Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

Lao She recognized the symbolism in the date of the raid. For his generation of writers and artists, the date “May Fourth” had a particular, highly meaningful resonance. On May 4, 1919, a student demonstration against imperialism had broken out in central Beijing, becoming symbolic of a wider current of freethinking. This new strain of thought envisioned a Chinese culture based on “science and democracy,” those twin beacons

that would rescue China from its political weakness. And no educated Chinese would have missed the significance of the terror raids on Chongqing on May 4, 1939, exactly twenty years after the legendary protest.

By holding down large numbers of Japanese troops on the mainland, China was an important part of the overall Allied strategy. China had much less ability to make its own decisions than the other Allies because it was so much weaker than they, both economically and politically. Yet the war still marked a vital step in China’s progression from semi-colonized victim of global imperialism to its entry, however tentative, on the world stage as a sovereign power with wider regional and global responsibilities. Nor has the outside world ever fully understood the ghastly price that China paid to maintain its resistance against Japan for eight long years, from 1937 to 1945. Some 14 million deaths, massive refugee flight, and the destruction of the country’s embryonic modernization were the costs of the war.8 The road to victory for the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 lay within the devastated landscape of China created by the years of war with Japan.

In recent years the sheer scale of the war in China has become apparent. What began on July 7, 1937, as an unplanned local conflict between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing, known as the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” escalated into an all-out war between the two great nations of East Asia; it would not end until August 1945. In the eight intervening years China’s Nationalist government was forced into internal exile, along with millions of refugees. Huge tracts of the country were occupied by the Japanese, who sponsored collaborators to create new forms of government aimed at destroying the authority of the Nationalists. In other parts of the country, the Chinese Communist Party grew in influence, burnishing its credentials through resistance to the Japanese, and vastly increasing its territorial base through policies of radical social reform. The toll that the war inflicted on China is still being calculated, but conservative estimates number the dead at 14 million at least (the British Empire and United States each lost over 400,000 during the Second World War, and Russia more than 20 million). The number of Chinese refugees may have reached more than 80 million. The greater part of China’s hard-won modernization was destroyed, including most

of the rail network, sealed highways, and industrial plants created in the first decades of the twentieth century: 30 percent of the infrastructure in the rich Pearl River delta near Canton, 52 percent in Shanghai, and a staggering 80 percent in the capital, Nanjing.9 The war would undo two empires in China (the British and the Japanese) and help to create two more (the American and the Soviet). The narrative of the war is the story of a people in torment: from the Nanjing Massacre (widely known as the Rape of Nanking, December 1937–January 1938), when Japanese troops murdered and looted in the captured Chinese capital, t...

The war was also a turning point for three men, each of whom had his own vision for the future of China. During the war, all eyes, whether admiring or critical, were on Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang or Guomindang) Party. At the outbreak of war in 1937, almost everyone, even Chiang’s Communist enemies, acknowledged that he was the only figure who could represent all of China in its resistance to Japan. Chiang dreamed that the war might be a cleansing fire: China would rise from the ashes and become a sovereign, prosperous nation, able to take a leading role in the postwar order in Asia and the world beyond. In the end, Chiang won the war, but lost his country. For Chiang’s great rival, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the war against Japan was

the making of a leader. When the war broke out, he was the head of a small party on the run that had been forced into a hideout in the dusty hill country of northwest China. By the end of the war, he would control vast areas of China with its population of some 100 million people, as well as an independent army of nearly a million men.11 In contrast, the war was the unmaking of a man whose name is little remembered outside the ranks of China historians: Wang Jingwei. Wang’s story is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history. He was a more prominent nationalist and revolutionary in his youth than either Mao or Chiang, and served as second in command to the legendary revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen. But during the war against Japan, Wang authored a decision that would condemn him, to this day, as “a traitor for a thousand generations” against the Chinese people. These three men—Chiang, Mao, and Wang—would use the war to propose and debate, often with great violence, their visions of what a modern, free China should be. The war forced them to take sides and exposed the fundamental disagreements among them that would eventually lead to the victory of Mao Zedong.

Today, when relations between China and the United States grow tense, the Chinese side is motivated in part by a belief that its wartime contributions, its efforts to defeat America’s enemies, have been forgotten—and that it is time for America, and Europe, to remember.

Memories of the war against Japan can also heal scars left by another conflict, the painful civil war between Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists. One of the most startling sights for anyone who remembers Mao-era China is the villa at Huangshan that once belonged to the chairman’s old foe Chiang Kai-shek. Today the villa is restored to look as it did during the war years, when Chiang lived there, writing of the Chongqing bombings in his diary. The displays inside give plenty of details of Chiang’s

role as a leader of the resistance against Japan, all of them very positive, and none painting him as a bourgeois reactionary lackey. Of the Communists, there is very little mention. A generation ago, one might have seen this kind of praise for Chiang on Taiwan, but it would have been impossible to find on the mainland.

The agony of “Chungking,” as the city was then known in the West, became a symbol of resistance to people around the world, who were now certain that a global war could not be far off. At the time, the conflict between China and Japan was one of the most high-profile wars on the planet.

Put simply, that history disappeared down a hole created by the early Cold War, from which it has only recently reappeared. The history of China’s war with Japan became wrapped in toxic politics for which both the West and the Chinese themselves (on both sides of the Taiwan Strait) were responsible. All sides aligned their interpretations of the war with their Cold War certainties.

The war, then, marks the transfer of power to the Communists, but there was nothing inevitable about the process. And for much of the early part of the war, before Pearl Harbor, there was an alternative: the

possibility that Japan might win, and that China would become part of a wider Japanese Empire. A new history of China’s wartime experience must take account of the three-way struggle for a modern China: Nationalist, Communist, and collaborationist.

Even the massive loss of life in Russia that followed the German invasion in June 1941 was less transformative than what happened to China in one fundamental sense: the USSR was pushed to its ultimate test, but did not break. It fought back and survived. In contrast, the battered, punch-drunk state that was Nationalist China in 1945 had been fundamentally destroyed by the war with Japan.

The crippled and unsympathetic Nationalist regime that limped to peace in 1945 was not a product of blind anti-communism, refusal to fight Japan (a bizarre accusation considering the Nationalists’ role in resisting alone for four and a half years before Pearl Harbor), or foolish or primitive military thinking. The regime was overwhelmed by external attack, domestic dislocation, and unreliable Allies.

The greater demands that the state made on society in wartime also created a reverse effect: society began to demand more from government. The war saw extensive experiments in welfare provision for refugees, as well as improvements in health and hygiene. Other societies at war, notably Britain, found that they had to promise a welfare state to repay the population for the suffering it had endured during the war. But in the end, the Nationalists had created demands that only the Communists would be able to satisfy.

within China; its capital was at the great city of Nanjing, and millions of people lived under its rule. The Taiping was nominally a Christian regime, but it espoused variations in doctrine (such as acknowledging Hong Xiuquan as Jesus’s younger brother) that put off most missionaries and other foreigners from joining forces with it. The Taiping also enacted strict reforms such as the abolition of opium and made moves to redistribute property and land. “Nowhere will inequality exist,” one Taiping notice declared, “and no one not be well fed and clothed.”

The New Armies were highly successful, and the rebellion was finally defeated, although not without massive bloodshed: some 100,000 people were reported killed at the last Battle of Nanjing, in 1864. The Qing had also exacerbated another weakness in their rule. Although the immediate problem of the Taiping was solved, the devolution of military authority from the center to the provinces had laid the grounds for a culture where autonomous militarists, often known as “warlords,” rather than a central Chinese government could lay down the law.

In 1900 the Boxer uprising broke out, a peasant rebellion that gained its name from the religiously influenced martial arts practiced by its proponents. The rebellion was spurred on by a great drought that came on top of widespread, grinding poverty, and it saw immense violence against foreigners and Chinese Christians in the villages of north China, culminating in a two-month siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. The rebels whipped up feeling in drought-ridden districts with xenophobic slogans such as “When the foreign devils have all been killed, a heavy rain will fall.”10 Drought and famine also increased the level of local violence, as militias formed in communities that no longer trusted the state to defend them against marauding bandits or corrupt officials.

In addition he would be China’s first leader to have experience of the outside world: a youthful visit to the newly formed Soviet Russia shaped a lifetime of visceral hatred for communism, and a Japanese military academy gave him insights into the enemy he would face one day. During the Second World War itself, his visits to India and Egypt would shape his conviction that a postwar China must fight imperialism and stand tall among the family of nations. Li Zongren, an ally with whom Chiang would have a turbulent relationship, confirmed that he had one key quality for leadership: “he loved to make decisions.”

But few agreed with him, and the political turmoil caused by the foreign threat led not to a war against the Americans but to a coup against the shoguns. After a short civil war in 1868, the Tokugawas were replaced by a very different sort of aristocratic elite, who decided that the way to repel Western imperialism was to embrace wholesale modernization.

“Meiji restoration.”

By 1900, within just three decades, Japan had been transformed. It had a disciplined, conscripted army, and a constitution and parliamentary system. It was Asia’s most heavily industrialized society, exporting goods around the world. By the start of the twentieth century, Japan had nearly 6,000 kilometers of railway tracks and 700,000 tons of shipping. Its leaders had created a modernized, industrialized state in record time.

In 1894–1895 Japan took on China for control of the Korean Peninsula, traditionally an area of Chinese influence. Twenty thousand Japanese troops made a daring assault on the fort of Weihaiwei, on the coast of China’s northern Shandong province, and turned their guns on the ships of the Chinese navy, sinking five of its finest vessels.

The Japanese not only claimed control of Korea (which they annexed

formally in 1910), but the island of Taiwan as well (which remained a Japanese colony until 1945). In 1904–5 Japan pulled off an even greater coup. It fought for influence in Manchuria, the northeastern province of China, where Russia had established a colonial presence. Japan paid a heavy price: over 80,000 of its troops were killed by wounds or disease. But thanks to Japan’s military skill, the war ended with Russia’s defeat. It was the first time that an Asian power had overcome a European one, and the achievement drew admiration from colonized and vulnerable peoples around the world.

This special status was spelled out most clearly by the stationing in Manchuria of the Kwantung Army. This force, initially made up of some 10,000 men, was supposed to protect the interests of Japanese citizens and business interests in the region, in particular the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR, or Mantetsu), which was the primary instrument of Japanese colonialism in the region. By 1933 its numbers had increased dramatically to over 114,000, and it gave Japan a powerful advantage in its quest to control north China.

Spencer argued that races and peoples, not just species, were competing for mastery. His central ideas were later characterized as “social Darwinism” and are now dismissed as pseudo-science, but they proved very popular in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they seemed to provide a rational explanation for the decline of the Asian powers, as well as a potential solution.

Sun Yat-sen,

Wang Jingwei

Young Chinese like Wang took great inspiration from the activities of the Russian nihilists and terrorists, with their anarchistic philosophy. Not all Russian anarchists were violent, but those who were glorified their use of violence.

They marched to the military headquarters and made their demands to the commander. They gave him a choice: be killed, or announce on their behalf that on that day, October 10, he was declaring the city’s independence from the Qing dynasty. He did so, and within days there was a chain reaction as city after city declared independence from the regime. Provincial assemblies, filled with the representatives of the new, politically empowered gentry class, all declared themselves part of a new republic and named Sun Yat-sen as their chosen president.

Yuan Shikai, the leader who controlled the Beiyang army, the biggest in north China, went to the court with a proposal. In return for the abdication of the six-year-old emperor, Puyi, Yuan would ensure that the imperial household was given suitable accommodation and an income. On February 12, 1912, the last emperor of China abdicated, and China formally became a republic.

General elections were set for late 1912, and Sun ran at the head of his newly formed Nationalist Party (Guomindang or Kuomintang). He handily gained the largest grouping in Parliament, with 269 out of 596 seats. But China’s experiment in electoral democracy, while real, was very short lived. On March 20, 1913, an assassin walked up to Song Jiaoren, the Nationalists’ brilliant young nominee for prime minister, and shot him. Song died of his wounds soon afterward. Everyone assumed the assassin had been sent by Yuan Shikai. Yuan quickly dissolved Parliament and banned the Nationalist Party. Sun fled to Japan, deeply disillusioned.

In January 1915 the government of Prime Minister Okuma Shigenobu presented Yuan Shikai with a set of territorial and political demands that would give Japan immense advantages in everything from trading rights to the placement of Japanese “advisers” within the Chinese government. Yuan’s position was still weak, and in May thirteen of the original demands were formalized by treaty. Yuan remained president until 1916, when he died of uremia. For the next decade, China was split among warring militarist factions. Although the international community recognized whichever government was installed in Beijing at any given moment, many felt that China was a geographical expression rather than a country.

But the territories were awarded instead to Japan. The Western Allies turned out to have made simultaneous secret agreements with both China and Japan in order to bring them both in on the Allied side.

His fellow students quickly mobilized, and on May 4, 1919, three thousand students from the capital’s finest colleges marched through the Legation quarter of the city and set fire to the house of a government minister whom they condemned as a “traitor to the nation”—an apologist for Japanese interests. The students sparked a wider movement that vowed to use “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” to revive a society suffering from “warlordism within, and imperialism from outside.” The demonstration was over in a few hours, but the aftershocks helped to transform Chinese society and culture for decades to come.

However, Sun’s idea of pan-Asianism, the philosophy of Asian unity, meant something rather different in governmental circles in Tokyo: not cooperation, but domination by Asia’s major power.

In the Soviet view, China was too backward for a socialist revolution. Instead, a “national bourgeois” party, the Nationalists, should carry out the first revolution. Sun agreed, content to ally with Russia, believing that alone among Western nations she had shown “benevolence and justice.”

The new alliance changed the fate of the Chinese Communist Party. During the first couple of years of the party’s history, it was a tiny and marginal political grouping (as well as being officially illegal). It made grand claims about fomenting a revolution among urban workers, Bolshevik-style, but in reality it had little prospect of doing so. Cooperation between Sun and the Soviets gave the CCP a crucial opportunity to expand. On Soviet advice, many Communists also joined the Nationalists, forming the United Front, making the two parties hard to distinguish during this period. The alliance made sense ideologically for Sun as well. His political philosophy, which he termed the “Three People’s Principles,” consisted of democracy, nationalism, and the idea of “people’s livelihood,” a vague social welfarism that was sometimes rendered as “socialism” in English. He was not a Communist, but he and the Soviets had enough in common to make the alliance useful for both sides. Sun’s prestige was also enough to calm the more conservative elements in the Nationalist Party who were wary of the Bolsheviks.

Revolutionary politics were forged on a small island in Guangzhou (Canton) Harbor. The nerve center was the Whampoa (Huangpu) military academy, where the Soviets tutored China’s revolutionaries. For both the Nationalists and Communists, the experience of working with the Soviets between 1923 and 1927 on the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) was crucial. Wang Jingwei worked in the political education department of the academy, and alongside him was a rising star of the CCP, Zhou Enlai (later to become China’s premier under Mao). On the military side, Chiang Kai-shek rose rapidly in the officer corps as his organizational skills became better known and better valued, along with his comrade from his Japan days, He Yingqin. Also at the Academy were Hu Zongnan and Xue Yue, both of whom would provide crucial military service to Chiang during the war years.

By the spring of 1925 China seemed ready for revolution. On May 30 demonstrators gathered in front of a Japanese-owned factory in Shanghai’s International Settlement, protesting their dismissal from work there. As the crowd grew to tens, then hundreds, chants of “Kill the foreigners” became louder. Panicking, an officer of the British-run Shanghai Municipal Police force directed his men (Chinese constables led by Indian Sikh officers) to shoot into the crowd. They shot eleven workers dead, and in doing so, sparked a national protest movement of demonstrations and boycotts.

But by early 1926, Chiang had started to cater to the more conservative elements in the party, who had become convinced that the Soviets were planning to use the Communists to undermine the Nationalist leadership. Chiang became convinced that his own life was in serious danger from leftist plotters. In March Chiang placed Guangzhou under martial law, disarming the strong Soviet and Chinese Communist presence in the city.

On June 5, 1926, Chiang was officially placed in charge of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), the military force that served the Nationalist Party. In an ironic echo of the way in which Sun Yat-sen’s own power and prestige had been rendered null by the greater military power of Yuan Shikai in 1912, Chiang’s ability to command force now brought him victory over Sun’s supposed heir. That military power was important, for there was a great deal for the NRA to do. Over the next two years the Nationalist army fought or coerced its way to control over most of China’s central and eastern provinces, a campaign termed the Northern Expedition. In fact, it was a drive to complete the national unification that had been lost in the wake of the 1911 revolution.

The NRA continued its advance, terrifying many foreigners who assumed that this Soviet-backed, Communist-allied army would upend their comfortable lives. Greater success increased the real tensions between the left and right wings of the alliance. Chiang Kai-shek’s military supremacy over the other leaders was clear, as was his increasing distaste for the Communist presence within the United Front. The Soviets were bankrolling the Expedition, making it impossible for Chiang to end the alliance with them, but he had already begun to put plans in place to tip the balance of power when the moment was right.

That moment came in April 1927, when the greatest prize, the city of Shanghai, fell to the Nationalists. The British had already anticipated the rise of a more coherent nationalism in China and while they did not welcome it, they were prepared to deal with the country’s new, more assertive face. The British settler community in Shanghai was less sanguine, and armed itself against what they feared would be leftist marauders. Some even termed Chiang “the little red general.” But in fact the greatest victims of the capture of Shanghai were not the foreigners (who were anyway mostly safe in the concession areas), but the Communists. They had infiltrated much of the city, awaiting the joyous moment when the NRA would arrive. What they did not know was that Chiang had used his secret society contacts with the Green Gang, the largest criminal outfit in the city, to have all known Communists rounded up and murdered.

But the further one went from Nanjing, the less secure the Nationalist government’s control was. The Northern Expedition was supposed to have put an end to warlordism, but in many cases the Nationalists had had to reach uneasy agreements with the local militarists, lacking confidence in their ability to conquer them by force of arms.

Chiang’s shaky grip on large parts of China was an immense obstacle to achieving a genuine unification: Nanjing could not rely on tax collection or military recruitment from huge swathes of the country that it claimed to rule.

The British presence was deeply exploitative, racist, and often brutal, but British diplomats were also capable, on occasion, of a remarkable clarity of vision and were ready to recognize the Nationalists as different from the warlords who had preceded them.