China's forgotten heroes

After defeating Japan in 1945, Chinese nationalists (KMT) resumed their ill-fated fight against their communist compatriots. Today, China is still struggling to come to terms with individuals who have been both heroes and enemies of the state. In the meantime, these veterans have grown old, often in extreme poverty, ostracized and mostly forgotten.

Since 2015, Cambridge anthropologist Zhenru Jacqueline Lin has been studying a passionate group of volunteers, many former Chinese soldiers themselves, who go to extraordinary lengths to care for and honour these nationalist (KMT) veterans in their final years. Lin believes there may now be fewer than 3,000 living in China (most but not all men), a small fraction of those who fought in the Second World War.

While the Chinese state shows little sign of officially endorsing these efforts, ordinary citizens are showing growing interest. This is particularly evident on 18th September, the day commemorating Japan’s invasion of China. In 2020, a charity fundraising event organized by a private foundation in Shenzhen lived-streamed eight KMT veterans performing Peking Opera and military songs, attracting thousands of likes and shares on TikTok, WeChat and Sina Weibo.

In 2021, local volunteers and charities are again organizing a commemorative ritual in the former national memorial hall built by the KMT government in Hunan province in 1942. The building was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution but then restored in the 1980s. In their publicity materials, the organisers seek to depoliticise the event, helped by the fact that it coincides with the autumn sacrifice in the Confucian tradition. The acute sensitivities surrounding these fragile veterans look set to outlive them.

It was not until 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, that the Communist Party itself actively promoted the 3rd of September as ‘Victory over Japan Day’. Historical redress activists perceived this as misleading political propaganda and responded by presenting 100 neglected KMT veterans at a grassroots “military parade”. Since then, state-sponsored activity on 3rd September has become more subdued.

While CCP state propaganda has gradually begun to acknowledge the KMT’s role in the victory against Japan, it still refuses to provide social welfare or what Lin describes as “an honourable rehabilitation” to individual KMT veterans and their families.

Lin says: “For most of their lives, the majority of KMT veterans who stayed in China, together with their family members have suffered political stigmatisation, social discrimination, and as a result, severe economic difficulty. At the same time, the CCP erased the contribution of these national heroes from China’s official history.”

Lin has met dozens of elderly veterans affected by this tragic pattern of events. Accompanying activists wanting to venerate one KMT veteran, she witnessed his enraged daughter shouting: “Why do you honour this old thing as a hero? He ruined my whole life. I cannot go to school; I cannot have a job in work units (danwei); I can't even marry the one I love.” On another occasion, Lin met 96-year-old Zeng Defa.

Born in a rural village in Canton (now Guangzhou) in 1922, Zeng was forcibly conscripted by the KMT in 1942. He fled from his military camp twice but eventually joined the elite Chinese Expeditionary Force (CEF). In 1944, he was sent to India on “The Hump”, a perilous route over the Himalayas, to support the Allied Forces. Fewer than half of CEF troops who fought in Burma and India survived the ordeal. After recovering from a leg injury caused by a hand grenade explosion, Zeng was sent back to fight in Guizhou, Guangxi and Hunan until the war ended in August 1945.

At that point, the KMT recalled Zeng to fight the CCP. By the end of 1948, his army had surrendered and when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Zeng started training in the newly-established military academy in Hunan province. Hoping to serve the new China, Zeng shared his battlefield experience with his new peers. But then disaster struck. Zeng’s former “political affiliation” was leaked, he was abruptly demobilised and forced to return to his childhood village to live as a peasant. Sharing his bitter past for the first time, Zeng told a local activist’:

“When I returned home, my family was broken. I have written so many reports to the Party leaders in our county, but they refuse to listen to me. In the Cultural Revolution, some villagers called for me to be executed for being a KMT counter-revolutionary and the Party members accused me of being an army deserter from the PLA. I explained that the PLA forcibly discharged me even though I was educated and had rich battle experience. I have never asked for an allowance or subsidy from the government. Why can't the government verify me as a (PLA) veteran (zhuanye junren) so that I can have a job? Nothing, nothing, (my life is) a misery. For my whole life, I have been looked down upon as a poor peasant. For seventy years, nobody said anything good about my sacrifice in the war.”

In 2015, the CCP announced that it would reward those who fought the Japanese with 5,000 RMB (£526), but Zeng had nothing to prove his war service. Like many other KMT veterans, Zeng destroyed documents, photographs and items proving his KMT membership to avoid persecution. Not long after, however, Zeng’s luck dramatically changed.

A local redress activist visited his house after reading an interview with one of his old comrades who had fled to Hong Kong in 1948. In the article, published online by a Hong Kong newspaper, this man mentioned fighting with Zeng in India. He had managed to keep an address book and a group photo which preserved Zeng’s personal information and image. Thanks to these documents, the activist successfully applied for Zeng’s medal and allowance from the central government. When receiving these honours, Zeng knelt to express his gratitude to the activist and burst into tears. He said:

“I returned home in 1951, and nobody cared about me until you came… I always feel deeply sorry for all my dead brothers-in-arms, as nobody knows to this day where and how they died. Without your charitable caregiving to us, we would have had no other ways (to deal with our situation). I owe you so much…”

Zeng also wrote a poem and hung it under the badge he was given by the state. When he met Lin in 2015, he asked her to translate his words into English:

Dr Lin says: “In the historical narratives and public commemoration events that serve the agendas of the party-state, the past lives of individuals like Zeng have been erased, distorted, and buried in political turmoil, historical chaos, and social oblivion.”

But Lin is equally interested in the volunteers who, despite once serving in the People’s Liberation Army, now dedicate their lives to honouring men once condemned as “counter-revolutionaries”. Their historical redress movement began online in the 1990s, initiated by a group of Beijing-based rock music fans; and by the 2000s, cultural elites and wealthy entrepreneurs were beginning to establish a nationwide charity programme to support the most vulnerable KMT veterans.

By recording oral histories and crosschecking the information given with that stored in historical archives, the volunteers seek to restore the identities of KMT veterans. But they also distribute charitable donations, arrange birthday celebrations, exchange military salutes, record war wounds and arrange photoshoots to celebrate the perceived “enduring love” between veterans and their wives.

In doing so, Lin has found that the volunteers, who self-identify as “brothers-in-arms”, connect their own suffering and difficulties – experienced as former PLA servicemen – to the stories, photos and other cultural representations of the older war heroes they now care for.

Many of the volunteers, usually in their 30s and 40s, tell Lin that they enjoyed serving in the military but were discharged after failing to gain promotion and then struggled in the wider job market, often contributing to marital breakdown. For these men – derided by some civilians as “army riffraff (bin pi)” – finding and helping KMT veterans has become a new mission, offering them a renewed sense of purpose and honour.

Yan Bing (not his real name), a leader of volunteers in a remote mountainous region of Hunan province, told Lin about the moment that compelled him to help:

“When I learned that this man, who was living like a dog, was a KMT veteran who fought during the War of Resistance, an immensely complicated mixture of feelings washed over me: anger, guilt, shame and confusion. How could the state and our society treat a man who had sacrificed his entire life to the protection of the motherland like this? As an (ex-)soldier, how can I allow this kind of injustice to happen? With this self-reflection and raft of complicated feelings, I started to search for War of Resistance veterans. It turned out to be an endless journey. The more injustice I witnessed, the heavier the burden on my shoulders.”

Lin’s research examines the creation of a shared soldier identity and the transfer of memories across generations and political affiliations. This, she argues, undermines the assumption, widespread in the West, that Chinese citizens are uniformly brainwashed to accept a CCP-approved version of the past.

Zhenru Jacqueline Lin was a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and St John’s College, Cambridge until May 2021. In August, Dr Lin became a Research Assistant Professor at the Centre of China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Published 4th November 2021