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Overview
In the summer of 1937, Japanese troops occupied the campuses of Beijing’s two leading universities, Beida and Qinghua, and reduced Nankai, in Tianjin, to rubble. These were China's leading institutions of higher learning, run by men educated in the West and committed to modern liberal education. The three universities first moved to Changsha, 900 miles southwest of Beijing, where they joined forces. But with the fall of Nanjing in mid-December, many students left to fight the Japanese, who soon began bombing Changsha.
In February 1938, the 800 remaining students and faculty made the thousand-mile trek to Kunming, in China’s remote, mountainous southwest, where they formed the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda). In makeshift quarters, subject to sporadic bombing by the Japanese and shortages of food, books, and clothing, students and professors did their best to conduct a modern university. In the next eight years, many of China’s most prominent intellectuals taught or studied at Lianda. This book is the story of their lives and work under extraordinary conditions.
Lianda’s wartime saga crystallized the experience of a generation of Chinese intellectuals, beginning with epic journeys, followed by years of privation and endurance, and concluding with politicization, polarization, and radicalization, as China moved from a war of resistance against a foreign foe to a civil war pitting brother against brother. The Lianda community, which had entered the war fiercely loyal to the government of Chiang Kai-shek, emerged in 1946 as a bastion of criticism of China’s ruling Guomindang party. Within three years, the majority of the Lianda community, now returned to its north China campuses in Beijing and Tianjin, was prepared to accept Communist rule.
In addition to struggling for physical survival, Lianda’s faculty and students spent the war years striving to uphold a model of higher education in which modern universities, based in large part on the American model, sought to preserve liberal education, political autonomy, and academic freedom. Successful in the face of wartime privations, enemy air raids, and Guomindang pressure, Lianda’s constituent universities eventually succumbed to Communist control. By 1952, the Lianda ideal had been replaced with a politicized and technocratic model borrowed from the Soviet Union.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804765244 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 28 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lianda
A Chinese University In War And Revolution
By John Israel
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6524-4
CHAPTER 1
From Beiping to Changsha
What is Japan going to do next? What will Japan do tomorrow? There was always apprehension, always that tension, which is extremely annoying, extremely uncomfortable.... When war finally came it was a relief.
— JIN YUELIN, "Education in Contemporary China"
At the gardenlike Qinghua campus five miles northwest of Beiping's old city walls, shortly after midnight on July 8, 1937, Yu Zhenyong and several other students were enjoying the evening breeze and reflection of the moon in the lotus pool when the sound of cannon fire came rolling in from the west. They assumed that the armies of Song Zheyuan were on maneuvers in the countryside. Song, the local military commander, had vacillated under Japanese pressure, but, spurred on by the Beiping students' patriotic December Ninth Movement, he seemed to have stiffened his resistance, and the sound of guns was, if anything, reassuring.
Early the next morning Wu Dayou, a young physics professor at National Beijing University (Beida), located inside the city walls, ignored the faint chatter of machine-gun fire and went on with preparations for a picnic in the Western Hills with three old friends — Rao Yutai, Wu's former professor at Nankai University and now dean of Beida's College of Natural Sciences and chairman of the physics department; Zheng Huazhi, who had graduated a class ahead of Wu and was now his departmental colleague; and Fan Jichang, Beida's dean of academic affairs. The four men were all in their thirties, nearing the peak of their academic careers, and were teaching at China's most prestigious university. Taking a watermelon for refreshment, they happily set forth on their day-long outing.
It is not remarkable that Beiping's professors and students passed these fateful hours oblivious of their historic importance. We now know that the shots at Wanping, near the Marco Polo Bridge, marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War; but to Beiping residents the sound of gunfire on the night of July 7–8 was of no particular consequence. Ever since the Boxer Protocol of 1901, Japan had stationed troops in the area; and a scant six months before this night, Japanese forces had staged a mammoth military parade through the streets of Beiping. But enemy tanks had come and gone, and warplanes marked with the rising sun had buzzed the city without releasing their lethal loads. Well might sophisticated Beipingers ignore the rattle of guns a dozen miles outside the city walls.
Sporadic fighting continued for the next few days, but Wu Dayou was only stirred to action when friends who had tried to leave for Tianjin only to find rail traffic suspended urged him to get out — if he could — as fast as possible. Wu sent a servant to purchase railroad tickets to Tianjin, then packed a few small bags and took his old mother with him to the station. Nine years would pass before he returned to the ancient City of Culture.
In the days following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Wu's colleagues pondered the future. On July 8, half a dozen Beida professors meeting at the home of Hu Shi, their perennially optimistic dean of arts, listened respectfully while Hu proclaimed the incident an isolated one that would lead to nothing. As they sat talking, a phone call from the China Travel Service reported the Tianjin-Pukou Railroad running as usual. His happy prognosis confirmed, Hu departed for a meeting of political and intellectual leaders at Lushan.
Not all members of Beiping's summertime academic community spent their days on picnics and their evenings viewing the moon's reflection in the lotus pond. On the Qinghua campus outside the city walls some two hundred recently graduated seniors were planning their professional careers or feverishly cramming for examinations to graduate school or for study in America under the Boxer Indemnity Fund. Most male students in the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes were undergoing military training at the Xiyuan barracks in the western suburbs. On the fateful night of July 7 — 8, some of the students heard their commander, Ji Xingwen, phoning his subaltern in Wanxian. Ji's voice was stern, his message clear: "Stand your ground and don't give an inch. If you retreat, you will pay for it with your head."
Unlike Beida, which enjoyed at least the illusion of security inside the city walls, Qinghua was exposed and vulnerable. Even before the outbreak of fighting, school authorities had begun sending books and equipment south for safekeeping. Now, with a new sense of urgency, students and teachers threw themselves into the job of packing, labeling, and shipping precious school property.
For the moment, however, academic life continued more or less as usual. On July 10, as military skirmishes intensified and railroad traffic was again disrupted, members of the Beida-Qinghua joint committee on entrance examinations mimeographed twelve thousand copies of questions for the hopeful youths who would compete for some six hundred spaces in that fall's entering class.
A July 11 truce was followed by renewed fighting. Japanese reinforcements poured in via Tianjin. On July 14, Lieutenant General Katsuki Kiyoshi, the bellicose new commander of Japan's North China garrison, announced that his forces would "chastise the outrageous Chinese." On July 15, Japanese extremists forced their higher command to deliver an ultimatum. On July 16, Beida's Chinese department held a reception and Chairman Luo Changpei presented copies of the faculty rules to newly appointed teaching assistants Wu Shaoling and Yang Peiming.
The continual contradictory rumors sapped civilians' initiative. "The Japanese don't intend to fight," some said; "they are just making a show of it to intimidate us." Fighting was sporadic. Makeshift fortifications went up and came down. Only gradually did it grow apparent that things would not soon return to normal. A curfew set for ten o'clock was advanced to seven. Day by day, food prices rose and the sound of guns grew louder.
During the second fortnight of July, at a series of three meetings punctuated by artillery fire, Beida professors finally agreed on a resolution on the current situation. Two political scientists (Zhang Zhongfu and Qian Duansheng) and a professor of English (Ye Gongchao) were appointed to organize a propaganda group to disseminate a pro-Chinese view of the situation to the rest of the world.
On the night of July 25 — 26, there was fighting at Langfang, midway on the Beiping-Tianjin railroad line. The incident provided the excuse for another Japanese ultimatum: Chinese forces must evacuate the area by noon on July 27. Song Zheyuan tried to temporize, then declared with bravado unbacked by military power that his troops would "defend the country to the best of their ability and resources."
WAR
July 27, 4:00 P.M. Demographer Chen Da was in his study in the basement of the Qinghua library, editing an English-language manuscript — "Emigrant Communities in South China" — when his wife phoned. "Come home immediately!" she said. While Professor Chen was engrossed in his writing, Mrs. Chen had been witness to a day-long exodus. Most of the Chens' neighbors were now gone. The Chens decided to follow. Professor Chen filled two suitcases; packed his wife, three children, and a servant into a car; and directed the driver to the Qinghua Alumni Association office in Beiping.
Chen was awakened at 3:00 A.M. by artillery fire. Before he could get back to sleep a school servant, "Old Huai," barged in. "I hear that the enemy is going to use poison gas," he exclaimed. "Quick, wash your nostrils with vinegar."
At the Qinghua meteorological station, Li Hongling had been listening to the cannon fire. Back in the dorm, he was awakened by three loud explosions. He threw on a robe, tossed a towel over his shoulder, and ran down to the lounge, where fellow students were already gathered. Momentarily, through an open door, they saw Japanese planes in flight — the same ones, apparently, that had just dropped the bombs. After the planes had passed, the artillery opened up. The students were too petrified to eat. Around 10:00 P.M. they heard that a bomb had fallen into an open area of the southern compound. Nobody had been hurt, but the sacrosanct precincts of Qinghua were under fire. When somebody said that the dormitory was not as sturdy as the science building, they cleared out and joined the throng packed into the basement corridor of their new refuge. By 4:00 A.M. the shells seemed to be landing almost next door. Then the explosions grew fainter and finally there was silence — followed by machine-gun fire. Professor Chen Futian, who had experienced battle, declared that the Chinese forces had repulsed the enemy and were mopping up the battlefield. Nonetheless, Li Hongling and his friends spent that night in the basement of the zoology building, where they had stored basins of sand and a pail of water in case of fire as well as facemasks that they had cut out of their bedsheets in case of poison gas attack.
July 29. Dawn broke bright and clear. Only the chirping of birds broke the morning's silence. Qinghua was its old tranquil self.
Serenity was short-lived. People coming out from the city were telling of disturbing signs: police, dressed in a new kind of uniform, were posting notices on behalf of the "Peace Preservation Association." The news was unbelievable: hadn't Chinese troops just won a glorious victory? Who would follow a triumphant battle by surrendering?
Qinghua students had completely misread events. Striking with overwhelming ground and air power at strategic points on all sides of Beiping, Japanese forces had broken the back of Chinese resistance. Students training at the western barracks had only escaped owing to the commander's decision to withdraw rather than resist. At the southern barracks, more than two hundred student volunteers had died in a hopeless defense. The machine-gun fire was a sign of mopping-up operations, but it was the Japanese who had done the mopping.
By the time Li Hongling and his friends realized the seriousness of the situation, many of their schoolmates had fled westward on the heels of General Song's Twenty-ninth Army. Since there was no way for later groups to catch up, Li and the others did the next best thing by boarding a bus into the city. At the Qinghua Association offices, they found their schoolmates, who had tried to follow in the wake of the army and had narrowly averted death at the hands of Japanese machine-gunners.
Normal campus life at Qinghua ended altogether as Japanese soldiers began marching through the grounds, confiscating firearms — even bird-guns — and posting sentries at the gates to search pedestrians. By the time Chen Da and his wife managed to get out of their house, the Japanese had clamped an embargo on the removal of luggage, so the Chens returned empty-handed to Beiping. The chaotic environment of the alumni association drove them to the Central Hotel on Changan Road, where on August 3 they watched aghast as the Japanese army made a triumphal entry into the city.
As soon as rail service resumed, Beida and Qinghua professors headed for Tianjin, where they hoped to find transportation to the still peaceful Yangzi valley. Students also flocked to Tianjin, or sneaked over the city wall at night to join guerrillas in the Western Hills. Those faculty members who remained tried to save their universities from ransacking. At Qinghua, Professor Zhang Zigao headed a committee to protect school property, but on September 12, Japanese troops searched Qinghua's offices, plundered books, laboratory equipment, and other valuables, and took up positions on the campus. On October 13 troops occupied the entire campus.
Throughout Beiping, wrote an American on the scene, "there were sudden and unwarranted invasions of private houses" — searches for Nationalist literature, Guomindang insignia, or pictures of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. There were sudden arrests, without explanation and sometimes without cause. The mails were interfered with and every letter was opened and scrutinized for suspicious sentiments. The Chinese press was limited to printing releases from the Domei News Service, and professors were compelled to rely upon the English-language Peiping Chronicle. On August 24, the Chronicle, too, was banned, so the only outside news came over the crackle of radio broadcasts from Nanjing.
With the departure of growing numbers of professors and administrators, the administration of Beida fell onto the shoulders of Secretary-General Zheng Tianting, advised and assisted by a few remaining senior colleagues. On August 25, four Japanese gendarmes paid a visit to Zheng. Two days later, enemy agents spent three hours at the library interrogating Meng Xinshi about a Sino-Russian border map. The Japanese then moved to establish a campuswide security apparatus. On September 3, troops seized several buildings; and on October 18, the puppet government occupied the rest of the campus, where, eighteen years earlier, young patriots had unfurled the first banners of the anti-Japanese student movement.
Occupied and humiliated, Beiping was still physically intact. Tianjin was less fortunate. There, a local commander waged a fierce but short-lived resistance. In response, squadron after squadron of Japanese warplanes took off in rotation from an airfield three miles outside the city. Targets included government and communication centers, and one university — Nankai.
For more than two decades, the Japanese had suffered the insolence of Nankai student demonstrators, whose line of march into the city passed directly in front of the Japanese garrison. Recently there had been an additional "provocation" when Chinese forces had used a nearby village to launch a secret attack on the garrison, inflicting heavy losses. That night, Dean Huang Yusheng and a few remaining students and servants abandoned the campus. The following day, July 29, an angry Japanese captain proclaimed to a press conference: "I inform you that today we are destroying Nankai University. It is an anti-Japanese base. All Chinese universities are anti-Japanese bases."
After a devastating bombing raid, the Japanese sent in soldiers with straw and kerosene and burned the remnants of the handsome Nankai campus.
AN EXODUS OF ACADEMICS
With Beida and Qinghua occupied and Nankai reduced to rubble, the future of Chinese higher education was in jeopardy. Beida, the center of China's cultural renaissance and the birthplace of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, was China's most prestigious university — her Sorbonne. Qinghua, heavily endowed with funds from the American Boxer Indemnity, was China's leading institution for science and engineering — her Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Nankai was China's outstanding nonsectarian private university.
The presidents of the three institutions stood in the front ranks of Chinese educators. Jiang Menglin, a student of John Dewey, had been acting president of Beida during the 1920s, then Minister of Education, and, since 1931, Beida's president. Under his leadership, the institution, plagued by political chaos, financial instability, and academic imbalance, had resumed its rise to prominence. Mei Yiqi, an American-trained physicist, had rescued Qinghua from administrative turmoil and built it into an outstanding university. Zhang Boling was both founder and president of Nankai. When news reached him that his life's work lay in ruins, he sat silently and then exclaimed, "The enemy can destroy the body of my Nankai; he cannot destroy its soul."
Brave words, but how to give them substance? Fortunately, the machinery that would save all three institutions had been set in motion two years before the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Qinghua had started to hedge its bets about the future of north China in 1935, when it began construction in Changsha to house two research institutes. During the same year, the Japanese had demanded the establishment of an "autonomous region" in north China and Qinghua's engineering college had begun to crate equipment to move south. In the spring of 1937, as Qinghua authorities began a serious quest for refuge, Hunan's commissioner of education, Zhu Jingnung, a famous educational reformer, onetime Beida professor, and vice-minister of education under Jiang Menglin, promised wholehearted support if the university would move to the province of Hunan. Thus Changsha was chosen as an emergency site for a temporary university.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lianda by John Israel. Copyright © 1998 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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