Restless Empire (38 page)

In Tokyo, the Japanese leaders were becoming increasingly frustrated by China’s ability to resist. By early autumn the military officers
who wanted to attack the United States and Britain to crush what they saw as Western attempts at strangling Japan were getting the upper hand in a remarkably open policy debate. By conquering Southeast Asia, some Japanese planners believed that they would force China to surrender and get access to the resources they needed to fight a wider war. The imperial army’s failure to make major gains in China in late 1941 helped push the argument that Japan could not win and preserve its honor without engaging its enemies on a broad front. Privately, many Japanese officers had started talking about a “China quagmire.” Defeating the Western powers in Asia through the use of the navy would erase the memory of the army’s humiliations on the Chinese front and let Japan be seen as the power that brought modernity to other Asians.

When an aide awakened him in the early morning of 8 December 1941, Chiang was in no way surprised at the news he received. More than anyone else in the Chinese leadership, the Generalissimo had been convinced that Japan, sooner or later, would move south. Learning of the full extent of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he sent a message to President Roosevelt: “To our new common battle we offer all we are and all we have, to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are free from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy.”
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Even the rapid Japanese advance into Southeast Asia did not rattle the Generalissimo, though the quick surrender of Singapore, on 15 February, came as something of a shock. Chiang had believed that the British would put up more of a fight. With two-thirds of the Japanese army still in China, Chiang could rightly pride himself on holding the main front against Tokyo’s attempts at imposing a new order in the region.

Chiang’s first fear was that the Japanese southern offensive would cut China’s lifeline through Burma. He did not trust the fighting capacities of the British. When their commander of the Indian forces, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, hesitated at receiving the divisions Chiang was willing to transfer to northern Burma in early 1942, the Generalissimo lashed out at him: “You and your people have no idea
how to fight the Japanese. Resisting the Japanese is not like suppressing colonial rebellions, not like colonial wars. The Japanese are a serious great power. . . . Fighting against them for so many years, we Chinese are the ones who know how to do it. For this kind of job, you British are incompetent, and you should learn from the Chinese how to fight the Japanese.”
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In his meetings with the one-eyed British field marshal, Chiang must have considered how perceptions of power and alliance had changed since his own youth: China was no longer a despised outsider to the international system, and the British were no longer at the top of the world. Even when British forces retreated into India in May 1942, leaving the newly arrived Chinese divisions in the lurch and abandoning the Burma Road into China’s southern Yunnan province, Chiang did not despair. He knew that the Chinese military presence in Burma had made his point about China being a great power and had scored points for him with the only military power that really could support China: the United States.

The Sino-American alliance developed rapidly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even after the Burma Road was closed, Allied planes brought US supplies, military equipment, and advisers in “over the Hump,” the dangerous flight from northern India into China across the Himalayas. Without US backing there was much doubt whether the GMD regime would have survived the final three years of the war. Still, Chiang had reason to deplore Allied strategy with regard to China. Of US assistance to its allies, the portion that came to the GMD averaged around one percent up to 1945. The reason involved not only the difficulties of transport. The Allies had also decided on a Europe First strategy. Their main resources would initially be used in the war against Germany, and only be employed against Japan after victory in Europe. Chiang, understandably, deplored this strategy, as he did much of the military advice he got from his chief US adviser, General Joseph Stilwell. A curmudgeonly Yankee who disdained the Chinese war effort, Stilwell was about as much of a mismatch for the leading GMD generals
as could be imagined. They accused him of holding back on supplies and US troops while promoting useless offensives. He accused them of corruption, waste, and incompetence. By 1944 Stilwell was in direct conflict with Chiang, whom he referred to as the Peanut. After a particularly brazen encounter the US general doggereled:

I have waited long for vengeance,

At last I’ve had my chance.

I’ve looked the Peanut in the eye

And kicked him in the pants.
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But the conflict between Chiang and Stilwell should not overshadow the close cooperation that developed between Chinese and US forces during the final years of World War II. The Americans trained and equipped Chiang’s best troops, his intelligence services, and his administrators. In spite of his general dislike of American society and culture, Chiang knew in which direction world power was turning. And he saw great opportunities for China in it.

The main benefit China got from its first US alliance was its increase in international standing. At the Allied war summit in Cairo in November 1943, Chiang sat down at the table with the US president and the British prime minister as an equal, though he was kept away from their deliberations on Europe and the Soviet Union. He also got promises of continued US assistance for China after the war and a permanent alliance with the world’s leading power. According to the State Department’s offical records, “President Roosevelt proposed that, after the war, China and the United States should effect certain arrangements under which the two countries could come to each other’s assistance in the event of foreign aggression and that the United States should maintain adequate military forces on various bases in the Pacific in order that it could effectively share the responsibility of preventing aggression.”
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In need of Chinese help to win the Pacific war, Roosevelt gave Chiang’s
China status as one of the Big Four allies, with special influence over the occupation of Japan and the future of Korea and Southeast Asia. Well before the Cairo conference, in January 1943, the United States and Britain had relinquished their extraterritorial rights in China. The GMD proudly declared that they had returned China to its proper status: “We, the Chinese nation, after fifty years of sanguinary revolutions and five and a half years of sacrifice in the War of Resistance, have finally transformed the history of a hundred years of the Unequal Treaties of sorrow into a glorious record of the termination of the Unequal Treaties.”
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A
NY SOCIETY PUT UNDER
the stress of massive warfare will suffer, not just at the time but for years to come. China was no exception. Everywhere the Japanese armies went, Chinese civilians suffered, through war-induced atrocities, starvation, or the humiliation of foreign control. But those who were drawn through the meat grinder of the defending power, the Guomindang, suffered too. It is likely that more GMD soldiers died from disease and starvation during the war than the number of those who fell on the battlefield. As the GMD armies ran out of supplies, they confiscated the scarce goods and produce of the peasants. And as the war wore on, more and more peasant communities in China cared less who was in control than how hunger and killing could be avoided in their villages. In many areas the Japanese were simply considered one outside power among many, and the population’s anger was sometimes more intense at the behavior of Chinese troops than against the Japanese.

In economic terms, the war against Japan was a disaster for China. A significant part of what had been constructed in the first part of the twentieth century was destroyed: communications, industry, irrigation. It is often said that regions that depend on basic agricultural production suffer less during wartime than more complex economies, but this was not true for China in the mid-twentieth century. The war with Japan
came as a climax of a century of rural deprivation, in which peasant room for survival had become increasingly narrow. Trade, which had always played a key role in the Chinese agricultural economy was impeded, and in some areas stopped. Access to fertilizers and water was limited. Henan province went through a large-scale famine in 1942–1943, in which drought and military procurements combined to kill off two to three million people and make another three million homeless. While peasants in the province starved, Chinese armies continued to requisition grain and conscript laborers. As the American journalist Theodore White described it,

There were corpses on the road. A girl of no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death; her eyes were open and the rain fell on them. People chipped at bark, pounded it by the roadside for food; vendors sold leaves at a dollar a bundle. A dog digging at a mound was exposing a human body. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools to eat the green slime of the waters.
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The war made between 60 and 90 million Chinese into refugees. Some went to the cities to survive, creating new urban environments, both in the occupied zones and in GMD territory. Crime and exploitation thrived, and life for refugees and city dwellers alike became chaos.
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Even those who tried to work with the authorities were stifled by what they saw as unreasonable demands by the state and by uncertainties about the future. Choices that were made today could be utterly nonsensical tomorrow, and behavior that was lauded in society one morning could bring about the death penalty by the following afternoon. For the bloated and terrorized cities, wartime was not so much about collaboration or resistance as it was about survival or death, or at least about possessions or penury. Abhorring the Japanese and feeling abandoned by the GMD government, most urban Chinese, rich and poor, exited the war disillusioned and downcast.

Despite its overall failure to deliver for the population, the GMD did succeed at increasing production and at organizing a sometimes unwilling populace for resistance. The government’s problem was of course that two-thirds of production and almost all of its income went to fight the war. Like governments elsewhere, it attempted to compensate for this permanent crisis by becoming more centralized and efficient (which often meant brutal). It also benefited from the use of experts who returned to China for patriotic reasons and who mostly recommended increased state control. Some of the methods that the Communists later used to rule China were first tested out by the GMD during the war against Japan. Production quotas, price controls, and militarization of the population were cherished aims of the wartime GMD leaders (though most intended to relax these corporative arrangements after the war). But in spite of all of the regime’s calls for unity and sacrifice, its biggest problem was handling its own finances. It was deprived of almost all of its prewar tax base, which was located in the productive and relatively prosperous eastern coastal regions, areas largely controlled by the Japanese. And so the GMD never achieved any kind of fiscal stability during the war. New taxes, especially the new land tax in kind from 1942 on, were seen as unfair and an attempt to shift the burden onto the peasantry in the government-held zones.

The war against Japan both made and unmade China.
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On the one hand, it furthered ideas about centralization, effectivization, and a modern state that were to come to fruition in the late twentieth century, long after the war ended and under a new Communist government. On the other hand, it brought almost limitless destruction and dislocation to many parts of China, and influenced peoples’ lives in ways that underlined abandonment and brutalization. For those who lived through it, there is little doubt that the war was more about destruction and loss than about renewal and modernization. It took China’s suffering to a new level and made it, in the eyes of the Chinese, the country that the rest of the world had scorned and abandoned.

W
ITHIN
C
HINA, THE
CCP turned out to be one of the main beneficiaries of the war. The Japanese threat helped the Communists survive the onslaught by the GMD. The war made it possible for the party to mobilize in its new bases in the northwest and behind the overextended Japanese lines, where the GMD state had collapsed. When the war began, the CCP was a small group, but in 1945—with 1.2 million members and 900,000 men and women under arms—it was a force to be reckoned with. Even more important than its numerical expansion, though, was the ability the party had gained to work with all segments of Chinese society through a system of centralized decision making. The war had made it possible for Mao Zedong and the group who had promoted his leadership to achieve two very different goals at the same time: Make all party members obey a secret and cloistered Mao-centered inner organization but present a moderate and cooperative outward image. It was a stunning transformation that would help the party gain from the war and succeed in Chinese politics after the war was over.

The CCP had been advocating a united front against Japan, but immediately after the war started, it was less than clear how the party should behave. The Comintern wanted the party to put military pressure on the Japanese, but Mao resisted appeals for large-scale warfare against the enemy, whether they came from Stalin or from Chiang. Instead, he emphasized guerrilla tactics, meaning—most often—a clandestine presence behind Japanese lines aimed at building the CCP as a party. From 1939 to 1945, the CCP mainly fought either to preserve its own territory or to avenge Japanese atrocities against the civilian population in rear areas where the Communists operated politically. The CCP killed many more Chinese—whether GMD, collaborators, or just local forces who got in the way—than Japanese. But Mao needed to maintain good relations with Moscow, so in late 1940 he embarked on the Hundred Regiments Campaign. It was a response not just to Stalin’s repeated calls for action but also urging from his own CCP officers.
The Hundred Regiments Campaign was a set of offensives against the Japanese in northern China, but it was poorly coordinated, and the results were near disastrous for the Communists. Four times as many CCP soldiers were killed as those from the imperial army. And after it was over, the Japanese took a terrible revenge on the local population.