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

), a term applied to the great diaspora of avowed or assumed ROC citizens and KMT loyalists, whether in Thailand, Burma, or Hong Kong awaiting (re?)patriation to Taiwan, or transported there suddenly from offshore islands such as the Dachen group. Thus, gradually and through interaction with both domestic warfare and national politics and larger geopolitical postwar processes of partition, de- and recolonization and boundary-drawing, the politicization of refugees in China and Taiwan became internationalized.14

Land and “home”

14 Ironically, the effects of civil conflict on the politicization of refugees have probably been better studied outside of China and Taiwan than in, at least insofar as the extent to which Cold War politics affected diasporic communities in the United States and elsewhere. See, for example, Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), chapter 5, as well as the introduction by Madeleine Y. Hsu. Hsu’s current research on postwar migration from China and Taiwan explores the ramifications for United States society and immigration policy of the international and US domestic politicization of refugees. A recent effort to theorize the integration of Taiwan’s 1949 migrants into the larger history of Chinese diaspora is Dominic Meng- Hsuan Yang and Mau-Kuei Chang, “Understanding the Nuances of Waishengren: History and Agency”, China Perspectives 2010/3 http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/5310.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 10 The trajectory of politicized rhetoric surrounding refugees seemed to be one of gradual narrowing, or at least one where the ever louder claims of the party states drowned out the rising and falling opposition from various refugee positions themselves, such that something of a historical reclamation project is now necessary. Perhaps the surface appearance of rhetorical narrowing lies in exact inverse proportion to the problems state and even private planners faced with managing land reclamation (kenzhi ) schemes for the rural resettlement of displaced persons. It should be emphasized that these were not proposed and used only for rural refugees who were originally farmers. These began as surprisingly utopian, given the circumstances; their development, less surprisingly, posed challenges to government control.

For state-building entities in wartime such as the Nationalist government in Chongqing, the

Sino-Japanese occupation regimes, and the Communist base area governments, the broadest notion of displacement stretched well beyond groups of scattered persons seeking refuge from the depredations of warfare. Each side sought to retain and move economic, governmental, cultural and personnel resources for immediate tactical survival and long-term strategic victory.

Viewed in this light, it is may be hardly surprising that these combatants similarly viewed emergently displaced persons as potential resources in political-military strategy. For instance, in 1938, when the KMT government was still based in Wuhan, its members started revising the “Plan for Executing Refugee Settlements” Nanmin kenzhi shishi dagang

(1938-1941).15 This adapted a plan put forward ten years earlier at the beginning of the

Nanjing Nationalist regime to locate fallow land in the near northwest “border” region

(primarily Chahar and other parts of present-day inner Mongolia) for the resettlement of rural disaster victims from China proper. Now, in the view of members of the national government,

15 File of March-June, 1938, National Government Office of the President archives 270-0925, p1039-1065; Judicial Yuan ruling 216, March 3, 1941, Judicial Ministry for the Executive archives 154; Academia Historica, Taiwan. On October 4, 1938, the revised and replaced the original prewar measure.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 11 the scheme showed promise for placing war refugees in the previously politically and militarily unstable inland areas into which KMT forces were now moving: Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, and so on. They admitted problems that had arisen in the early experiments would have to be addressed – for instance, the accurate determination of fallow, therefore available land in an area newly under Nationalist control, and hence the necessity of cooperating with local elites in bringing the scheme to reality.

The Chongqing-based government continued to pursue and refine this plan during the first three years of the war. Lu Liu notes that large-scale surveys of the western regions were carried out in order to determine eligible sites, which were determined to be some 12 million acres in total, even though the percentage of refugees who were farmers remained quite small.16

In addition, it as well as sympathetic intellectuals further developed a wide variety of methods for utilizing wartime necessity as a means of integrating the “border regions” into the national polity.17 Indeed, the idea of turning refugees into “cultivators” – or more broadly translated,

“settlers” – had widespread currency during the early years of the war. As both the idealistic urban cultural elites and a substantial – though not overwhelming – portion of the rural population of the lower Yangzi region were displaced by Japanese invasion, charitable leaders as well as rural reformers were taken by the notion that refugee settlements could simultaneously address urgent problems of sustenance and housing of the displaced, but also contribute to productivity and the wartime economy by feeding the nation, and indeed, some suggested, by replenishing China’s very population.18 According to Tang Qiyu and Zhou

16 Liu, 276-77 (she cites the study of sociologist Sun Benben who found that in the end of 1939 only 2-3% of Sichuan refugees came from peasant backgrounds.) See also 272-3 for her overview of private plans based out of Shanghai and other eastern cities. 17 In addition to Liu’s study, see for example Muscolino and Andres Rodriguez, “Building the Nation, Serving the Frontier: Mobilizing and Reconstruction China’s Borderlands during the War of Resistance (1937-1945)” Modern Asian Studies 45:2 (2011), 345-376. 18 This last point is suggested by Tang Qiyu, whose Nanmin yu kenzhi [Refugees and settlement] (Jiangxi shengwu chu yeli er Zhong; Nanchang?: Jiangxi shengwu chu?, 1938) contributed to a small collection series on Jiangxi relief work. Tang noted that farmers constituted 7% of refugees coming through the Nanchang Refugee

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 12 Yongshu, two authors of handbooks on the settlement movement in Jiangxi province, in that location alone the first year of the war had drawn rural cultivation projects started by the central government; by official entities such as Zhejiang University; by preexisting charitable groups (for example the Huayang yizhen hui ) as well as local aid organizations created as a response to the war (e.g. Jiangsu nanmin kenzhi tuan .)

Apparently members of the Shanghai Dalushe () literary society also got the spirit to join in, although, Tang commented, their unfamiliarity with rural living led them to a rapid return to the city “to pursue their old dreams.”19 Yet those who sought to create a populist political movement out of the urban xiajiangren united with the rural refugee also saw value in the kenzhi ideal.20

Numerous other pamphlets, articles and plans emanated from Shanghai, Chongqing, and other outposts of wartime activism, but Tang and Zhou well sum up the ideological as well as pragmatic role of rural settlements. Actual farmers with real experience should be selected for such projects, Zhou remarked, since they would prove more reliable than neophyte urban refugees whose lives and desires were inherently less stable. Moreover, those living on the front will have “really felt the coercion of death and war,” and therefore make receptive targets for propaganda.21 This included not just wartime mobilization and patriotism, but a larger project of inducing citizens to be more receptive to moving their homes in the service of the

Center at that point of the war (October 1938), but argues that this could be a potent force if organized (2-3). Examples of similar efforts in wartime Sichuan, both public-private and governmental, are described in Nanchuan Jinfoshan kenzhi jihua shu [Plan for settlement at Jinfoshan, Nanchuan] (Nanchuan?: Nanchuan Jinfoshan kenzhi zhoubei weiyuan hui, 1938) and Sichuan dongnan bian Xi Xiu Qian Peng Shi wuxian kenzhi diaocha baogao shu [Investigation report on settlement in the five counties of Xi[yang] Xiu[shan] Qian[jiang] Peng[shui] and Shi[gui] on the southeast border of Sichuan] (1938?) 19 Tang Qiyu, 3; the more thorough accounting of local projects is found in Zhou Yongshu, Wo suo jiandao de nanmin yiken wenti [Problems of refugee transfer and settlement as I have observed them]. (Jiangxi shengwu chu yeli wu zhong; Nanchang?: Jiangxi shengwu chu?, 1938.), 20-1. 20 Wang Longzhang, Zhanzhi nanmin jiuji wenti [The problem of wartime refugee relief] (Chongqing: Duli, 1940), 114-16. 21 Zhou Yongshu, 25-28.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 13 nation. Zhou discussed how the organizers of settlements could provide practical incentives in order “to give farmers the courage to leave their land,” while Tang suggested a combination of rhetorical and punitive devices to keep settlers at their new destination. Not only should planners encourage farmers to resist nostalgia by thinking of the settlements as their “second home place”, he said, but they needed to warn them that they could have to refund the government’s cost outlays if they chose to return to their war-wracked homes.22 In August

1940 such a generalized ideal found expression in military policy: the Military Affairs

Commission announced that due to the Japanese strategy of closing off the occupied areas, any efforts to enable refugees to return to their homes must be ceased from that point forward.23

The significance of the idea that refugees could be resettled into areas more amenable to the economic and military planning of governments cannot be overstated, even while we must keep in mind that not all of these plans may have come to full fruition.24 On one level it will help historians understand the range of motivations for government (local as well as national and regional) schemes for moving and housing refugees, schemes that interacted with independent refugee movements and private relief and that may have originated in humanitarian and practical impulses, but hardly stopped there. Secondly, it sketches a longer historical trajectory in which refugees become agents and subjects of Chinese border-creation and state-building. The orientations of New Qing History (as well as a more pronounced tendency to incorporate military and migration history into the social and political history of the Ming and middle periods) have demonstrated that large-scale demographic change, trauma on a widespread scale, and periods and places of highly militarized culture are by no means

22 Tang Qiyu, 4; Zhou Yongshu 28. 23 Chongqing Municipal Government order, August 7, 1940, Chongqing Municipal Archives (hereafter CMA) 0015: 03586:0010:125 24 The CCP produced its own version of political arguments promoting the idea that refugees could contribute to productivity and not wallow in sorrow or nostalgia for homes left behind. One example is the Yan’an era pamphlet Nanmin laodong yingxiong Chen Chang’an [The refugee labor hero Chen Chang’an] (Zhonggong xibei zhongyang ju diaocha yanjiu shi, 1944)

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 14 innovations of the era of the nation-state. Thus the pertinent comparative questions seem to no longer be ones of kind (an allegedly “civil” imperial culture versus a militarized modernity) but ones of scale and range. The militarized aspects of Qing culture have been shown to be not simply an internal Manchu organizing tactic but a widespread element of ritual behavior that enabled territorial expansion as well as pacification efforts after major cataclysms.25 Are these

(including the late Qing rise of Western and Japanese military culture) mostly properly characterized as mechanisms of the elite, or are there some characteristics in them which are comparable to the coming developments of “total war”’ political-military mobilization of all segments of the population? Similarly, what resonances might exist between Qing planned migration and military colonies in the service of border expansion and internal control on the one hand, and the militarized refugee settlements of twentieth-century conflicts on the other?

Planners of such Republican-era schemes – it should be emphasized – were largely silent, for good political reason, on such precedent, just as they were silent on the Japanese colonial enterprise that was their goad.

In his work on the north China famine of 1920-21, Pierre Fuller addresses the rise of rural refugee settlements in the Manchurian domain of Zhang Zuolin, 26 a development which could conceivably be linked to the development of KMT “border policy” and the colonial contest with Japan that followed. Lu Liu remarks that wartime land reclamation projects imbued their imperial-era predecessors (both those stemming from dynastic expansion and charitable enterprise) with a new nationalist air.27 Further detailed exploration may turn up specific ways in which Republican policies took up Qing expansionist planning and modified

25 A very select few examples include: Joanna Waley-Cohen, The culture of war in China: empire and the military under the Qing Dynasty (IB Tauris, 2006), Chuck Wooldridge, “Transformations of ritual and state in nineteenth-century Nanjing” (PhD diss, Princeton, 2007), Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains (Stanford, 2013). 26 Pierre Fuller, "North China Famine Revisited: Unsung Native Relief in the Warlord Era, 1920-21." Modern Asian Studies Firstview, no. Firstview(2012) : 31. eScholarID:168288. 27 Liu 276.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 15 them for more purely civilian or mixed military-civilian colonies. Settlement policy yields many possible connections: the nationalist framework which interests Lu Liu; the ethnic integration planning that is the focus of Andres Rodriguez; the environmental destruction that is the focus of Micah Muscolino’s study. Here I am most interested in its connections to the militarization and politicization of the displaced, and the tension between “home” and the mobilized and mobile population of a wartime and postwar regime of citizens.

The resettlement of rural populations for military purposes has a direct model at the time, of course, and that could be found in the actions of the Japanese-controlled area in the north, especially in Manzhouguo. Thousands of “strategic hamlets” were created out of deliberately displaced farming households in order to counter and starve the resources of guerrilla resistance.28 The Chinese kenzhi planners lacked the centralized planning, resources and sheer gall to propose anything so comprehensive, of course, but the notion that refugee- colonists should be actively encouraged to separate permanently from their home place and sent to locales of both agronomic and strategic significance reflects similar lines of thinking.

Both Tang and Zhou agreed that a rough sort of eugenics should prevail in choosing colonists

(thus putting paid to any idea of rural settlements as direct aid), even to the point of separating families. Strong hands were needed to replenish the nation’s food baskets.

They were also needed, it was heavily implied, to establish order at its borders and in sparsely populated or “wild” (demographically if not ecologically) areas. A 1938 report investigating the suitability of five counties in southeastern Sichuan for kenzhi noted that the plans were ideal for repopulating a region that had been depleted by successive secret society actions (of the Badehui, the Divine Soldiers, and the Lianhuanghui). It would also be a way to quell tax revolts lingering from the previous summer. A kenzhi prospectus put out by the local

28 See Xie Xueshi, “The Organization and Grassroots Structure of the Manzhouguo Regime”, in China at War: Regions of China, 1937-1945(Stanford, 2007), 134-147.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 16 government in Nanchuan county basically argued the same for the Jinfoshan area: in this light, refugees meant resources as well as potential security. The very fact that local social- governmental entities in Sichuan sought out kenzhi grants and programs through such prospectuses (which were administrative reports polished with the zeal and salesmanship of real estate advertisements) speaks to the role of “resettlement” as active policies of resource generation and military expansion, not just “relief” reaction.29 Thus refugee programs can be seen as part of the larger process already noted by scholars of the political cultivation and military pacification of China’s hinterlands and non-Han areas.

More compelling evidence lies in the existence of at least ten limited liability corporations created during wartime for the purposes of land cultivation by displaced persons.

These were funded by bank loans, and party and government officials sat on their boards and were among their investors. The most ambitious of these was the China Wartime Construction

Cultivation Society (), which established farms in several locations in Mabian

county, receiving some 60 million yuan in loans to run an enterprise with a few thousand refugees. Though there is little evidence that these farms ended up turning the eventual profit that the corporation’s business plan promised, the notion that refugees could not only be self- supporting but revenue-generating is one that is not generally part of the larger philanthropic discourse of the time as usually described. Moreover, the presence of the farms was indeed accompanied by a shift in government and police power in the county: military-run anti-opium operations were extensive in 1943 and 1944, and the company became a new entity in mediating (and creating) friction between Han and non-Han people in the county.30

29 Sichuan dongnan…; Nanchuan.. 30 CMA 0060;0002;00503; 0107:0064:00378; 0298:0001:00494; 0296:0013:00011; 00296;0014; 00306. There were also several government funded model cultivation districts created for special populations (women refugees; wounded veterans, etc.)

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 17 The arguments of kenzhi planners that putting refugees on farms could help “settle” restive areas, however, conveniently overlooked the presence of remaining landholders, tenants, squatters or those with customary claims to local property. Sure enough, Zhou Yongshu’s account of his experience with kenzhi efforts – published only early in the war – is consumed with accounts of conflicts between new settlers and local residents. He makes it clear, however, that former bring with them the diktat (and paperwork) of the Nationalist authority, which in the short term at least prevailed.

In the postwar era, the ideology of wartime settlements and base areas continued as a mechanism of processing and politicizing the refugees of the civil conflict between the

Nationalists and the Communists. As security measures, they were both even more appealing and even less stable. Land reclamation plans were executed in late 1940s Jiangsu both to receive returnees from the interior and bear those escaping civil battle in the north of the province.31 Politicization and publicity began to outstrip realization, however. Janet Chen has described how rhetorical and material struggles developed in Shanghai between north Jiangsu refugees, possessed of a moral high ground due to their anti-Japanese credentials, and a city that soon tired of the obligation to house them. Further inland, the Nationalists were careful to exclude civil war refugees from the national capital, directing them instead to the provincial capital Zhenjiang and its environs. The government quickly came to regret its resettlement schemes now that they were so close to the seat of power. Most prosaically and probably more expressive of commonplace problems, the publicizing of reclamation schemes in local newspapers (even when they were for sandy riverside land in Zhenjiang) brought in petitions demanding the promised fields. This was two years after local officials had embarked on a laborious process to scour the area surrounding the provincial capital for unclaimed land, after

31 Archives of the Jiangsu Provincial Government Department of Social Services, June 1946—August 1948, Jiangsu Provincial Archives (hereafter JPA) 1009 200, p1513-1639.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 18 rejecting the cavalier claims from high-level leaders that the Jiangnan area – one of the most heavily cultivated regions in world history – had plenty of hilltops and such going unused.32

Evidence from Academia Historica files further shows that refugees’ access to un- or semi- cultivated land in Zhenjiang could conflict with promises made to settle veterans in the same areas.33

Such demands were especially problematic when they represented a second or even third wave of flight, as each repeated shift between 1946 and 1948 increased the likelihood that some removals might be permanent. The danger potential of refugee settlements was not simply perceived to be one of public order, though: one 1946 newspaper article thrilled with its accounts of Communist agents hiding amid the women and elderly flooding in from Subei in order to get access to the provincial capital (as well as strapping explosives to the hulls of their boats and sewing arms into the stomachs of livestock.)34

For Jiangsu refugees, then, one war quickly morphed into the next. The necessity of geographically stabilizing and therefore claiming political and moral rights to a displaced population became all the more urgent for the KMT and the CCP in Jiangsu between 1946 and

1948, a scenario that doubtless was reproduced in other areas around the country. Yet how much more difficult was that process made by the war that had just concluded, which meant that establishing authentic claim to a piece of land to be “cultivated” involved the concurrent process of decolonization (unnamed as such, but so all the same) and return and reabsorption of persons displaced during the previous decade?

Thus in civil conflict and all the more so in a Cold War environment, the necessity of settling and managing refugees as a bulwark against public danger emerged as a more insistent

32 Files related to kenzhi districts, Jiangsu Provincial Government and Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, June 1946, JPA 1016 1649; Communication to Director Niu of Social Affairs Office, June 7, 1948, JPA 1009 200, 1540-43. 33 Academia Historica demobilization files. 34 1946:18 p7.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 19 theme, even as it became more difficult. The ideal of politically vetting and circumscribing the identity of the refugees became even more appealing as well. Such policies bore fruit in

Nationalist Taiwan, where a glimmer of the “second home place” propaganda can be seen in the juancun military dependent communities, a hint that becomes overt in the attempts to resettle the residents of offshore islands displaced by the Cold War battles of the 1950s.

Although outside of the scope of this study, the PRC’s “third front line” factory communities might also be profitably placed in this long narrative of twinned displacement and strategic planning.35 The fear of refugee crossings as cover for military and intelligence action certainly heightened rather than diminished in such an atmosphere: in 1952, for instance, rail authorities in Taiwan were warned to be on the lookout for one hundred fake refugees that the PRC’s

Ministry of War had sent across the border.36

This broad process was refracted, if not precisely reflected, in the system by which the

Nationalist government provided selective burial assistance and death honors to parts of a population all seeking ways to settle the displaced dead. In something of an inverse as well as a byproduct of the way in which, Adam McKeown has argued, border-crossing procedures became ritualized as well as systematized under the US system of Chinese exclusion and other global migration laws specific to Asians, here ritual became systematized and subsumed under border-crossing procedure as a result of war. But governmental processes coexisted with social rituals of moving and burying the dead, enacted at various levels ranging from the trans- regional to the familial.37

35 Muscolino makes similar connections in the conclusion to his JAS article, 473. 36 AH 407:009 August 27, 1952. 37 Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008), chapter

9.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 20 Processing, sorting and depositing the dead

The Japan war presented new issues of scale and distance when it came to burying even the civilian victims of bombing, sickness, fatigue or outright attack. In places like Jiangsu, charities of late-Qing origin (shantang as well as native-place associations) continued to bury the needy, while burial corps of redemptive societies like the Red Swastika Society; new international charities like the Red Cross; and other religious groups such as branches of the

Buddhist Association rose to join them. Viewed from certain angles, the resources of such non- governmental organizations were challenged by the scope of the war, and by the encroachments of the nation-state. Much depends on geographic perspective: a comprehensive survey of Shanghai charities in 1946, for instance found a number of organizations reassigning resources from burial and coffin transport to medical services to meet urgent needs. 38

But investigations across regions, looking precisely at the problem of population movement, repatriation and the reconstitution of community from a ritual as well as physical perspective shows that native place associations (as well as burial corps, certainly pertinent but outside the scope of this paper) remained important throughout the war and postwar.

Moreover, government personnel depended on their services, so much so that eventually they realized that they must imitate them in order to claim similar spiritual authority in the process of reconstruction.

The Wuxi Coffin Boats

38 Such is the argument of Lu Liu’s thesis, for example, which puts forth the idea that the war proved a decisive turning point in the rise of nationalism and the decline of the power of native-place associations. Xu Wancheng,

Shanghai cishan jiguan gaikuang [The conditions of charitable organizations in Shanghai] (Shanghai, 1946).

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 21 One element of wartime displacement and community that native place association documents reveal is just how early the return to the east was envisioned, whether as figurative goal or actual plan of enactment. Moreover, for native place association members, the return of bodies to their home place was an urgent a task of postwar reconstruction as any other. In minutes from a meeting of May 11, 1945, members of the Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place

Association eagerly anticipated the spread of the Allied victory to western China and foresaw the work ahead. Members who returned home to find that their homes had been occupied by military forces or youth camps or destroyed ought to be able to seek legal assistance from the association, it was decided. And, as soon as the line of victory reached the wartime capital, the group would put out a call for members to register to send their relatives’ and friends’ coffins back east. The following month, association leaders convened a “reconstruction conference” in which they started apportioning responsibility to important members for getting “downriver” people back home. Though these plans took months to come to fruition, wartime native-place associations – formed with the express purpose of “maintaining contact with”, “developing intelligence of”, and “furthering the reconstruction of” the home place – kicked into action.

Native-place networks still provided a material and ritual service that at this point the government was unable to do. Though plans were published at the end of 1945 stipulating payments for the transport of bodies of deceased wartime workers, for example, it does not appear that the state had in place actual mechanisms for executing such work. 39

39Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association , minutes of board meeting 6:2, 5/11/45, and

Reconstruction Conference, 6/13/45;) 0091:2:5, 9, 12-13. Other native place associations performed this service for members – for instance the Ningbo association in Chongqing. Zhong Yanyou, Zhengzhi xing yimin de huzhu zuzhi

– Taibei shi de waisheng tongxiang hui [Political migrant mutual-aid organizations: Mainlander native place

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 22 The Wuxi-in-Chongqing association became one of the primary transporters of encoffined corpses back upriver in the immediate postwar. The association sent five boatloads of coffins by wooden boat and barge during the first ten months of 1946. There are about 160 extant requests in the Chongqing archives for permission to send a coffin on one of these trips, but given damage to the files and that some trips are noted as comprising 80 or more coffins apiece, the total number sent was likely much higher, probably around 400. A mere handful of those in the records (around ten) were destined for Wuxi itself. Instead, requests reveal that a wide variety of private persons, government officials and even military personnel asked that the association help transport the bodies of relatives and friends to places throughout Jiangnan,

Anhui and sometimes Hubei as well.

The rapidity with which these transports were arranged once victory was ensured and the possibility of transport back to east China opened up is remarkable. The corpses followed the living in swift succession upriver in winter 1945-46, but via different official conduits. For instance, undated draft correspondence of the association chair from very late 1945 requests the aid of the Relief and Reconstruction Office (Shanhou jiuji zongshu , the main state node for relief management) in obtaining permission for a wooden boat containing 60 persons to sail from Chongqing to Nanjing. The flag and individual permits for this return-refugee boat had to be obtained from the Ministry of Social Affairs. Boatloads of corpses, on the other hand, were treated as cargo, and thus subject to the strict oversight of riverine transport in the immediate postwar era. Individuals had to apply certifying the name and details of the deceased (including cause, place of and age at death) in order to receive specific permits of military and police passage. Then the shipment as a whole required approval from municipal associations in Taipei City], ed. by Lin Manhong and Wen Jiayin (Banqiao, 1999), 252. Plans,

Dec. 7, 1945, CQMA 0200:0001:00387:56

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 23 police and customs authorities as well as from relevant stations along the route. Little wonder, then, that the trips could take more than seven months to reach their final destination, and that basic transport costs per coffin doubled between February and October 1946, from Y25,000 to

Y50,000. 40

The business of repatriating bodies was both important and perilous. The Wuxi association initially kept the transports secret from the public. First, it was a touchy subject. It took some doing, for example, to find boatmen willing to deal with corpses, and the logistics of sending boatloads of coffins at a time when military and governmental transshipment took priority cannot be discounted. The trip itself posed dangers: in August 1946, the fifth coffin boat hit rocks in Zhong county, Sichuan and sank, three bodies tumbling irretrievably overboard. The consequences took months to sort out. These only began with scrambling to finance the onward journey and sort out the legal matters surrounding the conduct of those on the scene. The Wuxi association and those in charge of the boat also owed a moral debt to the families of the lost corpses, one which had to be repaid in monetary compensation and also in collective responsibility, which, the directors agreed, “we all shared.”41

40 Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association to Relief and Reconstruction Office, draft, CMA 0091:1:4, 52.

This was the base amount per coffin charged by middlemen who arranged the boat transport. The trips incurred other expenses, including the cost of longshoremen and ambulances to transport the coffins (all the better to meet the standards of public health and propriety). Most incidentals seem to have been initially borne by the association rather than the families of the deceased, who nonetheless paid a fee for the transport. By the time of a planned 6th transport in the spring of 1947, which was meant to clear out the association’s Chongqing cemetery so that the land could be sold, inflation had caused this fee to spiral to Y400,000 per coffin (Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place

Association, board meeting minutes 7:2, 8/9/46 and 7:6, 3/3/47. CMA 0091:2:5, 54-56, 81.)

41 Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association, minutes of emergency meeting of the standing committee,

10/3/46. CMA 0091:2:5, 68-9.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 24 Second, the first coffin shipments were also likely kept secret because people were clamoring to bring their relatives home, and few resources existed to help them do so. When in October 1946 the association chair finally made the trips known to the broader public, the

Wuxi press immediately called on other native-place associations to apply to his group for aid in bringing their fellow villagers home. The list of those utilizing the association’s services, meanwhile, included officers of the KMT Politburo’s secretariat and bureaucrats in the Military

Affairs Commission and other branches of the military-political structure, as well as academics and businesspersons. At this point of the postwar, clearly the native-place association offered a better means to thus reunite a family than did official channels. 42

The native place association records do not reveal what the process of repatriation of corpses and reburial meant to people, and why they went to such great lengths to pursue it at a time when physical return of living bodies to hometowns was itself still so unsure and difficult.

In the absence of first person testimony, however, something can still be deduced from actions, policies and context. Party functionaries, government bureaucrats, bankers and tradespeople, and transferred academics and factory clerks sent back the bodies of parents, spouses, siblings and sometimes young children who had died during the war, mostly from disease, occasionally during air raids. These had the benefit of being relations and friends whose location was known, during a time when so much else was uncertain (for example, many Chinese combatants were buried on the battlefields where they fell, and family notification was unreliable.)

Moreover, their displacement could be remedied. In addition, recalling the ethical narrative offered in the Ding genealogy, properly constituting a locality or family tomb or graveyard – by physical burial and by ritual – could be seen as an essential part of restoring normalcy. In

42 Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association, minutes of board meeting 7:5, 10/17/46. CMA 0091:2:5, 78a.

Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association, permits, coffin repatriation shipments, 1946, CMA 0091:2:1.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 25 this respect the reburial efforts represented the first step in a broad postwar moral reconstruction effort undertaken by Jiangnan lineages, and that flourished in Wuxi in particular. The postwar years saw an unusual surge in new editions of genealogies, often accompanied by repair to lineage halls and tombs. As in the case of the Ding family geneaology, the next previous edition of most of these works had been in the post-Taiping era.

Yet it was not only these relatively privileged displaced persons who, having preserved their family units to some extent during the war, sought to continue to preserve them as part of returning to the home place after it. There were also several permit requests signed by the local bao or jia [, – local government units] heads pleading for the association’s help in returning the bodies of Jiangsu or Anhui natives, wartime residents of the locality who had died some years earlier and had been temporarily interred nearby. In some cases relatives had come or written looking for their husband’s or son’s bodies. But in others, it was the local Sichuan official who himself took the initiative – perhaps out of moral principle, social connection, or as a way to rid his community of a troublesome presence.43

It should be noted: the Wuxi bodies had the virtue of being identified, and their places of temporary interment known. Their repatriation not only held the potential of helping to reconstitute a family and a community back east, at a time when too many people did not know where their relatives were buried, whether they be men fallen on the battlefield or friends and family taken by bombs, disease or military attack to an unmarked or mass grave. It was the occasional, privileged or very fortunate person whose body or bones would have been carried home during wartime (there are a few of these cases in the Chongqing archives.) What was more, the removal from Chongqing of the Jiangsu natives held the potential for helping reconstitute those local communities as well. In a city peppered with “white bone pagodas” (bai

43 Ibid.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 26 gu ta ) marking the collective graves of air raid victims, it would be understandable if local authorities were anxious to promote the business of spiritual pacification by removing the displaced dead and sending them to their proper homes. In this sense Chongqing and its environs, riddled with temporary and hasty graves as well as native-place-association cemeteries explicitly created during wartime – had stretched the boundaries of the Chinese pattern of sojourning and bone or coffin repatriation of migrants.44

Given the dependency of the human Nationalist infrastructure on private groups like the Wuxi-in-Chongqing Native Place Association for aid in physically and psychically reconstituting upriver communities, it is not surprising that the government itself soon desired to step in to serve that role for national goals. Thus the Nationalist government eventually provided coffin transport and burial support of its own, but only to certain populations. This had been presaged during the war: one means of keeping essential personnel on hand – “at home”, when one wanted them at home -- was to provide burial funds for their families, as the

Fujian provincial government did in 1944 for teachers and doctors in official employ as well as provincial officials. In late 1946 the national government began offering support to government officials returning to Nanjing to bring the bodies of their family members back with them, and vice versa: thus a brief window existed in which the government issued “coffin passports” to enable the collective transport of remains, though it does not appear that the affected persons numbered more than in the dozens. As the postwar quickly melded with civil war, this privilege was extended to essential transport personnel. Railway and shipping workers were needed to complete the process of restoring the east China Nationalist power base and also combating the

44 Elizabeth Sinn demonstrates how this process of corpse repatriation functioned in international migration as well; “Moving Bones: Hong Kong’s Role as ‘In-Between Place’ in the Chinese Diaspora”, in Cities in Motion: Interior,

Coast and Diaspora in Transnational China, edited by David Strand and Sherman Cochran (Berkeley, 2007), 247-271.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 27 CCP – a fight which naturally put them in the line of fire. Families of managers on the Nanjing-

Shanghai Railway received particularly generous compensation for coffin transport and burial expenses (those of ordinary workers and railway police were compensated at half the level).

Rates had to be adjusted frequently to keep up with postwar inflation. 45

Coffin transport and burial was also a means of reincorporating the lost into the body politic. The Nationalists coupled this action with the quintessentially postwar acts of border redrawing, repatriation, and measuring individuals anew for citizenship. Thus the third main class of persons provided with government funds for corpse transport and burial were the former subjects of the Japanese empire in China’s northeast. Their process of repatriation (huiji

) in both its broadest and most literal senses was tied to a strong encouragement toward onward migration to China proper (largely under the assumption that their families had migrated to Manchuria in the recent past.) Hence the Relief and Reconstruction Office was prepared to issue burial or reburial subsidies in exchange for certification as a citizen of the

Republic of China.46

Thus in contrast to the rural resettlement programs of the early part of the Japan war -- whose leaders regarded the threat of death as incentive for people to abandon home permanently without considering the ties bound by the past dead -- organizers of postwar life recognized that burial could be used as a lure to reconstitute place along the lines they preferred. In fact the goal of mobilizing and politicizing displaced persons was the same. It was only that the methods had adjusted slightly.

45 Minzheng jianbao 1944(18). National Government Archives, Academia Historica 6953A. Yunwu zhoubao no

16(1946) 319 and no 48 (1947) 1402.

46 Executive Yuan archives, February 1946; Academia Historica 062:649.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 28 Murder after death in Taichung

My final example departs from the others in that it focuses on a specific event – a crime

– carried out among people who would have very likely balked at being called “refugees”. I contend, however, that the benefits of using the term “displacement” to consider the lives of the

Nationalist forces that crossed to Taiwan in 1949 and the people they brought with them are many – not least of which is that some portion of these people lived lives of overt displacement not long before, the difference in nomenclature being purely a political matter. Using these terms also allows us to bring to the fore the reciprocal nature of displacement: those who receive the incoming populations are sometimes themselves displaced in the process. It takes as its departing point a fairly ordinary crime – not an act of war – but one that in very many ways is enabled, in its circumstances, commission, and punishment, by the prolonged state of emergency caused by the absence of demobilization in 1950s Taiwan. In that sense it is a piece among the displacements of the long war.

Early on the morning of Sunday, March 8, 1959, a house was robbed in the small community of Wenhua New Village in downtown Taichung, Taiwan. The incident bore the hallmarks of a string of thefts that had been taking place in the city: the homes of

Chinese families, postwar migrants, were targeted during the day, when the household was presumed to be out. The thieves sought and found stashes of cash – frequently in restricted US dollars as well as ROC currency – and gold ingots and jewelry. Homing in on these valuables, they would take no other belongings.

That March 8, however, they went farther, and took a life as well. Contrary to the ringleader’s intelligence, the target home, belonging to Yan Jingxing and his wife Huang

Chengjiao, was not completely empty when the homeowners left to attend to Catholic church

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 29 that morning. When the thieves entered they surprised a female servant, 45 year old Wu

Xiuying. They strangled her with grass rope, and her own belt, and dumped her body in the house’s bath, which they filled with water. When the lady of the house Huang returned an hour later, bringing with her the servant’s teenage son whom she had taken to church, she had to get the woman’s husband to leap the garden wall – just as the robbers had done -- and open the still locked door. Then she discovered her house ransacked, and, finally, found the body.

Crime in 1950s Taiwan – whether among civilians or in the form of political or militarized violence involving the state – cannot be said to have been an out of the ordinary occurrence. This particular act, nonetheless, received a considerable amount of attention for being the killing of a not especially notable person in a not especially noteworthy place. The national papers Lianhe bao and China Times devoted regular coverage, as did the Taichung edition of the Taiwan Minsheng Daily . During the first half of

March, 1959, all three papers repeated the complaints of the residents of Wenhua New Village that they were living in fear, that this was not an isolated incident. Most of the 40 households in the community consisted of public servants who were away all day, sources said, and the previous year the area had suffered a string of robberies.47 For this reason or for other reasons of influence and public perception, the Taichung police created a special unit of a dozen officers to investigate the case.

They broke it in less a month. It emerged that the accused were, like the victims,

Chinese (mainlanders). The exception was a local Taichung shopkeeper arrested for possessing some of the 35 US dollars taken from the house, circulation of foreign currency being tightly controlled by the government. Eleven other men between the ages of 24 and 38 were held for running a robbery ring active in central and northern Taiwan. Soon, charges of violent crimes

47 ()1959/03/13, 4.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 30 stemming from the Wenhua theft and killing were added for most of them. Hailing from diverse places across China, the men included civil servants, active duty servicemen, demobilized soldiers, and the unemployed. Within a year, two would be sentenced to death for the murder of Wu Xiuying by a Taichung court. Later that sentence would be commuted to life in prison by the high court in Taipei.

The accessible materials on this case render it more open to certain kinds of analysis than others. The event is close enough to the present that trial records are not readily accessible to non-participants, which leaves answers to some of the most natural questions – such as the basis for overturning the death sentence -- tantalizingly out of reach, at least for the moment. My initial access to the case is through police files and newspaper articles, which offer enough detail to begin building out the social world around this death, one that allows us to think about states of mobilization and demobilization, sanctioned and un-sanctioned violence.

The precise ties that created this slice of the mainlander community in Taichung had made them vulnerable to criminal exploitation. Such ties, further, made it possible to organize and execute crime of this sort. Beyond the nature of these ties, I also want to discuss the conditions of militarization and demilitarization that generated these communities or loose groupings in the first place, and the state that lay behind them. For as we see in the passing and commuting of the death sentence, and, as I will argue, in the prolonged mental state of emergency that lay beneath the crime, the state and its wartime mobilization had a presence both palpable and spectral in most every aspect of the case.

Wenhua New Village was not strictly speaking a juancun (military dependent community), in that it housed civil servants – yet they were one ones, like Yan Jingxing, who were former air force officers demobilized to civilian assignments in the education system and the like. Thus the military was never far away. And it shared a commonality with juancun in

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 31 housing mainlanders who stood in the complicated subject position of being displaced by civil war and privileged by the state that caused their displacement. Wenhua had the same physical characteristics as the second wave of “improved” juancun of the mid-1950s -- modest single- story poured-concrete houses with kitchen and toilet ensuite. And, as we will see from the facts of the murder case, ties between “civilian” and military “villages” were strong. It is useful, then, to think of both types as “planned migrant communities” to distinguish them from the many kinds of spontaneous settlements that occur during wartime and postwar, and to indicate the presence of the planning government hand. Studies of these “planned migrant communities” by

Taiwan scholars and popular writers have blossomed in the past ten or fifteen years, augmented by recent dissertations in North America (such as Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang’s) and cooperative projects in Europe and Asia. By and large, they have coalesced in three or four disciplines. Literary scholars have explored the matter of juancun memory and memorialization and the writings of juancun-raised authors such as the Zhu sisters, Tianxin and Tianwen.

Sociologists, urban planners, and now urban anthropologists and archeologists have tackled the centrality of military dependent communities and other public housing in Taiwan’s urban redevelopment since the 1980s. And the past 3-4 years in particular have seen the development of a nostalgia industry of popular histories (a trend spearheaded by Lung Ying-tai), television shows, CDs and cookbooks that collectively argue for a distinctive “juancun culture” or recognition of mainlander suffering. Most recently, historians have been placing mainlander migration more squarely in frameworks of diaspora and Cold War politics to help wrest these tales out of such feedback loops.

My aim is rather different than any of these, although it is most sympathetic to the very last group, takes careful cognizance of the nostalgia trend, and relies heavily on the work of the urban planners, memoirists, and literary scholars. To me Taiwan’s planned migrant

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 32 communities are useful as part of the “long war” story in part because I understand displacement to indicate not only those who warfare causes to flee their homes – whether short or long distance, short or long term – but also those who must make room for them along the route of their flight, willingly or unwillingly. Thus although Chinese wartime/postwar migrants are the focus of this example, their neighbors are very much part of the larger analysis. Nonetheless, it is a useful exercise to fine-tune the sense of “mainlander”, and not simply on either extreme of class and privilege. To whatever extent the KMT military-political structure doled out privileges, the negative effects of long term, continual mobilization were fairly indiscriminatory and widespread.

The first of several ways in which the Wenhua New Village case can be read, then, is as a story of social networks. I won’t go into great detail here, but as one example offer up a sampling of the leads the investigators pursued with regard to the homeowner Yan Jingxing’s social ties: they investigated his coworkers at the nearby Provincial Second High School; his fellow air force veterans and unit comrades; and the fellow members of the Sanmin Road

Catholic Church, where he was board president. (The one lead they did not seem to pursue far was his wife’s suspicion that he still, at age 68, had affairs).

If we consider that nearly all of the participants in this scenario – crime victims, criminals, and likely to a large extent police and judiciary (though specifics on each person is less clear for this group) – were outsiders brought to Taichung in the previous ten or fifteen years by war and its aftereffects, does that cast a new light on these networks? When the role of military service, whether voluntary or conscripted, in the daily life of Chinese men and women of the modern era is so infrequently articulated in any register other than nationalistic narratives, hagiographic biography or oral histories of high-ranking officers, how can we link

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 33 the military identities of these individuals to the more familiar analytical frameworks of Chinese history: native place, diasporic networks, longing for home?

A start is differentiating the types of military and civilian institutional frameworks contained within the vast ethnic label “Mainlander”. The press played up some details of the story as rhetorically exotic, for instance the Catholic connection: the initial report of the murder in the China Times carried the headline “Mistress goes to worship God; servant left to meet a demon”. But, as scholars such as Huang Ke-hsien have shown, Catholic conversion underwent a boom in the mainlander population during the 1950s, drawing as much on the same eschatological narratives suggested by decades of hot and cold war that built membership in Yiguandao and other redemptive societies as it did on the fellowship and social bedrock the church could offer a displaced population with little in linguistic or cultural common.

Nonetheless, a family’s leaving the house together to attend church every Sunday morning would have constituted a slight social peculiarity, and in this the thieves saw their opportunity. The Lianhe bao -- like the rest of the press— seemed to work directly with the police, as they reported the confessions of first five men arrested. Tan Hanwen, a 34 year old

Sichuanese who worked as handyman for a unit of the Taichung civil defense (minwei ), confessed that the group cased the house twice, found it vulnerable, and hatched to plan to stake two men as lookouts while four carried out the robbery.

But how the group targeted the Yan household to begin with points at other aspects of mainlander networks, and their stress points. It emerged that the two main ringleaders, a

Beijinger and a Zhejiang native, worked together at an engineering journal. They used their connections at the air force base and communities around Taichung to sniff out news of who among veterans, residents of the juancun, and other connected families might have cash and goods at home – or at least, who was rumored to be rich. Thus one of the eventual dozen

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 34 arrested included a 24 year old airman in the Sixth Wing, about whom little is known since he was remanded to his unit for justice.

The links in the military and veterans network disguised disparities of wealth and privilege. These could be notable even if they did not reach the rarified heights of the circles of the Chiang family and the high KMT leadership celebrating Christmas on Yangmingshan with elite pilots and their wives. Sheng-wei Lin and Yu-wen Fan point out that the government system put in place in 1954 for the support of demobilized soldiers and veterans focused first on placing officers in suitable jobs or finding them land to farm; enlisted men, and especially men who had entered service after 1950, were a lower priority. It is not clear whether all the members of the robbery ring had military backgrounds, but half of them were unemployed. The

Taichung papers attest to a regular stream of thefts and social instability, including fights involving so-called “thugs” and “drifters” and military police, pointing to discord between the military infrastructure so prominent in the area and its ongoing ability to support either the public at large or the subset of mainland emigres.

After the career military men, former officers in elite corps such as the air force – like

Yan Jingxing – had their social transitions smoothed for them to the greatest extent. The family occupied a choice lot in Wenhua New Village: they boasted two bedrooms and a large living space on an end of the alley plot, with a rear garden and a garage.48 The family even had a driver, something rather remarkable for 1950s middle-class Taiwan. As for the settlement itself, contemporary evidence indicates it to be one of the more comfortable new urban neighborhood developments, distinct from the haphazard and crowded early generation of military dependent communities. The location nestled between high schools and along a canal made it secluded for a downtown neighborhood (and, ironically, ideal for theft). Neighbors

48 Police report Academia Sinica…; () 1957/12/05, 6; 1958/05/11, 4

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 35 included clerks and department heads in city and provincial government offices and public utilities; a few households took in lodgers, ran businesses or otherwise shared their space.

The deceased servant, by contrast, lived nearby on Kenan Rd – literally,

“Emergency Road.” She too was a mainlander, from Shandong, and her husband was also connected to the military: he belonged to the Air Force mechanical division. Yet that single income, it seemed, was not enough to provide for their household, and thus she kept house for a woman who could now afford leisure.

“Leisure”, in this time and place and context, is nonetheless a relative term. Thus, for my final point I want to turn to the actual objects stolen as a way of wondering, when and how did demobilization actually occur in the long war of the Chinese twentieth century? The main ringleader Yang Zihan was picked up in Taipei’s Ximending after flashing around a lot of cash and giving a fancy ring to a young actress of his acquaintance. In total the items taken from the

Yan household amounted to 3 or 4 gold rings; a gold ingot weighing 1 tael; Y5000 in cash and

$35 in US dollars; and finally two large gold crucifixes, one on a chain.

It was not wealth per se, but stockpiling cash and gold that made this family a target.

They were not the only ones. The crimes were never directly connected by the police, but the papers reported that four days after the robbery and murder at the Yan house, a 40 year old

Hebei woman died of a stroke in the Eastern District of the city. The wife of grain manufactory supervisor, she was felled when she discovered that their home had been robbed, and seven taels of gold, one thousand yuan and an unnamed amount of US currency taken.49 These were not isolated incidents: police leaks to the press did connect the robbery ring leaders Yang Zihan

and Yu Lanfang to more than forty thefts in all.

49 ()1959/03/13, 4.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 36 Thus, only half a year after the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, we have thieves of mixed military and civilian backgrounds utilizing military networks to target mixed civilian-and- military households for the wealth that, it seems likely, they are hoarding in a continuation of wartime flight mentality. The public is mobilized to move again and again – often though not always at the behest of the state – yet to keep thinking of “home”, one that is ever receding in the distance. In the planned migrant communities, they are dependent on the largesse of the state, and yet some hang below sustenance levels. Policing and policy encourage a sense of isolation from surrounding communities (notably, the police investigation into the murder first and seemingly automatically targeted “louche” () characters around Taichung who were exclusively native Taiwanese.) But how does a mentality of fear affect the physical home that lies in hand? Here we see how it renders one vulnerable in the long run.

Crime scene investigation in Taiwan during this era involved a reenactment of the crime by confessed defendants. The police photos of this scene make plain Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the modern state maintains the ultimate authority over life, albeit in a curiously roundabout and surreal way. The rounded up group was marched back to Wenhua New Village to once again carry out their crime, now for the investigator’s cameras, and now at night.

Linked together by a thin rope, the men regard, barely, the threshold they jumped over, the closet they raided. The accused murderer, still tied to the rope, places his hands around a tall policeman. But ultimately it is his life in the hands of the state’s agents. His killing power is no longer prioritized; yet both before and after the crime, the forces of mobilization are no longer certain where to place men like him. The commuting of the death sentence indicates that the courts were unwilling to remove all traces of the exculpation of violence that wartime mobilization could provide. So the traces of war remain, in his hand and in the state’s hand on him.

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 37 The closer one looks at the twentieth century – in this case, in Taiwan, and I think this holds true in China during this period as well, though in different ways and alternate specific configurations – the clearer it becomes that plans for wartime mobilization of combatants and noncombatants persisted rather than ended. I am not sure that the Cold War frameworks now increasingly popular in the study of China and East Asia do much to help us sort out the historical problem of lingering “hot war” mentalities. At the very least we ought to leave room for ample transition and overlap between the two. The states of emergency that were particular to places such as Jinmen and Matsu, as studied in excellent detail by Michael Szonyi and Wei- ping Lin, respectively, were replicated in inexact form in the planned migrant communities, military bases, and personal hoards of “mainland” Taiwan: not as emergent, not as deeply militarized or subject to front-line fire, but also subject to violence real, imagined, and remembered, and to separation between communities. One particular question that the Wenhua case raises is: when does war end for the people involved? What are the short- and long-term effects of violence and displacement? Scholars of Korean history and contemporary studies have begun critical analysis of the meanings of the armistice and its suspension of the end of war.

Can we start to ask of the twentieth century in China and Taiwan, what are the meanings of their multiple wars, their wars upon wars?

Nedostup: Displacement DRAFT 38