Parks M. Coble

Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937-1945

In this probing and original study, Parks M. Coble examines the devastating impact of Japans invasion and occupation of the lower Yangzi on Chinas emerging modern business community. Arguing that the war gravely weakened Chinese capitalists, Coble demonstrates that in occupied areas the activities of businessmen were closer to collaboration than to heroic resistance. He shows how the war left an important imprint on the structure and culture of Chinese business enterprise by encouraging those traits that had allowed it to survive in uncertain and dangerous times. Although historical memory emphasizes the entrepreneurs who followed the Nationalists armies to the interior, most Chinese businessmen remained in the lower Yangzi area. If they wished to retain any ownership of their enterprises, they were forced to collaborate with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. Characteristics of business in the decades prior to the war, including a preference for family firms and reluctance to become public corporations, distrust of government, opaqueness of business practices, and reliance of personal connections (guanxi) were critical to the survival of enterprises during the war and were reinforced by the war experience. Through consideration of the broader implications of the many responses to this complex era, Chinese Capitalists in Japans New Order makes a substantial contribution to larger discussions of the dynamics of World War II and of Chinese business culture.

Counterrevolution in China : the Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet period

Analyzes the failure of the Nationalists to respond effectively to the internal Communist challenge.

The Legacy of China’s Wartime Reporting, 1937-1945: Can the Past Serve the Present?

Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China’s wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a “new remembering” of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today’s China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution.

Writing about Atrocity: Wartime Accounts and their Contemporary Uses

In todays China, public memory of the War of Resistance against Japan, 1937–1945, is more visible than ever. Museums, movies, television programmes, and commemorations focus heavily on the victimization of the Chinese people at the hands of the Japanese invaders. Japanese atrocities, particularly the Nanjing Massacre, are at the centre of much of this remembering. But what of the wartime period? How did journalists and writers discuss Japanese atrocities? This paper finds that most wartime writing stressed the theme of ‘heroic resistance’ by the Chinese rather than Chinas victimization at the hands of Japanese. Exceptions to this approach included efforts to publicize Japans action to Western audiences in the hope of gaining support for Chinas cause, and a related focus on the bombing of the civilian population by the Japanese. This paper suggests major differences between the current approach to remembering the war and to writing during the war itself.

Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese Movement in China: Zou Tao-fen and the National Salvation Association, 1931-1937

Japanese imperialism relentlessly besieged the Nationalist government of China during the Nanking decade. Chiang Kai-shek, believing that China was not ready to confront Japanese military power and obsessed with the desire to eliminate the Communists, adopted a policy of consistent appeasement toward the.Japanese. This enraged public opinion in urban China, and Zou Tao-fen, a popular journalist, led the cry for resistance to Japan. He and his associates were continually suppressed by the Nanking government; nevertheless, they published several journals in succession, each of which denounced Chiangs policy toward Japan and all of which achieved enormous circulation. Late in 1935 Zou and his followers helped organize the National Salvation Movement, which demanded that Chiang suspend the civil war against the Communists and fight the Japanese. When Chiang Kai-shek, acting under Japanese pressure, arrested Zou and the leaders of the association in 1936, they became national heroes, the legendary “Seven Gentlemen.” Zous martyrdom and that of his associates transformed their movement into a powerful political force, one that opposed Chiang and increasingly favored the Chinese Communists.

Engineering the State: The Huai River and Reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927 – 1937 . By DAVID A. PIETZ . [New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ix+142 pp. £45.00. ISBN 0-415-93388-9.]

Imperial China was known for its massive water control projects, most famously the Huang (Yellow) River dykes and the Grand Canal. Todays China is now constructing the largest hydroelectric project in human history, the Three Gorges dam. Sandwiched between these two eras was Republican China, when the traditional methods of construction and engineering gave way to new processes grounded in the principles of scientific hydrology and engineering largely developed in the West. In this brief but fascinating study, David A. Pietz examines the efforts of the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek during the Nanjing decade of 1927–1937 to re-shape the Huai River basin. A student of William Kirby, Pietz adopts the Kirby view that one should see 1949 not as an unbridgeable divide between two eras, but find much continuity in the growth of the modern developmental state in China. Pietz has chosen the Huai River basin for his case study primarily because it witnessed the Kuomintang governments largest such project. In addition, the ecology of no other area of China has been more impacted by human action. Although draining over a relatively flat alluvial plain, the Huai was far more stable in ancient times than its northern neighbor, the Huang River, because of a much lower silt content. Yet all changed in 1194 when the Huang broke through its banks and began to flow south into the Huai, radically altering the ecology of north central China. From 1194 until 1855 the Huang River entered the ocean through the old Huai River channel, rendering the Huai a mere tributary. Subsequent imperial governments attempted to contain the Huang River while at the same time stabilizing the Grand Canal, so essential for grain transport from the south.