Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

34 Princess of patriots

34 Princess of patriots Cixi may have entertained a benevolent attitude toward the United States (or flattered the American women at her tea parties that such was her feeling), believing the United States had cut a more honorable figure in Chinese affairs than any of the other nations which had put their hands in the pie. But in reality, the U.S. had not done much, besides its honorable posings, to deserve Old Buddha’s praise during her lifetime or for a long time after it. Even at the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the U.S. had not shown itself disposed toward intervening in the situation despite calls to do so. When Japanese bombers strafed Shanghai in 1932, allegedly to protect their own civilians from harm (no evidence that such was the case has ever been uncovered; if anything, the bombs were a response to the national boycott of Japanese goods), the U.S. similarly stayed out of the fray. The U.S. Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 made it easy to duck any subsequent opportunities to check the Japanese advance, and when Japan launched war against China in summer 1937, the United States offered no aid to the Chinese; American ships running scrap steel to Japan did not cease their coming 322 Imperial Masquerade and going, lining the pockets of scrap corporations and the families that owned them.1 As in the “Manchurian incident” of 1931, Japan proved it knew not just when the iron was hot enough to strike but how to keep it at highest temperature until the optimal moment. When Chiang Kai-shek was arrested at Xian in December 1936 by officers critical of his obsessive focus on fighting the Communists instead of warding off Japan, it took Communist intervention, in form of future premier Zhou Enlai, to negotiate Chiang’s release. It was hoped that a Nationalist-Communist alliance could be parlayed into just the sort of united front needed to fight the Japanese threat, which was growing more ominous by the day. For Chiang, it was a hated marriage arranged by ineluctable forces with a bride he had already seen and found wanting, but the efforts made to make the best of the situation were counteracted by a new Japanese scheme. For now Japan saw the attempted alliance as proof positive that China would never agree to a pact whereby China and Japan banded together to fight the very Communists who were now seeking to bind themselves to the Nationalists and block the Japanese. Based on China’s unwillingness and inability to subscribe to such a pact, Japan took the step it had been waiting for: causing a war, which was done one July night in 1937, when shots were fired at Chinese guards at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing by Japanese soldiers ostensibly searching for a lost comrade.When the Chinese fired back, the second Sino-Japanese War began in everything but name. Thirty-five thousand Japanese troops poured into the region around the city and soon took Beijing. Significantly, and perhaps predictably, considering what it had lost in Manchuria to the Japanese, the Soviet Union was first to see that a war had actually begun and signed a non-aggression pact with China; most nations with a right to be concerned, including China itself, persisted in seeing the hostile actions as something containable. The Japanese had clearly planned their thrust into China at a number of tables on a number of late nights, because the process of invading and consolidating their spoils functioned like clockwork. This included their knee-jerk response, reminiscent of the bombing of Shanghai in 1932, when a Japanese officer in that city was shot as he tried to make his way into the Chinese airdrome outside Shanghai. Over thirty warships were sent 323 Princess of patriots steaming toward Shanghai, which their troops captured at huge cost in men and matériel. They then turned their sights on Nanjing, locale of the Nationalist government. Chiang Kai-shek was all for defending the capital, despite being advised against it by German military aides — had their quasi-Daoist advice to let what must happen happen been followed, instead of resisting the Japanese and whipping their commanders into a froth of racist rage, what occurred next in Nanjing might have turned out differently. When the Japanese took the city, in December...