Abstract
Literature on the Second World War has been on the rise over the years, and multiple aspects of the war period have been dealt with by scholars. However, the number of works focusing on the European Theatre of the War by far outnumbers those on the China Theatre. Rana Mitter points out that, in the larger narrative of the Second World War, the role of China has been largely discounted. Mitter says ‘for decades, our understanding of that global conflict has failed to give a proper account of the role of China. If China was considered at all, it was a minor player, a bit-part actor in [a] war where the United States, Soviet Union and Britain played much more significant roles’ (p. 5). In this book, Mitter not only takes a China-centric approach to the Second World War, but also looks at the Japanese occupation of China leading up to the Second World War exclusively from a Chinese perspective.
While there have been two major frameworks of studying wartime China, the ‘resistance’ vis-à-vis ‘collaboration’ approach, the book under review attempts to encompass both the conceptual structures by referring to life in wartime China as ‘the struggle for survival’ (p. iii). The theme of survival runs across the entire book—the struggle of the common people, the struggle of the Chinese leaders and, most importantly, that of the Chinese nation during the war with Japan. Continuous struggle characterised by resistance and collaboration forms the primary contention of this work. However, the book delves deeper and looks into the larger issues that led people either to resist or collaborate as a means of survival during the difficult wartime.
The book is divided in four sections namely, ‘The Path to War’, ‘Disaster’, ‘Resisting Alone’ and ‘The Poisoned Alliance’, along with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue is a graphic description of the bombing of Chongqing, the wartime capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and sets the tone of the book—the Chinese struggle for survival under Japanese occupation. The historical background leading to the war with Japan in 1937 forms the content of the first part of the book. In this part, the author outlines the development which ultimately took the ‘close as lips and teeth’ Sino-Japanese relations to the ‘path of confrontation’. However, Mitter points out that although the actual war between China and Japan began in 1937, the situation ‘had been brewing for decades’ before the total war took place in the period 1937–45 (p. 17).
The second part of the book looks at the critical initial 15 months of the war which began with the skirmish between the Japanese and the Chinese troops at Luguoqiao, popularly known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This section brings out the tension in Chiang Kai-shek’s mind as he was forced to take cognisance of the extent of danger from a full-fledged Japanese attack on the Chinese heartland. Chiang, according to Mitter, was reluctant to fight the Japanese until the Japanese came knocking at the very door of Beijing and the realisation seeped in that ‘if Chiang surrendered the city, he would cede north China for centuries and put the Nationalist heartland in great danger’ (p. 75). The author says that Chiang, faced with the ‘stark choice’ of losing North China or fighting back, chose the latter. However, the Nationalist forces, despite their strong resistance could not match the Japanese, and Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan fell one after another.
The continued Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation forms the core subject of the third part of the book. In this period, as the Chinese resisted the Japanese by employing a defensive rather than an offensive strategy, Mitter reveals that the course of the creation of a welfare state was also set into motion. Until then, the Chinese state had taken little initiative for social provisions but the war drove both the Nationalists and the Communists ‘to demonstrate that as the state demanded more of its people, so they should demand more of their government’ (p. 171). Chongqing, the new ‘beacon’ of Chinese resistance, also became the centre of the Nationalists’ attempt to create a welfare system. According to Mitter, the extent of the Nationalist Government’s relief provision system ‘was beyond anything previously seen in China’ (p. 178). Moreover, efforts were also directed towards conscripting more people into the Nationalist Army through intense propaganda measures aimed to appeal to the Chinese population but, more importantly, to seek international support in its war against the Japanese.
The Nationalist Government had realised the importance of international assistance as a major strategy in its war of resisting the Japanese. However, the international community, specifically the West, had turned a blind eye to the Nationalists’ appeal for help in its war against Japan until the Japanese directly challenged the West. The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941 brought home to the Americans the absolute necessity to check the advances of Japan by aligning with Nationalist China. The British similarly realised that the effort of Chiang Kai-shek’s government would be vital to tame the Japanese. Thus, China became one of the ‘equal’ partners in the Allied effort to ‘protect civilization in the face of Axis barbarity’ (p. 242). Mitter critically brings out the nuances of the initial relation of China with the US and Britain, and the implications these were to have on China and the world at large in the later years. The author points out that from the very beginning until the Japanese surrender in 1945, the alliance between the US, Britain and China was a ‘poisoned’ one and suffered from mutual distrust, deep-rooted biases and a clash of interests. The Allied strategy was directed more ‘to keep China in the war’ and to hold the Japanese army in China, thereby keeping the Pacific Theatre safe (p. 244).
Nevertheless, the author rightly asserts that China’s wartime collaboration with the West signalled its rise as one of the key powers on the world stage, with an array of responsibilities both at the global and regional level which it enjoys till date. China’s war with Japan laid the basis for how modern China as well as its relation with the West was to evolve in the post-War phase. For Mitter, the genesis of many of the important events, both internal and external that unfolded in post-War China, had their origin in wartime China.
In its domestic affairs, the author contends that the war positively ‘transformed’ the fortunes of the CCP and laid the platform for the rise of its leader, Mao Zedong. Unlike the Communists, who did not face the full ire of the Japanese, the Nationalists had to fight on two fronts—the Japanese as well as the Communists, which ultimately led to their defeat at the hands of the latter during the Civil War; at the end Chiang Kai-shek ‘won the war, but lost his country’ (p. 7). The author also points out that the evolution of China’s international relations, for example, Sino-American relations, Sino-Japanese relations, the question of Taiwan among others could be traced to wartime China.
One of the major contributions of the book is the attempt to provide one ‘continuous’ narrative of the ‘struggle’ by intricately interweaving the perspectives of three key Chinese personalities, Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Jingwei and Mao Zedong representing the three dominant political factions in wartime China. Not only does one get a glimpse into the minds of these prominent personalities, but one also gets to understand the complexities and the ambiguities of the time, thus revealing a balanced and a more comprehensive picture of wartime politics in China. Even though Mitter attempts to provide an objective analysis of Chiang, Wang and Mao by historically contextualising their decisions and choices made during the War, the author appears to dwell more on Chiang Kai-shek’s account of wartime China than those of Wang and Mao. At times the narrative of Chiang Kai-shek becomes the dominant narrative influencing Mitter’s account of wartime China.
The historical legacy of the Japanese occupation of China looms large even today and is a major bottleneck in the normalisation of the relationship between the two Asian giants. Given the current resurgence of animosity in Sino-Japanese relations, the author also dwells on the post-War use of the war with Japan. In mainland China, with the coming of the Communists to power, there has been a tendency to project China’s war with Japan as a war primarily led by the Communists while undermining the role of the Nationalists. In the narrative of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) it was Mao Zedong and not Chiang Kai-shek who led the war against Japan to a successful conclusion. The Republic of China (ROC), on the other hand, maintains that it was the Nationalists who had led and fought the war against Japanese aggression. Park M. Coble asserts that in contemporary China, while there is unanimity on the decision to remember the war for invoking public nationalist sentiments, the debate on ‘how’ and ‘who’ to remember continues (Coble 2011). The book, by attempting to provide a more complete picture of wartime China contends that while the Communists did fight the Japanese, it was the Nationalists who had to face the maximum and direct onslaught of Japanese aggression. In this aspect, the author seems to side with the version of the latter. However, on the question of China’s role in the Second World War, the author takes a stance which is similar to that of the CPC that the world owes a debt to China for failing to acknowledge the crucial role played by China in containing the Japanese. Thus, the book is an attempt to provide an impartial and historically accurate account of wartime China by situating the actions of parties concerned in the historical context.
In this extremely well-researched work, Rana Mitter has used a plethora of primary sources, prominently Chiang Kai-shek’s diary, the diary of Zhou Fohai, one of the main associates of Wang Jingwei and many hitherto unused archival material to construct this China-centric narrative of wartime China. The list of ‘further reading’ appended at the end of the book is an additional help to scholars interested in reading more on the subject. On the whole, this is an immensely readable book which will appeal to both scholars and lay readers.