The war with Japan and the second united front

From the Mukden incident to the Xi’an incident

The prehistory of the war began in Manchuria. After the Russo-Japanese War Japan held the South Manchuria Railway and the Kwantung Leased Territory, set up the Kwantung Army in 1919 to guard those rights, and in June 1928 Kwantung Army officers, against cabinet policy, blew up the train of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin. In September 1931 the Kwantung Army colonels Seishirō Itagaki and Kanji Ishiwara set off a bomb on the South Manchuria Railway, blamed it on Chinese troops and, claiming “self-defence”, occupied all of Manchuria (the Mukden incident). The following year Japan set up Manchukuo with the last Qing emperor Puyi as its figurehead, and when the League of Nations’ Lytton Report condemned it, Japan left the League. No country took action against Japan beyond that. 1 2

Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, citing its military weakness and the ongoing civil war, ordered Zhang Xueliang not to resist in Manchuria, and under the policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance” put the suppression of the Communists first. Japan used the opening to encroach on north China. The Tanggu Truce that followed the fighting at the Great Wall in 1933 handed Rehe to Japan and created a demilitarised zone between the Wall and Beiping–Tianjin; the He–Umezu Agreement of 1935 banned Kuomintang activity in Hebei. When the Japanese-backed East Hebei Autonomous Council was set up late that year and “north China autonomy” was pressed, Beiping students launched the December 9th Movement and anti-Japanese feeling boiled over. Chiang had been quietly preparing for war since 1932, bringing in German military advisers, but in public he kept giving way. 1 3 4

Having reached northern Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, the Communists changed their slogan from “resist Japan and oppose Chiang” to a call for a ceasefire and joint resistance, and the Soviet Union, alarmed by Hitler’s rise, pressed for a negotiated truce. Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army and Yang Hucheng’s Northwestern Army, charged with destroying the Red Army in Shaanxi and only piling up losses, made a secret alliance with the Communists. When Chiang came to Xi’an in December 1936 to drive the campaign on, the two generals seized him before dawn on the 12th and telegraphed eight demands across China calling for an end to the civil war and for resistance to Japan (the Xi’an incident). The Communist leadership at first wanted Chiang put on trial, but Stalin, suspecting the mutiny might be a Japanese plot to weaken China, ordered a peaceful settlement. Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu (Qin Bangxian) and Ye Jianying joined the talks, and Soong Mei-ling and T. V. Soong overrode the advocates of an armed assault in Nanjing and flew to Xi’an. 5 6

Chiang agreed to a ceasefire, and on the 25th Zhang Xueliang released him and went with him to Nanjing, where Chiang had him arrested at once; Zhang stayed under house arrest until 1990. Yang Hucheng was arrested in 1937, held for twelve years and killed with his children by Nationalist secret agents at Chongqing in September 1949. The incident is still read in opposite ways: for the Kuomintang it was a lost chance to destroy the Communists, for the Communists proof that they put national resistance above civil war. Either way, from early 1937 the two parties kept negotiating over the reorganisation of the Red Army and the status of the border region, and that became the basis of the front when war broke out seven months later. 5 6 7

From Marco Polo Bridge to Nanjing

On the night of 7 July 1937, near Marco Polo Bridge about 16 kilometres from Beiping, units of the Japanese China Garrison Army on night exercises claimed a soldier was missing and demanded to search the walled town of Wanping; when the Chinese 29th Army refused, shots were exchanged. Who fired first is still uncertain. A local ceasefire was agreed on the 11th, but the same day the Konoe Fumimaro cabinet approved sending three divisions from Japan, and Kanji Ishiwara, who opposed escalation, eventually agreed. In his Lushan statement of the 17th Chiang framed the incident as a matter of national survival and declared that China had reached “the last critical juncture”. The Japanese opened a general offensive on the 28th and took Beiping on the 29th and Tianjin on the 30th. 8 1

The killing of two Japanese naval officers near Shanghai’s Hongqiao airfield on 9 August led to fighting in Shanghai from the 13th. Hoping to draw in international intervention, Chiang concentrated his German-trained Central Army divisions north of the city, and Japan eventually committed more than 300,000 troops with naval and air support. After three months of street and trench fighting the Japanese landed in Hangzhou Bay on 5 November behind the Chinese lines and the Chinese army fell back in a general retreat. Chinese casualties were 187,200 killed and wounded by an official report of 5 November and about 250,000 by Japanese estimates, and Chiang lost his best units and many of his young officers. Meanwhile the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 21 August opened the way for Soviet arms, military advisers and volunteer pilots. 9 10 11

The Japanese General Staff drew an operational limit at Suzhou and Jiaxing, but on 19 November the field army under Iwane Matsui disobeyed and pursued the retreating Chinese towards Nanjing, and the General Staff sanctioned the advance on the 28th. The capital fell on 13 December, and for some six weeks Japanese troops massacred prisoners and civilians and committed mass rape, looting and arson (the Nanjing Massacre). The death toll is still disputed. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found more than 200,000 killed, the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal of 1947 more than 300,000, and China commemorates 300,000 as the official figure; recent scholarly estimates mostly fall between 100,000 and 200,000, with a range running from 40,000 for the city alone to over 340,000 for the whole Shanghai–Nanjing region. The Nanking Safety Zone set up by John Rabe and other Westerners sheltered large numbers of refugees. 12 13 14

After Nanjing fell Chiang showed willingness to accept the initial Japanese peace terms conveyed by the German ambassador Trautmann, but Japan raised its terms sharply, adding recognition of Manchukuo. On 16 January 1938 Prime Minister Konoe’s first statement declared that Japan would “no longer deal with” the Nationalist government, closing the door on negotiation. A clash that had begun as a local incident thus became a total war aimed at replacing the enemy regime. The Japanese army took one big city and railway after another, but in the vast countryside beyond them it controlled only “points and lines”. 1 12

The terms of the front: the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies

The negotiations that followed the Xi’an incident were hurriedly concluded when war broke out. In August 1937 the 46,000 Red Army troops in northern Shaanxi became the three divisions of the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army (commander Zhu De, deputy Peng Dehuai): Lin Biao’s 115th, He Long’s 120th and Liu Bocheng’s 129th; the Nationalist government designated it the 18th Group Army. The Red Army guerrillas left behind in eight southern provinces were gathered into the New Fourth Army, founded at Hankou on 25 December (commander Ye Ting, deputy Xiang Ying), at first some ten thousand men in four detachments. The Shaan-Gan-Ning border region became a “special region” under the national government. Both armies wore Nationalist uniforms and flew the Republic’s flag, but the Communist Party commanded them. 15 16 17

The Communists’ declaration on KMT–CCP cooperation, drafted by Zhou Enlai on 4 July and sent to the Nationalist government on the 15th, was published only on 22 September. The party made four pledges: to fight for the full realisation of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People; to abandon its policy of insurrection against the Kuomintang regime and the violent confiscation of landlords’ land; to abolish the soviet government; and to drop the Red Army’s name and be reorganised into the National Revolutionary Army under the Military Council. Chiang issued a statement the next day recognising the party’s legal status. The two parties entered the front with different calculations. For Chiang it was a device to bind the Communists inside the national army; for Mao, an opportunity to move behind enemy lines under the principle of “independence and initiative”. From the Luochuan conference of 20–25 August Mao insisted on avoiding large regular battles in favour of mountain guerrilla war and base-building, and differed with Peng Dehuai and others who wanted to engage the Japanese head-on. 1 18 15 19

In Shanxi the two parties’ armies actually fought side by side. On 25 September Lin Biao’s 115th Division ambushed a supply column of the Japanese 5th Division in a narrow defile near Pingxingguan, inflicting more than a thousand losses and destroying over a hundred vehicles. It was publicised as the first Chinese victory on the main front since the war began, but in the same campaign Yan Xishan’s Shanxi army gave up Yanmen Pass and Pingxingguan and fell back to the Xinkou line, and Taiyuan fell in November. Lin Biao was badly wounded the next year and at the end of 1938 went to Moscow, where he recovered and worked at the Comintern until February 1942. Wang Ming, who had headed the party’s delegation to the Comintern in Moscow since 1931 and returned in November 1937, urged “everything through the united front”, putting cooperation with the Kuomintang and the defence of Wuhan first, and this difference of line soon became an inner-party struggle. 20 21 22 23

1938: trading space for time

Having lost Shanghai and Nanjing, the Nationalist government withdrew into the vast interior, made Sichuan its last base and switched to a war of attrition, “trading space for time” and stretching the Japanese supply lines. In March and April 1938 at Taierzhuang in southern Shandong, Chinese troops under the Fifth War Zone commander Li Zongren kept the Japanese divisions from linking up, then used night attacks and close combat to surround them and force them out. It was the first great victory of the war and broke the myth of Japanese invincibility. The Japanese then tried a vast encirclement around Xuzhou, but some 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese troops in forty divisions broke out and turned to the defence of Wuhan. 24 25 1 26

In early June Chiang had the Yellow River dikes broken at Huayuankou near Zhengzhou to stop the Japanese advance. The flood slowed the Japanese drive west and towards Wuhan, but 30,000 to 89,000 people drowned at once in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu, and with famine and plague 400,000 to 500,000 died; the river kept its new course until the dikes were rebuilt in January 1947. Around the same time, in the lectures “On Protracted War” given at Yan’an from 26 May to 3 June, Mao predicted that the war would pass through three stages: the enemy’s strategic offensive and our strategic defensive, the enemy’s strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive, and our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy’s strategic retreat. 27 28

The Battle of Wuhan was the largest, longest and bloodiest battle of the war. For four and a half months more than a million Chinese troops of the Fifth and Ninth War Zones under Chiang’s direct command fought some 400,000 Japanese under Shunroku Hata, with the Soviet Volunteer Group in the air. The Japanese used poison gas hundreds of times and committed a massacre when they took Jiujiang. Wuhan was also where cooperation between the parties worked best: Zhou Enlai served as deputy head of the Military Council’s political department in charge of propaganda, and on 10 October the Korean Volunteer Corps, a Korean armed unit under Kim Won-bong as commander-in-chief, was founded in Hankou. Wuhan and Guangzhou fell in late October, and Chinese military and civilian losses reached a million. 29 1 30

After Wuhan fell the Japanese offensive reached its limit and the war entered a stalemate. The Nationalist government made Chongqing its wartime capital, and from February 1938 to December 1944 Japanese aircraft raided it 268 times to break the government’s will. As Japan turned from a military decision to political subversion, calls for peace arose within the Kuomintang itself: Wang Jingwei, second only to Chiang, left Chongqing for Hanoi in December 1938 to call for a negotiated peace with Japan and was expelled from the party. 31 32

Chongqing’s war: attrition and inflation

From 1939 China was divided into three parts: the Japanese-occupied areas, the Nationalist areas and the Communist liberated areas. The Nationalist army defeated the Japanese at Suixian–Zaoyang and in the first battle of Changsha in 1939, and Changsha held against three Japanese campaigns up to 1942. But the first large winter counter-offensive of December 1939 failed, and after it Chiang could not risk an all-out offensive. In March 1940 Wang Jingwei absorbed the puppet regimes Japan had set up in north and central China and set up a “National Government” in Nanjing. Dressed up as a carbon copy of the Republic’s government to claim legitimacy, it won little support because Japan would not hand over real power and Japanese atrocities went on, and only fellow signatories of the Anti-Comintern Pact recognised it. 1 33 34 32

From 1937 to 1941 the Soviet Union gave China the most material aid: fighters, artillery, tanks and military advisers, while Soviet volunteer pilots flew with the Chinese air force. The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941 cut it off. The Nationalist army had lost its best troops and its tax base in north and east China, and the government paid for the war by printing money. The inflation that began in the summer of 1937 became chronic hyperinflation by the mid-1940s, and attempts at a general price freeze in 1942 and 1943 and the use of a US$200 million loan to absorb surplus currency all failed. Conscription and requisitions bred peasant resentment. During the Henan famine of 1942–1943 (estimates of the dead run from about 700,000 to two or three million) both Chinese and Japanese authorities kept requisitioning grain, and Henan’s grain administration collected more than the reduced quota Chiang had announced. Corruption and smuggling spread through the bureaucracy and the army. 1 11 35 36

With Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 China formally declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy and became one of the Allied “Big Four”. Chiang became Allied commander-in-chief of the China theatre, and the American general Joseph Stilwell came as his chief of staff and commander of US forces in the China-Burma-India theatre. Lend-Lease aid and Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers arrived, but once Japan occupied Burma in 1942 and cut the Burma Road, aid was limited to what could be flown in over the Himalayan “Hump”. For Japan the Pacific War became a burden that restrained further offensives in China, and the China war became part of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. 1 37 38

Relations between Chiang and Stilwell soon broke down. Stilwell wanted command of all Chinese forces and an offensive to retake Burma and reopen the land route; Chiang, having already suffered losses in the tens of millions, preferred to husband his troops until American industry defeated Japan, and backed Chennault’s strategy of air bombardment. Stilwell called Chiang “Peanut” in his reports to Washington. Some historians, such as Barbara Tuchman, trace the conflict to the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government; others, such as Ray Huang and Hans van de Ven, see a more complicated situation. 1 39

Bases behind enemy lines and the Hundred Regiments Offensive

The Eighth Route Army moved into the mountains and villages of north China that the Japanese had passed through along the railways, and built bases there. The first was the Jin-Cha-Ji military region set up on 7 November 1937 where Shanxi, Chahar and Hebei met, with Nie Rongzhen as commander and political commissar; Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping’s 129th Division built the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu base around the Taihang Mountains, and bases arose in Shandong too. Base governments did not confiscate landlord land but made landlords lower rents and interest. An inner-party directive drafted by Mao in March 1940 laid down the “three-thirds system”, under which Communists, non-party leftists and centrists each held a third of government posts, and in 1941 the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region re-elected its governments on that basis. This moderate policy was the laboratory of the coalition of revolutionary classes that Mao had formulated in “On New Democracy” in January 1940, and it drew landlords and middle peasants into the resistance. 16 40 41 42 43

The expansion of the bases bred clashes with the Kuomintang. The Communists grew by absorbing Chinese guerrilla bands behind the lines, and attacked units that refused, branding them “traitors”: in June 1939, for example, He Long’s forces wiped out Zhang Yinwu’s militia brigade in Hebei. The front began to fray from late 1938, and from 1940 armed clashes between the two parties in areas beyond Japanese control became more frequent. The Japanese, for their part, mounted 109 mopping-up operations of more than a thousand troops each in 1939–1940 and applied the “cage policy” of cutting the bases apart with railways, roads and blockhouses, until the bases were in crisis. 15 1 44

On 20 August 1940 the Hundred Regiments Offensive under Peng Dehuai began. Planned with twenty regiments, it drew in regiment after regiment of the 115th, 129th and 120th Divisions until 105 regiments were striking railways and roads across north China, above all the Zhengding–Taiyuan line, and the Jingxing coal mines, which were shut for six months. The offensive went on in three phases until January 1941. Its results differ by record: the Eighth Route Army reported killing or wounding over twenty thousand Japanese and puppet troops, Western sources give 20,900 Japanese and about 20,000 puppet casualties, and Japanese records give only partial losses. It was the largest Communist offensive of the war, and on 22 December Mao told Peng not to declare it over yet, since with Chiang showing his anti-Communist colours the offensive’s impact was needed to win the propaganda battle. But it had also revealed the Eighth Route Army’s strength to the Japanese. 44 19

The Japanese reprisal was atrocious. Yasuji Okamura, who took command of the North China Area Army in July 1941, doubled his forces in 1941–1942 and carried out five pacification campaigns in Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Henan and Chahar. Burning whole villages, massacring inhabitants or carrying them off as forced labour, seizing grain and using poison gas, these operations were called by the Chinese the Three Alls policy: “kill all, burn all, loot all”. By Communist records the population of the bases fell from 44 million to 25 million, and the Japanese historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta estimates that the campaigns killed at least 2.47 million civilians. Mao later criticised the Hundred Regiments Offensive as a mistaken resort to large-scale regular warfare, and it became one of the charges against Peng at the Lushan conference of 1959 and in the Cultural Revolution. 45 1 46 47 19

The New Fourth Army incident: the end of the front in substance

As the New Fourth Army expanded on the lower Yangtze, the Kuomintang ordered the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies in October and December 1940 to move out of Anhui and Jiangsu to the north of the Yellow River within a month. The Nationalist side maintains that in the autumn the New Fourth Army, ignoring the order, had attacked Han Deqin’s Nationalist troops first. The Communists agreed only to move the New Fourth Army headquarters in Wannan (southern Anhui) to the north bank of the Yangtze, and on 4 January 1941 nine thousand troops set out from Yunling in Jing County. On 5 January they were surrounded around Maolin by 80,000 Nationalist troops under Shangguan Yunxiang, and in days of fighting suffered heavy losses, including many non-combatants of the political department. 48 15 49

On 13 January the commander Ye Ting went to Shangguan Yunxiang’s headquarters to negotiate terms that would save his men and was detained; only about two thousand broke out. The deputy commander Xiang Ying, escaping, was murdered in March by his aide Liu Houzong, who was after the gold he carried. On 17 January Chiang cancelled the army’s designation for “mutiny” and sent Ye Ting before a court-martial. On 20 January the Communists set up a new headquarters in Jiangsu with Chen Yi as acting commander and Liu Shaoqi as political commissar, and the New Fourth Army was rebuilt as seven divisions and an independent brigade, over ninety thousand men. Ye Ting was held for five years and released only in 1946; on 8 April the plane taking him from Chongqing to Yan’an crashed, killing him together with Bo Gu and others. 48 50 51 52

The incident is still read in opposite ways: by the Republic of China as punishment for insubordination and a first strike, by the People’s Republic as Nationalist treachery. The Communists lost their positions south of the Yangtze, but won public opinion by portraying a Kuomintang that put civil war above resistance, and consolidated their base north of the river. From then on the two parties blockaded each other while keeping only the name of “cooperation”. From 6 January 1941 the Kuomintang barred domestic and foreign aid from the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region and ringed it with hundreds of thousands of troops; the blockade drove up prices, created shortages of necessities and raised the peasants’ taxes. Yan’an held out through the Great Production Movement, symbolised by Wang Zhen’s 359th Brigade reclaiming land at Nanniwan from March 1941. Some research holds that the party also financed the region through opium production and trade. 48 41 53 1

The resistance also had a cross-border solidarity. In 1941 many members of the Korean Volunteer Corps in Nationalist territory went north to the Eighth Route Army’s Taihang base, and in July joined Choe Chang-ik’s North China Korean Youth Federation to form the Corps’ North China detachment. In the battle of Hujiazhuang on 12 December, twenty-nine Korean volunteers fought some five hundred Japanese. In July 1942 the Korean Independence League was founded under Kim Tu-bong, and the detachment became its army, the Korean Volunteer Army, which from 1943 served under Eighth Route Army command with Mu Chong as commander. Mostly doing propaganda work in three languages, it numbered 850 to 1,000 by 1945, while the main body in Chongqing under Kim Won-bong joined the Korean Liberation Army in 1942. At Yan’an, on Sanzo Nosaka’s proposal, the Japanese People’s Emancipation League was set up in 1944 to organise anti-war propaganda by Japanese prisoners; of the 3,000-odd Japanese deserters and prisoners taken by the Communists up to mid-1944, only about 325 stayed, the rest being sent back if they chose. 30 54 55 56

Yan’an: rectification and Mao Zedong Thought

After 1937 the party grew fast. By 1942 it had 800,000 members, most of them peasants from the north China bases, together with some 40,000 young intellectuals who had flocked to Yan’an from the Nationalist areas. Mao had taken the lead after the Zunyi conference, but even after winning his power struggle with Zhang Guotao he was one leader among several, alongside Zhou Enlai, Zhang Wentian and Wang Ming, and not the Comintern’s favourite. On 1 February 1942 Mao opened the rectification movement with “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work”, his speech at the opening of the Central Party School, and on 8 February with “Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing”. The targets were the “dogmatism” of Wang Ming, the “28 Bolsheviks” and others who had studied in the Soviet Union, and the “empiricism” of leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai who had followed them. The methods were study of assigned texts, criticism and self-criticism, and written confessions. 57 58

The movement soon turned on intellectuals’ criticism. In March 1942 Wang Shiwei’s “Wild Lilies” in Liberation Daily criticised the graded privileges of Yan’an, and Ding Ling wrote of the position of women there in “Thoughts on March 8”. Wang was branded a Trotskyist, arrested by the Social Affairs Department and executed in 1947. In May Mao laid down in the “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” that literature and art must serve workers, peasants and soldiers and be subordinate to politics; the talks set the standard of Chinese cultural policy for decades. Mao set up a General Study Committee run by his allies Kang Sheng, Li Fuchun, Peng Zhen and Gao Gang to direct the campaign, and for a time it took over the daily business of the party from the Politburo and Secretariat. In March 1943 Mao became chairman of the Politburo. 57 59 60 61 62

In April 1943 the Central Committee decided to continue the rectification, and on 15 July Kang Sheng’s speech “Rescue the Fallen” exaggerated the threat of spies within the party and set off a sweeping screening, the “rescue campaign”. Thousands of young members from the Nationalist areas were branded “Kuomintang agents” or “anti-party elements”, detained and tortured, and some were executed; confessions led to chains of further accusations. When the campaign ended Mao apologised at public meetings for “excesses” that had wronged some comrades, but not for the campaign itself. The historian Gao Hua argues that rectification broke the authority of the Soviet-trained leaders and the May Fourth ideas of freedom and individual liberation, and created a party culture that effaced the individual before the leader and the collective. 57

On 20 April 1945 the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee adopted the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party”, rewriting the history from the Fourth Plenum to the Zunyi conference as the errors of the “leftist lines” of Wang Ming and others and the vindication of Mao’s line. The Seventh Congress, held at Yan’an from 23 April to 11 June, brought together 755 delegates representing 1.21 million members. In his report “On Coalition Government” Mao stated that the liberated areas now numbered nineteen with a population of 95.5 million, that the army had grown to 910,000 men, and that the militia, who did not leave productive work, numbered more than 2.2 million. Through Liu Shaoqi’s report on the revised constitution, the new party constitution made “Mao Zedong Thought”, together with Marxism-Leninism, the party’s guiding ideology in its preamble. The “five great secretaries” Mao, Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi were elected, and this leadership led the party for decades. 62 63 64 65 66

1944–1945: from Ichi-Go to the surrender

In April 1944 Japan began Operation Ichi-Go, the largest campaign of the war. Some 500,000 troops with 100,000 horses, 1,500 guns and 800 tanks swept in turn through Henan, Hunan and Guangxi, with the aims of destroying the American airfields from which Japan was bombed and opening a railway corridor across the continent from Manchuria to Hanoi. Weakened by years of blockade, famine and corruption, the Nationalist armies lost Luoyang in May and Changsha in June; Hengyang held out until 8 August, and the Japanese, entering Guangxi in September, took the American air bases at Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning; Guilin and Liuzhou were abandoned when Bai Chongxi and other Guangxi clique generals judged them indefensible. The Chinese suffered 300,000 casualties. The Japanese halted at the end of November some 300 miles from Chongqing; they had reached their objectives, but too late to change the course of the war. The defeat was widely seen as proof of Chiang’s incompetence, and the Nationalist army was so broken that about one in ten press-ganged peasants died before reaching their units. 34 1

Ichi-Go shook relations between Washington and Chiang decisively. In September Roosevelt sent an ultimatum threatening to cut off Lend-Lease unless Stilwell was given command of all Chinese forces; Chiang rejected it as an affront to Chinese sovereignty and, backed by the presidential envoy Patrick Hurley, demanded Stilwell’s replacement. Stilwell was recalled on 19 October and Albert Wedemeyer succeeded him. Meanwhile, on 22 July, the US Army Observation Group, the so-called Dixie Mission, arrived at Yan’an. John S. Service of the State Department and Colonel David D. Barrett reported that Yan’an was more energetic and less corrupt than the Nationalist areas and that the Communists might be useful allies in war and peace. Hurley flew to Yan’an on 7 November and signed with Mao a draft agreement calling for a coalition government, a joint military council and the release of political prisoners, but it came to nothing when Chiang demanded full command of the Red Army and Mao refused. 39 67 68

At the end of 1944 Sun Li-jen’s troops from India and Wei Lihuang’s from Yunnan met in northern Burma and drove the Japanese out, and the Ledo Road opened early in 1945, restoring overland supply. In the spring Chinese forces retook Hunan and Guangxi. In February the Yalta conference, without China, recognised Soviet rights in Manchuria, and the Nationalist government accepted them in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of 14 August. On 9 August 1.5 million Soviet troops invaded Manchuria and destroyed the Kwantung Army of over a million men, which together with the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the Japanese surrender. Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender on 15 August, and on 9 September at Nanjing Yasuji Okamura, commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army, handed the instrument of surrender to He Yingqin. 1 69 70 71 46

The surrender at once became a race between the two parties. Chiang ordered Japanese and puppet troops to stay on guard in the occupied areas so that they would not surrender to Communist forces, and relied on American transport to move Nationalist troops into the big cities. But the returning Nationalist officials and soldiers seized Japanese-held businesses without returning them to their owners, embezzled property and extorted money by threatening to label people collaborators, earning the name of a “botched liberation”. The Communists rushed troops from Yan’an and elsewhere into Manchuria and, while the Soviet occupation lasted, took over Kwantung Army weapons and seized control of the countryside; meanwhile the Soviets carried off more than half of Manchuria’s industrial equipment. Compared with the 40,000 troops of 1937, the war had made the Communists a national force. 1 35 72

Assessment

China’s human losses cannot be fixed at a single figure. Modern estimates of the dead range between ten and twenty million, with fifteen to sixteen million the broad consensus. Odd Arne Westad counts about twelve million civilian and two million military deaths; Rana Mitter considers this conservative. Official PRC statistics give 35 million casualties, including 3.85 million military, of whom over twenty million died. Nationalist military losses vary by record from 1.32 to 1.8 million dead and from 3.2 to 5 million casualties. Five to six million died of hunger and disease, and the war created 95 million refugees. More than 200,000 Chinese women, and many Korean women, were forced into sexual slavery as “comfort women” for the Japanese army. Japanese military deaths in China are estimated at between about 400,000 and 700,000. 1

Who led the resistance remains a political question. The Communists say they were its “mainstay”; the Kuomintang and many historians reply that Nationalist armies fought all twenty-two major battles in which more than 100,000 troops met on both sides, while the Communists avoided regular warfare apart from Pingxingguan and the Hundred Regiments Offensive. The Nationalist war minister He Yingqin found it impossible that ill-equipped, untrained guerrillas could have killed over 1.7 million Japanese, as the Communists claimed. On the other hand it is widely accepted that while attrition on the main front wore down the Kuomintang, the bases behind enemy lines built up the Communists. Whether the Stilwell–Chiang conflict reflected Nationalist corruption or the contradictions of Allied strategy divides Tuchman from van de Ven. 1 73

In the history of the socialist movement the war became the classic case of a Communist party organising the peasant masses and building the foundations of power through a war of national liberation. “Independence and initiative” within the united front, the moderate New Democratic policies symbolised by rent and interest reduction and the three-thirds system, and guerrilla war with base-building put into practice the long war Mao sketched in “On Protracted War” and became the prototype of the theory of people’s war. At the same time the Yan’an rectification turned Mao’s personal authority into party ideology and created the methods of the political campaign, criticism and self-criticism, confession and purge, which after 1949 were repeated on a far larger scale in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. 28 43 57 66

The balance of forces in 1945 bore no resemblance to that of 1937. The Kuomintang still held the government and the big cities and the recognition of both the United States and the Soviet Union, but its army was exhausted, its finances were collapsing in hyperinflation, and with the “botched liberation” it began to lose the cities too. The Communists had become a force of 1.21 million members, 910,000 regular troops, 2.2 million militia and liberated areas of 95.5 million people, and they moved into Manchuria the moment Japan surrendered. The war exhausted the Nationalist state while giving the Communists a school of peasant mobilisation. This asymmetry was the starting condition of the civil war that broke out again in 1946. 1 35 65 72