The Siege of Changchun

by Lung Ying-tai

I decided to take a trip to Changchun because within Changchun lurks a secret that I don’t quite understand.

My flight arrived at the crack of dawn on the 13^th of May. Despite it being the middle of the night, as I gazed upon the vast, desolate central square illuminated only by the dim light of street lamps, the city exuded a peculiar atmosphere. Wide boulevards radiated outward from the city center in all directions. Changchun is a city with an unusually high number of public squares and unusually large public parks; if you’ve ever walked through Moscow, Berlin or Budapest, the first impression Changchun will give you is: huh, this city has the feel, the atmosphere of a capital.

Changchun in May: the wind is still a little chilly, a mother holds her child, she wraps a scarf around his neck; a little face, exposed to the cold wind, peeks out like a rosy apple. I stand on the edge of the People’s Square looking upwards toward a towering monument in the center, The Soviet Red Army Martyrs Monument.

Standing twenty eight and a half meters tall, the granite monument thrusts into the heavens, a fighter jet rests at its peak, overlooking the city. On a tablet, alongside text in Russian is a quote in Chinese: ‘The Soviet Army Martyrs Live Forever in the Hearts of the People’. This is credited to ‘The People of Changchun From All Walks of Life’. In Russian there are twenty three engraved words, the names of the pilots who sacrificed their lives in the attack on the Chinese Northeast. The Soviet Red Army entered the region on the 9^th of August, 1945. After capturing the main communications hubs of the region, the first thing they did, in Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, etc, was erect monuments to the ‘Soviet Red Army Martyrs’.

In August 1945, after living under Japanese rule for fourteen years, the Soviet Red Army entered the city as ‘liberators’ and installed a towering monument in the city center. How did the people of Changchun feel about the fact that it was erected in their name? At the same time that these monuments paying tribute to the Red Army were being completed, ‘The People of Changchun From All Walks of Life’ were being burned alive by the Red Army and their city pillaged.

In the winter of that year, Xu Zhangqing, a twenty one year old from Taipei stood outside Shenyang train station, after bidding farewell to a friend, he witnessed the following scene:

Outside the station is an enormous square, about the same size as the Presidential Palace in Taipei. As I was leaving I saw a woman on the square, dragging along a child on each hand, another child clung to her back, and another, slight older, carried a straw mat, altogether five people. Seven Soviet troops surrounded them and in plain view of passersby, began to brutalize the mother, the children, too, were assaulted. The child that had been knocked off her back sobbed bitterly. After they were finished, they ordered the woman and her children to lie down in a row on the ground. Using their machine guns, the Soviets sprayed their bodies with bullets.”

What Xu Zhangqing witnessed was most likely a Japanese mother and her children. However the Chinese people lived in a similar state of terror.

In 2010, officials from both China and Russia visited Changchun and laid wreaths at the foot of the Red Army monument. In the winter of 1945, Yu Heng was in Changchun, he noted that “everywhere the Red Army went, women were raped, buildings pillaged and houses set on fire”. No matter if they were Chinese or Japanese, the women all cut their hair short and wore men’s clothing, otherwise they wouldn’t dare set foot outside. The so-called ‘liberators’, were, in actual fact, a frightening rabble, but people were too afraid to say so and their descendants still have to queue in front of the Soviet monument, take off their hats and show reverence.

The siege began on the 15^th of March 1948, when the Communists had captured the neighboring city of Siping, leaving Changchun isolated. By the 23^rd of May, even small aircraft had no way of landing. The city remained closed off until the 19^th of October.

During this period, how many people starved to death? When the siege began, the city’s population was 500,000, but taking into account the huge number of refugees that entered the city from surrounding villages, the total number has been estimated to be around 800,000 to 1.2 million.

After the siege had ended, Chinese communist statistics state that the population had fallen by 170,000. Estimates for the number of those who starved to death range from 100,000 to 650,000, a median figure of more than 300,000 people, which just happens to be the same number that the Communist Party believe were killed in the Nanking Massacre.

What I still don’t understand is, considering the enormous number of war casualties, why isn’t the Siege of Changchun given the same treatment as the Nanking Massacre: the subject of countless academic studies, its history spread far and wide through word of mouth, its anniversary covered annually in the press, with monuments of every size erected in commemoration, young students photographed lined up in uniform saluting it, the expensive construction of magnificent memorial halls visited constantly by political leaders, city residents shown on the news observing a moment of silence, and bells rung in its memory year after year. Why isn’t Changchun treated in the same way as Leningrad, as a famous historical city, a frequent topic of novels, made into screenplays, turned into Hollywood films, the subject of independent documentary makers, broadcast on public television throughout the world, ubiquitous to such an extent that schoolchildren in New York, Moscow, Melbourne, are all aware of its name and its history.

This discrepancy is the reason why I began to conduct a ‘public opinion poll’ among those around me. In the process I learned that although the Siege of Changchun resulted in about 300,000 to 650,000 deaths from starvation, the majority of my friends in Taiwan had never even heard of it, while my friends on the mainland just shook their heads and said they weren’t quite sure. Afterwards I thought, outsiders are clueless but the people of Changchun will surely know, in Changchun there must be a monument somewhere, no matter how inconspicuous. But when I arrived in Changchun, all I saw was the monument of ‘liberation’ with the Soviet Red Army fighter jet on top. I suddenly realized, oh, even the people of Changchun know nothing about this chapter of history.

My driver, Xiao Wang, was a thirty-something resident of Changchun, as I told him about the siege, his eyes bulged as if he were listening to a fantasy tale from the Arabian Nights, politely but cautiously he asked me “Did this really happen?” Afterwards he couldn’t hide his astonishment, “I was born and grew up here, how come I’ve never heard of it?”

Then it suddenly came to him, “I have an uncle, he used to in the PLA, I recall him saying that he was in the Northeast during that period, fighting the Kuomintang, but whenever he spoke of the old days, we kids would run off, no one was interested in listening. Perhaps he knows something?”

I urged him to phone his uncle and ask about it, “When the PLA surrounded Changchun, a lot of their troops were actually from the area. You should ask your uncle if he took part in the siege.”

That evening, while having dinner, Xiao Wang called his uncle. He picked up after one ring. The connection was clear enough that I could hear him at the other end of the table. As it turned out, he was part of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army and he really had taken part in the siege.

“Ask him where he was stationed.”

“Hong Xi Street”, his uncle replied with a Northeastern accent, “where Red Flag Street is today, that’s where the most people died.”

Obviously he had no idea people would all of a sudden take an interest in his past, excited, he spoke breathlessly for forty minutes straight. Xiao Wang ate with one hand while the other held the phone to his ear.

A blockade line of more than 100 kilometers and a guard with a gun every 50 meters, prevented refugees from either leaving or entering. A large number of the refugees were Changchun residents that had been kicked out of the city by the Kuomintang and were now trapped on the land between the Nationalists who were defending the city, and the siege line of the Communists surrounding it. Heaps of corpses were spread out all over this area of wild land, thousands at a glance.

Thin as matchsticks, their lives hanging by a thread, grasping their infants, they crawled up to the feet of the guards and begged tearfully to be allowed to pass. “I wept too, but I couldn’t defy orders.” Xiao Wang’s uncle continued, “One day, when I was sent to Erdao River to collect wood, I came across an abandoned house, peering in through the window, I saw something terrible, a family of about ten people, all dead, either lying on the bed, spread out on the floor or lying against the wall. Standing on the threshold, I looked over the scene, an entire family, young and old, all of them dead of starvation, and I began to weep.”

On the 30^th of May, Lin Biao issued his instructions for the siege:

1. Block all passageways and tunnels, large and small. Build fortifications on the main front, control the airport outside the city.

2. Use long distance firepower to control Freedom Road and the airport inside the city

3. Strictly prohibit the entry of food and fuel into enemy territory

4. Prevent the masses inside the city from leaving.

5. Turn Changchun into a city of death.

To bolster morale among troops, the Communists devised a slogan: ‘Don’t give the enemy a grain of food or a blade of grass. Chiang’s bandits must perish.’

100,000 Communist troops surrounded the city, 100,000 Nationalist troops defended the interior, nearly 100,000 people remained trapped in their homes. Unwilling to passively await their own doom, they headed toward the city limits, but the perimeter was locked down. In addition to artillery and concentrated forces of troops to contend with, there were also deep trenches, barbed wire and high-voltage fencing.

The Yitong River that runs through the city, blessed with rich vegetation and a plenitude of fish, that rush through the water like shuttles, has been the gentle mother river of Changchun and its residents for endless generations. But in 1948, every bridge on the river was guarded by Kuomintang troops, one could try to leave but re-entry was impossible. Below the bridges lay the four kilometer wide area of wild land that separated the Communist and Nationalist forces. In this space were countless corpses as far as the eye could see.

By July, the temperature had soared, the scorching city streets were clogged with corpses. Packs of emaciated dogs with wild blood red eyes tore at the decomposing remains of Changchun residents. Soon after the dogs themselves were eaten by desperate, starving people.

Yu Qiyuan, an editor of the ‘The Local Chronciles of Changchun’ publication series, was just sixteen years old at the time of the siege. Every day on his way to school he would walk through a stretch of wild country on the grounds of the Geological Palace Museum, covered in tall grass and weeds. That summer, he began to smell something. Overcome with curiosity he made his way into the grassland through dense foliage and came across mounds of rotting corpses. Later on, again walking through this stretch of wild land in downtown Changchun, he saw something moving in the distance. Moving closer, he encountered a truly disturbing sight: a pile of naked, abandoned babies with prolapsed rectums, due to starvation, wriggling feebly on the ground like worms, suffocating, incapable of crying.

Yu Qiyuan was born on the same year that the state of Manchukuo was founded, his father served as a minister in the court of Emperor Pu Yi. After experiencing an idyllic, carefree, childhood, the intense misery of the siege became indelibly marked in his memory.

“When the siege began, everyone still had provisions, but who could have expected that they’d need to last for six months. The provisions people started out with quickly disappeared. After killing all the cats, dogs, horses and rats, they started to shave the asphalt off the roads, there was no land to cultivate, and by the middle of August, it was already too late to wait for harvest. I ate tree bark, grass, the ferment used for making liquor, once that was gone, I ate red distillers grain, it was like dry fermented soy paste…”

“How do you eat distillers grain?”

“If you take the grains, rinse them repeatedly with water until the stickiness is gone, you end up with a small piece of dry material. After being left to dry in the sun it looks like buckwheat husk. Once it’s ready you grind it up, add water and eat.”

The evening sun illuminated the room, enveloping it in warm color. Despite the gory details of Yu’s testimony, his tone remained calm and dispassionate, he had really seen a lot. I asked him, “So, was there cannibalism?” “That should go without saying”, he replied. He told me a story about an old granny who sliced pieces of flesh off the legs of her dead husband and cooked them.

On the 9^th of September, 1948, Lin Biao sent Mao Zedong a field report from Changchun:

“The famine situation is becoming more and more severe, hordes of hungry people swarm our outposts day and night, after we push them back, they end up in the area between our outposts and the enemies, as a result the death count is extremely high. Within the district of Baipi alone there has been approximately two thousand deaths. We cannot allow the hungry masses to exit the city, the hordes must be driven back, this policy is very difficult for both the starving citizens and our troops to comprehend. The starving people express their dissatisfaction toward us with abusive language. They say, “You see us dying and you do nothing”. They kneel down in front of my sentries and beg them for the right to leave, some drop their babies on the ground and make a run for it, others bring rope and hang themselves in view of our guards.”

Nowhere in the official narrative, passed down from generation to generation through Chinese education, which celebrates the siege as a ‘bloodless victory for the glorious revolution’, is there any room for the reality of the horrors of the Siege of Changchun.