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.In the 1930s, Chinese political leaders had to maneuver in a regional and global context that threatened to overwhelm their every effort.Sino-Japanese relations explain much of the dynamics of East Asia’s twentieth century.In 1972, when the first Japanese delegation visited China since the war, Prime Minister Tanaka apologized for Japan’s invasion of China.Mao is said to have responded that the CCP would never have come to power without the296War and revolution, 1937–49invasion.Or so the story goes.1 Certainly, the Japanese gravely weakened the GMD, decimating conservative forces and fostering popular nationalism, which the CCP was able to tap.Even before the outbreak of war, the Japanese military presence in North China led to the Second United Front, thereby saving the CCP from obliteration (conversely, though, the United Front heightened Japanese fears of the Chinese and intensified Japanese militarism).Indeed, Mao might also have pointed out that not merely the future of the CCP was shaped by Japan.Throughout the 1920s, Japanese imperialism in China drove both Chinese and Japanese domestic politics, eventually resulting in the devastation of both countries that was the product of Japan’s aggressive military expansion across China and then Asia.As we have seen, Chiang Kai-shek’s inability to come to grips with the expanding Japanese domination of the northeast left him open to criticism throughout the Nanjing decade and made the task of creating a strong and legitimate state nearly impossible.To understand the 1930s and 1940s in China, it is thus necessary to come to grips with the sources of Japanese imperialism.The invasion is a clear example of several broader issues.It is a good example of factors “contingent” to China’s domestic politics, yet the larger international context was ultimately inseparable from internal events.If the Japanese invasion ultimately assisted the Communist Revolution, so too the fear of communism had contributed to the decisions made in Tokyo and Xinjing (Changchun), the capital of Japan’s Manchukuo.2 Although the Japanese justified their militant imperialism in terms of the Communist threat, Japan’s actions in the 1930s were also a product of global economic and political trends, including the world depression and the rise of the Axis powers in Europe, and American isolationism.Japan defeated many of Chiang’s best forces and the Nationalist regime decayed under wartime circumstances.After attacking Pearl Harbor, British Malaya, Hong Kong (and Shanghai’s previously protected International Settlement) in December 1941, Japan humiliated Western forces throughout East and Southeast Asia, creating a vast but short-lived empire, and ultimately contributing to post-war national independence struggles.During the war, the CCP grew to 1.2 million members and the Communist armies grew to almost a million soldiers.China, including both GMD and Communist forces, lost every major battle against Japan in the course of the war.If Japan was ultimately defeated by the United States, China’s contributions – and sacrifices – were large.China, which to some degree had been fighting Japan for fifteen years from the time of the Manchurian Incident of 1931, tied down two-fifths of Japan’s forces.And while Japan enjoyed a high degree of success in pacifying the areas that it conquered all across East and Southeast Asia, continued Chinese resistance sapped Japanese strength.Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, Chiang Kai-shek rebuilt his dictatorship; the revivified Nanjing government could finally claim real national sovereignty.Extraterritoriality was abolished in 1943; Chiang used the war toWar and revolution, 1937–49297push Soviet forces out of Xinjiang (though China recognized Outer Mongolian independence under Soviet auspices); China recovered Taiwan and Manchuria from Japan, and the United States continued to back the GMD government.China became a founding member of the United Nations with its own Security Council seat in 1945, though it was still a desperately poor nation with little international influence.Yet if China – and the Nationalist government – won the war, the Nationalists also seem in a sense to have lost it, so quickly did the subsequent civil war turn against them.They faced a Communist movement far stronger than it had been at the start of the war [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]