China's war With Japan 1937-1945: the struggle for survival, by Rana Mitter, review
Julia Lovell praises a superb account of the Japanese invasion during the Second World War.
Battle for survival: a scene from 'The Flowers of War' Photo: Rex
By Julia Lovell
7:00AM BST 18 Jul 2013
China’s Second World War began in 1937: two years before Britain entered the conflict and four years before the United States joined the Allies. Ending with Japanese surrender in August 1945, the war in China left between 14 and 20 million Chinese dead, and created as many as 100 million refugees. Yet for decades, argues Rana Mitter in his superb new book, Western readers have known too little about China’s suffering.
Due in part to its depiction in recent films (such as Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War), the Japanese army’s massacre of Nanjing in 1937 has broken into our consciousness; but most of China’s eight-year struggle with Japan remains shrouded in vagueness.
Mitter’s new book will surely change this. He begins with the tumultuous backdrop to the war: dynastic China’s disintegration after the onslaught of imperialism and revolution, and Japan’s steady encroachments onto Chinese territory from the 1890s onward. When war was at last formally declared in 1937, Mitter relates, it started disastrously for China’s Nationalist state, due largely to Chinese military incompetence and Japanese technical superiority.
By October 1938, the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek had lost its political heartland and industrial base on the east coast and retreated to the ramshackle, opium-infested city of Chongqing in south-west China. In a desperate attempt to slow the Japanese advance, Chiang ordered the destruction of the Yellow River’s dykes, unleashing floods that killed at least half a million Chinese and displaced five million.
Until 1941, China resisted Japanese military offensives alone. Japanese air-raids targeted Chongqing, generating hideous casualties: in one retreat to an air-raid shelter, as many as 1,500 people suffocated or were trampled to death. Elsewhere in China, heavy grain taxes and the dislocation of war created a famine whose severity drove some to murder and cannibalism.
After Pearl Harbour dragged the United States into the conflict, China benefited from some American support, but Chiang’s relationship with his new ally proved stormy. In 1944, President Roosevelt ordered that Chiang should hand over command of all Nationalist forces to his American chief-of-staff, Joseph Stilwell. The humiliation reduced Chiang to noisy weeping.
Mitter offers a lucid and moving account of the conflict’s staggering military tragedies. But it is also a first-rate political and social history of China’s wartime years. It describes the various forces contending for China: the dysfunctional Nationalist state in Chongqing; the communists led by Mao Tse-tung in the north-west; and the collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei in the east.
His use of diaries is one of the highlights of the book, humanising a story that might otherwise be dominated by battle formations and statistics. His mining of personal accounts illuminates the terror of air-raids, the ambivalence of collaborators and the resourceful desperation of refugees. A Mrs Yang, we learn, fled east China in the winter of 1937 with “only a few essentials, including two big turnips with 200 banknotes hidden inside, and some jewellery in a hollowed-out egg”.
Mitter looks beyond the war years to explain their consequences. They bore primarily on the future of the Chinese state. Before the outbreak of war, China’s Nationalist Party had begun to construct a modernised government. By 1945, the war had fatally undermined its attempts at state-building. It also distracted Chiang from his campaigns to annihilate the communists and enabled them to expand their power base.
In the early Sixties, a Japanese delegation visited Mao in Beijing and attempted to offer an apology for atrocities committed against the Chinese in the war. Mao batted it away: the Japanese Imperial Army, he countered, “created the conditions for our victory in the war of liberation… If I ought to thank anyone, it should be the Japanese militarists.”
Mao’s state was relatively isolated from the main theatres of war. According to one estimate, around 90 per cent of the war’s military casualties fought in Chiang’s, and not Mao’s, armies.
More broadly, China’s eight years of resistance changed the course of the Second World War. By refusing to surrender, China’s armies detained at least half a million Japanese troops which could otherwise have been deployed to other territories. “A pacified China,” Mitter argues, would “have made the invasion of British India much more plausible.”
In China, the Second World War remains an open national wound, commemorated in memorials, museums, books, films and on television. Chinese demonstrators regularly take to the streets, protesting Japan’s inadequate acknowledgement of its wartime atrocities in China and its claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea. To understand East Asia’s present and future, you have to understand its experiences in the Second World War. Mitter’s elegant, rigorous and balanced account is an ideal guide to traumas that continue to cast a long shadow over the region.
Julia Lovell’s The Opium War is out in paperback
