More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rana Mitter
Read between
March 8 - March 24, 2022
The greater part of China’s hard-won modernization was destroyed, including most of the rail network, sealed highways, and industrial plants created in the first decades of the twentieth century: 30 percent of the infrastructure in the rich Pearl River delta near Canton, 52 percent in Shanghai, and a staggering 80 percent in the capital, Nanjing.9 The war would undo two empires in China (the British and the Japanese) and help to create two more (the American and the Soviet).
Still, despite this imperial insouciance, China was highly integrated with the world economy and was very far from being closed or isolated. During the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) the distinctive blue-and-white pottery of Jingdezhen in central China graced elegant homes in eighteenth-century Britain
The spread of New World crops such as sweet potato and maize enabled the Chinese to move west and cultivate large parts of their territory that had previously been considered barren. Between 1700 and 1800 China’s population doubled, from 150 million to 300 million people.
Yet China’s success contained the seeds of its future problems. Although the country’s territory expanded during the eighteenth century, its bureaucracy remained small, as did its ability to extract taxes. The lack of government revenue meant that military spending was low.
Although the immediate problem of the Taiping was solved, the devolution of military authority from the center to the provinces had laid the grounds for a culture where autonomous militarists, often known as “warlords,” rather than a central Chinese government could lay down the law.
In reality, it was nothing less than a revolution. Japan had been a feudal aristocratic society, largely agrarian, with little foreign contact. Christianity and firearms, both dangerous influences that might upset the social order, had been outlawed. By 1900, within just three decades, Japan had been transformed. It had a disciplined, conscripted army, and a constitution and parliamentary system. It was Asia’s most heavily industrialized society, exporting goods around the world.
In the Soviet view, China was too backward for a socialist revolution. Instead, a “national bourgeois” party, the Nationalists, should carry out the first revolution. Sun agreed, content to ally with Russia, believing that alone among Western nations she had shown “benevolence and justice.”
What they did not know was that Chiang had used his secret society contacts with the Green Gang, the largest criminal outfit in the city, to have all known Communists rounded up and murdered. Many thousands were massacred in the space of a few days; some were kidnapped and tortured first.
Chinese nationalism, however, did not share much of that spiritual element. It was rooted in a much more secular and civic model of citizenship, and the Nationalists’ propaganda, while fiercely patriotic and even xenophobic at times, did not stress ideas of spiritual purity in the way that Japan’s (or Nazi Germany’s) did.
In fact, the Japanese had set off the bomb themselves. Two officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army, Ishiwara Kanji and Itagaki Seishirô, were behind the coup, which took place without the knowledge of the civilian government in Tokyo. Within weeks the Kwantung Army had occupied an area the size of France and Germany combined, placing 30 million people under their control.
After his bloody start, Chiang had made huge strides in his attempt to establish a government that could modernize China and end the stain of imperialism on its soil. During the first half of the decade, the Chinese economy began to improve markedly and indigenous businesses, from textiles to tobacco, thrived. Chinese diplomats began to take an important role in organizations such as the League of Nations. Infrastructure in the cities expanded: in the decade up to 1937, China’s paved roads doubled from 30,000 to 60,000 kilometers, and the railway system also improved. Still, Chiang’s regime at
...more
But the Japanese regarded events on the mainland with dismay. What worried them most was the Nationalists’ slow but steady move to reduce foreign privileges in China and become a more equal trading partner. In 1930 the government finally managed to restore tariff autonomy, the right to charge its chosen level of import taxes on goods coming into China.
That greater autonomy caused deep concern in Tokyo, where the government was becoming almost manic in its conviction that China should be regarded as an area of special influence for Japan.
Yet for a one-party dictatorship, the Nationalist Party was exceedingly diverse. The views of its members ranged from liberal to highly traditional and conservative.
Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist ethic in the interwar period had dampened Japanese expansion in Asia. But in 1929 the Great Depression plunged Japan into an economic crisis and onto the path of authoritarianism and aggressive imperialism.
The Long March was to become a glorious foundation myth of the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, it was a desperate retreat. Even after it was over, it still seemed likely that the ever more effective tactics of the Nationalists would have a good chance of finally crushing the Communists.
Nonetheless, the best estimates put the number very high: at some point during the war, some 80 million or even close to 100 million Chinese (approximately 15 to 20 percent of the entire population) were on the move.28 Not all of them spent the whole war in exile; many returned home soon after they fled. But the mass migration had destabilized society in ways that would reverberate throughout the war period and beyond.
The Japanese Army was deeply angry. It had assumed that it would conquer China fast, and that the lack of resistance that it had met on earlier incursions between 1931 and 1937 would be repeated. The strength of opposition, and the length of time it took to secure Shanghai, had enraged troops who were already whipped up by propaganda about the rightness of their cause, and who had themselves been brutalized by their military training in Japan.
Even if there was no meticulous plan for the massacre in Nanjing, the wider ideological clash between Japan and China was a central cause of the tragedy. Japanese Pan-Asianism had metamorphosed in the decades between 1900 and the 1930s, and the Japanese were seized with a sincere, if deluded, belief that they had a duty to lead their Asian neighbors, including China, in a journey of liberation from Western imperialism. The notion that China might have developed its own vision of nationalism, in which Japan was as much an aggressor as the West, did not fit into the worldview of the invaders.
...more
But the Chinese Army was still afflicted by fundamental problems. The parochialism that had crippled Chiang’s armies repeatedly in the past half year reared its head again. Although the various generals had agreed to serve together in a war of resistance, they still looked out for the safety of their own troops first, concerned with protecting themselves from any attempt by Chiang to usurp their power.
During the war the Nationalists never admitted that they, not the Japanese, had breached the dikes. But the truth quickly became widely known.
Eventually some 54,000 square kilometers of central China were inundated by the floods. If the Japanese had committed such an act, it would have been remembered as the prime atrocity of the war, dwarfing even the Nanjing Massacre or the Chongqing air raids in terms of the number of people who suffered.
but in 1948 figures issued by the Nationalists themselves suggested enormous casualties. For the three affected provinces of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu, the number of dead was put at 844,489, with some 4.8 million becoming refugees. More recent studies place the numbers lower, but still estimate the dead at around 500,000, and 3 million–5 million refugees.13 In contrast, the devastating May 1939 air raids on Chongqing killed some thousands.
In the short term the floods did what the Nationalists wanted. But the flooding was a tactic, a breathing space, and did not solve the fundamental problem, that China’s armies needed strong leadership and rapid reform.
On June 22 all of the Nationalist government’s German advisers were called home; any who disobeyed would be judged guilty of high treason. Ever since the First World War, there had been a special relationship between those two fledgling republics, the German Weimar and the Chinese. Both were weak and not in full control of their own sovereignty. As part of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the Germans had lost their extraterritorial rights on Chinese soil, but that disadvantage meant that they could deal with the Chinese as noncolonialist equals, and therefore found themselves more welcome in
...more
Chiang had no ideological affinity with Nazi Germany, but his government regarded it as a potential ally, and put significant efforts into trying to persuade Berlin to choose China and not Japan as its principal East Asian, anti-Communist partner.
It took massive military commitments on all sides to maintain a division of China among the Nationalists in the south and center, the Communists in the north, and the Japanese in the east. The nature of the war changed from offensive to defensive. The dramatic battles of the first year of the war were fewer in number: instead, China’s fate became tied up with shifting alliances, diplomatic intrigues, and social change that would permanently alter the country’s course.
Between 1937 and 1939 annual government revenues fell by 63 percent, whereas expenditure increased by 33 percent. Many of the major sources of state revenue, most notably import duties collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs, were lost when the National Government retreated from the east of the country. Instead, a new interport duty was established that taxed the movement of goods within China.
The war also transformed the career of Mao Zedong. Mao had not been the only possible leader for the party when the war broke out, but his position had been greatly strengthened by the Long March; later accounts would play down the role of other Communist leaders whose feats of bravery on the March equaled or exceeded Mao’s.
For in the two years from 1939 to 1941 the conflict had become not only a war of resistance against Japan and its Chinese collaborators, but also a duel between the Nationalists and the Communists.
Chiang had been desperate to involve the USSR in the fight against Japan. Now the Soviets were effectively allied with the Nazis, who in turn were allies of Tokyo.
The Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 had, in theory, bound together Germany, Italy, and Japan as the Axis, but they were always too mistrustful of one another to create a genuine alliance.
In the Winter War of 1939–1940 the Soviets invaded Finland, prompting Britain and France to sponsor a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. At the time, China was a member of the League Council, and it refused to exercise its power of veto on the motion.8 The Soviets were furious at Chiang’s failure to prevent their expulsion, and for the rest of China’s war with Japan the relationship between Chiang and Stalin would remain deeply mistrustful. China would have to fight Japan without further major Soviet assistance.
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. Across the region, the Indian nationalists Nehru and Gandhi were exceptional in their adherence to a model of wide-ranging democracy.
The problem was that the Chinese and the Westerners looked at China’s role through almost entirely different lenses. To the Western Allies, China was a supplicant, a battered nation on its knees, waiting for the Americans and British to save it from certain destruction at the hands of the Japanese. In Chiang’s view and that of many Chinese, their country was the first and most consistent foe of Axis aggression.
The United States maintained a more openly friendly attitude toward its Chinese allies than did the British, too many of whom veered between affable detachment and contempt, although some were sympathetic. 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
...more
In fact, Stilwell may have been more image-conscious than any other commander at his level, perhaps more so since his lack of command experience was now compounded by failure in Burma.
To create the new China he wanted, Chiang had to defeat Japan, and to do that he needed a military alliance. Finally, he had been able to form one after Pearl Harbor. Yet the immediate consequence of that alliance was that Chiang’s regime was now even more cut off from supplies from the outside world.
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.
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.
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.
Crucially, the USSR remained neutral against Japan. This meant that Stalin could not be seen to appear in public at any conference that included Chiang, since it would imply endorsement of China’s war aims against Japan. Yet Stalin clearly had a significant interest in the shaping of a postwar Asia. As a result, almost all the major conferences after 1941 excluded Chiang. This situation was worsened by Churchill’s clear contempt for the Chinese in general.
Chiang was still not in the same class of brutality as that other Western ally Stalin, but by the end of 1943 from the American perspective the Nationalist government was nearly impossible to like and almost as difficult to admire. Gauss noted the “fascist-like” actions that would make it an embarrassing ally for a postwar America.
Now the army felt the effects of years of attrition from Japanese assault and governmental corruption and incompetence. Recruitment had been falling since 1941, and press-ganging of new soldiers had become much more common. Conscripts were often marched in gangs tied together with ropes to an area far from home; if they were too close to their own villages, they might simply flee.15 Inflation had eaten away at military salaries and made service far less attractive. At the same time some of the best Chinese armies that remained, including the Yunnan-based Y Force, were thousands of kilometers
...more
