China’s Second World War lasted from 1937 to 1945 in the form of the Sino-Japanese conflict. Millions perished on the battlefield and on the home front, many succumbing to war-related famine and disease. The themes developed in this book regarding the character of the global conflict applied with full force to China. But here, unlike in other countries, they were superimposed upon a pre-existing social revolution.
From the 1839 Opium War onwards this economically backward territory suffered encroachment by states enjoying the military advantages conferred by industrialisation. In the 19th century its vast size and location at the intersection of many different spheres of influence meant no single foreign power could claim sovereignty and so formal colonisation was limited. However, China was subject to “unequal treaties” with Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Russia and the USA granting rights to exploit China’s people and resources. Thus the country became a field for inter-imperialist rivalry.
The Chinese government’s authority was undermined, although the piecemeal character of the damage meant it did not collapse immediately. Nonetheless, long-established internal social structures were disrupted and new forces unleashed. In 1911 what little remained of Chinese imperial authority was overthrown. But the movement that toppled the last dynasty was too weak to break free of imperialism or even to hold the country together. Regional warlords quickly filled the institutional vacuum. Thereafter China was also a field for internal rivalry between those seeking to claim authority within the country.
There was only one way to overcome these twin problems. For the revolution to succeed and for China to regain independence, to defeat warlordism and to progress, the masses had to throw their weight behind the process. The Kuomintang Party (KMT) founded by Sun Yat-sen claimed it could achieve this objective. But rallying the population was by no means straightforward. Sun Yat-sen’s brief presidency ended when he was driven out of power, despite the KMT’s success in elections. The KMT then retreated to the south where it was tolerated by local warlords.
The peasantry made up the vast majority of the Chinese population. As one writer puts it, most “never moved outside their immediate home patch, and there was no education or media to spread the idea of national government.” Any party purporting to represent the entire population confronted a fundamental social and economic reality—the landlord class owned three quarters of the land and took at least half of peasant income as rent, leaving two thirds of the population living below subsistence level.1
The KMT was dominated by privileged groups and, as Isaacs points out, “the gulf which separated them from the great mass of the people was far wider and less bridgeable than the antagonism between them and the foreigners. From the foreigners they could and would try to exact concessions, to demand and secure a larger share of the spoils. But they could not hope to satisfy the masses of the people without undermining themselves… This fundamental and inescapable fact predetermined the limits to which the propertied classes of China would go”.2
These contradictions would later cripple the KMT’s resistance to Japan during the Second World War, but they were evident much earlier. The KMT initially turned to Soviet Russia, then a symbol of anti-imperialism, as a counterweight to the colonialists.3 It followed logically that the KMT and the newly formed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should cooperate locally.
Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and was replaced by the KMT’s military leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Bolstered by Russian advisers and assistance, he announced a Northern Expedition to “overthrow all warlords and wipe out reactionary power…and complete the National Revolution”.4 This would be the largest military campaign to occur between the two world wars. In 1927, as the Nationalist Army approached Shanghai, a city largely controlled by foreign “Concessions” and home to half of China’s industrial workforce,5 massive strikes erupted around the slogans “Support the Northern Expeditionary Army” and “Hail Chiang Kai-shek”.6
The authorities responded by beheading strike leaders and parading their heads on bamboo poles. The stoppages then escalated to embrace over half a million people. When, after some deliberate delay, Chiang’s army arrived he did not thank his supporters. Instead:
machine gunners…opened fire without warning. Lead spouted into the thick crowd from both sides of the street. Men, women, and children dropped screaming into the mud. The crowd broke into a mad flight. The soldiers kept firing into the backs of the fleeing demonstrators.7
The KMT had made its choice. Overcoming warlords and imperialists was secondary to exploiting and controlling the masses. With very little to offer the population, Chiang’s government became elitist and dictatorial. Between January and August 1928 at least 28,000 people were executed.8 During the Second World War Chiang claimed to support Sun Yat-sen’s three principles: national independence, democracy and rising living standards for the masses. But the last two had to wait: “When victory comes at the end of this war, we shall have fully achieved national independence, but will yet have far to go to attain our other two objectives.” In the meantime the population must “restrict consumption and intensify production”.9
The chief obstacle to the native ruling class and its dictatorial ambitions was the organised working class and its most important political party—the CCP. Chiang launched successive “extermination drives” against it. Driven from the cities, the CCP established rural “red bases”, but he smashed these too. In 1934-1935 the CCP was compelled to undertake the perilous 7,000-mile “Long March” to Yenan in the remote north west. Despite this retreat, the KMT focus on the CCP did not diminish when Japan began its conquest of China.
Japan established an important foothold in Manchuria (a region north east of the Great Wall) in 1931 and launched a major expansion southwards after 1937. Chiang did not collaborate, unlike Wang Jingwei, his rival for KMT leadership and founder of a puppet state in 1940. But he was thoroughly equivocal about inspiring resistance either by speech or action, declaring: “Japan is not qualified to be our enemy; our present enemy is the red bandits” who represented a “disease of the vital organs”.10 Chiang had a clear order of priority: “first internal pacification, then external resistance”.11 So rather than fight the 1931 incursion into Manchuria, Chiang appealed to the League of Nations, which was impotent.
Such passivity was rejected by the volunteer armies that sprang up to resist but the KMT refused them all assistance.12 When a local KMT commander fought Japan’s attack on Shanghai in 1932, Chiang put on a belated show of opposition but quickly sought a truce. Demands for resistance from a “National Salvation Movement” were ignored13 and by 1935 Chiang was offering a “fundamental readjustment” of Sino-Japanese relations through direct talks with Tokyo.14 During the “Xi’an Incident” in December 1936 he was kidnapped by the former warlord of Manchuria. Chiang was only released after agreeing to a second united front with the Communists to resist Japan.
Chiang’s commitment to this should have been reinforced when fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937 unleashed a full-scale Japanese offensive. But Chiang soon reverted to type, adopting a policy of “trading space for time”.15 While claiming all the while to be fighting for the nation his forces would consistently “fall back into the interior”. As a consequence the Nationalist capital was moved successively further south west—from Nanjing to Wuhan and finally Chongqing.16
Any lingering doubts about the KMT’s attitude to joint action were dispelled in 1941. According to the terms of the united front, the Red Army was integrated into Nationalist forces under the titles of Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army. In January of that year the latter, comprising some 9,000 troops, was attacked by 80,000 of Chiang’s soldiers.
While suppressing the CCP Chiang planned to avoid any single imperialist power dominating China by exploiting their rivalries. In the early 1920s Russia was the favoured partner, until domestic working class discontent made that alliance inconvenient. After Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 Germany became “the KMT’s major supplier of military hardware and expertise”.17 When Hitler adopted Japan as his key Asian ally Chiang turned once again to Russia. Diplomatic relations, broken off in 1927, were now restored. Ironically, this led to Russian munitions being used against CCP positions.18
New avenues for Chiang to enlist foreign support appeared after Japan struck Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The US had merrily armed both China and Japan in the 1930s.19 But now, like the Russians, President Roosevelt hoped to use China to absorb Japanese aggression, leaving the US free to concentrate on Europe.20 Chiang happily received supplies and indeed regularly complained that these were insufficient. But observers eventually realised that his “principal aim was to acquire [US] military equipment and weapons for a post-war conflict with the Chinese Communists”.21
This suspicion was confirmed by Chiang’s day-to-day policies. Whenever Stilwell, the US general assigned to the Nationalists, urged the army towards vigorous action against the Japanese he was blocked. A frustrated President Roosevelt wrote to Chiang: “I have urged time and again in recent months that you take drastic action to resist the disaster which has been moving closer to China and to you.” He demanded “immediate action” including granting Stilwell “unrestricted command of all your forces”.22 But Chiang was immovable and on his insistence Stilwell was recalled.23
In late 1944, when the Japanese were making major advances during Operation Ichigo, Stilwell’s replacement told Chiang: “It is considered essential that all available Chinese troops be organised immediately”.24 This would have meant utilising Chinese Communist troops alongside Nationalist ones; the idea was rejected outright. Washington even considered assassinating Chiang more than once but held back as there was no obvious replacement.
Since the army’s role was to suppress the Chinese population rather than combat foreign aggressors, it had to be run on strictly authoritarian lines as an obedient tool of the authorities. Officers embezzled soldiers’ pay and, as Chiang admitted, indulged in gambling, smuggling and opium trading. Disease, starvation and desertion destroyed entire units and when someone died:
his death is not reported, he continues to be a source of income, increased by the fact that he has ceased to consume. His rice and his pay become a long lasting token of memory in the pocket of his commanding officer.25
While the rich avoided the draft, conscripted soldiers were tied together and force-marched hundreds of miles, many dying in the process. As one US commander wrote, military service “comes to the Chinese peasant like famine and flood, only more regularly”.26
Even if the will to resist Japan had been strong, not without reason did Chiang conclude that although 3 million Nationalist troops confronted 680,000 Japanese “if we merely compare the military strength of China and Japan, we are certainly inferior”.27 This judgement conveniently provided an alibi for inaction and a pretext for demanding Allied aid against the Axis. The only alternative would have been to turn to the masses, as US journalist Edgar Snow observed at the time:
It was clear that the Chinese command could not hope to outmatch Japan in any supreme struggle of arms for vital points and lines. Somewhere it had to find a strategic asset to reinforce the main effort of the regular troops. This asset could only lie…among the millions of people…28
But after repressing its own people the Nationalist Army could not engender enthusiasm. To ordinary citizens it appeared as a parasitic body feeding off them. This was literally the case. A US journalist described attending sumptuous banquets provided by Nationalist generals:
while peasants were scraping the fields…for tops and wild grass to stuff into their griping stomachs. But I was more than ashamed—I was overcome with a feeling of loathing when I learned that these same generals and the KMT officials were buying up land from starving farmers for arrears in taxes…29
Summing up the situation in Nationalist China during 1943, Fenby writes: “Corruption and speculation soared… Across the Nationalist areas, a quarter of the inhabitants were estimated to be refugees or homeless. Drought hit the South, killing more than a million people; yet troops sold food to the Japanese as starving people perished around them”.30
In places like France, Italy and Greece Allied governments harnessed mass resistance movements during the Second World War, even if their motivation was cynical self-interest. Although the former were fighting for imperialist hegemony and the latter for freedom and democracy, each side shared a common enemy in the Axis. It was only at the end of the war that these partnerships of convenience finally fell apart. The KMT did not get that far.
The Nationalist leadership may have been unwilling to mobilise wartime resistance and by 1944 tens of millions were subject to Japan’s rule. Its most notorious atrocity was the “rape of Nanjing” in 1937 during which 200,000 men were killed and some 20,000 women were raped.31 Rape was a policy systematically used by the invader.32 In Communist-controlled areas Japanese general Okamura Yasuki introduced a policy called the “three alls”—“kill all, burn all, loot all”.33 Tokyo also promoted large-scale colonial settlement policies and enforced labour conscription.34 By 1945 tens of millions of Chinese soldiers and civilians were dead compared to 400,000 Japanese troops.
This was the context in which the CCP was able to rise from near annihilation to undisputed ruler of all mainland China in 1949 by espousing the people’s war. Mao Tse-tung, the CCP leader, explained:
two lines have co-existed in China for a long time: the Kuomintang government’s line of oppressing the Chinese people and carrying on a passive resistance, and the Chinese people’s line of becoming awakened and united to wage a people’s war.35
The CCP’s path to that war was convoluted and shaped by its relationship with Russia and its social position within Chinese society.
In the mid-1920s the needs of Russia’s rising state capitalist ruling class were displacing the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Having suffered defeat by Japan in 1904, Moscow’s priority was that Japanese forces be drawn away southwards.36 This meant strengthening links with Nationalist China. The CCP and its working class supporters were ordered to submerge themselves into the KMT. This contributed directly to the massacre of workers by Chiang’s forces in Shanghai in April 1927. Afterwards Comintern policy was reversed and the CCP was encouraged to achieve “the immediate establishment of soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers”.37
So in September Mao led the “Autumn Harvest” uprising in Hunan province, in south-central China. Its failure saw CCP membership there plummet from 20,000 to 5,000.38 A few months later he wrote how in many areas the CCP “is entirely a peasant party”.39 Together the rightward policy of liquidating the CCP into the KMT and its ultra-left opposite seriously damaged the link between the CCP and the Chinese working class. In 1926 two thirds of Communists had been workers. By September 1930 the figure was 1.6 percent.40
Having lost their urban base and faced with Chiang’s extermination campaigns, the Communists channelled their efforts into a rural civil war. The intention was that the Red Army would create “red bases” free from Nationalist control and these would be sustained by a local peasantry grateful for the land reforms delivered. But the KMT could draw on much larger resources and outnumbered the Red Army by ten to one.41 After the successive Nationalist offensives the CCP’s bases had been reduced to just 2.5 percent of the Chinese population.42 Survival, for the time being at least, depended on the desperate retreat to Yenan, an area described by the Communist military commander Chu Teh as “the most backward economically in the whole country”.43 It was precisely its remoteness from centres of economic life (and opportunities for exploitation) that meant the Nationalists lacked a local presence and so were too weak to deliver the death blow.
It is important to note that, notwithstanding professions of loyalty to Russia, the CCP did not always slavishly follow Soviet demands. This became apparent in the mid-1930s when the Comintern abandoned its ultra-left position and adopted the “popular front” tactic, which meant renewed collaboration with the KMT. If the CCP had uncritically accepted that it would have meant subordination to Chiang (and his passivity towards Tokyo) at a time when the CCP’s very survival depended on fighting him.
Therefore Mao’s version of the united front was made dependent on signs of real national resistance coming from the KMT. A frustrated Comintern official assigned to the CCP wrote:
In 1935 the CCP was pursuing two independent and contradictory lines. One of them, favouring continued civil war, was directed by Mao Tse-tung and approved by the Central Committee and Politburo members in the Red Army. The other…strove for a national united front against Japan…44
Such relative independence from imperialism (in this case Russian) was an important factor in making the Chinese people’s war possible.
The CCP’s removal from the cities and direct physical confrontation with the state changed it from being a conventional political organisation. While retaining the ideological features of a party, it acquired the characteristics of a military formation. This inevitably affected the people’s war. This term says little about internal dynamics. “People” are a heterogeneous group, yet warfare, even of the populist kind, requires a level of definite, organised leadership. Whether decisions are shaped and controlled from below or determined by those acting “on behalf of” the people is an important consideration. In the case of China, it was very much the latter. There were social and organisational reasons for this.
Workers have the greatest potential for collaborative, democratic, action because production brings them together in comparatively large units. Individual family production is the norm for peasants. Agriculture is geographically dispersed, reinforcing obstacles to sustained collective control and representative decision-making. Mao hinted at this in 1928 when he complained that: “Once the land has been divided up, they have all gone to till it”.45 Although often called a peasant revolutionary, Mao was therefore dismissive of the ability of the peasantry to run affairs, stating that: “given the various kinds of deep-rooted feudal relationships in the countryside…this will definitely require that the Communist Party and the Soviet Government” play the leading role.46
With working class presence now minimal and peasants the main source of recruitment, it is clear the rank and file could hardly control the people’s war, despite providing the vast bulk of the foot soldiers and it being in their interests.
What of the CCP leadership? Unaccountable to either the working class or the peasants, it consisted of professional revolutionaries and soldiers whom both Johnson and Selden, historians with very different views, call an “elite group”.47 In practice many were drawn from the Chinese intelligentsia and Mao himself used the term “déclassé” to describe them.48 The character of this section has been described as follows: “as the only non-specialised section of society, the intelligentsia is the obvious source of a ‘professional revolutionary elite’ which appears to represent the interests of the ‘nation’ as against conflicting sectional and class interests”.49
If the social composition of the CCP circumscribed its internal regime, the CCP’s Stalinism also left little room for rival organisations. Potential alternatives such as the various Sacrifice Leagues and Anti-Japanese Associations emerged in the 1930s but were caught between the repression of Chiang’s regime and intolerance of the Communists. They were either crushed by the former or absorbed by the latter.50 As a consequence the history of people’s war in China came to be dominated by the CCP.
In an influential book Chalmers Johnson points out that the CCP made little headway in the early 1930s because policies like eliminating the landlords and total land redistribution “failed to obtain mass support”. But after the Marco Polo Bridge incident:
war presented the peasantry with a challenge to its security of such immediacy that the peasants could not ignore it. Pre-war pressures on the peasantry—such as economic exploitation, Communist ideology, warlord wars, and natural calamities—had never been sufficiently widespread or sufficiently intense to give rise to a peasant-based mass movement. But after July 7, 1937, the peasants spontaneously created resistance organisations in many areas of China; and they felt a heightened sensitivity to proposals for defensive organisation throughout the entire occupied area. People’s war had “a new kind of political appeal—namely, the defence of the fatherland”.51
Selden, who is more sympathetic to Maoism, argues that while Johnson:
focuses correctly on relationship between the Communists and peasants as the critical factor in people’s war, in attempting to define that bond exclusively in terms of nationalism, however, it ignores central features of the wartime resistance movement… [Patriotic] appeals were effective in securing active peasant support only when linked to a program focused on rural problems… In the resistance war a peasant revolution was transformed into a national revolution, and a people’s war was directed simultaneously against Japanese imperialism and the root problems of rural society.52
The blend of social radicalism and resistance to imperialism that would make a people’s war was summed up by the banner that greeted Edgar Snow on his arrival in Communist territory during 1936:
Down with the landlords who eat our flesh!
Down with the militarists who drink our blood!
Down with the traitors who sell China to Japan!
Welcome to the United Front with all anti-Japanese armies!
Long live the Chinese Revolution!
Long live the Chinese Red Army!53
The balance between the two factors was not constant, however. For example the CCP modified its initial policy of total land redistribution during the 1930s. There were several reasons for this. One was pressure from the Comintern for compromise with the KMT. Another was that for the slogan of a united front to be credible confiscation of the land of rich or middling peasants was difficult to sustain. Therefore, by the Second World War Mao had altered policy overall:
We see to it that, on the one hand, rent and interest are reduced so that the peasants may have food to eat, and on the other hand, rent and interest at the reduced rate is paid to the landlords…we on the one hand help the workers so that they may get employment and food, and on the other pursue a policy of developing industries so that the capitalists may reap some profit. In all this our aim is to unite the people throughout the country…54
A reduction of land rents by 25 percent was a retreat from land redistribution but was still very different from the situation in Nationalist areas. The same was true of taxation. In one Communist district the share of income taken during 1943 was as follows: poor peasants 0.3 percent; middle 26.4 percent, rich 42.2 percent, landlords 222.3 percent.55 In another, peasants found to have repaid in interest more than twice their original loan had the debt cancelled and land given away as security returned.56
Surveys of CCP members showed how attractive such policies were. In one typical sample, of 16 CCP members questioned: “Most of them stated that they joined the party in order to oppose the old rulers of the village. Three or four said that they joined in the hope that the party would help reduce their tax burden… One said that the War of Resistance against Japan motivated him to join”.57 Other progressive Communist policies in the base areas included a ban on arranged marriages, and the buying or selling of women. Marriage and divorce were by consent and free.58
For many a CCP-led people’s war behind enemy lines meant practical liberation from the occupier. By 1945:
In every one of the provinces occupied by the Japanese, which covered an area three times the size of France, partisans had set up village and country councils… These behind-the-lines regimes performed nearly all the functions of normal administration. They had their own postal system and radio communications. They published their own newspapers, magazines and books. They maintained an extensive system of schools and enforced a reformed legal code recognising sex equality and adult suffrage. They regulated rents, collected taxes, controlled trade and issued currency, operated industries, maintained experimental farms [and] a grain-rationing system.59
If such radical social content explains civilian support for the people’s war, it also shows why the Red Army survived “against vastly superior military combinations [despite] lacking any industrial base, big cannon, gas, airplanes, money, and the modern techniques”.60 In the late 1930s Snow interviewed a soldier who explained:
Here we are all equals; in the White Army the soldier masses are oppressed. Here we fight for ourselves and the masses. The White [Nationalist] Army fights for the gentry and the landlords. Officers and men live the same in the Red Army. In the White Army the soldiers are treated like slaves.61
Snow himself observed that: “From the highest commander down to the rank and file these men ate and dressed alike…there was even an equal sharing of the delicacies available…”62 This lack of hierarchy translated into battle conditions with officers fighting alongside their men and suffering their fate.63
He found that “the Reds had no highly paid and squeezing officials and generals, who in other Chinese armies absorbed most of the military funds”.64 It was frequently the case that neither Red commanders nor ordinary soldiers received conventional salaries. Instead they and their families were given land to farm.65 This reflected the poverty of the Red bases but had the political advantage of reducing demands on the local population.66 To the extent that the Red Army did make local demands, the better-off were expected to contribute the greater amount in taxation.67
Compare that to the KMT army which drew on assistance from imperialist supporters. Russia, for example, sent US$250 million in 1928,68 a figure much greater than the paltry US$15,000 per month spent on its Comintern operations across the Orient.69 The USA subsidised Chiang from 1933.70 Even before Pearl Harbor it provided the “Flying Tigers” air squadron plus many millions of dollars in additional military aid.71 Consequently KMT officers lived in luxury though their troops earned very little at a time when inflation stood at 243 percent.72 Yet, notwithstanding the generosity of its foreign backers, Chiang’s army still took 60 percent of the Nationalist budget.
Mao claimed that “there are two totally different states in the territory of China. One is the so-called Republic of China, which is a tool of imperialism… The other is the Chinese Soviet republic, the state of the broad masses of exploited and oppressed workers, peasants, soldiers and toilers”.73
It would be a mistake to idealise the role of the CCP, however. The Communists were ideologically tied to Stalinism (if strategically wary of Russian foreign policy demands) and were ready to accept aid from imperialism if it was on offer. In late 1944 and early 1945 there were serious negotiations between the CCP and the USA.74 A recent account suggests that “the picture of the ‘revolutionary holy land’” given by Snow and others was “too rosy…the view from the archives reveals a greater importance for local military superiority, a far greater role for coercion, and a smaller role for popular participation”.75
There are, for example, serious question marks about how genuine the 1940 “New Democracy” policy76 really was as there was only one party inside the Red bases. The so-called “three thirds” system of that year assigned just one third of official positions to CCP members but was largely a sham.77 Although the CCP provided a channel for a popular movement against foreign occupation and domestic exploitation, the broad masses did not and could not control it.
The move to united front propaganda and moderation of land policy also led to the CCP taking a more conservative attitude towards women than previously. By 1942 “the CCP abandoned any attempt to mobilise women behind appeals to emancipation and gender equality”.78 Women’s economic participation was encouraged but political involvement was discouraged. Nevertheless, the people’s war had a dynamic of its own so that over the course of the conflict:
women [were] mobilised by the climate of social change in which they lived. This was a climate for which the CCP was partly—particularly through its call for gender equality and women’s emancipation at the start of the war—but only partly, responsible.79
Criticisms need to be seen in the context of the situation of the KMT and Japanese occupation and, while recognising the limitations, the achievements of the people’s war under CCP leadership should not be underestimated. Stalinism in Russia reflected a new exploiting class but in Yenan there was little surplus available and survival depended on Spartan equality and strong ideological commitment.
People’s war and inter-imperialist war employed contrasting strategies. Chiang prioritised defeating the Red Army over fighting the invader but after 1937 he had no choice but to mount resistance. Tokyo’s highly efficient conventional army had limited numbers of personnel so it directed its chief blows against the Nationalist government, hoping to rapidly annihilate it. There were therefore some major set-piece battles such as the struggle over Wuhan (June to October 1938) during which a million Chinese soldiers were wounded or died.80
Chiang’s troops were successful on occasion. Victory in 1938 in the Battle of Taierzhuang, “the Chinese Stalingrad”,81 destroyed the myth of Tokyo’s invincibility. To the extent that the Nationalist government survived, “trading space for time” did not fail entirely. But it was costly and inefficient and did not take into consideration the consequences for civilians. For example, in 1938 dykes on the Yellow River were breached to create a temporary watery barrier to Japanese troops of up to 20 miles wide. But 6 million people were displaced and an estimated 800,000 died.82
The alternative was to employ guerrilla tactics. A commentator wrote in 1940 that “the question on the Chinese side can be reduced to this: How effectively can all of China’s military forces employ the method of fighting used by the Chinese Communists between 1930 and 1936?”83 Such methods required popular backing, to feed and hide partisans after hit and run operations and provide enthusiastic fighters capable of local initiative rather than depending on orders from a hierarchy, as well as belief in a cause rather than obedience under the whip. Such attributes were entirely lacking on the Nationalist side and cursory attempts at partisan warfare were abandoned.84
For the CCP such methods came naturally85 and were indeed a necessity. Firstly, they lacked the arms to fight prolonged conventional battles. Their own weapons production was minimal so arms had to be seized from the enemy. During the civil war period, for example, 80 percent of guns and 70 percent of ammunition were taken from the KMT86 and Japanese supplies played the same role later.87 It was not sheer bravado for Mao to ask: “Should we fear…the fact that [the enemy] has weapons? We can find a way to seize his weapons”.88 Secondly, the CCP’s Red bases were behind Japanese lines. Once again the Red Army was surrounded by an enemy that was far superior in firepower and guerrilla tactics were again applicable. The situation was summed up by this slogan: “The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue”.89
Even so, conditions were difficult. In addition to the “three alls”, the Japanese adopted the KMT tactic of installing troops into a string of blockhouses at regular intervals across the countryside. This was designed to intimidate the population and smash resistance. At the lowest point the population of the Red bases fell from 44 to 25 million and troop numbers declined by a quarter.90 Yet the people’s war proved resilient. A study of one CCP-controlled area shows how hatred of occupation and privileged Chinese elements was a factor:
Villages during the war were like small boats drifting on a vast ocean, tossed about and threatened with being swallowed by mounting waves. The villages in Licheng county during the war suffered tremendously from the repeated mopping-up operations of the Japanese army. Villagers had their houses burned, were deprived of their domestic animals, and lost family members. In order to resist the Japanese forces, the leaders of the villages organised guerrilla corps. Villagers were held responsible for providing guerrilla soldiers with food. Given the Communist Party of China’s policy of making the “distribution of burdens more reasonable and equitable”, better-off families must have been forced to take on heavier burdens in providing food for the guerrillas. Some of the well-off families who were displeased with such an arrangement sometimes opted to defend the village by collaborating with the Japanese Army but ended up being executed as “collaborators”.91
Partisan warfare effaces the division between soldiers and civilians. In Red areas large numbers were involved in bodies such as the “Youth National Salvation Association”, “Women’s Association” and “Peasants’ Association”.92 Snow estimates that in 1943 the Red Army was backed by a militia of 7 million with another 12 million in anti-Japanese associations.93 Liu Shao-ch’i, an army political commissar during the war, wrote: “Who will fight Japan? Too many think it should be done by specialists, summed up as ‘Let the Eighth Army do it.’ Wrong. The army must indeed fight the enemy, but the people—every single Chinese citizen—also ought to be armed and ought to fight the enemy”.94
Mao’s partisan strategy generally involved avoidance of frontal attacks. This has led some to suggest he was no more committed to fighting Japan than Chiang, both leaders being intent on marshalling resources to fight each other after the war. A Comintern representative within Red territory itself made this criticism,95 and the Nationalist press claimed the Red Army devoted twice as much effort to the civil war as Japan: “the ‘move and hit’ style of Communist guerrillas, much lauded by Mao, was in fact mostly moving, and very little hitting”.96 Perhaps such accusations spurred the Eighth Route Army to launch the “Hundred Regiments” anti-Japanese offensive in 1940. It proved costly and led directly to Okamura’s “three alls” policy.
However, a simplistic comparison of Communist and Nationalist contributions in the fight against Japan is unfounded. Chiang had Allied backing, a large-scale state and over 4 million troops. The Communists began with around 50,000 soldiers, though this had grown to 500,000 by the end.97 Another way of considering the issue is to observe that, excluding Manchuria, half of the Japanese army was involved in fighting the Chongqing government while the other half (with puppet troops) spent their time confronting the Communist threat behind its lines.98
Ultimately neither the Nationalist nor Communist war strategies succeeded. By 1944 Japan was close to victory in China. It was the combined pressure of US bombing (including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945) and the Russian invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (on 9 August 1945) that led to the formal ending of war on “Victory over Japan” Day (V-J Day) on 14 August 1945.
In 1937 China prefigured the Second World War in the way it interwove massive domestic social struggles and inter-imperialist war. It continued to reflect these characteristics even after peace was concluded. It was at that moment that the question of what the fighting had been for arose. Would the end of occupation bring improvements for ordinary people or just the victory of one imperialist gang over another? The answer to that question would have far-reaching consequences. Fenby describes what the return of Nationalist government meant: “Peasants who had taken part in [Communist] land reform were publicly executed. Farmers who had campaigned for rent reductions were buried alive, sometimes together with their families”.99
The key post-war events took place in the north east province of Manchuria: “Nearly one sixth the size of the United States, with a population of about 45,000,000, Manchuria in 1945 was the richest single region of East Asia in natural resources, developed and potential power sources, industry, transport facilities, and agricultural production”.100 For this reason the Nationalist government’s slogan was: “China will survive or perish with the Northeast”,101 believing its fate depended on preventing a Communist takeover there.
A simple chronology demonstrates how quickly imperialism showed its hand. Even before V-J Day the former enemies—Russia, the USA and Japan—came together behind Chiang Kai-shek. Having “traded space for time”, the KMT government’s writ only ran in the south west. So, on 10 August 1945 Washington pledged to help the Nationalists retake the north: in addition to 60,000 US troops already deployed south of the Great Wall, 53,000 Marines and half a million Nationalist soldiers were to be shipped or flown into Manchuria.102 The same day Stalin warned the Nationalist foreign minister that “the Chinese Communists would get into Manchuria first”103 unless the Soviet Union also played its part in preventing that eventuality. Moscow therefore approved a treaty granting Chiang “full authority” as soon as military operations were concluded.104 The following day Chiang incorporated the 1 million or so puppet troops who had been collaborating with Tokyo into his own forces. He asserted they had been an “underground army” for the KMT all along.105
Only Japan was missing here. But rumours abounded of a secret agreement between the Nationalists and the Japanese military106 and three days after Tokyo’s surrender General MacArthur’s Order Number One ordered Japan to “hold intact and in good condition” all its conquests “pending further instructions”.107 These came from Chiang who openly negotiated with General Okamura, notorious author of Japan’s “three alls” policy and forced prostitution. The latter formally agreed to “surrender unconditionally…to the forces specified by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, all arms, ammunition, equipment, supplies, records, information and other assets of any kind belonging to the Japanese forces”.108 Privately he promised to “assist the National Government” and “resolutely chastise” the Communists.109 As a consequence:
for the better part of a year after the war was over, much of the Japanese Army remained in China, most of it fully armed and frequently still in charge of rail zones, cities, and even many towns in North China…there were in eastern and north western Manchuria eighty thousand Japanese troops as late as 30 January, 1947, completely equipped and operating under the command of Chiang Kai-shek’s headquarters. Such troops were being issued rations that were at least twice as generous as those given to Nationalist soldiers…some Japanese comprised a part of Chiang’s officer corps. Chiang’s efforts to make use of the defeated Japanese were dwarfed, however, by those of his ally, the warlord Yen Hsi-shan. Yen not only employed Japanese officers but also was determined to use the entire Japanese army stationed in his north western province of Shansi against the Communists, which he succeeded in doing for nearly four years after the war’s end.110
Fighting between Japanese and Reds continued. In Shanghai Japanese bayonets helped smash a strike of 50,000 workers in support of the Communists. When Okamura was at last convicted of being a war criminal, the Nationalist government stepped in not only to protect him from punishment but to employ him as an adviser!111
There were Japanese soldiers fighting on the side of the Communists but they had defected to join the fight against imperialism, seeing their real enemies as:
Japanese officers and other members of Japan’s ruling class… After all, the vast majority of them came from the farming and labouring classes in Japan, with a small admixture of students and merchants. Few had been treated with respect in Japan and, especially, in the Japanese Army, where there existed a rigid hierarchy in which inferiors, meaning those who came from the poor and had little education, were often treated with considerable brutality by their superiors. Inevitably, such men were profoundly impressed by the egalitarianism that was perhaps the most important characteristic of the Chinese Communist armies.112
The unholy coalition of imperialist powers was short-lived as hostile brothers are bound to fall out. As long as Stalin believed the invasion of Manchuria by 630,000 of his troops guaranteed Russia strong influence, and aided the prospect of occupying Japan, the Nationalists were courted as allies. He therefore committed Russian forces to leaving Manchuria within three months.113 But the advantages conferred on the US by the atom bomb and the swift peace Tokyo concluded with the US alone dashed these prospects.
Now that the KMT would be a client state of the US, Russian withdrawal was delayed so that, under the pretext that nine days of conflict with Japan justified seizure of “war booty”, Manchuria could be plundered on an astonishing scale. A contemporary report said:
In addition to taking stockpiles and certain complete industrial installations, the Soviets took by far the larger part of all functioning power generating and transforming equipment, electric motors, experimental plants, laboratories and hospitals. In machine tools, they took only the newest and best, leaving antiquated tools behind… By the end Manchuria’s electric power capacity was reduced by 71 percent, its metalworking by 80 percent and textiles by 75 percent.114
The new Russian policy was one of malevolent neutrality. Treaty obligations meant they handed Manchuria’s cities to Chiang115 but with the Cold War developing they did not want the Nationalists to be too strong. Therefore Moscow did not oppose the advance of Communist troops in the countryside and left behind captured Japanese stockpiles amounting to 700,000 rifles, 14,000 machine guns and hundreds of vehicles including tanks.116
There has been debate about how calculated an act this was. Some see it as a Communist conspiracy hatched by Stalin and Mao. But according to one historian, although the Russians did not prevent CCP infiltration “it is by no means certain that they could have done so even if they had wanted to, for the guerrillas were innumerable, omnipresent and indistinguishable from the peasantry”.117 Whatever the reason, the Manchurian windfall was a godsend to the CCP, which had popular support but always lacked the military hardware to make this effective.
Between 1946 and 1949 Mao’s forces went on to defeat Chiang’s Nationalist government and his US backers in what Schramm describes as “unquestionably one of the most striking examples in history of the victory of a smaller but dedicated and well-organised force enjoying popular support over a larger but unpopular force with poor morale and incompetent leadership”.118 The Second World War with its combination of inter-imperialist rivalries and struggles against oppression and exploitation made a huge contribution to that outcome.
The Second World War encompassed two overlapping processes that exist within capitalist society at all times—the competitive struggle between the capitalists themselves and class/social struggles between the capitalists and other sections of society. The usual sequence of events between 1939 and 1945 was that the struggle between capitalists (imperialist war) opened the way for powerful movements from below to develop. China provides an interesting variation to this. A prolonged revolutionary process had begun before the Second World War and the imperialist Sino-Japanese War was overlaid upon it.
A Marxist analysis of the Chinese Revolution needs to take account of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The argument is that the world progression of capitalism generates forces within economically backward countries which drive them to develop this social system domestically. To do so they need to break through limits imposed by archaic social and state structures.
Initially this led to bourgeois revolutions such as occurred in England in the 1640s and in France starting in 1789. Here, as capitalists were a relatively small minority in society, their political representatives (like Cromwell and Robespierre) had to mobilise the masses to overcome the feudal state. The New Model Army and the London mob, Jacobinism and the Parisian sans-culottes tore down the old regimes and established capitalist state power.
However, even in these early revolutions reliance on the activity of lower sections was potentially risky as they could begin to impose their own needs. In England egalitarian currents like the Levellers and Diggers emerged. In France the enragés stepped forward on numerous occasions to provoke radical changes threatening capitalist interests. Once state power was secured for capitalism, such popular movements were cut down. England’s monarchy was restored (though constitutionally hedged in). In France, Robespierre and the Jacobin leadership were executed in the so-called Thermidorian Reaction.
With the passage of time and the development of industry the gulf between rich and poor grew greater and the working class became more organised and conscious of its own interests. During the European revolutions of 1848, Marx already noticed that the developing German bourgeoisie feared those below it more than the feudal state:
at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw…pitted against itself the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat… Unlike the French bourgeoisie of 1789…it was inclined to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representatives of the old society…119
Conversely, there could be moments when bourgeois revolutionary demands, such as national independence, were championed by other classes. As Trotsky wrote of the 1871 Paris Commune:
The Parisian workers took power…because they were compelled to do so by the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of national defence… It was only possible to defend Paris and the rest of France by arming the proletariat. But the revolutionary proletariat was a threat to the bourgeoisie, and an armed proletariat was an armed threat.120
At the beginning of the 20th century Trotsky related this understanding to the Russian situation to develop a fully rounded theory of permanent revolution whose validity was confirmed in 1917. The Russian bourgeoisie would not initiate or even support a bourgeois revolution and in their absence another section would take the lead. For reasons discussed above the peasantry could not fulfil this role but the working class could. That class, in accomplishing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, would also impose its own demands and thus the bourgeois revolution would grow into socialist revolution—and so be “permanent”. This is what happened in Russia in 1917.
At its start the Chinese Revolution seemed to fit Russia’s pattern. Its bourgeoisie faced the obstacle of foreign imperialism and backward internal social relations such as warlordism. Like its Russian equivalent, fear of mobilising the masses outweighed the determination to overcome these barriers. This was graphically demonstrated in the KMT’s massacre of Shanghai’s workers in 1927. At that point China diverged from Russia’s pattern. Such was the scale of repression that the workers’ ability to champion the revolution was destroyed in the long term. Its leadership, the CCP, not only lost its link with the proletariat but was ideologically distorted by Stalinism.
The CCP leadership was, in class terms, independent of both workers and peasants. In future this grouping would form the embryo of a new ruling class set on achieving the tasks of the bourgeois revolution – independence, national unity and economic growth—using the tools of state power. For this reason Cliff described the rise of Mao to power as an example of “deflected permanent revolution” because it was not the working class but “the intelligentsia as the leader and unifier of the nation, and above all as manipulator of the masses” who shaped the process.121
During the Sino-Japanese War in poverty-stricken Yenan the CCP leadership had little property to protect from those beneath it and therefore lacked the constraints on mass mobilisation experienced by bourgeoisies ever since 1848. However, the result was ambiguous. This was not socialism but it cleared away much of the “muck of ages”122 and at the same time established a new, state capitalist ruling class.
This experience illuminates the forces at work during the Second World War in an unusual way, because it demonstrates the relevance of the theory of permanemt revolution to the war generally.
1. The theory of permanent revolution is usually applied when Third World countries struggle against imperialist oppression and various social forces are unleashed in the process. The onslaught of Germany in Europe aimed to shackle weaker countries to (Axis) imperialism, though in this case the intended victims were developed capitalist formations. So despite the massive economic contrast between China and France, for example, the issue of what forces might be unleashed at a national level to counter the imperialist threat was posed in a similar way.
2. Each bourgeoisie had to consider the degree to which it was prepared to work with, or indeed encourage, mass mobilisation from below in order to ward off the imperialist threat to its future, or collaborate with the enemy to avoid a domestic threat.
3. Movements from below varied from place to place. They were shaped by the character of the leadership and this determined the degree to which they merely mirrored the bourgeois revolutionary demand of national sovereignty or went beyond this to begin to express their own independent interests (and threaten “permanent revolution”). However, the dominance of Stalinism meant that nowhere did the working class step forward as an independent force capable of completing the process in the direction of socialism.
It would be going too far to suggest that all the people’s war and resistance movements of the Second World War were examples of “deflected permanent revolution”; but it is clear that the basic elements operating in China were not unrelated to global currents. There was (excuse the pun), no Chinese wall between events in undeveloped countries and the war as a whole.
1 J Fenby, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (Free Press, New York, 2003), p106.
2 H Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1961), p32.
3 R C North, Moscow and Chinese Communists (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1953), p51.
4 Quoted in Fenby, 2003, p114.
5 E Snow, Red Star over China (Harmondsworth 1972), p456.
6 Isaacs, 1961, p133.
7 Isaacs, 1961, p179.
8 Isaacs, 1961, p295.
9 The Voice of China. Speeches of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek (London, 1943), pp 20, 50, 25.
10 Quoted in So Wai Chor, “The Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy, 1932-1937: The Roles of Chiang Kai-Shek and Wang Jingwei”, Modern China, vol 28, no 2 (April 2002), p231. See also M Schaller, The US Crusade in China 1938-1945 (New York, 1979), p42, who quotes Chiang in similar terms: “It is not the Japanese army that we fear, because our army is able to deal with it, but the defiant Communists.”
11 So Wai Chor, 2002, p213. See also Hu Pu-yu, A Brief History of Sino-Japanese War (Taipei, 1974), p7.
12 A Coogan, “The Volunteer Armies of North East China”, History Today, vol 43, no 7, 1992, p40.
13 See P M Coble, “Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese Movement in China: Zou Tao-fen and the National Salvation Association, 1931-1937”, Journal of Asian Studies, vol 44, no 2, February 1985, pp293-310.
14 So Wai Chor, 2002, p240.
15 Quoted in Fenby, 2003, p441; Isaacs, 1961, p298.
16 Hu Pu-yu, A Brief History of Sino-Japanese War (Taipei, 1974), p7.
17 J W Garver, “Chiang Kai-shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-Japanese War”, in Political Science Quarterly, vol 102, no 2 (summer, 1987), p32, and E Snow, Scorched Earth (Gollancz, London 1941), Part 1, p104.
18 E Snow, 1972, p473.
19 E Snow, 1941, Part 1, p105.
20 J R Miller, “The Chiang-Stilwell Conflict, 1942-1944”, Military Affairs, vol 43, no 2 (April 1979), p59.
21 R Spector, “The Sino-Japanese War in the Context of World History”, M Peattie, E Drea and H van de Ven (eds), The Battle for China (Stanford 2011), p473.
22 Quoted Fenby, 2003, p425.
23 See Miller, April 1979.
24 Quoted in P Chen-Main Wang, “Revisiting US-China Wartime Relations: A Study of Wedemeyer’s China Mission”, Journal of Contemporary China (2009), 18 (59), p242.
25 M Schaller, The US Crusade in China 1938-1945 (New York, 1979), p105.
26 Quoted in Schaller, 1979, p105; Spector, 2011, p475.
27 Chang Jui-te, “The Nationalist Army on the Eve of War” in M Peattie, E Drea and H van de Ven (eds), The Battle for China (Stanford, 2011), p104.
28 Snow, 1941, Part 1, p48.
29 M Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1971), p154.
30 Fenby, 2003, pp408-409.
31 See I Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War ii, Penguin USA, 1998 (Paper).
32 E Friedman et al, Chinese Village, Socialist State (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991), p36.
33 C A Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1962), p56.
34 Chalmers Johnson, for example, notes that in 1944 there were ten times as many Japanese nationals living in China as in 1937 (Johnson, 1962, p44).
35 Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, vol 4 (London, 1956), pp248-249.
36 J W Garver, “Chiang Kai-shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-Japanese War”, Political Science Quarterly, vol 102, no 2 (summer, 1987), p32. For a summary of Sino-Russian relations see Snow, 1972, p407.
37 Mao’s letter welcoming the new Comintern policy, quoted in S Schramm, Mao Tse-tung (Penguin, London, 1967), p109.
38 Schramm, 1967, p112.
39 Quoted in N Knight, “Mao Zedong and the Peasants: Class and Power in the Formation of a Revolutionary Strategy”, in China Report 2004, no 40, p63.
40 T Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm.
41 O Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932-1939 (C Hurst, London, 1982), p40.
42 Braun, 1982, p51.
43 Quoted in Cliff, 1963.
44 Braun, 1982, p134.
45 Quoted in Selden, 1971, p73.
46 N Knight, “Mao Zedong and the Peasants: Class and Power in the Formation of a Revolutionary Strategy,” in China Report 2004, no 40, p73.
47 Johnson, 1962, p157; Selden, 1971, p142.
48 Selden, 1971, p73. See also Schramm, 1967, p115.
49 T Cliff, 1963.
50 See, for example, D S Goodman, “The Licheng Rebellion of 1941: Class, Gender and Leadership in the Sino-Japanese War, Modern China, vol 23, no 2 (April 1997), pp216-245; P M Coble, “Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese Movement in China: Zou Tao-fen and the National Salvation Association, 1931-1937”, Journal of Asian Studies, vol 44, no 2, February 1985, pp293-310; and Donglan Huang, “Revolution, War, and Villages: A Case Study on Villages of Licheng County, Shanxi Province during the War of Resistance Against Japan”, Frontiers of History in China, 2011, no 6(1), p106.
51 Johnson, 1962, p2.
52 Selden, 1971, pp119-120.
53 Snow, 1972, p77.
54 Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, vol 4 (London, 1956), p25.
55 J Esherick, “Revolution in a “Feudal Fortress”, Feng Chongyi, D Goodman (eds), North China at War (Lanham, Maryland, 2000), p69.
56 Huang, 2011, p106.
57 Huang, 2011, p109. This is confirmed by another example given by Selden: “Third Township provides unique local data illustrating relationship between land revolution and political participation… The majority of the 134 who had become party members by 39 joined because they believed in the Communists’ commitment to redistribute land, improve standards of living, and abolish oppression… On one point the report is unequivocal. As late as 1939, after three years in which the united front was reiterated as a fundamental principle, only one person out of the total of 134 had joined the party primarily to resist Japan, and that was in 1937 long after Communist control and land revolution had been consolidated.” Selden, 1971, p110.
58 Snow, 1972, p261.
59 Snow, 1972, p469.
60 See Snow, 1972, p47.
61 Snow, 1972, p330.
62 Snow, 1972, p299.
63 Snow, 1972, p296.
64 Snow, 1972, p300.
65 Snow, 1972, p296.
66 Selden, 1971, p254.
67 Huang, 2011, p115.
68 Fenby, 2003, p322.
69 Snow, 1972, p410.
70 Snow, 1972, p410.
71 SeeTai-Chun Kuo, “A Strong Diplomat in a Weak Polity: T V Soong and wartime US-China relations, 1940-1943”, Journal of Contemporary China, no 18, March 2009, pp219-231.
72 This figure is for 1943 (Fenby, 2003), p408.
73 Quoted in Fenby, 2003, p199.
74 See for example, Schramm, 1967, pp210-214.
75 Esherick, 2000, p79.
76 See for example Mao, On New Democracy, in www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm
77 Selden, 1971, p135.
78 D S G Goodman, “Revolutionary Women and Women in the Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Women in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937-1945”, The China Quarterly, no 164 (December, 2000), p919.
79 Goodman, 2000, p941.
80 S MacKinnon, “The Tragedy of Wuhan, 1938”, Modern Asian Studies, vol 30, no 4 (October, 1996), p933.
81 According to Fenby, 2003, p318.
82 Fenby, 2003, p320.
83 Quoted in Snow, 1941, Part 1, pp48-49.
84 Selden, 1971, p174.
85 For a discussion of this aspect, see K Gawlikowski, “Traditional Chinese concepts of warfare and CPC theory of People’s War (1928-1949)”, 26th Conference of Chinese Studies Proceedings: Understanding Modern China, Problems and Methods (1979), pp143-169.
86 Snow, 1972, p299.
87 Johnson, 1962, p59.
88 Quoted in Schramm, 1967, p196.
89 Quoted in Schramm, 1967, p45. Snow gives a detailed discussion of partisan tactics (see Snow, 1972, p317).
90 Johnson, 1962, p58.
91 Huang, 2011, p115
92 Selden gives the following figures for 1938: Workers Organisation 45,000; Youth National Salvation Association 168,000; Women’s Association 173,000; and Peasant Association 421,000 (Selden, 1971, p142).
93 Snow, 1972, p468.
94 Quoted in Johnson, 1962, p147.
95 Braun, 1982, p49. Fenby quotes a Russian commentator who in 1943 wrote that “the Red Armies have long been abstaining from both active and passive action against the aggressors” (Fenby, 2003, p441).
96 See D M Gordon, “The China-Japan War, 1931-1945, Historiographical Essay,” The Journal of Military History, vol 70, no 1 (January, 2006), pp169-170.
97 Johnson, 1962, p72; Schramm, 1967, pp199-200. Snow quotes a Japanese source that suggested between 500,000 and 600,000 (Snow, 1972, p469).
98 Snow, 1972, p469.
99 Fenby, 2003, p461.
100 O E Clubb, “Manchuria in the Balance, 1945-1946”, Pacific Historical Review, vol 26, no 4 (November, 1957), p377.
101 Quoted in Clubb, 1957, p381.
102 Clubb, 1957, p379.
103 Schramm, 1967, p218.
104 Note accompanying the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of 14 August 1945, in American Journal of International Law, vol 40, no 2, April 1946, p59.
105 Schramm, 1967, p 218; Xiaoyuan Liu, A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire 1941–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p279.
106 D G Gillin and C Etter, “Staying On: Japanese Soldiers and Civilians in China 1945-1949”, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol 42, no 3 (May, 1983), p499.
107 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Order no. One. This was formally accepted by the Japanese on 2 September. www.taiwandocuments.org/surrender05.htm
108 Act of Surrender—China Theatre, 9 September 1945, www.taiwandocuments.org/surrender02.htm
109 Quoted in Gillin and Etter, 1983, p501.
110 Gillin and Etter, 1983, pp499-500.
111 I Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (Atlantic Books, London 2013), p193.
112 Gillin and Etter, 1983, p511.
113 American Journal of International Law, vol 40, no 2, April 1946, p53.
114 American investigation report quoted in E D Hawkins, “Manchuria’s Postwar Economy”, in Far Eastern Survey, vol 16, no 3 (12 February 1947), p35.
115 C P Fitzgerald, The Birth of Communist China (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964), p97.
116 Fenby, 1961, p306.
117 Fitzgerald, 1964, p97.
118 Schramm, 1967, p225.
119 K Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no 169, December 1848, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/12/15.htm. For a discussion of this see R Day and D Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2011).
120 L Trotsky, “Foreword to K Marx Parizhskaya Kommuna”, in R Day and D Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2011), p503.
121 T Cliff, 1963.
122 K Marx, “Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook D. Proletarians and Communism”, The German Ideology, part i, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm