Though both the Nationalists and the Japanese were searching for a new approach, neither went much beyond the conventional war paradigm. The Japanese placed greater stress on politics, attempting to bring about a federal China made up of a string of regional governments willing to align with Japan. In 1940–41 they also conducted a ferocious strategic bombing campaign – the first of the Second World War – in an attempt to destroy the Nationalist will to fight. In the Nationalist strategy greater emphasis was put on guerrilla warfare and, especially, diplomacy in order to secure outside assistance. The Nationalists withdrew deep into China’s vast hinterland, compelling the Japanese to spread out their forces, and kept the war going by launching limited offensives moving from one war zone to another. The Nationalists also turned to traditional methods of mobilising Chinese society, including by farming out recruitment to village leaders, and adopted an urban terror campaign to prevent the Japanese from consolidating their positions in China’s cities. The result was not a stalemate – far from it – but a meat grinder of a war that ravaged the country without bringing any solution.
The internationalisation of the fighting following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 profoundly altered the context in which China’s war with the Japanese took place, allowing the Chinese to offload a part of the fighting on to the USA, the UK, and eventually the USSR, and also ensure that they would be on the side of the victors. The emergence of the Communists as a powerful force was another, and for China ultimately more important, development during this period. Communist power expanded in two distinct timeframes. The first was the first two years of the War of Resistance, from 1937 to 1939, the second in 1944–5. In the first, Communist troops and cadres fanned out from their base at Yan’an in north Shaanxi province, in order to establish base areas behind Japanese lines. They waged small-scale guerrilla operations, avoiding direct contact with the Japanese, because they were too powerful, and with the Nationalists because they could not afford to alienate them at this point. The Communists carefully calibrated their political, military and cultural strategies to achieve these aims in a divided society in which they had a number of enemies and material resources were scarce. The circumstances under which the Communists were fighting rendered impossible a dialectical Clausewitzian approach to war.
The new way in which they went about conducting national liberation war combined the mobilisation of the countryside, at first on a limited scale for guerrilla warfare and for building up base areas and then for large-scale battles, with the creation of a tightly disciplined Party to provide cohesion, the assertion of a powerful ideology to jell together and motivate followers, the evasion of the battlefield until victory was virtually guaranteed, and the politicisation of all areas of life, including education, the village, court rooms, the media and even the family. Contrary to the romanticism with which national liberation war has at times been approached, it was a tough, merciless form of war – unsurprising, given the conditions under which it emerged.
National liberation war had a long-lasting impact, inspiring similar movements in south-east Asia, Africa and South America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and with a continuing relevance for today. It should come as no surprise that Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, one of Al-Qaeda’s founding strategists, was well versed in Mao.7 If atomic bombs were one invention to come out of the Second World War that would fundamentally shape the post-war world, national liberation war was another. The war in China may not seem to matter much to perspectives dominated by the rise of the two superpowers or by the emergence of nuclear warfare. But if we take the emergence of national liberation war seriously, then even though in China there were no great technological breakthroughs, what happened there nonetheless begins to matter enormously.
The years that followed the first period of expansion of the Communists were as difficult for them as for the Nationalists. In 1944, the Japanese launched their largest ever operation on land – the Ichigo offensive – in an attempt to create an overland link between south-east Asia and the Japanese homeland via China, and to drive the Nationalists out of the war completely. For the Communists, Ichigo was an opportunity. In their second period of growth, they flooded into the areas in north and central China vacated by the Nationalists and Japanese, who had to concentrate the larger part of their forces in China for this operation. They doubled the size of their armed forces to around 1 million men and, by the summer of 1945, they were in control of much of northern China, governing about a quarter of China’s population. This provided them with the springboard, not to seize power straight away (although they did try that) but to move into Manchuria, train their armies in waging large-scale warfare and, finally, to surround the cities from the countryside and so defeat the Nationalists. National liberation war was never just guerrilla war.
China at War uses this framework of modern Clausewitzian warfare between two sides giving way to national liberation war in a setting with a multi tude of enemies in order to bring out other key aspects of the narrative. China was a poor agricultural country fighting an industrialised state with superbly trained and equipped armed forces. Consequently, the Chinese had to ‘trade place for time’, that is, withdraw into the countryside and try to exhaust the Japanese through attrition, but also wait for beneficial changes in the global context. An important consequence was the virtual disappearance from pre-eminence of the large cities of coastal China, with their banks, industries, movie theatres, department stores and universities. That version of China did not survive the war, or rather, it did not re-emerge until well into the 1990s – although when it did, it did so with a vengeance. During the war, the bulk of the population moved into the countryside; it was here that China’s future was decided. The transition was accompanied by enormous movements of refugees as people fled the advancing Japanese forces and as the Nationalists adopted devastating scorched earth measures, denuding areas about to fall under occupation of anything that might be useful to the enemy. The withdrawal into the countryside went hand in hand with new understandings of village China, not just among the Chinese Communists, but more broadly. ‘The peasant’ and ‘the peasantry’ now became terms of common usage, effacing the complexity of China’s village cultures but also providing village China with a political potency it had lacked in the past. Its inhabitants, who had previously been largely ignored, became subjects who needed to be organised, disciplined, cleansed, indoctrinated and mobilised (and discarded after it was all over). China at War returns China’s Second World War to the countryside.
One challenge I have set for myself is to explore how the war was digested culturally. Two personal histories, one of a young woman who came of age during the war and the other of a middle-ranking, increasingly disillusioned Nationalist official, are interwoven into the analysis. The first, Chi Pang-yuan, has left us a beautifully written memoir of her experiences, while the other, Chen Kewen, maintained a diary in which he carefully recorded his reactions to people and events around him. They were from very different backgrounds. Chi Pang-yuan came from a politically influential family from Manchuria, while Chen was from a poor but educated family from the far south. Their experiences were not representative or typical, of course, but looking at events through their eyes nonetheless draws us intimately into the war. They give us a less ideological perspective than those provided by the Communist and Nationalist apparatchiks whose accounts have dominated the historiography and the memoir literature so far, because they and their families, while close to power, were nonetheless only on the fringes.
China at War will also discuss the shifts in history, culture and ideology at various points during the war. The struggle between the Communists and the Nationalists was decided not only on the battlefield but in the hearts and minds of the people. The Communists were consistently better at this, able to secure the allegiance of the best and brightest, at least of China’s youth. Revolution is a young person’s game and China’s population was still largely made up of young people at th
is time. To understand the Communist victory, we need to understand why their views gained traction. I analyse these aspects, too, in order to focus on the fact that while China may have been poor and backward, it was also a country with rich traditions in literature, art, philosophical and ethical argument, historical analysis and political debate, all of which mattered hugely at the time, precisely because the Japanese invasion threatened their extinction.
In the USA, the UK, France and Germany, as well as increasingly the Soviet Union, wartime generals and political leaders are still well known, often because of the diaries and memoirs they have written. This is not the case in China. However, in recent years, the memoirs and diaries of such figures have appeared, which allow us to peer beneath the basic facts of battles, campaigns and strategic decisions. In this book I rely on such writings to give a more human face to some of those who led China at this critical juncture in its history. For personal networks and personal relations were often important in the decisions that were made – inevitably in a country that was so deeply divided and in which the careful management of human relations is accorded special significance.
China at War treats the warfare in which China was involved between 1937 and 1953 as an interlocking series of events. As I have previously mentioned, its main military trend – there were many others – was the dissolution of dialectical Clausewitzian war and the emergence of national liberation war, a process that was driven by leaders thinking and acting; by people hoping, fighting, caring and dying; and by Clausewitzian chance, that is, by events that cannot be predicted or controlled in the clashes of competing armies. It returns village China and its inhabitants to a prominent place in the story, important because during the Second World War the whole world was still overwhelmingly rural, not just China.8 It stresses the importance of scholarship, art, culture and ideology in understanding China at war. However, this study seeks to take war seriously as war; that is, recover how it was thought about, analyse how it was planned, and examine how it was enacted, rather than just regret its horrors, see it merely as the context in which ideological or political struggles played out, or, important as these things are, use it to construct narratives about the origins of today’s world.
In stressing Chinese and east Asian dynamics, I am consciously resisting the homogenisation that the concept of the Second World War often brings with it, an approach which compresses the complex events that took place in various theatres around the world into a single, usually moralised, dichotomous narrative. As the Cambridge historian David Reynolds has demonstrated, the idea that the fighting around the world amounted to a world war is a post-war construction. As he put it, ‘only in 1948 did the British government decide that it had just been fighting the “second world war”’.9 The USA had acted with more speed, but there, too, the term was only officially adopted after Japan’s surrender, when Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal proposed to President Harry S. Truman to adopt the term ‘as a matter of simplicity and to insure uniform terminology’.10
With the exception of Germany, during the war none of the contending countries used the term. As we have seen, the Chinese called their war the ‘War of Resistance against Japan’, while the Japanese termed it, first, the ‘China Incident’ – a label widely used in the Anglophone press at the time as well – and, after the expansion of the war to include the US in December 1941, the Greater East Asian War, a name ruled out of order in post-war Japan and replaced with the Pacific War and the China War, in a move that gave rise to a bifurcation in scholarship that has lasted to this day.11 After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, the British talked of ‘the European War’, or just ‘the War’, while in France it was ‘la Guerre’ or ‘la Grand Guerre’. The Soviets fought the ‘Great Patriotic War’, a term first used by Pravda.12 The Germans did talk about a Weltkrieg but, as Reynolds remarks, along with their unconditional surrender came the loss of naming rights.
On the Allied side, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who first used the term systematically, doing so well before Pearl Harbor, in order to ‘prod America out of isolationism into belligerency’.13 Roosevelt had pragmatic as well as idealistic concerns. America would have been difficult to mobilise unless its citizens were convinced that their country was under threat and they were fighting for a moral purpose. Roosevelt was concerned, too, with ensuring that the war would lead, not to the survival of an international system dominated by empires armed to the teeth and looking at each other with suspicion, and, in the case of Japan, hatred, but to a new global order of independent nation states who freely traded with each other and agreed to work cooperatively to maintain peace and foster prosperity. When in August 1941 the British prime minister Winston Churchill travelled to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in the hope of convincing the US president to join the war, he failed in that mission and instead found himself being asked to sign the Atlantic Charter, which set out Roosevelt’s ideas about the purpose of the war. If there was to be another great conflict in which millions died, then everything possible should be done to make sure that it would be the last one. The term ‘world war’ was never merely a factual description of a war fought on several continents.
After 1945 the term Second World War proved political useful. In the USA, the desire to ‘bring the boys home’ was huge. The surrenders of Japan and Germany made it possible to regard their job as finished and therefore to do so. But if the transition to peace was straightforward for the USA, for China it was not. In Asia and elsewhere, the arming of anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements during the war prevented the return of peace. It was only when these struggles had exhausted themselves, as they eventually did in China in 1949, and when the USA and the USSR consolidated their Cold War front lines in east Asia during the Korean War of 1950–53, that a measure of stability returned to the region. The term Second World War suggests a sense of finality to processes that in many places around the world remained ongoing; or, perhaps, a belief (in many cases unfounded) that peace would now return. In east Asia, wars between countries only really ended when the Cold War order descended over the area during the Korean War.
The time has come to disaggregate the Second World War and become attuned to the differences in each of its theatres. That is not to say that no connections existed between them: the Second World War was an alliance war, which the Allies won because they worked together much better than the Axis powers. Alliance members provided troops, ammunition and other aid to each other. America, a land of increasing plenty, supplied not just arms and ammunition but also food to Britain and the USSR.14 Events in one theatre impacted on others. The war in China made it difficult for Japan to join Germany’s war against the Soviet Union, leaving the latter free to concentrate on fighting the Wehrmacht. Had Japan succeeded in forcing a Chinese surrender, then China’s resources would have become available to Japan. We can only speculate about the consequences, but they would have been significant. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, meant to put the US Pacific Navy out of action so that Japan could occupy south-east Asia, ensured the defeat of Germany in Europe by bringing the USA into the war. No study of any region during the Second World War should be written without considering its global dimensions.
China at War does not set out to ditch the term Second World War completely. Given both its ubiquity and its continuing appeal, any attempt to do so would be foolhardy; but some refiguring of its meaning is, I believe, in order. The idea that it all began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and came to a definite stop in 1945 is too limiting to capture the complexity of events. The Second World War is, I believe, best seen as the result of Japan’s and Germany’s desire, at a time when resources around the world were thought to be restricted, to acquire new land in order to secure the agricultural, mineral and industrial resources they felt they needed to survive in a global order made up of competing empires. They also believed that their countries were overpopulated and therefore needed to a
cquire new territories (such as the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Manchuria) in which to move what they considered to be surplus populations. Both countries made initial forays – Japan in Manchuria, Germany in Austria and Czechoslovakia – which remained limited and hesitant. But full-out war broke out in Asia in 1937 and in Europe in 1939. Both Japan and Germany pursued quick war strategies in the belief that the greater resources their enemies could potentially marshal left them with no other choice.
In placing themselves on a war footing to resist German and Japanese aggression, other countries built up their armed forces, mobilised their societies, turned their industrial capacity to war purposes, and drew food, energy and people from their colonies to sustain their war effort. They also developed an alliance in which such former enemies as the UK and the USSR found ways to work together. The pre-war world of empire blocs disintegrated during these processes as Japan occupied large parts of east and south-east Asia; as the USA opposed their restoration after the war; and, critically, as national liberation movements organised and armed themselves. What emerged instead was a patchwork of arrangements involving global institutions of governance, new states that emerged out of national liberation movements, and the division of the world in two opposing camps, each led by one of the two superpowers that had grown out of the war, the USA and the USSR. China at War uses China not least as a case study to illustrate this process.
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