“11. Evaporating Legal Memory and KMT War Criminals” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 11 Evaporating Legal Memory and KMT War Criminals
The concept of how and why the push for “global justice” emerged from the aftermath of World War II was crucial to the political shaping of East Asia. However, public pushback and political criticism of the law and how it had been orchestrated in China began almost immediately after the 1956 trials of the key Japanese war criminals. The Shanghai legal world soon opened a struggle against Wang Zaoshi and Yang Zhaolong, notable lawyers who were pilloried for their supposed Republican-era views on law. In an official 1957 discussion touting China’s new legal system, disparaging the West became a focal point. One member retorted:
Look at America’s fatuous democracy. […] To concretely express true legal rule you have to look at the social order. Last year in America there were 2.5 million juvenile offenders and American prisons in a year see more than one hundred riots. The main reason is because they use torture to deal with criminals. What kind of rule of law is this? In Shanghai prisons we do not even have bedbugs and if the criminals get ill they can stay in the hospital. Our criminal rates are falling so what kind of rule of law is that?1
This was, of course, false. At the time the PRC was rapidly constructing a laogai (reform through labor) incarceration system, where forced labor was employed as a means to punish criminals and those who held opposing views regarding socialist law. Ministry of Justice legal scholar Yang Zhaolong did not see the evolution of law in China from the same rosy standpoint and was quoted as having said that China “had no law upon which it could depend.” To him this meant that “bad elements could act without fear of consequences and good people did not feel protected.”2
In mid-July 1957, Minister of Justice Shi Liang jumped on the bandwagon abandoning important tenets of the rule of law. Once Mao sounded the alarm against what he deemed as counterproductive law, the race to line up as his minion was on. Even though the legal edifice on which the PRC managed to prosecute Japanese war criminals in a bid to gain international legitimacy was still fragile, Shi disparaged Yang, Wang, and others for pushing “poisonous attacks” on the people’s legal work under party direction. These men criticized the “purge of counter-revolutionaries” as “a shame” and a “mistake,” something with which Shi Liang disagreed. She explained in a talk at the Fourth Session of the First National People’s Congress that “everyone knows the elimination operations are entirely necessary and we could even ask if we had not conducted these would we have such peaceful days as we now have?” She did admit that the purges had their faults, but that did not mean China should suspend all such operations. Rather, the authorities needed to be more vigilant when finding cases of malfeasance and correcting them, Shi opined. Shi Liang went on to complain that such individuals, those rightists, wanted a US-style rule of law. And those same individuals say “suppressing counter-revolutionaries is ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘contravenes the law.’ Whose constitution, whose law?” she asked. She then admitted that, yes, this move goes against KMT law, but that was the aim from the beginning.3
For all the years of effort that CCP officials had spent on investigations, the war crimes trials honeymoon of the Japanese was short-lived. Internal party criticism of Judge Jia Qian, who presided over the first Shenyang military trial in the summer of 1956, began not long after the conclusion of the trials. Jia was worried about the deficit in legal knowledge of his fellow judges because China’s courts would be observed by the world. According to his former secretary, “After forming the legal teams for the special military tribunal Jia Qian several times requested that everyone needed to earnestly study Chinese and international law and strictly implement those ideas.”4
On February 15, 1958, the CCP voted to purge Jia Qian from its ranks. This was a seismic shift in legal power—subordinating the judicial branch to the political arm. Like other legal workers, Jia Qian was critical of merely eradicating all prior Chinese law. The decision was censorious of his comments concerning traditional law, and he was quoted as having said, “Old law has tens of years of experience and leaves a cultural legacy. I can accept criticism of it but we cannot wipe it away in one stroke.” Jia Qian was also a fierce advocate of the independence of the court, and he perceived that party questions concerning legal cases was tantamount to meddling in justice. He believed defendants should have the benefit of the doubt in court, which the party found aggravating while trying to round up counterrevolutionaries. Party dissatisfaction had seemingly little to do directly with Jia’s actions at the trials of the Japanese, but he was castigated for decreasing former Japanese Manchukuo administrator Furumi Tadayuki’s sentence. Regardless, his suggestion was not carried out, because CCP leaders disagreed.5
In mid-February 1958, the party showed its displeasure with another judge, Zhu Yaotang, who had been deputy chief of the Shenyang military tribunal trials of the Japanese. Zhu was also expelled from the party rolls. His criticism of the CCP’s quick methods of delivering death sentences in other tribunals drew ire. Zhu stated that trial committee members’ problems were numerous and that records were too simple, often recording the proceedings with just one word: “kill” or “judgment.” “Zhu has distorted the facts, saying the judicial committee deliberated death penalty cases for just three minutes each, one minute in one case, and authorized some ten or so in one morning.” Internal party complaints noted that Zhu had the temerity to support Jia Qian’s “antiquated” views on law. The party pointed out for particular scorn how Zhu emphasized the rights of the accused.6
Yang Xianzhi was expelled at the same time as Zhu, also after serving as a military tribunal judge in the Shenyang cases. Yang affirmed “judicial independence” and chafed at party interference in judicial matters. He also “savagely” criticized central cadre policies. He was accused of “ignoring the time and place of the conditions of the struggle” while “single-handedly trying to affirm legal science and publicly promote ‘the presumption of innocence.’ ” Such ideas were seen as anathema to the revolutionary process and Mao’s political goals after 1957.7 The criticism of Judge Hao Shaoan, also part of the Shenyang war crimes tribunals, followed a pattern similar to the others. Protesting too much for independence of the judiciary and admitting that legal staff were essentially not good or incompetent were the charges leveled at him.8 Yuan Guang, deputy chief judge at the Shenyang trials, appears to be one of the few highly ranked Shenyang war crimes tribunal judges who was never purged.9
In late April 1958, just shy of two years after the Taiyuan trials of Japanese war criminals in Shanxi Province, the party expelled Judge Zhang Xiangqian. He had served on the military tribunal for the June 9–19, 1956, Japanese war crimes trial of eight Japanese prisoners in Taiyuan, including Uesaka Masaru, Suzuki Hiraku, and Fujita Shigeru, among others. Zhang graduated from law school in Beijing and was forty-six in 1958. The charges against him were that he had expressed in “word and deed” opinions as a rightist with a group that included Jia Qian, Zhu Yaotang, and others. Zhang believed in the independence of the judiciary, “and from the outset opposed the party’s direction of judicial proceedings.” The party saw Zhang “as a rightist element of the capitalist class and through the decision of the party court branch all party members are unanimous in the decision to purge him from the party register.” Zhang proclaimed that judicial workers were “utterly hopeless” because they did not study and were not thorough. And he had the audacity to “oppose dogmatism.” The last damning point of the internal party analysis of his supposed crimes was that “Zhang’s mistakes are absolutely not random and have roots in their class element and historical origins.” This referenced the fact that Zhang came from a “wealthy peasant household” and “received a capitalist legal education at university.” However, even after entering the party he had supposedly not been able to reform himself, the analysis stated.10
On the one hand, the CCP made a clear attempt to implement justice and act magnanimously toward Japanese prisoners during the initial years of the nascent rise of the PRC. However, almost immediately after the military tribunals concluded, the records of those trials were buried, along with the notion that law could help adjudicate historical reconciliation. Sadly, by 1958 the memory of justice and benevolence found in some measure in those trials of Japanese war criminals had been pushed to the dark recesses of administrative drawers. Because the legal knowledge gained and talent experienced at trial were stifled shortly after the verdicts were delivered, the potential cultural legacy and dividend of the trials remained stunted.
KMT War Criminals
The PRC’s public security ministry assessed that reeducating KMT soldiers was often harder and took longer than work on the Japanese war criminals. This was because the Chinese military men were disciples of Chiang Kai-shek and believed he was the legitimate ruler of the Chinese government.11 Interviews with former CCP guards and those who worked with KMT war criminals, as well as memoirs from the KMT prisoners themselves, provide a window into the mind-set of the CCP and how the party configured its response to the incoming KMT high-ranking officers late in China’s civil war and then after.12 Early on, PRC officials labeled KMT prisoners as “war criminals,” like the Japanese, but also called them traitors and reactionaries. Moreover, the CCP considered its reform policies aimed at KMT prisoners as different from plans imposed on Japanese officers and officials.
Lei Hao worked on the reeducation campaigns of KMT war criminals. However, even though the CCP had for years categorized KMT prisoners with this legal classification, and incarcerated them, trials were rarely ever held. They were, in essence, mainly prisoners without a sentence, and their treatment was therefore very different from how justice for the Japanese war criminals was adjudicated. For the CCP, it was important to gain a public confession of guilt and malfeasance from the Japanese on the trial record and in public. To be frank, there was little justice for the KMT prisoners, just reeducation and incarceration. The KMT prisoners were less clear regarding the CCP’s plans. At the beginning of 1949, Lei arrived in Beijing and went to work in the Gongdelin Prison. There he came into contact with KMT prisoners Kang Ze and Dong Yisan, who were kept in solitary cells.13 Dong had been sent to the United States to study wireless communication technology toward the end of the war and was made part of the military defense staff until he was taken prisoner by the CCP during the civil war in 1948. Kang was a famous KMT officer whom Lei called a “walking dictionary.” From the early 1930s, Kang had been a leader in the propaganda war against the KMT’s enemies and later helped run the China Daily newspaper, which had the stated aim of propping up Chiang Kai-shek. Mao Zedong mentioned Kang by name in his seminal April 25, 1956, speech, “The Ten Major Relationships.”14
In that speech, given on the eve of the CCP’s announcement about its trial policy to release most of the minor Japanese war criminals and pursue only the top leadership, Mao outlined his policy for tracking down and punishing counterrevolutionaries. He distinguished between those within the general society and those within the government itself, for whom he had no pity. But with the general prisoners, and particularly toward incarcerated KMT officials, Mao’s tone was more measured and very pragmatic.
Even war criminal Emperor Pu Yi who was taken as a prisoner, and the sort of people like Kang Ze, we do not kill. We do not kill them not because they have not committed crimes worthy of execution but because killing them has no merit. If you kill someone like this you will have to compare them later with the others that follow and you will end up killing more people. This is the first issue. The second issue is you can incorrectly execute people. History proves that a head falling to the ground cannot connect back to a body again. It’s not like with garlic chives, when you chop them off they grow back. Cut a head off incorrectly and even if you want to do it over to correct your mistake, there is no way. The third issue is elimination of evidence. Suppressing the counter-revolution requires evidence. The case of a counter-revolutionary can frequently serve as living testimony against other case of counter-revolution. We can prosecute them if we have the legal means. However, if we eliminate them we will no longer be able to find any evidence. Such a move would only benefit the counter-revolution and would not assist our revolution. The fourth issue is that if we kill them we first cannot increase production, second we cannot raise our levels of science, third they cannot help in our “eliminate the four pests campaign,” fourth we cannot increase our national defense, and fifth they cannot help us regain Taiwan. If you kill prisoners, you will get a reputation of killing prisoners for yourselves. It is historically proven that this reputation is negative.15
By 1950, not long after the establishment of new China, there were about eighty KMT prisoners in Gongdelin Prison, and by the end of 1955 their reeducation had begun. This was just about the time when the investigations of most Japanese war criminals had ended and their trials were being prepared. There had been numerous small sites of KMT prisoner detention around China—in Chongqing, Xian, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shenyang, Zhangjiakou, and elsewhere—but by 1956 a move was under way to “consolidate” the KMT war criminals into a few major detention sites. Former high-ranking KMT officials got sent to Beijing and housed in Gongdelin, which was just outside the city borders.
Like the Japanese war criminals, the KMT prisoners did not easily accept their predicament and did not believe in the reeducation program. Some even tried to escape. One such prisoner who was initially detained at the Shanxi, Hebei and Chahar Provinces (Jin-Cha-Ji) Military Zone Detention Center was Lieutenant General Yang Guangyu.16 Owing to lax guarding, he managed to escape but did not get far. It was the dead of winter, and both of his legs succumbed to heavy frostbite. He was brought back, but the wounds had already turned gangrenous. As a result, both of his legs were amputated. Afterward he was incarcerated at Gongdelin Prison.17
The CCP guards believed they were just as righteous as the KMT. But they did seem to evince compassion rather than cruelty, at least at that time. The Fushun War Criminals Management Center, the keystone of the PRC’s renovation plan for Japanese war criminals, was reopened to prisoners in June 1950, just before the Japanese arrived from the USSR. Jin Yuan was there from the start. Jin was part of the Korean-Chinese minority in northeast China, had learned some of the Japanese language in his youth, and later joined the CCP’s Eighth Route Army during the war. He began as a section chief, became deputy warden, and then was prison warden in 1964, the year all the Japanese were released.18 In September 1956, Jin said that with the exception of high-ranking KMT officers in Gongdelin Prison, the rest of the KMT prisoners were eventually moved to Fushun. They came in waves from detention sites dotted across China. In September 1963, the Chongqing War Criminals Management Center closed, and those prisoners were transported to Fushun. Over a period of years, from the autumn of 1956 to the spring of 1968, the transfer of KMT political prisoners was completed, Jin wrote, and all eventually made their way to Fushun in northeast China.
Jin Luxian was a Chinese Catholic priest incarcerated for using foreign languages and considered a spy. Deemed a dangerous counterrevolutionary, he was jailed in numerous prisons throughout China—similar to the forgotten Japanese communist Itō Ritsu. Jin recalled a similar system of transport that had been used with the Japanese soldiers, of not telling prisoners where they were going when being moved around the country.19
The train started, picked up speed, didn’t stop at any station along the way—it was a special train. The next morning, the train slowly decreased speed and then suddenly stopped. We got off to see that it was yet another small station, the platform covered with armed soldiers. Once again we boarded vans and after half an hour entered a compound full of single-storey buildings and stopped in front of a large assembly hall. We lined up in order to listen to the instructions of the prison authorities. Only then did we learn that this was the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre.20
KMT war criminals underwent reeducation campaigns similar to what the Japanese had endured, but there were stark differences. Unlike the Japanese program that emerged in 1952, the CCP push toward reforming KMT officers did not ramp up until later in 1956. When they arrived, some KMT prisoners whispered, “We started out as counter revolutionaries and were sentenced, and now we have become war criminals. It’s like adding another criminal charge. That’s a bit much isn’t it?” Seeing the name on the prison as “War Criminals Management Center” and the items that former and current Japanese prisoners had pasted up on the walls caused many KMT soldiers to feel despondent that they would never be able to leave and return home. Another depressing factor the men learned about was the 1956 Hungarian uprising. After all, what was happening in China did not occur in a vacuum. The KMT prisoners were justifiably now more anxious that what was going on in Hungary could spill over into China. In turn, their anxiety pushed them to believe that China could learn the lesson that it needed to be more vigilant, and if the Republic of China (Taiwan) attacked, the prisoners might be expunged as a form of revenge.21
Duan Kewen was a skeptic and one of the few KMT prisoners who managed to get to the United States after incarceration. He claimed that Manchu prisoners were favored, and at the top of the list were the Japanese, who received all the perks. Duan was angry that the Japanese who “butchered Chinese” were released first.22 Duan’s peripatetic life story demonstrates the vagaries of PRC policy toward KMT war criminals and how long it took to arrive at a unified national policy. When the war ended in 1949, Duan was in Changchun. He then traveled down to Beijing, where he was a businessman for two years before being arrested by the CCP government in February 1951. He was taken back to Changchun and detained for two years by the Public Security Bureau for “reflection.” At the end of January 1953 he was sent to the Changchun People’s Court and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent a bit more than two months in prison and was then sent to a Changchun labor reform camp, where he fired bricks in a kiln all day. In the autumn of 1955, he was suddenly returned to the Changchun Prison and then in January 1956 was transferred to the Jilin Provincial Public Security Bureau. After one more transfer in September 1956, Duan finally arrived at the Fushun Prison, where he was incarcerated for the next twenty years.23 He wrote that during his various detentions he was forced to write his “confession” numerous times. Duan reflected on why the CCP left him alone for so long before arresting him, and the only rationale that he could come up with was that the pressure of the Korean War must have postponed his arrest and then the suppression of other important “counter-revolutionaries” followed.24 Duan wrote that during his initial incarceration he was kept in leg irons for five years.25
Many of the KMT officers did not believe in the CCP, of course, and there were “class contradictions,” Jin Yuan wrote. Everyone had their own stance toward the label of war criminal. Jin noted that KMT cases were different from Japanese cases, which he had also managed at Fushun. The KMT soldiers, he wrote, for certain had committed serious crimes, but among them were many individuals who had contributed in the war against the Japanese and sacrificed for the Chinese people. These soldiers were Chinese nationals, but not all supported the same KMT cliques and therefore they did not share the same interests and privileges as the KMT leadership. Owing to this rather complicated set of circumstances, Jin recalled, “our reformation work with the KMT war criminals, compared with how we treated the Japanese war criminals and fake Manchukuo war criminals, was more carefully calibrated and painstaking.”26
At the start of 1957, reform education began to steer KMT prisoners toward acknowledging their crimes. This process, Jin explained, was a series of three steps: first, “benevolence for frank admission of crimes”; second, “stern punishment for refusal”; and third, “rewards for those who successfully completed the process.”27 Not everything went smoothly, however. Internally, not all the guards or the investigators agreed with the government’s initial policy not to render a verdict in the KMT cases. Prison officials were concerned that such a move would not allow the prisoners to admit their crimes. The reformation program needed to first get the men to internalize what they had done and press them to “rectify their own errors.” But, after scouring through their case files, many offices around the country had merely listed the KMT prisoners as “war criminals” or as “counterrevolutionaries,” so the record of their crimes was not systematically organized. At first the KMT prisoners were puffed up with pride. Only once they learned more about the consequences of their actions did they come to suffer regret and then start on the path toward accepting reforming education, Jin explained. One should note, however, that former KMT prisoners never dedicated a memorial to their incarceration at Fushun and never began a lobbying group like the Japanese Liaison Group.
Two of the more famous war criminals within the CCP prison ranks were former KMT generals Du Yuming and Huang Wei. As with the pragmatic usage of Japanese war criminals to promote better Sino-Japanese relations in the immediate postwar period, Mao was pleased with the capture of Huang and did not allow his execution. Instead, Mao believed Huang could be put to good political use.28 Huang was implicated in the KMT military defeat at Huai-hai and charged by the communists for having supposedly used poison gas. US State Department records, however, suggested that the “poison gas charge is an old one, bandied back and forth by both sides but never substantiated by either.”29 The Battle of Huai-hai (also called Chiang Kai-shek’s Waterloo), in which close to two million soldiers came into fierce combat on a plain hundreds of miles wide, was one of the largest military campaigns of the Chinese civil war. The campaign was costly for both sides, but the losses were devastating for the Chinese Nationalists. More than 550,000 KMT soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured during the campaign. Although the PLA lost 150,000 men, it ended the battle in a stronger position because the communists gained the captured and defecting Nationalist troops. In short, the Huai-hai battle marked the beginning of the end of the civil war.30
When he was first captured in December 1948, Huang recalled that he did not give up his real name and rank. Nonetheless, the communists soon figured it out.31 At the end of January 1949 he was transferred to Gongdelin Prison. Ironically, the facility had earlier served as a place to torture and kill Chinese communists during the Republican era of oppression against those who opposed the KMT. Huang admitted he was determined to prove the CCP’s policy of magnanimity toward POWs was a lie, so he remained stubbornly opposed to their interventions. He kept his composure as an old-school general, supposedly held his head high, and never admitted his crimes. To be fair, Huang’s supposed war crimes were never actually made clear during the interrogations. Was he a counterrevolutionary or something else?32 In 1952, Huang wrote that he fell severely ill with tuberculosis, and his body was ravaged to the point that he could not leave the bed even to get to the bathroom for the smallest of necessities. He noted that China had an old saying: “During a chronic illness even dutiful children will leave your bedside.” He was a “war criminal” and an enemy of the communists, and yet they continued to provide him the best of care. How was that possible? he wondered. For several years they fed him meat, eggs, and milk to strengthen his health, even during the most difficult of economic times.33
Huang was also one of the more colorful prisoners and an amateur scientist in the most expansive sense of the word. He grew obsessed with disproving scientific principles in his bid to invent a perpetual motion machine while incarcerated. His fixation stemmed from his belief that it would be “an inestimable contribution to all of humanity.”34 It is possible that another factor behind this passion was linked to the fact that he was languishing in prison, so focusing on this project offered him a way of avoiding reform, at least according to some in the public security bureau.35 Lei Hao wondered why Huang was preternaturally absorbed with this impossible machine and concluded it was just a way for the former military general to deal with his change in life circumstances. Regardless of the criticism, Huang was seemingly serious about what he called his “Eastern Red Engine.”36 Huang also remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. Even as Huang changed within the reformation education, he never wavered in his fealty to Chiang, although he eventually saw the light.37 His incarcerators saw him as obstinate. Jin Yuan, in charge at the Fushun War Criminals Management Center, must have had the central government’s authorization, because great financial largesse was granted to allow Huang to build a model of the contraption. The prison held a grand unveiling, but, of course, the machine failed to perform.38
In the late 1950s, with great fanfare the CCP launched its “special amnesty” campaign toward KMT prisoners. On September 18, 1959, the People’s Daily celebrated China’s achievements on the tenth anniversary of its founding. To promote that success and the solidification of the “people’s dictatorship,” the newspaper produced a glowing editorial, “Turning Away from Evil and toward Virtue, the Future Is Bright,” to champion the moment.39 The announcement was not met with complete social acceptance, and there was some pushback. Regardless, on December 4, 1959, prisons in Beijing, Fushun, Jinan, Xian, Chongqing, and Hohhot held amnesty meetings for some KMT war criminals. The year 1959 was significant for the PRC, marking the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the new government. Mao was inclined to bestow an amnesty of sorts toward prisoners, mirroring his belief that this was a practice enacted by Chinese emperors in ancient times.40
It is clear that the process was somewhat muddled at times. Huang Wei recalled, much to his amazement since he was still stubbornly against the CCP reeducation process, that Zhou Enlai had originally put him on the 1959 list to be granted special amnesty. The authorities had even notified Huang’s daughter, who was teaching at Qinghua University, to be prepared to come and get him. But the prison authorities rejected the proposal, saying that Huang had not yet sufficiently reformed, and to release him would cause great problems among the remaining war criminal prisoners.41
Many former KMT officers wrote memoirs, but none was as prolific or as toadying as that of Shen Zui. Shen had been a KMT spy and had worked under the notorious KMT officer Dai Li. Quoting Shen’s own observations, one historian likened Dai Li to the most subservient of subjects to Chiang Kai-shek, implementing Chiang’s will like a “dagger” behind the scenes but serving as his “butcher” publicly as head of the KMT’s spy network, which at one point employed about twenty thousand people.42 Shen had expected to be executed upon capture and admitted that he did not find the process of CCP thought reform easy. He believed the communists never demeaned him but kept pushing and pushing him in interrogations and discussions, with “dogged persistence” as he put it.43 He was also one of the former KMT officers whose will eventually bent to his captors, ultimately writing numerous books about their benevolence and benefiting from the glow of their adulation. His stories also relate a dark humor at times.44
KMT war criminals were also employed as political window dressing for the CCP in its gestures to gain international legitimacy. Du Yuming was one such individual—a failed military general but a willing pupil as a prisoner. He had engaged the CCP consistently from the start of the civil war but lost every single battle, an impressive record. He, too, was captured during the disastrous Huai-hai campaign. At first, Du seemed less willing to change, in comparison with some of the others, but upon release he was quickly trotted out for international propaganda events.45 Felix Greene, a British journalist, was invited to a banquet hosted by Premier Zhou Enlai toward the end of May 1960, and Du was present. Greene was “the US-based cousin of Graham Greene who became one of the most effective advocates of the Chinese cause both in print and in television documentary films.”46 Also in attendance was Manchukuo last emperor Pu Yi. British field marshal Bernard Montgomery was the guest of honor that night and was enamored with Mao. Not only did the UK military commander find Mao “delightful,” but he added, “Like all sons of the soil he is a genuine democrat.”47 When Premier Zhou introduced PLA general Chen Yi and former KMT general Du Yuming, Montgomery was told, “These two fought each other. This one lost,” Zhou said, pointing to General Du. Montgomery asked Du how it was possible to lose the civil war when he had a million men under his command. “Du responded, ‘They all ran over to his side,’ nodding toward Chen Yi. Chou En-lai [Zhou Enlai] threw back his head and laughed.”48 Du and Pu Yi had been released from detention only about five months prior, but their presence was deemed necessary to showcase PRC military competence and magnanimity toward past enemies. The CCP could demonstrate its new approach to foreign policy, and the meetings entertained foreign guests. Montgomery returned to the UK convinced that rumors of starvation after China’s Great Leap Forward were false.49
As Mao did with KMT war criminals, CCP leaders believed it was imperative to keep the last Manchu emperor alive and well. He was a useful tool for international and domestic propaganda.50 We can gain a further understanding through the fate of Li Yuqin, Pu Yi’s fourth wife. In 1955, after a decade of incarceration in various locales, Pu Yi managed to get in touch with Li, and she visited him a few times in Fushun. Chinese authorities were keen on getting her to bolster Pu Yi’s flagging health. In arranging for her visits, prison officials opened up a larger room for two, stocked it with better furniture and a large double bed, and even repainted the room. At this time, Fushun officials were also allowing visits to the incarcerated Japanese. The prison authorities passed a rule that war criminals with more than five years to go on their sentences could have their spouses live with them. Of course, Pu Yi had no time on his sentence since he had never been charged. He was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner at the leisure of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Luo Ruiqing, the head of the Public Security Ministry. However, Li Yuqin wanted a divorce, which the authorities did not want to grant and they pressured her to stay married. Eventually, she went to the government offices in Fushun City to file directly for divorce. She remarried and went to work for the Changchun city library. Pu Yi was released from Fushun in 1959 and remarried in 1962.51
As they had done with the Japanese prisoners, starting in 1956 the PRC officials also escorted KMT prisoners on many tours around the country to introduce them to new China.52 Generally speaking, Japanese and KMT prisoners still fared far better than the average Chinese citizen in confinement.53 However, not everything was in accord with the law in prisons or camps that housed KMT prisoners. Sometimes the situation went very much awry. Liu Binyan, a famous Chinese reporter who documented legal and political corruption within China and eventually chose exile to the United States, wrote about these issues when they first started to surface. He described the murder of a former young KMT soldier at a camp called Nenjiang. The murder was committed by a camp guard in full view of more than one hundred prisoners, and no one did anything. The prisoner, who was shot, died a slow and painful death in the prison yard while everyone watched, helpless to intervene.54
Comparing the confessions of the KMT and other war criminals is difficult. CCP obsession with acknowledging one’s crime was central to its personal renovation process, but it is an interesting method in the face of the lack of actual trials for KMT prisoners. “To insist on a confession, repeatedly revised and extended, while at the same time knowing it is often produced simply to conform and avoid trouble would seem to place too low a value on sincerity, even if this is regarded as a first stage only.”55 It is obvious the CCP did not see Fushun merely as a prison but as a site of reeducation.56 It was clear that Mao did not believe in the rights of man but in the right of the majority to bestow or deprive rights based on the class or background of an individual. Within a society still transitioning from one form of rule to another, confessions were also employed to assert new authority. Confessions demonstrated that a defendant was attempting to redeem himself within the utopian society, and this, doubly, served as a public record of the new state’s legitimacy.57
Taiwan and KMT War Criminals—So Much for Loyalty
The issue of war criminals remained potent in China and Taiwan owing to strained cross-strait relations. Even though the Chinese had long since repatriated those who they claimed were the worst of the worst Japanese war criminals, delays of KMT “war criminals” dragged on. Decades after World War II had concluded, the issue of Japanese war crimes and the meaning of justice had transformed into something truly greater than the sum of its original elements.
By the early 1970s, Taiwan had been dislodged from its UN seat representing China, and the mainland Chinese communist government under Mao was invited to replace it. Seemingly the world had shifted, and yet the issue of World War II war criminals was still a high priority. In the early 1970s, CCP leader Mao began to receive word from his premier, Zhou Enlai, concerning the state of POWs still being held at Fushun Prison in Liaoning Province. But the memos were perplexing because the Chinese communist government had already repatriated the Japanese defendants, and the four dozen or so who had been sentenced to lengthy jail terms had already been released back to Japan, the last three to great political fanfare in 1964.
On May 19, 1971, Zhou Enlai notified Mao that no one from the Public Security Ministry had been checking on the KMT prisoners in Fushun Prison, and many were now gravely ill. With the Cultural Revolution in full swing, Zhou was anxious that the government would end up being criticized. He feared that people would say that Japanese “great war criminals are granted amnesty while the smaller [Chinese] war criminals are jailed until they die; foreign war criminals are released, but we incarcerate our own war criminals.” This, Zhou attempted to explain in the memo to Mao, did not fit the CCP’s goals for the revolution. Mao instructed Zhou to change what the prisoners were being given to eat, alter their labor requirements, or figure out some way to help them survive.58 What communist officials realized was that KMT war criminals had been forgotten in the dungeons up north. In the end, the communist government was never quite sure exactly how many were released, because records were lost. Agreement on who was detained on what charges was also absent because the prisons and the rule of law had essentially been ignored for more than a decade and a half since the end of the 1950s.
What happened to high-ranking KMT war criminals was not only of consequence to propping up the domestic legitimacy of the PRC. This delayed clemency had an impact on Taiwan. In Taiwan, the term for KMT generals and others who were captured but never sentenced was “fierce loyalists.” At least this was the generous label employed when the prisoners were kept at a respectful distance. But when the potential for formerly “tainted” prisoners to repatriate arose, KMT leadership showed the same sort of reluctance CCP leaders had shown in their suspicion of returning POWs from the Korean War. In the spring of 1975, when a select number of remaining KMT prisoners were offered a chance to depart to Taiwan, the KMT showed its true colors and rejected their requests.59
This last group caused a massive political scandal because ten men requested to return to Taiwan and the CCP leadership granted the application. This was Mao’s propaganda ploy and he had declared the men were free to go anywhere after their release. On April 13, 1975, the ten amnestied prisoners left Beijing by plane and flew south, then took a train to Shenzhen. They were each given 2,000 Hong Kong dollars, some new clothes, and an exit visa for half a year, meaning they could apply to return to the mainland if so desired.60 They were then escorted to the border. Once the former war criminals crossed the bridge to Hong Kong, reporters swarmed. The Taiwan press was not as forgiving or interested (the KMT was firmly a dictatorship at this point, reliant on a media that was heavily censored), and the Chinese Nationalist news companies barely reported the event. The Taiwanese media saw this move as part of Mao’s strategy to gain more political capital—to appear benevolent, to show the world that mainland China was stable, and maybe with a longer eye toward future relations. By contrast, the early 1970s international changes had rocked Taiwan’s world. The ROC had recently been booted from its seat on the UN, US president Richard Nixon had dined with Mao in Beijing, and Taiwan was unsure of its future. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had just passed away in April 1975, and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was settling in during this delicate time of a transfer of power. For decades, Chinese Nationalists had billed themselves as the anticommunist stronghold and “free China,” but now that policy was no longer paying dividends.61
The KMT sent out a variety of messages, at first saying it was pleased these men were being released and wanted to return to the “motherland,” a strange turn of phrase since none of the incarcerated prisoners had ever been to Taiwan. But a few days later at a media event, a KMT party spokesman said that while Taiwan welcomed all anticommunists, this did not include spies from the CCP. KMT leader and Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, felt “only the personnel captured in raids on the mainland since 1950 would be considered for settlement in Taiwan.”62 It is possible Taiwan rejected former KMT war criminals because it believed this acceptance would destabilize the KMT’s long-standing “three no’s policy”: no contact, no negotiation, and no cooperation with the Chinese communists.63 Initially, when the ten said they wanted to go to Taiwan, CCP leaders said they would pay the costs and Taiwan showed a welcoming attitude. Soon after, the KMT assessed that the men were “tools” for a CCP liberation plan of Taiwan and denied their repatriation.64 One released prisoner, Zhang Tieshi, grew so despondent over the postponement that he committed suicide in a Hong Kong hotel.65 The CCP was in a quandary over what to do and set up a commission to study the issue. The remaining nine men were told that if they wanted to return to China and work, that was fine. If they then later chose to try to go abroad, this was equally acceptable. Or they could even “stay in Hong Kong,” CCP officials advised. In the end, almost half eventually returned to the mainland, and a few chose to stay in Hong Kong. Several made it to the United States.
A few years after Taiwan rejected the KMT former prisoner return, the island country welcomed a defecting high-ranking communist officer, PLA Air Force squadron commander Fan Yuanyan. It seems KMT officers who became prisoners were no longer believed loyal, but CCP officers who brought military hardware with them to Taiwan were seen in an entirely different light. Defecting with his Chinese fighter jet to Taiwan earned Fan the sizable reward of 150 kilograms of gold with no tax strings. “Massive rewards” and the presentation ceremonies were central to the ritual of celebrating these mainland military defectors as “anticommunist heroes.”66 Fan landed in what was still deemed “free China,” and the Washington Post quoted him as noting the lack of justice in China as a reason for his departure. “Comrades, it’s the Communists who forced me to do this. I just cannot take it anymore. I came here to seek freedom and human rights which are totally lacking on the China mainland.”67 The great irony, of course, was that Taiwan was far from such a land at that time.
It is interesting to consider just how different the CCP’s multiple prisoner reeducation programs were: the Japanese war criminal process; the one eventually set up for people not actually tried, the KMT prisoners; and the draconian system that developed for what many Chinese peasants would end up facing in the prison labor system. In particular, we should pause for a moment and demonstrate the stark contrast between these two mainland China policies for those defeated in war, the CCP’s former enemies. These more magnanimous plans were implemented during an era of revolution, but with an eye to the idea that former enemies could be reformed. Obviously, that reform came with many conditions and a long duration of incarceration, but it still kept an end goal in sight. Compare that policy with practices employed by the US military and intelligence services in the twenty-first century. US forces and the government found it difficult to practice full legal representation for all prisoners of war since there was little belief that those captured during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would reform.
When the United States suffered the 9/11 attack, an unnamed US intelligence official explained how the country should respond. “What’s needed is a little bit of smacky-face. Some al-Qaeda just need some extra encouragement.”68 With no understanding of how US officials had behaved in the past, a new American machismo asserted that the United States would defeat terrorism only with superior military prowess. Somehow or other the United States had forgotten what it learned immediately after World War II. A US Strategic Bombing Survey report, published in 1946, emphasized that “while defeat is a military event, the recognition of defeat is a political act.”69 In the postwar period, militaries demobilize, but civilian societies do not follow in the same way, and that is why intelligence, propaganda, and a strategy for after the battle are exceedingly important. But what should really give us pause concerns the issue of what follows incarceration and interrogation. If governments, like China, were interested in war crimes trials to showcase their benevolence, then, in some fashion, that policy worked. By contrast, US efforts at Guantanamo and elsewhere appear to be ham-fisted. A critical FBI interrogator explained, “After getting intelligence from terrorists, at some point we have to prosecute them. We can’t hold people indefinitely. Whether it is one year later or ten years later, eventually a trial becomes necessary; otherwise they’ll have to be released.”70 Close to eight hundred men were processed through the detention center opened in January 2002 in the US base of Guantanamo, and thirty-five remain. As of 2022, only twelve were ever charged in a military tribunal.71
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