Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (63 page)

However, the Nationalists had good reason to fear that the relief effort might be seen purely as largesse from the US. The blame for the failures of Nationalist provision (most notably the Henan famine) had fallen almost exclusively on the shoulders of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and corruption and incompetence had played a serious part in causing the disaster. Yet this explanation did not acknowledge that the wider constraints of the war had forced the government to make a series of deeply unappetizing choices. If food relief was now portrayed purely as a piece of American generosity that had no connection with sacrifices made by the ruling party, then Chiang’s government might well lose all of its legitimacy, be blamed for what went wrong, and be given no credit for any successes.

The Nationalists did not see themselves as a bankrupt and hollow regime. Chiang’s government was still determined to rule over a postwar China very different from the one that had gone to war with Japan in 1937. Many of the party’s planners saw the need to create a state where the obligations that government and the people had to one another were greater and more clearly defined. In this they were not alone. Roosevelt’s administration passed the G. I. Bill in 1944, providing training and education for returning veterans. In July 1945 the British people voted out the deeply admired wartime leader, Churchill, in favor of a Labour Party government under Clement Attlee with a program of extensive social welfare. One British example was particularly intriguing to some Nationalist planners. The Beveridge Plan, authored by a distinguished Liberal Party politician, had created huge enthusiasm on its publication in 1942, with its advocacy of a welfare state providing full unemployment and health benefits. It was adopted by all the main political parties and heavily influenced Labour’s winning election manifesto. Back in Chongqing, bureaucrats thinking about the shape of a postwar China noted with approval the “world-famous Beveridge Report.”
³⁷

Despite Western imputation that the Nationalists were capable of little but corruption and chaos, these proposals were not out of character. From the start of the war, Chiang’s technocrats had linked the provision of welfare and refugee relief with the creation of a stronger, more united national body.
³⁸
Health care was part of the agenda of “hygienic modernity” which underpinned the Chinese sense of national identity, stimulated by global initiatives such as the Health Organization of the League of Nations (predecessor of the World Health Organization).
³⁹
The Executive Yuan (the Cabinet-level body) of the government even argued that in time it would seek to provide greater health-care provision for the population, “in which the private and voluntary agencies will be encouraged to play their part.”
⁴⁰
This was clearly something rather less all-encompassing than a postwar European-style socialized health system, although the plans did include ideas such as the provision of health care “free of charge” to those who could not pay.
⁴¹
Concerns over health care were linked to a concern to create a modern, rational state in Nationalist China, even in the last desperate year of the war against Japan. Visible, if patchy, programs of vaccination and education for rural women on health-care issues continued all the way up to 1945, along with a seemingly more quixotic-seeming campaign to replace public lavatories in various Sichuan counties.
⁴²
In fact, these were among the more logical campaigns at a time of great financial and political pressure: they were low-cost, dealt with real problems of hygiene (dirty lavatories in the 40-degree Celsius heat of rural Sichuan were a sure recipe for an epidemic), and demonstrated a continued commitment, however flawed, to renewal at the grassroots level.
⁴³

The Nationalists had always had an interest in projecting the image of a modernizing, active state. However, the issue of social welfare had a particular resonance because it was a response to the Communist challenge. Not only to John Service and Colonel David D. Barrett, commander of the US Army Observation Group that was sent to Yan’an (the “Dixie Mission”) but also to millions of Chinese, the Communist system appeared to offer an egalitarian vision in which provision would be made for all. The Nationalists had to make at least some effort to compete. Yet stark reality blocked these good intentions. The basic reason for lack of progress was simple: there was no money. By 1945 the Nationalist government was undeniably riddled with corruption. But the total financial commitment of the Allies to the reconstruction of China was tiny, compared to the actual costs involved.
⁴⁴
Even if Chiang deserved his nickname of “Cash My Check,” others, notably the British Empire and Stalin’s Soviet Union, were making much heavier calls on the American bank account. In a private letter James Johnson, American legal counsel to UNRRA, acknowledged the roadblocks standing in the way of the Allies’ vision for postwar China:

There is . . . the fundamental problem of China’s difficult financial circumstances, which has all the government bureaus operating far below their potential efficiency. The picture of a fully equipped, fully staffed public hospital with virtually no patients is not uncommon, the reason being that there isn’t enough money available for the hospital to feed its patients after paying its staff even on a thoroughly inadequate basis. This difficulty has come up over and over again in connection with every conceivable aspect of CNRRA operations and preparatory work.
⁴⁵

The investigations of UNRRA also found the war-torn zones of China blighted by famine. In Henan UNRRA detailed cases of starvation that had been made worse by the massive destruction caused by the Ichigô campaign. UNRRA figures suggested that some 70 percent of the population in the province were in dire need in 1945; cases of malaria were reckoned at 130,000, and the number of people starving at over 2 million.
⁴⁶
The Nationalist aspirations toward social reform—though hampered by financial realities, political disintegration, and corruption—were matched by gestures that seemed to indicate political reform. In April 1945 Chiang called the Sixth Party Congress (May 5–21), the first since 1938. The proposed reforms had a liberal gloss, including a move toward the formalizing of multiple parties in the National Assembly, and for multiparty elections (though at the regional and local rather than national level). The Congress also declared its intention to reduce rents and reform land taxes. There were loud public attacks on the corruption that blighted public life.
⁴⁷
Clearly the Communist challenge had influenced the Nationalist program. Yet there were signs of something darker in the declaration, too—notably, Chiang’s intention to set up committees to oversee (and limit) the democratization process.

The CCP responded in kind with its Seventh Congress, timed to overlap with the Nationalist Sixth Party Congress, from April 23 to June 11, 1945. It had been even longer since the Communists had held their most recent Congress (in Moscow in 1928, in exile from the Nationalist purge), and even the last Plenum had been in 1938. The tone was confident, even aggressive. “Our Communist Party has never been so powerful, the revolutionary base areas have never had so large a population and so large an army,” Mao announced on the opening day. And Mao himself was central to the proceedings, officially acknowledged as the paramount party leader. The process that had begun with the Rectification movements now came to its climax. The Congress ended with one of the whimsical tales that Mao liked to tell to leaven his theory-laden language. A foolish old man of ancient legend, Mao began, found that his way forward was blocked by two mountains. So he began to dig away at them. His neighbors mocked him for engaging in such an endless task, but the foolish old man replied that even if he died before completing his task, then his sons and grandsons would carry on. “God was moved by this,” said Mao, “and he sent down two angels, who carried away the mountains on their backs.” In Mao’s atheistic interpretation of the fable, God was none other than “the masses of the Chinese people,” who would remove the twin mountains of imperialism and feudalism. With the masses behind them, “why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?”
⁴⁸

The relationship between the CCP and the Americans had now become more strained. In July, Wedemeyer wrote to Mao to inquire about the fate of four American soldiers and their Chinese interpreters who had accidentally parachuted into Communist territory in May and been placed in “protective custody.” The American went on, “In view of our common desire to defeat the Japanese, it is my hope that incidents of this kind will not arise in future,” but it was clear that the warmth which had been developing between the two sides had decidedly cooled.
⁴⁹

Meanwhile, Allied plans developed for the push against the Japanese. In Potsdam, the leaders concentrated on the settlement for peace in Europe. But the US, Britain, and China also issued a declaration that called for “the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces,” warning that “the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
⁵⁰
In China itself, Wedemeyer was drawing on Stilwell’s plans to train thirty-nine new divisions of Chinese troops for the recapture of eastern China, although Chiang Kai-shek rejected any suggestion that Stilwell himself might return to China for a land invasion in 1946. In turn, at Marshall’s suggestion (prompted by Stilwell in a final act of revenge), General Claire Chennault was also recalled to the US at the end of July.
⁵¹
There was anticipation in the air but also a sense of weariness. With peace now settled in Europe, the prospect of a war in Asia that might stretch into 1946 or 1947 was deeply depressing.

For both the Chinese and the Japanese armies were exhausted beyond measure. By the middle of 1945, the Japanese had been driven back from their most important Pacific conquests. From November 1944, American bombers used the recaptured island of Saipan as their base for increasingly ferocious attacks on the Japanese home islands. From spring 1945, their payload included incendiary bombs that unleashed devastation on major cities including Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Between April and June, the Americans captured Okinawa in fighting of immense savagery, which ended with the suicide of the Japanese commander, General Ushijima Mitsuru. Japan’s war economy stood close to collapse. Its shipping was decimated, meaning that the precious supplies that kept its war economy going became ever scarcer. But on the Chinese side, the Nationalist armies were also in a state of near collapse after Ichigô. The state for which they fought was riddled with corruption, inflation, and sheer battle-weariness. Yet somehow both sides insisted, at least outwardly, that they would continue to fight on the Chinese mainland.

Then, on August 6, 1945, a US Air Force aircraft named
Enola Gay
flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and released a 4,400-kilogram bomb nicknamed “Little Boy.” The first atomic bomb to be used against a human population instantly burned some 66,000 people to death. Truman promised a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” if Japan did not surrender unconditionally.
⁵²
While Japan started to come to terms with the destruction of a city by a force greater than any that science had previously created, events were also moving fast in Moscow. The Japanese ambassador, Satô Naotake, had been trying to discuss a negotiated agreement with the US using Soviet good offices. But at 5:00 p.m. on August 8 Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov called Satô in and asked him to have a seat. Molotov then delivered an uncompromising message. “Taking into account the refusal of Japan to capitulate, the Allies approached the Soviet government with a proposal to join the war against Japanese aggression,” he read. “The Soviet Government has accepted the proposal of the Allies . . . from August 9, the Soviet Union will consider herself in a state of war against Japan.”
⁵³
At 1:00 a.m. on that day the Soviet Union launched its troops into Manchuria. On the same day a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing a further 40,000 people or more. The Japanese government was now in a state of utter panic. A few diehards tried to make the case for fighting on, issuing a chilling statement in the name of the minister of war, General Anami (who turned out not fully to have known what was being done in his name), that “even though we may have to eat grass, swallow dirt, and lie in the fields, we shall fight on to the bitter end.”
⁵⁴
But the conclusion was inevitable. On August 14, at 10:50 a.m., the emperor declared, in a prerecorded statement, that it was time to “endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable.” Few Japanese understood the full import of the broadcast at the time; the emperor spoke in a form of courtly classical Japanese, and the sound quality of the recording was poor. But the meaning was unequivocal. Japan would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and surrender without conditions.

The next morning Chiang Kai-shek rose at his usual early hour. “I thanked God that the mercy he gave me was so great,” he wrote. “Every word in Psalm 9 is true, in my experience.”
⁵⁵
Psalm 9 contains the lines “Thou has destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.” Chiang continued with his prayer and, while meditating, heard the recording of the Japanese surrender broadcast. Chiang headed to the radio studios to make his own victory broadcast at 10:00 a.m. “Our faith in justice through black and hopeless days and eight long years of struggle has today been rewarded,” he declared. In the course of the speech Chiang gave special mention to two people: Jesus Christ and Sun Yat-sen. Solemnly he declared, “the historical mission of our National Revolution has at last been fulfilled.”
⁵⁶