Where does the modern Chinese superpower come from? Only 75 years ago, China was divided, impoverished, economically exploited and at war with ambitiously imperialist Japan. The notional rulers of China, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Kuomintang party, controlled a shrinking area of central and south-west China, fighting the Japanese with a poorly armed and trained army, and sometimes fighting the Chinese communists ensconced in China's north-west. In 1940, the Chinese nationalists seemed close to defeat and Japan's vision of a "Great East Asia Co‑Prosperity Sphere" (a Japanese-dominated Asian new order) looked closer than ever to achievement. Somehow, the rump independent China survived and, against considerable odds, became one of the victorious allies in 1945. But how?
The answer to this question has never much bothered western historians, who, for better or worse, have focused on what they see as the real war in Europe and the Pacific, where easily identifiable victories can be found and the explanation is clear. It is that neglect which has prompted Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford, to write the first full account of China's wartime resistance against Japan, restoring a vital part of the wartime narrative to its rightful place. Now, for the first time, it is possible to assess the impact of the war on Chinese society and the many factors that explain the Japanese failure in China and the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong's communists in 1949, from which the superpower has grown. It is a remarkable story, told with humanity and intelligence; all historians of the second world war will be in Mitter's debt.
The sheer scale and complexity of the Sino-Japanese war is daunting enough and Mitter, perhaps wisely, does not get bogged down in the technical and tactical details of how the war was fought. There were armies numbering millions on both sides, a fact that explains why the Japanese expansion in the Pacific theatre ran out of steam in 1942. The Chinese war effort could not hope to match that of the more developed states, but it dominated the administrative and economic spheres in China, while condemning tens of millions of Chinese to high levels of deprivation and hunger throughout the conflict. Mitter does not add to the debate about deaths, occasioned by the obvious absence of reliable statistics, but suggests the current estimates of between 15 and 20 million dead may not be wide of the mark; at the least, more than 90 million Chinese became refugees in their own country.
Moreover, the war encouraged the political fragmentation of Chinese territory as Japanese encroachments grew. In the north and east, the Japanese conquered large areas, where they installed and collaborated with puppet regimes, including Puyi (the last emperor) in Manchuria. Mongolia was more or less under Soviet domination. In the south and east, rival warlords maintained an uneasy relationship with Chiang's nationalists. In Nanjing, Chiang's former colleague Wang Jingwei set up a rival nationalist government under Japanese supervision in 1940. In the north-west, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai created a communist-dominated territory in Yan'an. Making sense of the different polities is a challenge in its own right, but the many divisions also explain not only the difficulty Chiang had in ever establishing an integrated, sovereign Chinese state, but the problems faced by the Japanese as they confronted the vast land area and the mosaic of local rulers.
Mitter explores this complex politics with remarkable clarity and economy. At the heart of the story is Chiang Kai‑shek, the one leader the West or Stalin ever took seriously. ..
The official history of China, much rewritten in recent times, is full of questionable propositions. Important among them is the assertion that China’s contemporary attitudes are determined by a century of “national humiliation” at the hands of foreigners – from the mid-19th century until the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the civil war in 1949. China certainly suffered the aggression of upstart powers, including Britain, which was intent on trade. When trade was refused, conflict followed. Yet, for the most part, the national response to foreign incursion was less a sense of humiliation than a painful reflection on what had gone wrong with a once mighty country and a search for modernising options that might restore its power. It was not until China lost the first Sino- Japanese war in 1895 that the word humiliation first appeared in this context. China regarded its smaller neighbours as tributary states. To be annoyed by western barbarians was one thing; to lose a war against the “northern dwarves”, as China’s president Chiang Kai-shek once described the Japanese in his diaries, was quite another... http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06/red-dawn
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