My Memories of War in China*

by John T. Ma


The War

The Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, known in vernacular Chinese as Kang Ri Zhanzheng(抗日戰爭) or Kang Zhan(抗戰), is by all measures the most significant event in the history of modern China. It lasted 14 years -- 8 years longer than World War II, and incurred many more casualties. It affected the life of almost everyone in China, me included.

The full-scale war started in 1937, when I was a student in the Science Department of Shanghai High School. It dashed my aspiration to become a scientist.

The warlords of Japan had the ambition to conquer the whole world. In order to achieve this, they had to conquer China first. In 1931, they created the Mukden Incident to occupy Manchuria. In 1937, the Japanese troops tried to enter the city of Peking by crossing the Marco Polo Bridge. As the Chinese troops resisted, a full-scale war broke out.

The Chinese government knew that sooner or later Japan would invade China. In preparation for resistance against the impending Japanese invasion, the Chinese government ordered all students who had completed the first year of senior high school to receive a three-month military training. When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident happened, I was in the military training camp at Zhenjiang, capital of Jiangsu Province. The officers who were training us were from the 88th Division, a crack division of the Chinese Army.

Every morning the Brigade Commander, who was in charge of the daily operation of the training camp, would preside over the morning exercises and give us a short speech. One day he did not show up. Later I learned that he had gone to Shanghai to inspect the military situation there. Japan had started to invade Shanghai.

When I went to the military training camp in 1937, I went directly from my school in Shanghai to Zhenjiang. I had left all of my luggage at school. When I returned to Shanghai a few months later, I could not go to my school to retrieve my luggage because the campus was located in the Chinese territory, while my home was in the French Settlement. Because of the war, all roads from the foreign settlements to the Chinese territory were blocked. I lost all of my luggage as a result, including my tennis racquet, my most precious possession. Later the Japanese converted my school into barracks. I do not know which lucky Japanese soldier got my tennis racquet.

*Extract from My Autobiography(in Chinese and English, by John T. Ma， translated by Zhao Shiren), Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press（FLTRP), 2017, 193 pages. Courtesy of Mr. Ma's family and FLTRP. All Chinese names are in Pinyin.


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