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

by Rana Mitter

Du Zhongyuan, who had been imprisoned in 1935 for publishing anti-Japanese screeds. Upon his release in 1936, he had been adopted by powerful Nationalists who had admired his stance. The outbreak of war gave Du his chance to use his skills where they were most valuable: in reporting the unfolding war against Japan.

Suddenly, the circumstances of war made the concept of the nation, and personal identification with it, more urgent and meaningful for many Chinese.

From Matsui’s viewpoint, shared by others in the Japanese leadership, the apathetic European powers were somehow propping China up, and only the Japanese had China’s true interests at heart:

However, none of the three principal actors was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multiparty regime with significant civil liberties. 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.

Japanese politics had become increasingly dominated by the inability to end the China war.

Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles,

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.10 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.”

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

During that decade, although the British viceroy remained supreme, significant amounts of executive power had been handed over to elected constitutional assemblies of Indians. Yet in 1939 the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had committed India to the war effort against Germany without consulting the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the major secular pro-independence movement in India. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, along with the movement’s other prominent leaders, were furious. Like

The next day Chiang wrote of his frustration: After meeting Gandhi yesterday, I’m disappointed. My expectations were too great, but perhaps the pain of being ruled by the British has hardened his heart . . . he knows and loves only India, and doesn’t care about other places and people . . . Traditional Indian philosophy has made him this way. He only knows how to endure pain, and has no zeal—this is not the spirit of a revolutionary leader. I judge that the Indian revolution will not easily succeed.

Chiang had replied that all politics was confusing, and if it were clearer then it would be “philosophy, not politics.”

But Chiang’s visit to India also strengthened his view that the war was an opportunity to create a new, anti-imperialist united Asia. “Revolutionary opportunities are hard to find and easy to lose,” he chided Nehru at the final lunch they held on February 21. “This is India’s only good revolutionary opportunity. If we lose it, we won’t get it again.” Nehru was silent, “but seemed to understand.”30 Chiang followed up in March with another speech in which he once again urged the Indian leaders to back the Allies. He also stressed to the British that India was already supplying more soldiers than any country except China, and that a promise of swift independence would energize the country yet further.31 Anti-imperialist solidarity

Above all, however, the visit marked China’s first wartime gesture as a great power, a sovereign actor in international relations. On

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.

Corruption, carelessness, and callousness all played their part. But in the end there was no obviously better choice that Chiang could have made.

When Chiang’s government found itself in difficulty, it turned to the printing press to produce more banknotes. Between mid-1941 and late 1944 prices rose by 10 percent or more per month.34 In February 1940 a shijin (approximately half a kilogram) of rice in Chongqing had cost 2 yuan; by December (during the year when the Burma Road had been closed over the summer) it was 18.35, and by the start of 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, it stood close to 40, a twentyfold increase in just two years. In the last year of the war, prices would rise even faster.

Yet these same observers, many of whom admired the Communists, did not acknowledge the crippling burden (in an already stretched economy) of having hundreds of thousands of economically unproductive soldiers on call. Nationalist China was, in a different way, as besieged as Yan’an. Yet the lower burden of military expenses meant that Mao could deploy his tax revenues in ways not open to the Nationalists.

The romantic era of joining the underground and running off to Yan’an in protest against China’s ills was over. Instead, party membership meant building a machine to rule China.

At the end of the Forum, on May 23, Mao came back to stress that this had been the beginning, not the end of the changes. “Intellectuals who want to serve the masses,” he said, “must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well.” Mao added an ominous coda: “This process may, and certainly will, involve much pain and friction.”36 Mao’s words marked a severe change of mood in Yan’an. Not only was it much harder for people to enter the region, but it also became very difficult to leave.37 The city was cut off from the outside world not only by enemy blockade, but also by a new hardness of the party line. An earlier atmosphere of openness and collective enterprise gave way to a much more all-or-nothing environment. Ideas of pluralism and “new democracy” were replaced by a turn toward party control.

But both Chiang and Mao ultimately envisaged a modernized China in which only one party would have a dominant role, a goal not compatible with true pluralism.

“it is necessary for us not only to have ideas and to proclaim that we have them, it is necessary that we act to implement them.”1 It was a clear challenge to her audience: give priority to aid for China, and stop criticizing its policies.

“If [the Allies] open a second frontline, Germany will definitely lose.” Zhou was prescient: the battle was indeed the turning point, when the Soviet Union began to turn back the Nazi invasion. Yet Zhou still believed that there might be a place for a Japanese-dominated sphere in the postwar world. Rightly suspecting that the Americans and British did not really trust the USSR, he thought they might try and prop up Japanese power to contain the Soviets: “They’ll still allow Germany a certain level of power so as to contain the USSR. Otherwise the whole of Europe and Asia will all be controlled by the Soviet Union . . . so the US, Britain, Germany, and Japan will all have to compromise to face the USSR.”4

wow. In 1943!

Few concrete promises were made at the conference. Yet for the Southeast Asian leaders, and also for Bose, however weak or self-serving the Japanese advocacy of their independence, the conference marked a clear moment when their aspirations to independence were, at last, officially acknowledged, free from British or (in the case of the Philippines) American colonial rule.

Even while the role of the Pacific was upgraded by both Washington and London during 1943, the precise significance of China was not defined.

Much of Chiang’s concern was about Xinjiang, the northwestern region which the USSR wished to control, and he also repeated his desire for an independent Korea and Vietnam (the latter apparently to be brought about under joint Sino-American tutelage).

Yet Chiang was not blind to the problems of developing officers of high quality. “My commanders” spirit, body, and scholarship, to be fair, cannot compete with that of the Americans,” he admitted. “How can we nurture such a backward people, feel proud of the country, and seek a true national liberation?”62

It became all the more imperative that the Nationalists should be seen to fight back.

Stilwell was also convinced that the Communists must be brought more fully into the conflict and that they had an understanding of Chinese society that the Nationalists lacked.

“He can’t see that the mass of Chinese people welcome the Reds,” Stilwell wrote, “as being the only visible hope of relief from crushing taxation, the abuses of the Army, and Tai Li [Dai Li]’s Gestapo.”

The events of the long summer of 1944 began to induce paranoia in Chiang. “For twenty years, the Communist bandits and the Russians have been plotting against me,” he wrote. “But now the British and Americans are plotting with the Communists—this is like world imperialism ambushing me!”

Service attempted to get some measure of the Communist leaders and their system. He described them as having a “lack of striking individuality” but giving an overall impression of youth and vigor, as well as pragmatism. “The test of everything,” he suggested, “was whether it works—in China.”

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.

The personal clash between Stilwell and Chiang was important, but it should not distract attention from the wider strategic decision that Marshall and the other Allied leaders had made at the start of the war: China was not going to be a major theater of war in the Allied effort.31

By creating a fiction that Chiang had to fight to show his value to the alliance, the Allies allowed the relationship between the US and China to erode. Rather than trying repeatedly to take Burma, a target of dubious value, it would have been perfectly reasonable to let Chiang use his limited resources to defend China,

Roosevelt personally approved the lifting of the ban on the story. Atkinson’s article was devastating. It suggested that Stilwell’s recall was “the political triumph of a moribund anti-democratic regime,” and described Chiang Kai-shek as running a government that was “unenlightened, cold-hearted,” and “autocratic.” Above all, the article accused Chiang of a “basic unwillingness” to fight the Japanese.1

This created a dilemma for Mao as to how best to orient his party toward the new world. The Communists had to be seen to support the war effort against Japan. To move openly against Chiang would rob them of the moral high ground from which they could accuse him of emphasizing the fight against the Communists over the war against Japan. (This accusation remained powerful even though Nationalist troops were fighting the Japanese in both the Ichigô assault and in Burma, and the CCP had contributed to neither of these campaigns.)

With the Nationalists on the back foot, and the Japanese close to exhaustion, might there be an opportunity for the Communists to place themselves in a better position for the postwar conflict, now surely just a year or so away? Mao advocated caution, noting that “our party is not yet sufficiently strong, not yet sufficiently united or consolidated,”

Late in the previous year, Service had sent a telegram to Stilwell declaring “The Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] is dependent on American support for survival. But we are in no way dependent on the Kuomintang,” adding that “we need feel no ties of gratitude to Chiang.”15 Even in a private telegram, this was an astounding thing to say of a regime that had been resisting Japan for over seven years.

At the heart of the problem was a stubborn fact that the Americans could not or would not see. Neither Chinese side was sincere about a coalition government for its own sake. Both Chiang and Mao saw it as a temporary arrangement while their parties prepared to vie for absolute power.

Chiang Kai-shek was not privy to any of the Yalta discussions about China’s future, but he had his suspicions. “The influence of this conference on China will be great,” he acknowledged. “I hope Roosevelt isn’t plotting with Churchill and Stalin against me.” When he heard even the public terms of the agreement, Chiang was plunged into gloom, thinking that the world would be thrown back into the same race for dominance that had marked the aftermath of the Great War. “This meeting of the three leaders has already carved the seeds of the Third World War,” he wrote. “Roosevelt is still calling this a diplomatic victory—this is really laughable.”27

Even now, the numbers are not clear, but some 14 million to 20 million Chinese seem to have perished during the eight years of conflict. The relationship with the US had become bitter, poisoned by the Stilwell fiasco. American disillusionment with the Chongqing government was fueled by the wreck of the regime that ruled China. The nation had grand visions, but the reality was mass hunger, official corruption, and a brutal security state that tried in vain to suppress the aspirations of a people who had been exhorted to develop a sense of national identity and now demanded a state that matched their new sense of themselves. There was a widespread feeling within the country of change abroad. China could not avoid it. And what seemed deeply ironic was that a triumphant Mao Zedong might now reap the fruits of Chiang Kai-shek’s victory. And

The Communist victory on the Chinese mainland shaped the politics of East Asia, and of US-China relations, for decades. In the US the “loss” of China (although it was a country that had never really been the Americans’ to lose in the first place) began to poison the political atmosphere of the early Cold War.

when the Korean War broke out in 1950.

The renowned historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a classic book that used Stilwell’s papers to make a devastating case against Chiang’s regime. Published just as Nixon began his opening to China, it further demolished Chiang’s reputation.20

The real venom was reserved for the Nationalists across the water in Taiwan, where they remained protected by the US Navy.

From the Aid Korea Resist America Campaign during the Korean War (1950–1953)

During the Cultural Revolution younger Communist cadres from ideologically “bad” families took the opportunity to seek revenge against cadres from “good” families who had been privileged since the Communist revolution in 1949.

The Nationalists maintained some 4 million troops in China through the war, helping to tie down some half a million or more Japanese soldiers who could otherwise have been transferred elsewhere.