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China Elevator Stories
Chongqing: Forgotten Ally—China's World War II, 1937–1945 (by Rana Mitter)
Chongqing was one of the cities bombarded by the Japanese in what is referred to as the “bombing of Chongqing”.
21/11/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Chongqing was my first stop during my travels through China in 2012. Other places on my travel itinerary before I visited Shenzhen included Kunming, and Shangri-La in Yunnan Province, as well as Changsha and Fenghuang Ancient Town in Hunan Province.
I enjoyed staying in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in 2009 and found the city very appealing. It is a close neighbor to Chongqing, which I didn’t find quite as attractive to visit.
Chongqing, though not very pleasant in my memory due to its hot and humid climate and mosquitoes, is a city with a fascinating history. To be honest, it is not one of the cities in China I would voluntarily revisit, simply because it didn’t leave a very positive impression compared to certain other cities and regions. That said, this is not to imply that others wouldn’t enjoy visiting.
Part of the city’s history is detailed in Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter:
“On May 3 (1939), the sky was clear above the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing. The weather was sweltering. Not for nothing is Chongqing known as one of ‘China’s three furnaces,’ where temperatures regularly rise to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. (…) On the docks, stevedores hauled boxes on and off the ships that plied the Yangtze. Passengers descending from the boats would be mobbed by dozens of sedan-chair bearers. Chongqing is famous as a shancheng, a ‘mountain city’ – far better to be carried up the steep hills that separate the river from the upper town, if you could afford it. In the markets, traders and their clients bargained for rice, vegetables, and meat. The number of customers was greater than at any time in the city’s history. In October 1937, the Nationalist government of China had announced that it could no longer defend the existing capital at Nanjing to the east against a Japanese invasion that had begun three months earlier. Chongqing therefore became the temporary capital. Millions of refugees had fled westward, and Chongqing’s population swelled. A city of fewer than half a million inhabitants in 1937 more than doubled in size within eight years. Aside from the crowded markets, the refugees’ presence was clear from the ugly, slapdash buildings, made from mud and metal girders, that had rapidly sprung up across the local landscape. These shanties gave an already slovenly-looking city an even more unkempt air.”
Today, Chongqing is sometimes cited as the world’s largest city population-wise, but this is a misconception. When I visited in 2012, I found a large city, but it wasn’t as vast as some people claimed. It still featured old shanties. The confusion about the city’s size arises from Chongqing being both a city and a province. Instead of counting only the city’s population, people often include that of the entire province. The city itself isn’t larger than other major cities in China and is certainly smaller than Beijing.
The other two cities in China’s “Three Furnaces” (三大火炉, sān dà huǒlú) are Wuhan in Hubei Province, infamous as the origin of COVID-19, and Nanjing in Jiangsu Province. Changsha in Hunan Province—where locals often stay indoors during the day and venture out only in the cooler evening hours during summer—or Nanchang in Jiangxi Province are sometimes added to the list, which then becomes the “Four Furnaces” (四大火炉, sì dà huǒlú).
Chongqing is China’s most well-known shancheng (山城). Locals told me that cycling through the city isn’t common compared to other cities in China because of its many hills. The term shancheng denotes a city built on hilly or mountainous terrain. In such cities, many buildings and facilities are situated on rugged or uneven landscapes.
Rana Mitter also describes the city’s history during the early years of World War II in China, through the perspective of journalist Zhang Xiluo:
“Suddenly, as he was sitting down to eat, Zhang heard a sound whose terrifying significance he knew well. ‘At about noon, we heard a short alarm signal,’ he recalled. ‘I didn’t even finish my meal but got ready to go and hide away in the air-raid shelter in the newspaper office in Jintang Street.’”
The Japanese bombed the city on 3 May 1939:
“At 12:45 p.m., dots appeared in the sky, thirty-six of them. They swiftly grew larger and louder. From airfields in occupied China, the Japanese Navy could dispatch Type 96 Land Attacking aircraft able to fly over one thousand kilometers on a single fueling. The Japanese were almost invulnerable and could bomb the Chinese government in exile into submission.”
After the raid was over, the destruction was evident:
“All across the city, from the docks to the residential districts, buildings were gutted, bombed into hollow wrecks. So complete was the destruction that the surviving buildings seemed to him strangest of all: at one junction, a cluster of banks stood undamaged amid the rubble of endless flattened structures. Even hours later, as darkness fell, the city was filled with the sounds of moaning and screams for help. ‘It was truly unbearable to hear,’ Zhang recalled.”
On May 3, 1939, over 40 Japanese planes bombed the city, but the attacks continued the following day.
This is Wikipedia’s summary of the bombing of Chongqing:
“The bombing of Chongqing from 18 February 1938 to 19 December 1944, was a series of massive terror bombing operations authorized by the Empire of Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters and conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service (IJAAF) and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service (IJNAF). Resistance was put up by the Chinese Air Force and the National Revolutionary Army’s anti-aircraft artillery units in defense of the provisional wartime capital of Chongqing and other targets in Sichuan.”
Mitter explains:
“Most Westerners have scarcely heard of the bombing of Chongqing. Even for the Chinese themselves, the events were concealed for decades. Yet they are part of one of the great stories of the Second World War, and perhaps the least known. (…) In recent years, the sheer scale of the war in China has become apparent. What began on July 7, 1937, as an unplanned local conflict between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing, known as the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident,’ escalated into an all-out war between the two great nations of East Asia; it would not end until August 1945. In the eight intervening years, China’s Nationalist government was forced into internal exile, along with millions of refugees. Huge tracts of the country were occupied by the Japanese, who sponsored collaborators to create new forms of government aimed at destroying the authority of the Nationalists. In other parts of the country, the Chinese Communist Party grew in influence, burnishing its credentials through resistance to the Japanese and vastly increasing its territorial base through policies of radical social reform. The toll that the war inflicted on China is still being calculated, but conservative estimates number the dead at 14 million at least (…). The number of Chinese refugees may have reached more than 80 million.”
Today, anti-Japanese sentiment remains widespread in China. Japanese residents often face racism and must take precautions for safety. When I worked as a professor at Jilin Normal University in Siping, one year, Japanese professors and exchange students were flown back to Japan shortly after arriving in Siping to ensure their safety.
Shortly after moving to Shenzhen in 2012, several violent anti-Japanese protests had started in various Chinese cities, including Shenzhen. Japanese shops, restaurants, and cars (often owned by Chinese) were attacked. Mob violence included smashing windows and overturning Japanese cars with the (Chinese) driver still inside.
Mitter notes:
“In the summer of 2012, disagreements over disputed islands (known as the Diaoyutai to the Chinese and Senkaku to the Japanese) in the East China Sea flared up into anti-Japanese demonstrations in numerous Chinese cities.”
Popular Chinese TV shows often depict Chinese soldiers killing Japanese soldiers during World War II, and these were my former father-in-law’s favorite programs (he watched them daily). I find these shows brutal and wouldn’t want my children to watch them. They encourage hatred toward the Japanese and are widely viewed across the nation.
At my son’s kindergarten, I once attended a performance. While the historical events were undoubtedly brutal, hatred toward the Japanese is not only common and widespread but is often promoted rather than discouraged, making peaceful relations between the Japanese and Chinese more difficult to achieve. In one performance, a class two years older than my son’s performed a scene where some Chinese children played Chinese soldiers and others played Japanese soldiers. The Chinese soldiers ‘played’ killing the Japanese soldiers with rifles, at just five years old.
I never liked how violence and hatred against the Japanese were encouraged, rather than discouraged, starting from such a young age.
Have you ever heard about Chongqing’s history?