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Wuhan, 1938
During the spring of 1938, a flood of Chinese refugees displaced by the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) converged on the central Yangzi valley tricity complex of Wuhan. For ten remarkable months, in a highly charged atmosphere of carnage, heroism, and desperation, Wuhan held out against the Japanese in what would become a turning point in the war—and one that attracted international attention. Stephen MacKinnon for the first time tells the full story of Wuhan's defense and fall, and how the siege's aftermath led to new directions in the history of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.
eBook
Scars of war : the impact of warfare on modern China
Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of this original hisotry is on the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country.
eBook
WUHAN’S REFUGEE CRISIS
ALTHOUGH THE AMERICAN EYEWITNESSES Anna Lee Jacoby and Theodore White exaggerated the lack of existing records, they were essentially correct in saying that the movement of peoples and the creation of refugee societies all over China’s hinterland are among the great untold stories of the Anti-Japanese War. InThunder Out of China(1946), they wrote:
Through the long months of 1938, as the Chinese armies were pressed slowly back toward the interior, they found their way clogged by moving people. The breathing space of winter had given hundreds of thousands time to make their decision, and China was on the
Book Chapter
WUHAN BEFORE THE WAR
LINKED ONLY BY FERRY CROSSINGS over hundreds of yards of treacherous river, each of Wuhan’s three cities—Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankou—had a distinct identity and history. The relationship between the communities was often tense, aggravated perhaps by the infamously bad weather—hot and steamy in the summer, cold and clammy in the winter. Yet the metropolis we now call Wuhan dominated the economic and political life of the central Yangzi River region for well over a millennium.
Twentieth-century Wuhan’s economic center was the bustling port of Hankou, whose pursuit of Western-style commercial and cultural modernity rose to a new
Book Chapter
CULTURE AND THE PRESS
IN 1938 NEARLY ALL of China’s important intellectuals descended on Wuhan. In a movement that was independent of any one party or state controlled entity, writers, dramatists, artists, and philosophers, as well as editors and journalists, began organizing cultural propaganda that would whip up maximum support for the defense of Wuhan among the urban and rural populations of the central Yangzi.
Since the 1980s scholars like Li Zehou, Feng Chongyi, Edward Gunn, and Vera Schwarcz have argued that the Anti-Japanese War was a cultural disaster, bringing a sudden end to the liberalizing renaissance inaugurated by the May Fourth Movement of 1919.¹
Book Chapter
ROMANTIC HANKOU
THE YEAR OF 1938 WAS pivotal internationally—a time when most of the news in the Western press was ominously grim: the failing defense and factional infighting at Madrid, concessions to Hitler by the major powers at Munich, and Stalin’s bloody purge of Soviet leaders and intellectuals. For this reason perhaps, the heroics of the defense of Wuhan seemed to sparkle by contrast, attracting more attention from Western governments and press than the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 or the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937. No tribute was more eloquent than the poetry and prose sent home by two
Book Chapter
MOBILIZING YOUTH
OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND student refugees passed through Wuhan in early 1938. The streets of the tricity throbbed with the energy of their patriotic speeches and wall posters. As the young journalist Israel Epstein wrote, “The sober commercial city of Hankou began to wear a different aspect. . . . On its walls were countless posters, wall newspapers, and proclamations. Daily they changed, reflecting events in China and in the world. The walls of Hankou were the platform of the people. . . . When the Chinese air force won a victory vivid placards announced the fact. When Hitler spoke
Book Chapter