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By Root 1067 0

army sometimes fought hard in the early years following the invasion, killing 185,000 Japanese between 1937 and 1941 in exchange for the loss of vastly more of its own men. By the time the Western powers engaged, however, the best of Chiang’s soldiers were dead, and the survivors were exhausted. Hatred of the Japanese did more to unite the Chinese people than any other force in their history. Yet their puny efforts to resist the invader brought upon them death and destruction out of all proportion to any military accomplishment.

Chongqing, Chiang’s wartime capital, was detested by almost all those obliged to serve and live there: servants of the regime, foreign missions overwhelmingly dominated by that of the U.S., refugees from all over China, carpetbaggers, Japanese spies, black marketeers, swindlers, merchants, influence-peddlers, beggars—the flotsam of a continent. An old imperial city standing on cliffs at the junction of the Yangtse and Jialing rivers, Chongqing lay in the south-east of Sichuan, China’s largest province. Its squalor was notorious. Sewage ran down open ditches, even in thoroughfares renamed with grandiose Kuomintang pretension the Road of the National Republic or Street of the People’s Livelihood. Many universities and armament manufacturers, refugees from the coast, had established themselves around the city. Six cinemas served the cultural requirements of exiles from all over China, who swelled the local population from 300,000 to a million. Restaurants learned to serve ham and eggs for Americans. Movie-makers from Hankau made propaganda films for the China Film Corporation. The Hankow Herald, now published in Chongqing, offered English-language news, while foreign listeners to the Voice of China heard bulletins read in English by Ma Binhe, a six-foot Chinese in a skullcap who was once a Dubliner named John McCausland.

Rickshaws and sedan chairs plied the streets, but carried scant romance. It was a dank place of fogs and Japanese bombings. Two enormous red paper lanterns, set on poles on nearby hilltops, warned of imminent attack; a green stocking was hoisted to signal the “all-clear.” “The streets were full of squealing pigs, bawling babies, yelling men, and the singsong chant of coolies carrying loads up from the river,” recorded American correspondent Theodore White. John King Fairbank, another U.S. visitor, claimed that the city resembled “a junk heap of old boxes390 piled together…There is no colour. Nothing grows out of the rock, the stone is all gray and slightly mossed; people, houses, pathways all blend into gray, with the gray river swirling between.” As in every Chinese city, the streets of Chongqing were densely populated with beggars, sometimes whole families together. Educated mendicants saved face by dispatching letters to solicit money, rather than doing so in person.

Chiang wielded power alternately from a villa headquarters and a residence, situated on opposite sides of the river. He and his remarkable wife sometimes serenaded each other as they crossed the Yangtse by launch. Meiling, forty-seven in 1944, came from a powerful mercantile family and had been educated at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. She was said to speak English better than Chinese. After becoming the generalissimo’s third wife in 1927, she was sometimes described as the most powerful woman in the world. For years she served as her husband’s deputy, patron of a galaxy of organisations, honorary commander of Gen. Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group—“the Flying Tigers”—and a formidably energetic propagandist for the KMT in the United States. “She can become at will391 the cultivated, Westernised woman with a knowledge of literature and art,” the British writer Christopher Isherwood wrote admiringly, “the technical expert, discussing aeroplane engines and machine guns; the inspector of hospitals; the president of a mothers’ union; or the simple Chinese wife. She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless; it is said that she sometimes signs death warrants