The Rest Is History - 236. China and World War II - Part 2

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Tom and Dominic welcome back special guest Rana Mitter to discuss China's position during World War Two. This episode covers the Rape of Nanjing by Japanese forces, the military tactic of flooding the Yellow River, the deal between Chinese Nationalist Wang Jin Wei and Japan, and the unlikely pairing of 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *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. The victorious army must have its rewards, and those rewards are to plunder, murder and rape at will, to commit acts of unbelievable brutality and savagery. In all modern history, surely there is no page that will stand so black as that of the rape of Nanking.

That was George Fitch, who was head of the YMCA in Nanjing, as it's now called. And he was reporting on a visit to the Japanese embassy in December 1937, where he had gone to complain about the behavior of Japanese troops after they had occupied Nanjing, ancient Chinese capital and previously the capital of Chiang Kai-shek's government that had fled in the face of the outbreak of what our guest, Rana Mitter, has described as the beginning of the Second World War. And Rana, if we could pick up where we left off, war has broken out between China and Japan. Beijing in the north has fallen. Shanghai has been occupied. The nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek has retreated to the interior

of China. But Nanjing, their capital, what happens there? Because it is one of the most notorious incidents, not just in Chinese history, but world history, isn't it? Yes. It's an event which has become known as the Rape of Nanking. And that phrasing Nanking is one of the older versions of the name of the city, which we would now call Nanjing. But whatever name you call it by, it's one of the most horrific war crimes really of any era. What happened, just to make it clear, is that huge numbers, and we don't, you know, I don't think we'll ever have an exact number for this, but certainly tens of thousands is a reasonable thing to say

and possibly well into six figures as well, of civilians, Chinese civilians were murdered, women were sexually assaulted, there was huge pillaging of property, immense destruction committed on a city and immense violence committed against the people living there on the occupation of China's capital city, Nanjing, in December of 1937. And the spree of violence lasted about six weeks from mid-December 1937 to mid-January 1938.

And this was surprising for a variety of reasons, but one was that the city was not hard fought. It was not being defended to the death. Chiang Kai-shek, when he and his troops withdrew from Shanghai, and we've mentioned in the last episode of the podcast that desperate, gallant, but in the end, unsuccessful battle in Shanghai that the Chinese troops fought. So when Chang and his troops and government withdrew to the southwest of China, to Chongqing, he left instructions that actually Nanjing should be defended to the death. And the general he left there, General Tang Shengzhi, was a very devout Buddhist. And he made an autonomous decision, which was that he wasn't going to defend Nanjing to the death. And he slipped out on the Yangtze River on a boat on the night before the Japanese arrived in mid-December 1937. So he didn't fight, but he also left the city undefended.

And because essentially the gates were opened, the Japanese army was able to march in triumph, and nobody was fighting against them, there was no real armed resistance. I think that probably most of the civilians would have assumed, certainly the ones whose diaries and records we have, seem to have made this assumption, that the Japanese would, of course, occupy the city. They might be pretty condescending. But the idea that they would really launch this spree of violence was completely unexpected and was, of course, a horrifying experience for all those who went through those six weeks, which have been recorded not just in a very interesting diary by one of the

Chinese teachers at the local university, but also by Germans and Americans who were present in Nanjing at that time and had no axe to grind. They recorded what happened really as sort of third-party observers and were unflinching in their clarity about how violent the invading Japanese troops had been. I mean, Rana, in your book, the details are absolutely horrific. You know, the stories of gang rapes and torture and murder and so on. And I guess the question is, I mean, you've sort of raised it yourself, is why? I mean, the war has not at this stage been a very long war. The Japanese are perhaps frustrated that it's not going even more quickly. But is it a degree of racial contempt?

Is it, I mean, maybe that's the wrong expression. Is it a deliberate campaign of brutalization? Is it top down or is it bottom up? I mean, what explains this extraordinary, I mean, it's more than a month. Six weeks. Yep. You quote a Japanese general in your book, Matsui Iwane, I hope I've pronounced that right, in which he claims the Japanese troops are the real friends of China. So he's obviously, there's a kind of plan to try and get the Chinese on board, and then it just goes spectacularly wrong.

Yes. I mean, General Matsui Iwane, who, you know, was one of the most senior conquerors of China during this period, and a man who bears tremendous responsibility. So at some level, I mean, you've done enough horrors over, you know, the many episodes of the podcast to know that at some level, it's often very difficult to explain why evil acts occur. But there are a couple of things I think we can say. And first of all, at the specific level, there's quite a lot of analysis that shows that the troops who were sent to Nanjing were not necessarily the cream of the Japanese army either. Many of them were from parts of Japan where they've been pretty heavily brutalized themselves. I mean, going into the Japanese army in the 20s and 30s was not a gentle experience. There was a lot of

class division, you might say, actually. people who came from kind of more rural northern parts of Japan were often looked down on, regarded as sort of inferior to their more cosmopolitan counterparts. And then they were brutalized very regularly in terms of the training that they were given. And then, don't forget what they'd been told. Because of course, nobody or very few people go into a war of aggression saying, you know what, it's going to be really long, really violent and may not win. They're being told these soldiers, look, it's all going to be easy. Not quite it'll all be over by Christmas, but certainly it'll all be over in a few months and then Japan will be victorious. So when they've been told all these stories about how the Chinese are all cowards and they're

inferior and they're not really going to put up any kind of a fight. And they suddenly find actually there are all these Japanese, these Chinese soldiers in many parts of China who fight very bravely with really fierce resistance. It made them tremendously angry and resentful because they had to fight their way down the East Coast as opposed to having a sort of triumphant march. So even though Nanjing itself, as I've said, was not defended, other cities in the areas very much had been. And this, I think, created a huge amount of resentment on the part of many of these Japanese troops. But I think there's also one other thing that's worth saying, which is, it's worth thinking comparatively. Because again, a lot of people will know now, and since the 1990s, when Soviet archives were opened, the German archives were opened up, about the way in which the Red Army,

conquering Eastern Europe and Germany in particular, in 1945, actually committed many acts of rape, of destruction of property, of, you know, just killing civilians because they were in the way. And there does seem to be this set of tactics that emerges in some military situations where if the troops aren't very well trained in the first place, then they're given license by their superiors to basically do what they want. And what they want to do is a combination of destruction and sexual assault. It is something that has to be pinned on firmly on the shoulders of the Japanese army here. But it's not just the

Japanese army that's behaved this way in a situation where they're conquering a city. But if we're talking about this as the way to go is surprising to many, because actually there are other examples of where Japanese conquest and colonialism was actually much less violent. The best example of that is Taiwan, which was actually occupied as a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945. And although, again, we don't have time to go into huge details here, it's fair to say that although the Japanese weren't necessarily regarded with immense favor, they were generally regarded as being fairly civilized colonizers. And certainly the sort of huge brutality that you get in Nanjing was not the experience of the Taiwanese who were on that island during those years. So Japanese imperialism is variable, rather like British and French imperialism in terms of where it uses violence and where it's more consensual. And it's no doubt that Nanjing and the conquest of China

became very much at one end of the violent spectrum. And essentially, it was also a process by which more and more fuel was thrown onto the fire, because the Japanese expectation had been that China would essentially compromise or, you know, come to some sort of agreement fairly early on in the war. And as it became clearer and clearer that both Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists and the communists with whom they were in uneasy alliance were going to continue to resist, the level of brutality became greater and greater. So a city like Suzhou, less well known than Nanjing, also suffered a horrific massacre in spring 1938 along the same sorts of lines. It was Nanjing, but not just Nanjing. And so the Chinese retreat and the most celebrated demonstration that Chiang Kai-shek makes, I mean, it's so shocking the scale of what he does that he

never actually admits to it. But it's a kind of absolute statement about they are not going to surrender. The Japanese army is sweeping into central, where Chiang Kai-shek's government and army have retreated, they look to the dikes that have been built to control and regulate the flow of the Yellow River, the ancient kind of the river that lies at the heart of ancient Chinese civilization. And Chiang Kai-shek decides that they're going to destroy it. So how huge a deal is that? It's absolutely massive. And again, one of the things that again forces us to stop and realize how ambiguous much of the history of war is that one of the great human rights disasters, to use an anachronistic term, but I think it's probably useful here, committed in China during the Second World War was by the Chinese government against its own people. And that was, as you said, the blasting of the Yellow River dikes. Just to explain what this was and why it mattered and

what happened. By spring of 1938, China's defenders were desperate. It was very clear that the defense of Shanghai hadn't worked. The government had retreated to southwest and the interior, but much of central China, provinces like Henan, Hebei were basically, you know, China's breadbasket areas in some cases, you know, very much at the center of grain growing and so forth, were clearly going to be conquered by the Japanese in very, very short order. And certainly the Japanese expected to do that. And by spring of 1938, Chiang Kai-shek and some of his advisors decided that only the most desperate measures would actually work to delay the Japanese advance. And so they worked out that by blasting these huge, immensely carefully built dikes that held back the Yellow River and created, you know created huge swathes of agricultural

land. By blasting them, they would cause a flood that would basically inundate huge swathes of central China and, of course, prevent the Japanese from advancing across that territory. They would be stopped in their tracks because they wouldn't be able to march and the railways would be covered. But to do that, they had to do it without warning because, of course, if you told local inhabitants that they had to move fast, then you'd be giving the Japanese warning as well. So essentially, we have these extraordinary diaries and memoirs from lower-level officers who were involved with this action,

which they themselves were deeply uneasy about at the time. Soldiers were saying things like, supposing we're haunted by the ghosts of the dead, we've drowned and so forth, and they had to be reassured by superior officers. No, no, this is for the nation, this is for the country, you will be rewarded. looking like something like 10,000 horses heads on the sea, you know, these sort of little flecks of white foam as it just pours out and drowns villages, drowns huge numbers of, you know, Chinese farmers. How many do drown? We've never got an exact figure, but the kind of post-war figure that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration looked at in terms of the flood area would suggest that if you're talking about maybe 850,000 to a million people, that's not completely out of order. You know, we'll never know exactly, but we're talking about this is one incident. And this is one of the reasons that, you know, this sort of single incident gets almost drowned out to use a phrase. I apologize, but you know why I use it in the scale of the destruction in China as a whole. That number of people could account almost for the entire number of dead for some countries in Europe, even during World War Two.

But this is just one incident taking place in June 1938. And the question that lasts this day is, did it succeed as a military tactic? And there are still two schools of thought. And I don't think there's been a definitive answer. One is the sort of cruel realist school that says that this was a horrific thing to do and, you know, a war crime in its own right, and the nationalists never omitted to doing it. But nonetheless, it did actually stop the Japanese from advancing. It gave the nationalists time to withdraw further into the interior and let China's defenders resist for longer. And there's another school that said, you know what, actually, no, because the Japanese

could have made their way quite quickly in another direction. It wasn't necessary to do it. And this was actually not only immensely cruel, an act of great evil, but also actually it wasn't militarily effective either. But the one thing that is not in doubt is that this is one of the most deadly incidents of the entire Second World War in China, and it was committed by the Chinese nationalists against their own population. Just to leap ahead a second, Rana, I mean, many of our listeners, probably most of that is that one of the things that helps to erode popular support for the nationalists because people are conscious that their own government has killed potentially a million of them and has has destroyed the the the sort of the agricultural ecology of central china and all this stuff or have people forgotten it amid all the other

horrors and the millions of dead and the refugees and so on? Is it just an incident or is it a key moment in the erosion of Chiang Kai-shek's base? It's part of a set of events that absolutely erodes the confidence in Chiang Kai-shek's government. Just to take a point of geography for a moment, I've mentioned Henan province, and many listeners who perhaps don't think about China very much might need a bit of visualization of that. That's basically the central plains of China, very central to the cultural heartland. It's also the place where, you know, we may mention this, that just three or four years later, also during World War II, there's a massive famine, which is caused for a variety of reasons. But basically, it's a wartime famine, and that kills

another 4 million people. So, you know, the numbers are beginning to rack up. And Chiang Kai-shek is seen as responsible for that as well. And Chiang Kai-shek is just as directly responsible for that in an absolute sense, because it's to do with grain seizures as well as bad harvest that this happens. So the point is, this isn't just about China. It's about one particular central Chinese province, just one province, Henan, where all of these things keep happening. And one thing that we know is by the end of the war, after this flood, after this famine, in Henan province, when the recruiters come around, the conscriptors at the last years of the war, saying it's time to round up whatever young men are left and put them back in the army. It is reported by reliable sources that the farmers basically kind of get spears and pitchforks and basically chase the army out of town because they're so angry at them. Not surprising at all. And yet, of course,

just to put the other side for a minute, if one can do that, you know, it's a horrific thing you have to do. What Chiang Kai-shek and his generals would say is, yes, but by this stage, we were throwing everything into the machine for one purpose and one purpose only, which was to make sure that we stayed in the war long enough to defeat Japan. And if we hadn't done all of these appalling things, then China would be a Japanese colony. So that's the dilemma. How close does China come to total defeat? God, it keeps happening all the time during, I mean, over the stretch of 1937 to 1945. I would say that there's probably three key moments. 1938, when essentially, you know, it's a year into the war, much of Eastern China has been conquered, and the Japanese are offering some pretty sweet deals to Chiang Kai-shek to come over to the other side. So that's one possibility. He says no. 1940, you know, most of china's resources are exhausted by that stage

nationalist china's exhaust and don't forget this is prior to pearl harbor so there's no lend lease there's no american assistance there's a bit of underground assistance coming financially from the british the china the americans are trying to put a bit of sort of you know uh back of the back of the room type assistance in there but basically the the chinese nationalists in a really really dire state by the end of 1940 and people people think they're going to collapse. And then fast forwarding to near the end of the war, the moment when it then seems that actually the whole thing might just collapse is probably during mid to late 1944, during the middle of Operation Ichigo, the last huge Japanese thrust into central China happens at the same time as the two other great continental campaigns,

D-Day, Overlord on the western side of Europe, and Bagration on the eastern front. So Ichigo, you could say, is the third great one of those. And that's been explored by the historian Hans van der Ven in his book, China at War, which I would highly recommend. In that context, nationalist China basically has to fight back with its last resources in 1944 against the Japanese. And had it not been for the sudden end of the war in mid-1945, Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombings of Japan, there is a very good argument that nationalist China would essentially have collapsed at some point in 1945. But Rana, that raises a really, really interesting question, though, which is what is

Japan's plan? How do they think? Okay, we can see how nationalist China would just completely collapse, and the Japanese would, as it were, walk in. But what do they think they're going to do in the long run, in 5, 10, 20 years? Are they just going to exploit China? Are they going to resettle it? Are they going to steal us resources? Are they going to resettle it? Are they going to steal us resources? Or are they going to absorb it into a Japanese empire as a sort of happy, contented province? What do they think is going to happen? Well, large geopolitical projects of empire or anything else are usually undertaken in a spirit of optimism, because you have to have that to want to undertake something that has so many obstacles

inherent in it. I think that the overall aim of the Japanese in the 1930s as they expanded both their formal and informal empire in Asia was the idea that China in particular, not I think that it would have become a formal colony in the sense that Korea was, because it was too big. And they didn't, I think, think that they could do as the British done in India, because the circumstance of the 18th century that allowed, or the 19th century, that allowed a sort of formal administration of Manchukuo, a sort of client government, which would be run with compliant Chinese, very much under Japanese control. Kind of Vichy state. Yeah, kind of exactly closer to Vichy than if you think of occupied France in the 40s, the north part is essentially a full occupation. The southern part is technically neutral, but really actually pro-German, much closer to that Vichy sort of model. So essentially,

the search, I mean, the ideal scenario from their point of view would have been to, and they spent a lot of money and effort trying to bring it about, was to get Chiang Kai-shek to come over to the other side. And they used every argument possible, you know, you're Asian and we're Asian, we're all anti-imperialist, we're all against the West, you know, the West is the real problem here, not the Japanese, you know, why don't we work together? Chiang Kai-shek wasn't having any of it, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the part not the Japanese. You know, why don't we work together? Chiang Kai-shek wasn't having any of it, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the Japanese. Right. So we've accused Chiang Kai-shek of drowning millions of people and, you know,

millions have died of famine. But you could also say that he saves China, that his obduracy is what enables China to survive as an independent state. Would that also be fair, do you think? Yes, because that is the historical ambiguity. I mean, the two of you know better than anyone, I think that it's very, you know, when you write about good guys and bad guys, you're writing melodrama, not history. Chiang Kai-shek is responsible,

and not just on the blasting of the dikes, but in general, he ran a pretty vicious regime, which, you know, shot down its opponents in the street. He had some horrific wartime concentration camps with torture going on run by an outfit called Sacco. A man called Dai Li was a security chief. Oh, is he the guy who chucks them into the boilers of trains? That's the guy. He's nicknamed China's Himmler. And let's just say it wasn't meant as a compliment.

Right. You know, this is one of Chiang Kai-shek's guys. At the same time, if Chiang Kai-shek had not stubbornly sat there in 1938 in 1940 1944 and every time the logic seemed to point towards you know certainly the early part of the war doing a deal with the Japanese and just saying no and to steal a phrase from another well-known wartime leader of the era never surrender then China would I think have been very very likely to become a sort of Vichy style, semi, you know, satrapy of Japan. And that, by the way, if I may, is perhaps the key to something that is worth listeners knowing, because I think there's a very good case, and I've heard it from various, you know,

quite distinguished people saying, look, there's no doubt that China's history during World War II is a tragic one, you know, all these millions of deaths, you know, 80 to 100 million Chinese become refugees in China during this time. That's one of the biggest internal movements of people in any war situation in world history. You know, all of this is horrific. The railways, the roads, all the painful modernization that China had been undertaking in the early 20th century, smashed into pieces. So it's a tragic story. But you could say something similar, say, for a country like Poland in World War Two, which has tremendous tragedy. It's harder to argue that Poland per se is a kind of maker of a different pathway for the war, because of course, it was

so much of a victim during that time. But China is. But China, I think there is a good case to make that China's resistance actually matters for the global war. And here's why. Let's take that moment in 1938, just a year into the war. It's not just the Japanese who are trying to get Chiang Kai-shek to come over to their side at that point. You know, lots of diplomatic correspondence from the British and others are saying, the Chinese cannot possibly hold out. You know, they haven't got foreign support. They haven't got enough money. They've been stuck in the interior. You know, they should do a deal now. And at that point, I think, I'm afraid at least some of the more unworthy British commercial

interests are saying, and then we can get back into the market in China and Japan as well, which they were rather worried about at the time. And Chiang Kai-shek said absolutely no. But supposing he'd said yes, which is quite plausible in some ways at that time. You then basically, in mid-1938, get a deal by which China becomes a semi-colony, let's say, a sort of informal colony of Japan. And the situation calms down. The communists are probably still there in the countryside as a sort of insurgency, but they're not a major force in their own right. And then you leave the Japanese army freed up to think about maybe attacking the Soviet Union, maybe going to Southeast Asia, maybe attacking British India, or maybe just sort of, you know, consolidating Japan's imperial gains at that point. The point being that it's much harder to see a way in which a becalmed war in East Asia in 1938 can then be

linked to a European war between 1939 and 41 that's broken out to eventually become that incident that we think of as Pearl Harbor in 1941. Because to get the European and Asian wars coming together, you need both to be raging at the same time, and for them recognizably to be part of the same conflict that could be brought together. So no Japanese resistance, no Pearl Harbor, no D-Day. Hill has an easier hand against the Soviet Union and so on and so forth. You can find ways to get, you could argue that, you know, in the end, the need for the Americans to fight back against authoritarian regimes would have brought them that way. But the point is, of course, that it was the Japanese, not the Germans, who attacked the United States in the first instance at Pearl Harbor.

And if the Japanese aren the war and the notorious relationship between Vinegar Joe Stilwell, the American general, and Chiang Kai-shek. But just before we do that, so the course of the war, it's essentially a kind of grinding brutal stalemate with constant risk of nationalist China imploding. You've talked about how Chiang Kai-shek is constantly being pressured by the Japanese to come to terms and he refuses. But just before we go to the break, could you just talk about one key figure in the nationalist government who does break? And that is the extraordinarily good looking Wang Jingwei, who we talked about in the first half, who has a very domineering wife, doesn't he? A bit like Chiang Kai-shek does, actually. And together, they decide that the right thing to do for China is to try and make terms with Japan. So just before we go to the break, just very quickly tell us about him. Yes. Wang Jingwei essentially is the Laval or Pétain of wartime China. In other words, he is a figure from the nationalist government who made the opposite decision from Chiang Kai-shek in 1938, instead of deciding that China would never

surrender, would fight back against resistance until, you know, they were lying in the ditches in their own blood, decided, look, this is crazy. You know, the Japanese have so much superior technology and manpower that actually we have to do a deal. And essentially, in deadly secret, in 1938, Wang Jingwei and some of his followers get on a plane. They fly to Hanoi, which, of course, at that point is in French Indochina. And they eventually undertake actually quite a long negotiation with the Japanese, which eventually, in March 1940, it's quite a long time after that, leads to him being brought back to Nanjing, the old nationalist capital,

and reinstalled as the president of what's called the Republic of China. But of course, it's now a Republic of China under the Japanese under Japanese control. So he is a figure essentially from the old regime who makes the opposite judgment, which is that the Japanese can't be defeated. You mentioned his wife. Domineering is a bit harsh, I think. She's actually basically a very strong-minded revolutionary who spoke on an equal status with her husband. But she's the one who basically persuades him to take the leap, isn't she? She's involved in the decision partly because Wang Jingwei

and his wife actually operated as a partnership, rather as actually Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Song Meiling did as well. I think prominent Chinese women politicians actually in this period are more prominent than might have been appreciated. But yes, essentially, figures, Wang Jiwen's wife, and also senior figures like Zhou Fuhai, who was actually a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party, but went very much in the other direction. He goes all over the place, doesn't he? He's constantly like a pinball.

Yeah, he's a communist, and then he's a nationalist, and then he's a collaborator. And then even when he's actually collaborating with the Japanese, our diaries tell us that, in fact, he's having secret conversations with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. He used at one point a wonderful metaphor, Zhou Fuhai. He says, the thing is that it's as if China is operating with one leg in each boat. The idea that one boat is Chiang Kai-shek and one is Wang Jingwei. So whichever side wins, you know, China will do okay. But essentially, Wang Jingwei is the face of the collaborators who made the bet, as it turned out, the wrong bet, that Japan was going to win. And that from their own point of view, they would always justify what they did by saying, once we agreed to deal with the Japanese,

they stopped bombing our people in Shanghai, Nanjing, wherever it might be. And that at least you can credit us for that we saved a lot of Chinese lives because we prevented people from being bombed from the air. You may or may not accept that particular argument, but it's the one that they made. And does his regime have any kind of credibility with ordinary Chinese people, Rana? It's difficult to say, Dominic, because even compared to the often rather inaccessible archives on Vichy France, which some historians have not found it so easy to get hold of, documentation in China about the collaboration history years is really very thin in many places because it's regarded as such a shameful, embarrassing period. But actually, what we know about the period where there is documentation, and there's quite a bit, is that attitudes were mixed. At the local level, the rural level, people didn't

necessarily have a very strong sense of kind of abstract nationalism. And therefore, a whole bunch of people coming in with soldiers and, you know, forcing them to pay taxes, didn't necessarily look very different from warlords who've been doing the same sort of thing in previous decades. And at the local level, often the restoration of order meant that people actually started flooding back in some cases from the free, non-occupied zone back into the occupied zone to reclaim their property and found that as long as they kept their heads down, they could basically, you know, carry on. Although there's a lot of horrific torture of political dissidents, and although there's tactics like the use of, you know, bacteriological and biological warfare during this period, none of, you know, all of

which are count as war crimes, it's also the case that an awful lot of people, as happened in other countries where there was collaboration, kept their heads down, got on with everyday life, and maybe didn't really talk too much about politics at that point. Right. So we have these three key figures. We have Chiang Kai-shek still holding out. We have Wang Jingwei, who's a collaborator in Nanjing. And we have Mao Zedong and the communists up in the north, all in the inland. And we are now approaching the crunch point, the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. And I think when we come back, we should look at the course of the war from Pearl Harbor

up to the defeat of Japan and China's role in that. So we'll see you in a few minutes. 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. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in the fourth quarter, as it were, of the Sino-Japanese War, and we've just had Pearl Harbor. So Rana, Pearl Harbor completely changes the game, presumably, because the United States is now fully engaged. The United States needs, obviously, to pick a side in China. And its

side is Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists. But it's not a happy relationship, it's fair to say. No, Dominic, that's right. I mean, in the book, I call this period the toxic alliance because it is a period when allies, who of course are ultimately working together, nonetheless become extremely resentful and angry about each other. It didn't start that way. I think many people will know the famous story of when Pearl Harbor happened

and the Americans came into the war. Winston Churchill noted that he thought that at last year the war had been won and that Britain would be saved. What's less well known is that Chiang Kai-shek had a very similar moment sitting in Chongqing when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He actually turned because, well, Tom knows this quite well, as well as being a Confucian, Chiang Kai-shek was also a Christian, a Methodist, in fact.

So he sort of shared in various ethical and religious traditions. And he turned to the Psalms. And basically, when he heard that the war was going to be internationalized with the Americans coming in, got out one of those Psalms about his enemies being sort of ground down under the heel of righteousness. So he felt that things were going to go very well. But overall, the central problem became a very unusual command structure that was put in place for China. Essentially, the Americans said, we're not going to send American ground troops because we're going to preserve them for the Europe first strategy, but we are going to send a certain amount of aerial support. And this was a group that became known quite famously as the Flying Tigers, the

American volunteer group, which was then regularized into the army after there was official declaration of war between Japan and the US. But they said that they would send an American general as commander in chief for the Chinese armies that were fighting on the Allied side. So they're Chinese armies. The overall commander, of course, is Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo. But the commander of military strategy is an American. And they sent a man by the name of General Joseph Stilwell. And Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek's relationship is really a thread that runs through the next four years and not, as you said, in a very happy way. So he's Vinegar Joe. Is that an aptly earned nickname?

Vinegar Joe, yes. A man who was known basically for his acid tongue and his willingness to use it. Because he calls Chiang Kai-shek peanut, doesn't he? Well, so this is indeed one of the many nicknames he uses. So this is an American general who has no great love for the Chinese leadership, although actually, to be fair, he was quite respectful of the ordinary Chinese soldiers. He didn't like the British very much either.

In fact, he was fervently anti-British, as indeed many senior American military were. So he described the retreat from Burma and Singapore as being the empire, spelled E-M-P-A-H, the empire with its pants caught down. So this was a man who was fairly upfront about who he liked and who he didn't. Essentially, he was someone who was chosen actually by, you know, the big chief, George Marshall, as the man who would be sent out to China.

Still had China experience. He'd served there previously. He spoke. Did he speak Chinese? He spoke some Chinese. It's a bit unclear actually from the records about how much he actually spoke. But, you know, enough to make himself known in certain circumstances. He certainly wasn't a fluent Mandarin speaker, I don't think, but he was able to make himself understood. But he'd also had enough service that he was in a position to be a plausible commander-in-chief. campaign in spring of 1942, that actually the overall aims of Stilwell and the overall aims

of Chiang Kai-shek were running in very different directions. Let me just explain briefly what I mean by that. So Chiang Kai-shek, let's not forget, had by the time of Pearl Harbor, by December 1941, been leading this country that had been fighting essentially on its own for four and a half years against the Japanese. Yes, there was some COVID assistance from various quarters, and there was financial assistance and a certain amount of intelligence as well. But overall, China did not have any formal allies. So Chiang Kai-shek and his government are thinking by this stage, look, we've done a tremendous amount to keep ourselves in the war. We're poor, we're understaffed, we're not well trained. And the best thing to do is to try and preserve as much of our capacity as possible, particularly since the overall strategy was Europe first, and then Pacific second, as it turned out, and then China last, because China

and the Pacific are not the same thing. So he's looking for a basically defensive strategy. But Stilwell had a rather different frame of mind. And again, I've mentioned before, I'll mention again, the premier historian of this particular set of issues and of Stilwell's relationship is Hans van der Ven at Cambridge. And those who have the time should read his book, China at War, which is an absolutely fantastic account of the military history of this period. But to summarize very briefly, what happens at this point when he gets to Chongqing, Stilwell talks to Chiang Kai-shek, he talks to the other Chinese generals, and he decides that the Japanese have taken Burma.

It's one of the lightning campaigns that they launch along with the fall of Singapore, of course, happening about the same time, February 1942. The Western powers in Asia have been thoroughly humiliated by the Japanese. And Stilwell wants to, you know, get some revenge for this. So he basically gets together troops to make a thrust into Burma in the spring of 1942. And it goes absolutely horribly, catastrophically wrong. Not only does he not recapture any parts of Burma, but also he manages to lose half the troops. I mean, the Chinese troops are sent to basically find their own way back home. Stilwell essentially is pretty close to abandoning them in the battlefield. He still well does, to be absolutely fair to him, take a number of both troops and civilians who are physically close to him in Burma on what became known as Stilwell's walkout.

And they literally walked through the jungles. He didn't jungle. He didn't lose anyone, to be fair. And he walked all the way into India. And that became a very heroic act that was rightly praised. But what was rather covered over was that there were an awful lot of other troops left behind. And when some of them actually got back to China, Chiang Kai-shek in his diary basically what records was the effect of what the hell does this guy think he's doing? He takes my troops, takes his own troops, he takes my troops, he throws them away in this useless battle instead of preserving them for the later war. And from that very unhappy beginning, and again, it's fascinating and sometimes kind of in the most black way possible,

hilarious to see how Stilwell's diary and Chiang Kai-shek's diary, and they both keep day by day accounts of what they're doing, are completely at odds with Stilwell cursing the peanut, as he calls him, because of his shaven bald head, Chiang Kai-shek, as this idiot who doesn't know about warfare.

You know, this is the guy who won the Northern Expedition, which reunified China in the 20s, but never mind. And Chiang Kai-shek basically saying this guy is a kind of an idiot, obviously some kind of reject the Americans didn't want at home. And the two are clearly not having a meeting of minds in any sense by the spring of 1942. Well, Ronnie, you've got a brilliant quotation from Chiang's diary in your book. I saw Stilwell today. He disgusts me. I despise him. I've never met anyone like that. So clearly, it's not going well. Not the greatest endorsement I've ever seen, I have to say. No, the two just mutually despised each other for the next three years, basically. So the Americans, they're obviously fighting in

Europe. That's the prime theatre, but also in the Pacific. China is very much a kind of tertiary theatre for them. And we talked earlier about how in this period, it's still very, very grinding for Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists. And actually, what is it? It's Operation Ichigo, is it? Ichigo, yes, which means number one in Japanese. So Operation Number One. In 1944. And that is a kind of massive punch to the vitals of China. It's kind of going right into the depths of central China.

And you talked about how this is almost catastrophic and how basically it's the end of the war that saves it. So during this period, is there any thought on the part of the Americans that they might kind of switch horses and perhaps start checking out the communists? Or are they always going to stick with Chiang Kai-shek because communism is kind of so beyond the pale? The middle period of China's war against Japan is sometimes characterized as a stalemate. And I think that's actually not entirely satisfactory

because although you don't get huge movements on the battlefields during that time, a lot of things happen which change the political and military weather in a big way. We mentioned briefly earlier on the horrific Henan province famine in 1942-43, which on its own kills something like 4 million people

out in the countryside. And that's just one set of events. During that time also, partly for reasons such as poor government response to the famine, you get a much bigger growth in the communist movement, which is out in the countryside at this point. So this is the time at which the communist movement is centralizing. It's becoming much more ideological. Mao in his base area up in Yan'an in northwest China is carrying out what are known as the rectification movements, which are basically getting people to think ideologically correctly.

So this is a kind of precursor to the Cultural Revolution. Essentially, you can see a very clear intellectual line between the 1940s, 1960s, that's correct. But what it also means in terms of the war is that essentially also the resources of the nationalist government are getting slowly but surely ground away. As they try and keep the war going, they are basically, originally they didn't conscript people. They actually kind of had people called up by lottery and other means. But by the middle of the war, they're basically just going out and grabbing people, roping them up, and then taking them away to serve in provinces in the army outside their home areas

so that they don't run away back home when the ropes are cut off. I mean, this sort of thing is just going on all the time. And as a result, the morale in the nationalist area becomes lower and lower, whereas at least in the communist areas, there's much more of a feeling of confidence. So by 1944, as we said earlier in the conversation, with Operation Ichigo, this massive thrust into the center of China, this last desperate attempt by the Japanese in mid-1944, you also have a clear sense on the part of the Americans, it's very clear from their intelligence communications, that they think the whole show is going to collapse.

You know, they think that by 1944-45, the nationalist government may not be long for this world. It's going to break up. So they start looking all sorts of places for who else might take over. And they think about other Kuomintang generals other than Chiang Kai-shek, who might be credible. There's even rumors of an assassination attempt, one of which Stilwell might possibly be aware of. We're not entirely sure. You know, again, another reason for Chiang Kai-shek not to be terribly keen on the guy. Or possibly some of the generals down in the southwest of China who are a bit more autonomous. But one area where the Americans not only looked, but actually stepped across the line

was the communist zone, particularly the base area in Shanxi province in northwest China, in the city of Yan'an or small town of Yan'an, I should say, where the communists lived in caves and were essentially creating a rural revolution. Very much not a party town, I think you quote somebody saying. Well, one type of party, but not the other. I think it's actually, no, no, no, Tom, let's get the quote right. Not a sexy town. Not a sexy town.

Yeah. I think that was to do with the fact that at one point, I think there were eight men for every one woman in Yan'an. And most of the women, I think, ended up. Wouldn't have been a problem for the Spartans. That's all I'm saying. We'll do that podcast another time. No doubt. But to get back to the Americans. So essentially, by 1944, there is a group of people, some of whom are people essentially disgusted by what they see as the corruption and the black marketeering that's really ripping apart the nationalist government by this stage. All of which is true, but nonetheless has to be

understood as part of the continuing disintegration that comes from trying to keep the war machine going. And they think, well, look, how bad can the communists be? And there's a sort of narrative going around at this point that the Chinese communists, they're not really communists, they're more like agrarian social reformers. Bearing in mind, as you know, people will know that the American vice president at this time was Henry Wallace, who actually not Harry Truman, who didn't come until a bit later. Henry Wallace was not a communist, but he knew an awful lot of people who were inclined in that direction. And there was a sort of tone in the US government at that time, which had at least people who were willing to hear a Soviet influence story, not least because it was about defeating the Nazis. And that was quite understandable in some ways. So basically, there was a sort of

confluence of interest in finding out more about the Chinese communists. And a couple of American officers, David Barrett and John Service, were sent on what became known as the Dixie Mission, as an analogy with Northern Union soldiers going behind Dixie lines in the American Civil War to go and meet the communists. And the communists, who knew very well what was going on, you know, were on their best behavior. They got Mao out. They got Trudeau and some of these kind of key warriors. Tractor factories, happy peasants, all that kind of thing. Happy peasants, all that sort of thing. I mean, even the Americans who, you know, were quite willing to believe what they saw,

did put on those things saying, like, we do think there's an air of artificiality about some of the stories being told. But overall, these guys seem to be seem to be impressive. What they didn't see was the activity of Kangsheng, the Moscow trained security czar, who had learned most of what he had learned from I think, I think it was Beria or Yagoda, one of the kind of really nasty Stalinist torturers in Moscow. And Kang Shung used to ride around Yan'an on a black horse, literally, you know, wearing black. I mean, you know, symbolism, if you like. He wasn't sort of riding around so much when the Americans were in town.

They kept him in the stables. But the idea that maybe these were people that the Americans could do business with suited both sides. The Americans, in case they needed a kind of fallbackback if the nation has basically collapsed in a cloud of smoke, and the communists, because of course, at that stage, while they were, of course, being heavily backed by Stalin, wanted to keep as many options open as possible and wouldn't have been averse to American money, American supplies, American weaponry coming their way. And you quote Roosevelt's last ambassador to China, who went in late 1944, a guy called Patrick Hurley,

who apparently called Mount Tietung moose dung. And he called Chiang Kai-shek Mr. Shek, which I can tell you now is not the correct way to put it down. He was an Oklahoman, and he was also, he claimed to have some part Choctaw native American blood in him and was given to giving these sort of yee-haw type calls on kind of random occasions, which I think rather startled Mao and some of his fellow communists. That's the best yee-haw we've had in the history of this podcast,

Rana. I mean, Tom essayed one about 100 episodes ago, but his heart wasn't in it as yours was there. Was that the one about the Reformation, Tom? Yeah, probably. I can't even remember. I'm blanking from my memory. So, Ron, just on this issue, are the Americans completely deluding themselves, do you think? Or do you think, you know, you said the communists want to keep options open. Do you think, let's imagine that the war goes on a little bit longer, there's no atom bomb. Is it plausible to imagine a world in which, you know, the Chinese Communist Party becomes a, I mean, a client of the United States is too strong, but in which there's a closer association

that actually endures. Well, actually, that world is imaginable, because essentially, it's what happened during that brief period between the Nixon visit of 1972, and probably the mid to late 1980s, when essentially, communist China actually was a tacit ally of the of the united states although that uh that changed and if i'm not a cross reference for a moment listeners who interested in that could check out free on bbc sounds my radio documentary the great war which is about that period interviewing some of the american and chinese players of that uh period oh that was masterful that was masterfully done we've never heard of it never heard of it but to

get back to the world war ii period i think two things are true at the same time. I don't actually think that the Americans were deluded because at that point, it was very difficult to tell. I mean, they weren't really in a position to be able to investigate in great detail what was happening behind the scenes in the communist areas. They spent quite a while there,

but of course they were still under the care of their minders. But what I think research had, you know, the debate has gone back and forth about, you know, was there a, it's something called the lost chance in China. Could the Americans essentially have actually picked up that opportunity and made more of it? I think historical consensus these days is the answer is no. And the reason for that, in the end, is that Mao and his communists were true believers and while they were not slavish followers of Stalin's line by any means not least because Stalin got into lots of trouble during the revolutionary years and had not always given the best advice in the end the

reason that they had done what they did gone on this thousands of miles of the long march you know lived under these appalling conditions in danger of being arrested and tortured and executed, as many communists were, was not because they were sort of social Democrats in disguise. It's because they were ideological revolutionaries who believed that China did not need reform. It needed a total overturning of the inequalities in society. Policies like the rather blandly named land reform, which meant both seizure and redistribution of land and the killing of many of the landlords who actually owned that land. Those sorts of policies became at the heart of the revolution that the communists were looking to put forward. I don't think in the end those

policies were particularly negotiable. And I don't think if they'd known about them, the Americans could really have taken them on board. So I don't think that lost chance was real. So Rana, we're coming to the summer of 1945 and the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan. We've talked about the state of Chiang Kai-shek, his acrimonious relationship with the Americans and leading government that is exhausted in every way. The communists to the north are in a much better shape. There's a third person, however, who we've been following, whose fortune has been following, and that's Wang Jingwei, who is, you've described him as the Laval, the Kiesling of China. So he has been running this kind of collaborationist regime,

but he is dead by this point, isn't he? So what's happened to him and what is the state of the kind of collaborationist Chinese regime as the end of the war approaches? Yes, Wang Jingwei had the great good fortune from his point of view to die early. He essentially developed cancer and died in the Nagoya University Hospital in 1944, so a year before the war actually ended. And his place as leader of the collaborationist regime in Nanjing, what was technically called the reorganized nationalist government, was taken by a man, his successor called Chen Gongbo. Just one note on that title, by the way, because it provides one of the finer moments of irony during the war. One thing that's different about Wang Jingwei's collaborationist regime compared to the Laval-Pétain French regime, the Vichy regime, is that Vichy and also the État français, the kind of successor state in occupied France,

always declared that they were a rejection of the French Third Republic, which had existed beforehand in this terrible bourgeois politics. Let's get rid of it as something new. Wang Jingwei never claimed that. He did almost the opposite. He said, I am the true heir of the Republic of China. It's this terrible Chiang Kai-shek who's gone off, you know, hanging out with the Americans and the Soviets and God knows what else. So he's the heir of Sun Yat-sen and all that. So he's the heir of Sun Yat-sen in that sense. And therefore, he comes back and restores the regime.

That meant that when there were battles in China between the Chiang Kai-shek nationalists and the Wang Jingwei nationalists, they were both wearing the same uniform. They've even got the same flag, haven't they? Well, the Japanese pointed out that this was, you know, to use a technical term, completely sort of cuckoo. So eventually, but one of the very few things Wang Jingwei refused to see, you know, they said, you've got to have a different flag, different uniform. He said, no, you know, I must be here as the restoration of the nationalist government. So the compromise they came up with was a little sort of pennant and flag that existed on the uniforms that was essentially the same as the restoration of the nationalist government. So the compromise they came up with was a little sort of pennant and flag that existed on the uniforms that was essentially the same as the existing one, but with a slight variation and a slogan on it. I still think in the heat of battle,

it would have been very difficult to tell exactly who was on which side, considering they look very, very similar. But essentially, by the end of the collaboration period, the whole regime was beginning to crumble in various ways. At the local level, it sort of carried on, but there wasn't really any very strong sense of ideological attachment to the Wang Jiuwei regime. And within it, there was one thing going on that basically undermined much of its premise, which was that one of the senior officials, Zhou Fuhai, you know, number two, number three in the regime, let's say, had opened up channels of communication with Chiang Kai-shek secretly halfway through

the war. He basically was trying to sort of play both ends against each other. But he was basically sending back huge amounts of intelligence information about what was happening in Wangji, West China, to Chongqing, to the nationalist government, and essentially therefore got off, you know, after the war, he was tried for collaboration, but given the lighter sentence because he'd been of assistance to the regime. So essentially, although the regime didn't actually collapse as such, the collaborationist regime, it came to an end pretty much instantly when in August 1945, you have first, of course, the Soviet invasion

of Manchuria, and then the atomic bombings of Japan, which together bring the war to a very abrupt close in the summer of 45. So in your book, you say about the process of the war, that Chinese society became more militarized, categorized and bureaucratized when governments struggled to keep some kind of order in the midst of chaos. So clearly, when we look at China today, and the history of China since the Second World War, is there a case for saying, well, I guess there absolutely is, because that's what you're saying, that the roots of much that we associate with the communist regime in China emerges almost as a kind of inevitability from the war, because it was the only way that both the communists and the nationalists could actually keep the show on the road by kind of imposing this much, much more kind

of oppressive system of government. We've dabbled a little bit in the earlier episode of this podcast with Marxism, but I will, you know, say that historical inevitability is one of those things I'm always a little bit wary about. You know, there almost always are different pathways. But having said that, I'll give you a story that is often attributed to Mao Zedong, although infuriatingly, no one I know has ever been able to actually authenticate it. But it's so good that I'll give it to you anyway. Which is that when Mr. Tanaka, the Prime Minister of Japan in the early 70s, visited Beijing at the reopening of Japan-China diplomatic relations, which were sort of kept on a very low level through much of the Cold War.

And Tanaka, who had been a quite young soldier in China during World War II, apologized to Mao saying, you know, he was very sorry that Japan had invaded China. And Mao was supposed to reply, oh, Mr. Tanaka, don't worry about that. If you Japanese hadn't invaded China, we communists would never have come to power. Now, as I say, it's such a good story that it's a shame that there's no actual attribution to it.

But the wider point is, I think, actually something that is quite valid. Because had it not been for the utter devastation that the Second World War visited on China, those millions of deaths, and again, it's very hard to get exact figures, but figures that say 8, 14 million, you know, if you count certainly famine deaths, and I would do the deaths from the flooding. These sorts of figures combined with 80 to 100 million refugees, and it's a destruction of the infrastructure meant that the fate of China, yes, that probably is inevitable, was always going to be different after an event like that. I don't think, having said that, Tom, that the end of World War II, 1945, was the moment of

inevitability. I think that probably came a couple of years later during the Civil War, when the communists and the nationalists basically turned on each other, subject to my current project, and maybe we'll talk about that one of these days. But I think at the beginning of that time, there was enough goodwill, certainly amongst some of the middle class, had the nationalists played their hands better in the immediate aftermath of the war, to perhaps try and create some sort of coalition, some sort of compromise that could have lasted for a while, even though I think ultimately, both nationalists and communists, even during the war against Japan, had one ultimate goal, which was seizure of complete power across China. But the Civil War essentially made that very difficult to achieve.

And this is a huge question. And as you say, it opens up a whole new episode. But just very briefly, do you think the nationalists could have won or was their state of exhaustion so much greater than the communists that they were doomed? I think there was a small but real chance that by, as later say, mid-1946, that, in other words, about the very first months of the full civil war, that the nationalists could have found a way to win. But it might have involved ideas such as, for instance, trying to divide up China, essentially clamping down massively on the corruption and morale loss that was taking place in their armies, finding ways,

perhaps, even though the communists, I think, were not being particularly sincere in their negotiations, to genuinely to put forward a coalition government. There was a Chinese parliament that was elected actually in 1946-47 under the new constitution. It actually sat on Taiwan until 1991, because of course, having been elected, it was never de-elected when they all fled to the island. Those ventures all provided possibilities, slim ones, but possible ones for a kind of deal which the Americans, because George Marshall, you know, we mentioned the kind of great figure of World War II, spent the whole of 1946 sitting in China trying to get the communists and nationalists to talk to each other. And eventually

he kind of threw up his hands and went home. Those elements put together in a slightly different way might have created probably not peace harmony liberal democracy forever and ever but something potentially more stable for at least a certain number of years but as we know you know that was not what happened in the end it was a fight to the death the communists won the nationalists lost can i ask a quick question about the memory of the war because the the war that the bits of the second world war that it's obviously most reminiscent of is what russians call the great patriotic war because the war that the bits of the Second World War that it's obviously most reminiscent of is what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Fighting off an aggressor, you know, resilience against the odds, horrendous casualties, appalling atrocities.

I mean, that's the obvious parallel. Does the Second World War, the Sino-Japanese War, does it have the same kind of traction in the Chinese imagination today that the Second World War obviously does in Vladimir Putin's Russia? So I would say that there is one major similarity, Dominic, and one really fundamental difference in the memory of the Second World War in China and in the Soviet Union. The similarity is in the all-embracing pervasiveness of it. In Russia, I mean, you know, essentially the current horrific invasion of Ukraine is being put in terms of Nazis, World War II analogies, and all sorts of things, historically entirely inaccurate, but playing on tropes that clearly have huge amounts of resonance in Russia. And if you go to China today, again, it's often surprised people. I don't know, British listeners, you know, the only thing I have to mention, if we're going to make it clear that 75, 76 years on, Britain's still a country that has World War Two in its bones is to ask why is dad's army still know where to look. It's on television with endless TV dramas.

It's on movies like The 800, which I mentioned earlier about nationalist soldiers. When politicians speak about things that have brought China together, Xi Jinping talks about World War II is important to us, the war of resistance against Japan, but the global war as well, because he said it was the first time that China was invaded in the modern era by an enemy which was able to fight back, resist and win. And that's one of the kind of resonances it has. But let me just add that one major difference. And I think this is really important. Although it goes in ups and downs,

the Soviet popular memory of World War II was a constant all the way from 1945 up to the present day, because of course, the whole nation had come together through the Red Army and fought back, except for collaboration in Baltic states and various other places, too, that, you know, make the Soviet story a bit more complex in certain ways. But, of course, when Mao won the civil war against the nationalists in 1949, defeating Chiang Kai-shek, sending him to Taiwan, whence he would never return, the one thing that Chinese propaganda could not do in the mainland for years and years was give any sort of positive mention to Chiang Kai-shek at all. And all the things that we've

been discussing over these last two podcast episodes, you know, the attack or the valiant fighting in Shanghai, the negotiations with the Americans, the Stilwell battles, all of these happened, of course, with nationalist soldiers, not with communist soldiers who actually undertook lots of guerrilla warfare, but never actually did the kind of big set piece battles, with one exception, the 100 Regiments campaign under Peng Dehuai in 1940. And that meant that through the whole of Mao's years, the only part of the story that was told was really about communist resistance to the Japanese, which was important, but a relatively limited part of the story. And it wasn't until the 80s, years after the war was over, that things like overtures to Taiwan and a kind of weariness with cultural revolution ideology and a desire for a broader patriotism

meant that the national story was brought back in to the story of China's World War II resistance. And I might just finish that thought, if I may, with perhaps the single most symbolic moment of that. And that happened in 2015 in Tiananmen Square, a fated place, famous not least because of the horrific massacre of students and workers in 1989. But in 2015, on the 3rd of September, it was used for a different purpose, which was a huge parade commemorating China's VJ Day,

the end of World War II plus 70. Very unusual to have a big parade in Tiananmen Square that was related neither to the Communist Party nor the history of the PRC. The only occasion that it's been linked to a historical event that's not specifically about those. And there were lots of tanks and lots of uniforms and lots of marching soldiers and Xi Jinping,

you know, waving to everyone. That was clear. What was less noticed, but I thought perhaps the most impressive part in some ways, was the presentation in the middle of a set of veterans, aged I think between about 90 and 102 at that stage. And some of the veterans, about half were from the old communist armies and half from the old nationalist armies. And they were presented in the most public place in the whole of China, Tiananmen Square, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party and President

of China. And that was the moment at which I think the reconciliation between these rival memories of who had been fighting World War II in China, at least for a moment, at least temporarily, found a resting place, a meeting place in terms of a shared historical memory. Well, Rana, you talked about memory. I think it's absolutely the case that here in the West, our memories, if we have any memories at all of China's agony in the Second World War, is very, very kind of bleary. So I can't thank you enough for having illuminated in the way you have over the past two episodes. Your book, China's War with Japan, is an absolute definitive masterly account of it. And I thought i would end i mean it's a bit of a cheat but i'm going to read the very last couple of sentences in your book because i think

it's a perfect way to to end this podcast as well both the nationalists and communists did fight a fate that they had never sought and in acknowledging their suffering their resistance and the terrible choices they were forced to make we in the West also do greater honour to our own collective memories and understandings of the Second World War. Thanks very much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Goodbye.

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