Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 (Rana Mitter)

How China resisted Japan and the kidnapper, hooligan, and bully

World War II began in Asia during the 1930s war between China and Japan. But China was not invited to the 1945 Yalta conference of the Big Three (USA, USSR, and British Empire) that would end the war and negotiate the post-war world order. China was the forgotten ally.

Welcome to the fourth week of my World History Tour of China. This week’s history book recommendation is Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 (2013).

The Prizes of War

Eighty years after the end of World War II too many Westerners forget China’s sacrifice in that war. They ignore how the story of China’s World War II is a tragedy in which national modern sovereignty is won, despite war, civil war, imperial foreign intervention, and 14 to 20 million deaths. They imagine the USA led the world on the path to the post-war world order. They ignore how the USA’s post-war leaders bewail the “loss of China” which they had exploited, commanded, and misled since 1842.

And they forget how the USA’s ally felt about the great powers who met at Yalta in 1945. Chiang Kai-shek, the principal of three leaders of the divided wartime China, had no illusions about the weakness of China or the values that motivated how the USA, USSR and the British Empire built the post-war world order. “China is the weakest of the four Allies,” he wrote when on a diplomatic tour in the USA.

“It’s as if a weak person has met a kidnapper, a hooligan, and a bully.”

Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang anticipated the rhetoric of US ex-Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, in a more brutal phrase. His allies treated friend or ally alike when they were out of the room; they “regard you as meat on the chopping board.”

Paradoxically, however the weak state of China prevailed over the kidnapper (Churchill, British Empire), hooligan (Stalin, USSR), and bully (Roosevelt, USA). It became the first signatory of the charter of the United Nations. Mitter writes:

“In August 1945 China was simultaneously in the strongest global position it had ever occupied and weaker than it had been for nearly a century. When the war began, it had still been subject to extraterritoriality and imperialism. Now, not only had the much-hated system of legal immunity for foreigners ended, but China was about to make its mark on the postwar world. For the first time since 1842, when the Qing empire had signed the Treaty of Nanjing, the country was fully sovereign once again. Furthermore, China was now one of the “Big Four,” one of the powers that would play a permanent and central role in the formation of the new United Nations Organization, and the only non-European one.”

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 362)

Mitter’s narrative of that paradox of strength and weakness has informed Klaus Mühlhahn’s account of the making of modern China, and plural ideas of nation, amid the disorder of 1900 to 1940. I outlined the path to war and nation in my deep dive this week: Upending the Empire and Rebuilding the Republic. In brief, it had fought with and against the empires to win the prize of modern national sovereignty. But the Chinese people paid a terrible price.

Before Yalta, Chiang Kai-shek with Roosevelt and Churchill at the Cairo Conference 1943

The Price of War

“The war with Japan,” Mitter writes, “had hollowed China out.” It approached disintegration, held together violently by armies. The country was divided politically between Nationalist, Communist and collaborators with Japan’s Pan-Asian ideas. Its strategic geography had changed with a new focus on the far southwest. It had suffered catastrophic bombing of its cities, massacres and war crimes, starvation, rapes, combat deaths, and an estimated total death in the range of 14 million to 20 million Chinese people. Up to 100 million people, one-fifth of China’s population, were displaced or forced to flee as refugeees. Its relationship with its faithless friend, the USA, had been poisoned through the person of Vinegar Bob Stilwell, who channelled all the worst characteristics of America: racial prejudice, civilizational contempt, and military arrogance. The divisions in China had brought out the worst in Chiang Kai-shek, who turned Sun Yat-sen’s dream of a generous republic into the ashes of a repressive nationalist regime. Mitter writes:

The nation had grand visions, but the reality was mass hunger, official corruption, and a brutal security state that tried in vain to suppress the aspirations of a people who had been exhorted to develop a sense of national identity and now demanded a state that matched their new sense of themselves. There was a widespread feeling within the country of change abroad.”

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 363)

Mitter narrates not only the high diplomacy and battles of China’s Second World War. He conveys the tragic, scarring experience of this war. In Part II: Disaster he describes the most disastrous events of the war, such as the bombing of Shanghai, the refugee crisis following Japan’s invasion, the Nanjing Massacre, and the destruction of dams to flood the Yellow River.

In late 1937 Chiang Kai-shek stood in defence of Shanghai. He gambled on intervention by the Western powers, but the “Western powers, despite wringing their hands about the fate of China (and the markets they wished to exploit), did almost nothing to help at this stage” (Mitter, p. 107). The Nationalists lost dreadfully, losing 187,000 troops in three months. British poets, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, were shocked at the devastation of Shanghai and the mercenary cowardice of the Western Empires, months before Munich 1938. Zhou Fohai, who would later collaborate with Japan, saw a bitter lesson. He wrote “Our fate has been decided. Where will our burial places be?”

After the rapid Japanese capture of cities across China, including in the north Beiping and Tianjin, a major refugee crisis emerged. Millions fled, including in central China along the Yangtze River to the refuges of Chongqing and Wuhan. Mitter shares personal testimonies of the refugees including the later recollection of one refugee that the escape of so many to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist base in Chongqing was like a Chinese Dunkirk. Mitter also compares this flight of Chiang Kai-shek’s loyalists to the Long March, the legendary retreat of Communist forces from Chiang’s nationalist forces; and so shows that in the memory of war all heroes are never equal.

Mitter also highlights how China’s path to war had created a bitter, violent society that was unforgiving towards the hard choices that people made to survive the war, which sometimes meant collaborating with the occupiers. As discussed in this week’s deep dive, the decades before the Second World War saw China turn its back on a pluralist political culture and become polarized, confrontational, and militarised. “The culture of constant warfare,” Mitter wrote, “had led to a deep and pervasive violence permeating Chinese society.” Civilians joined soldiers in killing and hounding opponents, outsiders, and collaborators, known as hanjian to imply they had lost the right to be Chinese. He quotes one account of roaming squads acting out retributive violence.

“One day they brought forward eight collaborators, and each collaborator was wearing a high paper hat, on which was written clearly each one’s name, personal details, and his treacherous behaviour. They were placed in a vehicle and taken through the streets, and the squad used a really big drum, beating it as they went along … The streets were full of people watching these collaborators, and all of them with one voice yelled and cursed them.”

(Du Zhongyuan quoted Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 121)

Societies that are shamed by defeat, displaced by chaos, and ravaged by war rapidly lose civility. I fear this may already be Ukraine’s fate, as I discussed in my interview with Marta Havryshko.

Mitter also discusses the atrocities and appalling mass rapes of the Nanjing Massacre, in which Japan sought to impress on China the results of resisting Japan. Mitter presents a subtle explanation of the atrocities that were not the only atrocities of the war, and not a preplanned massacre. It was driven from below by chthonic anger.

The Japanese Army was deeply angry. It had assumed that it would conquer China fast, and that the lack of resistance that it had met on earlier incursions between 1931 and 1937 would be repeated. The strength of opposition, and the length of time it took to secure Shanghai had enraged troops who were already whipped up by propaganda about the rightness of their cause, and who had themselves been brutalized by their military training in Japan.

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 142)

How many times must we learn that once the dogs of war are unleashed nobody can control events?

But Japan was not the only perpetrator of war crimes in this war. In June 1938, on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, the Nationalist forces destroyed the dams controlling the Yellow River. Their intention was to slow the advance of Japanese forces. The effect was to flood the land of their own citizens. Time magazine reported that a

“five-foot wall of water fanned out over a 500-square-mile area, spreading death. Toll from Yellow River floods is not so much from quick drowning as from gradual disease and starvation. The river’s filth settles ankle-deep on the fields, mothering germs, smothering crops. Last week, about 500,000 peasants were driven from 2,000 communities to await rescue of death on whatever dry ground they could find.”

But though the Nationalists had primed the explosives, they had not prepared an emergency response. An estimated 500,000 to 900,000 people died and close to 5 million became refugees. This act achieved little militarily, but as Mitter writes:

“In the struggle raging within the soul of the Nationalist Party, the callous, calculating streak had won, for the time being. The breaking of the dikes marked a turning point as the Nationalists committed an act whose terrible consequences they would eventually have to expiate.”

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 164)

The Personalities of War

Mitter’s story takes us through all the major events of the war from these early disasters, when China fought alone, through China’s joining a global war and a poisoned alliance after Pearl Harbour, when Britain and the USA made a late decision to fight with China.

He personalises the story through the three leaders of divided wartime China: Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Wang Jingwei. Chiang and Wang had been Guamindong leadership rivals from the right and left of the party, respectively. Wang Jingwei would make the fateful choice to lead the collaborationist government with Japan. It is a great virtue of Mitter’s book that none of these three leaders are presented as caricatures. You can understand their choices. In Wang Jingwei’s case,

“Wang’s group considered the negotiation of a just peace as the only realistic solution to the crisis of war. They were fueled by a genuine ideological enthusiasm that made them keener on a pan-Asianist future than on an alliance with Britain or America, powers whose imperialist behaviour in China hardly made them preferable to the Japanese.”

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 207)

Mitter insightfully explains the complex interplay of great states—Japan, USA, Britain and USSR—that forced the hand of the personalities who led divided China through war. He highlights the devastation, the consequences, and the contingency of the war, and how each of these leaders represented an alternative future for China, that with another roll of the dice could have defined the post-war world order. He unfreezes history and public memory of China’s Second World War in the West and in China.

“Yet one of the most important conclusions we can draw from China’s wartime history may still be unwelcome in China. And that is the contingent nature of China’s path to modernity. The three men who sought to rule China during the war—Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Wang Jingwei—each embodied a different path to the same goal: a modern, nationalist Chinese state.”

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 377)

Rana Mitter takes up the theme of how public memory in the People’s Republic of China has honoured one of those paths above the others in his work on nationalism and ‘circuits of memory,’ China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (2020). Circuits of memory describe how institutions transmit collective memories of war geographically and chronologically. As China’s role in the world has changed, as the tides of globalisation shift, China has rewired the circuits of memory of World War II and the post-war world order. Mitter notes:

Beijing now argues that China was a creator of the order that emerged in 1945, and that the threat to that order comes from the United States, not China. China is creating a circuit of memory to enhance its standing and authority domestically and internationally, as well as to compete with the long-established circuit of memory that nurtures the narrative of the United States liberating the Asia-Pacific…. As China becomes more powerful, the world will have to pay more attention to the stories that it wants to tell. Whether we realize it or not, we are all living in China’s long postwar.

(Mitter, China’s Good War, pp. 260-261)

If you do not like histories of war, then China’s Good War offers another way to rewire the circuits of memory in your perception of China’s place in the world. But I do recommend reading Rana Mitter’s compassionate, wise, balanced and insightful story of the ally the West forgot and of China’s Second World War. As he writes in his final sentence:

“And in acknowledging their suffering, their resistance, and the terrible choices they were forced to make, we in the West also do greater honor to our own collective memories and understandings of the Second World War.

(Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p. 379)

If you are looking for an audio or video introduction to the history in one hour or less, then you might want to watch Rana Mitter’s presentation at the Jaipur Literary Festival here:

He also appeared on the Rest is History podcast over two episodes with the first being available here.

Coming Up on The Burning Archive

Don’t forget: paid subscribers get full access to my Real History Guide to the Post-1945 World, as well as all the other benefits.

Coming up next Saturday I will guide you through Chinese culture after 1945 through the story of Chen Kaige’s 1993 cinematic masterpiece, Farewell My Concubine. We will also dip into China’s two Nobel Prize for Literature winners and some obscure poets.

On Monday in the Slow Read of The Books of Jacob we will be completing the Book of Sand with chapter 12, and learning about Jacob’s wife Hanah and the female divinity of the Shekhinah.

On Wednesday in the deep dive we will explore Klaus Mühlhahn’s assessment of how the Second World War made China modern.

Do also look out for my live stream on YouTube on Wednesday 11.00 am Melbourne time when I will review Trump and the USA’s domestic agenda after 100 days. American readers and viewers might be especially interested.

If you have not already done so, do also check out this week’s interview with Glenn Diesen on Peace after NATO: Glenn Diesen on Ukraine, Eurasia, Australia, and the Danger of Alliances.

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Jeff