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

by Rana Mitter

THE FIRST DAY OF February 1942 marked a turning point in the history of China’s Communist Party. On that day, at the opening of the Party School in Yan’an, Mao addressed over a thousand party cadres and laid down a stinging critique. “There is something in the minds of a number of our comrades,” he declared, “which strikes one as not quite right, not quite proper.”

The speech marked the formal opening of the Rectification Movement.

marked a thorough ideological shakeout for the party, portrayed, in the language of the time, as a chance to “rectify the Party’s work style.” It included intense devotion to the study of Mao’s works, and a thoroughgoing, almost religious commitment to the goals of the Chinese Communist Party. Those who declined to take part could expect pressure: psychological at first, but then something less abstract and more sinister.

The Rectification campaign was not a screen for something else. It was central to Mao’s mission of a thorough reinvention of Chinese society. And it was only the “arduous war” that allowed Mao to fulfill his goals so successfully. The war experience was crucial to the formation of the modernized Communist state, underpinned by terror in service of the revolution that Mao sought to build.

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.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, many outside observers found the phenomenon of the Red Guards, who persecuted and tortured their class enemies, inexplicable. But a quarter century earlier the Rectification Movement had provided a clear blueprint. It marked the moment when Mao’s China came into being. It was not immediately obvious because the outside world was hardly focused on what was happening in the blockaded northwest region where the Communists were based. Yet the signs of the state that would become the People’s Republic of China less than a decade later were there. What had been a radical opposition party was now unmistakably a party of government, with millions of people under its rule. The “Yan’an Way” policies that balanced land reform and progressive taxation would be part of the early years of the PRC. So, too, would the terror tactics. Enemies of the people would be publicly humiliated, beaten, or killed by their new masters.

The many tentacles of Dai Li’s MSB arrested numerous dissidents and took them off to torture and execution. 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.

In January 1944 John Paton Davies Jr., a US Foreign Service officer, had made the case that the US would be wise to make formal contacts with the Communist headquarters at Yan’an. “Only one official American observer has ever visited the ‘Communist’ area,” he noted. “That was six years ago.” Yet even from the secondhand information that the Americans had gleaned since then, Davies argued, certain points about the CCP seemed quite clear. The Communists had a major base near important Japanese military and industrial centers, and they possessed valuable intelligence on Japan. If the USSR were to enter the war, it would have to attack through areas held by the CCP. He declared that they were “the greatest single challenge in China to the Chiang Kai-shek government.” More contentiously, he suggested that they ran the “most cohesive, disciplined, and aggressively anti-Japanese regime in China” (with the implication that more active fighting was being done by the CCP than by the Nationalists), and that they might form the “foundation for a rapprochement between a new China and the Soviet Union.”

Roosevelt declared that if Chiang cooperated with Stilwell and Mountbatten, then “the land line to China will be opened in early 1945 and the continued resistance of China and maintenance of your control will be assured.” But if Chiang did not provide ground support for the Burma offensive, then land communications with Free China would be cut off. The warning became starker: “For this you must yourself be prepared to accept the consequences and assume the personal responsibility.” Roosevelt’s tone was firm: “I have urged time and time again in recent months that you take drastic action to resist the disaster which had been moving closer to China and to you.” One demand, above all, was made clear: to place “General Stilwell in unrestricted command of all your forces.”

The irony was that Chiang was about to concede all of Stilwell’s key demands: the command of the Chinese armies was to be handed over to a foreigner.

Yet Stilwell insisted. Hurley attempted to soften the blow by asking that Chiang read the Chinese translation, which later turned out to have been even more blunt than the original. Chiang read the note and said simply “I understand,” while appearing nervous. Then he turned his teacup upside down. The gesture indicated that the meeting was over, and with it, any chance whatsoever of continued cooperation with Stilwell, or of the American being placed in command of the millions of men who made up the armed forces of the Republic of China.14 The delivery of Roosevelt’s note was a watershed. For this short moment of satisfaction, Stilwell would pay a very heavy price. US-China relations for the next quarter century would pay an even heavier one. Arguably they are still paying some of that price today.