Abstract
This article explores the impact of the Japanese invasion of 1937 on Chinese cities. Focusing on Wuxi, one hundred miles to the west of Shanghai, the author argues that bombing was mainly limited to those commercial and industrial areas of the city that had come to define its modern identity. At the same time, municipal authorities also took steps to prepare the city and its inhabitants for war, although these were largely ineffective. However, the destruction of the invasion actually led to changes in urban morphology as the city was rebuilt in 1938. Meanwhile out in the countryside, some towns and villages remained wholly unaffected by the invasion. This exposes the need for a spatial analysis of how violence affects different areas in the city and countryside.
The morning of February 2, 1938, dawned bright and crisp in Wuxi City, as firecrackers punctuating the stillness announced the first lunar New Year since the Japanese occupation. People hung Chinese and Japanese flags, took the day off work, and visited their relatives. Families strolled down to Chongan Temple in the center of the city to pray and shop for clothes and New Year trinkets and then stopped to gossip over tea. The next day, shops around the temple were equally busy, while performances in the park by Japanese soldiers helped to give the city a holiday atmosphere. 1 Meanwhile in a village a few miles to the southwest, Stella Dong was going about her life peacefully. During the occupation of Wuxi in November the previous year, she had been forced to flee to the coastal city of Ningbo, but had returned a few months later, and lived in the countryside for four months without seeing a single Japanese soldier. 2
These descriptions of daily life in the city and the countryside provide a very different picture of the impact of the Japanese invasion of China, which is normally portrayed as a tragic event, leaving cities, towns, and villages burned and people massacred. 3 Instead, they speak of rapid urban reconstruction and areas of the countryside almost entirely untouched by the horrors happening just a few miles away and illustrate the importance of providing a nuanced spatial analysis of wartime violence. This article explores how the invasion was primarily concentrated in cities and along the transport routes that linked them and shows how municipal authorities and urban citizens attempted to cope with this tragic event. The extent of the destruction actually altered urban morphology, and in its immediate aftermath local citizens invoked a prewar urban identity to justify building plans even as the Japanese occupation began to imbue space with new meaning. Meanwhile, in the surrounding countryside some towns and villages also felt the harsh reality of invasion, but others were fortunate enough to escape the destruction altogether. Recovery in agricultural production was also affected by the location of violence during the invasion, but revival of sericulture was rapid and set the scene for later Japanese policies of economic extraction. Understanding that the experience of wartime violence is spatially determined both in the city itself and along the rural–urban continuum introduces a new dimension into the impact of war on society because it allows us to pinpoint exactly when people came to have personal knowledge of war, how that knowledge was different depending on where people lived, and how it might influence some of the difficult choices they had to make under occupation.
The Japanese invasion of the Lower Yangzi Delta, which is also known as Jiangnan, was a tragedy, as cities were bombed, populations displaced, and atrocities committed. Two years later, cities around the world were similarly afflicted, as the technology of war gave aggressors the ability to target entire urban societies. Invading powers now looked to not only destroy opponents’ military and industrial complexes but also pound their subjects into submission with the full armor of mechanized warfare. Despite the overwhelmingly urban nature of modern combat, scholars have only recently begun to investigate how the intimate relationship between cities and war has been a defining feature of modern history. 4 The Chinese case adds an extra dimension to this, since not only had industrial urbanization occurred more recently than in Europe, but extensive aerial bombardment and mobile warfare were experienced first in East Asia. Indeed, scholars have long recognized that the early decades of the twentieth century in China were unusually violent, and at times have remarked how this affected both urban morphology and city life. 5 Despite this, work is just beginning on the impact of the Japanese invasion and occupation on Chinese society, and cities such as Chongqing or Wuhan have been recognized as sites of national resistance, while Nanjing’s infamy as a place of atrocity should not draw attention away from the devastation elsewhere. 6 Although the scale of Japanese brutality during the invasion in the Lower Yangzi Delta is now understood, there is still an insufficiently detailed description of how people in cities across the region tried to cope with life during the first weeks of the invasion, when it was not at all obvious that the enemy would advance beyond Shanghai. 7
Scholarship on the occupation has moved beyond merely beyond merely studying political and military events to explore the structures of collaborationist regimes in different parts of the country, the nature of collaboration itself, the impact of war on society, and most recently the environment. 8 Within this revival, research on occupied central China, so named to distinguish Jiangnan from the Japanese-controlled areas in the north and south of the country, has also undergone a renaissance but has rarely highlighted the similarities and differences along the rural–urban continuum. One exception is Ma Junya, who describes farming in Jiangnan during the occupation and alludes to spatial distinctions between areas close to cities and more remote villages. However, he explores the war period as a whole instead of concentrating on the effect of the invasion alone and also does not concern himself with the urban built environment or the lives of people living in it. 9 Both Nanjing and Shanghai have been studied in depth, but the unique nature of these two cases, the first the scene of a tragic massacre and the second benefitting from the protection of the International Settlement and economic recovery until 1941, makes them somewhat exceptional. 10 This boom aided a revival in the metropolises’ hinterland, albeit within the constraints of the Japanese policy of yizhan yangzhan (using the war to sustain the war), and establishment of the Central China Development Company in November 1938, which eventually gained something of a monopoly over many areas of production. 11 The narrative is normally told from the point of view of Japanese attempts to assert economic and political control over the region, and in the rare cases in which the first few months of the occupation are analyzed in significant detail, the actions of local authorities are usually seen as somewhat ineffective. 12 This preoccupation with state building, regional economic recovery, and collaboration also means that the task of reconstructing the urban fabric after one of the most devastating invasions of the twentieth century remains unexplored, as does its legacy in the countryside.
To investigate how the invasion itself and the activities of Chinese in the first few months of 1938 provided the basis for the revival of the regional economy under the Japanese occupation, I take Wuxi City and the surrounding countryside as my focus. It is situated midway between Nanjing and Shanghai in the heart of the Lower Yangzi Delta, which has long been China’s most commercially developed and densely populated region. Before 1937 Wuxi had a population of some two hundred thousand people and, with over two hundred factories in 1930, was the largest industrial center outside a treaty port in the country, often being referred to as Xiao Shanghai (Little Shanghai) in recognition of its status. In part, it had achieved such prominence because of a supply chain that began with expanding sericulture in the countryside, continued with the emergence of an industrialized silk reeling process that was behind the growth of some fifty filatures in Wuxi City, and ended with the booming international demand for silk. 13 This meant that when the silk industry in Shanghai recovered in the latter half of 1938 and the Japanese began to impose their systems of economic extraction on the region, the city was perfectly placed to take advantage of such linkages as remained. 14 Before this, however, commerce, industry, and agriculture in Wuxi City and the surrounding countryside underwent a rapid recovery in the first six months after the invasion, albeit one that was spatially determined by the impact of the violence.
I use diary accounts, memoirs, surveys, and to my knowledge the only local newspaper to have survived from 1938 outside Shanghai and Nanjing to reconstruct the history of the invasion and the early months of the occupation. Although contemporary accounts and memoirs of this event and its aftermath often drastically overplay or underemphasize particular facets depending on the writer’s proclivities and the censorship of both Chinese and Japanese authorities, the physical environment appears in the background, making it possible to reconstruct a narrative of how it was affected by the invasion. In doing so, I tease out how the lived experience of violence differed depending on where one dwelt and offer an account of reconstruction in the early months of the occupation that concentrates on actions of local authorities and ordinary people. I highlight how the city wall was a key feature serving as a physical and symbolic boundary influencing patterns of destruction and later defining changes and continuities in urban morphology. Walls in China have long been important to how the built environment is organized and perceived, and this is in fact a global phenomenon since in many countries they are synonymous with the city at large. 15 In China, their defensive function continued into the early twentieth century, but they were also increasingly regarded as impediments to the flow of commerce, which was seen quite literally as the lifeblood of the city. 16 In Wuxi, the wall continued to be an important feature during the Japanese invasion and occupation. Understanding the shifting meanings associated with the city wall and the built environment in both the city and the countryside illustrates that in China, as elsewhere in the twentieth century, space was a central factor in determining the wartime experience.
Invading the City
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937 marked the outbreak of war in northern China. The following month, on August 13, the Japanese attacked Shanghai. Despite initial fierce resistance, the Chinese line broke at the end of October, and the war became one of rapid movement as troops advanced along railways, roads, and major rivers toward the capital Nanjing. 17 Japanese planes targeted cities in an effort to disrupt Chinese communications and destroy industry, while major sites of prewar urban development such as factories, commercial centers, and transport hubs were bombed. As the army advanced, communities in towns and villages closest to major intercity transport routes experienced similar devastation to their urban countrymen. However, more remote settlements remained free from violence and in some areas the arrival of refugees sparked an upsurge in commercial activity. This spatial differentiation between town and country meant that people had very different stories to tell of the invasion.
At first, many people in the Lower Yangzi Delta actually felt safe from attack. This may seem curious, but it should be remembered that previous Japanese military activity in the region in 1932 had been confined to Shanghai, and there was no reason to expect that this time would be any different. The stream of refugees and wounded soldiers from the front telling of strafing by Japanese pilots and bodies lying in rivers did little to convince the inhabitants of inland cities that war was coming. 18 In Suzhou and Wuxi people believed Japanese investment in local industry gave the enemy a reason to spare both cities. 19 Local customs were even more important in forming public opinion. A popular saying asserted that during times of crisis “the people of Jiangyin take up arms, the people of Wuxi take up incense.” 20 This long-standing belief had inspired a Buddhist ceremony during the attack on Shanghai in 1932, and now five years later incense smoke hung heavy in the air, and the sound of Buddhist bells competed with Japanese bombers. Local priests also made stickers with Buddhist blessings for people to put on their doors for protection and preached that Buddha’s hands were severely scorched from catching bombs. 21 Given the extent of the destruction that was about to ravage the city, these sentiments may seem naïve, but it is worth remembering that local deities often gained followers because people believed in their protective powers. Moreover, in August and September 1937 there was no reason to think the Japanese would advance beyond Shanghai. No formal declaration of war had been received, the Chinese troops were holding the line, and precedent taught that both sides would reach an agreement as they had done in 1932.
The uncertainty about whether the violence would directly affect Wuxi ended on October 6, 1937, when the city was bombed for the first time. Sitting in his office in the railway station, a clerk in the Wuxi branch of the Chinese Travel Agency wrote the following account.
Two squadrons of enemy planes, eight in total, flew in from the east. They wheeled over the railway station and the city. At that time, the 301 train from Nanjing was passing through Wuxi. When the enemy pilots saw the train, one squadron dropped five or six bombs, but the train was not destroyed with only one bomb hitting the vicinity of the railway, killing and injuring several tens of people. The other squadron bombed the railway station. The railway warehouse and the Xinren warehouse, as well as the railway restaurant were all hit. The Xinren warehouse was used to store cotton and so a fire broke out, burning it to the ground.
22
After that first devastating raid, the city was bombed at least seven more times throughout October, and although most of the raids were small, they were not indiscriminate. Together with the railway station, it was the industrial and commercial heart of Wuxi to the north of the city wall that bore the brunt of the destruction. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, development had primarily occurred outside the old city walls along Beitang Avenue and Beida Street, which ran north up toward the railway station. This was now the scene of focused aerial attack, as a lack of antiaircraft guns allowed Japanese planes to dive bomb their targets. However, on October 28 in the largest air raid yet seen, twenty planes attacked Wuxi City. By this time, Chinese forces had acquired some air defensive capabilities, which forced Japanese bombers to drop their payload from a greater height, making the destruction more indiscriminate. Therefore, as bombing continued into November, it began to spread inside the walls, and in one case damaged a hospital prominently displaying American flags. 23 Despite the destruction, the reaction of both the authorities and urban citizens illustrates not only how important bombing was in bringing home the full horrors of the war but also how its concentration in parts of the city set the scene for changes in urban morphology.
The shock of aerial bombardment either forced people to flee or woke them up to the need to take defensive action. Within three days of that first attack in early October, half the city had emptied, and rickshaw drivers and boatmen were able to charge a hefty sum from those desperate to escape the destruction. 24 Mrs. Yang, a missionary based in Wuxi, expressed what many people across China doubtless felt. “This accident threw everyone into excitement and left us in a bad state of nerves, so the flight began. We began to realize the cruelty and atrocities of our neighbor who did mean to kill unarmed civilians as well as soldiers, to destroy our homes as well as the military quarters.” 25 The flight continued into November, the panic increasing as soldiers approached, and it became harder to find transport. This situation was repeated across the region, since a combination of bombing and the news that the Japanese had broken through the Chinese lines prompted people to flee the neighboring cities of Changshu and Suzhou. 26
Escape is an understandable response to the imminent threat of danger, but many of those living in Wuxi City were either unwilling or unable to leave and tried to cope with the steadily deteriorating situation. The actions of local authorities reveal how they altered the urban fabric to deal with the violence. At the outbreak of the war, the municipal government organized teams of people to construct dugouts, and at least one was built on every street, although many were little more than holes in the ground that collapsed when it rained. Those made of steel and concrete behind the local government headquarters were more effective, but since they could only hold fifty people at most, they were not much good for the general population. An air raid lookout post was established atop a pagoda on one of the city’s mountains, but there were complaints that planes were already over the city by the time the siren sounded. 27 In fact, the air raid siren itself was the bell in the clock tower above the library, which like those in other cities served to chime out the new measurement of time that marked urban modernity. 28 Now, in an ironic twist of fate it warned of the destruction by a new type of modernity, that of technologically advanced warfare. This advance preparation seemed to do little to mitigate the impact of that first raid. Observing its effect, Xue Mingjian, the general manager of the largest factory in the city, called for centralized planning of rescue efforts, building of more dugouts, and collaboration between the fire services provided by the city authorities and those by the Chamber of Commerce. 29 When Wuxi was bombed for the second time, the city was better prepared. Soon after the attack, Xue and members of the Chamber of Commerce organized rescue teams to go out to the afflicted area. Teams from the Number Four Cadet Force, the Worker Rescue Party, the Red Cross, and the Buddhist Rescue Party “ran around like bees. Their excellent organization is something that other areas should try to emulate.” 30 Despite the improvements, Xue urged police to clear the streets when the air raid siren sounded to prevent people gawping at the approaching planes or fleeing in panic. 31
As the destruction continued, the situation deteriorated, and by the first week of November it was becoming clear that Wuxi would be occupied. The Chinese army began preparing to defend the city, which brought the wall into play once more. City gates were closed and the water gates, through which rivers passed, were blocked up with sandbags. In the end, the wall proved of little use, as on November 25 the Japanese blew up the south gate, taking some of the wall with it, and advanced into the city with tanks. 32 Repeating behavior elsewhere in Jiangnan, the occupying army set about plundering factories and shops, killing and raping the few people who had remained, and burning the city. One Japanese soldier wrote, “[T]he sky over Wuxi was filled with swirling clouds of black smoke that obscured the sun. The rising flames could be heard from far away, giving off a sound like the rushing wind. . . . The flames leapt from intersection to intersection and from neighborhood to neighborhood until they burned themselves out.” 33 Even after the fires, destruction was still somewhat limited to those areas of the city outside the walls, where the biggest losses were to Wuxi industry. Of the seven cotton mills in the city, three were totally destroyed, and the remaining four had still not recovered in 1941. Silk filatures, of which there had been over fifty in the early 1930s, were reduced to fewer than ten, all managed by the Japanese after July 1938, and rice mills, machinery factories, and other industry were decimated. 34 Shops, hotels, and other businesses in this area were also hit very badly. Within the walls, the old financial center, stretching from Chongan Temple up toward the north gate of the city, was plundered and burned. 35 There can be no doubt that for people living in Wuxi City, the invasion was a tragic event, but its impact on the built environment was defined by urban morphology, as the high concentration of industry and commerce in zones outside the walls limited the most extensive destruction to these areas. This would define rebuilding plans during the early months of the occupation, while in the surrounding countryside space also proved an important factor as prewar patterns of development determined the location of violence and the experience of the invasion.
Invading the Countryside
Destruction of the built environment was spatially determined not just by urban morphology but also by transport networks. Before the war, roads, railways, and major river routes had been vectors along which change began to spread out into the countryside, but now they were to be channels of violence, not just in the Lower Yangzi Delta where they were perhaps most dense, but across the country. 36 The enemy attacked Wuxi from two directions moving along the Shanghai–Nanjing road, which entered Wuxi County from Changshu to the northeast and up the railway line from Suzhou to the southeast. After Wuxi was occupied, troops were sent directly north, along the Wuxi–Jiangyin road to prevent Chinese reinforcements arriving. 37 The spatial pattern of violence in Wuxi County is illustrated in Figure 1.
Wuxi County with known major areas of fighting during Japanese invasion marked
In those towns and villages in the path of the Japanese army, buildings and crops were burned, farming equipment smashed or stolen, and people and livestock killed. Much of this occurred along the Changshu–Wuxi road. In Anzhen, a small unit broke away from the main force, killing farmers and raping women in several surrounding villages, while to the southwest the area around the town of Dongting was ravaged by enemy troops. 38 Tragically, Zhu Zongdi, a butcher from Yachengqiao near Dongting who had fled Wuxi City to return home, was killed with his whole family. 39 Such stories were not uncommon. For example, the small village of Xuxiang was surrounded on three sides by water, and refugees descended on the community, believing they would be safe. However, the presence of a small unit of Chinese troops made the village a target, and over two hundred people were killed. 40 These are just some of the stories of brutality in the Jiangnan countryside and illustrate that where violence touched the lives of villagers its impact was severe. However, its concentration along transport routes meant that in remote villages, people experienced the invasion very differently.
In some areas, the breakdown of law and order led to a rise in banditry. One report notes that five thousand villagers formed self-defense forces and like the bandits armed themselves with weapons left behind by the retreating Chinese troops. 41 Bandits continued to plague outlying districts in January 1938, prompting local authorities to organize patrols of rivers and docks at night to protect property. 42 Given that people in some areas experienced violence only from other Chinese, this indicates that for them the invasion was hardly a unique event. Banditry had long been a problem in Wuxi, although not nearly as serious as other areas of China. Other than rice or grain stealing and rent protests, at the end of the Jiangsu–Zhejiang War in 1924–1925 a wave of decommissioned soldiers burned and looted villages across the region. 43 In 1937, this type of violence was repeated across the Lower Yangzi Delta, as in some towns and villages it was Chinese and not Japanese who were responsible for any destruction that occurred.
Elsewhere, some communities remained entirely untouched by any type of violence at all, and sometimes movement of people even provided commercial opportunities for locals. In southern Suzhou County, people found safety in the town of Liye, where incoming refugees paid anything from one to thirty yuan a month for a room, and the center of the town was said to be as bustling as the market around the city temple in Shanghai. 44 In the Wuxi countryside, people reported shops opening up like flowers in the spring rain in the village of Xuheli. Renting rooms to refugees did not always bring with it an increase in commercial activity, as many moaned that there was nothing to do but play mahjong and ward off mosquito bites. 45 A reason for this differing experience may be because refugees did not always stay long enough to warrant locals setting up shops. For example, groups of students paused briefly in Luquqiao in the first three weeks of November before heading west to Danyang and beyond, many eventually joining communist forces in Nanchang or Yenan. 46 Moreover, this community benefited in another way for a while, as the village boasted a church in which Mrs. Yang was pleased to find a small congregation happy to receive her. 47
Those villages fortunate enough to escape contact with the Japanese suffered little from the invasion. Two surveys conducted by the county government in 1938 and 1939 provide a picture of losses, which are illustrated in Table 1. Although the data likely underestimate the destruction, they show clearly how in rural areas, just as in the city, space was an important factor in mitigating the impact of the violence. The districts of Jingyun, Yangming, and Kaiyuan all border the city itself, so large numbers of houses were destroyed, a pattern that extended to Huaishang and Beixia, through which the Changshu–Wuxi road ran. In more remote districts, such as Taibo, Wanan, and Nanyan, towns and villages suffered much less. The amount of land left uncultivated in 1938 also supports the patterns of destruction, although it should be noted that factors such as banditry, depopulation, and lack of access to seed may account for some of this. In Jingyun and Tianshang, for example, a significant proportion of the land was left uncultivated, but in southern Kaihua and Xinan districts, farmers were able to plant crops much as they had the year before.
Impact of War on Farming in Wuxi Districts, 1938
Data drawn from Tai Biangong, Yinian lai zhi xin Wuxi [One year in new Wuxi] (Wuxi: Weixin wenhua yanjiushe, 1938), 120-22; Yao Rongchu and Ma Zhicheng, eds., Wuxixian xingzheng zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu [Survey report of Wuxi county administrative situation] (1939), 4-5. One mu is equal to about 0.15 acres.
This spatially differentiated description of the invasion illustrates that the violence was primarily felt in cities and in those communities close to the transport infrastructure that linked them. Meanwhile, just a few miles away, some people endured the invasion in very different ways, or hardly at all. For them, violence wreaked by the Japanese army in 1937 was not a feature of their wartime experience, and it had no great impact on their lives. This was not the case in cities, where during the early months of the occupation, people began to assess the extent of the damage and pick up the pieces.
Rebuilding the City: Continuity and Change
After the tragedy of the Japanese invasion, many people in occupied central China were left with little option but to try to rebuild their homes and lives as best they could, and in cities this involved reconnecting with the urban fabric in multiple ways. In Wuxi urban morphology was altered, but opportunities also existed to carry out construction plans that had been impossible before. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Wuxi’s modern identity had come to be defined by the development of commerce and industry in zones outside the city wall. Travelers, such as Yu Dafu, often noted smoke from factory chimneys as the first sign of the approaching metropolis, while surveys from the 1930s also concentrated overwhelmingly on the importance of commerce and industry to the city and highlighted modern architecture, such as the New World Hotel. 48 This expansion of the urban fabric northward had provoked repeated discussions among municipal authorities to demolish part of the city wall, from Guangfu Gate in the northeast around to the west gate, and to widen roads, but for the most part they came to nothing. 49 Then, during the invasion, this area was reduced to ash by the Japanese, and in the first months of the occupation it became a liminal space, neither wholly inside nor outside the city limits. This meant that urban life reverted to older centers, particularly the city temple. However, as rebuilding extended outward the wall was imbued with new meanings and remained an important boundary marker, even as redevelopment incorporated prewar ideas that emphasized flows of transport and commerce.
The rebuilding of Wuxi was managed by local collaborationist authorities, and Wuxi was no different from other areas in Jiangnan in forming a Self-Government Committee (SGC) as soon as the fires had burned themselves out. This organization worked under the Japanese Pacification Team and the local army. 50 The Japanese directed activities, but as evidence from the early months of the occupation in Wuxi illustrates, it was Chinese who actually carried out the work. After all, Japanese pacification agents and remnants of the army left behind to occupy cities had better things to do than picking up bodies, removing debris, or building the wall of a house. Instead, as Mark Eykholt and Timothy Brook have pointed out, day-to-day management of the built environment as well as some other areas of life was left to local Chinese authorities. 51 The caliber of local officials in the first months after the invasion has been called into question, and it is certainly true that many of the best and brightest fled west with the Nationalist government, leaving behind either people who had last seen service during the latter days of the Qing or early Republic or others who were so young they had little experience. In Wuxi, things were a little different as the SGC was managed by Yang Hanxi, who replaced the initial leader on January 8, 1938. Before the invasion he had been a major investor in many factories and other businesses and in 1931 became head of the Wuxi Chamber of Commerce. Joining him was, among others, Qin Lianggong, who in June was appointed magistrate under the new Reformed Government established in Nanjing. 52 Although Qin was no longer a young man, it is likely that the familiarity of local officials with their territory and their previous experience in municipal affairs contributed to the speed of Wuxi’s recovery, and by the middle of January the SGC was already organized into an executive council with seven members and offices of general affairs, social affairs, finance, public works, and policing. 53
The speed with which effective local government was reestablished was matched by a rapid return of the city’s inhabitants, who were drawn to those areas within the city walls that had emerged from the invasion relatively unscathed. It is difficult to be sure if the population in central districts ever reached prewar levels, but by April over thirty-one thousand people were recorded as living there, fifteen thousand fewer than in 1937. 54 Economic and social activity also revived around Chongan Temple, which during the dynastic era had been the commercial and spiritual center of the city. Within one month of the invasion, a temporary market sprang up, and each morning food stalls sold rice, grain, meat, and vegetables, and there were even tea shops and restaurants. 55 In March and April a new more permanent market in front of the temple hall was built, and this continued to be divided between a food market in the morning and more general stalls in the afternoon for which stallholders had to apply for a license from the local government. 56 The hotel industry also revived. Outside the walls, the New World Hotel and the Wuxi Hotel had both been destroyed leaving only a few dingy rooms in the Railway Hotel and the Peace Hotel. However, inside the walls the Garden Hotel quickly filled with guests, while cars and rickshaws crowded outside. 57 This shift in commercial activity combined with the destruction to create an ambiguous relationship with the prewar heart of modern Wuxi. Repeated accounts referred to areas of the city outside the walls as once flourishing but now burned to ash, and surveys by both local and national authorities expressed similar sentiments. 58 However, as Wuxi City continued to recover in the second half of the year, commerce and industry began to spill over into areas around the city gates and beyond. By May 1939 there were over 1,027 separate establishments providing fifty-three different goods and services, ranging from rice milling and household silk production to face powder, clocks, bamboo, and hardware. 59 The momentum continued, and by 1940 there were eleven silk filatures operated by the Japanese-owned Central China Sericulture Company (CCSC), which was established in the autumn of 1938, as well as thirty independent smaller factories and hundreds of household filatures. In addition, there were thirty weaving factories, thirty rice mills, and many boat building, printing, and brick-making businesses, to name just a few. 60 As with much else in occupied Wuxi, municipal officials, almost certainly at the behest of the Japanese, required locals to apply for business licenses. Owners and managers gave up their names, addresses, name of the shop, and amount of capital invested and paid a fee ranging from one to three yuan, depending on the size of their operation. 61
All this increase in commercial activity took place in the midst of an extensive cleanup and rebuilding program that was also initially concentrated within the city walls. One of the first jobs of the SGC was to bury bodies and remove rubbish from the streets. Throughout January and February, burial teams organized by the Department for Social Affairs dredged rivers and worked their way through the debris left by the invasion, while locals were asked to report any corpses they found to the authorities. 62 Rubble was also collected, and in February 1938 thirty people were employed loading it on to six boats ferrying it out of the city. 63 Rebuilding followed, as the Department of Public Works produced plans for road widening, which reveals how the invasion actually provided an opportunity to carry out work that could not be done during peacetime. Before 1937, it had not been possible to widen roads because of the shops crowding their sides, but since these had been burned to the ground, roads could now be relaid and more permanent bridges constructed. 64 Lack of money hampered redevelopment, but in July work began on Fuxing Road stretching east from Chongan Temple. The total cost was estimated at 17,000 yuan, and the work was carried out by private firms under contract from the local government. When it was finished in October, the road itself was six meters wide, with raised pavement on both sides. The opportunity was also taken to improve drainage, and a new sewer was constructed, leading out into the river. 65 As the recovery continued, the rebuilding program extended northward. Beitang Avenue was widened to eight meters, while bridges were reconstructed using concrete instead of wood. One surveyor described the result in language that shows how destruction set the scene for recreating an area of the city that was once more a source of great pride for its residents. “During the invasion, houses on both sides of the road were burned, and losses great, which meant that prewar plans to widen the road could be put into effect. . . . In accordance with prewar plans, the county magistrate rebuilt the road and the houses, and within a few months the area returned to its former appearance.” 66
It was not only the local authorities who took the initiative with reconstruction, as newly returned residents to Wuxi began the task of rebuilding their homes. In January, the SGC put a notice in the local newspaper calling for builders to come forward. 67 Construction commenced the following month, and within the city walls it peaked in April, when forty-seven houses were built. Elsewhere, it really picked up in June, and was primarily concentrated in the north. From then until the end of the year, one hundred residences were completed every month save two. This compares with an average of fifteen a month outside the south gate and even fewer in other districts. Most of the houses were two-storied dwellings with a shop in the front and living quarters at the back and above. 68 These compare well with the majority of prewar development and suggest that with the exception of signature buildings, such as the New World Hotel and the Great World Entertainment Center, architecturally speaking there was continuity with former facades. As with commercial ventures, construction required a license from the SGC or people faced the prospect of having to tear down illegally constructed dwellings. 69 How far the municipal authorities were effective at controlling private rebuilding is hard to say, but they recognized that destruction and flight had caused friction between landlords and tenants. In January 1938, a meeting of the executive council of the SGC decided tenants had three months in which to return to their properties, or landlords would be free to rent the rooms to others. This still left the small matter of what to do about unpaid back rent, as people who had lost their homes or jobs were having problems coming up with the money. To avoid having to settle numerous disputes, the SGC suspended all rent payments from November 1937 to February 1938, but problems continued throughout the year, especially for poorer tenants. 70
The local authorities went beyond building roads and managing private construction, using the invasion as an opportunity to improve municipal services. The local water supply was in particular need of attention. By the end of February the four public wells, which ran on electricity, were working again and managed by the local authorities. Water was cheap at one or two copper cash but was available only during daylight hours. 71 In March the SGC voted to clear and drain the rivers, which set the scene for work on building wells. Plans were drawn up in early May, and by the end of the year two more public wells had been added to the existing four at a cost of 22,000 yuan. 72 The early return of electricity also brought street lighting back to the city. In February, roads within the city walls were illuminated from the closure of the gates at six in the evening until nine. Private citizens and businesses had to apply for a license, and although the provision of electricity was taken over by a branch of the Japanese-controlled Central China Water and Electricity Company later in 1938, by the end of the year over six thousand families were receiving power. 73 The return of lighting illustrates how just as urban social activity moved within the city walls, so the reconstruction of the urban environment began in this area as well, and confirms a shift in urban morphology.
Even as Wuxi revived, the built environment and the city wall in particular were also symbols of the Japanese occupation, and in some ways represented the limits of control. The gates were repaired using concrete over the summer of 1938, and gate houses and police stations constructed to oversee the flow of people. Checkpoints were initially staffed only by Japanese troops, but by the beginning of February there were so many people passing through the gates that two Chinese policemen were appointed to help. 74 This made entering the city a complex series of emotions, as one traveler wrote. “Arriving at the gate to the city, we saw a car pulling up. Those in the car got out, took off their caps and bowed to the enemy soldiers. . . . Afterward a policeman said this was according to the order of Qin, the county head . . . if the county head acts like this, what about us normal people?” 75 In 1938, leaving the city also required permission from the occupying power, and it was the military police who had authority to issue such licenses until December when it passed back to the County Government. The numbers granted rose steadily from just over two thousand in December 1938 to seven thousand by April the following year. Although there are no figures on the numbers of people leaving Wuxi City throughout the first year of occupation, it is reasonable to expect that this would not have surpassed the figures for 1939. 76 Regardless, it is clear that movement through the city wall required contact with the Japanese regime both bureaucratically and physically. Another way in which the city symbolized occupation was through the control of time, since the local government was required to reset public clocks in early May. When the clock tower above the library next to Chongan Temple was restored, this also marked the hours in Tokyo instead of Nanjing. With this, the monument had come full circle, from an icon of urban modernity, through warning of urban destruction, and now a symbol of a city under occupation. 77
Understanding how the urban fabric recovered and changed during the early months of the occupation still leaves the question of what happened in the countryside. As Table 1 illustrates, in 1938 agriculture prospered in some areas more than others, so just as in the city, the spatial pattern of the violence during the Japanese invasion certainly left its mark. Moreover, this recovery occurred before the Japanese imposed their systems of control, a trend that is most apparent with the revival of sericulture. The SGC was well aware of the contribution this agricultural sideline made to rural incomes and established the canye zhidaosuo (Silkworm Direction Office) in late March 1938. Its members, most of whom represented silk filatures in the city, recognized that many silk worm egg hatcheries had been destroyed and the impact this would have on both the amount and quality of silk worm cocoons that could be produced, and the shortage of good eggs had already led to a rise in prices, forcing the SGC to impose a cap. 78 Reviving prewar activities in sericulture improvement, the society established branches across the county in an attempt to improve the quality of eggs and issued guidelines on the proper temperature for storage, not to mention the importance of cleanliness. Three or four were set up in each county, including one in Dongting that had suffered heavily during the invasion. 79 It is difficult to know what the impact of this activity was, but the following month silk worm households across Wuxi were producing cocoons, and while accurate figures are hard to come by, production was reported to be between 50 percent and 70 percent of 1937 levels. 80 Soon after this, the Japanese began to establish what would in 1941 become a virtual monopoly over silk production across the Lower Yangzi Delta as rural households were increasingly forced to sell their cocoons to local brokers either owned or licensed by the CCSC. However, it is clear that just as the revival of commerce was extremely rapid in Wuxi City, the resilience of rural household production and marketing networks set the scene for later rapid growth in the silk industry. Its recovery was matched by the return of commerce to Wuxi County’s rivers and roads. Water transport took several months to revive, probably because many boats had been requisitioned for refugee transport or military use, but in June there were a total of 42 boat services running throughout the county, which had risen to 334 by the end of the year. Amid this flurry of movement, commerce in towns and villages thrived, and by the end of the year 3,261 shops were recorded across the county, including 345 grocers, 173 selling medicine, and 77 fuel shops, which dealt in kerosene. 81
This description of reemerging economic activity in the countryside has not yet considered the spatial pattern of the violence of the invasion, and beyond the data on farming and the number of houses destroyed in Table 1, sources rarely provide specific details. However, anecdotal reports confirm the terrible legacy of the violence. Bodies were still being found in Jingyun district throughout January and February, while in the following months the Shanghai branch of the Red Swastika Society sent out teams into the countryside, burying twenty-three men along the Wuxi–Jiangyin road and thirty men in Dongting. 82 Beyond this, some rebuilding occurred. Bashiqiao, the seat of government in Tianxia district just off the Wuxi–Jiangyin road, was fortunate enough to escape relatively unscathed. By the end of April, electricity had returned and a new headquarters had been built for the local authorities. 83 Farther south, the two towns of Jingtanzhen and Xinanzhen, which were close to major roads and so had not been so fortunate, took rather longer to get back on their feet. 84
In the Wuxi countryside, then, evidence indicates that the major impact of the invasion was on farming but that this was somewhat restricted to those areas that had suffered most from the violence. Sericulture and commerce recovered remarkably quickly in the early months of 1938, and while data do not permit a nuanced spatial analysis, the need for rebuilding in those towns afflicted by violence during the invasion certainly indicates that its legacy was felt in these areas. In the city, it was a different story. The violence had almost entirely destroyed those areas of commerce and industry that gave Wuxi its modern identity and forced urban life to retreat to older centers behind the city wall. However, destruction also created a window of opportunity for local authorities to put into action prewar plans for urban development, even as interaction with the built environment symbolized the reality of Japanese occupation.
Conclusion
The Japanese invasion of China is one of the most significant events in the country’s modern history and had a huge impact on its people. By the early 1930s, the Lower Yangzi Delta had become an increasingly urban society with a network of large economically developed and socially diverse cities connected by a modern transport infrastructure. This was a defining factor in the lived experience of wartime violence as those unfortunate inhabitants of urban areas suffered most from the devastation. During the invasion, local authorities in Wuxi altered the urban fabric in an increasingly vain attempt to cope with the tragic effects of modern warfare, which was itself targeted at those factories, shops, and warehouses that had sprung up outside the city wall. In 1938, as bodies were buried, debris was cleared, and houses and roads reconstructed, it became clear that the invasion had altered urban morphology. Initially, city life retreated behind the wall to older centers, and then as rebuilding expanded outward destruction proved to have an ironic twist as prewar plans for expansion, which emphasized transport and commerce, could be carried out. At the same time, the city wall became a physical and symbolic reminder of the reality of occupation. Meanwhile, in Wuxi County some towns and villages suffered in a similar way to the city as houses and crops were destroyed. However, in more remote villages farmers were plagued by Chinese bandits or went about their lives pretty much as normal, and some places even benefited from money brought in by refugees. Those communities unlucky enough to be living near major transport routes saw a significant decline in agricultural productivity during 1938 and had to go about rebuilding their homes as best they could. Despite this sericulture, which had been the engine of Wuxi’s growth before the war, recovered rapidly, which set the scene for later Japanese monopolization of the industry.
This differing experience of the Japanese invasion along the rural–urban continuum has important ramifications for our understanding of the impact of war on society because it shows how space is a useful analytical category with which to approach the lived experience of conflict. For example, it may help explain issues surrounding collaboration. If the violence of invasion reached only certain spaces, it begs the question of how people living far away from its effects formed a subject position in relation to the enemy. In occupied central China, methods of extracting agricultural produce tapped into existing marketing networks, and Chinese were installed in governmental positions in towns and villages across the region, and so it is reasonable to suggest that many villagers may not have understood the reality of Japanese occupation until much later and had very different perceptions of what it meant from those who suffered terribly at the hands of enemy troops. Whether knowledge was engendered through the occupation’s impact on the silk cocoon market, the actions of guerrillas in educating villagers, or the qingxiang (mopping up) campaigns of the early 1940s, the rapid sequence of historical events that overtook the Lower Yangzi Delta between 1937 and 1945 defeat generalizations as to their impact on the multitudes living there. To understand how invasion and the occupation affected individuals in China and beyond, and indeed how later politically constructed narratives of victimization and heroism were created and spread, it is important that scholars continue to realize how space can be used as a point of departure for exploring the impact of war on society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Lily Chang, Liu Wennan, Leon Rocha, and one anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments as well as Kathryn Schoefert for help with the graphics. I take responsibility for any mistakes.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.