Born of Struggle
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A Chinese artillery commander marks a Japanese target on the Yangtze front, circa 1937.Credit...Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBy Gordon G. Chang
Sept. 6, 2013
Between 14 million and 20 million Chinese died in the “war of resistance to the end” against Japan last century. Another 80 million to 100 million became refugees. The conflict destroyed China’s great cities, devastated its countryside, ravaged the economy and ended all hopes for a modern, pluralistic society. “The narrative of the war is the story of a people in torment,” Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, writes in his superb work, “Forgotten Ally.”
World War II, Mitter points out, started not on the plains of Europe but with an accidental firefight in 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge, a few miles southwest of Beijing, and although Tokyo surrendered eight years later, the victorious Nationalist China of Chiang Kai-shek arguably lost more than the vanquished Japan. By 1949, Chiang had fled to Taiwan and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party had taken control.
Yet the war did more than ruin the country and set the stage for a Communist dictatorship. In the early decades of the 20th century, Mitter writes, “many felt that China was a geographical expression rather than a country.” The invasion by the Japanese — once mentors to the Chinese but now seen as monsters — created a sense of national identity. In 1938, after the first Nationalist battlefield victory, China’s people for the first time began to care who governed them. The nation may have been in disarray, but “China” as a concept became personal and meaningful.
Throughout his book, Mitter discusses a “new compact between state and society,” as the country became “more militarized, categorized and bureaucratized.” Because of the exigencies of the fighting, the rival Nationalists and Communists demanded much more from populations under their control than had traditionally been the case, yet at the same time leaders were expected to provide more in return.
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In addition, the war effort required mass mobilization, and this soon came to define the Communists, shaping their rule, first in their home base of Yan’an and then, once they prevailed, throughout the country. Mitter argues that the experiences of the war marginalized those in the Communist Party who were hoping for a more tolerant style of government. The horrors of conflict, first with the Japanese and then between the Nationalists and the Communists, reinforced in the minds of government officials the fear of disorder that persists today.
The war also instilled in China a lasting hatred of the Japanese. They may no longer be called “dwarf bandits,” as they were during the great conflict, but even now Chinese “resentment can flare up suddenly, and seemingly without immediate cause.” As Mitter says, “the war’s legacy is all over China today, if you know where to look.”
He is correct, of course. Still, anti-Japanese sentiment is prevalent in China today largely because of indoctrination ordered by fundamentally weak leaders seeking to bolster their rule through nationalism. And even if the more tolerant Communists Mitter describes had won out, it is unlikely that any form of Chinese Communism would have been liberal or benign, especially with the dominating Mao Zedong as its leader. Mitter did not have to wade into the complications of present-day China, but having done so he should have put his judgments into firmer context.
As for Mao’s rival, Chiang Kai-shek (“Cash My Check,” as cynical Americans called him), “Forgotten Ally” is in line with other recent revisionist works — most notably “The Generalissimo” by Jay Taylor — in painting a mostly sympathetic portrait. We learn how Chiang was put into impossible military and political positions by an unreliable Washington and the cantankerous “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American general in China. Despite everything — Japanese savagery, Allied indifference, domestic ruin — China under Chiang did not submit to a militarily superior Japan. In fact, Chinese resistance proved crucial in the defeat of the Axis, tying down Japanese forces in what became known as the “China Quagmire.” By the end of the fighting, the Chinese state had regained the sovereignty it had lost in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing and assumed its role as one of the Big Four powers that would shape the postwar world.
During the war, it had often looked as if China would “have no more history,” as one leading political figure put it. Yet in 1945 the Chinese, Mitter notes, “at last had the power to write the next chapter of their story.” Unfortunately, that chapter would be written in even more Chinese blood.
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FORGOTTEN ALLY
China's World War II, 1937-1945
By Rana Mitter
Illustrated. 450 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and a contributor at Forbes.com.
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