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6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs wraps up his 20,000 foot view chronology of World War II in China, discussing the dispositions of the Nationalists and the Communists by war’s end.
Photo: Chinese zones of factional control at the end of World War II. Note communist controlled areas in vertical red/white striping. Stars indicate Nationalist provisional capital of Chungking (blue) and communist base of Yan’an (red).
Readers who missed Parts 1 and 2 of this very abridged summary of World War II in China can go to:
1) Japan's modernization and expansionist ambitions up to the 1931 invasion of Manchuria.
2) The invasion of the Chinese mainland and several years of brutal warfare.
After the Xi’an Incident of 1936 Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly agreed to the united front with the Communists to resist the Japanese. The combined armies, of which the Communists were by far the smaller at the time, were renamed the Nationalist Revolutionary Army.
Communist soldiers wore the Nationalist blue sun insignia and on paper they took orders from Chiang Kai-shek. However given ideological differences and the geographical distance between Nationalist and communist bases of control, cooperation quickly broke down. In practice the Nationalists and Communists operated independently with little coordination/cooperation.
THE COMMUNISTS
While the Nationalist government remained holed up in the Sichuan basin city of Chunking, its stalemate with the IJA provided a golden opportunity for Chinese communist rebels.
When the Japanese entered rural areas they mercilessly killed the peasantry. It didn’t matter whether village dwellers resisted the IJA or cooperated, the Japanese looted, raped, and massacred.
In the north, the Japanese “Three Alls” policy of 1941-42 (“kill all, burn all, loot all”) was aimed specifically at civilians of which 2.7 million were killed in that campaign alone.
Given no real choice, the peasants cooperated with the communist resistance since there was no incentive to remain neutral. Either way the Japanese would kill you.
The CCP’s base of Yan’an in northwest China also conveniently bordered Japanese occupied territory in northeast China. Given the sheer size of the country, Japanese occupation was limited mostly to urban areas with little presence in the countryside. Thus communist activity spread deep behind enemy lines and infiltrated the rural landscape of Japanese controlled provinces.
The Communists were also smart enough to treat the Chinese peasants well. Mao Zedong gave strict instructions to his soldiers not to steal and to always pay for whatever food they received from Chinese civilians. This, combined with seizing land and redistributing it to the peasants, won the Communists much support among the rural Chinese population in north and northeastern China. By contrast KMT troops, themselves poorly fed, equipped, and hungry, routinely looted their fellow Chinese.
Communist military leadership was also good. Famous commanders like Zhu De and Peng Dehuai successfully harassed Japanese troops with guerilla tactics similar to those they had used against the KMT during the Jiangxi Soviet days of the early 1930’s.
Although guerilla warfare was insufficient to change the outcome of the larger war, the perception that the Communists were going on the offensive—while the Nationalist government had retreated, sacrificed land for time, and was eventually holed up in Sichuan and playing defense—transformed the Communists into heroes who were “doing something.”
Thus millions of everyday Chinese—mostly young people and idealistic university students who were unhappy with the corruption and inefficacy of the Nationalist government—made pilgrimages to Yan’an from all over the country and joined the communist resistance. During the war the communist 18th Army Group’s numbers swelled from just 20,000 at the time of the 1936 Xi’an Incident to 1.2 million by war’s end. This doesn’t include another 2 million “People’s Militia” troops.
Most of the idealistic youth had no idea how communism worked and were unaware of the repeated famines in communist Russia, Stalin’s notorious NKVD police state, the Soviet Great Terror, or the Ukrainian Holodomor. Knowing nothing about the dangers of communism, they only saw the CCP fighting and harassing the Japanese invaders and poured into Yan’an as volunteers.
Fifteen years later these idealistic students would learn for themselves what life is really like under communism when the Great Famine of 1958-1961 came, but that's a subject for later.
By war’s end the Communists had infiltrated and controlled nearly all the countryside in northeast China and much of the Yangtze region, a major factor that would determine the outcome of the upcoming Chinese Civil War.
THE WAR TURNS
As Japan ravaged China Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling, American educated and fluent in English, routinely visited the United States in search of aid. While President Franklin Roosevelt and most of Congress were sympathetic to China, the American public remained generally isolationist so all the United States would offer was modest financial and humanitarian support.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor changed all that, drawing the United States directly into the war, and the Chinese were elated to have a new, powerful ally. FDR dispatched General Joseph Stilwell (aka. “Vinegar Joe”) to Chungking to assume the role of Commander all U.S. forces in China, Burma, and India (of which there were actually few Americans) and Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek.
The U.S./Nationalist China relationship was strained from the start.
Although Stillwell mastered both written and spoken Chinese, his lack of diplomacy didn’t go over well with the Nationalist government. Appalled by widespread KMT corruption, Stillwell was soon referring to Chiang Kai-shek as “Peanut” and his internal memos and discussions were so laced with personal insults that word eventually got back to Chiang.
Chiang himself was not personally corrupt (a subject for another column) but his government certainly was, especially his wife and her family. During the 1940's, as U.S. aid poured into China, Soong Mei-ling’s brother T.V. Soong, a former banker and KMT finance minister and premier, was speculated by the western press to be the richest man in the world.
Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek frustrated Stillwell by preserving his best remaining forces for an eventual showdown with the Communists while granting only his inferior troops and what few Americans were there to do most of the fighting against the Japanese. Stillwell also clashed with the British over operations in the China/Burma border region.
The disagreements and conflicts escalated to the point that Chiang asked FDR to replace Stilwell who was recalled to the United States and replaced by General Albert Wedemeyer.
Wedemeyer was more diplomatic and restrained in his disagreements with the KMT, but he saw the same problems that Stilwell did and conveyed similar reports of Nationalist corruption and poor leadership to his superior, George C. Marshall.
Under FDR’s presidency massive amounts of U.S. aid flowed to the Nationalist government, much of it ultimately into the bank accounts of corrupt KMT officials. Meanwhile Nationalist troops suffered from shortages of food, weapons, and even boots. KMT officials and Soong Mei-ling’s own family made fortunes during the war while Nationalist soldiers, lacking basic necessities, routinely looted Chinese villages for food.
Wedemeyer reported large numbers of KMT conscripts, snatched from their homes, died of disease or hunger before even reaching training camp. Many who did make it were immediately sent to “hospitals” which Wedemeyer’s report compared to German extermination camps at Buchenwald.
According to Wedemeyer, the “Chinese army was starving to death in the field.”
Nevertheless, the tide of the war turned against Japan in the Pacific. By late 1944 the U.S. Navy and its submarines controlled sea lanes to and from the home islands and the Nationalists won a few battles in mid-1945, mostly pushing the Japanese back in the southern and extreme southern provinces of Hunan and Guangxi. Even when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria there were still 1.2 million Japanese soldiers stationed in China.
While the United States had carried out nearly all the offensive successes against Imperial Japan, there is something to be said for China’s role pinning down over a million Japanese soldiers on the mainland, something the CCP reminds Chinese citizens today. In some propaganda the CCP claims America’s role was secondary and that it was they, the Communists, who actually defeated Japan. This is of course an exaggeration, but there can still be no question that China, with all its suffering and losses tying up the IJA, still played a significant role in Japan’s defeat. It was a period of sometimes uneasy cooperation between the Americans and the Chinese, but it ultimately worked.
Either way the final death tally was enormous. Nearly 20 million Chinese had died, mostly civilians, a number rivaled only by Soviet losses on the European Eastern Front. The Chinese economy lay in ruins with inflation running rampant. When Chiang moved the Nationalist capital back to Nanjing and attempted to rebuild the economy while simultaneously preparing for another civil war, the Communists had likewise established themselves in northern China and Manchuria and their numbers had swollen into the millions.
Once again, an outside intervention had aided the CCP. The Japanese invasion had taken the Communists from a force of perhaps 20,000 men on the brink of annihilation by the KMT to effective control of northern China and an army of millions.
This was the state of China right before the outbreak of the second Nationalist-Communist civil war of 1945-1949.
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