China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  A non-official but highly visible way of building up China’s status in the world was by giving prominence to the glamorous Madame Chiang Kaishek. She visited the United States from 27 November 1942 to 4 July 1943. While Churchill had gained respectful plaudits for his oratory in the USA, Madame Chiang’s fame was more like that of a Hollywood star, pulling in vast crowds wherever she went and bringing traffic to a halt. She was presented as China’s pro-American Asian other: modern, articulate, Christian, progressive and democratic, yet also Asian, slightly mysterious, feminine and vulnerable. Her vulnerability was for real: she was in the USA for medical treatment.

  Madame Chiang was entirely comfortable in an American setting. She was born in China, but had spent her teenage years in Macon, Georgia, and had earned a degree at Wellesley College, Boston, ensuring that she spoke fluent English with an American accent. During her American visit, she addressed a joint session of Congress, during which she praised US armed forces and US democracy, left the race issue alone, called for US leadership in the war and talked at length about Japan’s ‘sadistic fury’ and ‘military might’.102 These were the kinds of messages the Americans were eager to hear and the Roosevelt administration was keen to promote.

  Madame Chiang toured the length and breadth of the USA, travelling to Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles. In New York, ‘she disappointed none of the thousands who waited for sight of her, first at Pennsylvania Station, then at City Hall, and finally in the heart of Chinatown’, where 50,000 people jammed the streets.103 The finale of her US tour at the Hollywood Bowl attracted 30,000 people and became ‘a spectacular, star-studded pageant’, as could be expected from its organiser, Gone with the Wind producer David Selznick. Its highlight was a 45-minute address by Madame Chiang.104 If Churchill was a symbol of the USA’s links with its British heritage, Madame Chiang signposted a new future in international relations.

  Such events were of course multi-directional. Madame Chiang’s visit was useful to President Roosevelt, but it also helped the Nationalists’ efforts to woo the USA. In 1940, the Nationalists asked the painter Chang Shu-chi to produce a painting, Messengers of Peace, as a gift to President Roosevelt to mark his third inauguration. Chang completed the work, consisting of a hundred doves, in Chongqing. The painting, which carried an inscription by Chiang Kaishek, was formally presented to US Ambassador Nelson Johnson just before Christmas 1940. A letter from the ambassador to Roosevelt made clear that the painting was meant to be ‘symbolic of the position which the President of the United States holds in the present world’.105

  At the Cairo Conference, Roosevelt once more used Chiang Kaishek to advance his project of creating a new non-imperialist post-war order. In the preceding months, Cordell Hull had worked hard to gain recognition of China as one of the Big Four at meetings of the Allied foreign ministers in Moscow. Churchill was incandescent, believing it ‘an absolute farce’ that China should be recognised in such a way.106 He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that China would simply be a ‘faggot vote’ for the US in any Four Power organisation.107 At Cairo, Roosevelt sidelined Churchill and pulled out the stops to build up Chiang Kaishek as a world leader, something telegraphed to the world by newsreels and photographs of Churchill, Chiang Kaishek and Roosevelt, sitting together in a row in the garden of the residence of the US ambassador, with Roosevelt in the middle, Churchill to one side, cigar in his hand, and Roosevelt and Chiang Kaishek turned to one another, sharing a joke. Madame Chiang, who had been translating for her husband, was seated next to Churchill. She was often cropped out or erased from the photograph, despite being one of the most powerful women supporting the Allied cause.

  The Nationalists had prepared carefully for Cairo. They were not content with serving as Asian decoration to a meeting dominated by Churchill and Roosevelt, nor was it their aim just to relegate a century of humiliation to the past. At the conference, Chiang insisted on the return to China of sovereignty over Manchuria, Taiwan and Penghu, demands that made it into the Cairo Communiqué. In order to spare British blushes, he decided not to be the first to raise the issue of Hong Kong. However, if Churchill raised it himself, Chiang Kaishek planned to state China’s claim to the colony in a matter-of-fact way.108 Chiang also demanded the transfer to China of ‘all public and private property acquired by Japan in China since 1931’ and ‘ownership of most Japanese military equipment, naval vessels, merchant ships and aircraft remaining after the war’.109 However, ‘the key requirements of national defence’ were the most fundamental drivers of Nationalist aims at Cairo. Being a ‘continental country’, Chiang wrote, China should adopt ‘the defensive’ in the Pacific and ‘cooperate with the USA to avoid a tendency toward military competition with it’. Securing China’s north-west border region with the Soviet Union was ‘the main basis of national security’.110

  On 23 November, Chiang Kaishek had a four-hour conversation with President Roosevelt, in which he sought US support for the dismantling of the British Empire in east and south-east Asia. He told Roosevelt that ‘while your policies toward Soviet Communism have begun to bear fruit, only if your policies toward British imperialism also are successful and the oppressed people of the world are liberated will the USA’s contributions to this world war find appropriate reward’.111 He knew he was preaching to the converted. In line with the policy of having the USA take the lead in the Pacific, Chiang proposed that Liuqiu (Okinawa in Japanese) should be governed by the USA and China jointly under the mandate of a new international organisation. This proposal made sense because until 1874, when it had come under Japanese jurisdiction, Liuqiu, based on the island chain that stretches from Japan’s southernmost island, Kyushu, to Taiwan, had been an independent kingdom with tributary relations with the Qing Dynasty.

  Chiang Kaishek ‘proposed that the USA should carry the main responsibility’ in the occupation of Japan for the same reason. Roosevelt opposed that idea. According to Chiang, he ‘firmly held fast to the idea that China should be the main player’.112 Chiang also solicited Roosevelt’s support in promoting the independence of Korea. At Cairo, the Nationalists pursued a strategy of drawing the USA into a prominent role in post-war east Asia while securing recognition of a China that included Taiwan and Manchuria.

  Although the Cairo Communiqué was not a treaty but a simple press release, it nonetheless would become a key building block of the post-war order. Referring to the USA, the UK and China as ‘the Three Great Allies’, it declared that ‘all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa [Taiwan], and the Pescadores [Penghu], shall be restored to the Republic of China’. It also declared that the three countries were determined to see an independent Korea. No mention was made of French Indochina, nor of Hong Kong, in accordance with Churchill’s wishes. Churchill had wanted no mention of Korea or Manchuria, either,113 but he had given way on these two.

  Cairo marked the moment that Churchill had to face up to the rise of US power in the world, both diplomatically and militarily. He had conspicuously failed in his attempt to ‘persuade Chiang and his wife to go and see the Pyramids’ while he and Roosevelt settled matters.114 The Cairo Communiqué skirted the issue of the future of the British and French empires, but China’s recognition as a great power and President Roosevelt’s insistence that China take the lead in the occupation of Japan indicated that Roosevelt was serious about dismantling European imperialism in east Asia.

  In the months before the Cairo Conference, Churchill dreamt of a post-war world order run by English-speaking democracies, that is, the US and Britain above all, plus the white dominions.115 By aligning closely with China, Roosevelt declined to give succour to that idea, as he had to British imperialism in India. Roosevelt did not want a post-war order made up of empires and nor did he want one dominated by English-speaking democracies. He did not believe it realistic that US forces could occupy either Germany or Japan for any length of time. Instead he envisaged a new world order made up of independ
ent states, but with the major power in each region of the world carrying responsibility for maintaining security in its own area. In this scheme, China was to fulfil that role in east Asia.

  The implications of Cairo for the future of imperialism in east and southeast Asia were well understood in London. One British Colonial Office official picked up on a statement made by Roosevelt in his 1943 Christmas Eve radio broadcast, in which the US president stated that Cairo had recognised not only ‘the restoration of stolen property to its rightful owners’ (a reference to the communiqué’s declared restoration of Manchuria and Taiwan to China), but also ‘the recognition of the rights of millions of people in the Far East to build up their own forms of self-government without molestation’. The official worried that ‘the Chinese evidently think Roosevelt’s second principle can be invoked for claiming independence for “Indo-China”. But this line of argument can be applied just as well to Hong Kong, Burma and Malaya.’116 Indeed.

  The internationalisation of the War of Resistance did not deliver to the Nationalists the military benefits they had hoped for. Militarily they were treated as a minor ally of whom much was expected but to whom little was owed. Politically and diplomatically, on the other hand, becoming one of the Allies did wonders for China. The unequal treaties were abolished and the Allies accepted that territories lost to Japan after the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 would be restored to Chinese sovereignty. China was also formally recognised as a Great Power, a future pillar of the new post-war world order. As 1944 dawned, the Nationalists were well positioned to be the beneficiaries of these developments.

  — TEN —

  THE TURNING POINT

  The two great tyrants of the Earth: Time and Chance

  Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of History of Man (1803)1

  Three military campaigns in 1944 would have a profound impact on the world order that emerged after 1945. On 6 June the Allies implemented Operation Overlord, landing 130,000 troops in three waves on the Normandy coast. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, by which the Russians inflicted the largest defeat on German forces of the entire war, destroying the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Central. By August, both operations had succeeded. The drives into Germany from the west and the east that then followed would bring the Nazis to their knees. A Europe divided into a Soviet-dominated eastern zone and a democratic west had its origins in these developments.

  These were Allied successes. The third major campaign of 1944, Japan’s Operation Ichigo, marked an overwhelming defeat. For Ichigo, Japan mobilised no fewer than 500,000 troops, 100,000 horses, 1,500 pieces of artillery, 800 tanks, 15,000 mechanised vehicles and a large number of aeroplanes,2 making it Japan’s largest campaign on land of the Second World War. Ichigo’s forces slashed through Nationalist armies as if they did not exist, clearing them from the provinces of Henan, Hunan and Guangxi. By October 1944, Sichuan was the only large Chinese province still in Nationalist hands. A Chinese collapse appeared a distinct possibility.

  The worst did not come to pass. However, Ichigo inflicted serious damage not just to the military forces of the Nationalists but also on their domestic and international reputation. In 1943, Chiang Kaishek had been riding high, having secured an end to the unequal treaties and having been feted at Cairo as a world leader. He had also felt strong enough to publish a statement of his vision of China’s past and future, China’s Destiny, and so claim to transcendent authority. In China’s post-monarchical political culture, such statements have become a key aspect of leadership legitimation. Mao Zedong Thought was written into the constitution first of the Communist Party and then of the People’s Republic. Each leader since has published collections of articles intended to suggest he has formulated a distinct political vision uniquely appropriate to his times, a vision usually summarised by a catchy phrase, such as Deng Xiaoping’s ‘the Four Modernisations’ or Jiang Zemin’s rather less successful ‘the Three Represents’.

  ‘The unequal treaties’, Chiang Kaishek charged, had divided his country, enfeebled its people and destroyed its economy, thus causing its humiliating decline in the nineteenth century.3 Even though no less a person than Sun Yatsen had led the 1911 Revolution, the Republic had been shipwrecked by warlordism and the fact that most Chinese were uneducated. Now, however, a new China was being forged in the heat of battle under Chiang’s leadership, a China that was comfortable with modernity but also with its political and cultural traditions, especially Confucianism. In Destiny, Chiang promised that after the war he would implement constitutional rule and democracy. Now that China had rid itself of the yoke of imperialism and was a leading member of a military alliance whose victory had become a clear prospect, Chiang challenged all his countrymen to rally behind him. If that happened, China would survive the ‘acid test’ of war with Japan,4 the greatest crisis in its history, which would decide ‘China’s destiny of independence or slavery, glory or humiliation, survival or extinction’.5 If not, China would remain a poor, backward and divided country. The implicit message to the Communists was that they should see the error of their ways and fall into line.

  A year is a long time in history. Chen Kewen recorded in his diary in November 1944 that ‘these days, when among friends, we can only talk about the war and everybody is in despair’.6 Rumours about coups against Chiang Kaishek swirled through Chongqing. A group of southern generals who were considering their own declaration of independence approached US diplomats to assess the likely response.7 Even Sun Yatsen’s son, Sun Ke, was making moves to oust Chiang.8 At the beginning of the war, when Chiang spoke in public, he had appeared to Chen Kewen as determined, confident and strong; now he seemed flat, dull and unconvincing.9 Gossips leered about an illicit affair, tarnishing the reputation for high morals that Chiang put at the centre of his claim to be the right person to rule China, and prompting him to convene a press conference to deny the rumours – which inevitably only made matters worse.10

  But if Chiang’s domestic reputation suffered serious damage, internationally he had become an irrelevance. In July 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin drafted the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender, they did not even consult him. The US Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, handed a copy of the text to Chiang Kaishek a few hours before it was published. The only change that Chiang could make was to suggest that China should at least be included as one of the countries issuing the demand (which was not the case in the draft).11 To Chiang, Cairo must have seemed a very long time ago.

  Ichigo was as beneficial to the Communists as it was disastrous to the Nationalists. Having flooded into the areas vacated by the Nationalists and the Japanese, they had grown so strong that they made an attempt at seizing power straight after Japan’s surrender. There were, of course, other factors at play in their ultimate victory, but Ichigo set the ball rolling. To that extent, it can be considered as important to the new world order as Overlord and Bagration.

  The Ichigo Campaign (April 1944–February 1945)

  So why did the Japanese mount this vast operation? The Fundamental Guidelines for the Ichigo Battle, endorsed by Emperor Hirohito on 24 January 1944, restricted the operation’s objective to the neutralisation of US air bases in China, especially the air fields of 20th Bomber Command at Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which, Marshall hoped, would carry out the strategic bombing of Japan. In reality, Ichigo’s aims were broader.

  It originated in plans drawn up in February 1943 by the Operations Section of the Imperial General Staff after Japan’s defeat at Guadalcanal for the eventuality that they lost control of the western Pacific. These plans required Japan’s armed forces to establish an overland corridor to south-east Asia, in part by using railways running from Peiping via Wuhan to Canton and from Yunnan province to Hanoi. Once an overland route was in place, Japan would use the resources of south-east Asia and China – oil, rubber, tin, rice, coal, and mineral ores – to rebuild Japan’s navy and
strengthen its armed forces. Anticipating that this would take two years, the plans provided for a Japanese counter-offensive in the Pacific beginning in 1946 and staged from the Philippines.12

  But the Japanese commanders in China, as always, pursued their own objectives. In charge of the 620,000 troops of Japan’s China Expeditionary Army was General Hata Shunroku. He judged that the strategy pursued after the fall of Wuhan, namely to keep Nationalist armed forces down while building up regional administrations to foster the emergence of a decentralised China, had failed. He believed that Ichigo should go for the jugular and take Chongqing. The operational plans developed by Japanese planners in China for Ichigo provided for: 1) the destruction of enemy air bases; 2) the clearing of a railroad corridor through China to south-east Asia; and 3) the crushing of the Nationalists.13 During Ichigo, Japanese forces time and again sought out the Nationalists’ main forces with the aim of annihilating them. The campaign as it unfolded on the ground was never about destroying US air bases alone.

  Official documents can only tell us so much; the archives rarely reveal the whole truth. The historian Edward Drea has suggested that the likely overall aim of Ichigo was to force the Allies to the negotiating table by scoring a clear victory. This is because a negotiated peace would have been easier to accept for Japan and might have allowed it to retain some of its wartime gains. According to Drea, from 1942 Emperor Hirohito hoped for ‘a military or naval victory that would lead to a negotiated settlement … The chimera of the decisive battle, be it on land or sea, became not only the Emperor’s mantra, but also that of the court, the bureaucracy, and ultimately the die-hard military itself.’14