Forty Days at Linyi, and the Offices That Followed

In the spring of 1938 the city was the scene of fierce fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops. Zhang Zizhong and Pang Bingxun led their men here and the fighting ran for more than forty days; between the middle of February and the middle of April the Japanese 5th Division counted 1,444 dead and 5,268 wounded, the great majority of them in the fighting at Linyi. The townspeople were encouraged by the victory at Tai'erzhuang nearby and defended the city fiercely, but the Japanese breached the city walls on 19 April 1938. The next day the defenders withdrew, and moved forty-nine kilometres away to ground that was contested in the same way. Behind that wall the country was already becoming something else: the hills north of the city were where the anti-Japanese base area was made.

The institutions of the base area are recorded in the city's own history, and on the page they are almost bureaucratic in texture. In August 1940 the Shandong wartime work promotion committee was set up at Qingtuo Temple in Yinan county. In September 1943 it was renamed the Shandong wartime administrative committee. In August 1945 the provincial government of Shandong was established at Dadian town in Junan county. In July 1948 the three administrative areas of central, southern and coastal Shandong were merged into one South Central Shandong administration, seated in the city of Linyi, with seven special districts and forty-nine counties beneath it. What people here call the Yimeng spirit begins, on this record, as committees meeting in a temple and a provincial government installed in a small town.

Two things survive from those years as places rather than as documents. One is the East China Martyrs Cemetery, held on the city's list of national cultural relic protection units, a piece of ground kept for the people who did not come back. The other is the space the administration left behind: in 1946, with the war over, the CPC Directorate General of Shandong Wartime Posts was moved out of the Yimeng Mountains to Linyi and renamed the Shandong Provincial Postal Administration. A provincial post office began in hills with no roads under it and ended up in the city that had them. Maqi Mountain, where the Red Coat Army rose in a much earlier period, keeps the same ground on the record, and the cemeteries and old uprising sites are still standing in the towns below the ridge.