On a recent trip to Shanghai, I visited The Sihang Warehouse, which was the site of fighting that marked the beginning of the Battle for Shanghai. Situated on the bank of the Soochow Creek in the Zhabei District of Shanghai, the warehouse held no tactical or strategic value, but, as the Japanese advanced through the city, its defense became a morale-lifting, symbolic last stand.

After the Marco Polo Incident in July 1937, Japan launched an all-out offensive in China and pushed south quickly. They reached Shanghai a month later, but the soldiers from the National Revolutionary Army, although inferior in training and equipment, somehow held on. By October, though, it was clear that their resistance was faltering in Zhabei. Chiang Kai-Shek ordered all troops to withdraw, except for the 88th Division.

The 88th Division was to defend the warehouse for two reasons: 1. to slow down the invasion of the Japanese; 2. to garner international support by showing China’s willingness and determination to fight the Japanese. 524th Regiment, 88th Division was led by Regimental commander (CO), Army Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan, and he and his soldiers defied many odds and successfully defended the warehouse from October 26 to November 1, 1937.

This was one of many tales from that era that I’d heard growing up so I was naturally quite excited to find that a new museum is now dedicated to it. The concrete, six-story building still stands today, and one of the exterior walls is peppered with large holes from cannon balls and bullets to remind us of the fierce battles that took place here.

The “museum” itself, though, was a bit of joke. As anyone who is remotely familiar with that era of Chinese history knows, the War of Resistance (1937-1945) was fought and won almost entirely by the National Revolutionary Army, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. While Mao Zedong had pledged to partake in and repeatedly called for a united front against the Japanese, the reality was that he and the Communists were ensconced in northwestern China for much of the war, selling opium for money that he would later use to fight Chiang in the Chinese Civil War.

YET, in this museum, Mao Zedong loomed large, both literally and figuratively. Huge sections of the place were devoted to quotes from Mao--there was also a huge statue of him--and how valiantly the Communists fought. The language and set-up of the museum, which was only haphazardly focused on the Sihang Warehouse Defense, did not make clear it was Chiang’s NRA and NRA alone that did the defending and fighting.

Yes, I understand that victors write history, and I shouldn’t have had any expectations after seeing so many cases of historical negationism from the Communist Party. Even with my lowered expectations, though, I was still appalled by the lies being presented as truths in this “museum”. And I worry that it will continue to spread misinformation and eventually erase what actually happened there.

Anyway, today is October 10th, National Day of the Republic of China/Taiwan. As I wish happy birthday to my country, I wanted to share my guestbook entry at the end of the Sihang Warehouse tour. I think of it as a quiet, peaceful protest against the ridiculous mendacity on display there.

三民主義 統一中國 / Unify China under the Three Principles of the People

中華民國萬歲 / Long live the Republic of China

🇹🇼

The national anthem of the Republic of China performed by teachers and students from a school for orphans of Nationalist soldiers at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanking (Nanjing today).

The School for Orphans of Soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army (國民革命軍遺族學校 ) was established in 1928 by Madame Chiang, wife of Chiang Kai-shek, to look after the children of soldiers who fought and died in the Hsin-hai Revolution and Northern Expedition.

This video is perhaps the first time that the national anthem was captured live on tape. The poor editing job basically destroyed the anthem, but it’s pretty precious footage nonetheless.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Republic of China!

The picture was taken on National Day of the Republic of China in 1962, fifty-one years ago. The ++ symbol near the top is an amalgam of two tens written in Chinese (十). The National day of the ROC is also referred to as Double Ten Day to commemorate the Wuchang Uprising, which began on October 10, 1911 and led to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.

I woke up this morning to disturbing news about the lavish parade and military showcase that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) put on in commemoration of China’s WWII victory over Japan seventy years ago.

This garish display of military might as a victory dance is disturbing for many reasons but, for me, it is mainly because the PRC hardly participated in the war. While it’s true that China’s crucial role in WWII has largely been overlooked by the international community (an argument China used to justify this unnecessary exercise), it was actually the Chinese Nationalists who bore the brunt of the fight. From 1937 until the end of the war, Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army participated in some of WWII’s bloodiest battles at Taierzhuang, Changsha, and Ichigo and suffered casualties northward of 3 million.

Mao Zedong’s Communists, meanwhile, spent most of the war holed up in Yan’an, a remote area in northwest China, where they never engaged in any battle of significance or scope. Instead, they fought in relatively minor scuffles, mostly in guerrilla-style attacks, that didn’t affect the outcome of the war at all.

They appear to have avoided meeting the Japanese in frontal clashes, confining themselves in the main to occasional attack against small elements of the enemy. In reviewing the battles of the past seven years in China, it would seem safe to say that Communist participation has been on a relatively minor scale. The Communist[s] have fought no battles comparable in scope and intensity to those of the Shanghai, Hsuchow, Hankow, and Changsha campaigns; and their claims to the contrary notwithstanding, they appear to have contained but a minor proportion of the Japanese military forces operating in China.

--Clarence E. Gauss, American Ambassador to China in WWII

In fact, it is not inconceivable that the Nationalists emerged from their Pyrrhic victory over Japan so battered that they simply had nothing left in the tank to fight the Communists in the civil war that ensued immediately afterwards. The Chinese Communist Party was able to gain control of all of mainland China because they took advantage of the weakened state of the Nationalist troops and a nation of war-weary citizens.

Soon after the Communists established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, they began revising official histories claiming their supposedly colossal share in the brutal battles against a much superior enemy. The vital role that the Nationalists played in the war was infuriatingly omitted; instead, the Communists painted a picture of a corrupt Nationalist government that was more interested in fighting the Communists than Japan.

Scholars in Taiwan, where the Nationalists retreated to after the civil war, did argue against this revisionist history, but their credibility was undermined by the unfortunate fact that they were under the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek, who was eager to salvage his post-war image on the international stage.

And now, seventy years later, the political landscape is such that the PRC has come to represent all that is and was “China” (including this “victory” over Japan in 1945) despite the fact that, as a nation, it has only been in existence since 1949. The PRC has repeatedly used the Sino-Japanese war to stir up “patriotic” and, worse, anti-Japanese sentiments in the younger generation.

I know the PRC is committed to showing the world that it is no longer that poor, primitive country that many in the West have come to regard in the past few decades. That’s why the PRC and its citizens overcompensate by flexing their military and economic muscle at every opportunity. That’s fine. Class and dignity take time to develop. It is when they rewrite the real heroes out of history books and replace them with cowards and liars that I find very disturbing and disheartening.

Over the years, I have noticed something quite interesting and also baffling to me: the number of foreigners in Taiwan who are supporters of its independence far exceeds those who are ambivalent or pro-unification. The reasons for this disparity are many, of course, but I have come to the conclusion that the single, most important contributor is the media.

As is the case anywhere in the world, the media plays a vital role in shaping the way people think, behave, and live. Most foreigners who live in Taiwan have a poor command of the Chinese language. (I don’t mean this as an insult; I’m merely stating a fact. It’s a tough one to learn as a second language and an adult.) As a result of this, though, many expats rely on the very few English-language newspapers and news outlets for local news.

Taipei Times is one of only two(!) daily English-language newspapers in Taiwan, reporting on life, culture, politics, and everything in between that happens on the island. A two-minute Google search will tell you that Taipei Times is a subsidiary of Liberty Times Group, which also publishes the Chinese-language newspaper Liberty Times. What is the problem, you ask? Well, both papers are unabashedly “Pan Green” (pro-independence), and this stance is reflected in their editorial line. The fact that Taipei Times is one of the major sources of information for foreigners means that they are more likely to be exposed to the pro-independence rhetoric.

In addition, FTV (a TV channel that is also decidedly Pan Green) is one of the few local channels that produces an English-language news program. For someone who understands the politics of both Taiwan and the USA, I cannot help but compare FTV News to FOX News. The similarities are quite uncanny at times. Both will stop at nothing to ridicule and discredit the work of the current administration and its leader (both presidents have “ma” in their names, incidentally). Both channels are propaganda machines adept at creating incendiary remarks to drum up support for their own agendas.