Songxi’s Siege: Remembering a Rural Chinese Village in WWII

The soldiers arrived at night, moving in two flanks along the thickly forested Eastern mountains and the shale-covered Western mountains, before descending into the sleeping village of Songxi just before dawn. Xu Longshao, who lived in the village with his younger brother and parents, and continues living here today, remembers that day in the fall of 1943 in visceral detail — first, the slashing sounds of machetes, and then the thumping of boots on cobble stone, and finally, gunshots, far louder and reverberating than the small, flimsy pistols villagers used to protect their crops from wild animals.
Longshao had just turned twelve, and he was expecting to begin classes at the school in Pujiang county, a six mile walk through Songxi’s adjacent fields and the valley into which they led. He rose early to prepare and for a few moments that morning he was hearing and witnessing sounds from which his family, still wrapped in dreams, were briefly spared…
Longshao rushed into their adjacent rooms, but before he could tell them what he had heard, cries began ringing through the village. His family arose in terror; the equanimity he expected on his father’s face disappeared. And his own hopes for school were dashed — “Yes, I was still thinking about school during the invasion, I really wanted to leave Songxi and meet others,” Longshao said as we spoke in a small office just off the main square in Songxi one afternoon in August. That fall, the Japanese army sieged and occupied a village that, since the Ming Dynasty, had stood as a nationally recognized site of trade and limestone production. It had also had become the home of a Poetry Society under the Kangxi Emperor, which, throughout the 1700s, developed its own stylistic credo and gave the village a status as a cultural protectorate. Scholars traveled there to lecture and invested in its academic spirit. Meanwhile, the high number of ancestral halls for a rural town of 1,000 residents, along with the flowing streams that cascaded under brides and into its abundant fields of crops, gave Songxi a veneer of impregnability and canvas-style sanctity.
Few villagers believed that it would fall to a foreign power, even as American and Nationalist Army planes began flying over.

That suddenly changed, as the Japanese soldiers set fire to the streets, scorched bridges that crossed the the ming and hidden streams, and took villagers hostage. Many families fled into the fields, Longshao recalls, but were soon caught by the soldiers… “meiyou banfa,” Longshao says, “There was no way. They had no means of getting away…And so my father insisted we stay in the village, and try to survive that way.” Most of those years were spent trying to survive in the ruins of what was once Songxi. As we spoke, Longshao gestured with his hands to suggest a razing motion; “Everything to the east of here,” he said, “was burned..and we struggled to rebuild it for years after. There’s still evidence, if you look carefully…”
The Japanese had initially arrived in Songxi as part of its sweep of Zhejiang and Jiangxi, a campaign launched in order to find American soldiers who, returning from a mission in Tokyo, had run out of fuel. Not wanting to land on the eastern seaboard, then controlled by the Japanese, the Americans parachuted into the region, and many landed in the lush greenery of western Zhejiang, where small towns offered their sole hope of survival. Chinese villagers often opened their doors and provided days, and sometimes months, of coverage and safety. But the Japanese army soon began a mission to roundup these American soldiers, raiding villagers’ houses in search of hidden Americans, or any sign (flags, American products or gifts) that might alert them of their presence. If found, the American soldiers were summarily executed, and the Chinese families housing them faced similar fates.

Yet, the aims of the Japanese army in the western parts of Zhejiang soon expanded beyond a roundup, and in cities west of Hangzhou (including the village of Songxi) they began bazhan, or ‘forced occupation.’ By 1944, the Japanese army had established a base in the nearby town of Baima, also known as White Horse, and Xu Longshao found himself not in school but rather lining up at the village gate, where he was sent to a forced-labor camp in a nearby factory, which manufactured equipment as part of the Japanese war effort. Each family had been required to send a representative, and Longshao, fearing for his father’s health and still longing to leave the village walls, volunteered. He would return a full year later and walk back through the main bridge that leads into Songxi, over the conjoining streams and fields, and into the arched left gate of Songxi. It was originally built for soldiers in dynastic eras who, upon returning, were to be re-inducted into the village as a symbol for the world they had guarded. Yet, Longshao recalls few festivities — many of those who went to the labor camps did not survive, and China had achieved little of the stability for which many had hoped. Fighting between the Communists and Nationalists quickly resumed. And though they had been unable to provide any significant aid during the Sino-Japanese War, Songxi residents would learn that, just outside of Hangzhou, one of the many guerrilla camps of the Communists was beginning its own set of offensives.
Accounts of the Japanese invasion of China in the Second World War often focus on occupations of Shanghai and Nanjing, and they frequently center on stories of resistance. Books such as Rana Mitter’s “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II”(2013) provide a close look into the modes of resistance which the Chinese Nationalist Party, working with the Americans and often with the Communist soldiers, were successful at initiating. That resistance to Japanese troops, Mitter suggests, offered a compelling source of needed inspiration to the Western allies, revealing that the Japanese in fact could be defeated. Meanwhile, other titles such as “Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945,”(2007) provide a village-centric approach to the war years, but they do so primarily with an eye to the strategies which the villagers employed to sabotage the Japanese occupations, highlighting such stories at the expense of addressing the important disruptions in quotidian life, and their ongoing effects within villages of rural China.
While living for the past few weeks in Songxi, and speaking to residents who either survived the 1930s and 40s or intimately knew someone who did, it became clear that rural villagers here held their own specific narratives, many of which have not been given due space within the context of more large-scaled investigations into, and memorials of, the occupation.
Villagers confronted their own uncertainty and unique peril — without communication with the major cities, the years of occupation in Songxi were inscribed with rumors, occasionally distant hopes that help would arrive, and an existential fear that their old ways of life were forever lost. Days were lived in hunger, and often publicly-staged executions became the mode of instilling constant fear in the villagers. Meanwhile, though the Nationalist party did in fact arrive try to reclaim Songxi, the memories shared by both Longshao, and another villager and former solider named Xu Xiaoren, are of the Nationalists fleeing into the eastern-most fields of Songxi. A few years ago, one of Songxi’s buildings still remained dotted with gunshots from Nationalist gunfire as they retreated into the mountains, leaving Songxi under Japanese control. “We certainly were not their focus,” Longshao said.
Villagers have historically faced another difficulty in narrating the days of the siege-like occupation: many residents do not speak Mandarin, or putonghua (“the common language”), but rather a local dialect known as pujianghua, or Pujiang dialect. Longshao himself was speaking in this dialect, and we needed the help of a few locals to translate, as it were, his dialect into Mandarin. Because even native speakers of Mandarin can only understand fragments of such dialects, many stories that would otherwise become part of a national discourse are relegated to the status of oral tales, and kept within the provincial confines of the village. There was thus something in the space between Longshao’s pujianghua, with its more guttural intonation and fluid cadences, and the Mandarin translation we heard, that led me to wonder, how much in the nuance might we be missing? And how often have stories like Longshao’s become animated in Mandarin, especially when China has privileged the speaking of ‘putonghua’ and relegated many dialects to subaltern status?
Meanwhile, Longshao also confronts the cruel reality that can come when one outlives their contemporaries, and especially when one hold stories deeply specific to a particular historical moment. “All of my friends who were in the factories with me, or who lived in the village, have passed away. There might be some in other villages, but I often live alone with the memories of what happened.”
The process of speaking to Longshao via several townspeople, and primarily through Shao Lufu, the director of Arts and Culture in Songxi, thus felt like a gradual, necessary verbalization, a transformation of the abstract, vague stories we had heard of Japan’s occupation of the village into a specific and detailed narrative. And the crux of what Longshao told us concerned the state of living in the years between 1943–45, which he described as being one of fear and constant threat. He tells stories not dissimilar from those of Jewish families forcibly confined to ghettos in Europe in the early 1930s: villagers were beaten in public and sometimes killed, and his family lived a painful existence, subjected to raids and often unable to visit their neighbors.
For Longshao, it is important that Songxi not only preserve symbols of its historical prosperity, such as the Shao and Xu ancestral homes, but that it also conserve several marks of those traumatic years. While we were speaking, he asked Lufu to guide several of us, including a student from Zhejiang and a friend studying abroad in China, to buildings where we could see evidence of the invasion.
“We still have the henji — a word that literally mean “traces” — “of the Japanese invasion,” Lufu said, as he led us off the main Taiqi square and down a narrow street that led Southeast into the village. At a juncture where four such alley-like streets came together, he paused and pointed up to a three story house. “The first two floors were refurbished during 1820 and 1861, when two major fires swept through the village. “But look at the third,” he said. “Those are the stones from the river, and they were placed there in the early 1950s. Gunshots and mortar fire often razed the third floors of local houses during the occupation…after the war, the village was still recovering — it was poor, and the people had no way to bring in a stronger stone.”


Perhaps one of the reasons that Longshao insists that the village retain these sites, and that people like Lufu explain them to us as visitors, is that the occupation itself radically altered his own life, and in ways that are seldom visible to others. Unable to attend school, he did not learn to read or write until the early 1950s, when he attended evening classes that were part of the saomangyundong, or the campaign to eliminate illiteracy initiated by Mao Zedong’s Communist party in Beijing. While many after the war attended such classes and acquired basic literary, the years of missed education left an indelible, though invisible, mark on the population here. “We didn’t just want to learn characters, we wanted to go to school,” Longshao says. “That was tough, losing that possibility, and then entering a world where it was not possible. We returned and had to work.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I wanted to hear more about Longshao’s views on present day military interventions, and the growing concern that both China and the U.S. are not only feuding in the South China Sea, but also enacting policies that have directly threatened the livelihoods of its own citizens, and people trying to enter the country. In response, Longshao told us that he is not an activist, and he insisted that he mostly remains outside of political conversations today. Yet, there is also something about the invasion’s effect on Songxi that Longshao hopes to counter, and this marks in a sense his own mode of resistance, his form of politicality. He told us that one of the changes that was hardest about the invasion of Songxi, and the years of suffering that followed, emerged through the loss of intimacy which the village once possessed. Narrow streets where one expected to see neighbors became lined with soldiers, and the local stores and producers were all co-opted into creating not for their fellow villagers, but for the Japanese army, and exporting them to unknown battle grounds and shores. And everyone in the village knew someone directly who had been killed, or sent to one of the nearby labor camps.
Songxi has in many ways reclaimed that intimacy on which it was founded — small shops line its alleys, locals greet each other and share their crops, and a sense of place has been deeply imbedded in nearly all of Songxi’s literal spaces — the streams, the bridges, the entryways each are associated with a different villager or family, and the rituals of carrying the long wooden Dragon through the streets have been restored. The question Longshao considered, and which many seem to be asking, is how a village respecting these rituals, and restoring them to daily life, will be able to keep its practices as many tourists begin to visit. The Municipal government has recently enacted a series of measures meant to bolster tourism — buildings in Songxi have been refurbished and retrofitted for visitors, and the weekends now see the arrival of large tourist buses. In one sense, this kind of globalization and modernization creates far less immediate, and far less threatening, menaces to the braids of closeness that underpin Songxi, than the siege did years ago. But in another, it potentially undermines the pace and rituals of life, as more people come to its streets often unaware of the complex stories and lives endured by its villagers.
This is not to say that Songxi should resist tourism, nor that it should always stand turned towards its past, but rather that acknowledging and recognizing the memories that many of its villagers still carry, and the fear and persistence they confronted and adopted, might ensure that stories like Longshao’s are not “arrested” or excised from the village’s narrative, but inscribed within it. They are, after all, stories which connect that era here with the lives of many who live through similar atrocities and occupations, and might create untapped pathways of connection, and not just within China but in communities around the world. Perhaps a memorial with a series of inscriptions and reflections from surviving villagers could make that possible; or perhaps, Songxi should add to its myriad atriums and small museum-like halls a few chapters on the years when the village nearly faced its end, and began its recovery. These might stand as henji, or marks, of the stories one cannot immediately see in the villagers that line its streets, and they’d remind visitors of the stories that are in fact imbedded in its very architecture.
The final story Longshao told us concerned his pension, which he receives monthly for the factory work he did throughout the 1970s and 80s. “It’s four-thousand yuan, which means I can live quite well, and cook good meals for myself, and the other villagers who often come join. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, my father earned very little money. I appreciate the food today, and think of how much my family would have enjoyed it.”
Long Shao paused as he spoke, and then, with a brief smile, gave us a firm wave goodbye, and walked into the garden behind Lu Fu’s calligraphy room, back into the Songxi that hummed with hidden silences, the undying shadows of loss and pain, and the hope that memories would be heard and born together.

