Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (37 page)

Chiang’s troubles were made even worse by events some eight thousand kilometers away in Europe. In the late summer of 1939 two events changed the face of the conflict: the expected outbreak of war between Germany and Britain along with France, and the unexpected outbreak of peace between Germany and its ideological foe the USSR. The latter was marked by the announcement on August 23, 1939, of the signing of a nonaggression pact between Moscow and Berlin, perhaps the most astounding ideological reversal of the twentieth century. A week later, on September 1, Nazi Germany’s troops invaded Poland, and war with Britain and France followed two days later. At a stroke, the attention of the European powers was concentrated on their own fight for survival. The war in East Asia, already a secondary concern for them, now became a minor matter indeed.
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Chiang wanted to create a concert of allies who would help defend China against Japanese incursion. He was stymied not only by the reluctance of neutral powers to come to China’s aid, but by the speed with which alliances changed in the early years of the Second World War. Chiang had never been keen to see a general European war, rightly believing that it would distract attention even further from China. Nonetheless, he could see opportunities for new alliances, now that the battle lines had been drawn between the imperialist democracies and fascism. In this respect, the new warmth between Berlin and Moscow was a disaster for him. Chiang had been desperate to involve the USSR in the fight against Japan. Now the Soviets were effectively allied with the Nazis, who in turn were allies of Tokyo.

The post-Versailles world had made the Chinese deeply angry. (The iconic May Fourth demonstrations of 1919, after all, had been a direct response to the settlement at the Paris Peace Conference.) But at least that world had familiar points of reference, in particular the power of the two major European empires, along with the US. Now the empires were crumbling and it was unclear what the new geostrategic balance would be. For all that Chiang or anyone else knew, Germany would be the great new European power. The first years of the European war were a bewildering period of diplomatic cross-dressing.

The Nationalist government had earlier enjoyed a brief dalliance with Nazi Germany. Hitler’s regime did in fact continue to supply Chiang’s government with munitions in the early months of its war with Japan.
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The Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 had, in theory, bound together Germany, Italy, and Japan as the Axis, but they were always too mistrustful of one another to create a genuine alliance. Chiang found it useful to hint to the Western powers that he might be forced into a partnership with Germany, a particularly alarming prospect for the USSR, which had enemies both to the west and the east. But the contradictions in German policy toward East Asia finally became too great, and in April 1938 Germany bowed to Japanese demands and ceased to support China.

Britain was of little assistance. In May 1937 Neville Chamberlain became prime minister of a Conservative-dominated National Government, and found himself swiftly consumed by the problems of peace in Europe. If Czechoslovakia was for him a “far-off country of which we know nothing,” the fate of China was even more obscure for many (if not all) decision makers in London. The Nationalists’ efforts to gain US support were more effective. At the Nine-Power Conference held in Brussels in November 1937, the Chinese delegation had been unable to convince the United States to impose sanctions and confront Japan. By mid-1938, however, American attitudes had begun to change. As Japan moved further southward into China, it became increasingly clear that the occupied country would be closed to outside trade. In December 1938, US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau facilitated a private loan of $25 million to China, to be repaid in kind with supplies of tung oil (a varnishing product).
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Chiang also clung to the possibility of an even more unlikely alliance. He had become a fanatical anti-Communist during the 1920s, but in the first years of the fight against Japan his greatest hope still lay in the entry of the Soviet Union into the war. Soviet advisers and pilots had assisted the Chinese effort in 1937–1939, yet the USSR did not actually declare war on Japan. With Japanese aggression in northern Asia escalating, though, the Soviets might be forced into the conflict.

Then, as so often happened whenever Chiang tried to master the trajectory of the war, events outside China took a turn that fundamentally changed the nature of the struggle. While Western attention focused on the darkening situation in Europe, a battle that would shape the conflict in East Asia took place on the borders of Outer Mongolia, Manchukuo, and the eastern part of the Soviet Union. Through much of 1938 and early 1939 one faction of the Japanese Imperial Army had attempted to pressure the Soviets on their eastern border. It appeared that the USSR might be an easy target; Stalin’s paranoid purges meant that many of the Red Army’s best officers had been executed or sent to Siberia. In May 1939 a dispute flared up near the village of Nomonhan between troops stationed in the Soviet client state of Mongolia and Japanese troops from Manchukuo. Within days both sides had built up their forces, with nearly 60,000 Soviet troops facing nearly 40,000 troops of the Kwantung Army. For the next four months, until mid-September, the two powers fought an epic battle that ended with Japan’s resounding defeat and cemented the reputation of General Georgi Zhukov, later one of Stalin’s most decorated generals during the Second World War. The despised Soviet Army had fought fiercely, and not only was a cease-fire declared, but the two sides also signed a nonaggression pact, ending Chiang’s hopes of a Chinese-Soviet alliance.
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The crowning blow came in the aftermath of events in the frozen north of Europe. In the Winter War of 1939–1940 the Soviets invaded Finland, prompting Britain and France to sponsor a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. At the time, China was a member of the League Council, and it refused to exercise its power of veto on the motion.
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The Soviets were furious at Chiang’s failure to prevent their expulsion, and for the rest of China’s war with Japan the relationship between Chiang and Stalin would remain deeply mistrustful. China would have to fight Japan without further major Soviet assistance.

While Chiang struggled to set a diplomatic agenda in an unpredictable world, Wang Jingwei’s plans stagnated. The midlevel Japanese officers and businessmen to whom Mei Siping and Gao Zongwu had spoken in Shanghai turned out not to have been speaking for the whole of the Tokyo regime. In fact, they represented a rather small group, genuinely sympathetic to China and desirous of a peace that would not utterly humiliate their great neighbor. But Premier Konoye was far less convinced that working with Wang would bring about the result Tokyo wanted. Although Konoye indicated in his public statement of December 22, 1938, that he was prepared to reopen discussions with the Chinese side, he also made it clear that the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China within two years (a key piece of the deal offered to Wang in Shanghai) was off the table.

The Chongqing government, meanwhile, decided to treat Wang’s defection in tones more sober than shrill. On January 1, 1939, Wang was dismissed from his public positions and expelled from the Nationalist Party. But orders were not yet issued for his arrest. Wang’s group suffered a further setback on January 5 when Konoye’s government resigned. His successor, Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro, was also cautious when it came to embracing the Low-Key Club, as were senior figures in the Japanese military. However, in May 1939 Wang started to press for an invitation to Tokyo.

The trip to Tokyo, in early June, was a disaster. On June 6 five major Japanese ministers held a meeting in Wang’s absence, in which they made it clear that a regime run by him would only be one part of a wider patchwork of Japanese client regimes in China; Wang’s dream of reuniting China under his rule was dead before he had arrived. In addition, Japanese demands on China would be harsh, including economic and military dominance across all of China’s territory. The only senior minister who was willing even to make a show of discussing terms was Itagaki Seishirô, the minister of war. Yet Itagaki made it clear that he would not support the dissolution of the rival client governments, particularly the “Reformed” government that had its capital at Beiping and controlled much of north China. Japan had won control of north China in war and was not going to give it up lightly.
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Wang won concessions on only one issue. The Japanese wanted the symbol of his new regime to be the flag with five colored bars that had been used in the early years of the republic (and was used by the collaborator Wang Kemin’s “Provisional” government in north China, which Wang Jingwei despised). Wang was adamant; the correct flag for his regime would be the flag of the Nationalist government, as endorsed by Sun Yat-sen: a white twelve-pointed star on a blue background, and a red field. After all, Wang considered his regime the continuation of the true Nationalist government, now that Chiang had betrayed the cause by allying with the Communists. Adoption of the flag would fulfil Wang’s dream that he had nurtured for thirteen years, since Chiang Kai-shek had maneuvered him out of power during the Northern Expedition, namely, finally to complete the revolutionary destiny of Sun Yat-sen. The Japanese objected, ostensibly on the grounds that if the troops of Wang and Chiang ever came into conflict, then it would be impossible to tell them apart, as they would be wearing the same insignias. Wang would not budge. Finally, the Japanese agreed, as long as a yellow pennant reading “peace, reconstruction, anticommunism”
(heping, jianguo, fangong)
was added to the flag. Wang had scored a tiny victory, but not an insignificant one. The vast majority of the Japanese leadership despised Chinese nationalism, thinking of it as an alien transplant that had ruined the prospect of a pan-Asian brotherhood (in which Japan, of course, would take the leading role). For Wang to insist that the most potently symbolic flag of Chinese revolutionary nationalism should fly above his regime’s buildings was a small success in the midst of a collaboration that already looked threadbare.
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Attempts by Wang, now back in Shanghai, to establish dominance over Wang Kemin’s “Provisional” government and the other rival “Reformed” government under Liang Hongzhi, based in Nanjing, ended with all three leaders unwilling to work with the others. Japan’s defeat at Nomonhan in the summer of 1939 did make Wang Jingwei more attractive in the eyes of the power brokers in Tokyo, as it became clearer that their armies might not defeat Chiang as easily as they had hoped. But they remained inflexible. Over two long months in November and December 1939, Colonels Kagesa Sadaaki and Inukai Ken of the Japanese Army and other Japanese negotiators sat with Wang’s advisers, including Mei Siping, Zhou Fohai, and Tao Xisheng. (Wang himself did not take part directly in the discussions.) Kagesa, despite his sympathy for the Chinese side, was the channel for harsh and uncompromising demands from hard-liners in the Japanese Army. Japanese troops and “advisers” were to be stationed all over China, undermining Wang’s argument that his government would restore the Nationalists to sovereignty. New concessions were made in key industries such as coal and ore mining, and the Japanese Navy was to be given control over Hainan island in the south. In spite of Wang’s dreams of reunification, north China was to be kept separate, and Shanghai was also to be given special status (that is, with special privileges for the Japanese). The terms were almost entirely one-sided, and the signing of the agreement on December 30, 1939, was a gloomy affair.
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Still, the negotiations had established that there would be a “reorganized” Nationalist government, led by Wang Jingwei, with its capital at Nanjing.

By now, Gao Zongwu was having serious doubts about the whole enterprise. Following the drafting of the secret treaty, he was asked to help translate it into Chinese. Wang was understandably paranoid about security, and insisted that the translation be done at his home in Shanghai. However, Gao was determined to obtain a copy. He finally found an opportunity when he was escorting a visiting Japanese politician from Wang’s house, whereupon Gao slipped the translation into his own pocket. He then telephoned Wang and said that he had taken it by mistake. But before returning it, he took the document home and photographed it.
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On New Year’s Day 1940, Zhou Fohai talked to Gao Zongwu at length about the progress of their mission so far. “The two of us swore to work hard,” Zhou recalled, “and to forgive each other,” although he did not know why Gao was asking for forgiveness. But three days later, on January 4, Zhou recorded rumors that Gao, along with Tao Xisheng, had disappeared, probably to Hong Kong. “Now I understand what he meant on New Year’s Day,” reflected Zhou ruefully, realizing at last what Gao had had in mind.

Gao Zongwu and Tao Xisheng interpreted Japan’s two-faced behavior at the negotiations in the last weeks of 1939 as a sign that collaboration with Japan would not be a genuine partnership, but deeply exploitative. The two defectors were spirited away from Shanghai by the mobster and power broker Du Yuesheng (“Big-ears Du”) and reappeared in Chongqing in a monumental propaganda coup for the National Government. Gao and Tao announced in a statement in Hong Kong just how crushing Japan’s demands were and called upon Wang to end negotiations and “restrain the horse from falling over the precipice.”
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Gao was then given permission to emigrate to the United States, and Tao rejoined Chiang’s staff and became one of his top propagandists. (Both lived on to a peaceful old age.)

The Japanese wanted to keep their options open by holding Wang in reserve, while hoping they still might tempt the real prize, Chiang Kai-shek, to their side. For instance, the Japanese declared that they did not want to send an ambassador to Wang’s prospective new government in Nanjing (which would imply full diplomatic recognition), but instead would send a “special envoy.” “I consider that our central government
is
the national government,” fumed Zhou Fohai. “There is no ‘recognition problem.’” In conversation with a Japanese official, he said: “If the new national government has no significance, then what is the point of organizing it? You want to keep a space open for negotiating with Chongqing. We don’t oppose the Japanese talking to Chongqing, but if you won’t recognize the new government, then we prefer not to organize one.”
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