Writing and War: Silence, Disengagement, and Ambiguity

Between 1937 and 1949 the people of China endured twelve years of continuous warfare. The War of Resistance to Japan (Kangzhan) was followed almost immediately by the Civil War between the Guomindang (gmd) national government and the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). The military and civilian toll was so high, the scale of loss and trauma in those twelve years so vast, that it is difficult to find adequate words to describe it; the death toll is put at between twenty and thirty million, a disparity in number itself so great that it disturbs conceptualisation. There were massacres, forced relocations of people, slave labour, and sexual slavery, all on a massive scale. The second war was self-inflicted. During the Civil War the killing continued, and loss was piled on loss. At the end of the Civil War between two and three million people left China.

The wartime damage to China’s economy brought the nation close to total destruction. The old society almost disintegrated under the stress. Trauma was a standard part of life, almost universal, so much so that the nation suffered a collective trauma. A central question among Chinese ever since, over decades that brought their own agonies, was whether to reveal the trauma of the wars or to erase it. From that question derives a second one—is this a matter of choice or not? There is a long tradition in Chinese culture of dwelling on trauma and suffering. The representation of suffering in popular culture is always sad, often melodramatic, with sad outcomes, but beside that there is a tradition of taking pride in stoicism and overcoming suffering, of showing resilience.

The horrors of the war years are difficult to reconstruct. The sources are limited. There are very few statistics, and those there are, are awful but vague. There are photographs and some film footage of the war—the best photographs taken by Robert Capa, who was in China in the middle of 1938—but the quantity is small. There are many memoirs, most published quite recently, some based on diaries, some on memory alone; they tend to self-aggrandizement. There is little help for historians from government documents, which are few and always biased toward either the gmd or the ccp. The government has exercised tight censorship over historical writing and permitted only limited access to archives; there is little objective history on modern China. There is one glaring omission in terms of sources, in comparison to the sources available for the study of the war in Europe. In Europe historians rely heavily on German sources to study the Holocaust; for China the amount and quality of Japanese sources are insignificant in comparison. The reasons for the dearth of Japanese materials are not clear.

The shortage of conventional sources makes a convincing case for historians to use literature as a source for understanding one of the greatest tragedies in Chinese history.

Literature and History: Literature as the Transmitter of Collective Consciousness

For much of Chinese history, the elegant convention in describing suffering and tragedy has been through the pinnacle of Chinese literature, poetry. Poetry remains the means of expressing deep feeling. The earliest poems go back to the beginning of the third millennium bc.¹ Poets were not professionals; they were government officials (mandarins) and other people with high levels of education. Classical poetry reached its height in the Tang Dynasty. Tang poems constantly express loss and the pain of separation, the sadness that came with warfare— and with the practice of exiling critical or unsuccessful officials to the borders. Quoting classical poetry has continued to be the means to express deep emotion. In 1948 as Fu Sinian, the leading academic entrepreneur of the 1930s and 1940s, saw his world imploding, he recited to himself again and again Tao Yuanming’s poem of regret at lost chances.²

(种桑长江边), (三年望当采)(枝条始欲茂), (忽值山河改)(柯叶自摧折), (根株浮沧海)(春蚕既无食),(寒衣欲谁待)(本不植高原), (今日复何悔)

I planted mulberry trees by the Yangzi, hoping for a harvest in three years.Just as the trees were filling out, a landslide changed the course of the river.The leaves were stripped, the shattered roots and branches floated off to...