Lishui in the Republican Period

Lishui was still a county

Lishui was reduced from a prefecture to a county in 1369, the second year of the Hongwu era, and until it became a district in 2013 no record shows it being raised to a prefecture again or renamed (Kangxi edition of the Lishui County Gazetteer, Volume One, Annals; State Council reply Guohan [2013] No. 24). It follows that Lishui was still a county during the Republican period.

The boundary of that inference should be stated. Drawing a "not found" from two documents six centuries apart is an argument from silence: it supports only that no record of a restoration to prefecture status or of a renaming has been found, and it cannot show that nothing about the county organisation changed in between. The rank of the county and the organisation of its government during the Republican period remain unrecorded in the sources held here.

The editorial rules in the prefatory volume of the Guangxu edition state that "the county of Lishui was founded in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era, and the table of changes through the dynasties has been fully collated" — the old gazetteers' collation of the administrative sequence stops with the Qing, and the Republican period lies outside them. A search across this library's six old-gazetteer full-text cards returns no Republican-period administrative content, which is consistent with the closing dates of Qing gazetteers. That is not an omission in the collecting; it lies outside the scope the genre ever had.

Lishui's position during the War of Resistance

The administrative sequence has gaps, but Lishui's military position during the War of Resistance is established by two first-hand official sources that corroborate one another.

Bian Xinhong of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Party History Office, in "Wartime Memories — the Rally of the New Fourth Army at Xinqiao", records that on 24 April 1938 Mao Zedong cabled Xiang Ying instructing the New Fourth Army to "first send a detachment to reconnoitre in the Lishui area"; the advance detachment entered Lishui in mid-May; Chen Yi's First Detachment arrived in Lishui in early June, and on 8 June the two met at Xinqiao in Lishui. The Jiangsu Provincial Office of Local Gazetteers, in "The Maoshan War Years and the Red Memorial Sites", likewise records that the advance detachment entered the Jiangning and Lishui area in mid-May and split into three columns, and that the meeting at Xinqiao took place on 8 June 1938.

According to the first of these, the rally "formally opened the curtain on the New Fourth Army's advance east to resist Japan" and marks the beginning of the pairing of Chen and Su. That must be read together with the scholarly status the same article states: the rally of the New Fourth Army at Xinqiao "has long failed to attract attention in the historical profession, and there have even been doubts about whether the rally took place and what its historical value was". The author answers those doubts with the cable of 15 June 1938 from Xiang Ying to Mao Zedong — "the Chen detachment and Su's advance detachment have met at Xinqiao in Lishui" — and with the Chronicle of Chen Yi. Whichever of the two is cited, both must be given together.

The same article records that on the third day after the rally, on 11 June, Su Yu, then stationed at Lijiashan in Lishui, received an order from the Third War Zone directing him to send troops to cut the railway. That took place within Lishui; the Weigang engagement of 17 June, however, was fought around Danyang in Zhenjiang and must not be counted as a Lishui event.

The book that fills the gap

No county gazetteer of Lishui was compiled between the eighth year of the Guangxu era (1882) and the founding of the People's Republic. To fill that blank, the Lishui District Gazetteer Office gathered Republican-period materials including the Lishui Zhengfang Ce and the Lishui Gujin into a Republican-Period Lishui Source Reader, compiled jointly with the District Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and published by China Literature and Art Publishing House. The book runs to 313,000 characters in two parts: the first collects eight Republican-period documentary sources, all of which may be treated as official documents; the second collects seventy-one articles in which individuals recall Lishui in those years.

This is the work most directly aimed at the gap in Republican-period Lishui held by this library, and the difference between its two parts has to be respected: the recollections in the second part carry less authority than the official documents in the first and may not be cited as equals. Up to the present reading the contents of the book have not been seen here; only the fact of publication and its structure have been verified, so this entry does not use it to describe any particular Republican-era administrative change, official or person.

Gaps

The following are left until a dedicated source can be added:

• the provincial-level jurisdiction at each stage of the Republican period, including province, circuit and administrative inspection district;
• the rank of the county and the organisation and staffing of its government;
• the districts and townships below county level and their successive adjustments;
• whether the county seat was moved and whether the county boundary changed.

On the first of these there is a further documentary trail worth following: Jiangsu at that time divided the province into administrative inspection districts, and Lishui belonged to more than one of them in turn. The institutional background can be sought in the Second Historical Archives of China and in the civil-administration volumes of the Jiangsu provincial gazetteer, but this library has not established Lishui's actual assignment and awaits a primary source.

The sources to look for are the first part of the Republican-Period Lishui Source Reader, the pre-1949 records of governmental organs held by the Lishui District Archives under the Detailed Rules on the Scope of Archives Collected by the Lishui District Archives (Lisheng Gui [2015] No. 1), and Republican-period gazetteers of the administrative divisions of Jiangsu.

Uncertainties

First, the district government gives only a general statement for the Republican period, and no specific years or jurisdictions are inferred from it here.

Second, the heritage lists use "Republican period" as the date of a monument, which is not the same thing as a period in administrative history; the two cannot be used to corroborate each other.

Third, the two sources for the War of Resistance describe military operations, not administrative organisation. They establish Lishui's military position in those years; they cannot be used to fill in any level or jurisdiction of the administrative hierarchy.