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China Anti-Japanese War
Few Chinese had any illusions about Japanese designs on China.
Hungry for raw materials and pressed by a growing population, Japan
initiated the seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 and
established ex-Qing emperor Puyi as head of the puppet regime of
Manchukuo in 1932. The loss of Manchuria, and its vast potential
for industrial development and war industries, was a blow to the
Nationalist economy. The League of Nations, established at the end
of World War I, was unable to act in the face of the Japanese
defiance. The Japanese began to push from south of the Great Wall
into northern China and into the coastal provinces. Chinese fury
against Japan was predictable, but anger was also directed against
the Guomindang government, which at the time was more preoccupied
with anti-Communist extermination campaigns than with resisting the
Japanese invaders. The importance of "internal unity before
external danger" was forcefully brought home in December 1936, when
Nationalist troops (who had been ousted from Manchuria by the
Japanese) mutinied at Xi'an. The mutineers forcibly detained Chiang
Kai-shek for several days until he agreed to cease hostilities
against the Communist forces in northwest China and to assign
Communist units combat duties in designated anti-Japanese front
areas.
The Chinese resistance stiffened after July 7, 1937, when a
clash occurred between Chinese and Japanese troops outside Beijing
(then renamed Beiping) near the Marco Polo Bridge. This skirmish
not only marked the beginning of open, though undeclared, war
between China and Japan but also hastened the formal announcement
of the second Guomindang-CCP united front against Japan. The
collaboration took place with salutary effects for the beleaguered
CCP. The distrust between the two parties, however, was scarcely
veiled. The uneasy alliance began to break down after late 1938,
despite Japan's steady territorial gains in northern China, the
coastal regions, and the rich Chang Jiang Valley in central China.
After 1940, conflicts between the Nationalists and Communists
became more frequent in the areas not under Japanese control. The
Communists expanded their influence wherever opportunities
presented themselves through mass organizations, administrative
reforms, and the land- and tax-reform measures favoring the
peasants--while the Nationalists attempted to neutralize the spread
of Communist influence.
At Yan'an and elsewhere in the "liberated areas," Mao was able
to adapt Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions. He taught party
cadres to lead the masses by living and working with them, eating
their food, and thinking their thoughts. The Red Army fostered an
image of conducting guerrilla warfare in defense of the people.
Communist troops adapted to changing wartime conditions and became
a seasoned fighting force. Mao also began preparing for the
establishment of a new China. In 1940 he outlined the program of
the Chinese Communists for an eventual seizure of power. His
teachings became the central tenets of the CCP doctrine that came
to be formalized as Mao Zedong Thought. With skillful
organizational and propaganda work, the Communists increased party
membership from 100,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945.
In 1945 China emerged from the war nominally a great military
power but actually a nation economically prostrate and on the verge
of all-out civil war. The economy deteriorated, sapped by the
military demands of foreign war and internal strife, by spiraling
inflation, and by Nationalist profiteering, speculation, and
hoarding. Starvation came in the wake of the war, and millions were
rendered homeless by floods and the unsettled conditions in many
parts of the country. The situation was further complicated by an
Allied agreement at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that
brought Soviet troops into Manchuria to hasten the termination of
war against Japan. Although the Chinese had not been present at
Yalta, they had been consulted; they had agreed to have the Soviets
enter the war in the belief that the Soviet Union would deal only
with the Nationalist government. After the war, the Soviet Union,
as part of the Yalta agreement's allowing a Soviet sphere of
influence in Manchuria, dismantled and removed more than half the
industrial equipment left there by the Japanese. The Soviet
presence in northeast China enabled the Communists to move in long
enough to arm themselves with the equipment surrendered by the
withdrawing Japanese army. The problems of rehabilitating the
formerly Japanese-occupied areas and of reconstructing the nation
from the ravages of a protracted war were staggering, to say the
least.
Data as of July 1987
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