The Sino-Japanese War on the Night of 7 July 1937, While

CHAPTER FOUR THE Sino-JapaneSE WAR On the night of 7 July 1937, while Japanese troops were engaging in mili- tary manoeuvres outside the historic fortress town of Wanping, southwest of Beijing, one among their number failed to report for muster at the end of the exercise. His regimental commander, Mutaguchi Renya, tele- phoned the Chinese garrison commander of the town, Ji Xingwen, and requested that his troops be allowed to enter the town to conduct a search for the missing soldier. Ji refused on the basis that such an act would be a violation of Chinese sovereignty, but compromised by allowing two Japanese officers to oversee Chinese troops carrying out the unsuccessful search for the missing soldier. Convinced that the missing soldier was in fact being held prisoner by the garrison, Mutaguchi gave the order for the Japanese troops in the area began firing on the town at 5 am the following morning, and ordered his men to seize a crucial crossing that the fortress was designed to protect. This bridge—the Lugouqiao, otherwise known as the Marco Polo Bridge because it had been the subject of detailed descrip- tion by the Venetian explorer in The Travels of Marco Polo—became the focal point of a bitter struggle that would escalate into a Sino-Japanese war spanning nearly eight years, ending only with Japan’s surrender to the Allies in 1945. The story of the early phase of the Sino-Japanese War was one of spir- ited yet ineffective defence, followed by disorderly retreat on the part of Chinese troops. What began as a skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge soon developed into a full-scale Japanese offensive, against which Nationalist forces were unable to withstand. Beijing fell within a month to advancing Japanese forces, as did the key port city of Tianjin. By November, Shanghai had been seized. The capital, Nanjing, would follow before Christmas, pre- cipitating one of the most horrific events of the Second World War—the massacre of an estimated three hundred thousand civilians and prisoners- of-war by the Japanese. From the commencement of hostilities, the KMT government found that it could draw on the patriotism of a vast, international diaspora that numbered in the tens of millions. While some of those of Chinese descent living abroad, particularly those that had assimilated to their local 58 chapter four communities over centuries, identified more strongly with other political and cultural centres, the majority of Chinese overseas who had emi- grated did so from around the start of the twentieth century onwards, and tended to harbour deep, continuing interest in political events in China. These were the Chinese who would form associations so as to bring to bear on the war effort, with a level of coordination that was astonishing in scope, the myriad of skills and the resources they possessed. The Sino-Japanese War was, therefore, not just a war contained geo- graphically within China. Instead, once the opening salvos were delivered China’s diaspora was at war as well, despite the fact that the colonies and countries they resided in were not involved in the conflict, transforming it into a global conflict in its own right. As we shall see, while there was a global response among Chinese residing overseas, in terms of the scale of monetary and labour contributions the diaspora’s response was argu- ably most apparent in Malaya (and the Nanyang region more broadly), where the largest concentration of overseas Chinese resided. Thousands would volunteer to go to war in support of a political centre that they identified with. Even greater numbers were involved in forming a com- prehensive support network to enable the war service of volunteers, who became known as the Nanyang ji gong. The story of those who travelled to the Burma Road as truck drivers, mechanics, and labourers allows us to understand that they were merely the most visible members of a larger community who saw themselves at war from July 1937 onwards, rather than concerned but nevertheless removed observers who were ready to be reinvented as part of a separate post- colonial nation, as they have since been portrayed in national remembrance. The China Diaspora at War Chinese immigrants across the world who identified politically with China were unsurprisingly involved in public displays of patriotism and support in the war against Japan. Communities of Chinese had formed across Europe as thousands of coolies who had recruited by the Allies to work on the Western Front during the First World War settled across the continent once the Great War came to an end. Some remained in France and northern Europe, but many made their way to Britain. Collectively, they formed the basis of a pan-European diaspora that was still for the most part distinctly oriented towards China. This patriotic network cen- tred on the Chinese of Britain (numerically the largest group in Europe), .

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