Talk About Heroes: Expressions of Self-Mobilization and Despair in Chinese War Diaries, 1911 - 1938

Heaven feels the sacrifices of these heroes-it makes the gods cry.

-Zhong Song, Shanghai, 3 November, 1937

One of the great lacunae in the history of the Second World War is how the Chinese experienced the conflict. Although wartime documents composed by "ordinary" Chinese are not as plentiful as one might hope, there are numerous field diaries (陣中日記 zhenzhong riji), short personal accounts, and other "semi-official" diaries in Japanese, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese archives. These documents provide more than a view of the war penned by propagandists in rear areas; they constitute a record of the daily experience of that war as it was composed by Chinese Nationalist (國民黨 Guomindang [GMD]) combat officers at the time. Diaries are not merely descriptive, however; they can also function as spaces of "self-discipline," where an author uses language to rationalize his actions, convince himself of his identity, or construct a coherent world view.¹ This article examines one aspect of self-discipline: how individual servicemen used textual representation in motivating themselves to fight-a phenomenon that I refer to as "self-mobilization"-and the relationship it had with describing loss and despair. First, however, it is necessary to explain the history behind military diary writing in modern China so that the forms and literary genres that influenced diarists become clear. Second, by analyzing diaries from the period 1937 to 1938, I argue that "self-discipline" emerged as a critical factor behind the GMD armed forces' high casualty rates and fierce resistance to the Japanese invasion of 1937, and that diaries, by personalizing mobilization efforts, played an important role in inspiring proactive support and self-sacrifice for the war effort.²

Before discussing the documents, a short word on the overall phenomenon of diary writing in modern China is necessary. Even after revolutions, civil conflict, foreign invasions, floods, fires, and domestic political repression, hundreds, if not thousands, of war diaries from the Republican era survive in the archives. Some are official in style and rather uninteresting documents while others are highly personal and riveting; most, however, are between these two extremes, something that can probably be said of diary writing anywhere. They can be found in local (provincial and municipal) and national (military and administrative) archives, publicly and privately funded museums in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China, and exist both in manuscript (handwritten and typed) and published form. Graduates of local military academies, Baoding (保定), and Huangpu (黃浦 Whampoa) all kept them, from the position of army group commander down to platoon commander, including Chiang Kai-shek himself. By the 1940s, Chiang Kai-shek even took steps to require diary writing among civilian officials, but they had already begun to write of their own volition and asked it of their subordinates.³ Modern diary writing was systematic and pervasive, yet it is a sorely neglected topic in Chinese history.⁴

Military Discipline and Reviewed Diaries

In order to understand diaries from the Second World War properly, one must examine how field diaries came to adopt certain generic conventions prior to that period, in particular the influences of war reportage and disciplined military record keeping. China has a long premodern tradition of diary writing, which, in addition to diaries, also includes "disorganized" personal records, travelogues, and notebooks. This study, however, need not be preoccupied with an examination of those texts. It is important here to recognize both that, in imperial Chinese literary history, self-accounts were a form of writing in which adherence to normative literary style guaranteed acceptability, and that there was a tradition of sharing these accounts among fellow scholars and gentlemen in order to garner their approval.⁵ Thus, a system of diary writing that involved vetting by peers or superiors would not have been a strange concept in China. Peers or superiors often reviewed war diaries in the modern era, and sometimes the diaries were even published as exemplars of writing and self-discipline. In fact, the history of reviewed diary writing in the Chinese military may reach as far back as the late nineteenth century (even...