China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan by Coble, Parks M

Abstract

Reviewed by: China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan by Coble, Parks M Aaron William Moore Coble, Parks M. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 288pp. $39.95, £29.95, €36.00 (hardcover). In issues of the wartime newspaper Qianxian (前線 Frontline), Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) member and Third War Zone propagandist Chen Sibai (陳斯白 1899–1980) published, along with illustrations by Xu Fubao (徐甫堡 1913–2004), a series of short articles under the title “The Beasts in Jiangnan” (野獸在江南 “Yeshou zai Jiangnan”) which, as the title suggests, chronicled the abuses of the Japanese in the GMD heartland. In the issue of October 17, 1938, Chen described the violation of Guangde (廣德), the assault on its women, the abuse of its elderly residents, the theft of the residents’ property. These and other crimes were all “a responsibility that we cannot escape.” The degree to which Chinese people embraced this view is a matter of some debate, but there is little question that the mavens of the written word, both on the political left and on the right, pushed the discourse of total resistance against Japan. Parks Coble’s new monograph is an important contribution to the field of Chinese wartime print culture, focusing largely on the leftist tradition of reportage. Coble’s book follows other volumes on the subject by authors such as Charles Laughlin, Stephen MacKinnon, and Chang-tai Hung.1 Coble’s analysis of leftist reportage writers, and their lives after 1949, shows us not only how political opponents of a wartime regime could still enable mass mobilization, but also how these authors shaped and were shaped by memory in the postwar era, as well as how their wartime patriotic bona fides failed to protect them when putatively sympathetic new regimes came to power. In China’s War Reporters, Coble seeks to “understand how the rather unusual way in which the legacy of the war has been ‘remembered’ in China had constrained a deeper understanding of the war” (5); he splits the book between the study of wartime literary trends and postwar interpretations. His study focuses on the National Salvation Movement (NSM; 救國運動 Jiuguo yundong), which was admittedly a fairly porous and disorganized group; nevertheless, it is fair to say that the NSM was largely populated by educated individuals who were critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s prewar anticommunist policies. In numerous publications, Coble has already pointed out that the GMD government’s policies were opaque to even [End Page 201] educated and informed Chinese citizens but, once the war started, those on the left who decried the GMD as “the traitorous Nanjing government who will sell our country”2 were proven wrong about Chiang and his followers. In moving prose, supported by years of thorough research, Coble captures well how the leftist intellectual class celebrated the GMD’s advance into Shanghai against the Japanese, and their eventual despair. The “euphoria” that these writers expressed was surely genuine, and, as Coble writes, they “universally believed that if the Chinese people united and were mobilized, China could take on Japan, ” balancing previous critiques of the GMD right against their indispensability for the resistance (25, 52–54). The failure of the GMD to defend China devastated these writers, who had invested so much in the decision to resist Japan openly. Nevertheless, writers like Guo Moruo, Fan Changjiang (范長江 1909–1970), and Zou Taofen (鄒韜奮 1895–1944) began to speculate that the failures in the East would lead to the construction of a new China (39). What followed, however, was a tragic suppression—simultaneous to the collapse of the Second United Front (112–15)—of leftist reportage writers like Zou Taofen who had nowhere to hide when the Japanese armed forces dismantled areas of Western privilege. The losses during the Ichigō Campaign in 1944 were almost fatal, and Coble writes that China did not therefore “successfully organize for total war” (129). Here I have some doubts regarding Coble’s argument: writers on the left and the right bemoaned the rural population’s “ignorance” of the war effort, but this was also a genre convention of reportage literature. Digging into the scant documents left behind by non...