"DODGING BOMBS IN BATH-HOUSES"
DU ZHONGYUAN REPORTING CHINA'S WAR WITH JAPAN
College Seminar given on Thursday 13 March 2003
Du Zhongyuan (1895-1943) is an object lesson in the fickleness of fame. For a few years, in the 1930s, he was one of the best-known journalists in China. His weekly editorial columns lambasted his political opponents, praised his friends, and provided a read so riveting that his magazine sold more copies than any other in prewar China, and also resulted in his being prosecuted for causing a diplomatic incident. Yet he is almost unknown in the west, and even in China, although his name remains known, he has been under-recognized as an actor in that country's turbulent twentieth-century history.
Nonetheless, Du Zhongyuan used his brief period of notoriety to help shape understanding of perhaps the greatest of all the traumas in China's twentieth-century history: the war against Japan which raged from 1937 to 1945. The war killed some 20 million Chinese, and turned another 80 million into refugees. Its after-effects traumatized Chinese society for decades afterwards, and it is still a subject of controversy today (as recent news reports on diplomatic rows between China and Japan about abandoned biological weapons demonstrate). In the early months of this massive conflict, Du became one of the most prominent of the frontline war reporters who brought the reality of the war experience home to his readers, and helped them make sense of the terrifying turn that their lives had taken.
Who was Du Zhongyuan? He was born in Manchuria, China's bleak Northeastern provinces, and although his family was not well-off, it became clear that he was bright, and he did well at school, eventually gaining a scholarship to study in Japan. His period in Japan helped shape two of his lifelong fixations. One was a nationalistic conviction that China must fight back against imperialist encroachment from powers such as Japan. Another was that the path to China's salvation lay in developing its own industries. After completing his studies, Du became a prominent businessman in Manchuria, running one of the most successful porcelain factories in the region. His success, though, came to a brutal end on the night of 18 September 1931, when Japan launched its invasion of Manchuria. Prominent Chinese in the region either had to collaborate with the new rulers – and many did – or, like Du Zhongyuan, leave behind their lives and possessions and go into exile in unoccupied China.
Du carved out a new career for himself, becoming a famous, indeed notorious, editorialist on the best-selling weekly news journals of the era, based in Shanghai. His columns, unsurprisingly, were virulently anti-Japanese, and in 1935, he was successfully prosecuted by the government of Chiang Kaishek for allowing the publication of an article which insulted the Japanese emperor. Yet shortly after his release, war broke out between China and Japan in 1937, and Du's journalistic talents were now turned to reporting the horrors of war. His journalism of the period still powerfully evokes the sounds, sights and smells of the devastating conflict unleashed on China. Reporting to his newspaper twice a week, Du gave the intricate details of his trek to the ever-moving battlefront. Du's war, though, was not witnessed on the battlefields. Instead, it comes across as ever-growing distortions and disorientations in everyday life. Transport is one of his obsessions: delayed trains, hitched rides on military trucks, commandeered cars which sink up to their axles in the muddy, flooded roads of rural China. Air raids are also a constant threat: Du tells in detail the stories of cities where the population had to hide all day in damp, claustrophobic caves because Japanese bombers made it too dangerous to be seen outside in daylight. Through his writing, Du not only transmitted the news, but reflected people's own experiences back to them in accessible, often earthy language. Popular mass journalism, which had little more than half a century of history in China, came into its own in wartime China through the work of Du and those like him.
Du's next career change was his downfall. He accepted a job offer from a friendly warlord to become head of the main university in Xinjiang province, in China's far west. But Du's patron turned against him, becoming suspicious of his contacts with the Chinese Communists. He was arrested in 1941, and executed in prison in 1943. As China went through the war against Japan, the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, and the shocks of the People's Republic period, memory of Du Zhongyuan faded. But he did not disappear permanently. In recent decades, his story has been revived, particularly in his home provinces in the Northeast of China: in the newly nationalistic atmosphere that marks contemporary China, he is portrayed as a patriot who spoke out at China's time of greatest need. As China becomes obsessed, after more than sixty years, with its war against Japan, Du's place in history seems likely to become more assured.
Rana Mitter
