Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (64 page)

The end had come, suddenly and unexpectedly. The war had broken out almost by accident in July 1937, escalating within weeks from a skirmish near Beiping to an exile from eastern China that would last eight years. China had changed immensely. In August 1945 China was simultaneously in the strongest global position it had ever occupied and weaker than it had been for nearly a century. When the war began, it had still been subject to extraterritoriality and imperialism. Now, not only had the much-hated system of legal immunity for foreigners ended, but China was about to make its mark on the postwar world. For the first time since 1842, when the Qing empire had signed the Treaty of Nanjing, the country was fully sovereign once again. Furthermore, China was now one of the “Big Four,” one of the powers that would play a permanent and central role in the formation of the new United Nations Organization, and the only non-European one. In Asia the decades of power enjoyed by Britain and by Japan were at an end. While the US and USSR would take their place at the center of the new international order, China would now have an autonomous role that had eluded it throughout the republican era. The war with Japan was fought for Chinese nationhood and sovereignty, the inheritance of the 1911 revolution, and China had achieved that goal.

Yet China had also paid a terrible price. The war with Japan had hollowed China out. Not since the Taiping War of the 1860s had China come so close to disintegration; then, only the decision of the Qing dynasty to devolve the power of warfare to new provincial armies had prevented collapse. The war with Japan had brought China very close to the same abyss. Even now, at the moment of victory, the country was split. It was divided between parties, Nationalist and Communist, who talked about compromise but seemed set for civil war. And it was distorted by an utterly changed geography. For centuries China had been controlled from the north and the east. The war had forced the Nationalists to redefine their mission in the unfamiliar territory of the far southwest. And as he tasted the moment of victory, Chiang Kai-shek looked out over ruin both foreign and domestic. So many people had died: bombed, slaughtered in Japanese war crimes, drowned, starved, or killed in combat. Even now, the numbers are not clear, but some 14 million to 20 million Chinese seem to have perished during the eight years of conflict. The relationship with the US had become bitter, poisoned by the Stilwell fiasco. American disillusionment with the Chongqing government was fueled by the wreck of the regime that ruled China. The nation had grand visions, but the reality was mass hunger, official corruption, and a brutal security state that tried in vain to suppress the aspirations of a people who had been exhorted to develop a sense of national identity and now demanded a state that matched their new sense of themselves. There was a widespread feeling within the country of change abroad. China could not avoid it. And what seemed deeply ironic was that a triumphant Mao Zedong might now reap the fruits of Chiang Kai-shek’s victory.

And what of those who had taken the wrong turn in 1938? Zhou Fohai had realized long ago that his allegiance to Wang Jingwei and the Japanese-sponsored regime in Nanjing was a historical dead end. Zhou’s diary ends in June 1945 and we do not have a direct record of his sentiments about the end of the war. Yet he must have reflected on the changes in the world since his flight from Chongqing in 1938. Perhaps he would have been pleased to see that Chiang, who was after all his old friend, had achieved nationhood. Perhaps he would have been disconcerted to think about how far the Communists had advanced.

Chiang had plenty of tasks to attend to on the first day of peace. At noon he drafted a version of the surrender document that would go to General Okamura Yasuji, commander in chief of Japan’s China Expeditionary Command. He also started to put together a list of the officials who would receive the Japanese surrender in each province.
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By early the next morning he had also signed off on the Chinese-Soviet mutual assistance agreement, although it still left the exact nature of Soviet support for Chiang’s government ominously murky.
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But there was one piece of Sun Yat-sen’s unfinished business that Chiang turned to without any further delay: reunification. After finishing his radio broadcast, he cabled Mao, inviting him to come to Chongqing “to talk about his big plans.” Mao replied that he would have Zhou Enlai represent him in the talks, but Chiang cabled back that Mao himself should make the journey to the meetings that would decide the shape of China’s postwar government.
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China’s long, eight-year war with Japan was over. The Chinese themselves at last had the power to write the next chapter of their story.

Epilogue: The Enduring War

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HE FIGHTING HAD ENDED
so suddenly. Even in early August 1945, Mao Zedong perhaps even hoped that the war against Japan would go on late into 1946, and that this would give the CCP time to consolidate its position.
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Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek moved fast to try and prevent encroachments on his territory. His first target was the British. Chiang hoped to occupy Hong Kong, returning it to de facto Chinese sovereignty. Had the British known (they suspected, certainly), the first serious confrontation of the postwar era might have emerged. In fact, the suspicion alone was enough to compel the British to rush to reoccupy Hong Kong.
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But most of Chiang’s attention was on the Communists. On August 12 he told Communist troops that they were not authorized to accept any surrender from the Japanese or collaborationist troops. On August 14 he made an even more significant move, signing a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, which gave various privileges to the Soviets in northeast China, as well as renouncing any claim to Outer Mongolia. The very next day he invited Mao to come to Chongqing to negotiate a postwar settlement. Mao was reluctant until the US ambassador, Patrick Hurley, himself agreed to accompany him.
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Mao was shell-shocked. He had never imagined that Stalin would betray him by signing a separate agreement with Chiang. However, Stalin did not have faith that the CCP really could defeat the Nationalist armies. Focusing on building his new empire in Europe, he did not want to waste time and energy supporting allies who would be pitting themselves against the might of the US, and Mao was left in a weak position. Still, the encounter between Mao and Chiang was historic. It was nearly two decades since they had met.

Mao stayed for six weeks in Chongqing, and in their discussions both sides made some show of compromise. Mao did not insist on a full coalition government, and Chiang conceded that the CCP could maintain twelve divisions of its own. Both Chiang and Mao knew it was vital that they should be seen to attempt to negotiate a solution, but they were also convinced that a civil war was inevitable. Overall, the meetings did not produce a firm agreement that would have maintained stability.

The resulting stalemate was fragile indeed. The CCP began to consolidate its position in the northeast of China, at first attempting to secure the whole region. But the Communists clashed with some of the Nationalist troops being flown back into the region with American help. As it became clear that this might spark a civil war almost at once, the CCP scaled back its ambitions—at least for the moment. Meanwhile the Soviets, now aware that the Americans had no intention of allowing a joint Allied command structure in Japan, were less inclined to follow the Sino-Soviet agreement with the Nationalists to the letter. At the same time, they were at pains not to force a showdown with the Americans.
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As 1945 turned into 1946, President Truman made it clear that he would not allow American military forces to fight for the Nationalist government. He was taken aback by the sudden resignation of Patrick Hurley, who accused left-leaning colleagues in the State Department of undermining his position from within.
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Truman therefore decided to send to China the most prestigious envoy possible: General George C. Marshall, who had just left his post as the chief of staff of the US Army, would try to negotiate an agreement between the two sides.

Over the next few months, Marshall’s mission became an exercise in frustration. Neither side was genuinely willing to compromise. The Nationalists refused to allow the Communists to run a parallel military and political organization within their territory. The Communists baulked at the idea of handing over their autonomous military power to an ill-defined Nationalist structure. Both sides agreed to an armistice on January 10, 1946, yet Marshall found it impossible to get them to settle on the next steps.
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During the first six months of 1946, Marshall’s attempts to achieve a real breakthrough were undermined by the escalation of fighting both by the Nationalists and Communists. By the summer of 1946 the Communists were firmly entrenched in the northeast (Manchuria). Chiang continued to demand that the Communists give up their arms (believing that they were weak and would be unable to sustain themselves), while the Communists insisted that the Nationalists must give up the advances that they had made during the course of 1946.
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On January 7, 1947, Marshall announced that he was ending his attempts to mediate between the two parties.

The behavior of the Nationalists hardly reassured the Chinese people that their fate was in safe hands. The economy was in a parlous situation at the end of the war against Japan, but not irrecoverable. But Chiang refused to reduce military spending, sure that an armed victory over the CCP was the only way that he could stamp his control over the country. Chiang attempted to impose government price controls, with little effect, and issued new bonds which found few takers among the wealthy, who saw that the bonds issued during the War of Resistance had not been honored by the government.
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From 1947 inflation, which had been bad during the last years of the war, ran fatally out of control. The returning government also lost much of the goodwill of victory by its arbitrary and corrupt actions, regularly expropriating property and acting with arrogance in the territories it had reconquered.

The treatment of collaborators was a particularly painful question. When Wang Jingwei had died in Nagoya in November 1944, his body had been shipped back to China and interred beside that of his revolutionary comrade Sun Yat-sen. On his return to Nanjing, Chiang made it a first item of business to destroy this symbol in the most final form possible: he gave orders to use high explosives to blow up Wang Jingwei’s tomb. Chen Gongbo, who had become the head of the Reorganized Nationalist government after Wang’s death, was tried and executed in the spring of 1946.

There was more ambiguity in the way that some collaborators were dealt with. Chen Bijun, Wang Jingwei’s widow, was tried (like Chen Gongbo) in the spring of 1946, and she defended herself strongly, arguing that her husband had taken back sovereignty over territories already abandoned by Chiang’s government. Spectators at the trial applauded her and asked for her autograph. She was sentenced to prison, but not executed, and died in a Shanghai jail under Communist rule in 1959.
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And Zhou Fohai, who had been playing a double game for most of the last part of the war, was also spared execution. He might have expected even more lenient treatment, but his ambivalent protector, Dai Li, died in an air crash in 1946, and there were no other powerful figures in the regime who wished to use their political capital on behalf of Zhou. He died of a heart attack in prison in 1948. Overall, the collaborators became hidden and marginal figures as China was engulfed in the new crisis of civil war.

The Japanese were also condemned for their invasion of China. At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the “Tokyo Trial”) in 1948, the Nanjing Massacre was just one of the events of the China War used to indict the defendants. Seven defendants were sentenced to death, including General Matsui Iwane and former foreign minister Hirota Kôki, both closely associated with the escalation of the war with China.
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The social critic Xu Wancheng had made his name in the pre-war period with his investigations of change within Chinese society. Now, in the aftermath of the war, he gave a gloomy assessment of the various political actors and their promises for China. He mourned the “furnace of parties” that had emerged from the war. “Today’s Nationalist party authority as compared to Sun’s National Revolutionary goals have become . . . ,” he wrote, deliberately letting the sentence fade into nothing. As an example, he cited the way the Nationalists had ruined the value of the meager savings of those who had been left behind in the occupied areas by giving a miserly exchange rate for their banknotes. “Heaven and earth are confused,” Xu chided, “as if they are saying: ‘This victory of China’s, is it solely the contribution of the “resistance and construction officials” who escaped to the interior?’” The returning Nationalist officials were treating their compatriots who had been left behind as if they were traitors or conquered peoples, and this was hardly conducive to the weaving of national unity. As Xu pointed out, “among the ‘collaborator leaders,’ weren’t a good number of them Guomindang officials?” He concluded: “In the Nationalist dictatorship, corruption is huge, and they have forgotten the goals of the National Revolution. They only plan for their own big bellies, and their own households’ wealth.”

Yet Xu felt no greater faith in the Nationalists’ great rivals. “The Chinese, talking about communism, are talking about a tiger’s face and skin! Why? Because the CCP sets fires and kills people, and in everything its talents are for destruction:”