, it would be an unwelcome irony if emphasis moved completely away from the crucial role of the Communists during the wartime period. For while the CCP was not a major factor in Sichuan, Mao's base area with its capital at Yan'an was equally a site of state-building in the face of Japanese aggression. There were many obvious points of difference; rural and impoverished Shaanxi was a different terrain from lush Sichuan. Other factors which affected Sichuan, such as the need to cope with massive refugee flight and constant aerial bombing, were less important (although still present) in Yan'an. Yet overall the Communists provided the most important point of comparison, and competition, when it came to the idea of ‘national reconstruction’. They too wished to use the war as a vehicle to reshape China, and employed revolutionary credentials to do so.
However, in the end, the Nationalist efforts were made distinct from those of the CCP by their desire to use a particular definition of shared citizenship as their point of reference. The use of classification was not supposed to create sharply differentiated categories, in the way that the class distinctions between poor and rich peasants did for the CCP. Instead the Nationalists sought to downplay class differences, along with ethnic and geographical ones, in favour of a shared status that was defined by opposition to the Japanese invasion. This much, of course, has been known for many years, but it has generally been painted as an insipid alternative to the revolutionary overturning of society that was immanent in the CCP's ultimate project. However, the Nationalist model of reconstruction was also self-declaredly revolutionary, completing the unfinished business of 1911. The world that the CCP created after 1949 was also an inheritor of the wartime state run by the Nationalists, and it was against Nationalist efforts that the CCP defined itself. Even in today's China, issues such as the fraught relationship between the party, the state, and quasi-civil society (NGOs) bear many similarities to the problems faced by the Nationalists during the war.
In its determination to make use of the exigencies of wartime to create its own vision of a reinvented society in which vehicles as varied as welfare relief, conscription, and public propaganda would all play a role, the efforts of China's first party-state government in wartime should be examined more closely not just as a failed attempt to cope with horrific crisis, but as a serious attempt to rethink the meaning of Chinese modernity and citizenship, with dilemmas that remain relevant in the present day.
