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The United States simultaneously maintained two contradictory views of China. On the one hand, the US shared in all the imperial rights that the European powers enjoyed there: they had extraterritoriality, as well as representation on the Shanghai Municipal Council, and had been important actors in the opium trade.
Yet within China itself, many Americans felt that they had a special role, and regarded themselves as somehow different from the imperialist powers of the Old World. The missionary influence was key to this
belief. By the early twentieth century, funding from American missionaries in China had paid for some of the most important modernizing institutions in the country, such as the Peking Union Medical College, founded in 1906. In addition, missionaries spread throughout China, operating at a village level in a way that few other foreigners ever did. There were of course numerous European missionaries, but the attention of Britain
America’s missionary presence in China led to many fruitful cultural encounters. But there was a fundamental misconception at the heart of much of the American thinking about China, and one which is not entirely absent from political thought today: a widely held belief that the Chinese aspired to become like Americans, and that it was the job of the Americans to train them to achieve that goal, whether in systems of government, education, or religion.
Japan, the third great power whose fate would affect China in wartime, viewed the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in Nanjing with great alarm. During the 1920s Japan had appeared to take a more moderate attitude toward China. Tokyo had learned important lessons from the aftermath of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference that had followed it. The May Fourth demonstrations in 1919 showed that Chinese nationalism was an important force to be dealt with, and that Japan could not simply invade Chinese territory wholesale as it had done in the wars of 1894–95 and
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Wilson’s internationalist talk was undercut by hypocrisy and racism: Japan’s desire for a racial-equality clause in the final peace settlement was rejected by Western politicians who could not bring themselves to declare openly that nonwhite peoples were formally equal. The attitudes of imperialism had not disappeared, only mutated.
The Japanese elites saw Chiang’s Nationalist government, with its anti-imperialist rhetoric, as a hostile opponent. They refused to take the Nationalists seriously as a movement with popular legitimacy and an ideological agenda that demanded the eventual removal of imperialist power from Chinese soil. Instead, the Japanese acted as if Chiang was just another Chinese warlord to be bribed or browbeaten.
Drawing on the idea that the Asian nations needed to cooperate, Japan began to propagate the ideology of pan-Asianism in the first decade of the twentieth century, arguing that the nations of the “spiritual” East should differentiate themselves from the “material” West. The term “pan-Asianism” played into the irrational, romantic streak in Japanese nationalism that drew on Zen and Nichiren Buddhism as well as German ideas of “blood and soil” to give meaning to the national quest for power and glory. Chinese nationalism, however, did not share much of that spiritual element. It was rooted in a
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The “Manchurian Incident” became one of the most notorious diplomatic crises of the interwar period, one of the first in a series of confrontational acts by militaristic governments that would shatter the fragile peace created after the Great War. But the events of September 18, 1931, would also forever change the fate of China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party.
Even if the Chinese were not unified, they had to be militarily prepared. Seen in this context, the continued battles against the CCP and the various regional militarists seem more logical: from Chiang’s point of view, opposition to unification, whatever the reason, contributed to China’s continuing weakness in the face of an external
threat. To criticize Chiang for attacking the CCP in the face of a threat from Japan, as many have done, assumes that had he stopped fighting, his opponents would have too. This seems unlikely: only a decade earlier, Mao had declared that neither the left nor right wings of the Nationalists were true friends of the CCP, even though he had been allied with both at the time.
Council also investigated the impact of education and the importance of currency reform. A crucial conclusion was that China’s geography made it vulnerable in the event of a major war, because the vast majority of the country’s infrastructure was on the east coast, the area most likely to be invaded. Plans were drawn up for the state to ensure sufficient supplies of iron, coal, and chemicals should war break out.
In June 1934 the Red Army began a trek to the northwest that has become known as the Long March.
Up to that point, Mao had been an important member of the party (he had been at its first congress in Shanghai in 1921), but not the leader. The very fact that the party had been forced onto the Long March suggested that his rivals’ strategies had failed, and his criticisms of the CCP’s dominant ideological line, including the attention to urban over rural revolution, had real substance. Although Mao still had rivals, the march to Bao’an was an important stage in Mao’s ascent. The Long March was to become a glorious foundation myth of the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, it was a desperate
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of finally crushing the Communists. But within months a series of secret dealings and double-crosses would change the political reality completely.
On August 1, 1935, the USSR and its international organization, the Comintern, declared a worldwide front against fascism. The CCP was to abandon its policy of opposition to Chiang and give him its full support.23 Chiang and Mao both understood that Moscow’s new line had the potential to change Chinese domestic politics utterly. For the Communists, it was galling to have to embrace a former ally who had turned on them without warning just a decade
earlier. And Chiang also knew that his hope of finally crushing the CCP might well be slipping away. A war with Japan was now likely, and if it happened, he would need Soviet assistance to defend China. To serve that end, he might have to abandon any hope of destroying the final Communist holdouts, even though the party had been greatly weakened by the Nationalists.
On December 12, 1936, China awoke to extraordinary news: Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped. Troops serving under the militarist leaders Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng had surrounded his villa and were holding him hostage.
In the previous months’ confusion, Zhang had not been privy to the secret talks that had already laid the ground for an alliance between the Nationalists and Communists, and far from being hailed as a new leader for the nation, his actions were viewed as treachery by the Nationalist government and the wider public. Negotiations continued for two weeks, with both Chinese and foreign observers completely at a loss to know whether the country’s leader would be released or killed.
Now Stalin made it clear that the CCP had to settle its disagreement with Chiang and obtain his release. Stalin knew that Chiang’s death would not be to the advantage of the small, beleaguered Communist Party. Instead, someone like Wang, assisted perhaps by He Yingqin, might well take over. A pro-Japanese China would place the USSR in grave danger. By 1936 the Anti-Comintern Pact (which Chiang had seriously considered joining) threatened to encircle the USSR with a hostile Germany on one side and Japan on the other. If China also turned toward the Axis, then the Soviet Red Army might have to
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But Chiang did not go back on the idea of a new united front. It was clear to him that the threat from Japan was simply too great to allow another civil war to break out. Under the terms of the new United Front between the Nationalists and Communists, the armed forces of both sides would cease action against one another and would make preparations for war against a foreign invader. The atmosphere on the other side of the Sea of Japan was becoming yet more turbulent. On February 16, 1936, young army officers attempted to overthrow the government, which they claimed was doing too little to
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In late 1935, the Comintern had made Japan one of the areas of key concentration for their activities, and clashes had begun to arise on the border between Manchukuo and the eastern USSR. “Japan is destined sooner or later to clash with the Soviet Union,” said Itagaki Seishirô (then chief of staff of the Kwantung Army) to Foreign Minister Arita Hachirô, “and the attitude of China at that time will gravely influence operations.”
By spring of 1936, the Japanese increased the number of their troops in north China from 2,000 to a permanent brigade of 5,600, with troops based around major cities including Tianjin and Beiping. Throughout 1936, further incidents of violence took place against Japanese in various parts of China, all of which further fueled Japanese demands to increase their armed presence in China. In August 1937, the top Japanese civilian and military leadership agreed to a fundamental set of demands that they would make of China, including an anti-Communist military pact, the lowering of tariffs on
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China was still at peace. But just a month later, on July 7, 1937, reports came in of clashes between the Chinese 29th Army and the Japanese North China Garrison Army, at a small village named Wanping.
Chiang was confronted with a fateful question: Was the two-day struggle really just a minor skirmish, like so many before it, or did it herald the start of another major Japanese assault on Chinese territory, like the Manchurian crisis of 1931? If he decided that it was the former, then tensions would quickly cool. After all, north China was not really under Nationalist control, but dominated by a patchwork of regimes run by Chiang’s Chinese rivals and the Japanese military. By letting the fighting go, Chiang would not be immediately worse off. But if he decided that the incident was more
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First, and most immediately, it seemed likely that any compromise settlement would involve his government formally ceding control of the former capital. This was not like giving up Manchuria. The establishment of Manchukuo had been a huge blow to China’s prestige, but not a disaster. Chiang had all but recognized the Japanese client state by 1933. Beiping was a different matter. Under its former name of Beijing, the city had been a national capital for centuries. Although its political importance had waned, it was still a place of immense cultural and emotional significance to many Chinese.
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of Wuhan, and allowing rail traffic to travel in all four directions of the compass. If Beiping fell under Japanese control, then an order from Tokyo could send thousands of troops from Korea and Manchukuo into the heart of the mainland. If Chiang surrendered the city, he would cede north China for a generation, and put the Nationalist heartland in great danger. Chiang recognized this in his diary entry for July 10: “This is the turning point for existence or obliteration.”
Then, between 1933 and 1935, it had seemed possible that Japan would be content with its gains so far, and that Nationalist China could live, at least for a while, with Manchukuo on its borders. But from 1935 Japanese influence in north China had grown, and it had become clear that they regarded the entire region as their own territory. Chiang was increasingly convinced that Japan would not rest until all China was a client state. If he did not confront them now, then the moment would surely have to come soon.
The problem was that Chiang did not have time on his side. China did not—as Chiang would have wished—have sufficient time to professionalize more of its military, neutralize the separatist tendencies of its militarist leaders, and strengthen the economic and fiscal base of the country. And the scale of preparation for war in Japan by 1937 made the Chinese efforts look minor indeed.
Unlike in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, there was no single figure in Japan, no Duce or Führer, whose personal megalomania lay at the heart of foreign policy. Instead, Japan had ended up with a toxic situation where most of its politicians, military and public, had become infected by “war fever.”
One should not exaggerate the difference between the two sides—even “moderates” in the Japanese government believed that China should ultimately come under Japanese influence, but they disagreed on the timing.
As events escalated in July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge fighting began to resemble the shooting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. It was not inevitable that that particular incident would escalate into continental war. But if it had not, the balance of power and wider tensions within Europe would probably have precipitated war shortly afterward. In the same way, even if the fighting near Beiping had been resolved at a local level, it had become clear that China and Japan were heading toward conflict sooner rather than later. From July 7, events would no longer be driven
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Wang and Kung both made a prescient observation: “some day the United States would have to face Japanese aggression, unless that aggression should be checked by China”; therefore, the US should help China now.24 But Hornbeck, while sympathetic, was careful to point out that the US would only intervene where its own national interests were at stake. It was clear that as far as the US government was concerned, Japanese aggression in China was not a priority issue in the summer of 1937.
The Japanese were reluctant to declare war openly. But they wanted to neutralize China fast, and they hoped that they still had a chance to confine the conflict to the north: the Japanese Army had stated in a resolution that its aims were to eliminate the northern Chinese armies “in one go,” and occupy the region north of the city of Baoding, some 140 kilometers south of Beiping.31 At the disposal of the Japanese was the Kwantung Army, along with local forces that would either collaborate with them or at least not stand in their way, some 130,000 troops in total or more.
Chiang did not deploy his own Central Army, instead leaving the fate of the north in the hands of the generals who had dominated the region,
Immediately after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Mao Zedong and several senior colleagues had issued a statement urging Chiang to stand firm and fight, and pledging their support:
Yet both sides were cautious. Chiang did not want yet more troops who would not obey his commands, and the Communists, still wary after a decade of persecution by Chiang’s forces, were unwilling to lose any control over the Red Army, which had
been formed under conditions of great difficulty as the party fled from its Nationalist enemies. The Communists wanted cooperation, whereas Chiang’s preferred term was “assimilation.”
Chiang compromised, allowing the Communists to set up their own military headquarters. Mao then confirmed that reorganization would be completed before August 15, and specified that the CCP would provide three divisions of 45,000 men, along with 10,000 local troops who would defend various key points in the north, including the front in the northwestern province of Suiyuan.38 On August 2 Chiang legalized the Red Army.
By now, Chiang had returned to Nanjing and called a meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, the forum in which the decision to go to war would be discussed. To symbolize that the new politics of cooperation against the Japanese was real, three major CCP leaders took the precarious flight to Nanjing to attend the meeting: Zhou Enlai, Red Army marshal Zhu De, and General Ye Jianying.40 Mao instructed them to cooperate, but also to act with caution.
“The Red Army and the other appropriate armed forces . . . may engage in guerrilla warfare.” But Mao also sounded a wary note as he sent his comrades on their way into the camp of their former enemy, now reluctant ally: “You may come up with other ideas as opportunity offers, but not too many, and firmly grasp the essentials.”
Now, Chiang saw the agreement with the Chinese Communists as an opportunity to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviets and hinder Japan’s “dream” of further aggression in China; “otherwise not only will they control north China, but the whole country will become a second Manchukuo.”
Mao and the CCP also had to make a painful choice. They deferred dreams of revolution and entered an alliance with an old enemy. Mao’s public statements at this time reflect the unease that he and his comrades felt at the sudden outbreak of conflict. “The authorities of north China from the very start resorted to the tortuous pursuit of compromise, without making sufficient preparations militarily,” Mao declared at a rally on August 1, 1937. The “authorities” had also failed to harness popular anger against the Japanese. “The result of this behavior was that they lost Beiping and Tianjin!”
Throughout the length of the war, Chiang would see the war as a spiritual, sacred trust, a continuation of the 1911 revolution symbolized by Sun Yat-sen. That trust inspired him to declare repeatedly that the war could be the making of a new China. It was also why, despite continued temptations in the darkest days of the war, he would refuse to surrender to Japan.
At the end of the meeting, those who favored war were told to stand up. Among those who stood were Liu Xiang, military commander of Sichuan province in the west of China, which would within months become the center of China’s resistance. Liu had offered troops from his native province, declaring that over 5 million of them could be conscripted within two years. Also standing was Yan Xishan, another bitter military rival of Chiang, but one who now accepted his arguments that the war must come. And then there was Wang Jingwei, the man who had for so long tried to keep China out of a conflict
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Yet the war also provided an opportunity for successful mobilization of society at a level that had not previously seemed possible in China. From this point on, mass mobilization would become the norm. The endless campaigns in Maoist China, from the public humiliation and killing of landlords in the land-reform campaign of the 1950s to the ritual public torture of teachers and doctors in the Cultural Revolution, had their roots in practices forged in wartime, turning the indifferent and unsure in society into true believers.
The first point is to make the Nanking Government abandon the policy of depending on European countries and America . . . The second point is to make the Chinese people recognize that Japanese troops are the real friends of China, and have been sacrificing themselves in the current incident to rescue 400,000,000 Chinese correcting the latter’s misconceptions brought about by the anti-Japanese policy pursued by the Nanking Government.9 The idea that the Nationalist government was “dependent” on Europe or America was a reference to the way that Chiang’s government had tried to counter the
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They suspected that the Zone would become a hiding place for Chinese soldiers defending the city. Tang confirmed these fears when he made it clear that Chinese troops would be stationed in the Zone, and that trenches and defenses would be drawn up around it.
The ubiquity of human waste was not just an immediate health hazard. It marked a reversal of a trend that had been central to Chinese self-perception over the past few decades. Technology and new forms of government had been among the most prominent ways in which the Chinese state had demonstrated its modernity, and therefore its right to reject imperialism on its own territory. Another was “hygienic modernity,”
the idea that using scientific techniques could make a society cleaner and healthier.25 As Chinese cities modernized, they used sewage and drainage to show the world the progress that the country had made. Now the impact of war had reversed that tendency in the most arresting, and noxious, way. As it had been for Mrs. Yang, fleeing Wuxi just a couple of months previously, it was the stench of war that brought its reality home most clearly. On December 12 the Japanese carried out an act that shocked the outside world: they sank the American gunboat USS Panay.
