Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (40 page)

However, none of the three principal actors was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multiparty regime with significant civil liberties. Both Chiang and Mao spoke in terms of “democracy,” but their understanding of the term meant something more like mass participation in politics under the direction of a dominant party. They were not unusual in this. Many of their counterparts in anti-Western struggle, such as the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and the Burmese Ba Maw, were progressive and secular in their aims, but like the Chinese leaders, were not necessarily pluralist. Across the region, the Indian nationalists Nehru and Gandhi were exceptional in their adherence to a model of wide-ranging democracy.

Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing paid tribute to Sun Yat-sen for its ideology, and among its most active programs was the New Citizen Movement, a lightly disguised adaptation of Chiang’s New Life campaign. The government invested heavily in propaganda, such as posters and articles celebrating Wang’s return to Nanjing (and in one case, contrasting a picture of Chiang Kai-shek with his face crossed out), and instructions for the formation of youth groups, complete with illustrations of uniforms.
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In the countryside, it moved swiftly ahead with a program endorsed by Japan and euphemistically termed “village clearance”
(qingxiang)
. Masterminded by the regime’s security chief, Li Shiqun, the strategy aimed to root out any resistance from supporters of the Nationalists or Communists who might be hiding in the countryside. The policy had its successes: all the governments that collaborated with the Japanese used a fairly standard template of terror and intimidation along with a certain amount of relief and rehabilitation to imply that those who cooperated could be assured of the necessities of daily life.
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One Communist New Fourth Army document from 1941 noted that in certain counties in Jiangsu province, “the enemy and their puppets have shipped a lot of rice between harvests . . . the people are finding it very difficult to obtain ordinary goods, so the Japanese and the puppets have set up cooperative stores, selling goods at less than the market price.”
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Yet the cooperative stores were the benevolent face of a far more violent strategy against resistance, in which the Japanese hoped that their Chinese collaborators would do a great deal of the work for them. Jiang Weiqing served as a brigade commander with the beleaguered Communist New Fourth Army in the spring of 1941. He had only 4,000 or so troops to face around 100,000 collaborationist Chinese troops and police (supplemented by some 3,000 or so Japanese) serving the Wang regime in the areas around Suzhou, Changshou, and Taicang. Jiang recalled the techniques used to prevent Communist infiltration. Along the highways, there might be a checkpoint every
li
(around one third of a mile); the roads themselves were edged with a bamboo barrier, and every mile or so there would be a watchtower. On the road, motorized troops would roar past, and motorboats would patrol the river. Troops would be sent at dawn to track down anyone hiding in the fields, using dogs and big bamboo sticks that could part the stalks of the crops, “like combing your hair.” Anyone they found would be chased on horseback or sometimes bicycle; at night, portable searchlights could aid the chase.
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Jiang and his small band of troops had to adapt. For some forty days they hid at the side or in the rear of the most carefully monitored areas, wearing plain clothes and sticking to groups of two or three. “When the enemy settled down,” Jiang recalled, “we would suddenly attack them from all sides. We’d kill the sentry and the horses, set their weapons store on fire, and then throw a bomb into their sleeping quarters.” Another favored technique was to sneak into a watchtower in the dark, start firing, and hope that the defenders would fire back at each other in the confusion.
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These techniques were not going to bring the Japanese to their knees. But they showed how guerrilla tactics could prevent the new order under Wang from becoming stable, and were a reminder that not everyone had agreed to surrender. Of course, for local farmers, the presence of Communist (or Nationalist) guerrillas was not necessarily a welcome one; resistance fighters in the locality could lead to horrific reprisals from the Japanese and their allies.

The disastrous year 1940 seemed to cast doubt on the idea that there might be any future for China outside the Japanese Empire. As 1941 ground on, yet another horrific event shocked the weary wartime capital. On June 5 Chongqing was subjected to some five hours of bombing, sending the population rushing into the air-raid shelters. In one particular tunnel in the Shibati district conditions were even less salubrious than usual. The large shelter should have had electric lighting and fans, but the electric generators had never been connected. Conditions inside were dark and stifling. About 10:00 p.m. people had started to emerge from the tunnel, when rumors began to spread that the Japanese were coming back with poison-gas bombs. The air-raid wardens began to force people back into the shelter, even though some were still coming out. People fell on top of one another, then panicked because they were suffocating. In the next few hours hundreds died, trapped underground in the darkness. The exact figure was never known: the official version said 461, although a police report of the time put the number much higher, at 1,527. What the rescuers did remember clearly were the agonized expressions of the dead: people entwined in each other’s arms as they lost consciousness, clothing in strips because desperate people had torn away at each other’s garments, and corpses covered in sweat so copious that it appeared that the bodies had been soaked in water. One survivor, Tang Zhengchang, recalled a hand grabbing him from a pile of corpses, moaning “Sir, please help me . . .” The hand had held Tang’s shorts so tightly that they pulled them down; Tang jumped out of them and fled the tunnel, naked from the waist down.
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Official reports of the disaster were toned down. But the event added yet more gloom to the city’s mood.

Nonetheless, events far away would provide a sliver of hope for the National Government. Late in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been reelected as president of the United States. “I am not going to send your boys into any foreign wars,” he had declared in his contest against Republican nominee Wendell Willkie. Yet Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, were both aware that the Nazi domination of Europe had laid down a profound challenge to American influence there. And with China’s “Open Door” to trade closed off under Japanese occupation, it was becoming clear that simple neutrality might no longer be an option.

In a 1941 report on China’s domestic and international politics, US ambassador Nelson Johnson observed that during the great German sweep through Europe in the middle of 1940, the Chinese had been anxious about Allied commitment to their cause. However, Britain’s refusal to surrender, along with continuing Soviet goodwill, had encouraged the Chinese public, which now looked to the US and Britain for support, and felt that “victory” was “virtually theirs.”
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Then on June 22, 1941, the world woke up to the news that some 3 million German troops were on the move into the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, was a stunning reversal of the previous two years of nonaggression between the two major European dictatorships. The war in Europe was utterly transformed. Less obviously, so was the war in Asia. Thanks to intelligence leaks, Chiang Kai-shek had already become aware that conflict between Germany and the USSR was likely. Following the signing of a treaty of neutrality between the USSR and Japan on April 13, 1941, Chiang predicted that the US would be drawn into the war in Asia, and even that Japan might later change its mind and attack the USSR. In that event, China would play a crucial role as the key Asian ally of both Washington and Moscow.
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The German invasion had taken Stalin by surprise (largely because he had failed to heed increasingly shrill warnings from senior colleagues who were receiving intelligence from well-placed spies in Germany), and the Comintern, seeking to shore up its alliances, now demanded that the Chinese Communists cooperate further with the Nationalists.
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The Central Committee of the CCP responded on June 23, 1941, with a declaration that it would “persevere in the Anti-Japanese United Front, persevere in [Nationalist]-Communist cooperation,” as well as allying itself with the British, the Americans, and others who opposed the “fascist rulers” of the Axis powers.
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In Chongqing and Yan’an the German attack on the USSR was seen as a positive sign that the war might be turning against Japan. In Nanjing it was seen differently. On June 22 Zhou Fohai recorded in his diary that, though the outcome of the war “cannot be predicted,” the members of the Nanjing government “all believe Germany will win and will take Moscow within two months.” Zhou guessed that the Japanese could not reconcile their treaty of neutrality with the USSR and their membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was supposed to bind the Axis powers together against Soviet expansionism. However, because the Germans had attacked first, Zhou noted, Japan was not obliged to assist them.
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Zhou also saw developments through one lens that he had never abandoned in his own mind: that of a Chinese nationalist. “If Chongqing joins the Allies and they win,” he noted, “then this is good for China.” If they lost, then it would be a disaster for Chiang Kai-shek; but because Wang Jingwei had formed a government in Nanjing in collaboration with Japan, China had “a foot in both boats.”
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The summer of 1941 marked a decisive shift in the geopolitics of the war. Up to that point, the conflicts in China and in Europe had been self-contained (if desperate) struggles on the Eurasian landmass. But Germany’s invasion of Russia now confronted Japan with the choice of whether or not to enter the war against the USSR as well. The debate in Tokyo did not last long. Although some in the government, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka, advocated striking against the USSR before heading south, the Kwantung Army and the Navy both advised against assisting Germany, at least until it had succeeded in drawing significant numbers of Soviet troops away from Siberia to the European front. Konoye, now prime minister again, agreed.
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Having dismissed the idea of attacking the USSR, Japan’s leaders turned their attention instead to another great power: the United States. The inability of the Japanese to achieve further traction in China led to calls for a wider expansion of their influence in the region, in particular Southeast Asia, with its rich supply of oil, rubber, and other materials that were essential to the war effort. From 1940 onward, demands such as the closing of the Burma Road had made it evident that Tokyo was following a more assertive policy in Asia. Despite their inability to subdue China, Japanese leaders were making the decision to raise the stakes yet further.

Japanese politics had become increasingly dominated by the inability to end the China war. As early as 1938, military spending was taking up some 70 percent of Japan’s budget, and, in the same year, a National Mobilization Bill gave the government “total war control” over the
zaibatsu
(Japan’s big industrial combines). By 1940, the New Order was making itself felt in all aspects of Japanese life, with campaigns against extravagant consumption becoming prominent. In February 1940, one Japanese parliamentarian was expelled from the Diet for daring to speak out against the “holy war” that Japan was fighting in China.
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In this atmosphere, the possibility of backing down from Japan’s imperial ambitions became ever more remote.

The Roosevelt administration was increasingly concerned by these developments. Although still neutral, under the terms of its Lend-Lease program the US was providing significant assistance to Britain and the USSR in their efforts to resist Germany. Now the administration increased the amount of aid available to China also. On February 10 Roosevelt’s representative Lauchlin Currie visited Chongqing to let Chiang Kai-shek know that the US would soon deliver $45 million worth of military equipment.
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General John Magruder, the head of a small group designated as AMMISCA (the American Military Mission in China), had been sent to Chongqing in September 1941 (a few months before Pearl Harbor) as part of the discreet preparation for possible Chinese entry into an alliance against Japan.
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The China branch of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA) was headed by General William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, who had been sent out by Roosevelt to China in early 1941.
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The Americans made repeated attempts to dissuade Japan from a push southward into Southeast Asia, but the two sides reached ever higher levels of confrontation. The Japanese occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response, in July 1941, the US imposed an embargo on oil sales to Japan. Konoye, now unable to resist the increasing pressure for war from the army and navy, resigned on October 16, and was replaced as premier by General Tôjô Hideki. Tokyo hastened preparations for war with the Western powers.
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Among the targets would be Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines.

Over the autumn of 1941, ever more desperate talks took place between the United States and Japan. The United States was insistent that Japan must withdraw its forces from China; Japan was equally adamant that it would not do so. While civilian and military factions argued about how fast they should move toward war, there was little doubt in the minds of leaders in Tokyo that conflict was coming. At the imperial conference on November 5, it was formally agreed that if there were no satisfactory diplomatic solution by December 1, war would follow shortly afterward. Negotiations in Washington between Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburô and diplomat Kurusu Saburô and Secretary of State Cordell Hull got nowhere. On November 26, a note from Hull was handed to the Japanese representatives, reiterating the American insistence that Japan must leave China and Indochina. On December 1, the imperial conference made the decision to go to war; the next day, the date was set for the attack to take place on December 8 (December 7, US time).