The Rest Is History - 235. China and World War II - Part 1

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Friend of the show Rana Mitter joins Tom and Dominic this week to discuss the role of China in the Second World War. In the first of two episodes, Rana, Tom and Dominic cover the fall of the last Emperor and the establishment of a Chinese Republic in 1912, the Opium Wars, warlords, and the Kuomintang uniting China. Plus, tune in to find out why Rana argues that the Second World War actually began in 1937... *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. What is the Chinese war like? Well, at least I know it isn't like wars in history books.

You know, those lucid, tidy maps of battles one used to study at school. The flanks like neat little cubes, the pincer movements working with mathematical precision, the reinforcements never failing to arrive. It isn't like that at all. War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn and worrying about one's wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do, shouting down a dead telephone, going without sleep or sex or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.

So Tom, that was W.H. Auden, the great poet. And he was talking on the BBC in January 1939, having come back from China, about his experience of the Second World War in China, which of course had not started yet, according to the traditional chronology, because we think of World War II beginning in 1939. But it didn't, if you're in East Asia, did it? It absolutely did not. And the war between Japan and China, which breaks out in 1937. Well, or 1931. Well, we will have the chance to test that, but let's call it 1937 for now. Is it a kind of hideous prelude to the Second World War, or is it the opening stages of the Second World War? I mean, this horrendous conflict, which is so little known in the West, and yet it's so influential, not just on the course of the Second World War, but also, of course, on Chinese history right the way up to the present day, and therefore on the entire world. Yeah, on the entire world.

I mean, Tom, also, 14 million people died, colossal numbers of refugees, perhaps 80, 100 million refugees. I mean, this is not the weird thing is you and I were probably brought up to think of this as a sideshow, weren't we? You know, it was sort of in a 20 chapter book on the Second World War. There was one chapter called The War in the East. Yeah. But China is the first country to face a kind of Axis power onslaught. So there is really only one person to talk about this. And that is Rana Mitter, who regular listeners will remember from the absolute tour de force he gave on the Cultural Revolution a few months back. And he has written an extraordinary, brilliant, and I have to say, grueling book, because the subject is grueling. China's War with Japan, 1937 to 1945, The Struggle for Survival. And Rana,

welcome back. So good to have you back. And I guess that subtitle, 1937 to 1945, you're making a statement then about when the Second World War begins, or are you? I am, Tom. It's great to be back back and Dominic, great to be back as well. And I do want to make the case in the book. In fact, I think I use the sentence at the end of the first chapter when basically the first shots are fired in a little village just outside Beijing, which is still there today. It's a place called Wanping and I've been there quite a few times. It now has a big museum of the war placed right there. But the last line of the chapter is, although nobody involved knew it, the Second World War had just begun.

And I think that this is the way to think about this particular theater of war. It is, of course, as it's sometimes known, the Sino-Japanese War, a war between the Chinese and Japanese. And at the beginning, Dominic gave us some of the amazing, horrifying statistics that are involved with this bloodshed that took place over these eight years. But I think it's also important to note that we have to pull the Asian war back into the idea of the global war. And we might spend a moment or two, why don't we, just working out whether or not that idea of 1937 as a start point can be logically maintained? Because this would be my argument as to why we think this should, well, I think this should be the beginning of World War II. The war, in a sense, becomes genuinely global. In 1941, you have Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis. You have then Pearl Harbor, of course, in December. And that's when Americans in particular, hello to any of our American listeners, you know, tend to think the war becomes global because, of course, the United States becomes involved against Japan. Until that

point, there's an argument that you have basically a vicious war in Europe, which is being fought by the Nazis against other major powers, the French and the British. And of course, their empires are involved. Really, it's a continental war at its heart. But if that is the beginning of World War Two, as we tend to think of 3rd of September 1939, to put W.H. Auden back into the discussion again, in that case, why not 7th of July 1937, which is when locally garrisoned Japanese troops and local Chinese troops start firing at each other in a small incident, Sarajevo, like you might say. I don't think anyone at that point knew that they were starting a continental war. And then it blows up for reasons I suspect we'll

explore into essentially a massive titanic conflict between two nations, between China and Japan, which then gets absorbed just like the war, into a global war that ends only with ashes and destruction in 1945. So that's my case for 1937. So Rana, can we pull it right back even further? Because this is a conflict that in your book, you trace the roots of this back to the 19th century. So the shock of westernization hitting, I guess, China. Westernization hits Japan. So Japan feels it has to modernize and keep up. But China, there's a tremendous sense of fragmentation and humiliation and so on with the sort of depredations of Western colonialists.

And then there's this horrendous civil war in the sort of second half of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion, as we call it. So China, which has been, for most of human history, recorded history, this tremendous sort of hegemon, I suppose, is it fair to call it a basket case in the end of the 19th century? It's not a basket case, but it's a very troubled state indeed. I mean, Dominic, essentially, I think one way we can think about that whole sweep, perhaps from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century in East Asia is that it is a clash of two ideologies, each one of which sums up something very fundamental about each of the countries. So on the Asian mainland in China, you have the growth of one ideology, which is Chinese nationalism. China at that point is a country that in the 1830s is hit by an assault from forces that it had never really encountered before. The might of the industrialized West, you know, it's a couple of decades after the

Napoleonic Wars have ended. It's an era when industrialization has turned Britain, France, other countries towards this much stronger sense, not only of becoming industrially capable, but also building empires of their own. And they're looking south, they're looking east Opium Wars. In other words, the Western world, first the British, but then others, including the French, come along and basically force open the doors of China's Qing dynasty, the dynasty which had been on the throne since the late 17th century, 1644. Very much, as you said, a dynasty which, like Chinese dynasties before it, had seen itself as being at the heart of civilization, the heart of the world. And suddenly these foreigners, these figures from outside, come along with their big ironclad ships. Barbarians. I'm always slightly wary about the term Yi being translated as barbarians, though it's a good shorthand. It certainly involves a certain kind of amused contempt about it, but we sometimes put

our own interpretations on that. So certainly unwelcome foreigners, I would say. And essentially, the tables are turned in the late 19th century, the power of Western industrialization, and also the emergence of Christianity, of Western political thinking. And of course, I mentioned before, I mentioned again, that immensely powerful and highly desired good opium is brought into China and essentially turns the power relationship away from China towards the West. And for the next few decades, you basically get a period in which China is increasingly assaulted territorially and in terms of its own sovereignty by outside powers who either tear out physical chunks, Hong Kong being a good example of that, or else more existentially, force, for instance, the imposition of tariffs onto China that are not controlled by the Chinese

government. So essentially, foreigners are providing a customs authority that means that China doesn't get to control its own import and export tariffs. And if there are any people who have studied the Brexit debates in the contemporary era, you will perhaps hear some echoes of why they've got at least some Chinese very, very, very angry. And to move it on to the 20th century, although all of these tensions came together to see the overthrow of the last emperor, the boy emperor of China, Puyi, some people might remember from Bertolucci's movie from 30 or so years ago, five years old, kicked off the throne of China, and China became Asia's first republic in 1912. It didn't stop the problem, essentially, of China being a weak

country that had an unstable government, in which power either lay with foreign powers who essentially have these, you know, rights of conquest, or with a group of Chinese militarists, sometimes nicknamed warlords, essentially men with armies of their own at regional level who were always vying for control. And that meant that by the 1910s, 1920s, you get a lot of Chinese nationalists, young patriots, often students, who demonstrate over and over again demanding that China has to get its act together. China's elites have to get their act together.

One of the phrases that's used at the time is that China was suffering from imperialism from outside and warlordism from inside. And for some of these young nationalists, the answer was two gentlemen, as they put it, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, which are going to come together and somehow eventually save China. And then lots of things emerge from that. We can't go into huge detail, but Chinese communism emerges as a small party that becomes a large party in the 1920s. But before that, the man who really takes control of the agenda is the leader of China's nationalist party, sometimes known as the Kuomintang or Kuomintang. You may have seen that abbreviation. It's a party founded by a man named Sun Yat-sen, one of the great nationalist leaders of China,

but he died in 1925 of cancer. And his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, who will be tremendously important to our story of the war, becomes literally a man on horseback leading an expedition that very tentatively reunites China under one government in 1928 based in the capital of the city of Nanjing. But in doing so, he slaughters the communists who had temporarily been his allies. And he turns against them and basically sees them as a sort of snake in the grass who have to be wiped out. And that is the sort of position of China in the period leading up to the war. Just to flip to the Japanese side for a couple of moments, I said there were two ideological forces

that really shaped this moment. One is that Chinese nationalism that emerges during that time. The other is Japanese imperialism, because it's worth remembering that the only country in the world that had a modern empire like the British, the French, the Americans, or the Americans don't like to admit this, just ask the Filipinos if you doubt it. The Japanese created a modernized empire of their own by basically modernizing very, very fast in the late 19th century, a period known as the Meiji Restoration. They modernized the army, education system, railways, but also started to build their own empire as a way of showing they were sitting at

the top table of international politics. And huge amounts of Asia began to fall to them by the late 19th century. 1895, Taiwan is conquered by the Japanese. 1910, Korea becomes a colony of Japan. Even before that, 1904 to 5, the Russo-Japanese War, despite the title, actually fought on Chinese territory, the northeastern territory of Manchuria. Some parts of that go over to the Japanese. And then the big one in 1931, which is an increasingly confrontational, aggressive Japanese empire that's abandoned democracy by that stage, has a coup essentially launched by Japanese junior officers in this huge territory of Manchuria, about the size of France and Germany combined, and essentially turns it

into a puppet state, a client state under Japanese control. And that's where the emperor turns up again, isn't it? If I remember the film right. That's exactly right. So they need it because the technical case, which is a little bit actually like the way in the era we're talking about, Putin's Russia has created supposedly autonomous little kingdoms or stateless republics on the edge of Ukraine and claimed that they're independent states that are being just supported by Russia. Similarly, the Japanese, when they conquered Manchuria, didn't make it a formal colony. They claimed it was a new independent state called Manchukuo. And to find a figurehead for it in 1932, they came across the deposed last emperor of China, Pu Yi, who by now, of course, was a young man, no longer a boy. And he was essentially plucked from Beijing, put on the throne and ruled, very unhappily actually, as the emperor of Manchukuo from 1932 all the way to 1945 and the end of World War II. He eventually died, I should say, in 1966 as a sort of reformed figure in Beijing. Gardner, didn't he? He became a gardener. Yeah, he's a gardener at the end of the film, isn't he?

That's right. So, Ron, I've got three questions. You're such a brilliant speaker that I've probably got about 50 questions during the course of your... Peroration. Peroration. That may be code for I'm going on too long. No, no, no. It's not at all. It's not at all.

Because I was actually thinking this is so good that I could actually just sneak out of the room and make a tea or something. But okay. So here are my three questions. Question one. When 1931 happens, so that's the so-called the Manchurian incident or the Mukden incident, the Japanese, it's a sort of false flag operation, isn't it? They have a bomb that goes off by the railway that they planted themselves and they say, oh, the Chinese are attacking us. Oh, this is, we must immediately take over Manchuria. That's exactly right.

First of all, why are there Japanese troops already in parts of China? Because there are Japanese sort of bases and things in China, aren't there? So why is that? So a phrase that you'll quite often hear, and it's actually a Marxist phrase, but it's been used more broadly speaking, because I'm sure you always love a bit of Marxism on the rest of history. Love it. Dominic loves it. Yeah. Get it in there. Dominic's particularly fond of it, I'm sure. The phrase semi-colonial, which is a rather unsatisfactory phrase in some ways that's used to describe the state of China during that time. China was never a formal colony other than some small parts like Hong Kong and also lesser known places like Weihaiwei. But the vast majority of China's territory technically was sovereign.

They were a member of the League of Nations, for instance, the interwar predecessor of the United Nations. Can I just ask about Shanghai? Yes. And what the state is there? Because that is, is that unusual? Because there, there does seem to be kind of distinctive European territory carved out. Great, great question. And I'm going to make a shameless plug here by saying that, you know, one of these days,

the discussion of the Shanghai International Settlement and its century of existence is one of the other great stories that I'm sure will make a wonderful podcast. Just putting that in there. We would love to do that. That is a great idea. But put very briefly, in 1843, just after that opium war that I'm sure will make a wonderful podcast. Just putting that in there. We would love to do that. That is a great idea. But put very briefly, in 1843, just after that opium war that I've mentioned, the Treaty of Nanjing is signed in 1842. The most famous aspect of that these days is the handover of Hong Kong, because that has now, of course, become quite a current issue as Hong Kong

has been locked down under the national security law a couple of years ago. But one of the other clauses basically opened up five Chinese ports, essentially as sort of autonomous free ports that were not under Chinese sovereignty, or not fully under Chinese sovereignty. And Shanghai became the most successful of them. So essentially, within a short period of time, in the 1840s onwards, one section of Shanghai city became, actually that became a sort of colony, which was governed by the French. It's called the French concessions. That's more straightforward, a kind of little colony inside the city. The second part, which was larger, was more complicated.

It was called the International Settlement. That's a slightly misleading name because it's essentially a form of British colony on the soil of Shanghai, but governed not by a colonial governor, so not like India or even like Hong Kong, instead governed by the Shanghai Municipal Committee. In other words, a group of rate payers, essentially. So British, Japanese, Americans, and again, I always want to dip the blood of the Americans into the story of empire in Asia, because they always get away with claiming that they're anti-imperialists. And I want to make sure that they're right in the middle of the story. They basically raise taxes to run the city, but there are very few rights given to Chinese residents of that part of the city until into the 20th century. The nearest thing I can compare it to perhaps is a settler community, perhaps a bit like Rhodesia. In other

words, it is of course a colonial situation, but the city itself is run by a committee largely of britains but not exclusively during that period and it's not directly under the control of the colonial office in the way that full colonies were one of the reasons that that matters is that the british foreign office you find more and more exasperated notes in the early 20th century basically saying that they want to tell the shanghai british community what to do the shanghai landers as the historian robert bickers has written about about them um community what to do. The Shanghailanders, as the historian Robert Bickers has written about them, refusing basically to do what they're told

and just getting on with whatever they're actually interested in. But essentially, it's a semi-autonomous, largely British-run city. I want to further note on that, actually, it's often forgotten. Some of us think of the great cities of British colonialism, Bombay, Calcutta, Pretoria, Cape Town. But people forget that Shanghai is very much a British colonial city.

And if you go to the waterfront, the famous Bund, even today, look at those huge Art Deco buildings that have a touch of Manchester about them as well. You will see quite how longstanding the British influence on the city remains even now. And HSBC, isn't it? HSBC, of course. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Although actually, I believe the story is that after, you know, when things got back to capitalism back in the 2000s, the city council of Shanghai in the present day offered HSBC the building back for some incredibly extortionate price. But HSBC, I think, realised that in fact, they couldn't really run a modern bank out of that building. So that building is, I think, now the Pudong Development Bank run by the Chinese. And today's HSBC is actually across the water in the futuristic New Pudong District.

But if you go into the old Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building, which in normal times, non-pandemic and so forth, tourists are allowed to do. And then look up, you will see this fantastic mural with pictures of the eight great cities that the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank operated in, obviously Hong Kong and Shanghai, but also Bangkok and other cities of empire of that time. Beautifully painted and a really, really interesting mural. And if you can't get to Shanghai, which you probably can't at the moment, you can find that image on the internet, actually. It's well worth looking at. So Ron, to take you back to the Japanese, the Japanese are one of the powers, aren't they, that have basically got a little toehold. And they have this railway in Manchuria, but they also have barracks all over China and things. So my question is, why aren't they happy with that? So in other words, why is there this

internal dynamism, this restlessness, that means the Japanese even want to get involved in China militarily in the 1930s? What is driving all that? The primary driver, and there are a lot of them, but to go to the primary driver is emotional. Japan was the only non-European nation to have made this astonishingly rapid rise from being a country that was nearly in danger of being colonized itself by western powers in the 1850s to being a colonial power in its own right half a century later and they looked at the way that by the 1920s and 30s as you know western empires tended to be settled i mean the colonies that existed weren't being given back but there was also a feeling that british uh colonies and french colonies shouldn't expand at that time and some of them should be turned into League of Nations mandates, colonies by another name,

you might say, but nonetheless. And the Japanese quite explicitly said quite often, well, look, this isn't fair. We came along late to the game of empire. Why on earth should the British and French get to keep this huge swathe of territory they have around the world in Africa and Asia? But when we want to do something similar, people say it's no longer permitted. So that emotion, I think, is a large part of it. The second part that I think links to that, but it's perhaps slightly separate, is pushed by the Great Depression. Essentially, in the late 1920s, when the world turns to economic autarky in the aftermath of the Depression and the Wall Street crash, Japan found itself being increasingly shut out of international markets. I sometimes like to say, here's another one of my little phrases, you're welcome to pick

apart if you like. World War II was started in part by American women's silk stockings, because a large part of Japan's industrial strength in the early 20th century was in light industrial textiles. In other words, young women, quite often it was young women, working in Japanese factories in horrible conditions, getting lung diseases from all the fibers, making cotton and silk products, including stockings. And in the 1920s, when the Smoot-Hawley and other terrorists prevented exports of Japanese and indeed most foreign goods

coming into the United States, the collapse in market for these sorts of goods meant that China, sorry, Japan's rural economy was destroyed, you know, very, very quickly. And all of these rural young women and men suddenly found themselves essentially without an export market. And that fueled, of course, an angry politics, which said, well, what are you going to do about it to the politicians? And the answer tended in some cases to say, well, we expand in our areas of regional interest. In particular, that means the mainland of China.

So that's the reason why you get the reason that you get these troops being stationed. Essentially, Japan used its military superiority to make the case that it had special rights. Again, you may be hearing echoes of Putin in Russia and Ukraine here again, special rights in geographical areas that were close to it and where could be closer than China, and essentially use the weakness of China's internal politics to force Chinese rulers to sign agreements that Japanese troops could be stationed on Chinese territory, ostensibly to protect Japanese interests. And again, keep coming back to the Putin comparison. If Japanese civilians found themselves being insulted or injured or hurt, then Japanese troops were allowed to basically

come and save them. And as you can imagine, there was more than one incident in which Japanese civilians found themselves being treated badly, possibly with an element of provocation, which allowed that Japanese military presence to expand even further. So that essentially meant the informal empire that Japan had in China became very extensive by the 1920s and 30s, and frankly, wasn't all that informal by that stage. But Brandon, can I just, just to pull the camera right back, the relationship between China and Japan, I mean, it's very, it's a very long one, obviously, they're very geographically close. Historically, Japan had been hugely influenced by China. Is there any sense still of an inferiority complex that the Japanese have towards China as the kind of birthplace of its own culture and this immensely ancient civilization? Or have they completely suppressed that? Do they now regard the Chinese with contempt? There's a real emotional rebalancing that goes on between China and Japan between the late 19th and early 20th century.

And it has two parts which sit almost in opposition to each other. Yin and yang, you might say, to use a Chinese phrase. On the one hand, it was undeniable. But by the early 20th century, Japan was the more powerful actor in regional and in global politics. Because it's industrialized more successfully. It industrialized more successfully. It's richer and it was able to exercise its will.

And therefore, there was a strong sense amongst many of China's elites at that time. My gosh, we have to learn from Japan because they've obviously worked out how to push back the foreigners and actually become strong themselves. And that sense of many Chinese elites, people like Liang Qichao, one of the great intellectuals of late 19th century China and a figure who eventually actually went to Japan in the end. So he felt something of an affinity. They spent a lot of time actually working out why on earth has Japan succeeded

and we have failed. On the Japanese side, I think there was a sort of ambiguity of feeling because the long Chinese cultural tradition that you've mentioned, the Confucian tradition, tradition of using classical Chinese as a linguistic tool, was so longstanding that it couldn't simply be overthrown at one blow. And therefore, the mixture of feelings of both kind of almost resentment that the elder brother had fallen backwards and that the younger brother had to be sort of brought into modernity was found there. It's worth saying one of the things, I think this sometimes gets a bit lost in the story of the hatred, which became very real between many Chinese and many Japanese during that time and subsequently, which is that despite empire, and there are parallels here actually with the British and the French empires too,

despite the anger that came from Japanese conquest in China, there was also a certain amount of cultural interaction and actually a feeling of more egalitarianism on the cultural front as opposed to necessarily the military front. So a lot of young Chinese came on Japanese scholarships to study in Tokyo and in China. And while they somewhat resented, you know, the kind of rather condescending charity that might be associated with these scholarships, the opportunity to actually come to a metropolitan center, which Tokyo was, you know, where Koreans would come, where Southeast Asians would come, where Chinese would come, as well as Japanese, was regarded as a sort of cultural melting pot that actually acknowledged the fact that there was a lot of shared culture between China, Japan,

and other East Asians as well. So it's quite an ambivalent set of feelings on both sides. But there's no doubt that overall, the Japanese, as they move towards this idea of pan-Asianism, of themselves as a sort of first-class Asian power who has to show the other Asian powers the way, that they definitely got themselves into a position where they were looking to lord it over the other Asian nations. There's little doubt about that. Rana, one more question before we move on towards 1937. Dominic, have you had your two questions already?

No, this is my final question, Tom. This is my third question. So I've been very good at keeping my questions kind of hanging. So Rana uh why isn't 1931 the beginning of the second world war because that's the moment when you have this false flag operation and the japanese as you said they can't they basically conquer an area the size of france and germany put together in manchuria and they set up their puppet state and that's a from the sort of perspective of the league of nations and sort of western opinion that's seen as a sort of flagrant act of aggression and annexation. So why isn't that the beginning? Why isn't that the turning point? Well, first of all, Dominic, if you go to China and say what I've just said, which is that it starts, I think, in 1937 properly, you can get into big trouble these days.

So a little bit of political subversion right here on the podcast, you know, send it over to Beijing now and let's get the handcuffs out. Because about four years ago, it was actually legally decreed in China that the official start of World War II is 1931 because of the Manchurian incident. And that's now an officially maintained position. So for instance, books in China have had textbooks have had to be changed to reflect that. Prior to that, there was a very lively debate in the Chinese academic world, and that still actually does, you know, exist, I think, although not so officially now, about whether it was 1931 or 1937. Just to add to the mix, actually, for a very long time, certainly during the Cold War years, the Japanese, particularly the Japanese left,

have referred to this whole period, I always think slightly mysteriously, as Jugo Nen no Senso, the 15-year war. I'm not quite sure how 1931 to 45 counts as 15 unless you sort of actually count the fullness of each particular year. But you know, never mind that. The point is that the Japanese have also seen this as a long period in which there is a continuity. However, here are the reasons briefly that I think that 1937 is the starting point. First of all, during the war itself, and for many, many decades afterwards, the Chinese who were fighting it thought it had begun in 1937. So at the end of 1945, when the war was over, all Chinese newspapers, commentators,

you know, journalists, writers, historians, talked about the great eight-year war of resistance against Japan that they had fought, Ban Yan Kang Zhang in Chinese. Nobody at that point talked about, or very few people, I should think, talked about it being a 14-year war. So, in that sense, I would give the contemporary survivors of the war a certain amount of leeway. But leaving that aside, there are analytical reasons, I think, as well. And I'll just go for one. If you look at what happens after 1931 and this conquest and annexation of Manchuria into a client state of Japan, it's not a straight downhill path from there all the way to the outbreak of war in 1937.

In 1933, Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government and the Japanese government at the time undertake an uneasy truce. It's called the Truce of Tangu. And it's basically the beginning of a two-year period when both sides, I think the Chinese more sincerely than the Japanese, to be honest, are trying to reach a new status quo. Again, I'm going to keep reaching for these Putin-type analogies here, but they do seem in so many ways so powerful. So do you think the Ukraine war began in 2014 with Crimea or this February 2022? You don't necessarily have to answer the question, but you see the distinction I'm making there. Lots of people actually now talking about the reinvasion of Ukraine. And you could talk about the restarting of the war in China. But overall,

there was a status quo, a very uneasy status quo achieved certainly by 1933 in Manchuria, and the flare up didn't happen again until 1937. So I might leave you with the way in which Chinese historians today try and square the circle of this distinction. Nowadays, the official position, if you kind of want to say that you think it's really 1937, but you don't want to say it, well, you're not able to say it publicly because it's no longer permitted in textbooks and so forth, is to say that 1931 is the beginning of the overall war of resistance in the Chinese phrase. And then 1937 is the beginning of the full scale war of resistance. And that is a way, I think, of trying to get both of those viewpoints in. But that's why I personally would still stick to 1937 and argue for that as

the beginning of, well, as we've said, the Second World War in Asia, but also actually globally. Okay. Well, I think we should take a break here. And then when we come back, let's look at the start of the outbreak of the full-scale war of resistance, and we'll move to 1937. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And And we'll move to 1937. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news,

reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History.

We are looking at what Rana Mehta is, our guest, is casting as the outbreak of the Second World War. And Rana, we have got to 1937. But before the war actually begins, you've been talking about Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader, leader of the nationalists. But there are two other figures who over the course of the war will play very, very significant roles. One of them, very, very famous name, we've already devoted an entire episode to him, Mao Zedong, communist. But the other one, Wang Jingwei, who you describe as a man of extraordinary good looks in your book. What is there to say about Wang Jingwei, other than his extraordinary good looks, that means that he's such a kind of key figure in this story? Albeit one that, you know, compared to Mao and

Chiang Kai-shek, much less well known. Well, I should say that Wang Jingwei's good looks are not incidental to this man's history, and I'll explain why in a moment. Wang Jingwei was one of the most prominent revolutionaries against the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty that was overthrown in 1911, 1912. He was an extremely fierce opponent of the Manchu Qing dynasty that ruled China at that time. You can think, you know, in the same way that one thinks of the sort of late 19th century Russian revolutionaries who overthrew the Tsars, you know, they assassinated Alexander III. They weren't immediately successful. There's a lot of persecution, but eventually the Russian revolution overthrew the Bolsheviks as well.

So Wang Jingwei was very much in that mode of an anti-monarchist, an anti-royalist who was seeking to overthrow the last Chinese dynasty. And his raven-haired beauty was something that was very, very widely noted amongst those people who hung out in revolutionary circles and beyond. It was said that when he was caught, because he took a leaf out of the Russian book and

chucked a bomb at a prince of the Qing royal house, he didn't miss, but it didn't kill him. But he was, of course, nabbed and sentenced to death. And it is said, certainly, that one of the reasons that his sentence was commuted from death to long term imprisonment was that one of the court ladies, the Manchu court, caught sight of him and said, you know, this young man is so good looking, we can't possibly cut his head off. So if that is true, then his chiseled good looks, feel free to put his name into a search engine if you want to see what they look like. Plenty of pictures of him certainly made a difference. But his political significance, for good or ill, doesn't really, in the end, lie on the shoulders of his looks. The best way to think about Wang Jingwei, I think, is as a figure who in some ways is parallel to figures who may be better known to listeners who know the European World War II story, such as

Laval or Pétain in France or Quisling in Norway. In other words, collaborators with the invaders. And Wang Jingwei is probably the most famous, certainly the most well-known and notorious of those who collaborated with the Japanese during their occupation of China. In the 1920s and 30s, Wang Jingwei became one of the most prominent figures in the nationalist revolution of the time. He was second really in prominence only to Chiang Kai-shek, who became the leader of China once he'd set up his regime at Nanjing in 1928. And Wang Jingwei had a very difficult relationship with him. The two of them never trusted each other an inch. But through much of the 1930s, Wang Jingwei became a very prominent figure in the cabinets of China at that time. He was essentially prime minister at

one point. And he became known as a figure who probably was more sympathetic to the idea of a deal with Japan during the 1930s after the Manchurian incident than some of the other more sort of hardline nationalists in the government. But at that point, there was no doubt that he was regarded as a figure of the highest significance in the Chinese government alongside Chiang Kai-shek and other nationalist figures. So a very prominent national level figure who everyone would have known, rather like a figure like Pierre Laval in France at exactly the same time, the Third Republic. So we'll come back to his story a little bit later. But Rana, you talked about Chiang Kai-shek. And I guess it's easy to have the impression that Chiang Kai-shek is leading a united, coherent China. But am I right in thinking that in that period,

coming up to 1937, the warlordism, as it were, is not quite as bad as it was. But China is still pretty divided, isn't it? So you have Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists. You also have Mao and the communists who've done their long march. So they've kind of gone into the countryside and formed an alternative power base, I suppose. So is that one reason why the Japanese think, well, this place is really fragmented and divided, we can just waltz in and take it all? One phrase that was used by a Japanese commentator, admittedly one who had a vested interest in trying to split China up, was that China at that time, the 1930s, was not a country, it was a geographical expression. Now, I think that's too strong. But the way in which I try

and explain perhaps the view from Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek's capital, and how it looked if you were sitting in his presidential palace, still there, by the way, in the in the center from Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek's capital, and how it looked if you were sitting in his presidential palace, still there, by the way, in the center of Nanjing, you might think of it as a sort of nerve center in which the further you get away from Nanjing, the less power the national government of China has. So if you think about the area, which is actually some of the most prosperous and some of the most culturally significant part of China in the kind of Yangtze Delta area, that's some east central China, you might say. So if you know big cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, provinces like Zhejiang, Jiangsu, those would all be basically part of that heartland. That's really where the Nationalist Revolution had its strongest area of control, along with Guangdong, Canton or Guangzhou, down in the south of China, where it had another beachhead, you might say. And those areas meant that a combination of local elites,

business people, rural landowners, and so forth, who were pretty dedicated to the Nationalist cause, meant that the government was reasonably stable, even though it had various things that were very problematic. For instance, it didn't have a very, very strong regular tax income. And a lot of that was dependent on an institution called the Maritime Customs Service, which essentially was, again, as many things were at this time, was run by a bunch of Brits. It was actually founded by an Ulsterman called Sir Robert Hart, who had come from Portadown and ended up in the service of China. But even though he died in 1911, the customs remained as a sort of reliable stream of income for the recognized Chinese government. But the further you got away from Nanjing, the further you find yourself into

areas where essentially other Chinese military leaders might pay nominal allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government, but in practice, did whatever the heck they wanted. So Sichuan down in the southwest, Manchuria before the Japanese conquest, Dongbei, the northeast, which was under the control of a younger warlord called the Young Marshal, or indeed large parts of northeast central China, Shanxi province, ruled by an extremely, in some ways quite progressive warlord, Yan Xishan, very much against things like foot binding, but a man who kept his own army very, very close to hand to make sure that Chiang Kai-shek or any other ruler couldn't simply tell him what to do. So Chiang Kai-shek was doing a combination of bribery, coercion and conquest out that one of the many reasons why China became destabilized in the war years was that they had to flee that cultural heartland in Nanjing and around and instead make their way to another part of China, the southwest, that is the center of gravity, cultural, economic, financial. And would it be fair to say that you've got Beijing in the north, although it's called

what, Beiping? Beiping, Northern Peace, because Nanjing had become the capital. And so Beijing, which means northern capital, could not use that name at that time. So that was a former imperial capital. Then you have Nanjing that we've been talking about, which is the nationalist capital. Again, a kind of very ancient Chinese city. So kind of very important in the Chinese psyche. And then you have Shanghai, which is the great kind of commercial port and center. So you have these three ports. You have Chiang Kai-shek head of the nationalist government you've explained you have all these warlords as well you have the communists who at this point are what I mean how how much of a a power are they they are they're kind of sent north central

northern China central northern China Shanxi province basically as you'll have discussed on another episode I know of um of the podcast of the rest is history. They have been sent on the Long March that takes place in 1934 to 35. And essentially, that's Chiang Kai-shek chasing them out of their previous heartland in Jiangxi, which is basically South Central China, and being made to walk thousands of miles up to the northwest of China, to a part of China that's so remote, so difficult to get to that they're safe. It's kind of like being forced out of Islington to go to the Northern Highlands. Well, some of us would love to go to the Northern Highlands. I think it's a fantastic idea, Tom. That sounds lovely, Tom.

You're not suggesting, call it a difference between the two. But yes, actually, it's like, first of all, being kicked out of Islington, which is when the communists were in Shanghai, then being sent possibly to somewhere like Devon and realizing that they're coming to get you in Devon and then having to take a roundabout route that gets you to the Northern Highlands. But you're traveling via Wales and East Anglia, which is not the most obvious route. OK, right. OK, well, so that sets that up. So that gives us China in early 1937. And then what happens? 1937. And what happens then is in some ways best described by a brief entry from Chiang Kai-shek's diary. And I should say, by the way, here in a word on sources for all these questions, one of the most valuable and relatively recent documents that historians in this period have

been able to get access to, only since really the early 2000s, is the voluminous diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, China's leader, which he kept all the way from about 1917 up to the early 1970s. So they are a wonderful insight. Obviously, he had to treat it with caution, but they're a wonderful insight into what he and others were thinking around him. And in the summer of 1937, tensions heightened and Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese leadership were keeping a close eye on what the Japanese were up to. So that is the context for the 7th of July, 1937. And this is essentially a date that in the history of China's war with Japan might be thought of as the moment when, you know, Archduke Ferdinand's car is rounding that corner in Sarajevo. Is he going to go left? Is he going to go right? Oh dear, he goes right. Oh dear, there's a chap called Gavrilo Princip there. And goodness me, what's he got in his hand? I think that story probably is quite well known. In the case of China, what's perhaps less well known is what happens on the outskirts of Beijing,

this little village called Wanping on the evening of 7th of July. What happens is that one of those locally garrisoned Japanese troop deployments that I've mentioned, the ones that have been put there through imperial powers, they're on sovereign Chinese territory, but they're allowed to be there. They're taking roll call and a couple of the soldiers don't answer roll call and um their offer their commanding officer gets extremely worried stroke angry about this and thinks that what's happened is that local chinese warlord troops must have basically knocked a couple of them off for sport and he's not having any of it um it the missing soldiers actually do turn up the next morning and i think a slightly possibly embellished version of the story, but it may have something to it is that basically they popped off to have a pee. And they realized they'd missed roll call, they get into trouble. So they didn't actually report themselves back. So you might say that two soldierly bladders may have had something to do with the outbreak of World War II in China. But by that stage, things were beginning to spiral out of

control because essentially having reported up, the local Japanese troops said, we've lost these troops. Chinese must have done it. Chinese said it has nothing to do with us. And essentially, a confrontation occurred between the two sides in which the Japanese commanders then say, well, you know, we're not having any of this. And we demand much more control over much of the territory in this part of Beijing, including the railway junctions. And this is a really, really important element because whoever controls the railways can control freight, can control the transport of troops, and of course, can control communications,

you know, broadly speaking, in that part of northern China. And so this reached a point where essentially it was flashed up to the national government, Chiang Kai-shek down in Nanjing. What are we going to do? And up to that point, for the previous few years, even after the invasion of Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek had essentially operated a policy of public non-resistance. Behind the scenes, he was sort of harrying the Japanese in various ways, but publicly he was saying, we're not going to get pulled into a conflict. That's not the way to go because he knew how devastating it could be. And in his diary for that or the day after, he writes, is this the moment for confrontation with the Japanese?

Is this the turning point? So he can see that this moment is maybe the moment at which something really devastating is going to happen. And he had people around him, actually, various advisors said, look, we're just not strong enough in China to actually fight the Japanese. Yes, we have a large army, but it's controlled by warlords. They're not well trained. It's largely agrarian society. The Japanese army is heavily mechanized. We just can't win this war. And Chiang Kai-shek thinks about it and says, no, this time, after all the provocations, after Manchuria, after smaller, but still very worrying incidents, and finally now this new demand for territory, in 1937,

in July, he says, we have to push back. And by making that decision and by holding a war council, which essentially takes the decision, he opens up the conflict, which moves from being a very local skirmish between these soldiers just outside Beijing, to becoming a war of nation states between the Japanese Empire and the Republic of China. And that is the beginning of the conflict between the two. So Rana, some people may find that counterintuitive, because the common way that we think about the Sino-Japanese War is a war of Japanese aggression against China. But in a way, you're saying that Chiang Kai-shek consciously, deliberately, chooses to accept this provocation of the Marco Polo Bridge. And he could have passed it up.

And is there an alternative reality, as it were, in which he does pass it up and the war doesn't break out? Or do you think war was a bit like the argument about the First World War, actually, the Sarajevo parallel? Was war coming inevitably anyway? Yes, it's a very good parallel. And again, one could, I suppose, ask the question, actually, for 3rd of September 39, you know, could Neville Chamberlain have found a way to perhaps get out of the Polish guarantee? Or that probably would have been difficult by that stage. There are always choices. They're not always the right choices, but they have to be made. I think

that Chiang Kai-shek certainly thought that the war was clearly coming. And if it didn't come then, it would come very soon. And the advisors, people like the academic Jiang Wenlin, you know, very experienced and thoughtful guy who knew his Chinese history, was saying, you know, give it till, I think he said till about 1940, something like that. That's how long we'll need to rearm. And of course, there are similar arguments about rearmament in Europe as well. The problem is that by this stage, I think it was eminently clear, and certainly the Japanese themselves gave no indication otherwise, that the aim was essentially conquest of large parts of China, maybe not as formal colonization, but expanding the already very, very significant amount of control that China, so Japan had. And if they'd taken that railway junction, which was at the heart of the particular decision in July of 37, then essentially you do have a decision that you are handing over North China to Japan for a generation. Including Beijing. Including Beijing for a generation. Now, that's not where his capital was, but culturally,

handing over Beijing to the Japanese would have been a deeply symbolic and deeply humiliating moment. And Rana, Cankocek's decision to go to war, basically. Yes. What is the attitude of the communists to this? And are they complicit in it? The communists at first aren't quite sure what's going on, because of course, they regard everything as being part of a wider imperialist conspiracy. And of course, they're getting instructions from Stalin. But at the same time, they've also been put on their best behavior. And I just need to go back briefly for a couple from Stalin. But at the same time, they've also been put on their best behavior. And I just need to go back briefly for a couple of months.

Right at the end of the previous year, in December 1936, circumstances emerged in which Chiang Kai-shek is kidnapped briefly by a couple of warlords. One was the young marshal of Manchuria, another one, a man called Yang Ho-chung. And these two warlords basically kidnap him in the city of xi'an in uh northwestern china hold him in a villa uh i mean you know the man when he sort of realized he was about to be kidnapped sort of caught running up a hill his false teeth had apparently fallen out onto the the hillside and had to be picked up and clean for put back in being put back in his mouth and these warlords are basically in uh collaboration with the communists who were also very keen to get chiang Kai-shek under their control. And when the news came in that he'd been kidnapped, the communists, Mao and others were like, well, let's kill the guy, you know, give him a trial and shoot him for his crimes against the Chinese people.

And then basically a very big name steps in. And that guy is Joseph Stalin, who says no to the communists. You're not going to do this. And the reason is very simple. Bearing in mind what time we're talking about here, this is 1936-37. The Red Army in the Soviet Union is undergoing huge purges and it's very, very, you know, it's not at its full strength. Stalin is desperately worried as well he should be about the possibility of an attack from Germany on the western side and Japan on the east. One of those is enough to deal with.

Two would be absolutely deadly for the Soviet Union. The last thing he needs is basically Chiang Kai-shek, who's the only credible leader that China has at a national level at this stage, being knocked off. And who takes over? Well, maybe Wang Jingwei, who we mentioned before, who we mentioned is much more pro-Japanese than Chiang Kai-shek, at least in public perception.

So is Stalin going to allow the Chinese communists to kill a leader who is well known for his opposition to outside forces, especially the Japanese, coming in and instead let in a Chinese leader who might be much more amenable to that? Of course, he's not going to do that. So by that stage, the Chinese communists know that they're not going to be in a position to knock Chiang Kai-shek off his perch. But when the war actually breaks out in July 1937, they're brought into discussions very, very quickly in a united front. That's the phrase that's used at the time. The nationalists and the communists have a meeting. They send some of their top leaders and essentially a deal is done. It lasts through in one form or another through the whole of the Second World War, which is that during the time of national crisis,

the invasion by Japan, China's nationalists and communists, much that they hate each other, daggers drawn and all of that, will uneasily work together to oppose the Japanese. And then when the war against Japan is over, then we see what happens after that. Yeah. Okay. So Beijing falls. Shanghai, what happens in Shanghai? Beijing falls in summer of 1937, although it probably wasn't very easily defensible either. I mean, it fell within weeks, Prana. Extraordinary. Such a huge city. I mean, just gone within a couple of weeks. that was primarily under nationalist central army control uh because essentially it was defended by troops of various people including sung joe yuan and other local warlords who when we say warlord armies you know we're not here talking about the kind of superbly trained battlefield ready um soldiers that japan had managed to put together by the stage we're talking about okay peasant boys

brought out of the countryside often not very keen to be there. And yes, those troops were not able to hold Beijing. Shanghai was different. And Shanghai was where Chiang Kai-shek chose to make a stand. So I mentioned the war opened in northern China around Beijing. But Chiang Kai-shek decided, well, if the war's beginning, then we need to open up a second front. And the second front was opened up rapidly in August 1937 in the great port city of Shanghai, much further to the south on the eastern coast of China. And Chiang Kai-shek did it for a couple of reasons. One is that the world's press was there. I mean, you started this podcast with that he and Isherwood and Auden, who were there together in China in 1937-38, wrote a wonderful book called Journey to a War, which is about their

experiences in China from that time. So all sorts of people from the West were watching what was happening. Auden, the great war photographer Robert Capa, took some of his finest photos in China at that time. Many people came straight from the war in Spain, which had already been raging for a year at that stage. And this is presumably really important for Chiang to keep China in the global eye. In the public view. At that time, in the mind of the Chinese and others,

the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese war against Japan were regarded as two sides of the progressive coin. And people like Auden and Isherwood tend to think so as well. They were explicit about the fact that they've been in Spain and then in China. The two went together in minds then, in then where it isn't so commonly heard now. So the publicity is one reason. But another reason is to do with troop training.

The best troops that China had, Chiang Kai-shek's finest troops, were essentially stationed in and around Shanghai. And they had been trained by actually some of the best German commanders, Hans von Sigt and then Alexander von Falkenhausen, who had been brought in as German military advisors to Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the 1930s. And the historian Hans van der Ven has written in great detail about the amazing detail of how these troops were actually retrained. So China did have its own core of modernized troops, but they were a relatively very small number of the millions who were recruited overall. And Chiang, I think, would have hoped that they would have been able to hold Shanghai for as long as possible. And indeed, they did hold out for about three months in Shanghai. But Shanghai turned into a city that was a battlefield. Trenches were literally dug in the streets of Shanghai, not in the French concession and not in that international settlement that we mentioned earlier, because those areas were

neutral, because of course, they were run by foreigners, they weren't under Chinese sovereignty. But you could look from your tea time terrace at the Cathay Hotel, in the international settlement, almost, or the rooftop anyway, and see the fighting going on just across the city border in the Chinese controlled area, which in the words of Orden looked like a moonscapecape because it was being so heavily bombed. And although the more than 100,000 Chinese troops who were fighting there fought very, very valiantly, commemorated actually in a movie that was a big hit in China and briefly released in the UK a couple of years ago called The 800, which is about the last stand of some of those Chinese soldiers in a warehouse on the riverbank of Shanghai. Eventually, by November of 1937,

they were defeated, many of them had been killed, and the Chinese troops as a whole were ordered to retreat from Shanghai because it was simply no longer defensible. But it became the first really public major battle of the Chinese war against Japan. And so Shanghai falls to Japanese takeover. That's right. In November 1937, Shanghai is captured by the Japanese. Again, not the foreign-controlled areas

which don't fall until Pearl Harbor, but essentially by that stage, by the end of 1937, beginning of 1938, Shanghai and much of the area around it is in Japanese hands. And the Chinese nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek and his government and much of the army have shipped downriver 800 miles to the southwestern city of Chongqing,

known in the West at that time often as Chongqing, which became the temporary wartime capital of China from 1937 all the way up to 1946. And the war, from their point of view, moves inland. So Rana, that seems like the perfect place to break. Because of course, next in their sights is the capital, isn't it? Nanjing. And many of our listeners will know that things don't unfold well for the people in Nanjing. But we will come back to that next time in our next episode. So thank you very much, Rana, and we'll see you all next time.

Look forward to that. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

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