China at War Read online

  CHINA

  AT WAR

  Hans van de Ven is an authority on the history of 19th and 20th century China. At the University of Cambridge he serves as Professor of Modern Chinese History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the author of Breaking with the Past: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and Global Origins of Modernity in China, War and Nationalism in China: 1925-1945 and From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927. The Battle for China, a book of essays he co-edited, received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the Society for Military History.

  CHINA

  AT WAR

  HANS VAN DE VEN

  TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY IN THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW CHINA 1937–1952

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London WC1X 9HD

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Hans van de Ven, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 78283 016 0

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Introduction

  Part I: Staking a Nation

  1. Chiang Kaishek: Saving China

  2. Nation Building

  3. Nanjing, Nanjing

  4. To War

  Part II: Momentous Times

  5. The Battle of Shanghai

  6. Trading Space for Time

  7. Regime Change

  8. War Communism

  Part III: The Acid Test

  9. The Allies at War

  10. The Turning Point

  11. Japan’s Surrender in China

  Part IV: The New China

  12. Crash and Burn

  13. National Liberation War

  14. Exhaustion

  Epilogue: Transitions

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  MAPS

  1. China

  2. Battle for Shanghai

  3. Battle of Shanghai

  4. Battle of Wuhan

  5. Military Situation 1939

  6. Japanese conquest of Burma

  7. Ichigo Operation

  8. Manchuria 1948

  9. Korean War

  INTRODUCTION

  … I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

  Deuteronomy 5:9

  The world war which is approaching with irresistible force will review the Chinese problem together with all other problems of colonial domination. For it is in this that the real task of the second world war will consist: to divide the planet anew in accord with the new relationship of imperialist forces. The principal arena of struggle will, of course, not be that Lilliputian bath-tub, the Mediterranean, nor even the Atlantic Ocean, but the basin of the Pacific.

  Leon Trotsky, foreword, in Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938)1

  Coming to grips with China’s wartime history poses extraordinary challenges, not least because so much fighting took place in such a vast country over such a long period of time, from 1937 to 1945. In resisting Japanese aggression, China fought a war whose moral contours were simple and during which the country made enormous sacrifices to ensure its survival. This was the warfare of Herodotus’s The Histories, of a civilisation defending itself against the depredations of a barbaric aggressor. However, there was also more or less simultaneously a civil war, of the kind that Thucydides portrayed in his History of the Peloponnesian War, with instances of gross brutality, lawlessness, social mayhem, cynical betrayals and Machiavellian struggles for power. Civil wars raise different issues from wars between countries. In national wars, such as between Prussia and France in 1870, Spain and the Netherlands between 1568 and 1648, or even the First and Second World Wars, the goals are straightforward and nations come together. In civil wars, charismatic leadership, an ability to inspire, political shrewdness, managerial skill and a strong dose of ruthlessness are usually needed, first to force an outcome and make it stick, and then to bring calm to a society that has just torn itself apart.

  Today, China recounts its wartime history in the Herodotean mode. This is a recent departure. In the early decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), China’s recent past was constructed as a revolution in which the Chinese Communists had triumphed against great odds, freeing the country from the brutal tyranny of the Nationalists led by Chiang Kaishek, Japanese aggression and Western imperialism. Public attention was focused on events such as: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921; the 1927 purge that left thousands of Communists dead; the emergence during the Second World War of Yan’an, the Communist capital, as a beacon of hope in a sea of Nationalist corruption and oppression; and the final defeat of the Nationalists in three great battles: the Liaoshen Campaign for control of Manchuria from May to November 1948, the battles for Beijing and Tianjin that lasted from 29 November 1948 until 31 January 1949, and the Huaihai Campaign in north China from 6 November 1948 to 10 January 1949. The history of the Communist revolution stood centre stage.

  Now it is China’s victory over Japan that takes the limelight. The Second World War (or the War of Resistance, as it is still usually called in China) is portrayed as the time when the New China was born, when the country managed to come together to prevail over enormous odds and safeguard a civilisation threatened with extinction. That today’s leaders of the People’s Republic choose to portray the country’s war history as its finest hour is entirely understandable. Globally the Second World War has come to be regarded as something of an axial moment out of which the modern world emerged, providing not only its geopolitical contours but also its moral bearings. Many countries, including the United State of America, Russia and the United Kingdom, have put victory to use to enhance the national feel-good factor; why should China not do so, too?

  The change, as so often in post-Mao China, was the result of initiatives at the local level, in this instance beginning in the universities. In the early 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power, academic historians in the People’s Republic, especially at Nanjing University, initiated a reassessment of the Nationalists’ role during the War of Resistance. Using archival sources preserved in that city, they argued that, especially during the first phase of the war, it was the Nationalists rather than the Communists who bore the brunt of the fighting. In so doing, they overturned decades of silence about the enormous sacrifices the Nationalists and their armies had made in the service of the country.

  Soon after, museums opened in places of significance in the war: at Nanjing, where the Nanjing Massacre Museum welcomed its first visitors in 1985 and where in the foothills of Purple Mountain the names of slain Chinese, as well as Russian and American airmen, are inscribed on memorial walls; in Shenyang, where the September 18 Memorial Museum, named after the date in 1931 on which the Japanese occupation of Manchuria began, was inaugurated in 1991; at Marco Polo Bridge, where, on 7 July 1937, the first shots of the War of Resistance were fired; and in Chongqing, the city in western China to which the Nationalists retreated in 1938, and where Nationalist government buildings as well as the residen
ces of Nationalist leaders have been restored and opened to the public.

  Many cities now house memorial parks for the war dead, including Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hengyang, Guilin, Changde, Harbin, Shanggao and others. The war now features in movies, TV documentaries, memoirs and video games. In schools, students learn about the Second World War in China in Patriotic Education programmes. This trend culminated in the decision, taken by China’s highest law-making body, the National People’s Congress, to enshrine the new narrative in law. In February 2014 it decided that from then on China would mark its ‘victory in the Chinese people’s War of Resistance against Japan’ every 3 September. Showcasing the inclusivity of the new narrative, both Communist and Nationalist veterans flanked President Xi Jinping as he presided over the commemorations held in September 2015. A year later, the seventieth anniversary of China’s victory was celebrated with a huge military parade in Beijing.

  There are real positives to this development. As Oxford historian Rana Mitter has noted, it has facilitated the healing of wounds resulting from decades of class struggle during which millions of Chinese people died.2 It has given a new dignity to all those who were connected in one way or another with the Nationalists, distrusted during the Cultural Revolution and before as ‘bourgeois running dogs’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘big tigers’ or ‘bad elements’. They, and their descendants, can now hold their heads up high in public.

  This new understanding of the Second World War does more than further national reconciliation. The appeals of Maoism have long faded and even economic success, no matter how stellar, no longer suffices as a source of national pride for the country or of political legitimacy for its leaders. Commemorating the war fits the PRC government’s efforts to move beyond ideology and economic success to promote a common national identity and proclaim its new international stature. To achieve these aims, the leadership has taken a series of steps, ranging from staging spectacles such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and reforming the national football league with the aim of making Chinese football internationally competitive, to instituting a uniform nationwide examination for university admissions and enforcing a standard pronunciation of Chinese through its schools. To construct an inspiring account of how the New China emerged from the Second World War furthers this project in modern statecraft.

  China’s leaders today are of course well aware that presiding over commemorative events associated with this version of China’s history burnishes their image by association.3 One of their aims in emphasising China’s role in the war against Japan is also to suggest equivalence with the Western Allies, the message being that if China could be trusted by the international community then, the same should be true now. Hence their pressure to talk about a ‘worldwide anti-fascist war’ in which China led the fight against Japan, rather than just the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan.4

  If this heroic version of China’s Second World War history has a number of positive aspects, this book will nonetheless take issue with it, in several interconnected ways. The War of Resistance was never about the defeat of Japan alone. For China was at war not just with Japan but also with itself. For the historian the challenge has been to combine China’s resistance to Japanese aggression and the simultaneous revolutionary war between the Nationalists and the Communists into a single account, an account that must be alert to the ways the two impacted on each other as well as to China’s fragmented state at the time. Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek was China’s wartime leader, recognised as such even by the Communists. However, even as the leader of the Nationalists he was more the convenor of a fractious alliance than the chief of a disciplined and structured organisation working towards a single purpose.

  If China’s war with Japan resulted from Japan’s attempt to establish a Japanese empire across east and south-east Asia, the Chinese Civil War was the product of starkly different views within China about deeper questions made acute by the 1911 Revolution.5 These questions included: who was to have a say, and on what grounds, in political discourse and decision-making; what should China be seen to stand for; how should central and local authority relate to each other; what to preserve of China’s traditions; and what was the country’s place in the modern world. No mechanism existed to resolve these key constitutional issues, or indeed to foster compromises for them, with the result that the republic that emerged in the wake of the 1911 Revolution disintegrated as soon as it confronted its first major crisis, the death in June 1916 of President Yuan Shikai, the strong man of the Revolution.

  By the late 1920s, Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists had prevailed in the civil wars that followed, but powerful regional forces, although nominally incorporated into the new order, remained largely independent, and frequently took to the battlefield to challenge Nationalist rule. In addition, a Communist insurgency took hold in the central China countryside in the early 1930s. In 1934 the Nationalists succeeded in driving the Communists out of their enclaves, but the Communists then undertook the Long March, as their escape to Shaanxi province, an inhospitable part of a poor province in north-west China, became known when the Communist revolution remained the preferred source for tales of heroic daring-do.

  If in 1945 it was clear that Japan’s gambit to establish its domination over east Asia had failed, the issues that the 1911 Revolution had shaken loose remained unresolved. If the Nationalists had hoped that leading their country to victory and securing international recognition for China as an equal nation state had bestowed on them the mantle of legitimacy, they were to be disappointed. The Communists, and many others, refused to recognise their accession. And if by 1937 the Communists were but one among many opponents to the Nationalists – and not even the strongest one – by 1945 that situation had changed. In 1937, the Communists commanded perhaps some 30,000 inferior troops, with only a small base in a poor province. By 1945, Communist armed forces numbered some 1 million men, stationed in large bases across northern China. One effect of the War of Resistance in China was the radical narrowing of polit ical options. At the time of the Japanese surrender on 9 September 1945, it was clear that it would be either the Nationalists or the Communists who would take charge of China. So it was that civil war continued for another four years, until October 1949, when, standing atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tian’anmen Square, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

  It is simply not possible to separate China’s civil war from China’s war with Japan. To give just one example, the Communist victory required a tightly disciplined party to ensure that its armed forces, Party cells, administrative organs and mass organisations operating across China’s vast spaces implemented a coordinated strategy. In the early 1940s, when China faced the gravest situation in its war with Japan, Mao Zedong spent two years building such a party, combining a ruthless purge of his political opponents with a thorough indoctrination campaign, terrifying Communist Party colleagues into accepting his personal dominance. The negative example of Nationalist disorganisation – for which they became increasingly well known during the War of Resistance – no doubt was one reason Mao concluded that this had to be done if the revolution he wanted was to triumph. However, other factors created by the War of Resistance – such as heightened emotions, social dislocation, economic collapse and the fragmentation of military authority – were critical to his success. Similarly, the growth of Communist power impacted on Nationalist strategy. The Nationalists deployed large armies, including some of their best forces, in blockading Communist base areas, inevitably leading to a reduction in their anti-Japanese efforts.

  Artificially separating China’s War of Resistance from the Nationalist – Communist civil war inevitably leads to histories that are partial at best. A heroic account of China in the Second World War veils the fact that both the Nationalists and the Communists resorted to horrendous strategies, including scorched earth policies, flooding vast tracts of land, urban terror campaigns, murderous pu
rges and the use of starvation as a military tactic. Unpalatable decisions and horrific measures are at times inevitable in war. Nonetheless, if the Chinese have every reason to be proud that their country survived one of the greatest crises of its entire history and to celebrate this as a collective achievement, historians must try to tell it as it was.

  The narrative arc for China at War is provided by the failure of conventional warfare in China and the emergence of what might be called national liberation war. When Japanese and Nationalist forces began fighting each other in 1937, they were committed to conventional war, with both sides seeing it as a marker of modernity and nationhood. They believed that war was a matter of deploying forces into the battlefield, arming them with industrially produced weapons and coordinating them through a general staff, while government ministries mobilised the materiel and human resources necessary for what was thought of as total war, in which mass was everything. This was the kind of war conceptualised by the great nineteenth-century military thinker Carl von Clausewitz. To Clausewitz, war was fought between opposing but internally cohesive societies, allowing all events to be placed into a dialectical narrative. That model of warfare did not survive the Second World War. What replaced it is difficult to define. At one end of the new range of possibilities was nuclear warfare, which, fortunately, has proved more a possibility than a reality. Somewhere in the middle is the kind of warfare the US waged in Vietnam, which can be thought of as managerial warfare, characterised by the use of tables, graphs, statistics, calculations and the application of modern business practices to war. Asymmetric warfare (typically between standing armies and insurgents) and terrorism are at the other end of the range.6

  Both China and Japan realised early on in the conflict that the assumptions they had made about conventional warfare were unsound. By the autumn of 1938, the Nationalists accepted that they would not be able to throw the Japanese into the Pacific, as some had initially hoped might be possible, and nor could they sustain the war at the intensity with which they had pursued it until then. Japan drew the conclusion that it was unlikely that it could force a Nationalist surrender. It also was not willing to pay the price of pursuing the Nationalists all the way to Chongqing in western China, where they had by now fled, and judged that, in any case, the Soviet threat in Manchuria was too grave to risk such a diversion of energies.