Chinese public opinion of Japan during World War 2

[manfredzhang]

You don’t have a clue of what were Chinese opinion

I do not, which is why I am keen to learn what it was. Not someone else's theories about it.

but couldn’t care less to fabricate a Nationalism prevailed China

As far as I can see the only one fabricating this idea is you so please feel free to argue with yourself but please keep me out of it. Preferably elsewhere so that this topic is not closed - as per the above I am keen to learn about Chinese contemporaneous opinion.

I do not, which is why I am keen to learn what it was. Not someone else's theories about it.
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Right you do not. But you are happy to jump in this thread and offer valueless opinion.
Again, I repeat, I contributed to this discussion with tons of facts. I have yet to see anyone else in this thread to do the same.

As far as I can see the only one fabricating this idea is you
---------------------
What did I fabricate? This is a serious accusation. Please come up with evidence.

I am keen to learn about Chinese contemporaneous opinion.
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I have presented tons of facts including millions of Chinese actions. But you are not interested to learn these facts but stick to your imagination and assumptions.

[David Thompson]

Gentlemen -- Avoid personal comments about other posters and stay on the topic, Chinese public opinion of Japan during World War 2. Our readers are probably interested in any reliable sources of information on the subject.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi manfredzhang,

A request for sources is entirely legitimate in the terms of this forum.

Therefore, "I don’t appreciate you..... asking for what were my sources" is not an appropriate reply.

The fact that you decline to give sources and then say, "This is probably the last post I respond to you", unnecessarily puts everything you claim in question.

You like to give the impression that you know things the rest of us don't but, because you are unwilling to give any sources, this currently carries no evidential weight.

None of us know you from a bar of soap, or you us, so it is necessary to have the ability to check on what each of us claim. Without sources we can't do that.

Cheers,

Sid.

[manfredzhang]

Just to be clear, if anyone else is interested in the 30K Chinese resided in Japan, I don't mind sharing. But just not to answer the request from a specific person...

[David Thompson]

manfredzhang -- The forum rules say (emphasis added):

5. Back up your claims
We wish the forum to maintain a high standard. While posting on the forum isn't on the same level as writing an academic text, we want to maintain a balanced level of scholarship.

When you include a quote, cite the source. Include enough information to allow other members to find the source themselves. As a minimum, include the author, title/issue, and page number (for monographs and serials) or a link to the specific article (for websites).
When you cite a source, the source must be of sufficiently high quality to substantiate the nature of the claim. Do not cite racist or supremacist websites, unsourced secondary articles, opinion pieces and reviews (other than as evidence of the opinion or review itself), or similar sources.
If another member challenge one of your claims, you must cite a source for your claim.
If you make a claim that is obviously controversial, you should cite a source immediately.
Do not post your opinion without supporting it with facts or context.

app.php/rules

[manfredzhang]

Allow me to extend this topic a little bit.
The moment I see people were asking to have a poll with Chinese people in the 1930s, my first reaction is laughing. Poll is probably the last vehicle you want to use in China to draw public opinion.
Poll is very popular in English Speaking countries and other Western countries. It largely works because of the following preconditions.
1, A system that encourages independent thinking.
2, An environment promoting free speech.
3, Population is largely honest to respond (This is no longer true in recent years which led to couple of poll failures) or you have a track of record of poll behaviors.
4, Effective means to conduct the poll e.g. common usage of telephone or post mail services.

There are probably other preconditions required to make a poll effective. My point is, none of the four preconditions listed above existed in China in the 1930s.

Chinese culture along with other East Asia cultures is promoting obedience NOT independent thinking. We were trained to follow instructions and execute rather than thinking and figuring out solutions. Doesn’t mean Chinese people are stupid or have very poor problem-solving skills. It’s just the system in general does not encourage that. Living in China, even elites have a tendency to rely on others to inform them and in many cases make decisions for them.
When my dad lived in my house, the following dialogue happened almost on a daily basis.
Me: Dad, what do you want for dinner?
Dad: Whatever works for you. Anything.
Me: How about burger?
Dad: No Burger please.
Me: How about Pizza?
Dad: No Pizza.
Me: How about chicken?
Dad: No chicken.
Me: What indeed do you want?
Dad: Anything that works…
Keep in mind, I am his son. Their generation was very reluctant to express their opinion/preference/will even within families. He was born in 1939 by the way. One can imagine how earlier generations would react to a stranger asking for their opinions.

I was giving an example of a simple choice in one’s normal life. Now, when it comes to politics, the reluctance became pretendence. With a long history of authoritarian regimes, the basic instinct of survival in China is to align your opinion with the ruler’s opinion (whoever the ruler is). There were too many cases in history one speaking out their opinions and got executed along with their families. People learned that. You never know what will happen to you when you said something that was not appreciated by the ruler. Let’s say now, if you have a poll in China asking are you supporting the Communist Regime? You probably will get a 99% if not 100% approval rate. How useful/relevant that result is?
In the US, I believe the polls were largely done thru phone calls or mail. Telephone was probably commonly used in the States in the 1930s. NOT in China. Again, my own experience. My family did not have a phone until early 1990s. And I am talking about Shanghai, the most advanced city in China.
How about mail? Remember I talk about 90% illiteracy in China? So most people don’t read or write. There were a handful of literates in every village at that time. One of their core businesses was to read and write letters for the illiterates and name their children. That’s a business. The illiterates paid for such services. And you can imagine where the poll mail will end up to. Even the literates were honest to transfer the mail to their recipients, he would usually be asked, hey, help me fill the questionnaire. I don’t mind. You do it for me. So again, do you think the poll will generate any meaningful result?
That’s why I said: Don’t look at poll result (Don’t even have a poll). Don’t listen to what people are saying. Watch what they are doing. Millions migrating to Manchuria did not necessarily mean the Chinese people like Japanese but at least they didn’t hate them. There were not so much national pride/self identification in the play. They simply didn’t care who they work for. They worked for whoever paid them the best. Plain and simple.
What’s funny and more interesting is I see a bunch of people who don’t even speak/read Chinese who did not even know the basic facts (not to say interpret) came up with an assumption that the Chinese Nationalism prevailed in the 1930s.
That’s simply NOT true.

[manfredzhang]

manfredzhang -- The forum rules say (emphasis added):

5. Back up your claims
We wish the forum to maintain a high standard. While posting on the forum isn't on the same level as writing an academic text, we want to maintain a balanced level of scholarship.

When you include a quote, cite the source. Include enough information to allow other members to find the source themselves. As a minimum, include the author, title/issue, and page number (for monographs and serials) or a link to the specific article (for websites).
When you cite a source, the source must be of sufficiently high quality to substantiate the nature of the claim. Do not cite racist or supremacist websites, unsourced secondary articles, opinion pieces and reviews (other than as evidence of the opinion or review itself), or similar sources.
If another member challenge one of your claims, you must cite a source for your claim.
If you make a claim that is obviously controversial, you should cite a source immediately.
Do not post your opinion without supporting it with facts or context.

app.php/rules

I consider this is a request from you. And here is the source

https://www.zhihu.com/question/27327549

抗战爆发之后，国民政府发起了“华侨总撤退行动”，绝大部分在日本的留学生及一部分侨民，在中国驻日使领馆的协助下，回到了祖国。但是，仍有相当数量的华侨，出于各种原因，难以归国，而选择了滞留日本；有些归国华侨，后来又返回了日本。
......
日本学者安井三吉根据外务省档案考证：1937年6月底，日本本土华侨29280人，至1937年10月，撤退14199人，残留15081人。

Oh, anyone here read Chinese? Does the forum rule also impose free translation service? Let me know.

[David Thompson]

manfredzhang wrote, in response to the forum rules:

抗战爆发之后，国民政府发起了“华侨总撤退行动”，绝大部分在日本的留学生及一部分侨民，在中国驻日使领馆的协助下，回到了祖国。但是，仍有相当数量的华侨，出于各种原因，难以归国，而选择了滞留日本；有些归国华侨，后来又返回了日本。
......
日本学者安井三吉根据外务省档案考证：1937年6月底，日本本土华侨29280人，至1937年10月，撤退14199人，残留15081人。

Oh, anyone here read Chinese? Does the forum rule also impose free translation service? Let me know.

The Chinese passage translates as:

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the National Government launched the "General Retreat of Overseas Chinese", the vast majority of Japanese students and some expatriates, with the assistance of Chinese embassies and consulates in Japan, returned to the motherland. However, there are still a considerable number of overseas Chinese who, for various reasons, find it difficult to return home and choose to remain in Japan;
......
According to the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japanese scholar Sanji Ani said: At the end of June 1937, 29,280 overseas Chinese in Japan had been evacuated by October 1937, leaving 15,081.

from the (free) Bing translator service, at:

https://www.bing.com/Translator

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi manfredzhang,

Many thanks.

Google translate gives it similarly as, "After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the National Government launched the "Overseas Chinese Retreat Operation". Most of the students studying in Japan and some of the overseas Chinese returned to the motherland with the assistance of the Chinese Embassy in Japan. However, there are still a considerable number of overseas Chinese who, for various reasons, have difficulty returning to their country and chose to stay in Japan; some returned overseas Chinese later returned to Japan.
......
The Japanese scholar Yasui Miki, based on the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, verified that at the end of June 1937, there were 29,280 local overseas Chinese in Japan. By October 1937, 14,199 were retreated and 15,081 remained."

Also thank you for laying out your reasoning on polls so articulately.

Cheers,

Sid.

[limited]

They didn’t give a fxck about ordinary people’s life. That’s why they had been ruthless in the war. Just name a few atrocities the KMT regime committed to her own citizens which they were supposed to protect:

Tons of underage teenage Japanese prostitutes (karayuki san) worked in Chinese merchant's houses in Japan, migrated to China and migrated to western colonies where Chinese coolies worked to service them. This must mean Japanese people had no sense of nationalism and that the standard of living was better in China than Japan by your logic.

Speaking of not caring about your own people's lives:

Sorry I posted this in another thread earlier, but its more relevant here. The Japanese state committed many crimes against Japanese women themselves before before and after World War II, trafficking them as sex slaves to benefit their economy and fund their military growth.

Japan's militarisation against China was funded by decades of sex trafficking of Japanese girls to Chinese men and western men. Japan was a poor country in both resources and technology before western assistance.

100,000 Japanese girls called "Karayuki-san" were sold by the Japanese government to foreigners including Chinese and westerners across China, Siberia, North america, Australia, British India, British East Africa, British Malaya, British Borneo, Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and the American Philippines, in order to raise money for Japan's militarisation and economy after the Meiji restoration. The Japanese prostitutes also acted as spies in China and Southeast Asia before World War II. They were divided into subcategories like Ameriyuki-san depending on where they went.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karayuki-san

US diplomat Townsend Harris demanded Japan's government provide him with Japanese teenage girls for sex. The Japanese government obliged him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townsend_Harris#In_Japan

Many Chinese merchants, students and exiles in Meiji Japan took Japanese girls as concubines, Sun Yatsen had a 13 year old Japanese concubine and another Japanese woman as another concubine. Meiji Japan allowed sex trafficking and selling of underage Japanese girls to both Chinese and westerners for Japan to earn money. Tokugawa Japan did the same thing on a more limited scale in Nagasaki while Meiji Japan expanded trafficking of Japanese girls to all over Japan and the world. Hideyoshi also did it before them and sold Japanese girls to Chinese merchants in Nagasaki too. The Orandayuki-san Japanese girls served Dutch merchants while Karayuki-san Japanese girls served Chinese merchants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Manshu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Jitao
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoru_Otsuki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haru_Asada

https://meijiat150.arts.ubc.ca/episode- ... -setsunan/

And at some point, they met procurers, who talked about nice things of America: job opportunities or a chance to have an American education or marry rich landowners in California, who turned out to be peasants or hired hands who forced them into prostitution. I also found that not all women were unaware of what kinds of work they would do in their destinations. Some women had already sold sexual services to local foreigners in Yokohama working as servants in the houses of Chinese merchants. Others worked in brothels and dance halls, catering to foreign sailors and merchants. And in that process, they became familiarized with foreigners and Western cultures, which influenced their decision to follow masters or procurers to the American West.

https://napost.com/2018/karayuki-san-in-the-west/

Based on geography alone, the southern countries would have been the nearby teeming cities of China, specifically the adjoining mainland centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and in nearby Taiwan, the capital, Taipei.

Unstated is the labor that the women performed. It was prostitution, the timeless trade of dreams for cash. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the Japanese karayuki business had extended beyond China to the developing Pacific Rim, including the Philippines, Australia, Manchuria, Siberia, and even British India.

That such business also reached western North America has long been k non, if not widely acknowledged. For example, a Seattle Issei describes an apparently organized, vast network: “At the age of 18… I started… work as a dishwasher at a hotel in Spokane. Later I became a [railroad?] cook and went to North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and even as far as to Minnesota and Alaska… To my surprise I found at least two to six Japanese prostitutes in every town where I went between Seattle and St. Paul, a range of two thousand miles. Even when I went to Alaska to… a salmon cannery in 1908, I was surprised to see from two to five or six in such towns as Ketchikan, Juneau, Wrangell, Sitka, and Skagway.”

—Bunshiro Tazuma, in Kazuo Ito’s “Issei”

Japanese government begged Jacob Schiff for loans against Japan during the Russo Japanese war. Japan's economy would have collapsed and they would have lost the war if it weren't for Schiff giving emergency loans to Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

US recognised and supported Japan colonising Korea in the Taft Katsuura agreement of 1905 in exchange for Japan recognising US colonising the Philippines, with Japan saying that the Philippines shouldn't be under the misrule of the natives. US president Theodore Roosevelt was supported by Jacob Schiff who influenced him to side with Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Katsura_agreement

US military officers helped Japanese attack Paiwan Aboriginals in Taiwan in 1874 and helped them colonise Ainu in Hokkaido.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... wan_(1874)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaidō_ ... Commission

Britain helped built Meiji Japan's fleet and its aircraft carriers which were used against China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sempill_Mission

Japan only obtained Chinese naval codes in the Nagasaki incident when Chinese sailors visiting Japanese prostitues were invovled in a brawl with Japanese police and dropped the code book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki_incident

Japan helped France colonise French Indochina by threatening to go to war against China on France's side during the Sino-French war over the Gapsin coup in Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapsin_Coup

At least over 10,000 Japanese girls and women settlers called Zanryu-Fujin were left behind in Manchukuo after 1945 and they were taken by local Chinese farmers as wives, while Soviet soldiers (who raped Japanese nurses and Japanese female settlers) deported Japanese men and soldiers to Siberian gulags to be worked to death. Japan did nothing to save its own people and the women blame the Japanese government for abandoning them.

70,000 Japanese girls including teenage high school students were forced into prostitution by the Japanese government in the "Recreation and Amusement Association" to service western Allied US, UK and Australian soldiers after 1945. Some of the Japanese girls were from families in Hiroshima, after their families were wiped out by the atomic bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreatio ... ssociation

Former Japanese Unit 731 scientists experimented on Japanese babies during tests for the US military after World War II in the 1950s. A Japanese baby girl they experimented on died from infection.

https://theguardian.newspapers.com/arti ... 122763034/

After 1948 Japan forced sterilised 25,000 Japanese women and girls, including a nine year old Japanese girl.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... genics-law

https://www.nippon.com/ja/currents/d00421/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-65958119

Japan didn't respect their own women's rights, treating them as commodities to be sold to foreign men.

Some pro-Japanese on here have tried to use the argument that people moving to Manchukuo proved that Chinese identity didn't exist and there was no nationalism.

Then it follows that Japanese Karayuki-san prostitutes moving to China and other countries proves that China was better run than Japan and Japanese people had no sense of national or ethnic identity.

They also say that Chinese don't value human life because of the alleged death rate during military conscription.

During the battle of Beicang in the Boxer rebellion and land siege of Port Arthur and battle of Nanshan in Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese ordered their own soldiers to go on human wave attacks against outnumbered enemies. Numerically superior Japanese soldiers were machine gunned and slaughtered in the tens of thousands by outnumbered Russians who suffered less casualties on land. Japan only survived the war because of Jacob Schiff's loans and Britain building the Meiji fleet for Japan to fight the Russian Baltic fleet at sea.

During World War II, Japan fed its soldiers methamphetamine and said it would sacrificed 100 million Japanese civilians for the emperor in an Allied invasion of Japan.

Its pretty easy to see which side doesn't value their own people's lives.

Even today Japanese women, including ones married to impotent Japanese men are going to Danish sperm banks for Danish sperm.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/ ... perm-bank/

https://www.progress.org.uk/danish-sper ... ince-2019/

Also regarding your other dumb points.

EVERY government pays the salaries of employees even in areas not under their control during wars, in the Syrian civil war, the Syrian government paid government employees to continue doing their work in areas controlled by rebels and ISIS terrorists. The point is to show they are the national sovereign government while the rebel and opposing factions are illegitimate and do not provide authority or finance.

The majority of soldiers in Henan were weak warlord forces deliberately placed there by Chiang, not mainstream KMT troops (both central government troops directly controlled by Chiang and Guangxi clique forces) or the stronger warlord armies. Henan underwent a massive famine at the time and warlord forces ate up most of the rations.

There was still a massive pocket of strong warlord armies and KMT forces in Anhui that never fell to the Japanese, east of Henan.