China's Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (review)

Modern Chinese history is replete with national anniversaries. October 10, for example, commemorates the outbreak of revolution against China's last dynasty, while July . marks the beginning of the terrible war with Japan. In China's Trial by Fire, Donald Jordan deals with the savage struggle that followed "Yi er ba" or January 28, 1932.

Jordan has been interested in this conflict for some time. In 1991 he published Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China's "Revolutionary Diplomacy," 1931-1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). And there the matter might have rested if he had not been "inspired" by the late Lloyd Eastman's Abortive Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 91), which—as Jordan recalls—described the Shanghai clash as complex, controversial, and worthy of study. He was also driven to undertake this study by what he believes has been a distortion of the history of the conflict as well as a general failure of historians to give the battle the weight it deserves.

In particular, Jordan objects to calling the thirty-three-day struggle an "incident." Despite its brevity (the truce talks lasted longer than the battle itself), it was in fact "war," he argues. As evidence for this increased historical significance, he details the large forces committed to the battle by both sides, the impact it had on Chinese and Japanese domestic politics, the cost to both sides in both human lives and economic losses, and its effects on the Western powers and the League of Nations.

Jordan's case for redubbing the clash a "war" seems convincing. And yet, one wavers. Neither side in the struggle declared it a "war"—an "incident" being much easier to settle, since the latter required only a truce and not a full peace treaty. Writing about the war that began in 1937, Marius Jansen further suggested that calling individual conflicts "incidents" avoided economic sanctions by other nations under the existing neutrality laws (Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000], p. 619). (It is interesting that the Japanese also dubbed the four-month battle with the Soviets at Nomonhan in the summer of 1939 an "incident.") In sum, although the semantics is complicated, to call the conflict the "Battle of Shanghai" makes more sense, in light of its brevity and its restriction to the Shanghai area (except for the conflict in the air).

The author also argues repeatedly that in the case of the Shanghai "war," myth replaced history both in the public opinion of the time and afterwards in the historical accounts. In the 1930s, and later in the history books, it was an article of faith that the Cantonese Nineteenth Route Army stood alone against the Japanese juggernaut at Shanghai while the armies of the central government held back. However, although it is true that the Nineteenth Route Army fought courageously, Jordan demonstrates convincingly not only that the central government supported the Nineteenth Route Army but also that the latter was paid while the government's Fifth Army went unpaid. Moreover, this Fifth Army participated in the battle and stood firm against the Japanese with their vastly superior military technology. "The telegrams preserved in the archives of both Nanking and Taipei," Jordan concludes, "counter the common charge that neither Nanking nor the Fifth Army actively joined in the battle" (p. 130).

In the course of his analysis, Jordan provides much food for thought. He demonstrates, for example, that the origin of the conflict lay in attempts by the Japanese Army to mount a diversionary action while it occupied northern Manchuria (although one feels uneasy when reading about the role of Japanese Special Services agent Tanaka Ryukichi; is Tanaka's account trustworthy?). The story went full circle when the Russian menace in the north became a leading factor in Japan's willingness to conclude a truce...