Mon, Sep 22, 2025 page8

• John J. Tkacik, Jr. On Taiwan: Chairman Xi’s Victory over Japan

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  It was most annoying last week to read Chairman Xi Jinping’s (習近平) fulsome encomium to the People’s Liberation Army during the Eightieth Anniversary celebrations of victory over Japan in World War II. Comrade Xi’s soaring rhetoric was stuffed with “martyrs, sacrifice, solemnity and unwavering resolve” in praise of the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.” His aspirations overflowed with “world peace” and love of the United Nations, of which China is a founding member.

  The Liberation Army Daily said that every word from General Secretary Xi Jinping “resounded in his powerful voice, illuminating the rich significance of this great victory with a broad historical perspective: Under the banner of the Anti-Japanese National United Front advocated and established by the Communist Party of China, the Chinese people fought powerful enemies with unwavering resolve and built the Great Wall with their flesh and blood, achieving the first complete victory against foreign invasion in modern times.”

  It was somewhat true, I suppose, except for one thing: The Chinese Communist Party had nothing to do with the “Victory” over Japan.

  

  In neither the Pacific Theater, where the US bore virtually the entire weight of battle, nor in China itself did the Chinese Communists contribute anything worthwhile. Quite the opposite. The Chinese Communist Party worked tirelessly to undermine the National Government’s war effort. Meanwhile, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) did all the heavy lifting against the invaders.

  Here, I will engage in some revisionist history myself. The conventional view among American academics of Chiang Kai-shek’s war effort is that he was useless against Japan and that he was a venal and corrupt man himself. Something more akin to fact is that Chiang was a very effective leader. His recent biographers, Jay Taylor and Jonathan Fenby for example, have read the contemporaneous documents — both US and British, as well as the Chiang family diaries — and have come away persuaded that the “Gimo” contributed substantially to the anti-Japanese war, was a serious strategist and a genuine Chinese patriot.

  I myself managed to rifle through the American records of the Cairo “Sextant” conference in November 1943. It was clear from the verbatim give-and-take throughout “Sextant” that President Roosevelt valued Chiang’s contributions. Chiang’s National Government troops were already engaged in North Burma, but the sad fact was that the United States was unable to supply the campaigns that Roosevelt envisioned. Moreover, Chiang insisted that any National Government campaign into Burma had to be augmented by a British amphibious landing in Western Burma. Churchill was openly dismissive. He had no intention of supporting a joint Sino-American campaign in Burma while the British Empire was pouring all its treasure into the European Theatre of Operations.

  As far as Taiwan was concerned, at least the trilateral US-UK-China “Cairo Communique” of December 1, 1943, agreed that Japanese territories “stolen from China” (including “Formosa” and “Manchuria”) would be “restored to the Republic of China” — and not to any other “China” that happened to survive the peace. The fact is that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists stalemated the Japanese on the China Mainland while the United States offensive plowed at full-steam across the Pacific against the Japanese homelands.

  Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party literally had nothing to do with the defeat of Japan. Admittedly, as Comrade Xi said, “the banner of the Anti-Japanese National United Front was advocated and established by the Communist Party of China.” Communists are experts at “advocating” and “establishing.” From 1937 on, China’s Nationalist Armies fought the Japanese, while the Chinese Communists in remote north central China kept their heads down and respectfully declined to engage. This is not surprising. The CCP had limited resources and manpower. Their oppressive taxation and class struggles did not universally endear them to the broad masses. And in general, Chinese populations in the Japanese occupied areas were just as likely to join the Japanese “puppet” armies as sign-up with the Communists.

  Communist Party historian Liao Gailong (廖蓋隆) records that the Soviet representative in Yan’an, a fellow named “Peter Vladimirov” (who had the nom de guerre “Song Ping” [孫平]) “viciously attacked the Chinese Communist Party in his ‘Yan’an Diary’ for timidity during the Anti-Japanese War, of engaging in guerrilla ‘maneuvers’ but never attacking.” This was understandable. Liao explains that the Communists considered the period from 1938 on to be “the strategic defensive stage of the War Against Japan.”

  Liao says that Stalin had scant regard for the Chinese Communists as a warfighting force: “When the Soviets began to feel the threat from Japan from the East, around the time of the Xi’an Incident (December 1936); They attached importance to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang: they thought that only he had any strength, and they basically looked down on the Communist Party of China. Regarding this point, Vasily Chuikov, who served as an adviser to the Kuomintang army during the Anti-Japanese War, made it very clear in his memoirs. According to his records, Stalin told Chuikov that if China wanted to resist Japan, it would mainly rely on the Kuomintang, and that the Communist Party had no strength at all.”

  Liao admits that Chiang Kai-shek actually DID fight the Japanese. “However, when the Anti-Japanese War entered the strategic phase in 1939, the Kuomintang adopted the policy of vigorously resisting Japan and actively opposing the Communist Party. After the Japanese invaders gradually began to use their main forces against us, and caught us in a pincers movement between both the Japanese and Chiang’s forces, we of course encountered extreme difficulties.”

  The only real Chinese Communist offensive against the Japanese in the entire 1936-1945 “war of resistance” was the so-called “Hundred Regiments Campaign” (百團戰役) led by Eighth Route Army general (and Korean War commander) Peng Dehuai (彭德懷) from Aug. 20, 1940, through January 1941. For a few months, the Chinese Communists were able to disrupt Japanese Army communications in North China from Taiyuan (太原) to Shijiazhuang (石家莊). Both General Peng and his colleague General Nie Rongzhen (聶榮臻) adjudged the campaign a military success, except that “we suffered heavy casualties” and, alas, accomplished nothing permanent. Their after-action assessment was that the brutal Japanese counter-attacks (known as the “Three Alls” for “burn all, kill all, loot all”) left the invaders in a stronger strategic position in North China. Worse, from a “strategic” point of view, the campaign revealed the communist Eighth Route Army’s strength to both the Japanese and to the Nationalists. Liao Gailong’s historical study says: “In 1941 and 1942, the number of people’s anti-Japanese forces shrank.” General Huang Kecheng (黃克誠) revealed in 1978 that the Eighth Route guerrillas lost 22,000 in the campaign, as against 4,000-6,000 Japanese and “puppet” forces.

  At this point, the CCP decided to adopt a strategy of “restrained struggle” (有節的鬥爭), of forgetting the Japanese and instead to build up against Chiang Kai-shek “to prepare for the opportunity”, i.e. the civil war. Indeed, the only other major action the communist armies saw in World War II was in January 1941 against the National Army as Mao’s “New Fourth Army” attempted to infiltrate into Nationalist territory in Anhui province and was wiped out by Chiang’s forces. No more “reckless fighting” for Mao. Colonel David Barrett, the US Army Observer Group chief in Yan’an from 1944-1945, recalls no military actions at all during his tenure. A US Army doctor did witness one communist attack on a village with one casualty. While the Communists facilitated weather reporting and mapmaking, only one downed US pilot was ever rescued by the communists.

  I do not suggest that Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) communist armies were incompetent or lacked courage during the Anti-Japanese War. But Chairman Xi should at least face the facts of history. His “Communist Party Banner” during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was not anti-Japanese at all. It was anti-China.

  John J. Tkacik, Jr. is a retired US foreign service officer who has served in Taipei and Beijing and is now director of the Future Asia Project at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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