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

by Rana Mitter

in a perilous military position: the United States remained neutral, and Europe was in turmoil. In fact, during that spring, as the fall of France looked imminent, the British government similarly put out very discreet feelers to test the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany. For China, there was no possibility of Western assistance. The Japanese saw it as a propitious moment to persuade Chiang to concede.21 Now, at a time of great danger for his government, Chiang opened the door to negotiations just a crack.

In these talks the Japanese pressed for recognition of Manchukuo, and the placement of Japanese troops in north China, while the Chinese side continued to play for time, arguing that Tokyo’s final position was still not clear. The Japanese also exploited the weakness of China’s potential European allies. Chiang’s government desperately needed supplies sent along the railway from the Indochinese port of Haiphong to Kunming in Yunnan province, nearly one thousand

kilometers to the northwest. In January 1940, as Paris prepared itself for a German invasion, Japanese diplomats had sent messages to their French counterparts demanding that the colony’s railway be shut down. The Japanese repeatedly bombed the railway, and when the French ambassador in Tokyo protested, Matsuoka Yôsuke, the foreign minister, replied that “the Japanese Government intended to continue bombarding the French railroad from Indochina until the French should stop sending supplies to Chiang Kai-shek.”25 France fell in June 1940, and like most of its colonies, Indochina came under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. As this new government was supposed to be neutral, it continued to allow supplies to be sent to Free China via the railway. Throughout the summer of 1940, the Japanese put the Vichy colonial authorities under pressure to close the railway, but the French refused to do so, although they agreed in August that a limited number of Japanese troops (no more than 6,000) could be stationed within Indochina. But the Japanese were not in the mood to compromise. On September 22 Japanese troops under Lieutenant General Nakamura Akihito invaded Indochina. The fighting ended within a few days when

Indochina capitulated, but Japanese troops remained in the colony until the end of the war, severing the Nationalist government from the vital railway line. In July 1940, while the Battle of Britain raged over the skies of the south of England, the Japanese government demanded that London close the Burma Road, linking the British colony to the border with China. This would cut off supplies of war materiel that were being shipped to Rangoon and then transported onward via the Burma Road into Nationalist China. Churchill’s government had seen France fall in June and feared that Britain was in danger of imminent invasion. Unable to contemplate opening up a new front for conflict in Asia, they closed the road. In less than a year, all of Free China’s supply routes from the south coast, from Indochina, and from Burma had been cut off (although the latter did reopen in October 1940). Better strategy by the Nationalists might h...

Chiang’s strategy of hinting at talks with Japan without ever holding any official meetings offered two main benefits. It made Japan hold on until well into 1940 before finally allowing Wang Jingwei to set up a government in Nanjing, and it sent the Western powers the message that if they did not grant further assistance to Chongqing, Chiang would be forced to seek some sort of agreement with the enemy. On November 30, Wang Jingwei’s government was officially recognized by Tokyo. On the same day the US government announced a loan arrangement of US$100 million to Free China, as well as the dispatch of fifty military aircraft.

Chiang’s actions did not suggest a genuine willingness to negotiate with the Japanese for a harsh peace settlement. He made it very clear that he would continue to resist Japan, even in the darkest days of 1940, when China, like Britain, came closest to collapse. He gave the impression of dancing close to the edge of cooperation with Japan, but never took steps that would send him directly over the precipice. The threat of a Japanese takeover of China frightened the Allied powers, and Chiang knew he desperately needed to draw them in. For not only were his armies and regime on the brink of disaster, with little prospect of external assistance. A new threat now emerged from within his own alliance. Beginning in early 1939, the Nationalists started to take measures to restrict the growth of the CCP. The year marked the beginning of the terror raids on Chongqing that would do so much to undermine the National Government’s position, and as the bombs fell, Chiang and his colleagues became alarmed by the growing strength of their rivals to the northeast, based in Yan’an. Chiang ordered new political and economic measures against Mao’s heartland. In particular, he sought to regain control

of parts of Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong that the CCP had come to think of as its own areas of control. The Nationalists imposed a blockade of some 400,000 troops around the SGN base to the south and the west. The campaign aimed to box the Communists in, rather than to invade their territory, but it was a clear sign that relations between the two sides were beginning to break down. However, the conflict remained a strange, shadowy one. Neither side could afford to let its own public, let alone the international community, think that the United Front had failed. When clashes broke out between Nationalist and Communist troops at the borders of the SGN region, the CCP claimed that the fighting had initiated solely at the local level and did not reflect any wider abandonment of the United Front. Chiang could hardly disagree openly.

Nonetheless, the Nationalist blockade continued, with disastrous effects on the economy of the Communist base area. Then, in early 1940, Chiang terminated the financial subsidy from the Nationalists. Making matters worse, after very good harvests during the first two years of the war, the yields in 1939 and 1940 were much poorer. The bad harvests also created problems for the Nationalists, as the food price index in Chongqing rose by nearly 1,400 percent in 1940–1941.30 But prices rose in the isolated and impoverished SGN area: in 1941 one needed 2,200 yuan to buy what would have cost 500 yuan in 1940.31 The CCP now had a much larger population to deal with, and severely reduced resources. The solution they turned to was a radical form of economic self-sufficiency. “Production campaigns” were launched which over the next few years would greatly increase the amount of land that fell under cultivation, as well as boosting the production of cotton, rearing of livestock, weaving of cloth, and extraction of products including salt, coal, and even some oil and gas.

On January 4, 1941, troops of the New Fourth Army began to move south, not north. The Communists argued that this was necessary to avoid marching through the areas controlled by Japanese troops. The Nationalists suspected that it was, instead, a move to expand CCP areas of control. Shortly afterward, clashes began between the two sides.

Over the next two days the army came up against Nationalist troops, with no quarter given on either side: “even [our] cooks took their kitchen knives,” such was the ferocity of the battle, although the Communists emerged victorious. As they went on, the troops had to negotiate between sudden, deadly skirmishes with the enemy, and dangers from the surrounding environment: some men fell to their deaths from the steep mountain ledges.

Yet even Xiang’s return could not compensate for the overwhelming strength of the Nationalist forces. Gu Zhutong’s attack led to the death or capture of 9,000 of Xiang’s troops.42 Xiang Ying himself was murdered on March 14. But the Nationalist military victory turned into a public relations firestorm. The immediate response from most outside observers was not that Communist troops had refused to obey orders, but rather that Chiang had treacherously turned on his allies in the hopes of defeating his domestic enemies, while ignoring the Japanese. On January 15 Mao sent a message to Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying declaring that “all of Chiang’s talk about virtue and morality is a pack of lies and should under no circumstances be trusted.”43 Public opinion, both domestic and international, came down firmly against Chiang’s act.

In fact, the resolution of the “New Fourth Army Incident” marked the conclusion to one of the most important years in the history of Chinese politics. The internal struggle of ideas going on during 1940 was evident to informed observers at the time. Early in 1941, US ambassador Nelson Johnson sent a detailed assessment of the political situation to Washington, in response to another report forwarded to the US by Major Evans Carlson, an American military officer who had undertaken an extensive tour of the Chinese interior. The difference between the two messages illustrated the growing rift in American opinion about the politics of China. Carlson, and his traveling companion, the New Zealander Rewi Alley, were increasingly sympathetic to the Communists, having traveled in their areas of control in 1938 and being impressed by

their discipline. Carlson characterized the Nationalists as moving toward “fascism” and demanded that in return for funding from the US, Chiang’s government should be forced to institute more “democratic” structures.46 Johnson disagreed strongly. The Nationalists wished to retain power, which was “only normal and natural,” but during the war years they had established the National Political Consultative Council, a body on which various parties including the Communists were represented. He also pointed out that the CCP were able to publish their own newspaper in Chongqing in a way that would not have been possible before the war. One might have expected the Nationalists to use the excuse of war “to extinguish . . . all political opposition,” but instead they had preferred to “muddle along.” Johnson also felt that the influence of the various cliques within the Nationalist Party had been exaggerated. Chiang Kai-shek, in contrast, had “grown in stature, as he has come to be recognized as the symbol of united resistance to Japanese encroachment”; in the end “it is he who makes the final decisions.” Johnson did agree with Carlson’s assessment that Chiang’s government was reluctant to sponsor a mass popular movement

driven by anything beyond a widespread sense of anti-Japanese anger, although he did note that the Nationalists had undertaken cooperative movements and county-level reforms. But Johnson did not agree that American assistance to China should be predicated on wholesale political reform by the Nationalists. Chiang was determined to fight the Japanese, and the US should support him in that endeavor. In a remarkably prescient comment, Johnson observed: It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have been feeling their way along toward a new evolving form of government. A definitive form of government has not yet been establis...

However, none of the three principal actors was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multiparty regime with significant civil liberties. Both Chiang and Mao spoke in terms of “democracy,” but their understanding of the term meant something more like mass participation in politics under the direction of a dominant party. They were not unusual in this. Many of their counterparts in anti-Western struggle, such as the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and the Burmese Ba Maw, were progressive and secular in their aims, but like the Chinese leaders, were not necessarily pluralist.

Jiang and his small band of troops had to adapt. For some forty days they hid at the side or in the rear of the most carefully monitored areas, wearing plain clothes and sticking to groups of two or three. “When the enemy settled down,” Jiang recalled, “we would suddenly attack them from all sides. We’d kill the sentry and the horses, set their weapons store on fire, and then throw a bomb into their sleeping quarters.” Another favored technique was to sneak into a watchtower in the dark, start firing, and hope that the defenders would fire back at each other in the confusion.54 These techniques were not going to bring the Japanese to their knees. But they showed how guerrilla tactics could prevent the new order under Wang from becoming stable, and were a reminder that not everyone had agreed to surrender.

Following the signing of a treaty of neutrality between the USSR and Japan on April 13, 1941, Chiang predicted that the US would be drawn into the war in Asia, and even that Japan might later change its mind and attack the USSR. In that event, China would play a crucial role as the key Asian ally of both Washington and Moscow.57 The German invasion had taken Stalin by surprise (largely because he had failed to heed increasingly shrill warnings from senior colleagues who were receiving intelligence from well-placed spies in Germany), and the Comintern, seeking to shore up its alliances, now demanded that the Chinese Communists cooperate further with the Nationalists.58 The Central Committee of the CCP responded on June 23, 1941, with a declaration that it would “persevere in the Anti-Japanese United Front, persevere in [Nationalist]-Communist cooperation,” as well as allying itself with the British, the Americans, and others who opposed the “fascist rulers” of the Axis powers.

Having dismissed the idea of attacking the USSR, Japan’s leaders turned their attention instead to another great power: the United States. The inability of the Japanese to achieve further traction in China led to calls for a wider expansion of their influence in the region, in particular Southeast Asia, with its rich supply of oil, rubber, and other materials that were essential to the war effort. From 1940 onward, demands such as the closing of the Burma Road had made it evident that Tokyo was following a more assertive policy in Asia. Despite their inability to subdue China, Japanese leaders were making the decision to raise the stakes yet further.

The Americans made repeated attempts to dissuade Japan from a push southward into Southeast Asia, but the two sides reached ever higher levels of confrontation. The Japanese occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response, in July 1941, the US imposed an embargo on oil sales to Japan. Konoye, now unable to resist the increasing pressure for war from the army and navy, resigned on October 16, and was replaced as premier by General Tôjô Hideki. Tokyo hastened preparations for war with the Western powers.67 Among the targets would be Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines.

Yet despite the many advantages that it had brought to China, the American presence was ultimately an imperial one, just as much as the British or French. Americans had also been prominent in the opium trade and enjoyed privileges of legal immunity in China.

Then he would join the Allies in their first joint campaign, not in China, but in the jungles of neighboring Burma. Yet the price he would pay for China’s entry, at long last, into the alliance, would be a heavy one. Chiang desperately needed his new partners, but accepting this alliance would unleash forces that would threaten the very basis of his rule. The complexities of that bargain would be most visible in the four-year duel between Chiang and that American general: Joseph Warren Stilwell.

Yet Chinese requests for a presence on the joint Allied boards and committees, or for a joint ABCD (American-British-Chinese-Dutch) military staff based in Chongqing, were not taken up.16 This was in part because of justified fears that the Chinese headquarters would leak intelligence, but overall neither the British nor the Americans treated Chiang as a true equal, nor China as a theater of primary significance.

Both sides’ views contained elements of self-deception: the British and Americans wished to give the impression that China was a serious ally without actually putting much effort into the relationship, while Chiang overestimated what he was worth to the Western Allies. But Chiang’s view was hardly irrational. The US knew that if China fell, then the more than 600,000 Japanese troops held down there by Nationalist and Communist forces could be redeployed to the Pacific Theater.

Chiang had authority in at least one area where his Western counterparts were compromised: his unwavering anti-imperialism. This would become particularly important as the newly begun war in Asia threatened the prize possession of the British Empire, the subcontinent of India. Axis planners had expressed covetous and ambitious plans to create a pincer that would attack from the Middle East and East Asia, capturing the Indian Empire with its manpower and rich resources. It was vital that no such plan ever came to fruition, but there was genuine fear that the turbulent state of domestic Indian politics might make it more likely.

By early 1942, however, Nehru and Gandhi were increasingly concerned that Indian political and military backing for the British cause was not being translated into a concrete timetable for independence. Relations between the British and Congress became fraught, particularly after the outbreak of war in Asia in December 1941.21 The connection with India was of vital importance to the survival of Chiang’s government. One of the consequences of war between Japan and the British Empire was that the Burma Road might well close. Chiang had had a foretaste of what this meant when Churchill’s government had shut it for three months under Japanese pressure in the summer of 1940, but at the end of that year it was still supplying China with some 20,000 tons of goods per month.22 With the loss of those supplies, the airlift of material over the Burma “Hump” from India became ever more important, and Chiang was increasingly concerned that the British hold on India should not be weakened before Japan had been defeated. Chiang proposed a visit to India to meet the Congress leaders. The idea outraged Churchill, but it was eventually arranged thanks to the intervention of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in Chongqing.

The visit soon ran into a diplomatic storm. Churchill was adamant that Chiang, a national leader, should not visit Gandhi at his home at Wardha, near Bombay, as if the latter were a dignitary in his own right. Instead, Gandhi should make his way to New Delhi. Chiang was furious. Chiang received repeated late-night messages from the British authorities ordering him not to visit Gandhi. He refused to reply.

noted that Nehru had complained of the contradictions in Chiang’s attitude to India, supporting independence but also requesting that it throw its lot in with the British war effort; Chiang had replied that all politics was confusing, and if it were clearer then it would be “philosophy, not politics.”

Anti-imperialist solidarity had its limits. A mission to India by the leftist British politician Sir Stafford Cripps in April 1942 failed to achieve any accommodation between the colonial authorities and Congress. Just a few months later, in August 1942, Nehru and Gandhi began the Quit India movement, which demanded swift independence from the British and led to the arrest of the top Congress leadership and around 100,000 other activists. Some 2.5 million Indian troops did fight for the Allies during the war, although without the explicit support of Congress.

Yet on February 6, 1942, Marshall sent a message to General John Magruder, the head of the American military mission in Chongqing, that made Stilwell’s role clear: “American forces in China and Burma will operate under Stilwell’s direction . . . but General Stilwell himself will always be under the command of the Generalissimo.”35 The gap between the official understanding of Stilwell’s role and Stilwell’s sense of his own position would soon come to assume crucial importance.

there were no U.S. ground combat units, for the U.S. effort in China had always been intended by the War Department to help the Chinese defend themselves, to which end the War Department and the Joint Chiefs had been willing to give advice plus technical and air support. Moreover, since every American flown into China meant that .62 of a ton of supplies had to be flown to China every month for his support, Stilwell had kept the number of U.S. ground force and service personnel in China to a minimum, hence there were few indeed in that category.

Then, in February 1942, the Japanese launched their assault on Burma. They had not previously considered the British colony a priority target, but the events of the previous month had inspired them. After Pearl Harbor, in quick succession they had conquered Hong Kong and the Philippines. It suddenly seemed that the mighty British Army was not such a formidable foe, and Burma now looked a more attractive target. It offered the twin temptations of cutting off the Nationalists from supply via the Burma Road, and making the eastern flank of British India vulnerable. On February 9 the Japanese 15th Army moved to take the capital, Rangoon, and then drive north toward Toungoo and Mandalay.

Chiang advocated the defense of Mandalay, in central Burma, but demanded that the British provide more active assistance before Chinese troops were sent to protect the city. Both sides had given up southern Burma as lost.44 Not so Stilwell. He arrived in Chongqing via India in early March 1942, having been named Chiang’s chief of staff. After his first formal meeting with the generalissimo, Stilwell noted approvingly that “he seems willing to fight and is fed up with the British retreat and lethargy.”45 Chiang’s initial reaction to Stilwell’s appointment was also favorable. But he made it clear that he was commander in chief for the China Theater, and that he expected Stilwell to follow orders. Chiang was content to allow the Americans the gesture of appointing Stilwell to show the closeness between the US and China, but he had no intention of actually ceding command to a Westerner.

By advocating an offensive strategy, therefore, Stilwell was going against Marshall’s advice.

Stilwell was not a fool, April or otherwise. But he showed characteristics that suggested severe limitations on his skills as a military commander. He had a particular way of viewing the world, and anything that ran counter to the assumptions that shaped that view was dismissed as irrelevant, or worse, maliciously intended to undermine him.

The Japanese did not need to thrust into China at this point. They had achieved their main aim of cutting off supplies to Chongqing via the Burma Road. With no reliable access to land or sea supplies, the National Government was now perilously close to being completely isolated.

Did Stilwell’s failed strategy in Burma destroy a key defense for the Nationalist government? The alternative, a retreat to north Burma—advocated both by the National Government and by the British—might still have seen the region overrun by the Japanese and the loss of the Burma Road. But Stilwell’s highly risky gamble was much more likely to fail than succeed. It led to the death or injury of some 25,000 Chinese troops along with over 10,000 British and Indian troops (with only 4,500 Japanese casualties).72 Retreat might have meant that more of the Fifth and Sixth Armies were saved for the defense of China. Whatever the alternative, the reality was that by the spring of 1942 there was no further possibility of Nationalist China being supplied through Burma. The political and financial consequences of Stilwell’s choice would rebound on Chiang’s government for years to come. The ending of the Burma supply route also put another opportunity in Stilwell’s hands. Some 45,000 tons of Lend-Lease supplies intended for China were now instead assigned to the Nationalist armies that had made it to India.73 Throughout the war Stilwell would retain control over the

Lend-Lease assigned to China, diverting much of it to projects which he favored, and exacerbating tensions that would corrode...

The sortie became known as the “Doolittle Raids,” after their commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. The news of the attack was a huge propaganda boost for the American war effort. But it appalled Chiang. On their return the fighters were supposed to land at airfields in the Nationalist-held parts of Zhejiang, in eastern China. In fact, none of them did so; they all crash-landed at various points in eastern China, bar one that landed in Vladivostok on the Russian coast and was then interned for a year. However, the Japanese reacted with fury. They attacked and destroyed all the airfields in Zhejiang which Chennault had built up, and committed atrocities against the local population in the surrounding areas. What went down very well with the American public had a hugely negative effect on the Chinese war effort.

Chiang’s regime must be held responsible for the famine in Henan. Actions directly attributable to the government, such as the switch to grain tax in kind, the failure to send grain rather than paper money to relieve the situation, and corruption, place the blame squarely at the feet of decision makers in Chongqing. However, Chiang’s was not the only government to make the same errors. Just a few months later, from July to November 1943, another famine of approximately equal severity (around 3 million deaths) took place some 640 kilometers to the west, in Bengal province in India.

As in China, grain was taken away from Bengal even while people were starving, because it was needed to feed troops overseas. The British War Cabinet refused to divert wartime shipping to send supplies to the starving. Leading politicians, including Churchill and the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, displayed attitudes toward the Indian population ranging from detachment to outright hostility, the latter a product in part of the Quit India movement (which Chiang had tried to persuade Gandhi and Nehru against), but also of the prime minister’s long-standing dislike of Indians.28 But unlike the administration of British India, Chiang did not have the resources of a global empire behind him, or a subcontinent under his control and out of the line of fire.

As the war situation worsened, so did the economy. The introduction of the grain tax in kind in 1942 had worsened the situation for the peasants, but had at least succeeded in lessening the effects of inflation on food prices for the army. However, inflation soon began to take hold again. Part of the cause was the Japanese-influenced dilution of the currency, and Arthur Young, whose sympathies were entirely with Nationalist China, fully acknowledged a variety of other reasons, including scarcity of goods, the refugee crisis, and the reduction in the labor force because of recruitment to the armies. Yet overall, his judgment was that “China’s wartime inflation was caused chiefly by monetary excesses.”33 When Chiang’s government found itself in difficulty, it turned to the printing press to produce more banknotes. Between mid-1941 and late 1944 prices rose by 10 percent or more per month.34 In February 1940 a shijin (approximately half a kilogram) of rice in Chongqing had cost 2 yuan; by December

(during the year when the Burma Road had been closed over the summer) it was 18.35, and by the start of 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, it stood close to 40, a twentyfold increase in just two years. In the last year of the war, prices would rise even faster.

Young also paid particular attention to the disastrous effect that inflation and corruption had had on China’s educated intellectuals, who became “disillusioned and antigovernment” and whose complaints were then suppressed.

Naturally, many observers, including Americans such as Peck and White, threw the Nationalists’ failures into starker relief by comparing them with Communist successes. Yet all was far from well in Yan’an. The Nationalists’ subsidy to the region had ended in 1939, and the blockade that replaced it made the economic situation much more difficult. The bad harvests in 1940 and 1941 that caused the disastrous famine in Henan also affected the ShaanGanNing area. Because the Nationalist currency (fabi) was no longer freely available there, the Communists had to issue their own currency for local use, saving the hard-to-obtain Nationalist fabi to import goods that could not be produced locally. The result was massive inflation, higher even than in the Nationalist areas. By 1944 prices that had increased 755 times since 1937 in Chongqing had increased 5,647 times in Yan’an. The economy of Mao’s base area was in danger of collapse.

At a time when the famine in Henan was reaching its height because of the massive demands of the land tax in kind, this was an important point indeed. Peasants forced to pay the Communists much higher levies felt bitter, but they escaped the harrowing deprivations experienced in Henan, where villagers gave their last grain to the tax collectors and were left to starve. The Communist policy was exacting, but it was progressive. It was also effective: during the war years, production of grain in Yan’an increased by almost 40 percent; more than fourteen times as many bolts of cotton were woven by 1943 as compared to 1938; and there was active development of salt, coal, and even basic oil and gas.50 Not that the Communists were above supplementing their income

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

on call. Nationalist China was, in a different way, as besieged as Yan’an. Yet the lower burden of military expenses meant that Mao could deploy his tax rev...

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

states in response to the weakening of the government in Chongqing. The essential element of that infrastructure in all three governments—intricately linked to their functioning, but rarely mentioned—was state terror. Each regime had its supreme leader: Chiang, Wang, Mao. But behind each of them was a shadowy figure, in charge of a security apparatus empowered to enforce the will of the state through psychological pressure, and use torture on those who refused to obey. China’s wartime existential crisis provided a perfect excuse for the rival, yet parallel, states to use similar techniques, from blackmail to bombing, to achieve their ends, and mute the criticisms of their opponents. If each of them paid tribute to Sun Yat-sen in public, they also each paid court to the thinking and techniques of Stalin in private.

Over the next three years the 250,000 troops in the Communist bases in north China were subjected to a wrenching assault by 150,000 men of the NCAA assisted by 100,000 Chinese collaborator troops. Rather than launching raids and then leaving, the Japanese army would destroy whole villages, ruin local crops, and confiscate grain stores; then they would return repeatedly to make sure that no resistance could spring up again. Communist sources admitted that the population of the base areas shrank from some 44 million to 25 million people, and there were large numbers of desertions from the Communist armies.27 The top priority for the Communists in most of the north was not active resistance, but sheer survival.28 The exception was Mao’s base area of ShaanGanNing.