Forgotten Ally Quotes

“If we wish to understand the role of China in today's global society, we would do well to remind ourselves of the tragic, titanic struggle which that country waged in the 1930s and 1940s not just for its own national dignity and survival, but for the victory of all the Allies, west and east, against some of the darkest forces that history has ever produced.”
― Rana Mitter, China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival

“Contemporary China is thought of as the inheritor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or even of the humiliation incurred by the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, but rarely as the product of the war against Japan.”
― Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

“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”
― Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945