The Great Flowing River Read online

  Through the long days and long nights he repeatedly wondered: We were victorious the whole way, so why on the night when the lights of Shenyang were already within sight did we fail to cross the great flowing river? If on that night in the temporary headquarters at the inn, when the chief of staff had sent a telegram offering to surrender to the Fengtian Army and forced General Guo to flee, I had dispatched someone to escort the general’s wife to the Japanese consulate in Xinmin City for asylum, then I could have accompanied General Guo and his guard to dash back posthaste to Jinzhou. The west bank of the river was controlled by Guo’s forces, and by retreating to Jinzhou, we could have preserved our forces and staged a comeback. Pondering this, he couldn’t help but feel chagrin about the battle by the river that ended in defeat when success was so close at hand. Oh, that great flowing river, that great flowing river that could not be crossed, could its water be the severe cold of reality, with foreign affairs and innovative thought frozen up within?

  When the thaw came and it was time for spring planting, the Fengtian Army once again entered Shanhaiguan and fought with the warlord armies of Hebei, Shandong, and Henan. The Beiping–Liaoning Railroad ran about five hundred and fifty yards from the Japanese consulate, and judging from the sound, the trains carrying troops and the train tracks were all worn due to constant friction. The Fengtian Army made life impossible for the people. Even if he weren’t pursued and killed, Chi Shiying couldn’t return home. His only hope was to escape and find another way to survive. “But even if I’m the only one left alive, I will fight this evil to the end!”

  On a night of the waning moon at the beginning of July 1926, with the help of Consular Secretary Nakata Chiyoda, who was sympathetic to General Guo, and the police officer Kanei Fusataro, the six were finally able to leap over the wall and in disguise made their way through the siege, which had been somewhat relaxed. They followed the railroad tracks on foot for sixty li to Xinglongdian where, with the aid of Japanese friends, they reached Huanggudun. For the first time, twenty-seven-year-old Chi Shiying and forty-eight-year-old Yoshida Shigeru spent a whole night talking in a meeting of the minds. Yoshida admired Chi Shiying for his education and opinions and found him a candid young man; although Yoshida carried out Japan’s policy of neutrality at that time, his action of protecting political offenders and helping them escape showed a bit of romanticism. The young man was grateful to him for the helping hand he extended in such a timely fashion, and when they met again after the end of World War II, though the experience of each had been quite different, he grew to admire Yoshida even more for his international perspective and his farsightedness in fostering talented political people after the war.

  Chi Shiying went from Liaoning to Pusan, Korea, in disguise, where he took a steamship to Japan. Upon arrival he took a train to Tokyo, and as the train arrived in Kyoto he was pursued by reporters. The following day, the newspapers were filled with wild surmises, so he decided to see the reporters and explain the truth of General Guo’s innovative ideas and what happened before and after he decided to return home. The news quickly spread to all parts of China. Arriving in Tokyo, they found that a play about Guo Songling was being staged in the Asakusa District and they were invited to attend as honored guests. A good part of the drama involved Chi Shiying. What was originally a daring act meant to change the fate of the northeast remains today in the human world as just a play.

  When he returned to Tianjin from Japan, the tangled emotions of love and hate among old and new figures in the Beiyang government had yet to settle. He couldn’t go home and had neither the means nor the inclination to go back to study in Germany. In the foreign concession in Tianjin, he met General Guo’s friend Huang Fu, who had provided timely help by sending money to the consulate in Xinmin City (when the Northern Expeditionary Army took Shanghai, Huang served as mayor of the city and later served as premier of the Republic of China). Huang encouraged him to first travel to Shanghai and assess the situation before deciding where to go. From Shanghai he went to Wuhan because the revolutionaries in the south were sympathetic to Guo’s cause. Drifting alone with the mind-set of one banished, he reconnected with his former classmates in Japan and Germany, and they talked to their hearts’ content. During that first period of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, he met and talked with communists such as Li Hanjun, Zhan Dabei, and Geng Bozhao and attended the mass outdoor rallies they organized. He listened to the speeches of the various parties, read their publicity booklets, and, after much consideration, decided that the Nationalist Party and its Three Principles of the People—nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood—represented the steadiest course for China’s actual situation. He also found the party members to be of a high caliber, and the most appealing. Thus, he joined the Kuomintang in Shanghai at the end of 1926 with no intention of seeking anyone’s protection. The first time Chiang Kai-shek met him at Nanchang, Chiang said, “You don’t look like someone from the northeast,” something he never forgot. This was in the days before Chiang became the sole holder of power. Thirty years later, when he stripped my father of his party membership in Taipei, it was probably because the consummate politician from Zhejiang discovered that mild-mannered and handsome Chi Shiying had indeed the intransigent and unbending nature of a real northeasterner.

  After joining the Kuomintang, he traveled between Shanghai and Hankou a number of times and accompanied Huang Fu to KMT headquarters in Nanchang. Chiang Kai-shek and Huang Fu were quite close, and when they ate together my father was often invited as well. It was in those days that he met the brothers Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu. After the Nanjing–Hankou split between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, he met a number of influential people at Nanchang, Jiujiang, and Hangzhou, and came to understand the state of the Kuomintang and its relationship to the Communist Party. That year, he also went to Japan a number of times to observe and do research on that country. During the revolutionary rising of Guo’s army, he had experienced political rise and fall and profoundly understood that in politics one could not be ignorant of military matters, and hoped that he could conduct systematic research on the modern military. Consequently, in 1928, with the rank of first lieutenant in the army conferred upon him by the government, he formally tested into the Japanese Infantry School for serving officers (it took three years to graduate). Before the start of school he was assigned to the Takada Thirtieth Company, where he served as assistant company commander. He attended class during the day and served with the company at night. On weekends he took the night train to Tokyo, where he met with the military officers sent by the central authorities to study in Japan (most were from the first class of the Whampoa Military Academy). Since he had graduated from Kanazawa, his spoken and written Japanese were excellent and he was considered an expert on Japan and was often able to help others. He had a wide range of contacts and would sometimes get together with his old Japanese classmates to reminisce. The Japanese were generally interested in northeast China (which they called Manchuria), and because he took part in the revolution led by Guo Songling and was fond of conversation, he frequently heard a lot of frank talk about Japan coveting the northeast, which left him inwardly apprehensive about his home. During this period he progressed in his study of Japanese military history, the samurai spirit of the shogunate, the modernization of the military since the Meiji Reform, and the stirrings of expansionism in the twentieth century.

  In those three years, a twenty-seven-year-old young man from north China had seen military defeat and fled to the ends of the earth. From conversations around the fire at General Guo’s house to the Yangtze River, he had met many people engaged in the creation of China’s modern history. Brought together by fate, they had long conversations on their ambitions and ideals and found that they were of the same cast of mind. Those long conversations shaped his political disposition and the strength of his character for the rest of his life.

  THE MUKDEN INCIDENT

  In June 1928, the Jap
anese Kwantung Army killed Zhang Zuolin by exploding a bomb at the Huanggutun Station on the South Manchurian Railway. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese occupied Shenyang in one night, which marked one of the most painful moments in recent Chinese history, the Mukden Incident. For my mother, who thought happy days were coming after all the suffering she had endured, this came as a bolt out of the blue. That frozen land full of lonely memories she had just bid farewell to now became a homeland to which she could not return, making it difficult to see her parents, who loved her deeply, ever again.

  For my father, it was a day that he had expected to arrive sooner or later, after having witnessed the shells of the Russo-Japanese War falling on the mountain behind his home when he was five years old, after Guo Songling’s fight to alter the fate of northeast China ended with his body displayed in a Shenyang city square following his defeat, and after Zhang Zuolin was blown to bits and his son Zhang Xueliang immediately assumed power as warlord. Zhang Xueliang was neither able nor bold enough to protect such a large territory; all he could do was watch wide-eyed as it became a vast land without a master. The homeland was lost for good due to ignorantly “ruling the country like a family,” and it was enough to fill a person with grief and indignation.

  The Japanese, who at the beginning of the century had constructed the South Manchurian Railway through half of northeast China, had waited patiently for thirty years for that day. After the Mukden Incident, the Japanese Kwantung Army controlled all outgoing information, and the railroads, roads, and telephone communications were cut off. But all the way from Shenyang to Heilongjiang they met with defensive resistance, and it was a year before the entire land was occupied. Manchukuo was established in 1934, marking the start of what would become the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940 and in preparation for opening the full-scale invasion of China. Where was Zhang Xueliang during that one long year? What had become of the Fengtian Army that had once swept the country with such ease?

  In one night, China was like a giant who, while sleeping, had his feet lopped off. Awakening suddenly, the whole country was engaged in protest marches and shouting slogans such as “Down with Japanese imperialism!” and “We pledge our life to recover our territory!” but the shouts were heard only by ourselves. The world in those days was still under colonialism, in which all strong countries with the power of sanctions had colonies (England’s colony India only became independent in 1947, and France’s colony Annam became independent in 1945 as Vietnam. This was accomplished in exchange for millions of souls lost during World War II.) The League of Nations formed the Lytton Commission because of the Mukden Incident, but to no avail, as there was never any real justice in the world.

  In the year following the Mukden Incident, my father repeatedly thought things over, considering the various possibilities for practical work. In the two years since he had gone to work for the central government, most of the people he had contacted or assigned to work in northeast China were involved in education. After the fall of Shenyang, they all retreated to Beiping, where they set up an office in exile; some went to Nanjing to report on the situation at home, calling for the central government to effectively aid the volunteer armies that had vigorously arisen in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces. The cream of the Fengtian Army, now under young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, had withdrawn to Shanhaiguan under his declaration of “nonresistance.” But locals, who were not content to sit around and wait to fall into enemy hands, rose up as long as they had guns. The more prestigious became known as the Volunteer Army to Resist Japan.

  Countless young people were unwilling to receive a Japanese education and fled to Beiping and Tianjin. Some sought refuge with friends and relatives; others wandered about from place to place. At that time, the central government didn’t understand the situation in the northeast and had no way to deal with it. My father knew the only thing he could do to comprehend the actual situation was to return to the lion’s den himself. This was to risk everything on a single desperate venture with “one’s head on the line,” as people from the northeast would call it.

  He quit his job in the central government and with utmost secrecy (only Chen Lifu knew) took a ship from Shanghai with the passport of a Germany-bound businessman named Zhao to Kobe, Japan, where he boarded another ship for Vladivostok, Russia, and then traveled by train, which ran once every two days, and crossed the Suifen River to Harbin. In Harbin he stayed at a hotel owned by a White Russian and contacted comrades who were still struggling with the critical situation in Jilin, including Xu Zhen (director of the Telephone Office, who became chairman of Liaoning Province after victory over Japan; withdrawing to Taiwan in early 1949, he and his entire family lost their lives when their ship, the famous Taiping, sank in the Taiwan Strait), Zang Qifang (director of the Land Office), Zhou Tianfang (director of the Office of Education), and other comrades engaged in secret activities, from whom he obtained a detailed picture of recent anti-Japanese actions in his homeland since the Mukden Incident. Nearly all of Liaoning Province had been occupied by the Japanese. Only Jing Kedu, Xu Junzhe, and Shi Jian (style name Mo Tang; he was captured by the Japanese near the end of the War of Resistance and sentenced to death. His trusted lieutenant, a young lawyer by the name of Liang Surong, who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, luckily regained his freedom after the war and withdrew to Taiwan for yet another struggle.), under cover in their capacity as civil officials, developed the the volunteer army.

  Han Qinglun and Ge Wenhua had been the most active and effective people in Jilin before it was taken by the Japanese. They planned the integration of military and civilian armed forces in northeast China into the volunteer army, which resisted Japanese efforts to advance north with an impressive display of power. The bloody battle for Changchun lasted a month before it was occupied by the Japanese. Ge Wenhua and eight other comrades were captured and decapitated, and their heads were hung on a tower on the city wall.

  Chi Shiying departed Harbin and went via the northernmost base of operations at Hailun, the temporary provincial capital of Heilongjiang, which was the responsibility of Wang Binzhang, Wang Yuzhang, and three other brothers, to meet the most famous leaders of the volunteer army, Ma Zhanshan and Su Bingwen. He learned of their shortage of gunpowder and their already precarious situation with regard to equipment and food. The remnants of the Zhang family army had already stopped resisting. The central government was thousands of miles away and communications had been cut. The volunteer army, with nothing but their bare hands, patriotic fervor, and the bone-piercing north wind, was unable to stop the Japanese Kwantung Army. The general situation was hopeless, and the only thing Chi Shiying accomplished with the trip was to convince the leaders not to surrender, that the enemy must not be allowed to make use of their armed force, and that they should not recklessly sacrifice themselves. They had to do their utmost to help the volunteers return home and keep their patriotism under cover so that they could answer the next call. After the Japanese occupied Heilongjiang in 1932, he helped arrange for Ma Zhanshan and Su Bingwen to enter Shanhaiguan, where they were given a hero’s welcome in Nanjing and Shanghai, giving a huge boost to the people of China in their later resistance against Japan.

  Since it was impossible to go directly to northeast China to work, after completing his liaison effort in the enemy’s rear, he returned to Nanjing. Chairman Chiang Kai-shek told him that once the government set up a Northeast China Association in Shanghai, he would be in charge of liaison between the central government and the anti-Japanese underground in the northeast, along with the arrangements for helping people who entered Shanhaiguan from the northeast to settle down. He would plan for the long term and never give up.

  HEADS ON THE CITY GATE TOWER

  Then my grandmother brought my two aunts to Beiping from the northeast. My father had already entrusted someone to take my mother, brother, and me from Nanjing to Beiping, and told friends that his wife was going to look after her mother-in-law. After my father returned to
Beiping from Harbin, he decided to do his utmost to stay in north China and use all possible means to make contact with the anti-Japanese underground resistance fighters in the northeast, to facilitate command over the situation there. In those days, Beiping wasn’t very safe and there was little protection. Japanese spies were frequently at work collecting information, so we moved to the French concession in Tianjin. My brother stayed in Beiping with my grandmother, and my mother went to visit them from time to time. At this time, my mother began to play a new role in her life, hosting the families of the revolutionaries and students from our homeland. I remember one day an Aunt Ge and my mother were crying together in our house. My mother told me to take the two little boys into the courtyard to play. The Ge brothers said, “We have no idea why our father’s head is hanging on the gate tower.” In 2001, at the opening ceremony for the Chi Shiying Memorial Library at the reactivated Zhongshan Middle School in Shenyang, someone gave me a copy of a commemorative album titled Don’t Forget the Mukden Incident in which there was a full-page and very clear photo of bloody men’s heads with angry eyes and clenched teeth, suspended from the tower. The sanguinary hatred felt by families and the entire country was still there, confirming my youthful memory, one that would be forever indelible.

  But even in the foreign concession it wasn’t very safe and the surname Chi attracted a lot of attention, so my father often changed his surname.

  I recall we most frequently used the surnames Wang and Xu. When we used the surname Wang, I was a third-grade student at Laoxikai Primary School in Tianjin. Since my parents didn’t dare let me run around on the streets of a big city on my own, they hired a yellow rickshaw to take me to school and bring me home. I remember when leaving school in the rickshaw, sometimes the naughtier students would shout “Wang Bayuan! (son of a bitch), Wang Bayuan!” It made me furious, and I would be in tears by the time I got home.