Displacement, Place, and the Experience of the Long War in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959
Rebecca Nedostup [email protected]
Bio: Rebecca Nedostup is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, and a Shelby Cullom Davis Fellow at Princeton University for 2014-15. She is the author of Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), and several articles on the reinvention of Chinese religion in the modern era; ritual and politics; and the relationship between national cultural policy and local social dynamics and conceptual and literal landscapes. She is co-organizer of the collaborative project "The Social Lives of Dead Bodies in Modern China", and is writing the monograph Living and Dying in the Long War: Tales of Displacement in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959. The paper she is presenting at the colloquium is an exploration of some of the underpinning concepts of that book, drawing on material from several chapters.
Abstract:
How can we understand the experience of prolonged civilian mobilization for wartime footing across multiple, overlapping conflicts? How do longstanding patterns of displacement change with the rise of total war? The severe social upheaval in China and Taiwan during the “long war” connecting the Second Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil Wars and the tense early Cold War period is still making its way into the global history of twentieth century conflict, but it offers some insight into these ongoing issues. In terms of displacement (which at times involved up to one quarter of the population), part of the explanation lies in the politics that narrowly defined the “refugee” in China and globally, a classification that included strategic utility as well as philanthropic care. More pervasively, the period 1937-1959 was one in which demobilization for civilians in China and Taiwan was perpetually postponed, creating conditions of emergency and uncertainty even amid attempts to raise prosperity and rebuild community.
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At its most elemental, this paper aims to bring forth two ideas for discussion, with the conviction that they can only be examined and developed as part of a collective effort. The first is that the long-term effects of military mobilization and action on the civilian populations of
China and Taiwan is a topic that deserves concerted scholarly attention. The second is that in order to accomplish this, it often helpful as an intellectual exercise and also as a matter of research strategy that historians experiment with periodizations that push beyond the boundaries of conflicts as determined by nation-states, treaty signatories, regional armies, or other “official” combatants. Since the participants (human, animal, environmental) in twentieth century history often experienced multiple conflicts, considering discrete encounters (the
Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, the Cold War, or earlier militarist wars) in isolation – however felicitous to the researcher, and necessary as a stepping stone -- runs the danger of obscuring important through-lines of human experience. To take a step back and consider a bigger picture, on the other hand, poses risks as well, Many of these will be apparent in the paper that follows, which places together disparate empirical examples extracted from the detailed local contexts in which they will appear in a monograph. This is done in the hopes of beginning to limn a greater whole, and to open up fruitful lines of conversation with colleagues in other fields where – frankly – the experiences of total war, postwar, and prolonged war have been theorized more extensively than they have in the modern China field, driven as it has been by frameworks of revolution and modernity.
That conflict is malleable and continuous is in part very much an idea abetted by our current age, a possibility that Mary Dudziak takes up for the twentieth century American experience in her 2012 book War Time.1 One wonders whether the case of the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – namely, the gradual encroachment of the technologies and impact of a constant state of war that is distant from some lives but entirely influential on others, in disproportionate ways – is not in some ways a case of the American case coming to resemble more closely one version of a range of situations that already prevailed in many parts of the globe. Indeed, one of the vexing problems in thinking through the relationship between cases outside of Europe and North American and the suggestive theory of the “state of exception” that suspends law in times of declared and undeclared war, civil war
1 Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford, 2012).
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 2 most particularly, is the overlapping layer of anti-imperialism, decolonization, and self- determination that characterizes many such conflicts. Thus the state of exception might coexist with state-building, constitutionalism, local self-government, and dictatorship – this was very much the case in 1940s China.2 In struggles of national self-determination – which underneath their civil conflict, the Nationalists and Communists were mutually engaged in, along with millions of fellow citizens with other affiliations or none at all – the distinction between public and private that Agamben so prizes as a mark of law often evaporates. The challenge for the historian is to discern where the willing blending of public and private life in an age of violent struggle ended, and the excessive demands of state mobilization began. Part of that task is to determine the rhythms of war amid everyday life.
In her recent book The Gender of Memory, Gail Hershatter offers two considerations that may aid us here. One is her remarking on the frequency of warfare as a catalyst in the lives of the northern Chinese women she studies: as a determinant of living place, food supply, and general security, and of course as a shaper of family structure and personal politics. The other is her observation on the nature of time as lived by her interviewees: in addition to being shaped by family and community milestones and the cycles of the rural and ritual everyday, a new influence emerged in the form of political mobilization, resulting in what Hershatter calls
“campaign time”. As CCP political campaigns intensified in the countryside during the 1950s and 1960s, the most important of these emerged as markers of the passage of time and – importantly -- as shapers of personal as well as collective memory.3
2 This does not seem incompatible with Agamben’s articulation of the state of exception, which he is careful to point out “is not a dictatorship (whether constitutional or unconstitutional, commissarial or sovereign), but a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all determinations – above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated.” State of Exception, 50. 3 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 3 In a related but slightly different vein, I want to consider how conflict shapes time and experience for people in many parts of China and Taiwan during many parts of the twentieth century. In particular, I find it useful to think of the period 1937-1959 – comprising the Second
Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the “hottest” part of the Cold War between
China and Taiwan, concluding with the aftermath of Second Taiwan Strait Crisis – as a “long war”.4 My interest is in displaced persons, with a focus on communities in Jiangsu, Sichuan and
Taiwan. I look at how displaced people became emplaced – through politicization, through land and shelter, and through burial. This era did bring death and especially displacement in unprecedented numbers. The civil conflict generated its own refugees, a matter which, aside from the flight to Taiwan or other destinations, scholars have barely been able to grasp in its entirety. Part of the difficulty stems from the availability and clustering of sources. Moreover, the same patriotic and humanitarian appeal that allowed Chinese refugees of the anti-Japanese war to grip the popular imagination worldwide in their time also makes them of great interest to scholars now. The narratives of civil and Cold war refugees, by contrast, are precisely clouded by politics of the wrong sort (albeit in the final analysis no less complex.) Even the strongly emerging reevaluation of early PRC history, for example, continues to center on frameworks of revolution (even insofar as studies deconstruct the concept), which diminishes the possibilities of framing the late 1940s as a period of civil war, and engaging in active comparisons with the vibrant field of postwar Taiwan history.
When one starts from a topic such as displacement, however, the picture changes somewhat. Examining both the developing political and social rhetoric surrounding refugees, and the schema for settling them, the putative division between the wars becomes less apparent.
4 I conclude my study in 1959 in recognition of the decisive shifts in ROC military policy toward the PRC that took place that year in the aftermath of the Second Strait Crisis: for my purposes, most notably a completion of the loosening of restrictions on marriage and settlement for military personnel that had begun in 1955, and which signaled not only an abandonment of the idea of “retaking the mainland”, but a turning point in relations between “mainlanders” and Taiwanese.
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 4 Rather, the heavy politicization of the refugee and the movement and deployment of displaced persons not simply for the purposes of relief but for the strategic ends of state-building, militarization and expansion is clear from the first stages of the Japan conflict, if not earlier.
Of course this notional “long war” connects various conflicts of differing nature, but from the point of view of the displaced certain experiences recur throughout. In particular, new patterns of long-distance displacement and mechanisms of total and political warfare arise to intermix with older, still extant patterns of short-term, short-distance flight. The new distances, boundaries, citizenship regimes and eventually borders that develop around the former increasingly challenge the ability of private citizens to maintain control over their own bodies and matters such as the burial of their lost family members and associates. At the same time, political authorities including the Nationalist and Wang Jingwei governments recognized the importance of asserting such control themselves. Thus personal, familial and local movements take place against a background in which the “refugee” is increasingly mediated not simply as a recipient of aid, but as a political and cultural trope, and a planning mechanism.
Recent scholarship has taken a fresh look at the political mobilization of civilians undertaken during the Second Sino-Japanese War as part of the engagement with total warfare:
Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally catalogues many such instances, and work by Nicole Barnes,
Wendy Fu, Colette Plum, and Helen Schneider, among others firmly link aid work with morale efforts. Such research, concentrating on the Nationalist-held areas, complements the detailed earlier work of scholars such as Chen Yung-fa on the role of the war in local mobilization in
Communist base areas.
In researching the problem of displaced persons, I find that just as the problem of displacement itself continues after 1945 – sometimes repeating older patterns, sometimes with sudden new challenges (such as the evacuation to Taiwan) – the tools used to mobilize citizens
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 5 around the challenge of displacement continue to be redeployed. The Nationalist government and military structure began to draft fairly clear-cut plans to demobilize its armed forces as early as June 1945. Though these ran into occasional funding problems and incidents of rough social reintegration, they did draw a firm strategic as well as ideological line concluding the deployment of key military personnel. A similar, somewhat rougher, process was undertaken in
Taiwan in the mid-1950s.5 The analogous efforts to “demobilize” ordinary civilians are missing.
In fact, the demands of politicized warfare meant that the very opposite was true: residents of important areas in the civil conflict (such as Jiangsu) experienced not only continued displacement and violence, but also intensified political warfare. Despite the passage of a postwar constitution, the democratic crisis of 1947 that helped to bring down the Nationalist government was generated by its insistence on the use of wartime powers to counteract the
Communists. For example, new general mobilization orders in July 1947, the Nationalists insisted with no apparent sense of irony, were the only way to carry out “peaceful national reconstruction.”6 On Taiwan, the politicized violence of the February 28th incident in 1947 and the subsequent declaration of martial law deferred the possibility of a deliberate “postwar” social policy on the order of that seen in Europe and the United States. Economic restructuring was not accompanied by military de-escalation or “peacetime” education, but rather by political policing and a state of emergency7. In the PRC conflict time merged with campaign time in ways that have yet to be thoroughly understood, though clearly the Korean War played a key transitional role. The situation resembled that of the Korean peninsula and Indian subcontinent
5 Academia Sinica files on demobilization, 1945-1947. There were accompanying measures to demobilize civil servants and special police forces. See also Neil J. Diamant, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007.
6 Central Daily News (Zhongyang ribao), quoted in China Weekly Review, 12 July 1947, 179. 7 Michael Szonyi very effectively explores the role of emergency in the condition of Jinmen under the KMT (Cold War Island), but it plays out in broader ways across the “main island” of Taiwan as well – and might be worth exploring for Cold War era PRC.
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 6 during the same period far more than it did the US or western Europe, or for that matter Japan.
In order to illustrate these points in concrete terms I will give three examples of the politicization of displacement during the period I am terming the “long war”: plans for rural resettlement of refugees; competing moral and physical claims for the wartime dead in its aftermath; and a small case illustrating the social effects of continued mobilization in 1950s
Taiwan. At this point it is important to note that despite my use of terms like “refugee” or
“displaced person” to indicate the civilian populations pushed into transit by wartime violence
(as well as their comrades moving in and out of military status), Chinese terms for such persons are hardly fixed, either in the contemporary documents or in later scholarship. As Rana Mitter and Timothy Brook have shown, schemes of classification became central to the wartime programs of the Nationalists and the collaborationist governments, not simply for managing the flow of people but for maintaining a footing of total, political warfare.8 Nanmin ,
“refugee” -- literally person under distress, duress or difficulty – was the term of public art applied most often to the displaced by this period, whether their flight originated in wartime fears or the deprivation of natural and economic disaster. Yet this was a collective term, not always self-applied. “Drifting” (liu ) emerged as a common trope of self-description, an unmooring that in some contexts could take on moralistic overtones. Editing the 1948 edition
8 Mitter, “Classifying Citizens”; Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard 2005). Regarding the notion of total war during this period, Neil Diamant argues that during this time period China experienced “limited” rather than “total war”, primarily based on the extent of territory encompassed and percentage of the population mobilized (“Conspicuous Silence: Veterans and the Depoliticization of War Memory in China” Modern Asian Studies 45:2 (2011) 431-61). Such a view is key to his explanation for why veterans have been systematically undervalued in postwar China. Yet viewed from another angle that takes into account the concept of war and its place in the politico-cultural system of the time, the concept of total war applies. Writers in and outside of government addressed it as such (quanmian zhanzheng ) when discussing the issue of refugees, for instance – both how they came to be in their situation, and how their problems might be redressed. The mindset of total war explains the sometimes blurred roles between civilian and military – a trend seen before the Japanese invasion in the militarized culture of the New Life movement, and with antecedents traceable back to the earliest waves of late Qing reforms. Indeed, it may be this kind of blurring that resulted in a contradictory and alternating valorization of the military in some respects and devaluing of veterans – especially footsoldiers – in others that Diamant sees (and indeed, also occurred in Taiwan despite the stronger veteran organizations there.)
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 7 of the Ding lineage’s genealogy in Danyang county, Jiangsu (the 13th edition and first one since an equally significant post-Taiping revision), 37th generation descendant Shao Zengsheng linked physical drifting to a loss of lineage order and morality. After the area fell to the
Japanese, he wrote, there were no keepers of the genealogy left in the town, and those in the country had no means of withdrawal: “fear and hate in people’s minds spurred a disorderly drift to the interior [ ] and the links to family and ritual were almost severed for good.”9
The postwar concern with family and lineage reunion as a reestablishment of moral order is found throughout dozens of Jiangnan genealogies that received new editions in the years 1946-
49. In almost every case, the prior edition had been undertaken in the aftermath of the Taiping
Rebellion.
But liu, liuli ( ) and liuli shisuo ( , which adds the sense of wandering about, lost) recurred in other contexts and from other writers.10 It was not until much later that a postwar global migration and geopolitical context would reconfigure these terms as possible approximations of diaspora (along with liusan ) and displacement, respectively, translations which still have not firmed their hold in common usage. The difference between drifting (or simply moving, being deployed, being drafted) and receiving refugee status certainly had a political valence in the 1930s and 1940s, though, if not one quite yet obviously connected to these global movements to come. So many who moved were not classified as nanmin – government officials and their families, soldiers (even though the life of the draftee and even the officer often intermingled with refugee status) – despite similarities in circumstances caused by the conditions of travel and housing. This disparity and its political origins became even more glaring with the Nationalist flight to Taiwan in 1949, during which time no one was quite
9 Danyang dongmen Ding shi zupu ershiliu juan (1948), preface 1, 1b. 10 See the round up of contemporary accounts of refugee experiences in Lary, 56-59.
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 8 classified as a nanmin (at least so the archival records would tell us.) Meanwhile the displaced themselves sought to control the nomenclature, demanding to be addressed as “righteous people” ( ) or reclaiming the value of nanmin for their own uses. One is put in mind of Janet
Chen’s argument about the pathologizing of indigence as one of the building blocks of the modern Chinese state; if suddenly everyone is rendered indigent at some level (if one accepts
Diana Lary’s arguments about the social leveling effect of war), or at least cast adrift, then the distinctions of authority can be maintained by selectively applying the label “refugee”, directing that sign of weakness away from the sources of political and social power.11
Yet by the same token the refugee could be made more pitiable and more valuable a political asset by slight shifts in nomenclature. In civil war Jiangsu, the provincial government began to describe as “refugee comrades” (nanbao ,; perhaps the more accurate translation is
“our brothers and sisters in distress”) the people who were forced to flee from the north to the south of the province by a combination of the advances of the PLA and postwar economic deprivation. This continued a politicization of the local population that had already taken place during the registration and certification processes of the Japanese collaborationist governments, systems echoed by the Nationalists and Communists alike in their wartime strongholds.12 The term nanbao was used in the region as early as the post-Taiping reconstruction.13In the immediate context of the 1940s, it appears as a term of politicized philanthropy among Jiangsu natives in Chongqing. In one case the “brothers and sisters” are those fellow provincials and especially displaced Anhui and Henan natives in the remoter areas of Guangxi, Yunnan and
Guangdong. Seeing that such persons fell further down the socioeconomic scale than their
11 Chen “Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953 (Princeton University Press, 2012), and “Will the Real Refugees Please Stand Up?”; Lary, 32-40; Liu, 228 12 Their potential militarization was also considered on an overt level; in October 1946 the general Bai Chongxi forwarded to the central government a request from “upper register refugees” to arm themselves for their return to their homes in the north. The request was passed on to the Ministry of Defense and the Shanxi provincial government. October 25, 1946, Executive Yuan archives. Academia Historica, 062:020. 13 Wooldridge, Late Imperial China…
Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 9 relatively stable urban position, members of the Jiangsu-in-Chongqing Native Place
Association initiated various schemes (including opera performances) to raise money for their repatriation in 1946, but also insisted on raising awareness of their plight before the central government. Their use of “comrades in difficulty” or “refugee comrades” thus emphasized the moral obligation that came with local ties as well as the human recognition of fellow suffering.
Thus we can see a trajectory in which nanbao shifted from a term of fellow-provincial (or fellow-neighbor) moral networking along lines familiar in Chinese history, to one overlaid with the timbre of party-political civil war.
The final morphing was one where these meanings, still in mutual action, found themselves operating in the arena of Cold War internationalization. On Taiwan, the term was revived and selectively applied to only the most contested and politically useful of the some 1.6 million Nationalist displaced. Sometimes it was further refined into “loyal comrades” (yibao