China For the fighting in China, see
Chiang Kai-Shek,
China–Burma–India theatre, and
China incident.
1. Introduction
The
China incident, or Sino-Japanese war, which began with a minor skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking on 7 July 1937, was the true beginning of the Second World War. It merged with the global struggle after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and led to fundamental change within China and in East Asia: the destruction of the Japanese empire, the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and the flight of
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists to Taiwan, deep involvement of the USA in Asia, and the re-emergence of the USSR as a major force on the Pacific rim. After Pearl Harbor, as the
Pacific war unfolded, the USA came to play an increasingly important role in Chinese affairs, both directly and indirectly. British and Commonwealth forces were also heavily engaged in this phase of the struggle, particularly in the
China–Burma–India theatre of operations. Finally, at the very end of the war, the USSR belatedly entered the war against the Japanese, stripped
Manchukuo (Manchuria) of its industrial base, and signed favourable treaties with China.
China's struggle with Japan and its participation in the Second World War was not, in fact, a single war but several conflicts nested one within the other like the intricately carved ivory spheres found in a Chinese antique shop. Until Pearl Harbor, the most encompassing sphere was war between China and Japan. But within this overarching conflict, two Chinas fought against Japan, not just one: the Chinese Nationalists or Kuomintang (KMT)—the official party-government of China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek—and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) symbolized by
Mao Tse-tung. Although the two parties were nominally allied in a united front against Japan, the CCP in fact headed a state within a state: it ruled its own territory, commanded its own military forces, and determined its own policies.
The next inner sphere, indeed, was the struggle between the nationalists and the communists, as each sought to increase its legitimacy, influence, and territorial control at the expense of the other. This struggle began in the 1920s and is best known by the Long March of 1934–5 where communist survivors of an of fensive by Chiang's forces retreated 9,600 km. (6,000 mi.) to the remote inland province of Shensi. By 1939 political rivalry was increasingly giving way to armed conflict at the local level, but because of the containing effect of the war between China and Japan, neither party dared initiate an open rupture, and so this incipient civil war remained congealed until after Japan's defeat.
Sometimes neglected because masked by other layers of conflict were the several Chinese regimes organized by the Japanese, and the puppet armies they put into the field against both the nationalists and the communists. The most significant of these collaborators—the Chinese equivalent of
Quisling or
Laval—was
Wang Ching-wei, a former colleague and bitter rival of Chiang Kai-shek who went over to the Japanese side in late 1938 (see also
collaboration). These forces were more numerous than effective, and they often changed sides as the fortunes of war and self-interest dictated. But when compelled by Japanese superiors, when they saw easy opportunities for expansion, or when they were cornered, the puppet armies were not a negligible force. At the most local level, puppets, bandits, secret societies, and local self-defence forces formed a shifting kaleidoscope of violence and counter-violence. Nationalists, communists, and Japanese variously sought their allegiance, their neutrality, or their destruction.
Finally, on 7 December 1941, an even larger sphere came to surround all of these struggles. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the China Incident became a part of the Pacific war and merged fully with the global struggle of the Second World War. This changed the complex dynamics of all the conflicts contained within it, and injected the USA deeply into China and Chinese politics.
During the Second World War, the USA became heavily involved in China, first by assisting its efforts to survive and continue resistance against Japan, second by measures designed to make China politically a member of the
Grand Alliance and militarily a more effective combatant, and third by seeking to mediate the increasingly threatening tension between the nationalists and the communists, as a precondition to China's intended role in post-war East Asia.
At the outbreak of the China Incident in July 1937, the USA was still isolationist in outlook. Although the public felt sympathy for China, few believed that US national interests were at stake or that morality required direct action. Following the beginning of the European war in September 1939, although US government and popular attitudes became more internationalist and global, it was not until the spring and summer of 1941 that the USA took more positive steps: military pilots were permitted to join the newly-organized
American Volunteer Group, a military mission was sent to China, which was declared eligible for
Lend-Lease assistance, and the US began training Chinese pilots at a base in Arizona.
Even before the formal US entry into the Second World War, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that top priority had to be the survival of the UK and the war in Europe, with Asia and the Pacific area taking a back seat (see
ABC-1 Plan). Within Asia itself, China and the China–Burma–India theatre came to take second place to the trans-Pacific,
island-hopping strategy that had proved successful by late 1943. China's strategic significance therefore dwindled, a trend exacerbated by the increasingly passive and often inept performance of the Chinese nationalists. China remained important as an arena in which about one million Japanese troops were tied down and as a symbol of what the USA hoped would be the centre of a friendly, free, and democratic East Asia.
2. Domestic life and war effort
In 1937, on the eve of war with Japan, China was the most populous nation on earth—an estimated 480 million of which about 85% lived in rural areas (see Map 20), most as peasants. By contrast, in the great coastal and riverine cities—Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking, Hankow, Canton—some of the elements of modern nationhood were taking shape. There, too, was over 80% of China's modern industry (an industrial census enumerated about 4,000 factories in China; although some were large, modern plants, many others were hardly more than workshops). Foreigners were also mainly concentrated there, in what were known as the ‘treaty ports’. There were more than two dozen of these major coastal or riverine commercial and industrial cities where Europeans, Americans, and Japanese had been granted special privileges under a whole series of treaties, agreements, and protocols known collectively as ‘the unequal treaties’, which had been imposed upon China by superior force, mainly in the 19th century. The largest of these treaty ports was Shanghai, followed in importance by Tienstin, Canton, and Hankow.
Beyond the littoral, with its veneer of modernity, lay the hinterland, hardly touched by the 20th century. Overall, China was an extremely backward nation. In 1937, the rail network in all of China proper totalled only about 12,000 km. (7,500 mi.) less than that of the state of Illinois, or Japan's 20,000 km. (12,500 mi.). Gross domestic product in 1933—a depression year, but the only year for which detailed estimates have been made—totalled about US$9 billion, compared with US$40 billion in the USA, with one-quarter the population. Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931, thus depriving China of nearly one-third of its industry and a fifth of its foreign trade. Literacy was perhaps 20%; only about 550,000 students were enrolled, nationwide, in secondary education; fewer than 20,000 attended the 30 or so universities and colleges throughout China.
Among those Chinese aware of the rising tension with Japan, the outbreak of war, however fateful, was greeted initially with a kind of relief and enthusiasm. Yet life in China during eight years of war was a cruel overlay upon the ordinary harshness experienced by most people in China most of the time.
There were, of course, the normal horrors of war: combat, bombings, armies of occupation, economic dislocation, blockade, and so forth. But there was more. As the nationalists retreated westwards, they sought to deny to the Japanese the fruits of victory by carrying out a
scorched-earth policy.
Beginning with the attack on Shanghai in August 1937 and symbolized above all by the ‘rape of Nanking’ in December, the Japanese pioneered the strategy of war against a civilian populace that came to be used by all nations in the Second World War. They initially visited these inhumanities mostly upon the cities of central China, where the nationalists were strongest, in the hope of terrorizing the populace into submission and of forcing Chiang Kai-shek's government to accept a dictated settlement. But in less spectacular ways the Japanese sought, throughout the war, to coerce Chinese civilians living in their zone of occupation or operations into acquiescence, obedience, and divorce from the forces of resistance. In areas their ground forces could not reach, the Japanese used the powerful new weapon of
air power, as in the sustained saturation bombing of Chungking throughout much of 1939 and 1940.
Against guerrilla forces, particularly communist-led guerrillas who often blended into the peasant population, the Japanese carried on ruthless campaigns until, late in the war, they could no longer sustain such operations. During 1940, these operations were of two sorts. The first, rapid search-and-destroy forays into communist-controlled bases, sought unsuccessfully to engage communist forces and eliminate their headquarters. The second were ‘cage-and-silkworm’ tactics, designed to deprive the communists of their vaunted mobility by containing them within ‘cages’ of which the major transportation routes were the bars, then to nibble inwards from these perimeters, like silkworms consuming a mulberry leaf. These latter tactics threatened the communist bases in northern China with slow strangulation, and in August 1940 the Eighth Route Army, commanded by P'eng Te-huai, undertook a major campaign to break the bars of these cages, the so-called ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive’. Initially successful, the campaign called forth a brutal Japanese response and a change of tactics. From late 1940 to 1943, the Japanese carried on mopping-up campaigns which no longer sought to distinguish civilians from guerrillas. These operations were often known, on both sides, as ‘three-all’ campaigns: kill all, burn all, loot all.
In Japanese-occupied areas, above all in the major cities of eastern China from Peking south to Canton, the occupiers enforced a host of onerous and humiliating requirements upon the subject population, including bowing to Japanese soldiers when passing them in the street.
The outbreak of war set off massive migrations, often involving enormous hardship, away from areas being overrun by Japanese armies. Calls went out to transport whole schools and factories—machinery and all—to the interior, and if these attempts failed to create viable war industries, such heroic efforts were inspiring none the less. In one of the great movements of modern times, an estimated 12 million people made their way westwards into the fertile but backward provinces of western China (called ‘Free China’ or ‘The Great Rear Area’), areas least touched by the 20th century and a central government. This migration included some 450 factories and 12,000 technicians.
While most of the evacuations followed the nationalist government, a smaller but significant movement took place into the communist-controlled areas in the barren reaches of north-western China. This stream included some of the most articulate and radical of China's student leaders and young intellectuals.
China, 2, Table 1: Value of note issue in terms of pre-war prices, 1937–45 (amount and value in millions of yuan)
End of the period | Amount of note issue of government banks | Average price index | Value of issue in terms of pre-war notes |
|---|
Source: Fairbank, J. K. and Feuerweker, A. (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Vol.13, Part 2 (Cambridge, 1986). |
1937, July | 1,455 | 1.04 | 1,390 |
1938 | 2,305 | 1.76 | 1,310 |
1939 | 4,287 | 3.23 | 1,325 |
1940 | 7,867 | 7.24 | 1,085 |
1941 | 15,133 | 19.77 | 765 |
1942 | 34,360 | 66.2 | 520 |
1943 | 75,379 | 228 | 330 |
1944 | 189,461 | 755 | 250 |
1945, August | 556,907 | 2,647 | 210 |
1945, December | 1,031,932 | 2,491 | 415 |
Despite the size of these migrations, much larger numbers, of course, remained behind and made the best of their lives under Japanese occupation. As in the occupied zones of Europe and the USSR, there was extensive collaboration—voluntary or compelled—with the invaders. In these areas, where open shows of defiance were ruthlessly punished, resistance had a meaning different from that in nationalist- or communist-controlled regions.
And everywhere in China, for tens of millions of peasants, life went on as it had for generations past memory, except that now and then occasional new threats of disaster were added to the familiar perils of drought, flood, insects, the tax collector, and uniformed or ragtag groups of predators foraging through the countryside. A disastrous famine in Honan province during the summer of 1943, caused partly by drought, partly by the inexorable grain requisitions of the provincial government and nationalist army, and partly by corruption and inattention regarding relief measures, took hundreds of thousands of lives. So enraged and desperate were the Honan peasants that they turned on their own army, disarming and shooting many nationalist soldiers.
Although the outbreak of war at first released much patriotic and selfless energy, the long years of war took an increasing toll on the population of China at all levels. In a seemingly endless struggle, fatigue, war weariness, and self-interest became more and more evident. Corruption, incompetence, personal evasion of the burdens of war, and individual enrichment were not limited to the areas of nationalist rule, but they were more prevalent and visible there than in the communist areas.
With the retreat to the interior and with most imports and industrial production lost, both revenues and supplies were drastically reduced. The Chinese government resorted more and more frequently to the printing press in order to finance its war effort. As a result, both the nationalists and the communists experienced the beginnings of a severe inflation (see Table 1). By 1940 in nationalist-controlled regions, prices were doubling every year; between January and August 1945 alone, prices rose by 250%. Real income of the professional classes had sunk by 1944 to 10% of pre-war levels. Workers were affected also (about 50%); farmers and rural workers, who could rely on subsistence and who benefited from rising prices, maintained about 90% of their pre-war income, meagre though it was for most of them.
Sharp inflation also occurred in the communist-controlled zones, but its effects were mitigated by extensive reliance on a subsistence economy and a commodity exchange system whereby salaries, taxes, and so on were provided in kind. Cash was used mainly for incidentals and non-essentials, when available.
Economic distress was felt in the Japanese-occupied areas, too, particularly in the cities; as in other areas of China, peasants suffered a smaller proportional decline from their already low pre-war standards than did city dwellers. Although the Japanese sought to control supplies and prices, their efforts were only partially successful and black markets flourished in nearly all commodities, from basic foodstuffs to lavish luxury goods. But at the same time, the Japanese and the collaborationist regimes sought to rebuild the economic infrastructure and productive capacity of the areas they controlled, if only the better to exploit them. By 1943 or so, much of this capacity had been restored in both central and north China. The railway network had actually been improved over its pre-1937 condition.
3. Government
Government in wartime China fell into the same untidy three-way division that characterized the country during the Second World War: the National government, the collaborationist or puppet regimes organized by Japanese forces, and the areas ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
(a) National government
The National government, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, was the internationally recognized government of China. Located in Nanking at the outbreak of war in 1937, it was soon forced to move 650 km. (400 mi.) up the Yangtze to Hankow. As Japanese forces threatened Hankow—it fell in October 1938—the seat of government was again moved, this time 965 km. (600 mi.) further west to Chungking, well-protected by mountains and behind the formidable Three Gorges of the Yangtze river. The National government was organized on lines laid down by Sun Yat-sen, before his death in 1925. In theory and in practice, this regime was a one-party government. With Sun Yat-sen's approval, the party, the Kuomintang (KMT), had been organized along centralist and Leninist principles by advisers of the Communist International (see
Comintern) during the early 1920s. According to Sun's doctrine, one-party rule would continue until the Chinese people were educated for democracy, at which time constitutional rule would be established, by mechanisms not clearly specified.
Also according to Sun's theory, the National government comprised five major branches, or Yuan: executive, legislative, judicial, control, and examination. Of the five branches, the Executive Yuan was overwhelmingly the most powerful, and was directly controlled by the Central Executive Committee of the KMT, which was to its political party what the Politburo was to the communist parties, a small inner group of influential figures under the dominance of the authoritarian leader. The powers of the Legislative and Judicial Yuan were narrowly circumscribed and often ignored.
The Nationalist Party, or KMT, was designed to be both hierarchical and authoritarian. Centralism took priority over democracy; institutionalized linkages with all segments of the Chinese population were weak; and supreme leadership was incarnated in the person of Chiang Kai-shek. Factional politics were rampant, there were many parallel organizations and bodies—one under the government, one under the party—and, despite his position of authority, Chiang had constantly to manipulate various interest groups within government, party, and army. Factions were to some extent encouraged by Chiang, who could thus weaken all potential rivals and prevent any coalition from challenging him. In his exercise of power, and particularly in his handling of international relations, he was powerfully assisted by his American-educated wife,
Madam Chiang, by his brother-in-law
T. V. Soong, and by other prominent members of the Soong family. Finally, although Chiang Kai-shek headed both party and government, the true source of his power lay in his control over the military apparatus (see below).
When the National government was driven westwards, it lost those regions of China over which its rule had been most secure and where its economy, by Chinese standards, was most highly developed—the provinces of central and eastern China centred on the lower Yangtze river and Shanghai. In these areas, the nationalists were able to maintain some forces behind Japanese lines, but no functioning government. In the rest of ‘Free China’, the National government had only shallow roots and often had to make compromising adaptations to the local power structure: petty warlords, heads of semi-secret societies, landlords, influential merchants. This was true even in the agriculturally rich but economically and socially backward Szechwan province.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the National government formed an advisory body called the People's Political Council (PPC), composed of 200 members, including representatives of the Chinese Communist Party, leaders of small splinter parties, and prominent non-party public figures. The PPC served as a sounding-board for a fairly wide spectrum of public opinion, some of it critical of the National government and the KMT. As this tone became more strident during the early 1940s, the National government convened the PPC less and less often, and increasingly circumscribed its agenda. And, of course, as an advisory body, the PPC had no executive or legislative authority.
A number of these small splinter parties and public figures began to form an independent coalition in 1939. At first this coalition tried to buffer relations between the KMT and CCP, which were now coming into frequent and sometimes bloody conflict. This role continued during the following years, but also broadened to form a so-called ‘Third Force’, which in hopeful moments imagined that it might become influential on the Chinese political scene. In 1944 the group formed itself into the Chinese Democratic League. But the coalition was never solid, its tiny parties lacked broad public constituencies, it had (and desired) no access to military power, and it was frequently harassed by the KMT. Meanwhile, the communists were content to let the Democratic League voice its criticisms of the National government and thus help to discredit it. The hopes of the more optimistic members of the Democratic League, shared by some US observers including
General Marshall, were thus quite unrealistic.
(b) Japanese rule and Japanese-sponsored governments
During the war, tens of millions of Chinese lived, at one time or another, under Japanese control. Most prominently, this included all those in the great cities of China's eastern seaboard, from Peking south to Canton and in such inland cities as Nanking and Hankow.
Japanese rule in China was founded on the coercive power of its armed forces, exercised through various civil affairs sections and branches. In large cities and along corridors containing major rail lines, this often involved direct rule by military authorities, but in the hinterland a Japanese governing presence was much more superficial and incomplete. One important part of their efforts was to compel existing municipal and local administrations to keep functioning under their authority, meanwhile appointing collaborators and weeding out resisters. The Japanese also made use of traditional Chinese forms of collective security, in which designated groups of Chinese citizens were sternly held responsible for assigned tasks and for the behaviour of each member of the group. In their efforts to exploit the Chinese economy for coal, cotton, foodstuffs, and other resources, the Japanese established or licensed semi-official trading companies to manage commerce in these and other commodities.
The Japanese efforts to set up collaborationist governments were undertaken by the major military commands: by the
Kwantung Army, which had long had responsibility for Manchukuo (Manchuria) and Inner Mongolia; by the North China Area Army (NCAA); and by the Central China Expeditionary Army (CCEA). These commands worked separately and sometimes in rivalry with one another, and the Chinese puppet governments they sponsored reflected these same traits.
In addition to the puppet government of Manchukuo, which had been in existence since 1932, both the NCAA and the CCEA sought to establish Chinese governments. The NCAA's entry, established in December 1937, was called ‘The Provisional government of the Republic of China’, and was headed by a little-known and lightly regarded banker and fiscal bureaucrat named Wang K'o-min. This government, staffed by conservative or opportunistic nonentities, lacked legitimacy not only in the eyes of the Chinese, but also in the eyes of its Japanese sponsors.
The CCEA meanwhile inaugurated the ‘Reformed government of the Republic of China’ in March 1938, seated in Nanking, China's pre-war capital. At first much inferior to its northern counterpart, it became more important when the Japanese induced Wang Ching-wei to defect in December 1938. Unlike his northern counterpart, Wang was a well-known political figure. An associate of Sun Yat-sen with longer credentials than Chiang Kai-shek, Wang had sometimes been his uneasy colleague but more often his unsuccessful rival. In the 1930s he became increasingly pro-Japanese, believing that a Sino-Japanese accommodation was necessary to peace, stability, and elimination of the Chinese communists. Wang's dramatic departure from Chungking rocked Chinese opinion.
After more than a year of unpleasant negotiations with the Japanese authorities, the Reformed government was overhauled and Wang became its president. As in the north, the CCEA faced the contradiction between its desire to form an effective pro-Japanese government and its compulsion to exercise direct control. It resolved this contradiction by the fiction of the former and the fact of the latter. Though proclaiming the opposite, the Japanese viewed their Chinese collaborators with contempt and mistrust, and were unwilling to allow them the independence and authority that might have gained them some legitimacy in China. Further compromising the puppet governments were sporadic Japanese efforts, at least throughout 1940, to seek a deal directly with Chiang Kai-shek.
These Japanese-sponsored regimes therefore never took root in China. Like their French and Norwegian counterparts, they were largely discredited from the start, but they nevertheless commanded some resources, exercised some delegated authority, and became a symbol of betrayal.
(c) Chinese Communist government
The territories governed by the Chinese Communist Party constituted an
imperium in imperio. One part of that imperium lay within the territory nominally controlled by the KMT government; the remainder was created behind Japanese lines during the course of the war. The CCP grew rapidly during these years, as shown in Table 2; expansion was most rapid from 1937 to 1940, then levelled off until a second spurt in 1944 and 1945.
China, 3, Table 2: Wartime expansion of the Chinese Communist Chinese Communist Party
Source: Fairbank and Feuerweker. |
1937 | 40,000 |
1940 | 800,000 |
1941 | 763,447 |
1942 | 736,151 |
1944 | 853,420 |
1945 (Seventh Congress) | 1,211,128 |
As war clouds gathered in 1937, the CCP acknowledged the legitimacy of the nationalists and promised to end its efforts to subvert Chiang Kai-shek's regime. In return, the nationalists agreed to call off their civil war against the communists and to form a united front with them against the Japanese. Thus, in a strictly legal sense, the communist regime became a legalized regional administration (rather than an outlawed rebellion), functioning under the overall authority of the National government. Although CCP leaders publicly embraced this status, in private they considered themselves not only sovereign but morally superior to the nationalists. From the beginning, the CCP was determined to preserve its freedom of action and to prevent the nationalists from exercising any influence whatever upon its organizational and territorial control. The principal constraint on its behaviour was the desire to prevent an open rupture or a nationalist capitulation to Japan.
Structurally, communist rule bore some resemblance to that of the nationalists. Both were one-party, Leninist regimes dominated by powerful and highly symbolic leaders. Like the KMT, the CCP was the dominating leg of the tripod which also included its government apparatus and its military establishment. The party exercised control through its own political rules and through interlocking membership at all levels.
Factions also existed within the CCP, but they were much less pervasive and divisive than in the KMT; by 1940 at the latest, Mao Tse-tung's leadership was unquestioned, and his coalition contained many able and powerful leaders: Liu Shao-ch'i,
Chou En-lai, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, Peng Te-huai, and many others. Where Chiang Kai-shek held his position by manipulating various factions, often setting them against each other, Mao dominated his principal rivals, reducing them to impotence and co-opting their ablest followers. As a result, Mao's power was more solidly based within his regime than was Chiang's. Furthermore, despite many problems and setbacks, the CCP was much more closely linked to the populations under its influence than was the KMT.
During the China Incident and throughout the Second World War, the headquarters of the Chinese communist movement was located in Fushih, a dusty, out-of-the way
hsien (county town) in northern Shensi province, where the survivors of the Long March had found haven in 1935. During the war, the area came to include portions of two adjacent provinces, Kansu and Ningsia, and the general name for this large base area was Shen-Kan-Ning. Sparsely populated (about 1.5 million inhabitants) and poverty-stricken, Shen-Kan-Ning was the only CCP-controlled region which lay beyond the reach of Japanese armies. From Fushih, Mao and his colleagues sought to control a far-flung and decentralized movement. All other regions under communist rule or influence were behind the lines of furthest Japanese advance.
Immediately following the outbreak of war, CCP armies and political workers moved eastwards and began the process of organizing local governments, linking up with pockets of spontaneous anti-Japanese resistance, and re-establishing contact with local party members who had lived a hunted and underground existence up to the war. As noted above, an initial period of rapid expansion (until 1939) was followed by about three years of desperate hardship (1940–3), before a second wave of expansion that coincided with the weakening of Japan's capacities in China (1944–5).
Part of the communist response to the years of hardship was a whole series of interrelated and quite sweeping reforms: the
cheng-feng or ideological and organizational ‘Rectification Campaign’ of 1942 and 1943; the campaign for ‘crack troops and simple administration’; the
hsia-hsiang (to the villages) movement; intensified rent and interest reduction; determined efforts to increase and diversify production and the co-operative movement. These policies were applied most systematically to the Shen-Kan-Ning base and much more unevenly in other base areas, but their cumulative effect helped the CCP to survive, to deepen and consolidate its hold on rural society, and to emerge from this period prepared for whatever opportunities might present themselves.
Eventually, the CCP claimed to have governmental authority in a total of sixteen base areas behind Japanese lines, stretching from Manchukuo to Canton. The most important of these were in north China, with only slightly less important bases in central China; the two so-called bases in the far south were quite insignificant (see Map 21).
The pace at which the CCP was able to set up anti-Japanese resistance bases varied greatly according local conditions. It was easier to establish and maintain them in mountainous, remote terrain than on the more densely populated plains, where their opponents were stronger and where better transport facilities gave them superior mobility. Major railway lines, heavily fortified and patrolled by the Japanese, puppets, and unwilling nearby villagers, often marked the boundaries between one base and another.
Nor were these bases contiguous areas of uniform communist rule. Instead, they were fluctuating archipelagos of influence, islands of firm control surrounded by semi-consolidated zones which gave way in turn to guerrilla territory and no man's land, and finally to zones of strong Japanese or nationalist control. Nevertheless, so far as possible, each base was organized hierarchically, from its central base area government down through regional administrations to districts and villages. In practice, because of the dispersed nature of these bases and the difficulties of communication, lower level bases had to function with considerable discretion and latitude.
In the anti-Japanese bases, penetration and the establishment of control by the communists proceeded through a typical sequence, with much unevenness, frequent repetition, and varying degrees of thoroughness. Not all bases completed all the following stages. (1)Arrival and initial penetration; linkage with local communists and/or anti-Japanese activists. During this phase, communists were willing to work with a very wide spectrum of local society, while identifying those elements most likely to co-operate fully. Land and other resources of ‘traitors’ were subject to confiscation.(2)Preliminary organization; takeover of local government, reduction of disorder, linkage of local community welfare with resistance led by the CCP. Anti-Japanese contributions were solicited and sometimes enforced against the more affluent, in order to finance local government and the CCP and to demonstrate to rich and poor alike that a change was taking place in local power relations.(3)Reorganization of local government, including the establishment of popularly-elected assemblies, which had no statutory power but served as a valuable sounding-board and as a symbol of the CCP's version of democracy, i.e., active participation, rather than the power to make decisions. Further involvement of villagers into popular organizations aimed at assisting the military (including recruitment), improving production, maintaining local order, and so on. Programmes of rent and interest reduction were instituted, and were coupled with guarantees that these reduced amounts would in fact be paid, with regularization of the tax system, and with the imposition of a steeply progressive tax.
Following the CCP's second wave of expansion late in the war, Mao Tse-tung claimed that a population of 96,000,000 lived under communist rule. This is a highly misleading figure because the estimate includes all areas of communist influence—consolidated, semi-consolidated, and guerrilla. But even allowing for Mao's exaggeration, the CCP succeeded during the war in vastly expanding its political structure and in penetrating local society. Perhaps more important still, the party felt confident that it had developed the techniques to expand further and had gained extensive experience as a functioning government.
4. Armed forces and Defence forces
The armed forces in China during the Second World War were, like so much else in China during those years, a kaleidoscope. Each major political regime maintained its own separate military apparatus. In addition, the Japanese organized extensive Chinese puppet forces.
Apart from these more or less conventional armed forces were many others. Provincial or regional armies of indeterminate and shifting loyalty sought mainly to survive, but would fight when it served their interests or could not be avoided. At the local level, self-defence forces tried to protect their villages from bandit gangs, while sometimes practising banditry themselves on neighbouring villages. Nationalists, communists, and Japanese alike sought to enlist these provincial and local forces, which were a kind of free-floating resource. They often bore formal unit designations which belied their ragtag and unstable nature.
At all levels, the Chinese understood that possession of military power equated to political power, the size of the former determining the amount of the latter. This perspective, shared by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung alike, contrasted with western, especially US, views that military affairs and politics are essentially separate spheres. The difference in outlook was a rich source of misunderstanding and controversy after the merging of the China Incident with the Second World War, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Chiang and Mao both soon recognized that Japan would eventually be defeated by the Allies, especially by the USA, without a major Chinese effort. This recognition grew ever clearer as the war progressed. Both Chiang and Mao also knew that a post-war show down for control of China was a virtual certainty. Therefore, each sought to use the war against Japan to create the best possible conditions for the coming contest. This strategy suggested avoidance of fruitless, self-destructive combat against the Japanese, but it required survival and it implied enough fighting, or the appearance of fighting, to maintain domestic and international credibility.
(a) Nationalist armed forces
The core of nationalist power, dominated by Chiang Kai-shek, had always depended upon his control of the military. With the outbreak of war, the National government delegated virtually complete power to the National Military Council (NMC), of which Chiang was, to quote the NMC, chairman and sole authority: ‘The chairman of the National Military Council, shouldering the full responsibility of national defence, shall have supreme command of the land, naval, and air forces, and shall direct the people of the nation.’
The NMC, functioning independently of party or government control, exercised fairly direct command over the Central Armies which were more or less patterned on a German model as German advisers were the principal source of military assistance available to Chiang's government in the 1930s. They were the best and most loyal of the forces available to the nationalists, though reckoned inferior by western or Japanese standards. At the beginning of the war in 1937, the Central Armies numbered about 300,000 men and included an even more élite group called ‘The Generalissimo's Own’. Trained under German advisers, armed with German-made automatic weapons and mortars, the 80,000 men in these élite divisions constituted the core of Chiang Kai-shek's military modernization programme.
Surrounding these core units was a heterogeneous coalition as diverse in their loyalties as they were in their equipment, training, and combat capabilities. In 1937, these forces numbered perhaps 1,200,000. Thus the nationalists began the war with a total armed force of about a million and a half.
The best of their units, including a large part of the Generalissimo's Own, were lost during the first year of the war, particularly in the heroic three-month defence of Shanghai ( August– November 1937), the fall of Nanking ( December 1937), and the Japanese advance on Hankow ( October 1938). Although all Chinese statistics are notoriously unreliable, the nationalists lost erhaps a million men during the first year of combat (killed, wounded, missing, or deserted). The losses were made up partly by incorporation of miscellaneous regional units and partly by conscription.
As the nationalists traded space for time, the Japanese strategic advance into central and southern China gradually slowed and then stopped. A war of offensive movement gave way to a war of attrition. One by one all avenues of access to the outside world were closed off, with the sole exceptions of the nearly impassable
Burma Road in the south-west and the long overland route from the USSR through Central Asia and the Kansu corridor. Over this latter track came substantial aid to China—all to the nationalists, none to the communists—during the first two years of the war, until Stalin realized the urgent need to husband his resources against Germany and to moderate any action which might provoke Japan into offensive operations in Siberia. By 1940, Soviet aid had all but dried up, and the Burma Road was sporadically closed by the British, in response to Japanese pressure.
By the summer of 1941, China was included under the
Lend-Lease Act passed in March. Some of this aid went to improving the load-carrying capacity of the Burma Road, some to supplies transported over it. By November 1941, the road was carrying about 15,000 tons per month; even so, Lend-Lease supplies were piling up on the docks in Rangoon. This traffic was ended in early 1942, when the Japanese seized the Burma segment of the road during their invasion of that region. It was not reopened until early 1945.
After the establishment of the China–Burma–India theatre, China's only external source of supplies was by air, over jungles and a rugged spur of the Himalayas, between north-eastern India and Kunming. This was the perilous 800 km. (500 m.)
Hump route, over which a gradually increasing trickle of supplies entered China. In all of 1942 this route carried only 5,250 tons; not until January 1944, had the flow risen to a monthly rate of nearly 15,000 tons, about the same as that over the Burma Road in late 1941. The larger part of these supplies, however, went to US forces (especially air forces) operating in China. In a situation of great scarcity and urgent needs, many bitter disputes concerned the allocation of Hump tonnage.
By this time, military supplies costing about $200 million were stockpiled in India, awaiting the opening of a surface route into China; much more was in the pipeline. The surface route, named the
Ledo Road (later the Stilwell Road), was finally pushed through in January 1945. Ironically, after so much effort, the road was made unnecessary by the Japanese surrender seven months later, in August.
For most of the war, therefore, the nationalist military had to rely overwhelmingly on what the broad hinterland of China could provide. Since industry in the interior was woefully undeveloped, the nationalists used plentiful manpower in an effort to compensate for other deficiencies. By 1939, these forces had very little motorized transport, or such other standard weapons of modern warfare as medium or heavy artillery, anti-tank weapons, and so on. As to aviation, the nascent Chinese Air Force had been almost totally destroyed by mid-1938. For a time, Soviet pilots and planes flew over China; then the P40s of
Chennault's Flying Tigers. Finally, after 1942, the USA assisted China with pilot training and planes to rebuild a Chinese Air Force (to defend Chungking and the Chengtu B29 base) and a Chinese Air Task Force (to protect the Hump air route from India). Both were minimally operational, but neither was very effective.
Furthermore, all aspects of military enterprise—including conscription, training, equipment, combat utilization, medical treatment—became increasingly corrupt and incompetent. One US military observer likened a nationalist recruiting sweep to a plague of locusts or epidemic disease, except, he noted, that unlike natural disasters, recruiters decimated the healthiest and ost able-bodied males in the population. As war weariness grew and as inflation both measured and helped to produce economic disaster, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The result was an army of impressive size, but with very low capabilities. It is astonishing that these forces could fight at all, yet they did, even occasionally with bravery, and they somehow survived.
The principal exception to this picture of the nationalist armed forces were the units trained and equipped by the USA under the ‘Thirty Division Plan’, a target which was never achieved. By the end of the Pacific war nationalist forces numbered 300 divisions, with a nominal strength of 10,000 men per division, but many were seriously undermanned. Massive amounts of military aid were already in the pipeline and continued to flow to China after August 1945. By 1941 the Nationalist Army totalled 5.7 millon men, and from 1937 to 1945 the government drafted just over 14 million. The officer corps, which numbered 90,000 in 1937, was increased to 180,000. Casualties were high (see Table 3), especially amongst the officer corps (54,000 annually according to the Japanese).
China, 4, Table 3: Chinese casualties, 1937–45
Year | Killed | Wounded | Missing | Total |
|---|
Source: Lloyd Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949, p. 136. |
1937 (July to Dec) | 125,130 | 242,232 | – | 367,362 |
1938 | 249,213 | 485,804 | – | 735,017 |
1939 | 169,652 | 176,891 | – | 346,543 |
1940 | 339,530 | 333,838 | – | 673,368 |
1941 | 144,915 | 137,254 | 17,314 | 299,483 |
1942 | 87,917 | 114,180 | 45,070 | 247,167 |
1943 | 43,223 | 81,957 | 37,715 | 162,895 |
1944 | 102,719 | 103,596 | 4,419 | 210,734 |
1945 | 57,659 | 85,583 | 25,608 | 168,850 |
total | 1,319,958 | 1,761,335 | 130,126 | 3,211,419 |
(b) Chinese Communist armed forces
The growing threat of Japanese invasion brought about a rapprochement between the nationalists and communists and the so-called Second United Front. Looking on the surface like a broad-based merger of erstwhile enemies, in fact the two regimes remained quite separate. In the nationalist interpretation, the communists had proclaimed an end to sedition, pledged to integrate themselves with the nationalists, and promised to accept the orders of the recognized government of China. The language of agreements widely publicized by the communists themselves supported this interpretation.
The nationalists designated CCP forces in north China as the ‘Eighteenth Group Army’ and authorized the formation of three divisions, each placed under the overall control of nationalist commanders heading the territorial war zones into which China was divided. In 1938, the nationalists also authorized the formation of smaller units known collectively as the ‘New Fourth Army’ in the lower Yangtze region.
Despite all this public posturing, the CCP asserted time and again in classified statements that it would never under any circumstances permit nationalist authority over its territorial bases or its armed forces. Like the nationalist armed forces, the military structure of the communists was controlled by the party through a Military Affairs Committee attached to its Central Committee. Throughout the war, this committee was chaired by Mao Tse-tung.
The CCP's military structure comprised three interlinked levels: regular forces, local forces, and militia. In north China, the regular forces were the Eighth Route Army (the CCP's much more commonly-used designation for what the nationalists called the Eighteenth Group Army); in central China the CCP controlled the New Fourth Army. Only a few small communist-led guerrilla units were active in south China.
These regular forces were full-time outfits available for duty anywhere that the party directed. These were the best-trained and least badly equipped forces available to the CCP. By comparison with most nationalist units of the Central Army, their training and morale were better, but their equipment was more limited. Artillery and mechanized transport were entirely lacking; communications were primitive;
logistics depended mainly on what was locally available, what could be captured, or what could be smuggled from occupied China. It was expected that Eighth Route Army men would perform political and economic work as their military duties permitted, and a strict code of conduct was enforced to prevent the looting, raping, and other crimes that so often went with Chinese armies of whatever persuasion. The communists were fairly successful in changing the image of the army in the eyes of the Chinese rural population.
Ostensibly the Eighth Route Army was divided into three divisions (the 115th, the 120th, and the 129th) authorized by the nationalists. Within a few months after the start of the war in 1937, all three divisions had moved behind Japanese lines in Shansi and Hopei provinces. There they linked up with or organized self-defence forces—always assuring communist leadership—and collaborated in the work of setting up regional anti-Japanese bases. With about a year's lag, the New Fourth Army sought to do the same in central China.
As Table 4 shows, the first couple of years of the war saw a rapid expansion in both the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army. This expansion went far beyond what had been authorized by the nationalists, just as did the CCP's territorial expansion. To avoid obvious provocation, the CCP held to the original three divisions, meanwhile organizing these new forces in units given many different names: training detachments, regiments, dare-to-die corps, and so on.
During the middle phase of the war, little further expansion took place, for two reasons. First, the rapidity of previous expansion now dictated a period of consolidation and qualitative improvement. Second, the pressure of Japanese ‘pacification campaigns’ and nationalist efforts to restrict the communists both inflicted numerous casualties on these armies. Finally, during the last months of the war, another phase of rapid expansion took place, mainly through wholesale reclassification of local forces as regular forces. By August 1945, Mao could claim regular forces of nearly one million, supported by local and militia forces of two million or more.
Local forces, like the regulars, were full-time units whose members were, in the communist phrase, ‘withdrawn from production’. In total numbers, local forces varied between 25% and 40% of the strength of regular forces. They also differed from regular units in that they served only in their home regions, and were not available for assignment elsewhere. This made military service more tolerable to many, for the principle of community defence was widely accepted. Their equipment was even more rudimentary than that of the regulars, and they had less extensive training. In combat, they served as auxiliaries and second-line forces. They organized most of the pre-battle logistics and much of the post-battle rehabilitation. They assisted the local populace with defensive and survival preparations. Finally, they could deal with any unrest or resistance that might occur within their assigned territories.
The militia was a part-time force charged with a wide range of duties and organized at the village level, but supervised from higher echelons. Every able-bodied male between the ages of 15 and 50 was liable for service as needed. In local affairs, the militia enforced public safety and could be employed against recalcitrant landlords or occasional bandits. In support of local and regular forces, they provided detailed intelligence, guides, porters; they helped arrange for billeting or hiding full-time soldiers; they provided stretcher evacuation for the wounded.
This tripartite military structure was not only adapted to functional and territorial differences, it also served as a ladder of recruitment. Rather than enlisting soldiers directly into the Eighth Route or New Fourth Armies, most served first in the militia and/or the local forces. This enabled the CCP to avoid the worst abuses of press-gang conscription as practised by the nationalists; it also provided basic training for new recruits, and it was more acceptable to rural populations.
(c) Collaborationist armed forces
Puppet forces were organized directly by the Japanese and by the collaborationist governments established under Japanese sponsorship. Some of the puppet armies were formed, by a combination of threats and promises, from already existing, semi-organized armed groups: army stragglers, separated from their parent units; local self-defence or secret society forces; bandit gangs.
Other elements of puppet armies were recruited from peripheral nationalist forces (i.e., those other than the Central Army). After 1939, when stalemate and undeclared semi-truce characterized much of the central China Front, the line between nationalists and puppets was quite blurred. Some local commanders did the bidding of either side without scruple, according to their calculations of survival and self-interest.
The communists also claimed that the KMT sanctioned the defection of units under its command to the Japanese if the alternative was destruction, either by the Japanese or by communist forces. The notion was that later on these forces would changes sides once again and be available for anti-communist action. The CCP sarcastically called this tactic ‘curveball patriotism’. Although the nationalists strenuously denied the charge, some affiliated forces did in fact surrender to the Japanese and then later return to the nationalist side without punishment for their defection.
It is therefore virtually impossible to estimate the size of puppet armies in China. One estimate for the early 1940s puts those nominally commanded by Wang Ching-wei's Nanking government at about 900,000. Puppet forces in north China may have been equally large. But whatever their size and location, they were viewed with contempt and mistrust by their Japanese masters. Only if directly ordered and constantly watched could puppet forces carry out orders; otherwise they were unreliable. Although puppet forces did not constitute a significant independent force, they were nevertheless a wild card affecting all other players.
5. Intelligence
In China, the collection and use of intelligence was generally divided between the military and the political, with different agencies responsible for the two kinds of information. Problems of overlap, duplication, and rivalry were common. Each military structure—nationalist, communist, Japanese—contained its own military intelligence apparatus. Because of the size of the China theatre and the dispersed nature of operations, the various field commands had much responsibility for their own intelligence. On the political side, the principal intelligence agencies of all three major contestants were concerned primarily with internal security and were held close to the centres of power. Not surprisingly, the Japanese had the best-organized intelligence service. They relied on their military intelligence apparatus in the field, but in the major cities the
Kempei—the much-feared military police—exercised stern control and sought to intimidate the Chinese populace into passivity and compliance.
The nationalist intelligence apparatus was centred in two agencies with the same name—the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics—but one was attached to the government's Central Executive Committee (BIS/CC) and the other to the party's Military Affairs Commission (BIS/MAC). Needless to say, Chiang Kai-shek maintained tight control over both. The former (BIS/CC) was charged primarily with the collection and analysis of political intelligence concerning all non-KMT activity, especially that of the CCP and its sympathizers. In contrast, the BIS/MAC, which was headed by the much-feared General Tai Li, collected military as well as political intelligence, and, unlike its civilian counterpart, it was also assigned operational missions—covert operations, spreading of disinformation, infiltration of target groups, sometimes even assassination. Like BIS/CC, BIS/MAC concentrated heavily on the Chinese communists, but also operated in such tightly-held Japanese areas as Shanghai and Peking.
Despite the presence of the eccentric American codebreaker Herbert O. Yardley in China, no cryptanalysis of any consequence was achieved by the nationalist Chinese.
In early 1942, US naval intelligence, at first in the person of one mid-level officer, began collaboration with BIS/MAC and Tai Li. Out of this collaboration came SACO, the Sino-American Co- operative Organization. Later in the year, the newly organized
Office of Strategic Services entered the scene. The result was a good deal of institutional and personal acrimony. Despite these rivalries, small groups of Americans and Chinese set up weather (see also
meteorological intelligence), radio, and intercept stations; collected military and political intelligence; assisted in the rescue of downed pilots; and undertook sabotage. Most of these and other activities were carried out behind Japanese lines.
The CCP's internal security agency was euphemistically called the Social Affairs Department, and was directly responsible to the Central Committee; in practice this meant it reported to the Political Bureau and to Mao Tse-tung. For most of the war, it was headed by Kang Sheng, who had lived in the USSR for several years, presumably learning his trade from the
NKVD. (In 1980 he was posthumously denounced and expelled from the CCP, mainly for his actions during the Cultural Revolution.) Political intelligence and related operational assignments outside the CCP were the charge of the United Front Work Department, also directly responsible to the Central Committee. Although its most important target was the KMT, it was also active among the uncommitted splinter parties that in 1944 formed the Democratic League (see
government, above), and in dealing with individuals and groups at the local level.
6. Culture
Cultural life in wartime China suffered many of the same hardships and deprivations that characterized every aspect of life during these eight terrible years. Creative artists of all kinds were among those whose lives were most adversely affected, and the Chinese people had little energy or money to spend on such creations as they might produce. Even the most basic material resources—paper, printing equipment, and ink, for example—were in desperately short supply and of poor quality. Yet somehow a heroically stubborn cultural life survived, in Free China, in the communist-controlled areas, and under Japanese occupation. Despite such adversity, a suprising volume of writing, drama, and graphic material was produced, most of it for popular consumption. Patriotism, nationalism, and support for the war effort were the watchwords everywhere, except under the Japanese, where the expression of such sentiments brought cruel punishment. But even in occupied China, veiled and indirect expression of these themes could be sensed.
One of the most tangible expressions of this spirit was the determination of three of China's most prestigious universities from the Peking–Tientsin area—Peking, Yenching, and Nankai universities—to keep alive the flame of higher education and academic integrity by moving far inland, beyond the reach of the Japanese. These universities eventually transported themselves to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, over 2,000 km. (1,245 mi.) from Peking, where they merged to form the South west Associated University. There they carried on throughout the war, despite enormous difficulties, hardships, and eventually harassment by nationalist authorities angered by the critical independence exhibited by many students and faculty members.
In Free China, cultural life was concentrated mostly in a few major cities: Chungking and Chengtu, in Szechwan province, and Kunming and Kweilin. In Chungking, the nationalist authorities encouraged but also supervised the media, including journalism, literature, drama, and art. In time, they also came to censor it. Chengtu was somewhat less restrictive. The nearest thing to intellectual and cultural freedom existed in Kunming and Kweilin, where sympathetic provincial authorities for a time provided insulation from KMT censors and secret police. In 1944, Kweilin was overrun by the Japanese during Operation ICHI-GŌ, and as the war came to a close, a heavy-handed nationalist influence grew more menacing in Kunming.
Early in the war, considerable numbers of students and left-wing intellectuals made their way to the communist-controlled areas, above all the Fushih area. They raised the cultural level of this backward region, but they also brought with them the critical stance and independence of mind they had exercised—with the party's approval—in Shanghai, Peking, Siking (Sian), and elsewhere. Although they enthusiastically supported the party's general programme, the bolder among them dared to point out the gap between ideals and actualities—the dark side of life in Siking—just as they had in Shanghai.
Mao Tse-tung sought to end this bourgeois individualism during the Rectification Campaign of the early 1940s. In his lengthy ‘Remarks at the Fushih Forum on Literature and Art’ ( May 1942), he decisively rejected the notion of art for art's sake, insisting instead that all literature and art expresses the interests of a social class, either of the people or of their oppressors. He called upon intellectuals to obey the CCP, to drop their arrogant ways and self-centred concerns, to learn instead from the workers, peasants, and soldiers—to use their vocabulary and to create for them. (The ideas underlying Mao's position remained more or less orthodox in Communist China, despite being repeatedly challenged; they were most crushingly applied during the Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, and were revived after the Tiananmen Square episode in June 1989.) Many intellectuals did, in fact, go to the rural areas and shape themselves to this populist mould, but writers who could not or would not follow Mao's dicta were silenced and sometimes imprisoned.
Cultural life in Japanese-occupied cities was thin indeed. In Shanghai, between 1937 and the end of 1941, the International Concession area was a zone free of direct Japanese control because it was administered by the UK and the other treaty powers. Called Solitary Island in the sea of Japanese occupation, it provided a perilous haven for those who would speak out against Japan, despite the real danger of abduction or assassination. After Pearl Harbor, this solitary island was entirely engulfed by the Japanese occupation.
Writers and artists, like the general public, had to choose between collaboration, passivity or escapism, and a deeply concealed attitude of resistance; some sought to reconcile the first two modalities with the third. For most, these issues took a lower priority than the daily struggle for family and individual survival.
However difficult it may be to assess how much the average peasant or worker was affected by the cultural production of these years, most of those who created it were profoundly influenced by their wartime experiences. Excepting those who remained in China's occupied cities, the eyes of writers and artists were opened to China's vast hinterland, to the peasantry, and to the minority peoples of the interior. They experienced a deepened sense of nationalism, if not always complete loyalty to one of the major political parties. For hundreds of millions of Chinese, the Second World War was a defining experience.
Lyman P. Van Slyke
Bibliography
Boyle, J. H. , China and Japan at War, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1972).
Eastman, L. E. (ed.), The Nationalist Era in China, 1927–1949 (Cambridge, 1991).
—— Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1984).
Van Slyke, and Lyman P. , The Chinese Communist Movement: A Report of the United States War Department, July 1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1968).
