Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (65 page)

Whoever in a place has money or power, they class them as gentry who are all vile and they kill them all, not asking the right or wrongs of it. They will kill the landlords, kill the rich old men, and burn all the big houses . . . This sort of behavior is worse than [the first emperor] Qin Shihuang burning the books and walling up the scholars. By carrying out this policy . . . do they want to rule the empire? Is this really right?
¹¹

Xu noted the cynical element in the CCP’s strategy (as had Peter Vladimirov before him):

The CCP is happy at disasters and delighted at calamities. Their only fear is that the empire is
not
in chaos. When Dushan was lost, the
Xinhua ribao
put this in big-character headlines, that Dushan had been overcome, and then was silent and said nothing more. The previous year, in this same newspaper, the CCP had said: “We are making efforts for the war of resistance.” How much effort
were
they making?
¹²

Xu was equally dismissive of the smaller parties such as the China Youth Party. “They have many theories, but have no military authority, and thus no political authority.” He summarized, despairingly: “The first to suffer are the good ordinary people! As the blood flows between Nationalists and CCP, the ordinary people are suffering!”
¹³

To be fair, there were real achievements made under the Nationalists in the immediate postwar period, but more in the international arena than the domestic. China’s wartime contribution meant that it was defined as one of the five permanent powers on the Security Council of the new United Nations, each of which had the right to veto resolutions put before the council. China also had a place within a whole range of other new international organizations. Even in 1945 there were still very few non-Western nations that had full and equal sovereignty in world affairs (and Britain and France continued to maintain large parts of their empire, even if India would be given independence shortly). China’s status was significant well beyond the country itself, and formed a startling contrast to the semicolonized and prostrate state that had gone to war in 1937.

Yet the Civil War, once started, went badly for the Nationalists, in large part because of Chiang Kai-shek’s judgments. During the war against Japan, Chiang had played an appallingly bad hand much better than might have been expected. During the Civil War, his judgment appears to have deserted him. In particular, his decision to extend his lines to try and recapture the northeast—the region which was the Communist heartland where Mao was underpinned by strong support from the neighboring USSR—was spectacularly ill-judged. In 1945–1946 George Marshall had encouraged Chiang to try and recapture the region, but had become much more pessimistic about the possibility by the spring of 1946.
¹⁴

As 1947 ground on, the Communist general Lin Biao’s brilliant campaigning in north China drove the Nationalists further and further back. While major cities were still under Nationalist control, along with the rail lines, the territory was now Communist—an echo of the situation under the Japanese just a few years earlier. In the autumn of 1948 General Wei Lihuang found himself with some 300,000 Nationalist troops facing some 700,000 under Lin Biao.
¹⁵
By November the region’s major city of Shenyang (Mukden) had been lost, and the northeast with it. Lin’s troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) drove on further, taking north China, and were poised for the conquest of central China too. During the first half of 1949 Chiang transferred his naval and air force headquarters to the island of Taiwan; many civilians followed suit. In May Chiang set sail for Taiwan. He would never return to the mainland.

The war continued through the summer, but Chiang knew that the game was up and all sides expected a Communist victory, as cities fell one by one—Nanjing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was declared, its capital once more in Beijing.

The Communist victory on the Chinese mainland shaped the politics of East Asia, and of US-China relations, for decades. In the US the “loss” of China (although it was a country that had never really been the Americans’ to lose in the first place) began to poison the political atmosphere of the early Cold War.

Chiang Kai-shek’s critics made their voices heard. Tired of being forced to restrain his indictments of Chiang, Theodore White had left
Time
magazine and used his new freedom to publish a devastating indictment of Chiang in book form (coauthored with Annalee Jacoby),
Thunder out of China
(1946). “The greatest danger to China,” he wrote, “is the right wing of the Kuomintang [Nationalists].”
¹⁶
The book was a best seller. There were other critical accounts. Graham Peck, who had spent much of the war working for the Office of War Information (OWI) in Chongqing, wrote a brilliant memoir entitled
Two Kinds of Time
. It was equally unsparing of Chiang, judging that by the time he fled the mainland in 1949 “the Generalissimo was virtually the only man who got satisfaction from his own regime.”
¹⁷

The right wing was able to use the issue to accuse American liberals of being soft on communism. The “red scare” tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have lists of Communists supposedly hidden in US government institutions, brought a chill to American public life. There was a strong suspicion that key advisers to Roosevelt on China, including Harry Dexter White and Laughlin Currie, had been actively part of a network of Soviet agents. (However, it is worth remembering that the USSR had no immediate wartime interest in the weakening of the Nationalist war effort, and both White and Currie were actively involved in providing material assistance to the National Government.)
¹⁸
But those who were guilty of little more than naîveté about the CCP and its intentions, including John Service, were persecuted and accused of betraying their country’s interests by undermining the Nationalists. The Nationalists themselves had established a coterie of figures known as the “China Lobby,” who had influence largely with Republican politicians, including Anna Chennault (widow of General Claire Chennault), T. V. Soong, and, of course Henry Luce. The US also encountered one of the most immediate effects of Chiang’s failure just months after Mao’s victory on the mainland, when the Korean War broke out in 1950. The experience of war on the Korean Peninsula was instrumental in hardening American attitudes toward the new Chinese Communist state.

The grip of McCarthyism had begun to fade by the early 1960s, and it became clear that the Communist regime on the mainland was there to stay. This development had a strong effect on academic analysis of the war against Japan in the West, and in the United States in particular. Since Mao’s regime had clearly won, the important question was why he had succeeded. Chalmers Johnson wrote a groundbreaking and courageous book which argued that the origins of Mao’s victory in 1949 lay in the ability of his wartime regime in Yan’an to mobilize peasants through nationalism, which further inspired them to embrace the social revolution of communism.
¹⁹
The book created a storm of debate, and one of the most important responses, a decade later, came from the historian Mark Selden, whose book
The Yenan Way
argued that the wartime social revolution itself, rather than peasant nationalism, was at the heart of Mao’s victory. By that stage, American life had been convulsed by the Vietnam War. For many, the experience of China’s Communists in the 1940s was an account that could help to deepen their understandings of the Indochinese Communists some thirty years later. For those who saw Vietnam as an unjust war, Mao’s social experiment during the war against Japan helped to burnish the idea that indigenous social revolution should be understood rather than opposed. However, with this “Yan’an-centered” history of the wartime period, the record of the Nationalists was mostly dismissed.

Other progressive critics attacked the right-wing version of history presented by the China Lobby, which held that Chiang had merely been a victim of Communist duplicity. The renowned historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a classic book that used Stilwell’s papers to make a devastating case against Chiang’s regime. Published just as Nixon began his opening to China, it further demolished Chiang’s reputation.
²⁰

In China itself discussion of the history of the wartime years was even more restricted. Mao’s China had no place for any description of the Nationalists except as enemies who did little to defend China against Japan and had rightly been routed in 1949. All credit for leading the Chinese people in the “war of resistance against Japan” went to the CCP alone, and more specifically to Mao himself.

The myths surrounding Mao’s revolution in Yan’an became central to the country’s identity. But huge swathes of people were excluded from the narrative. At a time when Britain, the US, Germany, France, and Japan came to terms, joyously or painfully, with the titanic changes that the war had wrought on their societies, the experience of eight years of resistance was almost entirely removed from the public sphere in China. The Nanjing Massacre, the bombing of Chongqing, the collaboration of Wang Jingwei, the Communist areas that had not been under Mao’s control: all were sidelined or not even mentioned. The Japanese did turn up, often in somewhat stylized form, as the enemy (as in the Chinese opera
The Legend of the Red Lantern
, designated one of the “eight model operas” during the Cultural Revolution), but during most of the 1950s to the 1970s Mao’s government was trying to detach Tokyo from the Cold War embrace of the US, and there was no sustained effort to whip up genuine hatred of the defeated enemy. Much of the discussion about the Japanese circled around the need to establish “reconciliation” with those who had genuinely repented. The real venom was reserved for the Nationalists across the water in Taiwan, where they remained protected by the US Navy.

Many aspects of Chinese society and culture seemed to reflect changes that had happened during the war. Military service had habituated the Chinese to more collective ways of living, as had the trend toward living and working in the same place to avoid being caught traveling during bombings. More than that, the atmosphere of political mobilization that the war had brought about remained a constant in Chinese life. From the Aid Korea Resist America Campaign during the Korean War (1950–1953) to the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), Chinese life was characterized by constant campaigns. In the latter case, the drive to increase economic growth gave rise to a horrific famine that killed some 20 million people or more. Yet of all Maoist China’s campaigns, the most intense was the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Ostensibly, the great upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao declared war on his own party, had little to do with the legacy of the Sino-Japanese War. But two of the cities where the fighting would be fiercest—with tanks in the streets—were Chongqing and Chengdu.
²¹
During the Cultural Revolution younger Communist cadres from ideologically “bad” families took the opportunity to seek revenge against cadres from “good” families who had been privileged since the Communist revolution in 1949. By 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was launched, the “bad” cadres came from families who had had bourgeois connections before 1949, and in many cases these would have been people associated with the Nationalist Party in particular. After 1949 the Nationalist record in Sichuan was associated with nothing except corruption and a supposed refusal to fight: the sacrifices the province and its people had made during the war years had little connection with the CCP, so they were written out of the narrative. While many factors shaped the savagery of the Cultural Revolution in Sichuan’s cities, it is not implausible to see at least the ghosts of the wartime trauma writing part of the story for the generation that was born after the war itself had ended.

Then the Cold War unfroze. President Richard Nixon visited Beijing in 1972 and the contours of global conflict started to shift. Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, Mao in 1976. The duel across the Straits had lost its fire. By the early 1980s the historical narrative of the war had begun to shift significantly.

Among the most important signs of the new policy were the establishment of new museums commemorating different aspects of the war. At Wanping, where the fighting had broken out in July 1937, a major museum opened in 1987 covering the events of the whole war, dated from the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to victory over Japan in 1945. Although the CCP was still given the credit for leading the victory against Japan, the Beijing museum stressed the contribution of Nationalist generals and the importance of victories such as Taierzhuang. In the suburbs of Shenyang, a museum commemorated the explosion on the railway track that launched the Manchurian crisis of 1931. (The facade of the museum is designed to resemble a desk calendar opened at September 18, 1931, the date of the attack.) And perhaps most resonant of all, in 1985, there opened a memorial museum to the Nanjing Massacre, on the site of one of the particularly horrific killings. It was remarkable that it took some four decades to pass after the war had ended for such a site to be created.
²²

As the 1990s drew on, various parts of China took advantage of the new historical openness to discuss previously taboo topics. Chongqing, in particular, took full advantage of the new possibilities. Of all the Allied wartime capitals, it was the only one that had been given no chance to celebrate its resistance or to mourn its losses. Even the Monument to Victory in the Anti-Japanese War set up in the city center was renamed the Liberation Monument (as in liberation by the CCP from the Nationalists) after 1949. In the early twenty-first century Chongqing made up for lost time. The city burnished its reputation as the last redoubt of resistance. Chiang Kai-shek’s old mansion at Huangshan, from where he had seen the city on fire during the war, is now handsomely restored. The historical narratives inside portray him as China’s national leader of resistance; his political and military shortcomings play little part in the description. The city’s Three Gorges Museum has featured displays including dioramas of the bombing of Chongqing and a reconstruction of the great tunnel suffocation disaster of 1941.