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

by Rana Mitter

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.