Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2 page)

The May 4 bombing had used fewer planes than the previous day’s raid, but the attackers’ targets were wider and their aim even more deadly. On May 3, 673 deaths were recorded, and 1,608 houses destroyed. On May 4, 3,318 people were killed, and 3,803 houses destroyed. 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).
⁴
The air-raid signals became part of everyday life in the wartime capital. One man who spent his childhood in Chongqing recalled decades later: “The whole of my life, I have remembered the sound of the air-raid sirens howling in my ears; the whole of my life, I have retained the memory of the red air-raid warning balls hoisted above the Meifeng Bank building.”
⁵

Sitting high above the city in his hilltop retreat at Huangshan was one man who had particular reason to be alarmed by the arrival of death and destruction in the city. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s wartime leader and head of the Nationalist Party, wrote in his diary on the evening of May 3 that “More than forty enemy planes came to Chongqing today and bombed the area around the Military Affairs Commission building. A lot of people in the city have been killed and wounded.” The next day he displayed more emotion: “The enemy planes came [again] this evening to bomb Chongqing, and it’s still burning. This is the most terrible thing I’ve seen in my life. I can’t bear to look at it. God lives—why does he not swiftly bring some disaster to our enemy?”
⁶

Yet some Chinese saw hope among the ashes. The great Chinese novelist Lao She had also been in Chongqing during the raids. He resided, along with various other cultural figures who refused to live under the Japanese occupation, in the suburb of Beibei. From there, he had a clear view of the fires’ red glow in the city center. Lao She recognized the symbolism in the date of the raid. For his generation of writers and artists, the date “May Fourth” had a particular, highly meaningful resonance. On May 4, 1919, a student demonstration against imperialism had broken out in central Beijing, becoming symbolic of a wider current of freethinking. This new strain of thought envisioned a Chinese culture based on “science and democracy,” those twin beacons that would rescue China from its political weakness. And no educated Chinese would have missed the significance of the terror raids on Chongqing on May 4, 1939, exactly twenty years after the legendary protest. Lao She declared:

If we are to seize . . . a free, liberated “May Fourth,” we cannot accept the threats of fire and blood. We must seize with our whole hearts the new life of our great China! Our lives, our struggle, our victory, this is our new “May Fourth” slogan!
⁷

Most Westerners have scarcely heard of the bombing of Chongqing. Even for the Chinese themselves, the events were concealed for decades. Yet they are part of one of the great stories of the Second World War, and perhaps the least known. For decades, our understanding of that global conflict has failed to give a proper account of the role of China. If China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor in a war where the United States, Soviet Union, and Britain played much more significant roles. Yet China was the first country to face the onslaught of the Axis Powers in 1937, two years before Britain and France, and four years before the United States. And after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), one American goal was to “keep China in the war.” By holding down large numbers of Japanese troops on the mainland, China was an important part of the overall Allied strategy. China had much less ability to make its own decisions than the other Allies because it was so much weaker than they, both economically and politically. Yet the war still marked a vital step in China’s progression from semi-colonized victim of global imperialism to its entry, however tentative, on the world stage as a sovereign power with wider regional and global responsibilities.

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.

In recent years the sheer scale of the war in China has become apparent. What began on July 7, 1937, as an unplanned local conflict between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing, known as the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” escalated into an all-out war between the two great nations of East Asia; it would not end until August 1945. In the eight intervening years China’s Nationalist government was forced into internal exile, along with millions of refugees. Huge tracts of the country were occupied by the Japanese, who sponsored collaborators to create new forms of government aimed at destroying the authority of the Nationalists. In other parts of the country, the Chinese Communist Party grew in influence, burnishing its credentials through resistance to the Japanese, and vastly increasing its territorial base through policies of radical social reform. 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 greater part of China’s hard-won modernization was destroyed, including most of the rail network, sealed highways, and industrial plants created in the first decades of the twentieth century: 30 percent of the infrastructure in the rich Pearl River delta near Canton, 52 percent in Shanghai, and a staggering 80 percent in the capital, Nanjing.
⁹
The war would undo two empires in China (the British and the Japanese) and help to create two more (the American and the Soviet). The narrative of the war is the story of a people in torment: from the Nanjing Massacre (widely known as the Rape of Nanking, December 1937–January 1938), when Japanese troops murdered and looted in the captured Chinese capital, to the blasting of dikes on the Yellow River in June 1938, which bought time for the Chinese Army but at a terrible price for hundreds of thousands of compatriots.

At the same time, China’s war is also a story of heroic resistance against massive odds, of a regime and a people who managed, despite everything, to pull off victory against the enemy in a “war of resistance to the end,” proving wrong the journalists and diplomats who predicted, over and over again, that China could not possibly survive. For over four years, until Pearl Harbor, China fought the Japanese practically alone. During this time a poor and underdeveloped country held down some 800,000 troops from one of the most highly militarized and technologically advanced societies in the world.
¹⁰
For another four years after that, the success of the Allies in fighting on two fronts at once, in Europe and Asia, was posited in significant part on making sure that China stayed in the war.

The war was also a turning point for three men, each of whom had his own vision for the future of China. During the war, all eyes, whether admiring or critical, were on Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang or Guomindang) Party. At the outbreak of war in 1937, almost everyone, even Chiang’s Communist enemies, acknowledged that he was the only figure who could represent all of China in its resistance to Japan. Chiang dreamed that the war might be a cleansing fire: China would rise from the ashes and become a sovereign, prosperous nation, able to take a leading role in the postwar order in Asia and the world beyond.

In the end, Chiang won the war, but lost his country. For Chiang’s great rival, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the war against Japan was the making of a leader. When the war broke out, he was the head of a small party on the run that had been forced into a hideout in the dusty hill country of northwest China. By the end of the war, he would control vast areas of China with its population of some 100 million people, as well as an independent army of nearly a million men.
¹¹

In contrast, the war was the unmaking of a man whose name is little remembered outside the ranks of China historians: Wang Jingwei. Wang’s story is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history. He was a more prominent nationalist and revolutionary in his youth than either Mao or Chiang, and served as second in command to the legendary revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen. But during the war against Japan, Wang authored a decision that would condemn him, to this day, as “a traitor for a thousand generations” against the Chinese people. These three men—Chiang, Mao, and Wang—would use the war to propose and debate, often with great violence, their visions of what a modern, free China should be. The war forced them to take sides and exposed the fundamental disagreements among them that would eventually lead to the victory of Mao Zedong.

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. The war’s legacy is all over China today, if you know where to look. In Nanjing, a huge combined museum and memorial commemorates the occupying Japanese army’s massacre of many thousands of Chinese civilians in December 1937. In Chongqing, visitors are now welcomed into the house once occupied by “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American chief of staff whose tempestuous relationship with Chiang Kai-shek would shape US-China relations for decades to come. On television, documentaries remind viewers of the record of the Communist Eighth Route Army and its resistance against Japan in north China, and soap operas with a wartime setting tell the stories both of the Nationalist army and of the Communist.

But the legacy of the war is also powerful in less tangible forms. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that continues to rule more than seventy years after Mao’s victory in 1949 gained strength and then power precisely because the war against Japan had weakened and divided China. In today’s international society, as China seeks to portray itself as a “responsible great power,” the country’s analysts and diplomats recall the days when China fought alongside the US, Russia, and Britain as one of the Allies. They draw a powerful parallel between a time when China cooperated against the forces of reaction, and the present day, when China wishes to portray itself as an integral and positive part of a new order. 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.

China’s most fraught international relationship is still with Japan, and the war remains central to the present friction between them. Even for generations born many years after 1945, Chinese nationalist pride is shaped by anger at Japan’s invasion of their country. In the 1990s the journalist Fang Jun, then only in his forties, made a personal journey of discovery to Japan to interview veterans of the war against China. “When [our motherland] was not rich and strong,” he concluded, “we lost the Northeast [Manchuria] . . . we retreated from Shanghai, and the blood flowed in Nanjing.”
¹²
Japan’s wartime record in China is still capable of engendering deep emotions.

In recent years Chinese youths have continued to express anger at Japan: many of them feel that the country has never apologized fully for its actions in China during the war. Anti-Japanese resentment can flare up suddenly, and seemingly without immediate cause. A news report in 2003 detailed an “orgy” organized in a northeastern Chinese city by Japanese businessmen hiring Chinese sex workers. The incident led to riots in the streets because the date of the salacious events was September 18, the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of China’s Manchuria region in 1931. In 2005 rioters, including educated college youths, surrounded the Japanese consulate in Shanghai and threw missiles, including glass bottles, at the building. They were protesting Japan’s attempt to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but the subtext of this rage was a six-decades-old hatred, the legacy of Japan’s war against China. In the summer of 2012 disagreements over disputed islands (known as the Diaoyutai to the Chinese, and Senkaku to the Japanese) in the East China Sea flared up into anti-Japanese demonstrations in numerous Chinese cities. Nor does this anger only affect Chinese-Japanese relations. Through the US-Japan Security Alliance, the United States has maintained a powerful position in the Asia-Pacific ever since the Second World War, shielding Japan under its defense umbrella. Continuing Chinese anger at these arrangements stems in large part from the sense that China, not the US, should be the major power in the region today. But the historical basis of that anger comes from the shared memory of Japan’s role in the region during an era when China was weak and vulnerable.