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

by Rana Mitter

These air raids brought international attention to the fate of Chongqing, and the Chinese government in exile based there. At the same time that the Spanish Republic was in equally desperate combat against the Nationalist forces of General Franco, diplomats, reporters, and businessmen from many countries were able to witness the devastation of the Chinese Nationalist capital. Worse yet, the raids of May 3 and 4 were just examples, albeit the most savage, of a continuous battering that Chongqing would endure for years. During the most intense period of bombing, between May 1938 and August 1941, there would be some 218 separate raids using incendiary and fragmentation bombs, resulting in 11,885 deaths (mostly of civilians).

Nor has the outside world ever fully understood the ghastly price that China paid to maintain its resistance against Japan for eight long years, from 1937 to 1945. Some 14 million deaths, massive refugee flight, and the destruction of the country’s embryonic modernization were the costs of the war.8 The road to victory for the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 lay within the devastated landscape of China created by the years of war with Japan.

The toll that the war inflicted on China is still being calculated, but conservative estimates number the dead at 14 million at least (the British Empire and United States each lost over 400,000 during the Second World War, and Russia more than 20 million). The number of Chinese refugees may have reached more than 80 million.

The story of China’s war with Japan is also crucial to understanding the rise of China as a global power. To interpret the changing Chinese sense of identity, and the country’s role in a rapidly changing world order, it has become profoundly important to understand one long-hidden aspect of its past: the story of China’s experience during the Second World War.

Today, when relations between China and the United States grow tense, the Chinese side is motivated in part by a belief that its wartime contributions, its efforts to defeat America’s enemies, have been forgotten—and that it is time for America, and Europe, to remember.

Memories of the war against Japan can also heal scars left by another conflict, the painful civil war between Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists. One of the most startling sights for anyone who remembers Mao-era China is the villa at Huangshan that once belonged to the chairman’s old foe Chiang Kai-shek. Today the villa is restored to look as it did during the war years, when Chiang lived there, writing of the Chongqing bombings in his diary. The displays inside give plenty of details of Chiang’s role as a leader of the resistance against Japan, all of them very positive, and none painting him as a bourgeois reactionary lackey. Of the Communists, there is very little mention. A generation ago, one might have seen this kind of praise for Chiang on Taiwan, but it would have been impossible to find on the mainland.

This situation changed radically in the 1980s, however. The People’s Republic of China reversed most of the key parts of its narrative about the war years. The party decided to revive memories of the wartime period, when Nationalist and Communist fighters had stood together to battle a foreign invader, regardless of party differences. New museums of the war sprang up to commemorate Japanese war atrocities, including Nanjing; movies and other museums gave the Nationalist military a much more prominent role, moving away from the ahistorical position that the CCP had been in the forefront of wartime resistance; and huge amounts of new scholarship poured forth, using archives and documents that had been locked away for decades.

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?,” a more open-ended and fruitful question that avoids questions of blame and instead looks for causes. It also moves the debate away from being primarily about the American role and places the emphasis much more on China itself.

Such a history must also restore China to its place as one of the four principal wartime Allies, alongside the US, Russia, and Britain. China’s story is not just the account of the forgotten Allied power, but of the Allied power whose government and way of life was most changed by the experience of war. Even the massive loss of life in Russia that followed the German invasion in June 1941 was less transformative than what happened to China in one fundamental sense: the USSR was pushed to its ultimate test, but did not break. It fought back and survived. In contrast, the battered, punch-drunk state that was Nationalist China in 1945 had been fundamentally destroyed by the war with Japan.

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. Wealthy American families including the Luces and the Rockefellers established universities, hospitals, and other institutions whose ethos was to encourage ideas of scientific modernity and democratization on a distinctly American model.18 A positive view took hold that China was indeed a fledgling America, a Christian nation in the making, and a potential liberal democracy. The disconnection between the fantasy and the reality would, in time, lead to fundamental clashes between the US and China during the war with Japan.

The occupation of Manchuria helped the Japanese exercise control of the mainland and also taught them lessons on how the Chinese population might respond in the event that they ever expanded beyond the boundaries of Manchukuo.

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.14

the National Defense Planning Council on November 29, 1932, which undertook thorough and detailed surveys to measure just what China’s capacity was in terms of coal mining, railway infrastructure, crop cultivation, electricity production, and metals.

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. There needed to be more production in the interior of China: iron and steel in Hunan, copper and iron in Sichuan, and coal mines in south and southwest China.15 The seeds of the planned economy that would mark Mao’s China were sown by Chiang’s government, stimulated by the Japanese threat.

Chiang’s government decided it must seek a compromise with Japan, and on May 31 the two countries signed the Tanggu Truce. The terms of the treaty were designed to save face on both sides, but they marked a de facto recognition of Manchukuo. Under the terms of the truce, there would be a demilitarized zone between the Great Wall and an area north of Beiping and Tianjin. The Japanese were allowed to maintain observation rights in the area, and Chinese troops were forbidden from engaging in “provocations.” It was clearly an embarrassment for China, but in the short term it was a very useful agreement for Chiang, as it provided a temporary breathing space in which he could focus on other priorities, notably his campaigns against the Communists.17

As the CCP began to turn in on itself, events outside Jiangxi started to plague the party too. The Tanggu Truce of 1933 had created a breathing space in Sino-Japanese relations that allowed Chiang more time and space to direct his armies against the CCP. His initial Suppression Campaigns, as they were uncompromisingly termed, had been failures, but by 1934 the army reforms were beginning to have an effect. The Communists in Jiangxi found themselves under siege. It was time to leave.21 In June 1934 the Red Army began a trek to the northwest that has become known as the Long March.

In October 1935 the weary Long Marchers finally reached the dusty yellow earth of Shaanxi province, where a Communist base had been founded in the small city of Bao’an. Of the more than 80,000 who started out, only around 7,000 reached their destination: the others had died, or had to abandon the trek in the face of hostile armies and immensely difficult terrain including marshes, mountains, and swamps. But the end of the Long March was a crucial staging post for Mao’s rise to paramount power. 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.

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.

it emerged that Zhang Xueliang had made a terrible error. 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.

Zhang Xueliang is today seen in China as a patriot who was shocked by the Generalissimo’s unwillingness to face the “real” threat of Japan, and his insistence on fighting his fellow Chinese, the CCP. In this version of events, Zhang kidnapped Chiang in order to force a change of direction. In fact, Zhang’s motivation may well have been more straightforward: Chiang was likely to deprive him of his military command. But the most important factor that saved Chiang was quite simple: few Chinese leaders would have benefited from his death or deposition.

One actor who found the prospect of Chiang’s death terrifying was Stalin. His support for the Communists had been variable in quality and consistency, and had plunged the party into trouble as often as it had helped. Yet his advice was still taken very seriously. 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.

During the attempted coup of February 1936, Japan’s finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyô, had been assassinated. A consequence of his death was a major increase in military spending.14 Japan’s government and public were both increasingly fueled by a desire to “teach China a lesson,” and regarded its increasing unification and the growing sense of nationalism with alarm. 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.” Military spending now took up nearly half Japan’s total budget. Furthermore, recovery from the Depression was fueled in part by growth in heavy industry, much of which made products that would be useful to any future war effort.

Chiang did have another option, albeit a very risky one: he could now enlist his former enemies, the Communists. On July 13 he received those visitors whose arrival would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier: top-level Communist officials including Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, and Lin Boqu.

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 wrote on July 27: “We mustn’t let [the Red Army] be too independent.”36 Mao, in turn, had let his negotiators at Guling know that they must not cede too much: “We have decided to adopt the policy of holding no more talks with Chiang if he refuses to compromise.”37 Finally, the urgency of the moment forced an agreement. 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. Of all the concessions that Chiang made to the Communists, the most important was permission to establish their own armed forces.

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!”43 Clearly he was pointing a finger at figures such as Song Zheyuan, but he was also criticizing the Nationalists. He would not attack them openly on the eve of war, but he was doing his best to position the CCP as the “truly” patriotic party, and by implication associating Chiang with appeasement, weakness, and poor judgment.

In later years, Mao never wished to commemorate those who had gone to Chongqing, only those (rather fewer) who had traveled to the Communist headquarters at Yan’an. That situation finally changed after Mao’s death. In a 1991 interview, former refugee Yan Yangchu declared, referring to the transfer of the factories: “This was Chinese industry’s Dunkirk,” and Xu Ying, a former journalist for Da gongbao, declared that “there was no difference between our Dunkirk and the British one—ours may have been worse.”23 Another historical comparison also stands out. Both the Long March and the move upriver were retreats in the face of a stronger enemy. But the Long March was carried out by a party, the Communists, that would finally come to rule all China, and as a result, their retreat became a world-famous legend. The equally wrenching retreat to Chongqing, associated with Chiang Kai-shek, was wiped out of the official memory.

Nanjing held immense cultural resonance for all Chinese. Until 1421 the city had been China’s capital under the Ming dynasty. Its great city walls had taken over twenty years to build with the labor of 200,000 workers, and they towered above Nanjing as a symbol of imperial power. Even after the capital moved to Beijing, the city was renowned for its fine architecture and the gracious lifestyle of its merchant class. Nanjing had also been the Taiping capital during the bloody civil war of 1850–1864.

Nanjing was never a strategic target for the Japanese. Shanghai gave them mastery over China’s greatest port. The capture of Nanjing was purely a matter of symbolic power. By taking the capital, the Japanese would finally demonstrate their victory over Chinese nationalism, a force they considered pernicious and alien to their vision of East Asia’s future.

The British had always been wary of Chiang Kai-shek, but Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in China, wrote to the new British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, on April 29, 1938, shortly after the Taierzhuang victory, and gave grudging credit to China’s leader: [Chiang] has now become the symbol of Chinese unity, which he himself has so far failed to achieve, but which the Japanese are well on the way to achieving for him . . . The days when Chinese people did not care who governed them seem to have gone . . . my visit to Central China from out of the gloom and depression of Shanghai has left me stimulated and more than disposed to believe that provided the financial end can be kept up Chinese resistance may be so prolonged and effective that in the end the Japanese effort may be frustrated . . . Chiang Kai-shek is obstinate and difficult to deal with . . . Nonetheless [the Nationalists] are making in their muddling way a good job of things in extremely difficult circumstances.

The loss of Xuzhou was both strategic and symbolic. Its fall marked another terrible blow to Chiang’s attempt to hold central China and control the transportation of troops in the region. Morale, built up so suddenly by the Taierzhuang victory, was now battered again, though it did not collapse. The fall of Xuzhou was also a sign, if one supported the resistance, that the war would be a long one and that a swift victory against Japan was no longer a possibility. Mao Zedong’s Yan’an base area was many hundreds of kilometers northwest of Xuzhou, but he understood the meaning of defeat there. In May 1938 he gave one of his most celebrated lectures, “On Protracted War,” in which he chided those who had been overly optimistic: “After the Taierzhuang victory, some people maintained that the Xuzhou campaign should be fought as a ‘quasi-decisive campaign’ and that the previous policy of protracted war should be changed.” Such people had been made “giddy” by Taierzhuang. Mao had no doubts that China would ultimately prevail (he could hardly say otherwise), but “it cannot win quickly, and the War of Resistance will be a protracted war.”26 In the meantime, the development of guerrilla warfare was an essential part of the long-term strategy, which the Communist armies would seek to develop in north China.

A leader more humane than Chiang might never have considered the dilemma, choosing to spare the dams and let the Japanese take Wuhan. But Chiang knew that if he did not break the dikes, and Wuhan fell within days, the Nationalist government might not be able to relocate to Chongqing in time and would be even more likely to surrender, leaving Japan in control of almost all China. Perhaps the nearest equivalent during the Second World War would be the decision of the French high command to surrender to the Germans in June 1940.6 As in France, Chiang’s decision was being made in the face of the most terrifying assault that the country had ever seen, and China’s armies were much weaker and less well trained than the French. The dilemma over whether to break the Yellow River dikes was the product of desperation.7 Chiang made his decision. He gave orders to General Wei Rulin to blow up the dike that held the Yellow River in place in central Henan. There was no doubt about what this meant. Floods would inundate much of central China, turning it into a vast expanse of water and mud, and the Japanese advance would be forcibly stopped. However, to make this strategy work, it had to be done fast. Nor could the government give any public warning, in case the Japanese found out and accelerated their advance.

Chiang’s government had committed one of the grossest acts of violence against its own people, and he knew that the publicity could be a damaging blow to its reputation. He decided to divert blame by announcing that the dike had been broken, but blaming the breach on Japanese aerial bombing. The Japanese, in turn, fiercely denied having bombed the dikes. White’s reporting reflected the immediate response of most foreigners; having heard about the atrocities at Nanjing and Xuzhou, he was disinclined to give the Japanese the benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, at the very time that the Yellow River was flooding central China, the Japanese were heavily bombing the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in the south, causing thousands of casualties. To White, the Japanese counterargument—that the Chinese themselves were responsible—seemed unthinkable: “These accusations, foreign observers thought, were absurd. For the Chinese to check the Japanese advance at possible sacrifice of half a million lives would be a monstrous pyrrhic victory. Besides, dike-cutting is the blackest of Chinese crimes, and the Chinese Army would hardly risk universal censure for slight tactical gains.”11 But, of course, that is exactly what they had done.

Chiang Kai-shek’s decision can be partly explained, although not excused, by the context. We can now look back at the actions of the Nationalists and argue that they should not have held on to Wuhan, or that their actions in breaching the dam were unjustifiable in the extreme. But for Chiang, in the hot summer of 1938, it seemed his only hope was to deny Japan as much of China for as long as possible, and create the best possible circumstances for a long war from China’s interior, while keeping the world’s attention on what Japan was doing. The short delay won by the flooding was itself part of the strategy. In the struggle raging within the soul of the Nationalist Party, the callous, calculating streak had won, for the time being. The breaking of the dikes marked a turning point as the Nationalists committed an act whose terrible consequences they would eventually have to expiate.

The very location of Chongqing itself was also important in changing China’s sense of its own geography. For years, the west of the country, particularly Sichuan province, had been at the outer edge of what was considered to be China, and had never been properly under Nationalist control. Now it was the center of government operations while the eastern heartland was under occupation. Rather as the invasion of another borderland region, Manchuria, in 1931, had helped to stimulate a much stronger sense of centralizing nationalism, the forced move west turned the government’s mind to solidifying unification with areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, both of which had edged out of Chinese influence because of the weakness of the republican governments.3 Anthropologists at the universities in the Nationalist areas began to study the peoples of the western borderlands, bringing them (at least ideologically) into the wider embrace of Chinese nationalism.4 Moving the entire government 1500 kilometers up the Yangtze River helped to consolidate ideas of a united China that spanned the whole of the country’s landmass.

The English-language magazine China at War, managed by the shrewd head of Nationalist propaganda, Hollington K. Tong, told tales for a neutral American public of brave Chinese fighter pilots seeking to land on Chongqing’s precarious Shanhuba airfield, a sandbar exposed only at high tide. (These magazines anticipated a very similar effort by British propagandists to tell tales of London during the Blitz in an effort to persuade isolationist Americans to enter the war.) The selling of the resistance was evident in the name given to the provinces of western and central China that Chiang ruled from Chongqing: “Free China.” This was a geographical designation primarily for foreign consumption.

Chongqing’s air-raid defenses remained weak, largely because the alternative would have required a swift increase in China’s aerial warfare capacity, as well as antiaircraft weapons and other equipment that the country simply did not possess. Chiang’s wife Song Meiling addressed the problem in 1937 by recruiting one of the more remarkable figures to work in wartime China: retired US Air Force Major General Claire Lee Chennault. A strong advocate of airpower, Chennault took over the training of China’s still minimal air force (the official number of 600 aircraft was probably an exaggeration). As well as giving combat training to the small cadre of Chinese pilots, Chennault also recruited pilots from the US who might be better able to take on Japanese fighters. The group was officially known as the American Volunteer Group (AVG), but it soon became much better known by its nickname, the “Flying Tigers.” The group was a real morale-booster for the beleaguered capital, even though the Tigers never actually flew in combat over its skies. But the real significance of Chennault’s presence and views would not be made clear for several more years.16

The threat of approaching war changed the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party. No longer a band of rebels on the run, they were now officially regarded as a junior partner in the United Front against Japan. The development of Communist political policy in the years of the war was inexorably shaped by the demands of warfare itself. 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. The Zunyi Conference, held in Guizhou province in January 1935, was also a major turning point for Mao’s fortunes, as it endorsed his tactics of mobile warfare and moved the party away from the conventional warfare strategies supported by the Comintern.

In the first years of the war, Mao’s writings show a politician and thinker in the process of change. Mao took advantage of his relative isolation in Yan’an by reading extensively in Marxist literature. He had always been a voracious reader, but not being on the run allowed him space for the first time, perhaps since the heady days of the May Fourth Movement, to immerse himself in the ideology that he had embraced as a young man. Unlike Wang Ming and his followers, who had been able to learn at the hands of Stalin in Moscow, or the various urban sophisticates in the party, such as Zhou Enlai, Mao came from a rural background and was an autodidact. His intellect was not in doubt, but his training and theoretical suppleness were. By making it clear that he was in control of the ideological apparatus that shaped the party, he was strengthening his bid for leadership. Mao’s writings on the war in its first year show a thinker whose range of reference took him well beyond the caves of Shaanxi province.

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.

Wang Ming was a more substantial challenger, particularly since his pedigree included prestigious training in Moscow. He advocated policy that was anathema to Mao, suggesting that the CCP might cooperate more strongly with the Nationalists, possibly even through a combined government. Since the Soviets were giving significant assistance to the Nationalists, this might also have been an opportunity for the Communists to share in some of the finance and materiel then flowing to Chiang Kai-shek. Wang Ming also clung strongly to the idea that a Communist revolution in China would take place in the cities, not the countryside.66 Yet events conspired against him. The loss of Wuhan meant that his hopes of organizing an urban base for Communist power were no longer realistic. Instead, it was the rural areas where the CCP would make inroads, and Mao’s vision prevailed over Wang Ming’s. By the end of 1938 the Moscow-trained pretender was no longer a real threat. 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.

Wang did not leave behind detailed personal writings, in contrast to Chiang’s diaries or Mao’s extensive notes and lectures, and we have come to understand him in later years through the eyes of others, such as Zhou Fohai.17 When war broke out in 1937, Zhou was deputy director of propaganda for the government.18 Even in the opening weeks and months of the war, Zhou had harbored doubts. He joined other political and intellectual figures who called themselves a “Low-Key Club” (Didiao julebu), the name indicating a desire to discreetly keep open the possibility of a negotiated peace with Japan. Also in the group was Tao Xisheng, a former professor who was close to Wang Jingwei and now served on several key committees within the government. It was through these “low-key” activities that Zhou first became close to Wang.19

In August 1937, hiding in a shelter from the aerial bombing of Nanjing, Zhou and his friends began to discuss an end to the war. “In three months,” Zhou wrote with some hope in mid-August, “they should be able to start talking about peace.” The “Low-Key Club” had no doubt that a long war of resistance would be disastrous for China. “China’s national strength is not sufficient,” wrote Zhou, “so the war should end at the right point.”20 Many of them had visited Japan in their younger days, and felt they knew the country. Years of conflict with a highly uncertain outcome would be worse than a swiftly negotiated peace in which China might be able to make at least some of its demands heard.

On November 3, Prime Minister Konoye spoke on the radio, announcing his intention of creating a “New Order” in Asia, in which Japan and China would (supposedly) have equal status and would fight together against the real menace, communism. Although the statement did not directly reverse January’s declaration that Japan would no longer deal with the National Government, Konoye’s statement did propose that a Nationalist Party with different “personnel” might well meet with more favor in Tokyo. The message was enough to pique Wang Jingwei’s interest, and he sent another member of the Low-Key Club to investigate.

To the ends of their lives, Zhou and the man he served, Wang Jingwei, saw themselves as the truest patriots. Faced with the prospect of the physical destruction of China by the Japanese assault, or else the establishment of a Communist China under Soviet control, Wang’s group considered the negotiation of a just peace as the only realistic solution to the crisis of war. They were fueled by a genuine ideological enthusiasm that made them keener on a pan-Asianist future than on an alliance with Britain or America, powers whose imperialist behavior in China hardly made them preferable to the Japanese.

In discussions, Zhou was at pains to stress two particular points. First, Japan would have to abandon its “traditional” thoughts of invading and humiliating China, and second, Japan would acknowledge that the War of Resistance (which Wang had, after all, voted for in committee) had been to guarantee the “independence and survival of the nation,” and that if this were achieved peacefully (that is, through negotiation with Japan), then China would have “achieved the goals of the War.”

Chiang’s troubles were made even worse by events some eight thousand kilometers away in Europe. In the late summer of 1939 two events changed the face of the conflict: the expected outbreak of war between Germany and Britain along with France, and the unexpected outbreak of peace between Germany and its ideological foe the USSR. The latter was marked by the announcement on August 23, 1939, of the signing of a nonaggression pact between Moscow and Berlin, perhaps the most astounding ideological reversal of the twentieth century.

Wang finally got his new government in Nanjing. On March 30, 1940, Wang Jingwei’s huandu—the “return to the capital”—officially came into being. The regime’s newspaper, the Zhonghua ribao (China Daily), was filled with fulsome praise for the government of “Chairman Wang,” positioned not as a new regime but rather as a restoration of the true Nationalist Party to its rightful capital at Nanjing. The cartoons that filled the middle pages were pure propaganda: pictures of Wang as a superhuman giant radiating light toward a group of children representing the Chinese people.17 Zhou Fohai recalled the ceremony in his diary with his usual touch of egomania. “My idea has come to reality,” he declared. “This is the happiest thing that has happened in my life.” He went on: “The National Government has returned to the capital, the national flag is fluttering in the city, and the whole thing was started up by me. After this, the movement will take me as its center . . . my whole life has not been in vain.”

Chiang would visit India and speak to the leaders of their independence struggle as an ally and friend, a fellow non-European. 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.

Although Roosevelt had disappointed Chiang, it was the other ally, the British, who bore the brunt of his criticism. “The British don’t take us seriously,” Chiang wrote, adding, “The next generation should understand the difficulty of building the country up from its past shame.” It was not just Japan that he considered to be the source of China’s troubles, and he had no intention of forgetting Britain’s long record of imperialism in China. On December 15, just a week after Pearl Harbor, Chiang noted: I can’t describe how humble the attitude of the British ambassador [Sir Archibald Clark Kerr] and his military attaché was . . . But their greed, and their search for a small profit while avoiding the big questions is the same as ever. This is the real character of the British; I wouldn’t have imagined this in normal times of this bold Saxon race.11 Two days later, he added, with honest ambiguity: “I despise them, but I also respect them.”