Taiwan and China are staging a series of activities to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
Since its establishment in 1949 after winning the Chinese Civil War, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has inflated the role of Communist forces in resisting Japanese aggression, while minimizing the role of the Republic of China Nationalist government forces.
It was not until 2005 that the PRC even acknowledged the role played by the Nationalists in the war, when then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) said the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces both contributed to victory over Japan by fighting the enemy on and behind the front lines respectively.
The PRC’s campaign to control the narrative of the war signals just another area in which Taiwan and China compete. After the KMT lost the Chinese Civil War, the Republic of China (ROC) was moved to Taiwan and remains Taiwan’s official name today.
In its activities commemorating the war of resistance against Japan, the KMT has emphasized the significant role played by government forces against the Japanese and in supporting Allied forces in World War II.
The PRC’s standard propaganda for both domestic and foreign consumption has been that the Communist forces were “the tower of strength” against Japan’s invasion.
Late National Taiwan University professor Lee Shou-kung said the reality was far different.
The CCP adopted a strategy of spending only 10 percent of its strength to fight the Japanese, 20 percent on its compromise with the Nationalists and most importantly, 70 percent expanding its reach, Lee said in the historian’s Chinese-language book A Contemporary History of China.
At the opening of two photo exhibits on the war in Taipei earlier this month, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said it was undeniable that the ROC government and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) led China to victory against Japan.
The CCP did join forces with the government, “but only to a very limited degree,” Ma said.
Nationalist forces successfully kept 800,000 Japanese soldiers occupied in battlefields across China, preventing Japan from throwing its forces into the Pacific and other areas, such as India and Australia.
Former premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), a four-star general, rejects Beijing’s claim that the CCP and KMT forces were both major resistors of Japan’s invasion, saying the comparison “is simply unfair.”
“There’s no doubt that the front line battles [fought by the Nationalist forces] were decisive, while battles behind enemy lines were supportive,” with the ratio contributed by the two to the war about 95 percent to 5 percent, said the 95-year-old Hau, who was a low-level officer in the Nationalist forces during the war.
He accused Beijing of intentionally “distorting or covering up the history of the war.”
The Hong Kong-based Chinese-language Yazhou Zhoukan said in the cover story of its latest issue that Beijing’s insistence that Communist forces played the major role and Nationalist forces a supplemental role in the war against Japan contradicted historical facts.
National Chengchi University history professor Liu Wei-kai (劉維開) said Beijing’s narrative of the war has not changed over the past 10 years, and that even Hu said Communist forces had turned the behind-the-lines battleground into a major field of combat.
However, Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History research fellow Chang Li (張力) said some academics in China have embraced different views from “Beijing’s official and simplified stances.”
He cited Yang Tianshi (楊天石) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as saying that there was not only one “tower of strength “ during the war, as Chongqing, then the temporary capital of the ROC government, was another.
When touring a museum on the war in Sichuan Province, Chang heard a visitor questioning the Communists’ role in the war by saying “they [the Communists] had just fought two battles. How could they have made a decisive contribution to China’s victory in the war?” Chang said.
The two battles, according to Chang, referred to the Battle of Pingxingguan in Shanxi from Sept. 3 to Oct. 2 in 1937 and the Hundred Regiments Offensive in central China from August 1940 to January 1941, which are commonly recognized as the only two major battles in which Communist forces fought.
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