by Odd Westad
When war came, it had disastrous effects for China. Large numbers of soldiers and civilians died, and much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed. China lost at least two million men in battle, and twelve million Chinese civilians died as a direct result of warfare. Others died from starvation, destruction of dams and dikes, and disease and mistreatment in the Chinese army. Japan lost 400,000 men fighting in China (and 1,500,000 more in the other wars that the war in China started). Japan also lost 1.2 million civilians in World War II, including 300,000 in prisoner of war camps after the war, mostly in Manchuria and in the USSR. In addition, 400,000 Chinese were killed fighting together with the Japanese army in China or elsewhere in Asia.2 These are staggering figures. Their effects were to be felt in China and in Japan for two generations as a misery of loss, blame, and guilt.
Politically, China’s first big foreign war on its territory since the Manchu conquest in the 1630s and 1640s changed the landscape forever. The war broke the back of the GMD, which had represented Chinese nationalism for thirty years. The damage was in part due to the fighting itself, of course. But it was also because of the civilian challenges of war, which the state the GMD had set up was barely able to handle. The CCP had the chance first to survive and then to expand, sheltered by the war the GMD had to fight against Japan. And the war meant dislocation on a grand scale within the country, both socially and politically, with the power of traditional elites broken, the power of the state questioned, and millions of people displaced. War, as often, became a catalyst for modernity, but not necessarily the form of modernity that most people had wanted to see.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1930s Japan was an inherently unstable state. Its political system has been called “government by assassination.” Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was shot in 1931, and his successor Inukai Tsuyoshi a year later. Both were killed by young right-wingers who wanted a more autocratic regime at home and a more expansionist policy abroad. By 1936 right-wing terror had succeeded in totally immobilizing Japanese democracy. Part of the reason for this sharp turn to the right was the Great Depression, which hit the Japanese economy severely, causing the first deep crisis in the country’s modern economy. Some politicians and intellectuals, and not least many officers, viewed the Depression as a deliberate attempt by the West to damage Japan’s economic rise. Japan had agreed to many Western proposals for arms limitations, tariffs, and international institutions in the 1920s. Now its rivals were attempting to make use of Japan’s self-imposed restrictions to sabotage its economy. Japan, the right believed, needed to throw off the political system it had taken over from the West, reorient itself toward “Asian values,” and expand its zone of control on its own continent.
The first step in this Japanese expansion was Manchuria. There, in September 1931, officers from Tokyo’s imperial army made use of the political chaos in Japan to attack Chinese forces at Shenyang and then move swiftly to occupy the rest of the region. Neither the Japanese government nor the high command of the army acted to stop this conquest by mutiny. Instead, Tokyo gradually gave way to the wishes of the radical officers in its army in China, the so-called Guandong Army. In the war that followed the Japanese attack, Chinese forces in Manchuria were quickly put on the defensive, and within five months Japan had taken control of most of China’s northeastern provinces. Unlike before, this time Tokyo did not give in to international pressure to withdraw. Instead, when the League of Nations defined its actions as aggression, Japan withdrew from the League in March 1933. Even before its break with the West, Japan had begun setting up a separate state in China’s northeastern provinces, which it called Manzhouguo—Land of the Manchus. Most of the former Chinese power holders were forced out, and a new administration fully beholden to Japan was put in place, led by the hapless Puyi, the last Qing emperor, who now became the Kangde emperor in what he considered his ancestral homeland. The Manzhouguo emperor’s role in the East Asian system that Japan was putting in place was clear: At one point Puyi performed an elaborate quasi-Japanese ritual from which he emerged as the younger half-brother of Hirohito, the Japanese emperor.3
The construction of Manzhouguo contributed to several key international developments of the 1930s. It pushed Japan’s weak civilian governments toward accepting a new form of state organization dominated by the military and aimed at overseas expansion. It intensified Chinese nationalism and convinced a younger generation of Chinese that they had to aim for a unified and centralized state. And it destroyed all attempts at international cooperation in East Asia, making the new powers in the region, the United States and the Soviet Union, concentrate, each in its own way, on dealing with Japanese expansionism. In spite of Soviet unwillingness to stand up to Tokyo and US inability to do so without the backing of the European powers, it did not, by the mid-1930s, take prophetic gifts to understand that East Asia was heading for war. What held the shaping of an international coalition against Japan back was the focus that all main powers had on the situation in Europe and the rise of Nazi Germany. And Japan was watching closely what Germany was doing on its continent: creating hegemonic forms of integration that could help it resist great power attempts at keeping it down.
Manzhouguo therefore came to symbolize a new form for Japanese imperialism, in which economic development and public services stood at the forefront. Japan was well prepared for this effort. Already before the world crisis, eighty-five percent of Japanese foreign investment was in China, and of its Chinese investments, eighty percent was in Manchuria. Between 1932 and 1941 Japan, in relative terms, invested far more in Manchuria than any Western power did in their colonies. By 1945, its investment there was larger than the total of its investment in Korea, Taiwan, and the rest of China put together. Production, both in industry and agriculture, tripled, with machinery, tools, and consumer goods being the fastest-growing sectors. The Manzhouguo government, and its Japanese advisers, also invested heavily in transport, education, and public health, offering a completely new pattern of development to a population that had suffered decades of warfare and economic chaos. Not surprisingly, some, especially among the traditional elites, chose to work closely with the new state and its foreign backers.
By the early 1930s, Manchuria was roughly ninety percent Chinese in population, with smaller groups of Koreans, Manchus, Mongols, and Russians. This pattern changed little during the Manzhouguo period, except that the number of Koreans, who could enter freely from Japanese-controlled Korea, increased sharply. The vast majority of Chinese in Manchuria continued to believe that the territory they lived in was a part of China, and while only tiny groups were willing to take up arms to resist the new state, resentment and passive forms of resistance existed everywhere. The Japanese army responded with repression and violence, including forced land confiscations to benefit new forms of industrialized agriculture. Even though the Japanese preferred to define Manzhouguo as a multinational development state, in which all national identities could and should play a part, the Chinese felt that they were the ones who benefited the least from the new order.
The creation of Manzhouguo meant a new phase of Japan’s expansion, and, to some extent, a new Japan. In its confrontation with the West, Tokyo’s actions became more similar to US or Soviet forms of control over others than to the arrangements within British or French empires. The pan-Asian developmentalism that Japan was to put forward over the next twelve years through 1945 gave purpose to the lives, and, eventually, often the deaths, of many young Japanese. It also appealed to some Chinese, through its anti-Western stance and its successes at modernization. But, as in Hitler’s Europe, in Japan’s Asia there could only be one nation at the peak of the development ladder. For those living in the shadow of the Empire of the Sun, the only way to become fully modern was to become fully Japanese. And that was a next to impossible process, because it led away from the emerging nationalisms that other Asians increasingly identified with.
FROM THE 1920S ON, the Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek had regarded J
apan as the foremost threat to China’s unity and integrity. While admiring Japanese fighting skills and organizational abilities, Chiang realized that these very qualities could be turned against China if Tokyo so decided. From 1931 on, Chiang knew that a war was coming, and he wanted to postpone it for as long as possible, giving his regime time to complete the unification of China and gain foreign allies. Though much maligned then and now, Chiang’s strategy made eminent sense: He knew better than anyone else just how weak China was compared with Japan, and that the only way in which his nationalist project could be saved was through buying time. Throughout the early 1930s, against considerable opposition from friends and foes alike within China, Chiang clung to his strategy. He would not fight a full-scale war against Japan until he absolutely had to, and then, he predicted, there would be a long war in which China’s very survival would be at stake. It was a war China could not fight without unity, weapons, and foreign assistance.
In the early 1930s the GMD government led a country that was more united than it had been for two decades, but where significant parts of the country had forms of self-authorized autonomy. Besides Manchuria, where the Japanese installed themselves as overlords, Outer Mongolia had a Communist regime, which Chiang, rightly, saw as an extension of Soviet power. In Xinjiang, Chiang had to confront a Uighur rebellion and then forces allied with the Soviets. Having overcome both, he lost control of the province in 1937 to Sheng Shicai, a GMD official who preferred to throw his lot in with the Soviets as Chiang’s government faced its final showdown with the Japanese. In Tibet, the regime acting on behalf of the boy Dalai Lama turned to the British in India to maintain its autonomy from China. And in the south, Yunnan was semiautonomous under the local strongman Long Yun and Guangxi under Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren. Chiang still had a long way to go to reunify China fully. And then there were the Communists, his most intractable problem, who had survived the onslaught against them in 1928 and were now making a limited comeback as a guerrilla force in Jiangxi/Fujian border areas.
For Chiang, the Communists were different from all his other challengers for power in China. Supremely self-confident, the generalissimo believed that the ethnic separatists or regional strongmen would, in the end, submit to the power of the central government he was constructing. But the Communists would not, because their political ideology prevented them from doing so. They were, he rightly thought, governed by their political beliefs and their ties to the Soviet Union and would therefore resist if not destroyed militarily. In 1934 Chiang therefore made the CCP bases the primary objective of his military campaigns, forcing the main Communist armies out of the south and on a long flight toward the west and north, leaving the survivors, by late 1935, to set up a new base in a desolate part of Shaanxi province. The Communists had survived again, but barely.
It was the Long March, as they called their flight from the south, that became the founding myth of the renewed CCP during World War II. The retreat also gave the Communists their new leader, Mao Zedong, who would be in place from 1936 until his death forty years later. Mao led a main part of the CCP armies into Shaanxi, and the capital the Communists set up there, Yan’an, was increasingly dominated by Mao and his political thinking. Even though Mao was a warrior who hoped to organize new armies in the north to take his revenge on Chiang, he was bound by Comintern discipline and by the orders given by Stalin—more difficult to ignore now that the CCP headquarters was in the north and closer to Soviet-held territory. And Stalin wanted the CCP to join Chiang in a new united front to fight Japan, the most dangerous enemy for the Soviets, too. Mao grumbled but had little choice but to comply, especially since he himself saw the propaganda advantages of calling for united resistance against Japan.
Then, in December 1936, matters came to a head. Chiang had gone to the army’s northwestern headquarters in Xian in order to urge the troops there to renew their offensive against the CCP. As often before, Chiang thought that he was within a hair’s breadth of wiping the Communists out. Instead, the local officers, headed by Zhang Xueliang, the strongman Tokyo had driven out of Manchuria, took the Generalissimo prisoner. They wanted to force Chiang to authorize combined action with the CCP and other Chinese autonomous armies against Japan. Chiang was outraged, but faced treason with his usual composure. He told his captors that he would rather be shot than offer them any concessions. Zhang soon realized that he was the one who was in big trouble. From all segments of Chinese society came requests for him to release Chiang. Most people did not believe that China could organize against Japan except under the Generalissimo’s leadership. Even Stalin and the Soviets chimed in, since they believed that all alternative leaders to Chiang would be less likely to wage successful war against Japan. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s second in command in the CCP, went to Xian to secure Chiang’s release. While Mao must have been fuming at seeing his archenemy get away, he knew that Stalin was keeping an eye on his every action, and that there was no other way out. He may even, in his heart of hearts, have agreed with the majority of his countrymen: With Chiang there might be little hope of ever defeating the Japanese, but without him there was no hope at all.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK RETURNED to his capital, Nanjing, in the snow on Christmas Day 1936, accompanied by his captor, the “Young Marshal” Zhang Xueliang (who might have opted to stay behind if he knew he would remain the Generalissimo’s favorite prisoner for many decades). Chiang had promised a ceasefire against the Communists and, in the vaguest possible terms, a united front against Japan. He told his closest advisers that he was furious that, in his view, a bunch of warlords and traitors had ruined his plan for buying time before fighting Japan. But Chiang had also recogized that he was running out of time. Even before the incident in Xian, he had confided in his diary that although he wanted another two years of preparation, “life” might not give him that much. If the choices were to lose control of his own country or go to war against Japan, Chiang obviously preferred the latter.
By the spring of 1937 some form of limited cooperation directed against Japan had been put in place. The Chinese central government and most of the regional power holders were beginning to work together. Since 1935 the CCP had been promoting a Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese United Front, and now even some of Chiang’s closest colleagues were using the term. The rhetoric against Japan contributed to strengthening Chiang’s position in China even further, but—understandably—had very negative consequences in Tokyo and in Manzhouguo, where even moderate politicians and officers believed that Chinese nationalism was reaching fever pitch and that war was not far off. Japan was also feeling the sting of its international isolation. Not only were the United States and Britain indicating their support for a more hard-line Chinese position, but so were the Soviets, Japan’s archenemy. Even Germany, technically Japan’s ally, had not withdrawn its military advisers in China.
The Japanese government was inclined to reduce the pressure on Chiang’s regime in order to avoid war, but tension was building in north China. The situation was especially volatile in Hebei province around Beijing, where Japanese forces of the Guandong army had been creating a buffer zone between Manzhouguo and the rest of China since the mid-1930s. On the evening of 7 July 1937, while Japanese forces were conducting an unannounced exercise southwest of Beijing, close to where the city’s fifth ring road runs now, Chinese soldiers fired shots at them. Finding one of their numbers missing, the Japanese demanded access to a nearby fortress to look for him. When the Chinese officers hesitated, the Guandong army shelled the fortress and took control of the key bridge coming out of the city, the Lu Ditch Bridge, or the Marco Polo Bridge as it is known in English. Chinese forces reacted and by morning had retaken the bridge, but when the Japanese commanders demanded an apology, the Chinese refused to back down. Sporadic fighting continued up to 26 July, when the imperial army declared a ceasefire. Even after most of the fighting stopped, the Guomindang officers rejected the Japanese demands, which by then had widened to imply a full Chinese evacuation of the area.
Not long after the fighting in Hebei broke out, Chiang Kai-shek decided that this was it: The war that he had dreaded, and prepared for, had come. He could not order his troops to accept the Japanese demands. On 30 July he declared that “the only course open to us now is to lead the masses of the nation, under a single plan, to struggle to the last.” Seeing the Japanese pour troops into North China, Chiang decided to strike back where his best troops were, in and around Shanghai. Egged on by the Shanghai commander, Zhang Zhizhong, who was communicating both with the CCP and the Soviets, the GMD air force on 14 August attacked the Japanese flagship, the aged battle cruiser Izumo, in Shanghai harbor. Although failing to hit the ship, the Chinese operation told Tokyo that a full-scale war was now on, and the Japanese fleet turned its guns on Chinese positions in the city. Addressing his countrymen by radio, Chiang said that “Japan’s limitless expansion impels China, gives it no choice, but to act in self-defense [and] to resist by armed force from now on.”4 The battle for Shanghai raged back and forth for two months, with both armies attempting to stay away from the foreign concessions. By early November the Japanese had secured the city and were moving toward the Chinese capital, Nanjing.
Although the Japanese tried to portray the GMD government’s actions as akin to the Qing government’s during the Boxer War, Tokyo’s international isolation only increased after the war broke out. By drawing on its putative alliance with Nazi Germany, Japan was able to get Chiang’s German advisers recalled. But Britain, Japan’s old ally, now viewed it as an aggressor. The United States was also edging closer to condemning Tokyo outright, though it still resisted any collective action. In a speech on 5 October 1937 clearly directed against Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt condemned “those violations of treaties and those ignorings of human instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.” Meanwhile, the Soviets, to forestall a two-front war against both Germany and Japan, began taking steps to confront the growing power of their eastern neighbor. Stalin not only agreed to arm the Chinese; he sent Soviet planes and pilots to combat the Japanese air force. During the first year of the war, the Soviets provided the Chinese government with 348 bombers, 542 fighters, 82 T-tanks, 2,118 vehicles, 1,140 artillery guns, 9,720 machine guns, and 50,000 rifles. In the summer of 1939, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a war for control of Mongolia around Nuomen Han, on the Manzhouguo-Mongolian border. The Japanese forces were soundly defeated by the Red Army under the command of General Georgii Zhukov. The Soviets lost 9,000 men; the Japanese at least twice that.5