Veteran Pan Cheng-fa said he clearly remembers fighting for China against the Japanese in World War II, but gets agitated when asked about the role of Chinese communist forces who at the time were in an uneasy alliance with his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government.
“We gave them weapons, equipment — we strengthened them,” Pan, 99, said at an event in Taipei to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
As China gears up for a mass military parade in Beijing on Wednesday to mark the war’s end, Taiwan — whose formal name remains the Republic of China (ROC) — and the People’s Republic of China are locked in an increasingly bitter war of words about historical narrative and who should really be claiming credit for the victory.
Photo: AFP
Fighting in China began in earnest in 1937 with the full-scale Japanese invasion and continued until the surrender of Japan in 1945, when Taiwan was handed over to the ROC after decades of Japanese rule.
“After Japan was taken down, [the Chinese communists’] next target was the Republic of China,” Pan added, referring to the resumption of the Chinese Civil War which led to the victory of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) forces and flight of the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949.
China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often reminds people of its struggle against the Japanese, but a lot of the fighting was done by the forces of former president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Nationalist government, and it was the ROC who signed the peace agreement as one of the allied nations.
“During the Republic of China’s war of resistance against Japan, the People’s Republic of China did not even exist, but the Chinese communist regime has in recent years repeatedly distorted the facts, claiming it was the [Chinese] Communist Party who led the war of resistance,” Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said on Aug. 15, the Japanese surrender anniversary.
The council said the communists’ strategy at the time was “70 percent about strengthening themselves, 20 percent dealing with the Nationalist government and 10 percent about opposing Japan,” repeating an old wartime accusation against Mao the CCP has denied.
Taiwan’s anniversary events are much more low key, and do not mention the role of the Chinese communists apart from to lambast them.
A Ministry of National Defense concert last week in Taipei featured performers dressed as World War II-era republican soldiers, images of the Flying Tigers — volunteer US pilots who flew for the republican Chinese air force — and rap by Taiwanese hip-hop band Nine One One (玖壹壹).
“History affirms that the War of Resistance [Second Sino-Japanese War] was led and won by the Republic of China,” the ministry said.
China has hit back at what it sees as misrepresentation of the CCP’s role.
The CCP’s official People’s Daily last week wrote in an online commentary that vigilance was needed against efforts to “distort and falsify the Chinese Communist Party’s role as the country’s backbone” in fighting Japan.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Wednesday said that Taiwan was “blaspheming” the sacrifices of those who died fighting Japan in World War II by denying the pivotal role of the CCP.
China said the victory belongs to all Chinese, including “those in Taiwan,” and is also celebrating that the war’s end in 1945 led to Taiwan — a Japanese colony from 1895 — being “returned” to Chinese rule as part of the peace agreement.
Taiwan said nothing in any agreements talked about handing over Taiwan to the CCP-run PRC, which was only founded in late 1949.
President William Lai (賴清德) marked the surrender anniversary of Aug. 15 with a Facebook post saying aggression would be defeated, in a pointed reference to Beijing’s military threats against the nation.
The PRC said it is the successor state to the ROC and that Taiwan is an inherent part of Beijing’s territory, a view Taipei vehemently opposes.
The government has urged its people not to attend China’s military parade, warning against reinforcing Beijing’s territorial claims and backing its version of what the anniversary means.
Pan, who said family members left behind after the Chinese Civil War were brutalized while he escaped to Taiwan, sees Beijing’s parade as having nothing to do with him.
“I can’t say anything good about the Chinese communists,” he said.
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