Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution

By John Israel

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9780804765244

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

CIP data appear at the end of the book

To the faculty and students of Xinan Lianda

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Note on Conventions

Introduction

PART ONE - Patriots’ Pilgrimage

ONE - From Beiping to Changsha

TWO - Lianda’s Long March

THREE - The Charms of Mengzi

PART TWO - Interactions

FOUR - Lianda and the Yunnanese

FIVE - Chongqing and Kunming

SIX - The Lianda Ethos

PART THREE - A Pride of Professors

SEVEN - The College of Arts

EIGHT - The College of Social Sciences

NINE - War and Scholarship

TEN - The College of Natural Sciences

ELEVEN - The College of Engineering

TWELVE - The Teachers College

PART FOUR - Eight Years at Lianda

THIRTEEN - Years of Hope: 1938—1941

FOURTEEN - Years of Endurance: 1941—1943

FIFTEEN - Years of Trial: 1943-1945

SIXTEEN - Fulfilling the Mandate: 1945-1946

Conclusion

APPENDIX - List of Interviews

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright Page

Preface

Cuban invaders have occupied the east coast of the United States, the federal government has moved to Denver, and the students and professors of Harvard, Yale, and Swarthmore have relocated in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the duration of the conflict. Through such fanciful analogies, I try to give inquisitive friends a sense of why I am so fascinated with an obscure and short-lived Chinese university that brought together in the mountainbound southwest an intellectual elite from the academic citadels of the north China plains.

The focus of my attention is National Southwest Associated University, a translation of Guoli Xinan Lianhe Daxue, abbreviated as Xinan Lianda or Lianda. Lianda’s nine-year history (1937-46) coincided roughly with the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), known in China as the War of Resistance.

Influenced by Anglo-American political and educational ideas, Lianda’s teachers and students could broadly be defined as liberals. As a liberal American academic, I find it easy to identify with their struggle to defend our common heritage. In contrast to the usual historians’ problem of having to empathize with people and ideas far removed from themselves, I have had to struggle to create a bit of distance between myself and my ideological kinsmen in wartime China.

The effort has been futile. Far from separating myself from my subject matter, I have grown ever close to it. Beginning in November 1973, when Lianda’s dean of students, Zha Liangzhao, presented me to a gathering of Taibei alumni celebrating Lianda’s thirty-sixth anniversary, I have been drawn into the Lianda community. In April 1974 a group of New York alumni invited me to dinner to discuss their alma mater. At the end of the meal they raised their glasses and declared me an honorary alumnus, a title that has stuck in spite of the rather irregular way it was conferred.

During the initial phase of this two decades’ project I interviewed several score alumni and professors emeriti in the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In 1980, the year after the normalization of United States’ relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), I spent six months as an exchange scholar in China, where I interviewed more alumni and former faculty members. In December 1984 I returned for eight months of study in Taibei, where I resumed interaction with local alumni, and in September 1986 I began a year of further research in Beijing and Kunming, both of which by then had well-established alumni organizations. Finally, in November 1988 I joined some eight hundred alumni in Kunming to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Lianda’s establishment in that city.

Lianda’s alumni have given me information, insight, friendship, moral support, and valuable criticism. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as my knowledge of the university has increased and my perspective evolved, I committed my ideas to print in nearly a dozen articles. Alumni in the United States, the People’s Republic, and Taiwan have offered critical comments on these publications, as well as on draft chapters of this book, from which I have benefited enormously.

In addition to interviews, I have sought to recapture a sense of place by visiting sites of Lianda’s various campuses—the provincial capitals of Changsha and Kunming and the remote towns of Mengzi and Xuyong. In all these places, I enjoyed the hospitality and cooperation of local scholars, officials, and Lianda alumni. This volume is not, however, based primarily upon oral testimony and travel. Lianda left a voluminous but diffuse record, in books, periodicals, newspapers, documents, and memorabilia. Beginning at the Harvard-Yenching Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Library of Congress and National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, I went on to the Guomindang archives in Taiwan and, in the PRC, to the Beijing Library, the Beijing University Library, the Yunnan Provincial Library, the Kunming Teachers College Library, and the December First Movement archives. I would like to thank the librarians, curators, and other responsible individuals in those institutions for their cooperation and assistance. I am particularly grateful to Kunming Teachers College (formerly Lianda’s Teachers College, now Yunnan Teachers University) and the Alumni Liaison Office of Beijing University for hosting me, in 1980 and in 1985-86, respectively, and for facilitating my work and travel.

The alumni have contributed enormously to the written record. Qinghua (conventionally romanized Tsinghua) University, one of Lianda’s component parts, has a long tradition of alumni activism. The Qinghua xiaoyou tongxun (Tsinghua Alumni Gazette), published in prewar China, continued intermittently during the war and civil war, and revived in Xinzhu, Taiwan, in 1962 and in Beijing in 1980, is a rich repository of reminiscences. Since its formation in 1983, Lianda’s Beijing alumni association has overseen the publication of memoirs, anthologies, chronologies, and documents. During the anniversary celebration of 1988, a flood of publications poured forth from Beijing and Kunming. In addition, there have been memoirs by former professors, novels, short stories, and essays by former students, and all manner of historical accounts written during and after the Lianda years. Everything has been grist for my mill, though I must confess that the grist has often accumulated faster than the mill has been able to grind.

In addition to the Chinese associated with Lianda, I have enjoyed access, in person or by way of their writings, to foreigners who knew the Lianda scene firsthand. The published diaries of Robert Payne, who taught there from 1943 to 1946, have been particularly valuable, as have the letters and reports in the files of my teacher, mentor, and friend, the late Professor John K. Fairbank, who kindly granted me access to these materials. Others who lived in Kunming or visited it as members of the United States diplomatic and military services have also shared their recollections with me.

Since there are few survivors among the small number of non-Chinese with firsthand knowledge of Lianda, and because these people played rather distinctive roles in the history of the institution, I have identified them by name in the endnotes. I have done the same for Lianda faculty members, many of whom are familiar to students of modern China. Exceptions have been made when my subjects requested anonymity, and even then I have taken the liberty of nullifying guarantees of confidentiality after the deaths of the individuals. In the case of alumni, I have usually dispensed with names, which would be meaningless to most readers, in favor of more important information—the years they graduated or left the university, their academic majors, and places and dates of the interviews, and in the case of the female minority, their gender.

Given the hundreds of people who have been so generous with their time and understanding, it might appear unfair to single out anyone in particular. Nonetheless, there are a few without whom this book would have been poorer or, indeed impossible. John K. Fairbank introduced me to his Qinghua-Lianda friends from the 1930s and 1940s, shared with me his memories and insights, and alternately encouraged and cajoled me until my manuscript was complete. My former wife, Mary H. Israel, shared Lianda with me for eighteen years, edited the first draft of the manuscript, and was a tough but loving critic.

Xiao Di, who directed the Lianda history project based at Beijing University, also deserves a special note. Following a laryngectomy that left him with a diminished voice but undiminished courage, Xiao dedicated his later years to the preservation of the Lianda legacy. Far from home and family, living in monastic simplicity, Xiao threw himself into the monumental effort of organizing a support network, collecting and publishing sources, and writing Lianda’s history. His persistence under adversity is a fitting tribute to his alma mater, and his generosity and openness in sharing resources and insights with me has been a model for the new era of Sino-American scholarly cooperation.

Two individuals whose spiritual contributions to this work have been particularly important are Kai-yu Hsu (Xu Jieyu) and Li Xiaoliang. Hsu, a Lianda alumnus whose virtuosity as historian, biographer, writer, literary critic, and painter epitomized the best in the Chinese intellectual tradition, served as friend and mentor until his untimely death in 1981. My wife, Xiaoliang, brought to life the romance of Kunming, where I met her in 1980, and has been an unfailing source of inspiration and support ever since.

On a more mundane but no less important level, this volume would have been impossible without the financial support of the following: the Social Science Research Council, the Wilson Gee Faculty Summer Fellowship Awards, and the Sesquicentennial Associateship program at the University of Virginia, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the Weedon Foundation, the Committee on Scientific and Scholarly Cooperation with the U.S., Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taibei.

The history of Lianda’s publication is a story in itself. The manuscript was accepted by Harvard University’s Council on East Asian Publications and skillfully edited by Pamela Banks. When we reached an impasse over technical matters, the Council’s executive editor, Katherine Keenum, generously allowed me to withdraw the manuscript, which was subsequently accepted by the Stanford University Press. Thanks to the painstaking efforts of Stanford’s Muriel Bell, Stacey Lynn, and Shirley Taylor, this volume is at last in print. Finally, a word of appreciation to family, friends, and members of the Lianda community for waiting so patiently for its appearance.

J. I.

Note on Conventions

Throughout this book dollars means U.S. dollars and yuan means the official currency of the Chinese national governments. Cents and pennies, unless otherwise specified, refer to hundredths of a yuan. The market value of the yuan fell from thirty American cents in June 1937 to five cents in September 1940, one cent in December 1943, half a cent in June 1944, and a twentieth of a cent in June 1945. In 1937 it took less than four yuan to buy an American dollar; in 1946 it took more than two thousand.

Units of distance are cited as they appear in the sources, whether in miles, kilometers, or li. There are approximately two li to a kilometer, three li to a mile.

In selecting a system of romanization, I discarded the old, inadequate Wade-Giles for the new, inadequate pinyin. My choice requires the uninitiated reader to cope with initial q’s (pronounced ch), x’s (pronounced sh), c’s (pronounced tse), and zh’s (pronounced j). I have modified pinyin in only one respect: by changing he (pronounced huh) to ho when necessary to avoid confusion with the English pronoun.

I have left the conventional spellings of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen unchanged.

Introduction

Romantic history has long been out of style. In an age of tough-minded social-scientific analysis, the subjective vagaries of the human spirit are not allowed to blur the neat configurations of quantifiable data. But are all subjects inappropriate for treatment in the romantic vein? Take, for example, National Southwest Associated University (Lianda), where many of China’s most eminent scholars struggled to keep Chinese culture alive during the Second Sino-Japanese war. Lianda began with an epic pilgrimage, continued through years of heroic endurance, and ended in triumph mingled with tragedy. It was clearly the stuff of romance.

For two decades these scholars strove to bring their young universities—Beida, Qinghua, and Nankai—up to world standards. Suddenly Japan attacked. Campuses were seized, occupied—one, blasted to ruins. Students and teachers fled across China to escape the enemy. For a few months they found refuge in Hunan, in south-central China, but were driven out by enemy bombs. Nearly three hundred students and a dozen faculty members embarked on a sixty-eight-day trek across three of China’s most primitive, impoverished, and dangerous provinces. The journey took them through bandit-ridden Guizhou, with its rugged terrain, opium-addicted population, and lore of black magic. They made it to Kunming, deep in China’s southwest hinterland, where in mud-walled classrooms they kept the lamps of learning ablaze for eight years.

Japanese planes pursued the academic refugees and leveled parts of their new classrooms and dormitories, disrupted academic schedules, and forced faculty families to evacuate to outlying villages. The bombers were eventually driven from the skies by America’s Flying Tigers, but a new enemy appeared: inflation. Prices soared, first tenfold, then a hundredfold. Professors sold their books and took outside jobs. The wife of the university’s president peddled homemade snacks to a corner stand in order to feed her family. Students barely survived on a diet of the coarsest quality of rice and a sprinkling of vegetables.

Finally Japan surrendered. Everybody prepared for a return to the campuses of north China. The scholars looked forward to a postwar era of peace and prosperity in which they could help to build a strong, democratic China. Instead, Japan’s defeat brought dictatorship and civil war, persecution and death. In December 1945, the soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek bombarded the campus with grenades, killing four young intellectuals. In July 1946, after most of the faculty and students had left, Lianda’s beloved poetpatriot, Professor Wen Yiduo, was gunned down. Wen’s endurance under the most stringent economic circumstances and his courage in speaking out for social justice, democracy, and peace have made him a symbol of the Lianda experience. His funeral bells rang a death knell for democratic, liberal alternatives and reduced China’s choices to dictatorships of the left or of the right. Three years after Wen’s assassination, a Communist government came to power and began the systematic destruction of Lianda’s liberal heritage.

I embarked upon my study of Southwest Associated University in 1973 because I was drawn to its dramatic story: here were China’s leading academicians exiled to a remote border city and bound together by a noble heritage and a common mandate. As I learned more about the subject, I realized that the interaction of intellects and personalities at Lianda was of extraordinary human interest and deserved to be recorded for its own sake, as well as for what it would add to institutional accounts of Chinese history.

In treating my subject as a dramatic pageant, I place considerable importance on the deeds and personalities of individuals. This approach has, for the most part, gone out of style. Jonathan Spence has done much to revive it in Chinese studies, and although I do not presume to compare my work with his, I do subscribe to the notion that a history drained of the human presence and reduced to the quantifiable interactions of impersonal forces is a poorer history, not only less readable but also, in a fundamental way, less accurate because it ignores the lived experience.

But if Lianda were interesting only as romance, it would be better left to the novelist.¹ The raison d’être for the historical study of Lianda is that it played an enormously important role in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of mid-twentieth-century China. Woven into Lianda’s history are patterns of traditions and liberal ideas, between the cosmopolitan milieu of the nation’s universities and the provincial environment that surrounded them. Beyond China, Lianda raises questions of universal significance: What conditions give birth to and sustain a center of liberal education? What are the internal dynamics that enable a university to fulfill its mission? How is that mission defined and justified during periods of crisis? Even in normal times, how important are the precepts of critical intellect, pluralism, tolerance, and freedom of thought in a world preoccupied with hunger, disease, poverty, social injustice, and tyranny? If the Lianda experience cannot provide final answers, it can, at least, illuminate hidden dimensions of these troublesome issues.

Friends and colleagues have sometimes chided me for my obsession with a single institution that lasted less than a decade, and have urged me to do something broader. In fact, the neat chronological and spatial bounds of Lianda were partly the attraction: nothing is so seductive to a historian as a subject with a clear beginning and a clear end. Thus when I began this study, I set no timetable for completion because I saw no need for one. Surely such a limited subject could be wrapped up in short order! Now, having lived with the memories of Lianda for three times as long as the duration of the institution, I am less naive, but no less enthusiastic. I know from experience what any historian ought to know as a matter of common sense—that there is no such thing as a subject with a clear beginning and a clear end. An understanding of Lianda’s origins takes us back at least to the late nineteenth century; an understanding of its legacies takes us through the 1990s into the uncharted future; and an understanding of its historical significance takes us beyond the boundaries of China into larger, transcultural questions.

Just as it was the precise boundaries of the subject that originally lured me in, it is the multifaceted, open-endedness of it that has sustained my interest through more than two decades of research and writing. In reading this account, the reader will, I hope, come to share my fascination with Lianda and understand my pride in being an honorary alumnus.

PART ONE

Patriots’ Pilgrimage

ONE

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.¹

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.²

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.³

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.⁴

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.⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷

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.⁸

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.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹

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.¹²

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.¹³

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?¹⁴

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.¹⁵

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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷

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.¹⁸

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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰

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.²¹ 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.²²

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. ²³ 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.²⁴

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.

Though it is unclear to what extent Beida and Nankai were in on the planning, according to the testimony of Qinghua Professor Xiao Gongquan, they were at least committed in principle to the idea.²⁵ Other sources suggest that Beida and Nankai did not become part of the picture until after the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Zheng Tianting, who served as Beida’s de facto head during the summer of 1937, denies that Beida had any plans to relocate. In moving books and equipment south in 1933 after fighting erupted at the Great Wall and moving them back after the crisis subsided, Beida had already reacted prematurely to the threat of Japanese invasion. Jiang Menglin was not about to go through all that wasted motion again.²⁶ Institutionally, moreover, Beida was linked to its traditional location, for it was the successor to the Imperial University and had long been identified in name and tradition with the ancient city. According to his own testimony, Jiang Menglin was dragged into the scheme with great reluctance. In August 1937, Jiang recalled, the government was planning to require Beida, Qinghua, and Nankai to combine into a union university at Changsha. . . . Hu Shi . . . asked me to put the scheme into effect. I did not welcome the idea but . . . there are things in the world which you do not want to do but must do in the end.²⁷

The final decision was made in a special meeting of the Executive Yuan, and on September 10, 1937, the Ministry of Education issued an edict: there would be two temporary universities, one at Changsha, consisting of Beida, Qinghua, Nankai, and the Academia Sinica, and the other at Xi’an.²⁸ The news quickly reached Beiping, but response among Beida professors still in the city was far from unanimous. On October 8, twenty of them signed a letter to Jiang Menglin expressing their resolution to remain in Beiping:

This school, which has been managed with great travail for forty years, will not become a neglected shell with nobody to care for it. We . . . who sit in the dark waiting for the dawn will not fail to carry out to the very end our initial determination to defend the school and maintain learning. As for our individual sustenance, we dare not concern ourselves with such things at this juncture.²⁹

The signatories were encouraged by a letter from Hu Shi, who expressed admiration for colleagues who chose to remain in the enemy-occupied city to carry on their lonely pursuit of scholarship.³⁰ A stream of communications from other colleagues and a personal visit from Qiu Kaiming, who had actually been to Changsha, helped swing the balance of opinion. Financial subsidy for travel expenses, which eventually reached Tianjin by special courier, may also have changed the minds of some of Beida’s less well-off faculty. Of the thirty-six Beida people still in Beiping in late October, only seven decided to stay. On November 17 the last contingent, including Zheng Tianting and eight colleagues, left for Tianjin.³¹

Qinghua scholars felt less anguish over the move. One reason was the leadership of Mei Yiqi, who, unlike Jiang Menglin and Hu Shi, never displayed any hesitation about the Changsha option. Another reason may have been Qinghua’s American connection, which virtually assured Japanese harassment for anyone who remained behind. At Beida, the Japanese scraped together enough talent to staff a puppet university. At Qinghua such an alternative was impossible. A few did choose to remain at Qinghua. The literary scholar Yu Pingbo refused to abandon his ailing father, and Japanese-educated Qian Daosun stayed out of ideological sympathy with the invader, but they were the exceptions. Most Qinghua professors got out, at all costs.³² Not that they were less devoted to their scholarly mission. Chen Da spent the better part of October getting his overseas Chinese study to press but managed to secure luggage, books, and manuscripts in the Legation Quarter, and then quietly make a railroad reservation. On November 10, telling nobody outside his family that he was leaving, he boarded a train for Tianjin.³³

The relocation of Beida, Qinghua, and Nankai was far from unique. As the war quickly spread across north China, one after another, universities moved inland. On August 13 fighting erupted in Shanghai, and by year’s end the conflagration covered the entire lower Yangzi valley. By early 1941, three years later, 77 of the 114 prewar colleges and universities had relocated in the interior.

For most Beida and Qinghua academics, the lifeline to freedom began with a 137-kilometer rail trip to Tianjin. This first lap was the most traumatic. Knowing that, as students and intellectuals, they were at risk, they traveled disguised as peasants, merchants, or puppet functionaries. But the normally peaceful two-and-a-half-hour ride took up to twelve nerve-racking hours, during which there were frequent inspections, with searches and inquiries at the point of disembarkation. Upon the slightest suspicion, one could be seized and whisked off to an unknown fate.

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Nor did problems vanish with arrival in Tianjin. The refugee-packed foreign concessions were the only sanctuary, and security was not absolute even there. Japanese agents were reported tracking down Nankai students as far away as the International Settlement of Shanghai.³⁴ Young, alone, frightened, sometimes penniless, the students knew that at any moment they could disappear without a trace.³⁵ Faculty members worried about families and belongings. More than one professor, cut off from home by the outbreak of war, made the long trip from Shanghai or Nanjing back to occupied Beiping before he turned around and retraced his steps.

The first refugees were able to leave Tianjin for Nanjing via the Tianjin-Pukou Railroad, which terminated in a ferry ride across the Yangzi from the nation’s capital, but as fighting spread along the railroad the journey became increasingly hazardous, then impossible. The only escape out of Tianjin was by ship. Tickets were scarce and costly, and the voyage was arduous. Wu Dayou borrowed several hundred yuan from his old amah for a second-class ticket on a ship to Hong Kong, from which he planned to take a train to Changsha.³⁶ Chen Da took a boat to Shanghai and another to Nantong, where he managed to find the captain of a British-owned tugboat who was willing to stow him and his fellow travelers in a barge for ten yuan apiece, provided that they kept out of sight. The tug wound its way through backwaters and canals to Kouan, where Chen was able to board a steamer to Hankou. When he arrived there five days later, he was told that all trains to Changsha had been requisitioned by the military. After two days’ wait, he found standing room on a special train for government functionaries. After a twenty-one hour ordeal, he reached Changsha. The Beiping-Changsha trip, normally a train ride of twenty-four hours, had taken nineteen days.³⁷

Beida history student Wang Dezhao, cut off from his home in central Hebei by the unstable situation following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, eventually made his way to Changsha by setting out for Shanxi via the Beiping-Hankou Railroad. At Shijiazhuang, he met a close friend, an army general, who asked him to serve as his secretary with the rank of major. After suffering defeat, the troops retreated westward into Shanxi. With his rucksack containing his life’s savings tied securely to his back, Wang hopped a train for the provincial capital of Taiyuan, but en route a Japanese plane swooped in to attack. The first bomb fell wide, so the pilot circled for another pass. Wang jumped off and went hurtling toward a deep ravine. His rucksack snared on a tree and saved his life. The second bomb also went awry, and Wang was able to reboard the train to Taiyuan and go on to Xi’an. At Tongguan the tracks reached the Yellow River and came to an abrupt end. There Wang encountered the infamous infantrymen of Sichuan armed with their two guns—the rifle and the opium pipe.³⁸

Wang suffered no harm at the hands of the soldiers, but he did have to ford the swift current. The technique was to wait downstream of the boat’s point of departure and to be carried piggyback by a coolie into the river to be thrown onto the boat as it sped past. Wang made it without wetting his feet, only to realize that his precious rucksack had remained in the coolie’s hands.

In Xi‘an the now destitute Wang found some fellow students heading for Yan’an, the Maoist mecca for thousands of anti-Japanese youths. Politically innocent, Wang would gladly have joined them had a friend not restrained him from committing himself to the rigors of life in the Border Area. In a Xi’an newspaper Wang read that a temporary university was being formed in Changsha. With money borrowed from a friend, he made his way by railroad to Hankou. There he received food and shelter at a Ministry of Education reception station for refugee students, and finally got to Changsha in time for the opening of school.

CHANGSHA TEMPORARY UNIVERSITY

In Hunan we rested

On the slopes of Hengshan,

By the waters of the Xiang,

Then again we moved on.

—XINAN LIANDA SCHOOL ANTHEM

News of the opening of Changsha Temporary University (Changsha Linshi Daxue, or Lin Da) spread through the press and, via the school’s preparatory committee, to all the students, alumni, and faculty members of Beida, Qinghua, and Nankai scattered across China. Lin Da enrollment eventually reached 1,452.—631 from Qinghua, 342 from Beida, 147 from Nankai, and 218 through a special wartime transfer arrangement. All but a few dozen were sophomores and above, since only in Wuhan had Beida and Qinghua authorities managed to hold the scheduled joint entrance examinations. There were 148 proressors—73 from Qinghua, 55 from Beida, and 20 from Nankai.

Qinghua had contributed nearly half of both the faculty and the student body,³⁹ and from its inception, Changsha Temporary University bore a Qinghua imprint. In 1937, two Qinghua research institutes were constructed at the base of Yuelu Mountain across the river from Changsha. Negotiations of Qinghua authorities with an American missionary society enabled Lin Da’s preparatory committee to establish offices in the Jiucaiyuan Bible School.

Lin Da was headed by a four-man standing committee consisting of the chancellors of the three constituent universities and Yang Zhensheng, the Ministry of Education liaison who had brought them together. For several reasons, de facto leadership fell into the hands of Mei Yiqi. Zhang Boling, recovering from the double loss of his life’s work at Nankai and his eldest son to the Japanese war machine, had a stronger commitment to his middle school in Chongqing than to the temporary university in Changsha. Jiang Menglin had felt oppressed by administrative burdens ever since picking up the reins as Beida’s chancellor in 1931. Financial uncertainty, Japanese intimidation, and student rebellion plagued him, and the ideal of a proud citadel of learning—secure from the vicissitudes of war and politics—eluded his grasp.⁴⁰ He had made impressive progress in bringing together a first-rate faculty, high-quality students, and an improved physical plant, but his accomplishments at Beida only made it more difficult to transfer his loyalties to the joint enterprise in Changsha; and what he found there caused him to lose heart for further leadership. To run a university in troubled times, he wrote, is something of a headache: To do it during a war, in conjunction with two other institutions not lacking in the diverse personalities and idiosyncrasies common to university professors, was worse. With the worries of war and anxiety as to my family and friends in the war zones or occupied areas, it was more than my health could endure.⁴¹

Mei, on the other hand, had for two years been preparing Qinghua for the Changsha move. Furthermore, as low-keyed but highly effective administrator of proven ability in handling proud professors and rebellious students, he was the ideal man to take command at this time of crisis. Mei presided over the secretarial, academic, and general affairs offices, buildings and grounds, and various specialized organs. The academic units of the three universities were merged into four colleges with a total of seventeen departments. ⁴² College deanships were judiciously meted out—arts going to Beida’s Feng Youlan, social sciences to Nankai’s Chen Xujin, and natural science to Qinghua’s Wu Youxun. Engineering, a Qinghua monopoly, naturally went to a Qinghua man, Shi Jiayang.⁴³ Top administrative posts also were divided among the three schools. Qinghua’s Pan Guangdan was dean of academic affairs; Nankai’s Huang Yusheng, dean of students; and Beida’s Fan Jichang, manager of general affairs.⁴⁴ Nonetheless, the three institutions maintained their own identities and their own advisory systems, graduation requirements, and informal administrative apparatus.

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Lin Da operated on a stringent budget. The Ministry of Education approved a loan of 500,000 dollars from Sino-British Indemnity funds, but less than half of that amount was immediately available. The ministry’s formula for wartime finance was 70 percent of the previous year’s peacetime allocations. Since there were three schools at Lin Da, they were funded at half this rate, or 35 percent of their total budgets.⁴⁵

Much of Changsha Temporary University was not in Changsha. The Bible college was adequate only for school offices and for classrooms for the College of Social Sciences. Most departments in the College of Natural Sciences used Yale-in-China Medical School facilities. Civil engineering students attended classes inside the city, and the electrical and mechanical engineering departments were located at Hunan University, across the river at the base of Yuelushan (Yuelu Mountain), adjacent to the site of the new Qinghua research institutes. The chemical engineering department was in Sichuan, guest of Chongqing University, and the recently formed aviation research section of the mechanical engineering department was in Nanchang, capital of Jiangsi, Hunan’s neighboring province to the east. Though a skeletal staff remained in town to teach the first-year curriculum to the few freshmen, the College of Arts itself was located in a branch of the Bible college at the foot of Hengshan, the sacred mountain several hours to the south of Changsha.

As students drifted into Changsha, they were housed on a catch-as-catchcan basis. Some of the men were put up in a number of the Bible college’s larger rooms, equipped with closely spaced double-deck beds. Many were assigned to the less cozy Forty-ninth Brigade barracks, to sleep on straw matting. Women were domiciled at the nearby Hande Girls School. Students who could afford it (mostly those who were still getting help from their families) lived three or four to a room in off-campus housing.⁴⁶

Classes began on November 1, 1937—a raw, overcast day—without ceremony. Although Japanese planes came to pay their respects, bombing was yet to become a serious problem, and it was widely assumed that the huge Stars and Stripes spread out on the lawn of the Bible college would provide more than merely talismanic protection.

Physical conditions were less than ideal. The shortage of classrooms made it necessary to extend classes into the early evening hours. There was also a shortage of laboratory equipment. Lin Da and the Beiping library each contributed 40,000 yuan to purchase books and periodicals, but new acquisitions had to be shipped in