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

by Rana Mitter

China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor in a war where the United States, Soviet Union, and Britain played much more significant roles.

Japan and China traded places in American and British affections between 1945 and 1950: the former moved from wartime foe to Cold War asset, while the latter changed from ally against Japan to angry and seemingly unpredictable Communist giant.

Now that the Cold War is over, the question is no longer “Who lost China?,” with its implication of Communist infiltration and McCarthyism; but rather, “Why did the war change China?,”

Chiang’s three years in Japan would instill in him admiration for that country’s sense of order, discipline, and commitment to modernization; but its imperialist intentions would also make him deeply wary.

Once again, Japan’s actions on the international stage were wreaking havoc with China’s internal politics.

Mao

unlike Chiang, he demanded a complete overturning of “heaven and earth”: nothing less than a complete social as well as political revolution would serve his purposes.

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.

Like the US in some ways, the Japanese were imperialists in China who thought of themselves as friends and mentors, rather than occupiers.

Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped.

militarist leaders Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng

The militarists demanded that Chiang cease attacking the Communists, and instead lead a united front against the Japanese.

So if Chiang wanted to fight back against Japan, he would have to do it on his own.

Chiang

decided to pull out, substituting a more achievable aim: to “defeat the enemy’s plan of a rapid decision in a quick war by carrying out a war of attrition and wearing out the enemy.”

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 threat from Japan before 1937 by seeking support from the Western powers, although those powers remained reluctant to offer much substantial help. It was also, more broadly, a recognition that China had started to participate in a world where transnational organizations such as the League of Nations were trying to overcome the frictions caused by bilateral conflicts between countries.10 Japan regarded China as its backyard, and these developments were deeply unwelcome.

But something utterly different happened in Nanjing. From the first hours of the occupation, the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. For the next six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area Army embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape, and robbery.

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. This cognitive dissonance did a great deal to fuel the contempt of the troops for their victims and their consequent savagery.63

However much sympathy there might be from progressives around the world, it was clear that Western governments would do nothing to save China unless they were persuaded that doing so was in their own interests.

The government knew that its treatment of refugees was being judged in comparison with the Communists and with the Japanese.

The Nationalist regime was under constant bombardment and in the public eye not only of the Chinese media but the international community. This fact, along with the remote location of Yan’an and the smaller influx of refugees relative to Chongqing, allowed the Communists to develop their project free from

outside observation or interference.

Mao was not the only noteworthy Communist leader, nor was his

base area the only place where the CCP developed its ideas and strength during the war. But Mao’s charisma, along with the geographical advantages of Yan’an, meant that the stories of the Communist resistance elsewhere in China were rather overshadowed.

Mao made it clear that the primary task was to rally around the cause of the united front against Japan, and that class warfare would take a secondary place for the time being.

What has kept the Communists fighting for Chiang is the fact that they fear Japan more than they fear Chiang.

“If Chongqing joins the Allies and they win,” he noted, “then this is good for China.” If they lost, then it would be a disaster for Chiang Kai-shek; but because Wang Jingwei had formed a government in Nanjing in collaboration with Japan, China had “a foot in both boats.”61

Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, as it became clear that China would have to bow to US and British priorities when it came to providing military supplies, Chiang wrote (at the first Three-Power conference) that China had been “shamed” by the way that she was treated by the Americans and the British.

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. Despite numerous opportunities to withdraw from the conflict, China had fought on when the prospects of outside assistance seemed hopeless, and it now deserved to be treated as an equal power.

neither the British nor the Americans treated Chiang as a true equal,

But Chiang’s visit to India also strengthened his view that the war was an opportunity to create a new, anti-imperialist united Asia.

The solution seemed to be to persuade Chiang to allow an American chief of staff for the Chinese armies, which would show that the Americans stood side by side with the Chinese, but did not require the assignment of significant troop numbers. Stilwell was Marshall’s choice to take the role.

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.

What went down very well with the American public had a hugely negative effect on the Chinese war effort.

Suddenly, the burden of feeding the armies fell directly on the peasants. In Henan, a traditionally fertile province on the frontline of control between the Nationalists and the Japanese, this would become terrifyingly clear in the summer of 1942.

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.

The Henan famine was an example, albeit one of the most horrific, of a wider phenomenon: the unraveling of the Nationalist state after 1941 following China’s entry into the global war.

Thus, it helped to soften up the country for the communists.”

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.

Yet the lower burden of military expenses meant that Mao could deploy his tax revenues in ways not open to the Nationalists.

In that atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and social breakdown, all of China’s regimes, whether under Chiang, Mao, or Wang, would resort to new and terrible techniques to control their people.

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.

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.

For Chiang, it was Dai Li, the man nicknamed “China’s Himmler.” For Wang, it was Li Shiqun, a burly and deceptively genial former street hoodlum. And for Mao, it was Kang Sheng,

The war against Japan was giving birth to Mao’s China.

The year 1943 would be one of deepening mistrust between the Allies, as China, Britain, and the US circled each other with ever greater wariness.

Soviet adviser Peter Vladimirov recorded that “the CCP leadership rejoices at the news of the defeat suffered by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Honan [Henan] and Hunan . . . His calculations are simple—whenever Chiang Kai-shek suffers a defeat, [Yan’an] benefits from it.”

In 1938 a gallant but failed defense had been sufficient to bolster Chiang’s case for support. By 1944 it was no longer enough. The Nationalists were drawing strong criticism from one figure whose confidence Chiang needed to maintain: President Roosevelt.

Chiang