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

by Rana Mitter

It was not only the Communists who used the heightened circumstances of war to remodel their states. So too did the Nationalist regimes of Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing and Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. As the economic climate worsened, Chiang’s government began to lose the precarious pluralism that had marked its earliest wartime phase. From the very start of the war, there had been light and darkness in the Nationalist program. One side of it was open and modernizing, symbolized by the plans to institute welfare relief, build technologically advanced facilities such as arsenals, and political participation from nonparty members. The other was darker and more inward-looking, harking back to Chiang’s connections to the criminal underworld and the intrigue that had brought him to ultimate power in China. Wang Jingwei’s state, of course, experienced a crisis of legitimacy from the start, and was defined by its need to justify its pro-Japanese stance during the war. As China’s physical isolation deepened and its military and economic crisis worsened after Pearl Harbor, the Nationalists tried to shore up their bureaucratic and social infrastructure. In turn, the Communists and the Nanjing regime tried to create rival