Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (66 page)

Mass media have also been used to send out messages about the new interpretation of history. A series entitled “Temporary Wartime Capital” was made by the local television station in 2005, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war and celebrate Chongqing’s role. The marketing of the DVD was revealing. The cover showed images, familiar in the West, of three great wartime capitals—London’s Houses of Parliament, the US Capitol in Washington, DC, and the clock tower in Red Square in Moscow. But it also showed, portrayed twice as high as the other structures, the Anti-Japanese Victory Monument in the center of Chongqing. The international message was clear: the Second World War had been won by four, not three great Allies. And the domestic message was also pointed: Chongqing had had a role of global significance in the recent past, and this should be acknowledged by all Chinese.

Yet convergence still seems far off when it comes to the most contentious areas of wartime history. A joint committee of top Japanese and Chinese scholars was established in 2006 to provide an agreed version of a variety of questions in the history of the two countries. Despite efforts to reconcile views, disagreements over the way that the war was interpreted (particularly the issue of whether Japanese aggression was preplanned or not) meant that the report was never officially adopted by the Chinese government after it was presented in 2009.
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As in China, historical memory of the war in Japan itself has been complicated. One version of events, often heard in China and sometimes in the West, is that Japan has simply refused to acknowledge its own war crimes. This view is too simple. It is true that there was and is a vocal right wing in Japan that downplays or denies wartime atrocities. The Japanese conservative mainstream is also often too quick to dismiss the enormity of Japanese crimes. Japan has also pointed to its sad distinction as the only country ever to have been attacked with atomic weapons to make a case for itself as a “peace nation”—but often with little context or explanation given for the events that led to the dropping of two atomic bombs.
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However, it is also true that there is a wide and lively public sphere in Japan which examines and in no way excuses the Japanese war record in China and elsewhere. The Japanese left, notably the journalist Honda Katsuichi, was instrumental in forcing their own country to re-examine the Nanjing Massacre in the 1970s, long before the issue was brought back to the public gaze in the West or China. Although there have been attempts in Japanese schools to introduce “revisionist” textbooks that minimize Japanese atrocities in China, they have not been widely adopted within the school system.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen China’s inexorable rise to greater global influence, and part of that rise has been a new assertiveness about foreign relations, and relations with Japan in particular. Repeated events showed that memories of the war remain a flash point. Around the time of the handover of power from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping in late 2012, tensions over the sovereignty of the Diaoyutai Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea spilled over into Chinese streets. The islands are part of the unfinished business in the Asia Pacific region, claimed by Japan, China, and Taiwan. Informed by popular memories of Japan’s wartime record in China, protesters railed against Japan’s claims to the islands in massive demonstrations across Chinese cities. Young people with no possible personal memory of the war were using its legacy to make a statement about contemporary East Asian international relations.

But rather more noticeable within China, and more significant in the longer term, is the use of the war to unite people within China and to position the country as a cooperative rather than confrontational actor in world politics. The term “war of resistance against Japan” (
KangRi zhanzheng
or just
Kangzhan
) remains the commonest term to describe the war in China. However, the term “antifascist war” has also become more commonplace, particularly as writers seek to portray Chinese resistance not simply as a solo act of opposition to Japan, but rather as part of an act of collective resistance to the Axis powers. The implication is clear: at an earlier time when its contribution was needed, China delivered, and it should now be trusted as it seeks, once again, to enter international society playing a wider role. The new interpretations of history acknowledge the role of the United States in China during the war, but not always to the advantage of the US. One Chinese historian concluded that the aim of the United States in making China one of the major world powers was to create a “vassal” for the US in the postwar world (an echo of Churchill’s anxieties on the same question). Another agreed, declaring that America had defined its foreign policy simply “to maintain its own national interests.”
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The war has also become a fixture in popular culture. In 1986 one of the first revisionist films about the war was entitled
The Great Battle of Taierzhuang
, celebrating the major Nationalist victory in April 1938. The Nanjing Massacre has been re-created on film several times, including Lu Chang’s
City of Life and Death
(2009) and Zhang Yimou’s
Flowers of War
(2012). Even video games have taken the war on board; multiplayer games allow enthusiasts to fight the Japanese Imperial Army.
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Given the tacit permission to rehabilitate the record of the Nationalists, however, not all new interpretations of the war have made entirely comfortable reading for the Chinese Communist Party. Fan Jianchuan, a former soldier turned wealthy businessman in Chengdu, used his fortune to set up a series of private museums outside the city. One of these commemorated Sichuan’s contribution during the wartime period, showcasing identity documents and uniforms from the Nationalist areas. Fan published a book entitled
One Person’s War of Resistance
in which he showed off some of his artifacts. In his reflections he talked about a cup he had found which dated from the Cultural Revolution era. It was inscribed with a heartfelt, semiliterate message from a victim of persecution: “I fought the Japanese, and I took a bullet in my leg.” Yet in 1966 the old soldier was being attacked because he had fought for the Nationalists, not the Communists. “For the eight years of the War of Resistance,” reflected Fan Jianchuan, “he had dodged death . . . and suddenly, overnight, [his war record] was considered shameful?”
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In more recent years Nationalist soldiers may not have been persecuted, but instead they were being ignored as they died off. In 2010 Cui Yongyuan, one of China’s best-known television hosts, gave an interview in which he talked at length about his rediscovery of the Nationalist role in the war. As a child he had seen films that implied that the Nationalists had collaborated with the Japanese, and it was only as an adult that he gained a greater understanding of their role when he toured a battlefield with a Nationalist veteran who showed Cui where his comrades had fallen. “This was perhaps the first time that I had met a Nationalist soldier,” Cui recalled. “I really began to feel respect for them.” Cui interviewed over a hundred Nationalist veterans in Yunnan province. He suggested that individual stories were the best way to explain the complexities of the war, whether it was occasions when the locals had pointed out members of the Eighth Route Army to the Japanese rather than hiding them, or occasions when even collaborators might have shown some conscience. “Memoirs from collaborators give a variety of self-justifications,” he observed, “but it’s not always as simple as betraying your country. There were even some collaborators who did what they did as a version of the war of resistance, trading space for time.”
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The unquiet spirits of the war against Japan were beginning to rise, some seventy years after laying down their swords—or their lives.

Modern China has been marked by massive upheavals and destruction that are just starting to be discussed openly. The devastating famine of the Great Leap Forward and the destruction caused by the Cultural Revolution have only been partially acknowledged in China. Likewise, the war against Japan, until recently, was only discussed in very limited terms. The opening up of dialogue on the war, and in particular the role of the Nationalists and of China as an international actor at that time, indicates significant change in the way that China conducts its contemporary politics, both domestic and international.

Yet one of the most important conclusions we can draw from China’s wartime history may still be unwelcome in China. And that is the contingent nature of China’s path to modernity. The three men who sought to rule China during the war—Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Wang Jingwei—each embodied a different path to the same goal: a modern, nationalist Chinese state. There was nothing inevitable about the Chinese Communist Party’s coming to power in 1949. Without the war with Japan, there would have been a greater possibility of an anti-imperialist, anti-Communist Nationalist government consolidating power. It would have still been an immensely hard task, not least because of the Nationalists’ own huge flaws, but the war made it nearly impossible. Of course, in an Asia ruled by Japan, China would have remained colonized for decades or more. The political conditions of China today are not the only possible ones that history could have produced. One of the great lost opportunities of the war was the tentative move toward pluralism both by the Nationalists and the Communists. The increasing harshness of the war, along with a reluctance by either party to surrender ultimate power, made this a green shoot that withered quickly. But it was there, and deserves to be remembered, and considered afresh.

Another topic that is more widely discussed in China today is the danger of an economic crisis leading to social unrest. Large parts of the old “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed employment, healthcare, and pensions, which were instituted during Mao’s years of rule, were abolished as part of the price of economic reform in the 1990s. From the mid-2000s, the government of Hu Jintao made moves to mend some of the holes in China’s social-welfare safety net, with new plans to subsidize support for the elderly and the ill. Yet the debates of the early twenty-first century on this issue are not new. The war with Japan pressured both the Nationalists and the Communists to create a new social contract based on greater obligations between the state and the citizen. Today’s debates are in part a legacy of that eight-year period of war when the state became more demanding of its people, but was also obliged to shoulder greater responsibilities toward them.

As the war comes to matter to China again, it will affect Western perceptions of China too. The immediate need to understand the continuing flare-ups in Chinese-Japanese relations provides a pressing reason to reevaluate the war. But there is also a more profound reason, one that has to do with historical completeness, even justice. Our collective history of the Allied contribution to the Second World War has moved a tremendous distance in the past few decades. The American role is now seen as part of a global war effort. The British have come to acknowledge the massive contribution of the empire and commonwealth in underpinning their decision to continue fighting. The Soviet Union’s great resistance, costing some 20 million lives, now stands central to the understanding of the Allied war effort.

China remains the forgotten ally, its contribution only slowly being remembered as its experience fades out of living memory. Its involvement in the war was not as harrowing as that of the Soviet Union, which was engaged in a struggle to the death, a fight about race and power. But the suffering endured by China was still unimaginably great: the war against Japan left 15 million to 20 million dead, and 80 million to 100 million refugees. The flawed but real economic development that the Nationalists had begun in 1928 was destroyed. For eight years brutal death was an everyday possibility for ordinary Chinese, whether from the swords in Nanjing or the bombs dropping on Chongqing, or even the dams, destroyed in desperation by their own government.

Yet this weakened and crippled state, whose centers of gravity moved at huge speed from Nanjing and Shanghai to Chongqing and Yan’an, still fought for eight years when it could have surrendered to the enemy. The Chinese Nationalists and Communists were the only two major political groupings in East Asia to maintain a consistent opposition to the Japanese Empire through the whole period from 1937 to 1945. The Nationalists maintained some 4 million troops in China through the war, helping to tie down some half a million or more Japanese soldiers who could otherwise have been transferred elsewhere. The Communists maintained a guerrilla campaign that prevented the Japanese from gaining control of large parts of northern China, tying down troops and resources.

Without Chinese resistance, China would have become a Japanese colony as early as 1938. This would have allowed Japan dominance over the mainland, and would have allowed Tokyo to turn its attention to expansion in Southeast Asia even more swiftly, and with less distraction. A pacified China would also have made the invasion of British India much more plausible. Without the “China Quagmire”—a quagmire caused by the refusal of the Chinese to stop fighting—Japan’s imperial ambitions would have been much easier to fulfill.

Throughout the war, Chiang Kai-shek’s master of propaganda, Hollington Tong, created a variety of characters who were meant to represent China’s continuing struggle to the outside world. The name he gave to one such character was highly symbolic: Yu Kangming, a name meaning “I fight fate.”
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Both the Nationalists and the Communists did fight a fate that they had never sought. And in acknowledging their suffering, their resistance, and the terrible choices they were forced to make, we in the West also do greater honor to our own collective memories and understandings of the Second World War.