Chapter 3. Unleashing Fire and Fury
Ying Jia Tan · Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021
Unleashing Fire and Fury I n the spring of 1936, Sun Yun-suan, a twenty-three-year-old electrical engineer with the Lianyungang Railroad Bureau Power Station in Jiangsu Province, caught the attention of Yun Zhen, the director of the Electrical Bureau, with a passionate essay calling for the nationalization of the electrical industries.A graduate of the Sino-Russian Industrial University in Harbin, this young engineer-bureaucrat would later rise through the ranks of the Republic of China government in Taiwan and would serve as premier from 1978 to 1984.In the spring of 1938, as Japanese troops advanced upstream on the Yangtze River toward the provisional capital Wuhan, Sun and other engineers of the National Resources Commission (NRC) were tasked with transporting hundreds of tons of power equipment into the inland provinces to set up the electrical infrastructure that would power the defense industries.Sun rushed to Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province, 128 miles east of Xuzhou where Japanese and Chinese forces faced off from January to June 1938.He oversaw the transportation of two 500 kW boiler-turbines 1,200 miles west to Ziliujing in Sichuan.Facing the fire and fury unleashed by the Japanese Imperial Army backed by a massive industrial base, the electrification of China's interior provided the spark that kept the flame of Chinese resistance going.With the Japanese capturing 97 percent of the nation's generating capacity, engineer-bureaucrats who retreated to Southwest China shouldered the responsibility of building an electrical infrastructure with a resilience to withstand the vagaries of war. 1 e 1941 map titled " e Final Days of the Anti-Japanese Resistance" sent a message showing that the efforts of engineer-bureaucrats serving the Guomindang regime were futile (see figure 3.1).It taunted senior Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist) party officials and capitalists for fleeing the destruction of Shanghai and Nanjing.It depicted Chiang as a coward hiding away in Southwest China as the Japanese conducted massive air raids over the wartime capital, Chongqing.In contrast, North China, which had been incorporated into the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was beaming with hope.