Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [140]
Back in his own village, however, Xu found no sanctuary. Local collaborators called. They told his family there was a choice. Everyone knew that their son had been a guerrilla. They must pay “squeeze,” or the Japanese would reward informers handsomely. The only member of the family who had money was Xu’s brother-in-law. He raised 120 silver yuan to pay off the blackmailers, but they knew this would not be the end of the matter. Xu needed to disappear. He made his way to the city of Jilin. There, through the next few years of occupation and unyielding hardship, he strove to acquire a training, or at least some education. He was apprenticed for a time to a sock maker, then to a bicycle repairer. He spent six years working in a rice factory, then became manager of a Korean-owned grocery store. At twenty-one he acquired an unsatisfactory wife with an expensive taste for mahjong and an irritating one for gossip.
Yet, as Xu observed wryly, he achieved a sort of success. He became a bourgeois who could write, count and speak some Japanese. Much as he hated the occupiers, they represented the best, if not only, source of employment. In 1944 he obtained work as a clerk in the Japanese propaganda bureau at Aihni, beside the Russian border on the Amur River. He worked there until August 1945. By definition, he became a collaborator. Yet how else were a host of Chinese to sustain existence? “Even when the Japanese383 were obviously losing, they behaved as arrogantly as ever,” said Xu. “In such a job, at least I was safe from the army and police. We were in the business of survival. I needed the money.”
Li Fenggui, born in the countryside near Shanghai in 1921, grew up in abject peasant poverty, his childhood landmarked by natural disasters, even before the Japanese entered the stage. There were two years of Yangtse floods, when everything which his family grew was submerged and ruined. In one year their landlord, “a very cruel man,” permitted them to keep only 160 pounds of corn from the harvest, to feed a family of fourteen. Once Li remembered the whole family being taken by their father to a nearby town to beg in the streets. In March 1940, the Japanese descended. Some 140 people were herded away from his hamlet and its neighbours to become slave labourers. In the next village to their own, just two miles away, twenty-four houses were burned, three people were killed, seven women raped, all the rice and grain taken. One of those killed was a fifty-eight-year-old woman who was bayoneted after being raped. Such experiences, multiplied a millionfold, explain the passion of the Chinese people towards the Japanese invaders. “In 1942,” said Li, by then a Communist guerrilla, “when the Americans had entered the war, we were so happy to have allies! We felt a surge of hope that Japan would be defeated very quickly. That soon died, and we grew more realistic. We knew that we must win sometime. But we had no idea when.”
CHINA’S PRINCIPAL RULER, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was born in 1887, son of a modestly successful trader near Ningbo in eastern China. He received much of his military education in Japan, and rose to prominence as a protégé of Dr. Sun Yatsen, who led the 1911 revolution which overthrew imperial rule. By the time Sun died in 1925, Chiang was his chief of staff, enjoying the support of some of the most powerful secret societies in China, of much of the army, and—more surprisingly—of the Soviets, who identified him as a coming man. Chiang shared with Mao Zedong an absolute ruthlessness, vividly exemplified by his destruction of the Yellow River dikes in