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

by Rana Mitter

The Japanese did not target Yan’an in the way that they did Chongqing. In total, there were some seventeen air raids between 1938 and late 1941; the death toll was 214, a significant loss, but a much smaller number than the 5,000 or more killed in just the Chongqing raids of May 3 and 4, 1939.63 The enemy was fiercely anti-Communist, but the prize target was Chiang Kai-shek; it was his resistance that symbolized the fact that not all of China was willing to succumb to Japanese dominance. 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. Yan’an remained something of a mystery: no embassies were located there, and no journalists had bureaus in town. Foreigners were not unknown, but most of the invited guests from outside, such as the radical journalists Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, were Communist sympathizers who gave a generally positive account of Yan’an in their reports.