WAR AND NATIONAL SALVATION

War broke out between China and Japan after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Beiping on the night of July 7, 1937. Even before then, a Shanghai "merchants militia" (shangtuan) had been formed by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which had taken out advertisements in the Shanghai press offering free courses in civic training to shop assistants.^[33] During the six weeks between the on-set of fighting in north China and the eruption of conflict in the Yangzi delta on August 13, more citizen volunteer groups were formed in Shanghai under the loose supervision of the Nationalist general Zhang Jizhong.^[34]

On July 15, for example, the Chinese Youth National Salvation Association was formally inaugurated at the Guandi Temple, where a depot had been established. More than a thousand people showed up to hear speeches by the head of the association, Zhao Gangyi, and by the chief of its execution department, Sun Yaxing.^[35] A number of those who came then or later in answer to advertisements

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in Zhongyang ribao (Central daily news) were taken aside and interviewed by Sun Yaxing, who asked them to write about their reasons for joining. Three of these young men later became members of Sun Yaxing's antitraitor assassination group: Wang Zhigu, a twenty-three-year-old factory apprentice; Jiang Haisheng, a nineteen-year-old student; and Zhou Shougang, a twenty-five-year-old printer.^[36] A fourth, Sun Jinghao, was the bomber killed on December 3, 1937, at the Japanese victory parade on Nanjing Road.^[37]

These new members of the National Salvation Association—all students, apprentices, or shop assistants—attended lectures on the current political situation, and then were asked on July 21 to volunteer to dig fortifications outside Shanghai. About two hundred men, mostly between eighteen and twenty-one years old, volunteered, and under Sun Yaxing's command they proceeded to Nanxiang, where they were attached to the Eighty-seventh Nationalist Division. For the next month, supplied with food but not pay, they dug trenches, working mostly at night to avoid Japanese bombers.^[38]