RANA MITTER
The path to war
The war between China and Japan may have been the single most important event to shape twentieth-century China. The victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in 1949 was undoubtedly the most important turning point, but it was the war with Japan that created the circumstances in which the revolution could come to pass. Also crucial was the Chinese civil war that convulsed the country between 1946 and 1949 and allowed the final victory of the Communists. The mere dozen years from 1937 to 1949 saw China go through some of the most profound changes in its era of modern formation.
War broke out in 1937, but the circumstances that caused it were created many decades previously. The early twentieth century saw two major ideological forces in conflict with one another: Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism. The Republic established in 1911 was counted a success by few who lived under it or observed it, yet the troubles that defined it (“warlordism from within, imperialism from without”) nonetheless helped to create an ever-greater sense, particularly among China’s elites, that a more firmly defined nationalist consciousness was essential if China was to become a strong, sovereign state. The establishment of the Nationalist government at Nanjing in 1928 did not bring about that definitive strengthening of the state. However, the government under Chiang Kai-shek did appear to have made some major advances in consolidating its rule, including the regaining of tariff autonomy in 1930.
In contrast, the Japanese state of the early twentieth century seemed solid and well founded to many, benefiting from the modernization of the country that had followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. However, one part of Japan’s modernization was tied to the development of an empire through war; Taiwan became Japanese in 1895 at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, Japan gained a foothold in Manchuria in 1905 after the Russo-Japanese conflict, and in 1910, Korea was fully annexed and became a Japanese colony. An internationalist note was visible in the policy of the 1920s, but the Great Depression hit Japan hard and turned politics toward greater economic autarky and political control, and away from democracy. As a result, Japanese ambitions on the mainland grew greater, and in 1931, a coup by the locally garrisoned Kwantung Army saw the occupation of Northeast China (Manchuria) and the establishment of the client state of Manchukuo.
Chiang Kai-shek’s government did not resist immediately. Chiang knew that China’s military capabilities were not strong enough to be able to defeat Japan. However, his government started to plan for a war with Japan that might be under way at some point in the next decade. They established a National Resources Commission, which aimed to make sure that China could maintain a sufficient supply of key metals and fuels in the event of a war. Chiang did not have direct control over large parts of China’s armies, and many troops nominally loyal to his government were in fact in the service of rival militarist leaders. Therefore he appointed German military advisers to provide rigorous training for the officers of the Central Army who were eventually expected to be at the forefront of the defense of China in the event of a future war.
Yet Japanese aggression made it harder for Chiang to maintain his policy of open non-resistance to Japan, particularly as he launched powerful campaigns against the Communists in the mid-1930s. The Amo doctrine (1934) made it clear that Japan considered the Asian mainland to be a legitimate area for its own expansion and that it had no intention of ceding to the demands of growing Chinese nationalism. Popular feeling, particularly among Chinese intellectuals and elites, grew against Japan. By the late 1930s, Chiang’s government had put out feelers toward a compromise with the Communists on resistance to Japan, although neither side had yet made a formal commitment. Then an event took place that threatened to derail the whole process: on December 12, 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by two warlords, one of his former military allies, the “Young Marshal” of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang, and Yang Hucheng. At first it seemed that the Communists might weigh in to have Chiang killed, but intervention from Stalin made it clear that this was not on the agenda. If Chiang died, then it was unclear who would take charge in China, but it might be a weak leader who would allow the Japanese to use China as a base for attacking the Soviet Union. After tortuous negotiations, Chiang was released, his reputation if anything raised, and he became now more publicly committed to an alliance with the Communists against the Japanese.
By early 1937, it was clear that war was a distinct possibility, as the Japanese created local alliances with local militarists in north China in an attempt to detach the region from Nanjing’s control. Then, on the night of July 7, 1937, there was a minor incident at a bridge at Wanping, near Beiping. Locally garrisoned Japanese troops clashed with Chinese troops, but the incident was soon over and seemed unlikely to balloon further. However, politicians in Tokyo saw it as an opportunity to press for reprisals; in particular, the cession of rights to the crucial railway junctions in and around Beiping. Tensions between the two sides escalated over July and August 1937. On July 11, the Japanese premier Prince Konoye mobilized troops in North China. On July 26 they attacked Beiping and the city fell on July 28, followed by Tianjin on July 30. Realizing that a great conflict was imminent, Chiang legalized the Communist Red Army on August 2.
On August 7, the government held a secret Joint National Defense Meeting, attended by large numbers of China’s major leaders. He pointed out that China had no reliable foreign allies, but that further appeasement of Japan would lead to yet more territorial losses, from which it might take decades to recover. He ended the meeting by demanding that those present who supported war with Japan should stand up. Everybody did, including Chiang’s political military rivals such as Wang Jingwei, Liu Xiang of Sichuan province, and Yan Xishan of Shanxi. The decision had been made: China would fight back.
The first phase
Chiang Kai-shek decided that he would have to open up a new front in eastern China. At the center of this decision was the great port city of Shanghai. Shanghai was China’s most cosmopolitan and international city, with a large foreign population. It was unlikely that the Chinese could defend their position in Shanghai, but by making a strong defense, they could emphasize how seriously they took the task of resistance.
The battle for Shanghai began on August 13, 1937. On August 14, a horrific incident punctured any complacency left in the local population. Nationalist bombers aimed to hit the Izumo, a Japanese warship anchored off Shanghai. Instead, they released their load over Nanjing Road, at the heart of the (neutral) International Settlement area. Over 1,000 people were killed on this “Black Saturday.”
Yet if the Japanese thought that they would have an easy time of it, they were mistaken. By early September, some 100,000 Japanese troops had been moved into the area around Shanghai, locked in combat with some 500,000 Chinese forces. The battle continued street by street, causing massive destruction throughout the city. The local British-run newspaper, the North China Daily News, reported that “like a nightmare octopus flinging cruel tentacles around its helpless victims, the local hostilities are slowly strangling Shanghai’s trade.” Finally, in November, the Nationalist troops retreated; they had lost 187,000 men including some 30,000 of the German-trained crack troops who were Chiang’s best hope for a revival of the Chinese army.
The Japanese army’s failure to make a quick finish in Shanghai served to anger them yet further. This rage manifested itself most terribly in the Chinese capital city of Nanjing in the winter of 1937. The Nationalist government, anticipating the loss of east China, had prepared for the capital to move to Chongqing in southwest China (with the military headquarters at Wuhan until September 1938). However, Tang Shengzhi, the general left in charge of the defense of the city, was left with instructions to defend it to the end. In the end, realizing that he had been left an essentially hopeless task, Tang slipped out of the city. Meanwhile, the civilian population were left to their fate. On December 13, Japanese troops under Prince Asaka entered the capital. A small number of foreigners who had stayed behind in the city hoped to create an International Safety Zone that would protect civilians who stayed inside it. This proved a forlorn hope as the Japanese troops committed horrific acts against the civilian population, murdering and raping them in huge numbers, in an event that would become commemorated as “the Rape of Nanking.”
By early 1938, the situation of the Chinese Nationalists was becoming desperate. Then, in April, a morale boost came with the defense of the city of Taierzhuang, in Shandong province. In spring 1938, the Japanese were pushing hard on the city of Xuzhou, a major railhead, but in a fierce battle that lasted from the end of March until April 7 at the small town of Taierzhuang, the Nationalist generals Li Zongren and Tang Enbo carried out a major counter-attack. In the end, some 8,000 Japanese soldiers were killed and the remaining troops were forced to retreat. Chiang urged his generals to step up the attack, but the continuing failings of the Chinese army prevented this once again; China’s army was really a conglomeration of interests, not a unified fighting force. Rival militarist leaders controlled huge swathes of China, which were essential to recruitment, food supply, and resource production, and many of the troops on the Nationalist side were responsible to those other leaders. The desire to hoard supplies and not to expend too much of one’s own strength meant that Chinese military leaders could offer resistance, as they had done at Taierzhuang, but would often fail to follow up on their initial successes. The Taierzhuang victory was followed by a further Japanese advance, which soon captured Xuzhou.
With the path to central China now lying open to the Japanese, desperation overtook the Chinese leadership. The city of Zhengzhou looked set to fall as the enemy advanced to within 25 miles of the city. Chiang’s government turned to a plan that would have been unthinkable at almost all times: to “use water instead of soldiers” (yi shui dai bing). In June 1938, they decided to breach the dams on the Yellow River at Huayuankou. This would cause a flood that would inundate much of Henan province, stopping the onward advance of the Japanese army. However, it would have to be done without any warning, meaning that the lives and property of the many millions who lived in the path of the river would be vulnerable. On the night of June 8–9, 1938, thousands of workers were brought to Huayuankou where they dug away at the dyke by hand. By the next morning, the waters had begun to flow, in the words of one officer present, “like 10,000 horses.” Some 20,000 square miles of land were covered in water, and in the end some 500,000 locals were either drowned or starved because of the destruction of their land. The Japanese were halted in their advance, however, for the next five months, giving the Nationalists a breathing space for further withdrawal into the interior. The temporary military headquarters at Wuhan (Hankow) finally fell on October 25, 1938.
Stalemate
There then began a period of seeming stalemate. For the capture of Wuhan did not prove to be the next phase of a further Japanese thrust into the interior. Instead, all sides found themselves bogged down in a three-way division: the Japanese in the east, mainly centered on cities and railway lines, the Nationalists in the interior and southwest, and the Communists (of whom more later) in the northwest and parts of central China.
The halting of the Japanese advance in late 1938 meant that the war developed in other ways. From the start of that year, the Nationalist temporary capital at Chongqing was subjected to an increasingly fierce bombing campaign by the Japanese. Over the next three years, there would be repeated raids during the summer months (during the winter, Chongqing was covered by a blanket of fog that made raids much harder to carry out). The air raids were the first major aerial attacks on an Asian city (the only previous major serious attacks anywhere had been in colonial wars and in the Spanish Civil War), and created a whole new ecology of survival. People started to live and work in the same locations, which often had built-in bomb shelters. When sirens sounded and red balls were hoisted to show an imminent air raid, the population of Chongqing headed for shelters, many of them hewn out of rock. The most memorable raid took place on May 3–4, 1939, when repeated sorties of Japanese bombers caused some 4,000 deaths. In later years, these numbers would be dwarfed by the London Blitz or Tokyo firebombing but at the time they were high tolls indeed, combined with the destruction caused and the feeling of vulnerability to sudden death from the air.
While the Nationalists retreated to China’s interior and southwest, their great rivals, the Communists, also tried to develop safe havens of their own. The most prominent was their base at the junction of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces in northwest China, which they had reached at the end of the Long March of 1934–35. In 1938, Mao wrote his essay “On Protracted War” which argued strongly that China “cannot win quickly.” The Communists could consolidate their position, but they were no more able than the Nationalists to strike a decisive blow against the Japanese.
One figure who was increasingly concerned with the turn of the war was Wang Jingwei. Wang was a controversial political figure, with a long history in the Nationalist (Guomindang) party. Originally he had been a close associate of Sun Yat-sen during the years after the 1911 Revolution, but he had lost out to Chiang Kai-shek in the struggle for the Party leadership after Sun’s death. By the mid-1930s, Chiang had placed him in elevated but powerless positions within the Party, and in 1937 he had joined the consensus for the war against Japan. But by 1938, he was becoming convinced that the war was a terrible error. He saw the destruction being visited upon Chongqing and other cities in “Free China.” He also observed China’s lack of formal allies in the face of the vastly superior Japanese forces; and he noted with alarm the United Front between the Nationalists and Communists, regarding the latter as essentially tools of the USSR. He also nursed a strong personal ambition, never having forgiven Chiang for (as he saw it) usurping his position. These different motivations made him vulnerable to approaches from a rival power.
By the middle of 1938, secret negotiations had begun between members of the “Low-Key Club,” Chinese officials who wanted to keep open the option of a negotiated peace, and Japanese officials. The Japanese hope was to bring over Chiang Kai-shek to their side, but this proved impossible. Hopes turned instead to Wang Jingwei, who had always been perceived as more sympathetic to Japan (though he had always been staunch in his advocacy of Chinese nationalism during the 1920s and 1930s). In December 1938, Wang responded to the blandishments of the Japanese side. He took a tortuous route, arriving first in Kunming in southwest China, and from there making the journey across the border to Hanoi in French Indochina. Rumors swirled about his intentions. On December 22, Prince Konoye, the Japanese prime minister, gave a press conference at which he declared, in vague terms, that Japan was making a commitment to China to pursue friendship, economic cooperation, and anti-communism. On New Year’s Eve, a Hong Kong newspaper published a telegram with Wang Jingwei’s declaration that Konoye’s statement provided the grounds for negotiation.
Over the next two years, the Japanese made repeated attempts to obtain cooperation from Chiang Kai-shek. Only when it became clear that that cooperation would not be forthcoming did they finally authorize Wang Jingwei to establish his own government (heavily influenced by its Japanese sponsors) in Nanjing, in March 1940. It would survive until the end of the war (unlike Wang, who died in 1944), but it had little real autonomy.
However, another political grouping began to make much greater strides during the same year. In February 1940, Mao released one of his most important speeches, “On New Democracy,” which laid out the blueprint for a cross-class alliance to defeat the Japanese and create a new society. Its tone was notably emollient, seeking to downplay ideas of class struggle and emphasize the CCP’s desire to unite different groups within Chinese society. Within the base area in Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia, with its capital at Yan’an, new experiments in government were tried out by the Communists, including fairer tax burdens and the institution of popular participation in local elections.
10. China at the end of World War II.
The global war
After a series of near-defeats, the Chinese resistance continued through 1940 and into 1941. The start of operation Barbarossa in Europe made it clear that the war at the other end of the Eurasian landmass was expanding, although there was no connection yet between the European war and the Chinese one. For that connection to be made, Chiang was aware, as was Winston Churchill in Britain, that one decisive factor was needed that could promise victory rather than just resistance against Japan: the entry of the United States.
At the start of the war, this seemed unlikely. American sympathies were with China rather than Japan, but this was a very long way from a commitment to participation in the conflict. But by 1940, the Roosevelt administration had become increasingly concerned about Japan’s aggression in the Pacific. Increasing amounts of financial aid were made to China in 1941, at the same time that Washington and Tokyo engaged in ever-more desperate diplomacy. The United States insisted that Japan must withdraw its forces from China. Japan was equally insistent that it would not do so, and in October, General Tojo took over as prime minister and heightened preparations for war. On December 2, the imperial conference in Tokyo took the decision to attack the United States on December 8.
In the early morning of December 8 (December 7 US time), two waves of Japanese bomber aircraft attacked the vessels of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Some 2,400 Americans were killed, and 1,100 wounded. Japanese attacks on Malaya, Thailand, and the Philippines quickly followed. President Roosevelt spoke of a “day which will live in infamy” as Chiang Kai-shek made a public declaration of a “common battle.” Within three days Hitler had also declared war on the United States, making the conflict truly global.
From Pearl Harbor on, China had formal allies, the United States and the British Empire, in its war against Japan. Yet this alliance would prove a very uneven one, not just because of the mismatch in the resources between the powers involved, but also because of the differing understandings of what the alliance actually meant.
For the United States, the formal alliance with China was a means to “keep China in the war,” through the provision of financial assistance but not American combat troops. China was a welcome partner in the war against Japan, and nominally an equal ally. The fact that China was a non-Western nation helped to give credibility to the idea that the war was genuinely a battle for global freedom. Churchill, in contrast, was always much more cynical about the real value of China, his attitude shaped by his strong antipathy to non-European liberation movements. However, China was regarded by the Western allies as a secondary or tertiary concern at best, with the “Europe first” strategy placing more emphasis on the defeat of Nazi Germany before Imperial Japan. There was also a strong sense among the Western commanders that the Americans were coming in to rescue the Chinese, and that the latter were victims rather than actors with any control over their own fate.
This was not how the Chinese government saw the situation. Their perception was that they had been attacked in 1937, and resisted for four and a half years without any significant external assistance. Aid and assistance to the Chinese, they felt, was only their due after their own polity had been brought to the edge of destruction. China had already offered robust opposition to the Japanese well beyond what most observers would have expected. Furthermore, Chiang did not accept that the destiny of China had to be a secondary priority. Indeed, while from a geostrategic point of view it was clearly necessary to prioritize theatres of war, it was also understandable that those who led the less favored theatres might not simply accept their place in the queue. Western leaders could not reasonably expect that Chiang Kai-shek would agree to downplay the fate of China without any concern for his own position.
These mismatched expectations would dog the relationship between China and its Western allies through most of the war. They were expressed most vividly in the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and the American chief of staff sent to command the Chinese armies, General Joseph W. Stilwell. Stilwell had gone on previous tours of duty in China, and had a high regard for the fighting capacity of Chinese soldiers, but an extremely low opinion of the efficacy of the Chinese generals and officers. The initial relationship between Chiang and Stilwell was fairly warm, but subsequent events would quickly sour the atmosphere between them.
In February 1942, the Japanese attacked Burma. The Allies had not expected this campaign, but the success of the initial assault on Southeast Asia emboldened Japanese military commanders to expand their aim. If Burma was captured, it meant that the Burma Road that supplied Nationalist China would be cut off. At this point, the Allies took rather different views about what their response should be. The British were concerned that Burma should not become a base for an attack on British India; the Chinese were equally concerned that it should not become easier to attack the Nationalist base areas in southwest China. Both sides preferred to maintain an essentially defensive position in Burma, and to give up southern Burma, including the capital, Rangoon, as lost.
Stilwell took a very different view, advocating a bold strategy to push back against the Japanese through the whole of Burma, and trying to recapture Rangoon: “I have a hunch the Japs are weak,” he noted in his diary on March 9, 1942. Chiang was extremely wary about the idea of an aggressive thrust against the Japanese; after all, it was mostly Chinese and British troops who would have to bear the brunt of the attack. But with misgivings, he gave Stilwell his head. Unfortunately, Stilwell’s conviction that the Japanese were weak was not borne out by the reality, as they surrounded the city of Toungoo, leading Chiang to advocate retreat. Stilwell refused this order, writing diary entries that blamed the Chinese and the British for refusing to stand firm. After two months of increasingly unsuccessful attempts to retake southern Burma, Stilwell finally decided on May 5 to walk out of the jungle. A fortnight later, he arrived with his party in Imphal, in British India. But while Stilwell’s own party escaped alive, their Chinese counterparts were less fortunate: some 25,000 Chinese were killed or injured with some 10,000 British and Indian troops in the same position (versus 4,500 Japanese). Stilwell declared at a press conference that the retreat from Burma had been “as humiliating as hell.” But privately, he blamed Chiang Kai-shek for, as he saw it, refusing to support his bold strategy.
Early in 1942, Chiang made a trip that failed in its immediate political effect but the symbolic importance of which was highly significant: he visited India and called on the major independence leaders of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The leaders of the Congress party had been outraged that the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, had committed India to the war effort without consultation with them, and had withdrawn from participation in government, as well as refusing to endorse the war. Chiang hoped to persuade them to change their minds. The endorsement of India’s freedom movement for the Allied war effort would have been a great boost for China, and Chiang in turn was keen to make it clear that he fully supported the independence movement. Churchill was extremely unenthusiastic about the idea of Chiang’s visit, and, in particular, tried to prevent him meeting Gandhi. In the end, the results were less transformative than Chiang would have wished. He and Nehru knew and respected each other, but Chiang’s arguments cut little ice against Nehru’s conviction that non-cooperation with the British imperial government was necessary. A later meeting between Chiang and Gandhi produced even less agreement between the two leaders. Still, this was an important moment; on the soil of British India, the leader of the sovereign Chinese nationalist government was meeting two of the most important advocates of liberation from empire. Chiang publicly declared his support for Indian independence in a radio broadcast, yet another irritation to Churchill. It was clear that the anti-imperialist element of the war could not now be suppressed if it were to have credibility.
The alliance with the Western powers could not, in the short term, address one of the most fundamental problems facing wartime China: its isolation. After Pearl Harbor, Nationalist China could no longer depend on the Burma Road or the border with French Indochina, both of which had been cut off by the Japanese. There was also a limit to the amount of relief that could be flown over the Burma “Hump” from India. The government was forced to maintain large standing armies with limited capacity to feed and pay them. The economic situation was significantly worsened by the government’s decision to print money, leading to ever-greater rates of inflation; between 1941 and 1944, prices rose by 10 percent or more per month. In 1941, the government began policies of grain requisitioning to try and keep the armies fed. The policy did reduce inflation because the government was no longer buying so much grain on the open market. However, the burden of the war effort was now being placed even more decisively on the shoulders of the farmers in the countryside.
This burden led to a major tragedy in the central Chinese province of Henan in 1942 where many factors had been coming together. The province was under very loose government control, with large parts occupied by the Japanese. Worse, the rains failed to fall and the crop yield was only some 10 to 20 percent of what it had been in previous years. Yet government officials still demanded that the grain tax must be paid in kind (rather than highly devalued paper currency). Famine began to sweep the province. “During our trip,” wrote one government inspector, “starving people were digging up grass roots, taking leaves, and stripping bark from trees.” Although food was available in the nearby provinces, the authorities in those provinces refused to allow it to be sent to Henan. In total, some 2–3 million people died from the famine in 1942–43. The government responded in piecemeal and ineffective ways, censoring the Da gongbao newspaper for reporting on the famine in February 1943, and doing little to deal with the incompetence and corruption that had caused the disaster.
The horrors of the famine in Henan brought the question of social change into sharp relief. But it was the Communists, not the Nationalists, who had produced the most radical vision of a new China. In their principal Shaan-Gan-Ning base area (with its capital at Yan’an), Mao and the other Communist leaders started to fashion a new social order. The region they controlled was poor and land ownership was very unequal (one estimate suggested that 12 percent of the population owned 46 percent of the land). The Communists began a program of rent and tax reduction that would ease the burdens of a high proportion of the population. In 1940, local politics was reformed by the introduction of the “three-thirds” system, in which an assembly was elected one third from the CCP, one third from other leftist elements, and one third from those who were politically neither right nor left. Between 1937 and 1941, the number of CCP members rose from some 40,000 to 763,447 and the combined Communist New Fourth and Eighth Route Armies rose from 92,000 to 440,000 over the same period.
For the first part of the war, relations between the Nationalists and Communists were workable, if not warm. But the tensions between the two sides became ever greater as both sides, with justification, suspected that the other was trying to maximize its position. By the summer of 1940, the Communist armies dominated much of north and central China, and on October 19, He Yingqin, Chiang’s chief of the General Staff, told Zhu De, commander of the Eighth Route Army, that all Communist troops must be north of the Yellow River by the end of January 1941. But at the start of that month, New Fourth Army troops began to move south, not north. Swiftly, Nationalist and Communist troops in the region clashed, ending in a Nationalist victory. However, the military success turned into a public relations nightmare for the Nationalists, convincing many outside observers that Chiang’s regime was more concerned with destroying its internal rivals than with fighting the Japanese.
Meanwhile, the increasing isolation of the Communist base area by the Nationalists led to a hardening of policy in Yan’an. In 1942, Mao began one of the most important movements in the process of creating a disciplined party shaped in his image: the Rectification Movement (zhengfeng). Rectification marked a turn away from the more pluralist politics of the early war years toward one where CCP control was much more dominant, and Mao’s personality came to dominate the Party. Party members and intellectuals who had fled to Yan’an to join the revolution were now told that they had to undergo a process of “thought reform.” Mao spoke in ominous terms in February 1942 when he spoke of “ill winds” that needed to be corrected.
In November 1943, two conferences took place which symbolized two different possibilities for postwar China, one in Tokyo and one in Cairo. On November 5–6, leaders from the countries within the Japanese empire gathered in Tokyo as a symbol of the pan-Asian unity that supposedly underpinned the region. Alongside prime minister Tojo appeared a variety of Asian leaders who had made different sorts of agreements with Asia: the Burmese and Indian nationalists Ba Maw and Subhas Chandra Bose had thrown their lot in with Japan with the hope of eventual freedom from Western imperialism for their countries, whereas in contrast Zhang Jinghui of the client state of Manchukuo had little autonomy. In the line-up stood Wang Jingwei, nervous and silent. For China, Wang’s presence could not really symbolize an alternative path to Chinese nationalism, as he had once hoped, but rather the hollowness of Japanese promises which a naive Wang had believed.
However, the conference gave added impetus to the idea that there was an alternative discourse of Asian nationalism. This gave extra impetus to the conference held at Cairo on November 22–26, 1943. The three leaders of the Allied powers in Asia—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang—met in the Egyptian capital both to make it clear that the Allies contained a genuinely non-Western element, and to determine the shape of postwar Asia. However, unity proved hard to maintain. One major proposal at the conference was for “Operation Buccaneer,” a bold amphibious campaign in which Chinese troops would be involved whose goal would be to seize the Japanese-held Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Chiang expressed his support for this proposal, which was backed by Roosevelt at the conference, although the British were unenthusiastic. There was also little solid discussion of the shape of a postwar Asia, as Roosevelt played off the British prime minister and the Chinese leader against one another. Still, as Chiang flew back, he was aware that his presence at the conference was a major milestone in China’s rise to greater global prominence. But his enthusiasm was short-lived: on December 5 the Western Allies cancelled the plans for Buccaneer, citing the need to maintain their strength for the campaign in Europe.
Yet even while the Nationalist government raised its international profile, the situation at home was deteriorating further. The start of 1944 saw another crisis for the Chinese resistance. The Japanese had made few advances in the previous years, stuck in their existing positions in China while becoming yet more vulnerable to the American assault in the Pacific.
The response of the Japanese high command was operation Ichigo (Number One), devised in January 1944. Among its aims were the destruction of American air bases in central China, and the opening of a railway connection between central China and French Indochina. However, it had a wider purpose overall: the final defeat of Chinese resistance which stood in the way of Japanese domination over China. If the Japanese could neutralize China, they might just be in a position to bring about a negotiated peace with the United States. The result was the largest campaign ever undertaken by the Japanese army: half a million men were mobilized, and a force of 200 bombers.
In spring, the Japanese army struck against central China. The Nationalist armies responded badly. General Tang Enbo, defending the city of Luoyang, proved an incompetent commander; he had shone at Taierzhuang some six years earlier but had been more interested in padding his payroll than maintaining an army capable of resistance to Japan. In the end, he ended up fleeing the combat zone with just a small group of followers. Following the disaster at Luoyang, the Nationalists lost Changsha, and then Hengyang. By mid-August, it looked likely that central China would all fall to the Japanese.
Meanwhile, other Chinese troops were being brought into action, not in central China but hundreds of miles away in the battlefield that had been so disastrous in 1942: Burma. Ever since the Allies had lost the territory, Stilwell had become almost obsessive in his desire to recapture it. Lord Mountbatten, the head of SEAC (Southeast Asia Command), and American chief of staff General Albert Wedemeyer, felt that it was impractical to commit to Burma. However, Allied attention was concentrated on the upcoming campaign in western Europe, which would start with D-Day. There was little will or energy to prevent Stilwell following up his idea of reopening the Burma Road. The Americans pressured Chiang to send some 40,000 troops under General Wei Lihuang to Burma, who would be in addition to the roughly 33,000 Chinese “X Force” soldiers based in India.
The Burma campaign of 1944 bore some resemblance to what had happened in 1942. It was a battle with no quarter given, the Japanese up against the combined forces of the Americans, British, and Chinese. Yet there were significant differences. Many of the Chinese troops sent into the campaign had been better fed and trained thanks to their period in India. Stilwell now headed for the town of Myitkyina, and was soon besieged there. The situation was made worse by Stilwell’s refusal to allow any relief for Frank Merrill’s unit, known as Merrill’s Marauders, who had defended the town with great valor but who were exhausted and fever-ridden. Stilwell refused to allow British troops to retake the town, believing that for PR purposes, it was crucial that the Americans should be seen to have dominated. Yet the result was profoundly different. In 1944, the Japanese were on their back foot, and despite the horrendous casualties, the Allies were advancing. By August 3, the Japanese knew they could defend Burma no longer and began their retreat. The road from Ledo in Assam through Burma to China was opened again, and renamed the “Stilwell Road” by Chiang.
But the naming did not mark a reconciliation between the two. Instead, the growing confrontation between them became much worse. By late 1944, China’s already perilous condition was becoming critical. Inflation was running at unprecedented rates, conscription to the armies was constant and brutal, and corruption and black marketeering was rife. Chiang and Stilwell had very different views on the significance of this. For Chiang, China’s troubles were in large part because the Western allies had failed to support it when the war began and were now immensely grudging in their assistance (less than 1 percent of the total Lend-Lease provisions went to China). In Stilwell’s eyes, the problems all stemmed from what he saw as Nationalist incompetence and corruption, along with reluctance to reform either military or political structures, all presided over by “the Peanut,” as he called Chiang. Chiang’s assessment failed to understand the very real failings in the Nationalist government; Stilwell’s assessment had little understanding of the appalling circumstances in which Chiang’s government had to operate.
By late 1944, Chiang had been put under a great deal of pressure from Roosevelt and George Marshall (Chief of Staff of the US Army). Stilwell argued to Washington that it was Chiang’s reluctance to offer assistance in Burma that had slowed down his campaign there (an argument which failed to acknowledge that Chiang had sent troops to Burma rather than reserve them for use in central China), and that all Chinese troops should be placed under his direct command. Chiang accepted that he would have to place Stilwell in direct command of his armies. But this tentative agreement was then shattered by an action taken on September 19, 1944.
Fearing that Chiang might balk at giving up authority, Roosevelt had a message drafted in his name (Marshall had been responsible for much of the content). It was an uncompromising statement that Chiang must take “drastic action” and give Stilwell command of the armies. Its tone was harsh, rather too much so from one head of state to another. When it arrived, the US ambassador, Patrick Hurley, advised against delivery of the note to Chiang, since its key aim (demanding that Chiang cede command of the armies) had already been achieved. But Stilwell insisted, keen to humiliate Chiang with a note that in the words of his diary, had “a firecracker in every sentence.” Chiang read the note in Chinese translation at the meeting, but gave little sign of a reaction until after Stilwell had left. At that point, however, he made his views clear: he could no longer think of working with the American, who would have to be recalled.
Roosevelt and Marshall were extremely unhappy at Chiang’s decision that Stilwell must go, arguing to Chiang that they would rather not maintain any American command structure in China at all, but recognized the importance of keeping the Hump route open. They were adamant that Stilwell must stay, but Ambassador Hurley, as he forwarded Chiang’s reply, was blunt: Stilwell and Chiang were “incompatible” and Washington would have to choose between them. On October 19, the decision was made: Stilwell was recalled. After a brief ceremony in which both sides mouthed polite words, Stilwell left China for ever on October 24. His legacy would last for decades, however. Stilwell’s account of his time in China, aided by allies in the press such as the journalist Theodore White, would paint a picture of Nationalist China as purely a corrupt, incompetent, and brutal state. It was indeed all of those things; but the idea that it had also, somehow, managed to resist Japan’s attack when almost all of the rest of Asia had fallen, never emerged in this version of history either.
In the short term, however, Stilwell’s departure did relieve pressure as he was replaced by Albert Wedemeyer, a more emollient figure. In addition, the imminent collapse of central China seemed suddenly less likely as the Japanese thrust petered out at the end of 1944. Yet the campaign had cost some 750,000 Nationalist casualties (as opposed to just 23,000 on the Japanese side), wounding the Chinese regime even more seriously.
However, it was not the Japanese but Chiang’s former foes turned allies turned enemies once more, the Communists, who now posed a threat. American intelligence rightly feared that the fragile state of the Nationalist government might lead to its collapse, and sought other partners who might be able to continue the war. For many diplomats and military figures, the Chinese Communists seemed possible partners. Yet little was known about them.
So some of the more adventurous of the American foreign policy officers decided to find out more. The young diplomat John S. Service and Colonel David Barrett were tasked with visiting the Communist area of control, in a visit that became known as the “Dixie Mission,” an analogy with expeditions behind enemy lines during the American Civil War. On July 22, 1944, the United States Army Observation Group landed on the yellow loess soil at Yan’an, to be greeted by Mao Zedong and Zhu De. Service reported on the Communist area in highly positive terms: “Mao and the other leaders are spoken of with respect,” he wrote, “but these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking.” Service noted many other things that provided a contrast between Chongqing and Yan’an: fewer beggars, simpler clothes, and a sense of political purpose that manifested itself in forms such as peasant folk art. Service and his group saw little of the political repression that was also a defining characteristic of Yan’an.
The motivation for the trip was to see whether the CCP might prove a useful alternative partner for the Allies in the final phase of the war in Asia, which would involve using the Chinese mainland as a part of the base for the final assault on Japan. Service was clearly impressed by what he saw, although he was cautious about suggestions from Communist leaders that the United States should make formal gestures such as the opening of a consulate at Yan’an. Certainly the growth in Communist power was impressive: by 1945, the Party had over a million members, along with some 900,000 regular troops, and a similar number ranged in militias. At that point, however, it was not clear how long the war in Asia would last, and therefore both the Americans and the CCP were trying to hold as many options open as possible in the face of a possible Nationalist collapse.
But the situation in China changed significantly in late 1944 and early 1945. First, the Japanese Ichigo assault came to a sudden halt. Southwest China and Chongqing itself, which had looked vulnerable, were no longer under immediate threat. Then in April, President Roosevelt died. His successor, Harry S. Truman, was thrust into the presidency and faced with a barrage of political problems. Meanwhile, Clarence Gauss, the American ambassador to China, had left in late 1944 and was replaced by Patrick J. Hurley. Hurley was much more favorable to Chiang than Gauss had been, but this new warmth had its own dangers: he was inexperienced and unable to see that Chiang needed to find a flexible response to the Communists. He started well, traveling to Yan’an to try and find a workable formula for a compromise between the Nationalists and the Communists, which involved the Communists entering a coalition government while retaining their own forces. However, when Hurley returned to Chongqing, Chiang turned the idea down flat, insisting that the Communists had to give up their armies first. Mao was scornful of the idea and the prospects of Nationalist–Communist collaboration dimmed further. Service felt that it was important to place greater pressure on Chiang, and to point out that the most important thing was to arm anti-Japanese forces. Hurley, in contrast, felt that it was important to shore up Chiang’s position in the face of his enemies. However, both American viewpoints missed an important reality: in the end, neither Chinese party was sincere about a coalition government. Both were preparing for a war in which only one party could emerge victorious.
The wretched state of China was relieved in part by a remarkable new international organization, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the office of which opened in Chongqing in November 1944 under its American director, Benjamin H. Kizer. UNRRA had been set up to deal with the devastation caused by the war in Europe and Asia, and provided much-needed relief in places where the infrastructure of health and hygiene provision had been destroyed. In just one province, Henan, UNRRA calculated that some 70 percent of the population were in dire need, that there were some 130,000 cases of malaria, and over 2 million people in danger of starvation.
Yet still this broken state was supposed to maintain itself for continued warfare that might last another year or more. However, in the end the question of whether the Nationalist government or the Japanese army would fall first was not put to the test. On August 9, Soviet troops started to move into Manchuria. On August 6 and 9, respectively, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Within days, Japan’s government had surrendered.
The Civil War
After eight years of war, the desperate desire of most Chinese was for peace. Hopeful signs appeared when Mao Zedong visited Chongqing for direct talks with Chiang in August of 1945 (accompanied by Patrick Hurley). However, the talks swiftly broke down. Both sides showed that there was little appetite for compromise.
The Communists began to gather in Manchuria, but even in early 1946, they did not make moves into the rest of China. The region was essentially under Soviet occupation, and Stalin made it clear at that point that he would respect the agreement that he had signed with the Nationalist government, which assured Chiang of Soviet support for his government’s sovereignty in return for Soviet control of much of Manchuria. Truman made it clear that he would not deploy American troops to fight for the Nationalist government although it received considerable US financial support. He also sent a highly prestigious negotiator, George C. Marshall, to China to try and negotiate a compromise.
Marshall tried hard but the prospects of an agreement faded fast. The CCP refused to give up their autonomy in favor of an ill-defined Nationalist command structure, whereas the Nationalists would not engage with the Communists unless they gave up their arms. In January 1947, Marshall returned to the United States, exhausted and convinced that an agreement was impossible.
Although Chinese society was breaking down, ironically China was, in international terms, more secure than it had been for a century. As a result of its efforts on the Allied side during the war, China had been made one of the five permanent members of the new Security Council of the United Nations. It also had wide standing as the only major sovereign non-Western country with a global role (Japan was now under American occupation and India was not yet independent).
Yet by this time, the whole of China had erupted into civil war, shaped by the breakdown of China’s social conditions. The Nationalist government, on return to the capital at Nanjing in 1946, seemed determined to alienate as many sectors of society as possible. Those who had been left behind under Japanese occupation were frequently accused of collaboration with the enemy, in a ploy that allowed many Nationalist supporters to seize money or property that had supposedly been gained in trafficking with the enemy. The fact that the Nationalist government had abandoned the residents of eastern China in the first place was not discussed. Human rights abuses were commonplace, as enemies of the regime were targeted for arrest or assassination. In 1946, for example, the poet Wen Yiduo was gunned down by Nationalist agents after condemning the government’s record on freedom for intellectuals. Furthermore, China’s financial situation became yet more wretched: inflation grew as the government printed money, and by 1948, sums of millions of Chinese yuan were worthless, with the personal savings of millions of Chinese wiped out. If the Shanghai cost of living index was 100 in May 1947, by July 1948 it had risen to 5,863.
Meanwhile, the military situation became yet more disastrous. Chiang was fatally over-confident, believing that sheer numbers of troops could outweigh the better training of the Communist armies. The Nationalists overstretched themselves by trying to recapture the northeast, only to find themselves pushed back further into north and central China. By May 1948, the major cities of Shenyang (Mukden) and Changchun, although still in Nationalist hands, were surrounded by Communist troops in the countryside. Chiang ignored the suggestions of his American advisers that he should pull back from the region, and found himself throwing more and more troops into an unwinnable battle. By the middle of 1948, the Communists had turned from guerrilla warfare to set-piece battles, and late in the year, in a mighty campaign, took the major eastern railway junction city of Xuzhou (also a target for the Japanese in 1938). By the end of January 1949, Beiping had also fallen to the Communist armies; Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Shanghai all followed in the spring.
Chiang Kai-shek realized that the mainland was lost. He now retreated to Taiwan, the former Japanese colony that had only returned to Chinese rule in 1945. Here he planned to regroup for an eventual recapture of the mainland.
Here he planned to regroup for an eventual recapture of China. In fact, he would never again set foot on the mainland’s territory again. Meanwhile, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. A new era for the Chinese people had begun.
Governance of the People’s Republic of China Administrative districts