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

by Rana Mitter

The Ichigô campaign had been just as destructive to Chinese society as it had to its military, creating yet more deprivation and destruction in China’s most fertile areas. The efforts in the early war years to create a more integrated system of welfare provision had always become weaker the further one traveled from Chongqing, but by the last year of the war, they seemed a hollow mockery in the face of massive need. To tackle the problem, China engaged with a remarkable new organization: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Roosevelt had realized that in the areas liberated from the Axis powers, there would be immense misery, and a formally coordinated effort was needed to make provision to feed starving people and enable countries to rebuild their societies. Although some forty-four countries signed UNRRA’s founding document at the White House on November 9, 1943, it was always heavily bankrolled by the US and run primarily by American administrators.