Parks M. Coble's illuminating China's War Reporters is anchored in two voluminous bodies of literature: journalism produced during China's War of Resistance against Japan, and academic and popular writing as well as other media production about the war produced in the post-Mao era. Through this arrangement, the war-era reporters associated with the National Salvation Movement, the best known of whom were Fan Changjiang, Zou Taofen and Jin Zhonghua, get double billing, for Coble is interested both in their writings in their original historical context and in the reintroduction and repurposing of those same journalists’ voices in the entirely new context of the reform era. The result is a subtle, thought-provoking work that sheds light on the way the Communist Party's insistence on upholding a dominant and exclusive narrative on modern Chinese history has hampered the development of a well-rounded understanding of the conflict.
The first part of the book traces the phases that the Salvationist writers progressed through during the war years. At the start, they were almost euphoric that the war had commenced. Finally China was standing up to Japan. Their job, as they saw it, was to mobilize the Chinese people in a united stand against the enemy. They calibrated their reporting to inspire their compatriots to have faith in, and sacrifice on behalf of, China's cause. But of course the war did not go well; Japan's military was too powerful, and Chinese peasants lacked the sense of nationalism that might have made them a more effective opponent for the Japanese. What is more, the Nationalist Party, afraid of popular mobilization, failed to mount a full propaganda effort in the name of organizing the Chinese countryside. This, Coble argues, made it impossible for China to fight a “total war.”
The Salvationists responded to China's defeats by stressing the need for unity, but that effectively broke down after the New Fourth Army Incident of 1941. Thereafter, facing heavy censorship and the threat of arrest in both occupied and free China, intellectual rectification in Yan'an, and Japan's unstoppable military, Salvationist writers and journalists were forced on the run, their early optimism and sense of mission giving way to dislocation, depression, and silence.
In the book's final chapters, Coble extends the historical importance of the war reporter story up to the present through discussions of the Salvationists’ sad personal fates under Mao, as well as the complex legacy of their wartime patriotism in the later period of reform. Following Japan's surrender and the Communist revolution, the Salvationists, who mostly had strongly leftist leanings, by all rights should have been celebrated for their wartime role. Instead, the memory of their activism was closed off by a regime whose hegemonic historical narrative sidelined the hugely impactful war experience in favor of a totalistic emphasis on revolution and the heroic role of the Communist Party. There was little room for public memory of the suffering and division that China experienced in wartime. Even more cruelly, given the Salvationists’ desire to bridge the gap between the Nationalists and the Communists during the war, and the fact that most of them spent much of the war outside China or in free China, rather than in Communist-controlled areas, they became prime targets during the anti-rightist movements of the Mao period. Broken lives and suicides, including Fan Changjiang's of 1970, were the not-unexpected result.
Only in the post-Mao period, especially after 1989 when the Communist Party found it politically expedient to cultivate nationalism as the dominant ideology, did the Salvationists’ patriotic wartime writings become useful to the ruling authority. In that context, the Mao-era verdicts against them were overturned and the long-forgotten wartime reporters were dusted off and ushered into public memory. Their writings were republished, and commemorative volumes and academic studies followed as part of the greater tidal wave of remembrance of the War of Resistance, which is now narratively configured as the final, horrific chapter before the Communist Party brought an end to China's “century of humiliation.”
As Coble explains, however, even at this moment of long-overdue glory the Salvationists’ place in public memory is carefully managed. To be sure, their early wartime patriotic effort to rally the nation is now officially deemed worthy of celebration. At the same time, however, in its bid to stoke nationalist sentiment and the people's belief in its indispensability to China's ongoing development, the Communist Party has encouraged the digging up of the tragic details of the war and ongoing very public discussion of them—details that the Salvationists downplayed in an attempt to maintain the people's morale. Coble's skillful meditation on the story of the war reporters and their afterlife reminds us just how much politics have distorted China's ability to come to terms with the nuances and full complexity of the War of Resistance.
