THE SITUATION IN CHINA DURING THE WAR OF RESISTANCE TO JAPAN

1931 - 1945

by Stephen Endicott

On the evening of 4 May 1939 when I was eleven years old, I stood with my family on a hill top on the south bank of the Yangtze River overlooking the ancient city of Chungking [Chongqing]. What we saw will always be a ghastly memory. Great leaping flames covered the much over-crowded city and clouds of black smoke reflected themselves in the river below. That night terrified crowds surged through the narrow gates of the city wall, trying to escape to the countryside, many were trampled to death. It was a baptism of fire and destruction from Japanese bombers which claimed the lives of ten thousand city dwellers in three short days. This first assault on Chungking, China’s wartime capital, typified the barbarism of Japan’s aggression. Chungking was nearly helpless. The small squadron of Soviet fighter planes which rose to defend the city was no match for the waves of Japanese bombers – bombers that were powered by British Vickers engines, armed with scrap iron from Canada and fueled by American oil.

By the time we left Chungking, in 1941, there had been a total of 7,000 bombers raid the city. How did this barbarism come about? Why did Japan have so much international support? Why did Japanese terror bombing fail to crush the Chinese will to resist? These are large questions to which answers can only be suggested in what follows.

Signposts of Japan’s Aggression in China

The signposts of Japan’s aggression and empire building in China are marked by five important dates. In 1895 after the first Sino-Japanese war, Japan annexed Taiwan and laid heavy war indemnities on China. At that time Japan joined the European imperialist powers in a scramble for concessions and treaty ports which divided China up into ‘spheres of influence.’ Then, in 1905, after Japan defeated Russia in war she proceeded to annex Korea as a colony and take possession of valuable Russian concessions and railroads in northeast China. Ten years later, in 1915, Japan took advantage of the First World War in Europe to seize the German concessions in Shandong province. Her predatory designs were further advanced that year by Twenty-One Demands on the Peking government, designs which if fully implemented would have made all China into a colonial appendage of Japan, a supplier of raw materials, resources and labour power for Japan’s burgeoning industrial development.

As Chinese nationalist feeling began stirring in resentment against Japan’s bullying, as student-led boycotts of Japanese goods spread and as strikes broke out in Japanese-owned factories, mines and mills from Shanghai to Shenyang, the Japanese government began denouncing what it called ‘terrorists’ and communist bandits. It accused the Chinese authorities of failing to live up to treaty obligations to protect Japanese property and interests in China. They used this excuse to begin a series of new intrusions into China. The most important of these occurred in 1931, the fourth milestone of aggression. At that time the Japanese army poured across the border from Korea to annex the three northeastern provinces in China. Japan established there a puppet state of Manchukuo in defiance of the League of Nations, a fatal blow to the collective security system of that time. In justification of such far-reaching action the Japanese minister to Peking is reported to have said “when there is a fire in the jeweller’s shop the neighbours cannot be expected to refrain from helping themselves.”

The War of Resistance

In a symbolic sense 1931 marked the beginning of China’s fourteen-year war of resistance to Japan. In reality though the Chinese were too weak and too divided to do much. The small Chinese Communist Party declared war on Japan from its base in south China and many compatriots from left to right, from all walks of life, agreed with them, including eventually the Young Marshall, Zhang Xueliang, commander of the Northeast Army which numbered 400,000 troops. But Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, procrastinated, hoping to destroy his Communist rivals before confronting the challenge from Japan. He persisted in a long-running civil war. It was only while he was on a mission to Xian, in 1936, to inspect an anti-communist campaign that Generalissimo Chiang was kidnaped by the Young Marshall and forced to agree to the formation of an Anti-Japanese National United Front of all parties and patriotic groups. The creation of the United Front provided a great boost to Chinese morale.

Faced with such a stiffening of China’s resolve, the Japanese lost little time in opening an all-out assault on China. This was the fifth signpost of Japan’s aggression. It began at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking in the summer of 1937 and swept down the eastern seaboard, capturing Shanghai and Canton [Guangzhou] and inland to take Nanking [Nanjing] and then Wuhan. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were handed defeat after defeat forcing the government to retreat until it finally ended up in Chungking striped of its assets and isolated from the world. By 1938 Japan had control of all of China’s major seaports, her railroads, her wealthy commercial and industrial centres and most of the fertile farmlands. Newly created China Development Companies worked with Mitsubishi, Mitsui and other Japanese corporations to operate coal and iron mines, steelworks, and harbour facilities to enhance Japan’s industrial capacities. To consolidate her hold on China politically Japan proceeded to install a number of puppet regimes on the model of Manchukuo which would be strongly anti-communist and would provide police protection for foreign investments. Great Britain, the United States and other capitalist nations of the West resented Japanese pressure on their interests in China but they acquiesced with their actions partly out of military weakness and also because they viewed Japan as a buffer against the turmoil of Chinese nationalism and social revolution, the ‘menace of Bolshevism.’ These governments continued to license private corporations to ship war materials to Japan even as they provided modest aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Chungking. Such actions passed for morality among the leaders of the Western democracies.

Stalemate

After 1938 the campaigns the Japanese fought were foraging expeditions rather than battles. Their objective was to keep the countryside in terror, to put Chinese forces off balance and to train their new recruits under fire. They would concentrate several divisions by rail, press forward sacking fields and towns and then turn back. The situation became what journalist Theodore White called “the permanent exhausting stalemate known as the China War.”

The two centres of Chinese resistance, the Nationalists directed from Chungking and the Communists in Yenan (north of the Yellow River) replied with flexible tactics, attacking the Japanese units on their flanks and then retreating before any pitched battles with the better equipped Japanese could develop. But any similarity between the two centres ended there. Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist party was half-hearted about efforts to continue the war especially after the United States became an ally following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Although Chiang was the recipient of increasing American aid, U.S. General Joseph Stilwell, commander of the China-Burma-India war theatre, found the Nationalist army to be increasingly corrupt, playing the black market, trading with the enemy, content to wait until America won the war. Chiang, he thought, was chiefly concerned with blockading his Communist allies in the United Front.

Guerilla Warfare

In Yenan an American military mission found an Eighth Route Army led by Mao Zedong and ChuDe that was a mirror image of the Nationalist armies. It practiced what it preached, reduced the rent burdens of the peasants, raised production, organized guerilla groups to harass the Japanese and formed partisan bases that reached out as far as the Yellow Sea. The areas under Communist control had a population of 44 million people in 1941 and grew to 90 million by the end of the war. This was a force, Stilwell thought, that could be relied on when it came time for a US assault on Japan.

The Japanese were well aware of the skillful guerilla fighters who continuously disrupted their design for a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ in North China and they struck back with savage measures to `kill all, burn all, destroy all.’ One historian describes it this way:

When peasants, desperate to avoid discovery, crisscrossed the ground beneath their villages with mazes of tunnels, the Japanese responded by surrounding the villages with troops and pumping poison gas into the underground networks. One documented case of such an action states that 800 Chinese died. Another details the execution of 1,280 villagers and the burning of every house in an eastern Hebei village. A third describes a ‘mopping-up campaign’ in north China between August and October 1941 that left 4,500 villagers dead and 150,000 homes burnt. Seventeen thousand other Chinese from the area were taken to Manchukuo to work as laborers. The purpose of such violence was to deter all China from future collaboration with the Communist guerrilla forces. In many cases, it had that effect; but in countless others, it encouraged a deep and bitter resentment of the Japanese that the CCP was able skillfully to build upon.” [Spence, Modern China, 469]

Another means of terror was biological warfare clumsily disguised as water purification efforts. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted lethal experiments on thousands of prisoners of war at Pingfang, near Harbin, and then used some of the results to disseminate bubonic plague in eleven county towns across China. Later the US government inherited the Japanese biological warfare secrets.

As the writer Ho Kan-chih has observed, these crimes of war, “the massacres, rapes, plunder, arson, demolition and other atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese fascist troops [have] left an indelible stain on human history.” [Ho. A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, 315]. The purpose of our conference now, in 2003, is to create public awareness, to prevent such stains from spreading even further.