In late November 1937, the Suxichang region fell one after another. The Japanese army established local puppet regimes at all levels in the urban areas; but in the vast rural areas, there were still so-called "underground county chiefs" appointed by the Kuomintang, who were responsible for the daily affairs of the areas.
The underground county magistrate, also known as the backpack county magistrate, because he only had a briefcase, he slipped away when he encountered a situation, and during the eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, 9 people were successively appointed by the Kuomintang as the governor of Wuxi County.
At the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Han Deqin, chairman of the Kuomintang Jiangsu Province, moved the provincial capital to northern Jiangsu, when the counties of southern Jiangsu fell one after another, and in order to restore the local administrative organs, the Jiangnan Branch Office and the Second District Commissioner's Office were still set up in Zhangzhu, Yixing. At the same time, Shao Nanji, the governor of Yixing County, was appointed as the governor of Wuxi County.
Shao Nanji had previously been the deputy captain of the Wuxi County Security Brigade and was familiar with the local situation in Wuxi. He took over after the Spring Festival of 1938. After arriving at his post, he saw that the Qiangxue Zengbu in Meicun, Wuxi, had more than 400 guns and strong strength, under the banner of the Anti-Japanese National Salvation Army.
Therefore, Shao immediately sent people to contact Qiang, and the other party agreed to accept the jurisdiction of the National Government, so Shao Nanji set up the county government in Meicun and appointed Gao Zulanli as the secretary, and Qiang xue was the first section chief.
By August, Shao Nanji was no longer the governor of Wuxi County, and was succeeded by Mao Mujun, who was recommended by the Wuxi Brigade Shanghai Hometown Association.
Mao Mujun is a native of Wuxi, once served as the mayor of the second district of the marine police, then lived in Shanghai, with the consent of the second district commissioner's office, after the commission, he took the secretary Su Shubin and others to Meicun to handle the handover matters. Soon, Mao Mujun moved the county government to Xibei Bashi Bridge.
After Mao Mujun arrived at Bashi Bridge, he saw that the guerrilla groups in the four townships at that time were on their own side, each of them was on their own, and they were very mixed, so he sent people to contact and win over from many parties, and xu took an official position, until the winter of 1939, when they began to piece together 7 "self-defense brigades" and a "special service brigade", with a total of more than 2,000 people and guns.
These people were nominally under the jurisdiction of Mao Mujun, but in fact they were independent and exclusive, and they were jealous of each other and did not hesitate to fight for territory. Mao Mujun is still a guangzhan county magistrate.
Later, Zhou Afu and several other brigade commanders surrendered to the enemy one after another, while Feng Yonggeng, Qian Junshi, and Feng Junyan, the head of the county government's finance section, were killed by Ri Kou.
The county government was fragmented and could no longer function. Mao Mujun was helpless, sneaked all the way to Zhangzhu in Yixing, cried to Leng Xin, the director of the Jiangnan Summer Tour, and then left his post as the county chief, transferred to the post of staff officer of the bureau, and appointed Song Yongsun to succeed him as the governor of Wuxi County.
After Mao Mujun handled the handover, after taking a short rest at xueyan bridge home, on the way to ZhangZhu to take office, he was shot and killed in the wilderness.
Song Yongsun was a native of Zhangjing, Beixiang, Wuxi, who served as a primary school principal and education bureau inspector before the war, and was then the secretary of the Second District Commissioner's Office. He was originally a person in the field of education, but in this chaotic era, he had only been in office for three months, and it was difficult for him to cope with the current situation, but he walked away and disappeared.
After Song Yongsun left, the Jiangnan Administration sent Zhang Quan, a Wujin man, to succeed him as the governor of Wuxi. After this person was commissioned, after inquiring about the situation in the four townships of Wuxi, he felt that he was incompetent and did not dare to come to his post to take over the work, and then the bureau changed the jiangyin man Xu Bingquan to be the governor of Wuxi County.
Xu Bingquan was born in the press, and after taking office, he only stayed in Dongxiang for three months before retiring in spite of difficulties.
His successor was Liu Wenxiao, a native of Songjiang, who set off from Shanghai after his appointment, and because the matter was not secret, he was detected by the Wang pseudo-Li Shiqun secret service Agency No. 76, and waited at the railway station to arrest Liu Wenxiao.
The Jiangnan Bureau had no choice but to urge Xu Bingquan to reinstate him. So he had to go to Wuxi, in the Dongxiang area, hiding in the east and the west, no fixed location, only one attaché, one briefcase, and a veritable "backpack county magistrate". He left his post in the second half of 1942 and remained in office for less than a year.
After that, the Jiangnan Bureau also sent Xu Guang, a Yixing person, to succeed him as the county magistrate, and in view of the difficulty of gaining a foothold in wuxi townships, he came up with an idea: set up a rear office in Zhangzhu, and in Wuxi, hu Shaomei was sent as the director of the Xixi office, and Gao Zulan was made the director of the Xibei office. Wuxi to Zhangzhu hundreds of miles, work efficiency can be imagined.
Sometimes, Xu Guang would disguise himself as a businessman and travel back and forth between the three offices, becoming a mobile "backpack county chief", and later, seeing that the situation was getting more and more tense, he simply pretended to be ill and resigned as a county chief.
In early 1944, after Xu Guang left his post, the bureau appointed Xu Zhuyi, a Shanghai Nanhui man, to take over the post of governor of Wuxi County. At the beginning of the commission, he hesitated in Shanghai, knowing that to become a county magistrate in Wuxi, he had neither armed nor a fixed place, and could only move around the townships, so he did not dare to leave.
Later, when the appointment was forced down, Xu Zhuyi sneaked into Wuxi, carried the letter of appointment of the governor of Wuxi, hid in Tibet for a period of time in the mountains of Wuxi Xixiang, personally went to the Zhangzhu Jiangnan Office in Yixing, looked for director Leng Xin, and wept and resigned the county governor's responsibility.
The last wuxi county magistrate was succeeded by Fan Tisheng, a Yiren, and by the autumn of 1945, when the War of Resistance was victorious, Fan Tisheng "drilled out of the ground" and went into the city to receive Wang's puppet county government, and like other Kuomintang officials, became a major acceptor of enemy and fake property.
The anti-Japanese democratic government under the leadership of the Communist Party, on the other hand, carried out the party's united front policy, united and mobilized the broad masses of the people, fought against the enemy, fought to the death against the Japanese aggressors, and dealt a heavy blow to the enemy and puppet armies.