Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (75 page)

4. Chen Jian,
Mao’s China
, 32.

5. Taylor,
Generalissimo
, 327.

6. Chen Jian,
Mao’s China
, 33.

7. Taylor,
Generalissimo
, 364.

8. Odd Arne Westad,
Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950
(Stanford, CA, 2003), 89.

9. John Hunter Boyle,
China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration
(Stanford, CA, 1972), 362. Charles Musgrove, “Cheering the Traitor: The Postwar Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946,”
Twentieth-Century China
30:2 (April 2005).

10. Neil Boister and Robert Cryer, eds.,
The Tokyo International Military Tribunal: A Reappraisal
(Oxford, 2008).

11. Xu Wancheng,
Chongqing Huaxu
[
Chongqing Gossip
] (Shanghai, 1946) [hereafter CQHX].

12. CQHX (appendix), 5.

13. Ibid., 6, 8.

14. Taylor,
Generalissimo
, 378, 392.

15. Ibid., 385. Westad,
Decisive Encounters
, chapter 6.

16. Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby,
Thunder out of China
(New York, 1946), 310.

17. Graham Peck,
Two Kinds of Time
(Seattle, 2008) [originally published Boston, 1950], 690.

18. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
(New Haven, CT, 2000).

19. Chalmers Johnson,
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945
(Stanford, CA, 1962).

20. Barbara Tuchman,
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945
(New York, 1971).

21. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals,
Mao’s Last Revolution
(Cambridge, MA, 2006), 217.

22. Rana Mitter, “Old Ghosts, New Memories: Changing China’s War History in the Era of Post-Mao Politics,” in
Journal of Contemporary History
(January 2003).

23. Details of the committee’s composition and procedures can be found at
http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/meet0612.html
.

24. Ian Buruma,
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
(New York, 1994); Franziska Seraphim,
War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2006).

25. Ruan Jiaxin, “Kangzhan shiqi zhuHua Meijun bushu ji zuozhan gaikuang” [“The Situation of the Deployment and Warmaking of US Troops Stationed in China during the War of Resistance”],
KangRi zhanzheng yanjiu
3 (2007), 27. Zhao Rukun, “Erzhan jieshu qianhou Meiguo duiHua zhengce wenti zai shentao” [“A Reexamination of American Policy toward China before and after the Conclusion of World War II”],
Guangxi shifan daxue uebao: zhexue shehui kexue ban
43:6 (December 2007), 104.

26. Hongping Annie Nie, “Gaming, Nationalism, and Patriotic Education: Chinese Online Games Based on the Resistance War against Japan (1937–1945),”
Journal of Contemporary China
22:18 (May 2013).

27. Rana Mitter, “China’s ‘Good War’: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan,” in Sheila Jager and Rana Mitter, eds.,
Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post–Cold War in Asia
(Cambridge, MA, 2007).

28. “Cui Yongyuan tan Wode Kangzhan” [“Cui Yongyuan Talks about ‘My War of Resistance’”],
Nanfang Zhoumo
, October 7, 2010.

29. Hollington K. Tong,
China after Seven Years of War
(London, 1945).

Further Reading

Although China’s war with Japan has generated far less scholarship in English than the European and Pacific fronts of the Second World War, there is still a substantial body of work for those who wish to go further. This short guide to further reading is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, it provides pointers to useful books and articles in the English-language scholarship that in turn could stimulate further reading and research.

OVERALL HISTORY OF THE WAR

This book has taken a new approach by examining China’s war with Japan as one continuous narrative combining the viewpoints of the Nationalists, the Communists, and the collaborators. However, there have of course been previous very important accounts that bring together various of these elements, usually through combining edited essays by different authors. The volume by Lloyd Eastman et al.,
The Nationalist Era in China, 1927–1949
(Cambridge, 1991), has two excellent overview essays, by Lloyd Eastman on the Nationalists and Lyman van Slyke on the Communists, that cover the wartime period. (These essays are also to be found in volume 13 of
The Cambridge History of China
.) James Hsiung and Steven Levine’s volume
China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945
(Armonk, NY, 1992), contains superb essays by leading scholars on topics including China’s wartime diplomacy, its economy, and changes in its political system. Chinese politics in the period leading up to the war is dealt with in Parks M. Coble Jr.,
Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937
(Cambridge, MA, 1991). On the fate of Hong Kong, see Philip Snow,
The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation
(New Haven, 2004); for a daring episode within that story, Tim Luard,
Escape from Hong Kong: Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, 1941
(Hong Kong, 2012). There is a wealth of literature on the Japanese side of the war in China and in the Pacific more broadly. Akira Iriye,
The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific
(London, 1987), is a compelling analysis of the key factors that led to Japan’s decision for war, as well as giving a detailed account of the scholarly debates underlying this issue.

BIOGRAPHIES

For many years there were few biographies of Chiang Kai-shek. Access to new sources, in particular the Chiang Kai-shek diaries at the Hoover Institution, has enriched the fine biography by Jay Taylor,
The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China
(Cambridge, MA, 2007), which gives comprehensive coverage of Chiang’s whole life, including his period on Taiwan. An earlier biography by Jonathan Fenby,
Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost
(London, 2003), broke new ground in reassessing Chiang outside the existing Cold War templates.

Mao Zedong has been reassessed in several major biographies in recent years. All are marked by a great deal of assiduous research, but take different views on this most controversial of figures. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s
Mao: The Unknown Story
(London, 2006) provides a great deal of new detail, and assesses Mao in ultimately negative terms. Philip Short,
Mao: A Life
(London, 2001), and Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine,
Mao: The Real Story
(New York, 2012), suggest that Mao both made important contributions to the revolution and committed terrible crimes. A fine guide to the controversies over Mao is Timothy Cheek, ed.,
A Critical Introduction to Mao
(Cambridge, 2010).

It is still difficult, though no longer impossible, to discuss Wang Jingwei in China without his being dismissed as a mere traitor and therefore of no further interest. One of the earliest biographies is still among the very best and most nuanced works on Wang: John Hunter Boyle’s
China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration
(Stanford, CA, 1972). There are also useful insights in Gerald Bunker,
The Peace Conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China War, 1937–1941
(Cambridge, MA, 1972).

THE NATIONALISTS: THE POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND MILITARY HISTORY OF WARTIME

Perhaps the most significant military history of the war in recent years is Hans J. van de Ven,
War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945
(London, 2003), which draws important revisionist conclusions on a whole variety of topics from the relationship between Stilwell and Chiang to military and food security during the war, embedded in an argument that revises the view that the Nationalist war effort was unimportant and ill-managed. For details of individual campaigns, Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds.,
The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945
(Stanford, CA, 2011), is essential. These works are in some sense a response to the classic works of an earlier generation: Lloyd Eastman’s
Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949
(Stanford, CA, 1984), is condemnatory of a regime that he characterizes as already flawed and doomed to collapse, and Hsi-sheng Chi,
Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937–1945
(Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), details the way that military disaster fueled the disintegration of the government. Aaron William Moore,
Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire
(Cambridge, MA, 2013), has powerful new material from Nationalist soldiers. John Garver’s
Chinese-Soviet Relations, 1937–1945: The Diplomacy of Chinese Nationalism
(Oxford, 1988) deals ably with the diplomacy of the period between China and the USSR.

Morris Bian,
The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change
(Cambridge, MA, 2005), and Mark W. Frazier,
The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management
(Cambridge, 2002), are examples of revisionist work that attributes significant social formations in the post-1949 era to wartime changes under the Nationalists.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WEST AND CHINA

Revisionist views of the alliance between the Western powers and China during the Second World War are covered in Van de Ven,
War and Nationalism
, and Taylor,
Generalissimo
. The more long-standing view that Chiang’s regime was an unworthy ally for the West is detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945
(New York, 1971). Older works, including Herbert Feis,
The China Tangle:
The American Effort in China from Pearl Harbor to the Marshall Mission
(Princeton, NJ, 1953), also expose how raw the wounds of the experience in China were in American public life during the early Cold War. Tom Buchanan,
East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976
(Oxford, 2012), charts the mobilization of British leftist opinion in favor of the Chinese war effort; and Christopher Thorne,
Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945
(Oxford, 1978), shows how fraught relations between the US and Britain often left China caught in the middle. The Burma campaign is dealt with in brilliant, horrific detail in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper,
Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan
(London, 2004). Frank McLynn,
The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–1945
(New Haven, CT, 2011), gives compelling portraits of the Western commanders. There is a very thoughtful essay on China’s wartime relations with the wider world in chapter 7 of Odd Arne Westad’s
Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750
(London, 2012).

WAR ATROCITIES

On the Nanjing Massacre, rigorous studies have emerged in recent years that give a clear account of what the historically valid parameters of debate on these and related questions are. Among them are Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi,
The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–1938: Complicating the Picture
(Oxford, 2007); Joshua Fogel, ed.,
The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography
(Berkeley, CA, 2000); Takashi Yoshida,
The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States
(New York, 2006); and Daqing Yang, “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,”
American Historical Review
104:3 (1999). Although some of this work takes issue with it, a significant proportion of the Anglophone debate in the 2000s was stimulated by the publication of Iris Chang’s
The Rape of Nanking
(New York, 1997). Accounts of other war atrocities are to be found in Diana Lary and Stephen R. MacKinnon, eds.,
The Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China
, and James Flath and Norman Smith, eds.,
Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China
(Vancouver, 2011).

THE COMMUNISTS AND THEIR REVOLUTION

The origins of the Communist peasant revolution in wartime China have been a central theme in the study of modern Chinese political and social history for some decades. The debate was started by Chalmers Johnson’s classic
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945
(Stanford, CA, 1962), which argued for the CCP’s ability to stimulate anti-Japanese nationalism as the key factor in the rise of the Communists. This was answered by Mark Selden in
The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China
(Cambridge, MA, 1971), which argued instead for social revolution and a more self-sufficient economic model as the reasons for Mao’s success. A variety of important studies then added nuance to the debate in the following years, for example Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, eds.,
Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolutions
(Armonk, NY, 1989). The debate on the origins of the rural revolution is synthesized very effectively in Suzanne Pepper, “The Political Odyssey of an Intellectual Construct: Peasant Nationalism and the Study of China’s Revolutionary History: A Review Essay,”
Journal of Asian
Studies
63:1 (2004).