井底之蛙

Sasaki Kei, one of our contributors at the Japanese history blog here at Frog in a Well pointed out some results of a survey recently released in the Japanese press (Mainichi article here). I’m cross-posting an English summary of the questions and results here that he discusses as they may be of interest to readers of the Korean and Chinese history weblogs as well as those who don’t read Japanese.

Below are the responses of the population at large (as opposed to to those in government):

Question 1: What do you think about the government’s apologies and expressions of regret for actions during World War II: They are sufficient (36%) Insufficient (42%) There is no need (11%) No response etc. (11%)

Question 2: Evaluation of the war against the United States (in World War II): It was a reckless choice (59%) It was an unavoidable choice (33%)

Question 3: Do you think the war against China was an act of invasion? One Can’t Really Say (45%) It was a war of invasion/aggression (40%)

Question 4: Evaluation of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials: It was an unjust trial but having lost the war it was inevitable (59%) It was a just trial of those bearing responsibility for the war (17%) It was unjust and one-sided trial by the victors of the war (17%)

Mr. Sasaki feels, and I think I agree, that the number of those who say the war was inevitable or who could not come to any kind of opinion on the issue is unusually high. He adds some results from a 2000 NHK survey:

Question: The war was a war of aggression against our Asian neighbors: I agree (51%) I don’t agree (15%) It is all in the past and so has nothing to do with me (7%) I don’t know, no response (28%)

Question: The war was an inevitable conflict that a resource deprived Japan waged in order to survive: I agree (30%) I don’t agree (35%) It is all in the past and so has nothing to do with me (4%) I don’t know, no response (31%)

While it shows that there is significant diversity in opinion in Japan (though I have issues with the way the survey is done, its questions, and the options everyone can choose between) it also shows a significantly high number of those who seem to lack enough confidence to say much about the nature of the wars of the mid-century in either direction.

Today is 6-3 anti-opium day in the Nanjing period and Anti-Smoking Day on Taiwan. It commemorates Lin Zexu’s destruction of the British Opium at Humen. In honor of the occasion I ask our readers to limit themselves to legal intoxicants for the weekend.

p.s. does anyone have a picture of Hsu Zilin, the hip Taiwanese cartoon guy who urges young Taiwanese not to smoke?

Christian Science Monitor has a substantial article about Sun Shuyan’s new book Long March (previously noted here), leadng this time with the book’s attempt to revise — erase, more or less — the Luding Bridge Incident. Part of what makes this interesting, of course, is that Chang and Halliday also claim the Dadu River crossing was a Maoist fairy-tale, based on interviews with unidentified eyewitnesses.

But there are identifiable people alive with memories of the incident, as well as other sources.

Mrs Li says there was indeed a battle. “The KMT warned us that the Reds would eat the young people and bury the old,” she said. “Many fled up the mountainside. But when we saw them, they told us not to be afraid, they only opposed bad people. I remember they were wearing straw shoes, with cloth wound around their shins.”
“The fighting started in the evening,” Mrs Li said. “There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross. Later, I was told that someone we had seen was Mao Zedong.”

Oxford University’s Steve Tsang says the Chiang Kai-shek archives show the KMT chief did in fact order the senior warlord in the area to hold the crossing on pain of court martial, while his 100,000-strong Central Army tried to catch up with the Reds from the south.

Some of the Sichuan warlord’s forces arrived before the Reds at Luding, but their commander panicked as the Reds’ main force arrived. He fled, leaving behind only a few of his notoriously opium-dazed soldiers to defend the bridge. The attempt to burn the bridge could not have amounted to much, as the timbers were soaked by rain.

“The Maoist story of the battle was a lie, and a huge exaggeration but there was a battle,” Tsang said.

Sun Shuyan’s claim seems to rest partially on a negative finding: no eyewitnesses, though given that she could only find forty Long Marchers to interview after seventy years, that’s hardly proof, really. She also cites

As Gen. Li Jukui wrote 50 years later in a memo never published until last month by author Sun Shuyan in her new book, “Long March:” “This matter was not as complicated as people made it out to be later.”

Though I’m always happy to see interesting new sources enter the public realm, that sounds reasonably close to what Steve Tsang was describing above, and it may be that what Sun is “debunking” is the static Chinese Communist narrative rather than the current anglophone understanding. To be fair, I haven’t seen the book: I am loath to rely too heavily on news accounts, but I also haven’t seen any scholarly reviews yet.

In preparing the Asian History Carnival, a variety of things turned up in my inbox – in between some very tempting deals on pharmaceuticals.

Today I received a link to this interesting site by Liang Jieming on Chinese Siege Warfare

The site is bilingual and full of illustrations of historical weaponry.

In the most recent issue of The Journal of Asian Studies there is a review of Timothy Brook‘s new work Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China written by Susan Glosser. I was very disappointed with this review which, except for a few conciliatory lines in the beginning of the review, was very critical of Brook’s work. While I agree with Glosser on one or two points, I found her to be far too harsh, sometimes irrelevant (she complains that he does not offer a glossary with the Chinese names of all the organizations mentioned, but they can be found under the index entry for every organization) and in several instances clearly wrong in her assessment of the book, which I believe is a truly excellent contribution to the scholarship on Chinese collaboration during the occupation.

Timothy Brook’s work is a careful look at the issues surrounding Chinese wartime collaboration through a close examination of a number of case studies from the Yangtze delta. With the exception of some work I have read in Japanese and some coming out of Taiwan, this is the most detailed source based research I have seen of this kind to date.

Here I just want to contest three points in Glosser’s critique of Brook’s work that I think particularly unfair. She argues that 1) Brook doesn’t discuss the “problem of generalizing from one city to another.” 2) She complains about Brook’s allegedly unproblematized use of the word “pacification” (such as in referring to Japan’s “pacification teams.”) 3) Glosser spends almost a third of the review critiquing Brook’s “desire to avoid moral judgments” and his allegedly “neutral stance” on issue of Chinese collaboration.

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Natalie Bennett reports that a new oral history investigation of the Long March experience is being published.

Over 10 months, travelling mainly by bus and train through areas little changed to this day, I found 40 of the march veterans. Talking to them, I learned that their suffering, and what they overcame, was actually much greater than we had been told, especially among the women. Some of the realities they described also sit uneasily with the myth – none more so, perhaps, than the fate of the children of the Long March: the children left behind, children given over for hurried adoption after being born along the way, the young taken on as recruits and sometimes abandoned if they could not keep up.

I can’t tell from the article, which focuses on women and children in the march, if the book will follow that emphasis, nor does it give any clues as to whether there will be any new information on the Luding Bridge incident which features prominently in Chang/Halliday’s attack on Mao’s legacy.

However, if the article is any clue as to the rich detail available in the book, it will be a valuable addition to the history and the pedagogy. Oral history is one of the most accessible sources for students, and well-done oral history is a joy to read and use.

Welcome to the third Asian History Carnival!

It’s traditional for blog carnivals to have some kind of internal organization…. Heh.

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While trying to track down two Gallup polls from 1947 and 1948 related to the role of the United Nations, I came across an interesting US Gallup poll from December 1950, soon after the Chinese enter the Korean War in November:

If the Chinese communists continue to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Korea, far outnumbering our forces there, what do you think we should do?

No specific suggestions – *%

Use the A-bomb (atom bomb), except on Russia:

Use a-bomb if necessary – 26

Take fight to Russia, attack – 2

Intensify fight against Red China, declare war (unspecified)–or on China, fight it out, call their bluff, bomb them to hell, stay in Korea, retreat only if necessary, give (General Douglas) MacArthur more power, follow his plan, increase our manpower too – 24

Strategic retreat: retreat to where we can make a better stand, retreat and attack again when stronger – 4

Withdraw completely, get out of Korea, withdraw and try something else, stop – 29

Negotiate: Try peace talk, meet Chinese delegates, make peace with them, call an armistice – 2

Do not use A-bomb (atom bomb), should only be used as a last resort – 1

Abide by U.N. (United Nations) decision, all nations should support U.N., make other U.N. nations do their share, get U.N. to sanction military action in Korea – 2

Miscellaneous – 4

Don’t know/No answer/Hard to say – 10

ORGANIZATION CONDUCTING SURVEY: GALLUP ORGANIZATION
POPULATION: National adult
NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 1,500
INTERVIEW METHOD: Personal
QUESTION NOTES: * = less than .5 percent Adds to more than 100% due to multiple responses
SURVEY NOTES: Sample size is approximate
BEGINNING DATE: December 3, 1950
ENDING DATE: December 8, 1950
SOURCE DOCUMENT: GALLUP POLL–A.I.P.O.
DATE OF RELEASE OF SOURCE DOCUMENT: December 1950

Note: I don’t have any more info on how the poll was done and the questions were asked.

Andrew Meyer takes an interview with Lee Kuan Yew and turns it into a short (considering the subject matter) but deep meditation on the history of China and “China,” the process of Chinese expansion and integration through trade and conquest. He concludes that “a ‘deep historical’ perspective makes Chinese aggression a less pressing long-term concern for global peace and stability than internicine strife within China itself.”

Though internal division and dissension are very important, I’m not sure whether I agree that, from an outsider perspective, they are more important than China’s rising nationalism and power. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that internal dissension could drive external aggressiveness (Wag the Dog, anyone?), that nationalism could exacerbate internal tensions by narrowing the definition of full citizenship, and that external adventurism could exhaust the state’s ability to deliver benefits resulting in a loss of legitimacy. Possibly all at once.

From a formal legal standpoint, the United States never ceded possession of Taiwan [via Simon World], which it took from Japan in 1945, to the Nationalist government. It’s still ours!

This raises all kinds of interesting issues, if you take these sorts of things seriously (with international law, it’s hard, because nobody really pays that much attention to the paperwork, do they?). The last time we gave away something we took from the Japanese, instead of making it an independent state (as most of its inhabitants wanted) we gave it back: Okinawa. Of course, we have a different relationship with China….