Getting to Nanjing

NANJING WAS NOT China, nor was it our home. But it was where my father found work and where I hoped to get into university. It seemed natural for us to visit the city almost as soon as we stepped on Chinese soil. Thus our first visit was especially memorable. Another reason I remember my first visit there is that it was the first, and only, time when my father and I were alone and talked about modern China and matters not related to literature or Confucian thought. He took me to places that left me with many questions that remained unanswered for many years. Long after wards, an event or something I read about would lead me to recall those four days the two of us spent together in Nanjing.

When we arrived in Shanghai, my father avoided attending his cousin’s wedding party by taking me with him to Nanjing. It was only a short train journey. He called in at the High School where he had been offered a job as an English teacher. This was a school established by his alma mater, the Dongnan or Southeastern University, now the National Central University, the same one that he hoped I could get into. The university had followed the central government to Chongqing in 1937 when the Japanese forced Chiang Kai-shek to evacuate Nanjing. After eight years of refuge, it had just begun to settle back on its old campus on Chengxian Street . When we visited it, we were told that the university was now much larger and there was the medical school campus in Dingjiaqiao where the freshmen would spend their first year.

My father had me registered for the university’s entrance examinations and wanted to make sure that I understood what was required. He knew that the examination was a challenge to me because I had gone to an English school. He knew I could not do well in the science paper because I had missed many years of formal schooling, and Anderson School had offered too little on science subjects. Furthermore, I was not confident with technical terms in Chinese, having studied the subjects in English. In any case, he had me apply for the Department of Foreign Languages, where the English language would be key. He thought that, if I did well in that, all I needed was to pass the other papers. His worry was the paper in Chinese. The National Central University was renowned for its emphasis on Classical Chinese and, given the high standards required in this subject, he was not sure that I would do well enough.

Nanjing was busy with people adjusting to the new conditions after nearly eight years of Japanese rule. The organs of central government had returned from Chongqing. The economy was suffering from severe inflation and everyone was desperate to find ways to secure their livelihood. My father talked to me about the widespread regret among the people that the two major political parties could not agree to a coalition government. Everyone had hoped for peace, but the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had marched into Central Manchuria with the support of Soviet forces, and the national government was determined to eject them. My father explained why, in early 1946 and less than a year after the end of the war, this civil war was seen as unavoidable. Despite knowing that, he had been determined to come home because he was hopeful that the national government would win. Now the fighting in northern China was fierce. It was obvious that the PLA was popular in the rural countryside and much more formidable than expected.

My father had not been to Nanjing for over twenty years. The city had changed a great deal. He was tense about the mood people were in and seemed undecided what he should talk to me about the current state of the Nationalist government. Nevertheless, he had broken his silence about the politics of China.

After dealing with the chores he needed to do, my father took me to visit the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. This was built years after he left China and he had never seen it himself. He was also eager for me to connect with the revolution that had offered a new national vision for China during the years when he lived abroad. By telling me about Sun Yat-sen, who made Nanjing his provisional capital in Nanjing in the first months of 1912 and had asked to be buried there, my father wanted his foreign-born son to understand how he felt about missing the new regime’s few good years after 1928. I had already heard a lot about the revolution of 1911. Standing at the foot of the mausoleum steps, I remembered how I used to boast to my friends in Ipoh that the date of the Wuchang uprising, 10 October, was one day after my birthday.

The side of the Zijin (Purple) Mountain leading to the mausoleum was a steep climb. My father showed me how to pay proper respect at Sun Yat-sen’s tomb. The walk up and my sense of awe reminded me that I was born two years after the Guomindang government under Chiang Kai-shek was established and my name is spelt the way it is because my father had followed the official romanization adopted by the Ministry of Education of this new government. Otherwise Gungwu would have been Kengwu or Gengwu. My father began to tell me that Nanjing was not only the new national capital but was also to become the modern centre of an ancient Chinese civilization. And, standing in front of the tomb, he made me feel that Sun Yat-sen’s dreams for a united China was at last being fulfilled. I knew from that moment that those dreams would always be relevant to my life.

The thought nudged me to think of studying with greater purpose. I must get to university as planned. But my options were limited and relied on my strength in English to gain a place. Of course, this was not so bad because it would allow me to pursue my love of literature, something my father had encouraged. My mother remained unimpressed. She thought that, with my foreign language skills, there must be better ways to serve the country.

The trip to the mausoleum led my father to talk about modern history, something new to me. Now, standing before the tomb and hearing my father tell the stories as he saw them, everything seemed to sink home. This was real and we were part of the unfolding story, with Nanjing once again the capital that Sun Yat-sen wanted for the new China. Nothing that day could have prepared me for what I was to experience a few months later. With my father’s words still fresh in my mind, I would soon see the picture he painted turning colour, from bright to darkness. After being a student for a few months and wandering around Nanjing with my friends, I began to see a corrupt and demoralized government unravelling before my eyes.

The next day we walked the streets of Nanjing city and my father continued to talk about the 1911 revolution. In his view, that had given the Chinese people the opportunity to reassess their heritage and develop new ideas and institutions to catch up with the progressive West by opening their minds to new kinds of knowledge. It was not going to be easy, and the future was now connected with the civil war going on around us. I knew enough Chinese history to understand that winning the Mandate of Heaven required victory on the battlefield. The two sides were therefore fighting each other in the name of revolution for total control. That was the original meaning of the geming now used to translate revolution.

My father reminded me of the photographs of Sun Yat-sen in many buildings in Ipoh that were accompanied by his famous words, “the revolution is not yet successful, comrades must keep up the struggle”. In Malaya, my father had not wanted me to be excited by that part of China’s modern past. During the years he was preparing me to return to China, he distinguished between that geming and the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party’s call for a war to liberate Malaya. The MCP took as its model the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was at war with the national government in Nanjing. Looking back, I realize how shallow my understanding was. Not many months after my father spoke about Sun Yat-sen, I began to doubt if the 1912 revolution ever succeeded and wondered whether the next one might have a better chance of success under the CCP. I began to ask if the Chinese people would have a better chance for peace and predictability if that party were given a try.

My father took me to see places that he remembered. Some were sites dating back to the time when Nanjing had been the capital of kingdoms like Wu of the Three Kingdoms period, the four Southern dynasties of the 5th and 6th centuries and briefly that of the Ming a thousand years afterwards. We passed places that more recently, in the 19th century, had been used by Hong Xiuquan and his fellow Christians when Nanjing was the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He also pointed out places associated with the puppet regime of Wang Ching-wei under Japanese control. When he was telling me about that, he also told me that the local press was still comparing the fates of two of Wang Ching-wei’s chief lieutenants, both of whom had once been supporters of the Nationalist Party. Chen Gongbo was executed in 1946 while Zhou Fohai’s sentence was to be commuted to life imprisonment. The country was wondering why the two received different treatments. Wang Ching-wei himself, however, died in 1944 before the war ended and escaped having to face the war tribunal. His wife Chen Bijun, who was from Penang in Malaya, was less fortunate and spent the rest of her life in prison.

He told me about the supporters of Wang Ching-wei in Perak and mentioned Chen Bijun’s brother in Ipoh, and about the complex relationships among the local Chinese community leaders in Malaya before, during and after the war. In particular, he expressed fears about what the conflict between the Guomindang and the Communists would do to Chinese education. I did not fully grasp what he was saying about the underlying problems within the community. Years later, when he was visiting schools in remote parts of Perak during the Malayan emergency, I asked him what could be done to protect his educational ideals. He was his taciturn self again and simply said that he was doing his best, but did not share his thoughts with me as he had done in Nanjing. I was left to imagine the depth of his concerns as he struggled on for a few more years before taking early retirement.

We also visited his friend and fellow alumni, Mr Qiao Yifan, the principal of Zhongnan High School, who told us about the grim conditions in the city. Corruption in the government was endemic and the civil war was draining the state of its resources. There was not enough revenue to pay the civil service, least of all to help its officials keep up with the rising rate of inflation. Most people in Nanjing felt that they had gained little from the return of the Guomindang leaders from Chongqing. Among the grievances he mentioned was one that caught my attention because it was connected with something that had troubled me as a boy in Ipoh. He referred to the lack of attention given to the families of the victims of the rape of Nanjing in 1937. Mr Qiao told us that people in Nanjing were upset that more was not being done for the families involved. My father thought that this was because the government was distracted by the civil war and had decided that the issue could wait.

At the time, most Chinese people had more on their minds than higher education. The most prominent stories for people in Nanjing were probably those concerning the progress of the ongoing civil war. The daily newspapers kept telling us that the government was determined to crush communist rebels and each bit of success was reported with words of encouragement. These were clearly posted from the Nationalist point of view, and my father alerted me to alternative views about the challenges facing the government.

He also cautioned me about strong measures against Nanjing university students a few months earlier, including police action on campuses like National Central University, and he told me that several student leaders were in jail. The main issues were economic, about hunger and the inflationary conditions, but students had also demonstrated against the government’s dependence on American support in fighting the communists, including anger at an American soldier’s rape of a female student in Beijing. By the summer of 1947, a ban against demonstrations in Nanjing had brought some peace to the streets, but there were still reports of union-led workers seeking higher wages to counter the high rate of inflation that troubled everyone’s daily lives.

Talk about civil war was not new to me. Ever since my parents began to prepare me to return to China, the Chinese people seemed to have been in an unending state of war. My parents had grown up with civil war being fought close to their respective hometowns in Jiangsu province, and the resumption of civil war in 1946 was unsurprising to their generation. It was more a matter of regret that no other way had been found to resolve differences, and that a national government dedicated to post-war reconstruction proved to be impossible. My parents clearly shared that feeling, but did not talk to me about who they thought were responsible for starting the fighting again. When I arrived in Nanjing, I thought that the Nationalists had a clear advantage and would ultimately win, but I soon heard about corruption in high places and how the government paid its soldiers poorly and was unable to inspire them to fight against the People’s Liberation Army. Even more disturbing was the picture of a deeply unhappy society plagued by rising prices that rendered the currency almost worthless.

I had experienced inflation during the last year of the Japanese occupation in Malaya, when rice had become very expensive and many people survived eating sweet potatoes or tapioca. Many people used raw greasy palm oil for cooking, and the price of fresh vegetables was rising daily. We were lucky to be living with a family whose workers were able to put edible meals on the table, but we were conscious that the Japanese were steadily printing more currency notes, and their value was falling.

I knew something about the subject from monitoring short-wave news broadcasts in English, which explained that Japanese money would not be accepted after the British returned. I also learnt about currency depreciation and its impact on daily life, lessons that proved useful in Nanjing. I could understand why my parents were able to survive in Nanjing on my father’s low salary and still help his family in Taizhou. He had savings in Malayan dollars and was wisely changing his money a little at a time to keep up with the falling exchange rates. He taught me to do this too. After he returned to Malaya, he sent me a draft each month that was the equivalent of fifteen Hong Kong dollars. My uncle in Shanghai taught me to change only a dollar at a time, each time for a large bundle of the national fabi notes that lost value almost daily. For many, this was the index of the Nationalist government’s loss of credibility. It was widely believed that the ruling elites and canny businessmen were converting their money into US dollars or gold bars while the rest of the population became steadily more desperate.

The situation continued to deteriorate. By the summer of 1948, one US dollar was worth some eleven million yuan, a meaningless amount that could buy very little. The Nanjing government finally replaced the fabi altogether with a new jinyuanjuan , with an exchange rate of three million (fabi) yuan to one jinyuanjuan. I was in Shanghai that summer staying with my uncle, and from his office in the middle of the city we watched crowds lining up outside the bank across the road to change their money. After we changed some ourselves, we found that there was nothing we could buy with the new currency. All shops were ordered to remain open, but the shelves were bare. We were told the shop owners had moved all their goods out during the night. To our dismay, we could not even find a place to eat because the eating-shops and stalls had nothing to offer.

The mayor of Shanghai was Chiang Ching-kuo , the son of Chiang Kai-shek. He ordered everyone to change their US dollars and gold coins and gold bars for jinyuanjuan, and threatened to execute anyone caught with gold and dollars in their possession. Although I had become blasé about currency fluctuations after a year in Nanjing, I was nevertheless astonished by the confusion and fear that spread through the city. If I had any remaining hope that the Guomindang regime would survive, that summer removed it altogether. Like all my university friends, I became certain that the fall of the regime was inevitable.

Many years later I came across studies that revealed the full scale of the disastrous inflationary spiral, but from the moment I first visited Nanjing, it was clear that inflation was a serious problem. My father admitted to me, just before he returned to Malaya in March 1948, that he was deeply worried. Unless the government could achieve a quick and decisive victory in the ongoing civil war, the country was on the brink of collapse. I remember being alarmed by the sharp difference between what he told me then and his optimistic tone the summer earlier, when we saw people who were, at least on the surface, still engaged in making Nanjing once again the great capital of a new China.

There was no escaping the fact that China was again in a winner-take-all bitter struggle to establish who should be the new “emperor” of a unified country. Coming from outside China, I did not want to take sides, although I knew my mother’s preference was for a Guomindang victory. My hope, and I think also my father’s, was that all could be decided sooner rather than later, allowing the country to get on with badly needed reconstruction after years of fighting and destruction. I had no idea which side would provide better governance, but as it became clear that the Nationalists were losing, I could understand why so many people around me were saying that the communists could not be worse.