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

by Rana Mitter

in more dubious ways: there is good evidence that they were also producing opium in the base area, strictly for export to the Nationalist and Japanese zones.51 The Communist policies in Yan’an saved the region from collapse and also showed that there was an alternative to the increasingly destructive cycle that was corroding the relationship between the Nationalist government and its people. Yet Mao did have one major advantage in stabilizing the region. While there were some 40,000 troops stationed in the ShaanGanNing region that he controlled, his commitment to guerrilla warfare meant that he was not required to raise the large standing armies that the Nationalists needed in order to participate fully in the wartime alliance. One of the favorite accusations of Chiang’s Western allies was that the Nationalists were unwilling to recruit enough troops to make a proper contribution to the war, and were hoping that the Westerners would win it for them. (This was at the heart of Graham Peck’s indictment of the regime.) Yet these same observers, many of whom admired the Communists, did not acknowledge the crippling burden (in an already stretched economy) of having hundreds of thousands of economically unproductive soldiers