Final Words

Summary

Twenty years after the war, C. T. Hsia, a gentle, reflective literary scholar, gave this deeply personal view of the war and the connection to the communist victory:

After the initial period of patriotic enthusiasm, the Chinese people, in the interior as well as in the occupied areas, by and large suffered patiently and awaited only favourable developments in the outer theatres of the war to bring about their deliverance from the enemy. Increasingly in the clutches of poverty, they sank into despondency, if not downright despair, and lost touch with the spiritual values which had sustained China in all her historical crises. They naturally blamed all their troubles on the inefficient and corrupt government, and allowed themselves to be seduced, often against their best convictions, by the propagandist wiles of the Communist party.

This sad statement was written by a man in exile in America. Mo Yan in Shandong found another way to show how futile, in the end, the divisions of the war had been. He described an event that took place in Gaomi in 1984 that is a stark reminder of the cruelty of war and of how fleeting the fatal divisions of the war were. In death, the former enemies were united – by anonymity; it was impossible to know who the dead were.

Forty-six years later. In a great storm one evening, a pit of a thousand (qianrenkeng, i.e., mass grave), in which were buried the white bones of communists, Guomindang members, ordinary people, Japanese soldiers and the emperor's helpers [puppet troops] was split open by a bolt of lightening. […]