Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

254 A History of East Asia

Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). The still-classic study of China's May Fourth movement is Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 1960).

On the warlord era in China, see Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emer­ gence of Modern Chinese Wilrlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Gavan McCormack, Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China, 1911-1928: China, Japan, and the Manchurian Idea (Stanford University Press, 1977).

For Korea under Japanese rule, see Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton University Press, 1984), and Michael Edson Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920-1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).

On early-twentieth-century Japan, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei and the Pol­ itics of Compromise, 1905-1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); and Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), provides a fascinating collection of essays on the modern reimagination of Japanese tradition.

9 The Darl' Valley (1930-1945)

The first great wave of modern globalization (which, because of the industrialized

West's initial leading role in defining global modernity, in this early phase some­

times overlapped fairly closely with what might even be described as Westerniza­

tion) had begun in the late nineteenth century and, in East Asia, culminated in the

1910s-1920s with China's May Fourth Movement and Japan's Taish6 democracy.

Because Korea was a Japanese colony during these years, developments in Korea

took the slightly different form of combined simultaneous modernization, West­

ernization, and Japanese-ization. The high tide of globalization receded rapidly

after the disastrous collapse of the U.S. stock market in 1929, however. By the

1930s, the entire world was descending into what some Japanese historians have appropriately dubbed a "dark valley." As a result of the Great Depression, in the

United States, real gross domestic product had declined 35 percent by 1933, a

quarter of American workers were out of work, and there were calls for the newly

inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt to assume dictatorial powers. Even

socialism no longer seemed entirely unthinkable in America. In Germany, the

Weimar Republic gave way to Adolph Hitler. In China, the Nationalist Republic

became an authoritarian single-party state with an increasingly nationalized econ­

omy. In Japan, Taish6 democracy was thrust aside by the rise of ultranationalistic militarism.

Surprisingly, the industrial sector of Japan's economy recovered fairly quickly

from the depths of the Great Depression, due to a sharp devaluation in the exchange

value of the yen (which made the price of Japanese exports globally competitive),

low interest rates, and increased government spending on public works and arma­

ments. The volume of Japanese exports actually doubled between 1930 and 1936.

But as much of the rest of the world responded to the Great Depression by adopt­

ing strict protectionist measures -such as high taxes or outright quotas on imports,

which threatened Japan's ability to continue exporting - the argument began to

resonate that what Japan really needed was to create an economically self-sufficient

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256 A History of East Asia

Figure 9.1. The Japanese battleship Yamato running trials, 1941. It and its sister ship, Musashi, were the largest battleships ever built. National Archives.

yen-bloc that would be independent and under Japan's own control. Manchuria, in particular, came to be viewed as a potential economic "lifeline" for Japan.

The purely economic argument for self-sufficiency was also reinforced by the strategic military lessons of World War I, which seemed to suggest that future

wars would be protracted and total, pitting the entire available resources of one

adversary against another. To prepare for such a total war, it was thought that

Japan needed to build a self-sufficient "National Defense State. " 1 To safeguard

Japan's vital interests, military expenditures accelerated rapidly. In 1934, Japan

departed from the Washington and London naval arms limitation agreements, and

in 1937, Japan began construction of what would become the largest battleships (the Yamato class) in the history ofthe world (see Figure 9.1).

The modern national public school system in Japan promoted ideals of patri­

otic loyalty to the emperor and military valor. 2 Organized state Shinto religion, although it was, as an institution, really only a modern creation of the Meiji era,

nonetheless emphasized the ancient mythology of imperial descent from the sun

goddess Amaterasu, dating from before the dawn of Japanese history. This suppos­

edly divine imperial line was proclaimed to be the core of Japan's unique national

polity (kokutaz), which invested modern Japanese imperialism with a special sense of sacred mission. Exultation of the imperial majesty reached a crescendo in the

late 1930s, when over two million copies of the Ministry of Education's Cardinal

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

Principles of the National Polity were published (beginning in 1937), and it became

required reading in Japanese schools. 3

The sense of a special divine mission also coincided with a romantic idealization

of the remembered "traditional" virtues of village life, and much criticism of alleged

capitalist greed and the corrupt special interests of party politicians. The idea that

Anglo-American-style "selfish" individualism should give way to a more native

Japanese spirit of harmony was emotionally appealing to many people. Rather

than representing a genuine return to premodern tradition, though, much of this

ultranationalist celebration of the "spirit of Japan" was really a new phenomenon.

It was also much encouraged by the modern mass media and modern expectations

of popular mass mobilization. Combined with considerable real rural economic

distress in the early 1930s, these ideas fostered radical plots and conspiracies, and

Japan was wracked by a staggering series ofhigh-level assassinations and attempted

military coups. In 1930, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was shot, and later died of his wounds,

for his role in agreeing to naval arms limitations. Efforts in 1931 by the civilian

government in Tokyo to bring the conflict in Manchuria to a peaceful resolution

proved so unpopular at home that it contributed, together with the onset of the

Great Depression, to bringing down the administration. Despite the fact that the

next prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was relatively hawkish, on May 15, 1932, a

group of naval officers and army cadets burst into his residence and shot him to

death. After the assassination, incredibly enough, the war minister publicly praised

the selfless sincerity of the killers, and the chief of military police actually called

them patriots, suggesting that they should have coordinated their attack with the

military police! Earlier that same year, a former minister of finance and a leading

businessman were also assassinated. 4

The wave of violence and military disobedience climaxed on the morning of

February 26, 1936, when the army's First Division, stationed in Tokyo, mutinied.

The rebels seized important government buildings and assassinated former Prime

Minster Saito, Finance Minister Takahashi, and Inspector General of Military

Education Watanabe in their homes. The grand chamberlain, Admiral Suzuki,

was seriously wounded and left for dead. Prime Minster Okada narrowly escaped

only because the mutineers shot his brother-in-law by mistake. An attempted

takeover of the imperial palace was blocked, however, by alert palace guards.

After the assassinations, the rebels issued a manifesto proclaiming the virtuous

motives for their actions and calling for a "Showa Restoration" (the name of the

current imperial reign period) in a hoped-for echo of the glorious nineteenth­

century Meiji Restoration. The mutiny was not universally supported even in

the army, however, and encountered direct opposition from the Showa Emperor

himself (often somewhat disrespectfully referred to outside of Japan by his per­

sonal name, Hirohito), who had the mutineers surrounded with loyal troops and

ordered the rebels to return to barracks. On February 29, they surrendered. Two

rebel leaders committed suicide immediately, and seventeen others were quickly

condemned and executed, without being given an opportunity to publicize their

message.

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258 A History of East Asia

This turned out to be the last great act of unauthorized pre-World War II violence

by the imperial Japanese army. By now, however, civilian politicians were effectively

intimidated, and a turn to less radical military leaders seemed a natural alternative.

In the 1937 Japanese cabinet, there would not be a single party politician. Even

after the final dissolution of political parties in 1940, elections continued to be

held and the forms of parliamentary government maintained, but the era ofTaisho

democracy had ended, and a new age of ultranationalistic militarism had begun.

Until the late nineteenth century, much of Manchuria- with the exception of the

southern agricultural regions that, although they lay beyond the Great Wall, had

long functioned as something of an extension of China proper- remained a sparsely

populated frontier. This was at least partially intentional, since the Manchu rulers

of the Qing Dynasty had forbidden Chinese migration into Manchuria to preserve

the integrity of their homeland. Meanwhile, however, Russian Cossacks in search

of furs had begun to appear in the area as early as the seventeenth century. A

formal border between the Chinese and Russian empires, along the line of the

Amur River, was first fixed by treaty in 1689.

By the nineteenth century, the Russians had become a dynamic presence in the

far northeast. Russia obtained a port on the Pacific Ocean at Vladivostok in 1858.

In 1896, thanks to Russian intervention (together with France and Germany) to

prevent Manchuria's Liaodong peninsula from being ceded to Japan after the Sino­

Japanese War, a deal was signed with the Qing Dynasty conceding to Russia the

right to build a railway straight across Manchuria - a considerable shortcut in the

Trans-Siberian route between Vladivostok and Moscow. In 1898, the Russians

also obtained from the Qing Dynasty a leasehold on some territory at the tip of

Liaodong peninsula and began constructing a Russian naval base (Port Arthur)

and civilian port facilities there, with a rail connection joining the main Russian

rail line at Harbin, in central Manchuria. After the Boxer debacle in 1900, for a time, the Russians were the dominant power in Manchuria.

But Russia was defeated by Japan in a war, largely fought on Manchurian soil, in

1905. As a result of this victory, Japan acquired control over Russian installations in

southern Manchuria. These included the leasehold at the tip ofLiaodong peninsula

and that portion of the railway leading north from there as far as Changchun. This

line now became known as the South Manchurian Railway (in Japanese, Mantetsu),

and it became the single largest Japanese corporation of the early twentieth century.

The Japanese government provided half of its initial capitalization, and although

the balance came from private investors, it was government controlled. In addition

to the railway itself, the South Manchurian Railway also handled the administration

of policing, taxation, schooling, and other important public functions along the line

of the tracks. Its first president (Goto Shimpei, 1857-1929) had previously served

as Japanese colonial governor of Taiwan. He had trained in Germany as a physician,

and was a progressive-minded administrator concerned especially with matters of

public health. Whatever other criticisms may be leveled at early-twentieth-century

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

Japan Sea

Map 7 3. Manchuria, ca. 1920

Japanese imperialism, it often did accomplish certain modernizing improvements.

Under Japanese colonial rule, for example, the death rate in both Taiwan and

Korea declined significantly in the early twentieth century. 5

Dreams of massive Japanese settlement of the new frontier opening up to them

in Manchuria - supposedly thereby relieving population pressure in the crowded

Japanese home islands- were never fully realized. Relatively few Japanese people

found the idea of becoming peasant farmers in a remote (and foreign) frontier very

attractive. The number of Japanese who did migrate to Manchuria, moreover, was eclipsed by a flood of new Chinese arrivals. The Qing Dynasty had only belatedly

realized that to cement its claim to the region against the growing Russian presence,

Manchuria would have to be more thickly settled and lifted its ban on Chinese

migration in the late nineteenth century. Large-scale Chinese in-migration then

caused the population of Manchuria to explode. The Manchurian economy also boomed in the early twentieth century, although

in this case, it was chiefly the result of Japanese investment. By 1932, when

Manchuria first became a Japanese-controlled puppet state, 64 percent of the

total capital invested in Manchurian industry was already Japanese. 6

Thereafter,

the pace of Japanese investment only accelerated. In the single decade between

1931 and 1941, Japanese investment in Manchuria multiplied more than fivefold.

Although actual production results did not entirely match expectations, Manchuria

became the most industrialized region of China by the end of World War II. 7

The Chinese warlord in Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin, had cooperated with the

growing Japanese interests there, but he also moved his headquarters to Beijing

259

260 A History of East Asia

m 1926 and exhibited signs of increasingly national Chinese ambitions. When

Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition for the military reunification of China

approached Beijing from the south in 1928, Zhang Zuolin was informed by his

Japanese advisors that he must either withdraw to Manchuria immediately or be

disarmed by Japanese guards at the pass separating Manchuria from China proper

if he tried to do so later. He accepted the Japanese warning and returned to

Mukden (the Manchu name for the capital of Manchuria) immediately, but was

blown up and killed in his railway car anyway by the unauthorized action of rogue

Japanese army officers. His assassination was presumably intended to provoke

an incident that might allow the Japanese Kwantung Army (a now conventional old spelling of the Chinese term Guandong, which means "East of the Passes" -

in this case referring to the passes separating Manchuria from China proper) to

seize control over Manchuria. The attempt backfired, however (this time). Both

the emperor and the prime minister of Japan were outraged, and Zhang Zuolin's

son, now understandably hostile to Japan, inherited his position. This son reached

an agreement with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese government to bring

Manchuria into the reunified Chinese Republic, which, in 1931, also announced

a goal of regaining Chinese control over the Japanese Liaodong leasehold and the

South Manchurian Railway.

The combination of this new Chinese Nationalist threat to Japanese holdings

in Manchuria, the global economic crisis created by the Great Depression, and

changing conditions in domestic Japanese politics, all made a second attempt in

1931 to provoke a Japanese military takeover in Manchuria by staging an explosion

much more successful. Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949), who had

studied for three years in Germany and was considered by many to be Japan's

most brilliant military theoretician, envisioned a future apocalyptic "final war"

between Asia, led by Japan, and the West, led by the United States. In preparation

for that cataclysmic final showdown, Ishiwara believed that Japan needed access

to the vital resources of Manchuria. He, and like-minded other officers, therefore

carefully planned a Japanese takeover. 8

On September 18, 1931, a senior officer from the Japanese general staff arrived in

Mukden with orders to restrain the Kwantung Army from taking any unauthorized,

rash actions. Forewarned, however, the conspirators decided to strike before they

were ordered not to. The distinguished visitor from the Tokyo general staff was

taken immediately on arrival to a restaurant to be entertained. While he was thus

diverted, around ten o'clock that evening, a bomb exploded on the tracks of the

South Manchurian Railway north of Mukden. The damage was so slight that a

train was able to pass over it soon afterward with little difficulty, but the explosion

was blamed on Chinese saboteurs, and the Kwantung Army sprang into action, swiftly grabbing control over a growing portion of the northeast.

The Japanese Kwantung Army, which had originally been established to defend

the Liaodong leasehold won from Russia in 1905, had a total force of only about

ten thousand men. Japanese media now enthusiastically celebrated the ease with

which such a relative handful of Japanese troops defeated the much larger force

of two hundred thousand Chinese soldiers stationed in Manchuria conveniently

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

ignoring that the Chinese were under orders not to resist. The modern mass media

in Japan, notably the still very new radio, found the eager popular hunger for war news to be a valuable commercial opportunity and helped generate a burst of

patriotic war fever in Japan following the Manchurian incident in 1931. 9

For now, at least, the actions of the Kwantung Army on the continent were highly popular

back home in Japan. Elsewhere in the world, however, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria was

widely condemned as a violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (a 1928 agreement that had attempted to outlaw aggressive warfare and that was ultimately signed

by sixty-three countries). The Japanese tried to justify their actions before the

League of Nations with the argument that China did not have an organized cen­

tral government and was therefore not a sovereign nation, and that Manchuria,

furthermore, was not necessarily a part of China. The League of Nations was not persuaded, however, and in February 1933, it adopted a resolution, 42-1, con­

demning Japanese behavior. The Japanese delegation walked out, and in March

1933, Japan officially withdrew from the League of Nations. In the aftermath, rather than attempt to directly colonize Manchuria, the

Japanese reorganized it into a nominally independent new country called Manchukuo ("kuo" being an old spelling of the standard Chinese word guo, mean­

ing "country"). The former last emperor of the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty in

China, Puyi, was brought in to serve as head of state. In 1934, his title was elevated

to "emperor of Manchukuo." In reality, however, the Japanese Kwantung Army

was the real power now in Manchuria. In Manchukuo, Japanese planners envisioned building a showcase of modernity,

which would, furthermore, intentionally exclude what they considered to be the

corrupt special interests of party politicians and big private business and that might become a shining example of state-planned economic development. State-run, or

joint state and private, corporations were created to administer different sectors

of the economy. Despite the army's suspicions of big business, the Kwantung

Army eventually did find it necessary to welcome much private investment in

Manchukuo. The army was especially cordial toward so-called new zaibatsu such as

Nissan. Yet even the private investment went overwhelmingly into state-controlled

enterprises because they provided risk-free, guaranteed returns. The centerpiece of modern state building in Manchukuo was to be the city that

was now literally renamed the New Capital (Xinjing, the former Changchun).

Xinjing was rapidly transformed, with many magnificent new public buildings,

wide tree-lined avenues, numerous parks, and the novelty of universal indoor

plumbing. 10 After 1934, Xinjing was linked to the ports of the original Liaodong

leasehold by an ultra-high-speed Asia Express, which featured streamlined, futur-

istic locomotives and air-conditioned coaches. 11

In Manchukuo, the Japanese sought to portray themselves as saving the com-

mon people from brutal and disruptive warlords, as upholders of an ideal Confu­

cian "Kingly Way," and as promoters of a new order of ethnic harmony among

the Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Korean, and Japanese populations of the region.

The Japanese Empire differed from most other colonial empires of that era in

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262 A History of East Asia

acknowledging a degree of racial and cultural commonality with its East Asian

subjects. "Co-prosperity" became an important slogan in the 1930s, and many

individual Japanese people were undoubtedly sincerely inspired by a genuine sense

of idealism. The Concordia Association that was established in Manchukuo, for

example, was intended to transcend not only the old-style imperialist exploitation

of the colonized but also the enforced mass uniformity of modern nationalism

by creating a harmonious multicultural new nation composed of many nation­

alities. Such ideals were fatally undermined, however, by pervasive (and highly

contradictory) Japanese assumptions of their own racial superiority. In practice,

the Concordia Association merely became another tool ofKwantung Army rule. 12

Despite enormous Japanese capital investments, moreover, Manchukuo became

more of a net drain on the Japanese economy than the hoped-for lifeline. The

integrated yen-bloc that was supposed to make the Japanese Empire economically

and strategically self-sufficient failed to materialize. Instead, especially after full­

scale war erupted with China in 193 7 and the economy shifted to an emergency war

footing, Japan found itself, ironically, even more critically dependent on imported

resources from the United States and elsewhere.

By 1928, Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition had been successfully com­

pleted, and a nominally reunified Republic of China had been restored. Nanjing

(Nanking) was chosen for the site of its new capital, as the "Father of the Chinese

Republic," Sun Yat-sen, had originally intended at the time of the 1912 Republi­

can Revolution. Unlike Beijing in the far northeast, Nanjing was centrally located

and conveniently accessible, it was unburdened by the weight of the supposedly

obsolete past and the legacy of "foreign" Manchu rule symbolized by Beijing, yet

it also had a glorious ancient Chinese imperial tradition of its own (as capital of

the Southern dynasties -when it may have even been the largest city in the world­

and of the early Ming). As an added attraction, it also held much vacant land that

would be available for new construction, since the city had never entirely recov­

ered after being laid waste by Qing forces during their suppression of the Taiping

Rebellion in 1864. Plans were drawn up to rebuild Nanjing as a gleaming, mod­

ern, world-class capital, a Chinese Washington, D.C., or Paris. Owing to a chronic

shortage of funds and, as it would transpire, a desperate shortage of time before

the outbreak of World War II - most of these dreams were, unfortunately, never realized. 13

The new government of the Republic of China also had highly ambitious

plans for tl1e rapid development of a modern, industrialized, and technologically

advanced Chinese nation. Through funding by the National Economic Council, a

network of modern motorways, railways, and air transportation links was rapidly

expanded. Science and engineering were energetically promoted. But again, the

overall actual results fell far short of the hopes. Following the Japanese takeover of

Manchuria in 1931-1932, the Chinese government also felt increasingly threatened

and responded with militarization. Building a strong national defense economy,

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

under central government control, became the driving goal. By 1942, more than

half of all industry in Nationalist China was state run. 14

In addition to extending state control over the modern sector of the economy,

the reconstituted Republic of China after 1928 was from the beginning- unlike the

abortive multiparty parliamentary republic that had briefly followed the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912- a single-party state. In 1928, opposition political

parties (other than the ruling Nationalist Party, or Guomindang) were banned.

Both free-enterprise capitalism and political democracy faced certain constraints,

therefore, in the Nationalist China of the 1930s. But if the Chinese Republic is

viewed in the general context of world trends in the 1930s, these developments

appear considerably less shocking. The 1930s were difficult and complicated times, and Nationalist China was

confronted by a swirl of various challenges, influences, and pressures. Chiang

Kai-shek's wife had gone to college in the United States and spoke impeccable English. Both she and her husband were also Christians. But Chiang, personally,

had attended a military academy in Japan and had visited Moscow. One of his

sons, Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo, 1910-1988), spent twelve years in the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman. As future president of Taiwan, after

his father's death, this man would become a key figure in the transition to genuine

multiparty democracy there (see Figure 12.2). Another son, Chiang Wei-kuo (Jiang

Weiguo, 1916-1997), graduated from a military academy in Germany and, as an

officer candidate there, participated in the 1938 Anschluss, or Nazi takeover of

Austria. 15

In fact, after Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in 1927 and sent his

Russian advisors packing, for the next decade, Nationalist China had especially

close relations with Germany. This was partly because Germany had lost its treaty

port privileges in China (a sensitive issue for Chinese nationalists) after Germany's defeat in World War I and partly because of the mutual convergence of interests

between Germany's search for markets and sources of industrial raw material and

China's search for a successful model for rapid modernization. This friendly rela­

tionship with Germany terminated abruptly after the start of full-scale war between

China and Japan, however, when Germany opted to align with Japan. German aid and advisors were witl1drawn from China in 1938. Thereafter, Nationalist China

developed its closest relationship with the United States. 16

Although this growing American influence probably did play a role in the even-

tual democratization of the Republic of China on Taiwan in the 1980s-1990s, as of the mid-twentieth century, Nationalist China was an authoritarian single-party

state. It was also heavily militarized. Forty-three percent of the central Nation­

alist Party leaders were military men as of 1935, and twenty-five of thirty-three

provincial chairmen were also generals during the decade of feeble peace between

the nominal Nationalist reunification of China in 1928 and the outbreak of World

War II in 1937. 17

Yet despite this authoritarianism, in many ways, the Nationalist Republic's

most outstanding characteristic was really weakness. "Far from being a dictator,"

observed U.S. general Albert C. Wedemeyer, Chiang Kai-shek "was in fact only

263

264 A History of East Asia

the head of a loose coalition." The Nationalist Party was heavily factionalized, and

even more important, its control over the Chinese countryside was extremely lim­

ited. At the height of World War II in 1944, the government of Nationalist China

was only able to mobilize about 3-5 percent of China's gross national product

for the war effort, compared to the 4 7 percent that was mobilized by the United

States. 18 Some Chinese provinces long continued to print their own separate cur­

rencies. One province (Shanxi) built its railways on a different gauge than the

rest of China. Much of China's military force also remained under local rather

than central control. Despite the nominal reunification of China in 1928, many of

the former warlords had actually merely declared their allegiance to the republic

and continued doing business as usual, as effectively independent powers. We will

never be able to know what might eventually have emerged from this unpromising

beginning, if only China had been left in peace. Instead, however, the outbreak of

full-scale war with Japan in 1937 effectively sealed Nationalist China's fate on the mainland.

"Science and democracy" had been the great slogan of China's May Fourth Move­

ment, and as late as the end of 1919, the man who would become the first leader

of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu, was still advocating an Anglo­

American model of democracy in China. By 1920, however, he had become a

self-proclaimed Marxist. 19 During a period of profound disillusionment among

many of the more radical May Fourth intellectuals, in the spring of 1920, a Com­

intern agent arrived in Beijing from Moscow with details of the Bolshevik model

for revolutionary organization. It was the organizational effectiveness of Bolshevik

discipline, more immediately than any theoretical appeal of Marxism, that resulted

in the creation of the Chinese Communist Party. 20 The first Chinese Marxist cells

emerged out of study groups in Beijing in 1920. By 1921, there were roughly fifty

Chinese Communists, and the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

convened in secret that summer, holding its opening session in a girl's school in

the French Concession in Shanghai.

In its early years, the Chinese Communist Party remained under the general

direction of the Comintern in Moscow, and because the Soviet Union had also reached an agreement with Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Nationalist Party in

1923, there followed a brief period of cooperation between these two Chinese parties. Chiang Kai-shek's sudden purge of leftists in April 1927, however, dealt

the Communists a devastating blow. The disaster was compounded by misguided

Communist efforts to stage uprisings in several cities that year, in a desperate

effort to maintain some connection with the urban industrial working class - the

so-called proletariat - which, according to Marxist theory, the Communist Party

was supposed to represent. All these uprisings failed, however. During the last

one, the so-called Canton Commune in December 1927, participants wore red

scarves or armbands as a kind of uniform. After the uprising was crushed, these

were hastily removed, but anyone discovered with telltale red stains on their skin

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

was executed on the spot. 21 In the chaos after Chiang's purge, at one point, even

Mao Zedong was caught by Nationalist soldiers and only narrowly managed to

escape. 22

The Chinese Communists were driven underground or out into the countryside.

As devastating as this purge was, however, it also gave young Mao Zedong a chance to try a radically unorthodox approach to Marxism: peasant revolution. Mao's faith

in the revolutionary potential of peasants stood orthodox Marxism on its head. In

theory, the communist revolution was supposed to be driven by objective material

conditions at a particular stage of historical development, through class struggle

between workers and wealthy industrialists in the most advanced modern capi­

talist economies. But Mao believed he could adapt the general Marxist-Leninist

principles to China's unique circumstances and tap into the explosive desires of

the peasantry as a force that might bring Communism to power even before mate­ rial conditions made it "inevitable." Mao had faith that with the right leadership

and indoctrination, a "proletarian consciousness" could then be instilled into the

peasantry and advanced socialist goals eventually realized. 23

Chiang Kai-shek's purge in 1927 gave Mao a chance to put his theories to

the test. At Mt. Jinggang, Jiangxi, in southeastern China, Mao led about two thousand followers to begin developing a rural Communist base in late 1927.

There they began experimenting with techniques for gaining the support of poorer

farmers through a program of forced land redistribution, backed by the guns of the newly created Red Army. They also began developing innovative tactics of

guerrilla warfare to compensate for the Red Army's conventional military weakness.

Although this style of peasant revolution was criticized by the Chinese Communist

Central Committee, Mao was, for a time, beyond their effective reach and free to

experiment. Details are murky, but Mao's rural Jiangxi base was successful enough

that it eventually expanded to include several million people. Success brought unwanted attention, however. Chinese Communist Party lead­

ers began drifting into the rural Jiangxi base from their beleaguered urban head­

quarters in Shanghai around 1932. These newly arriving leaders were still oriented

toward Moscow and critical of Mao's peasant deviations from orthodox Marxist

theory. Before long, Mao was removed from real decision-making power in the

Communist Party, and there are even rumors that at one point he may have been

placed under house arrest, although this has been denied. 24

Chiang Kai-shek's attention had also been caught by Mao's rural experiment,

and Chiang's Nationalist armies now launched a series of military campaigns

against this agrarian Communist base in the southeast. The first Nationalist attacks were repulsed by Communist guerilla tactics, but in 1934, Nationalist forces finally

succeeded in totally destroying the Communist base in Jiangxi. Before it was over­

run, however, in October 1934, a core group of about eight-six thousand Com­

munist cadres and Red Army soldiers managed to break out of the Nationalist

encirclement and begin what is known to history as the Long March. Initially,

this was something of an aimless flight from disaster, but eventually, a preexist­

ing Communist base area in Shaanxi Province, in the arid and poor northwest,

was decided on as a destination. Of the large number who had begun the Long

265

266 A History of East Asia

Figure 9.2. Mao Zedong at an airfield in north China - probably Shaanxi - in 1936. Col­ lection J. A. Fox. Magnum Photos.

March, only about seven or eight thousand finally arrived in Shaanxi the next year, in October 1935. Along the way, however, Mao Zedong was able to blame the

disastrous collapse of the "Jiangxi Soviet" on mistakes made by others and for the

first time establish himself as the dominant figure in Chinese Communism (see

Figure 9. 2). 25

It was, ironically, Chiang Kai-shek's near-success in exterminating

the Chinese Communists at the time of the Long March that helped raise Mao to

the top Communist leadership, and it would be the Japanese invasion, and World War II, that would provide the context for a final Communist victory.

In 1936, Mao Zedong's little Communist group settled on the remote Shaanxi

market town of Yan'an for its new headquarters. By this time, Chiang Kai-shek

felt that he had the Communists cornered and ordered his generals in the area to

finish them off. Public opinion in China, however, was now generally much more

alarmed by the growing Japanese menace than by the internal Communist threat.

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

It also happened that one of the principal Nationalist commanders in Shaanxi

was none other than the son of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, who had

been assassinated by the Japanese in 1928 and who had himself been driven out of

Manchuria by the Japanese establishment of their puppet state there. The Chinese

Communists had, meanwhile, astutely changed their tactics. They were now pro­

moting a truce in the domestic civil war with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party

and the formation of a United Front against Japan. When his generals in Shaanxi

did not pursue the war against the Communists as aggressively as Chiang would

have liked, Chiang Kai-shek flew in person to the largest city in Shaanxi Province,

Xi'an (sometimes spelled either "Sian" or "Hsi-an"), to encourage them to make

greater efforts. There, at a hot springs located in the outskirts of the city, in what

is known to history as the "Xi'an incident," in December 1936, Chiang Kai-shek

was kidnapped by his own troops, forced to negotiate with the Communists, and

agree to the formation of a United Front with them against Japan.

This Xi'an incident is important because it led to the start ofWorld War II a few

months later. During the night of July 7, 1937, a small detachment of Japanese

troops were on maneuvers at Marco Polo Bridge, just a few miles outside of Beijing

(which was then being called Beiping, "Northern Peace," rather than Beijing,

"Northern Capital," since it was not the capital of the Nationalist Republic), when

some shots were fired. This might easily have remained a relatively insignificant

incident, except that because of the formation of the United Front and Chiang

Kai-shek's new determination to resist further Japanese aggression, Nationalist

China responded by reinforcing its troops in the Beijing area. The Japanese also

sent reinforcements, and by July 25, full-scale war had erupted.

Based on the ease with which a small number of Japanese soldiers had ear­

lier overrun Manchuria, and widespread Japanese feelings of contempt for war­

lord China, the Japanese anticipated a quick victory. The war minister assured

the Showa Emperor that this China incident would be over in a month, and in

July 1937, the Japanese cabinet authorized operations for only three divisions for

three months. Although Chinese Nationalist armies did put up surprisingly stiff

resistance, especially in the Shanghai area (see Figure 9.3), by December 13,

the Nationalist capital at Nanjing (Nanking) had in fact fallen to the Japanese.

There the Japanese soldiers, who had behaved with notably good discipline during

the earlier war with Russia, went on a notorious rampage known as the Rape of Nanking. 26

Although it took somewhat longer than originally anticipated, the Japanese did

swiftly capture most of the major Chinese cities and the principal agricultural

plains of eastern China. But the Nationalist Chinese capital merely retreated far­

ther up the line of the Yangzi River, finally settling in the city of Chongqing

(in English, Chungking), in Sichuan Province a vast natural fortress protected

by steep encircling mountains. Despite prolonged Japanese aerial bombing of

Chongqing, the Chinese Nationalists continued to resist and stubbornly refused to surrender.

Despite their repeated battlefield victories, the Japanese found themselves unable

to inflict any decisive defeat on Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China. To the end of

267

268 A History of East Asia

Figure 9.3. A terrified baby in Shanghai's South Station following a Japanese bombing at the start ofWorld War II, August 28, 1937. National Archives.

World War II, the Japanese found it necessary to continue to station about half of all their total available forces in China, yet even that was not enough for conclusive

success. After the Japanese offensive stalled, however, Chiang Kai-shek's ability to

launch a counteroffensive was also seriously limited. Roughly one million Japanese

troops held strategic central positions in China, while some four million Chinese

troops were spread out in a vast surrounding arc, often in highly mountainous

terrain and linked together only by crude roads and inadequate transportation facilities. Much of China's industrial capacity (only modest to begin with) had

been overrun by the Japanese, and the Nationalist Chinese government's arsenals were now only able to produce about four bullets per soldier per month. As a

result of unresolved residual warlordism, furthermore, at one time half of Chiang

Kai-shek's frontline military commanders were men who had previously been in

conflict with him. The result was a stalemate. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese

were able to achieve a final victory. This stalemate degenerated into an increasingly cynical phony war, lubricated by pervasive smuggling across enemy lines, and a growing cloud of corruption. 27

Nationalist China's loss of the developed modern sector of its economy, which

had been almost exclusively confined to the large coastal cities, especially Shanghai,

and which had been the government's principal source of tax revenue before the

war, led the Nationalist government to issue mountains of poorly backed paper

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

money. This resulted in absolutely catastrophic hyperinflation. Between 1937 and

1945, average prices in Nationalist China increased by more than two-thousand­

fold. In the end, it has been suggested that "inflation did more than any other

single issue to undermine public confidence" in the Nationalist government and

cause it to eventually lose control of mainland China. 28

The Japanese had hoped that Chiang Kai-shek could quickly be brought to

terms, but they were disappointed by Chiang's continued stubborn defiance. In

exasperation, the Japanese government announced in January 1938 that they would

have no further dealings with Chiang Kai-shek. Because they had never seriously

contemplated assuming direct Japanese administration over all of China, however, the Japanese were obliged to find other Chinese collaborators. Aside from the nom­

inally independent country of Manchukuo in the northeast, the chief collaborator

in central China turned out, ironically, to be a former Chinese nationalist hero:

Wang Jingwei (1883-1944).

In 1910, toward the end of the Qing Dynasty, Wang had attempted to assassi­

nate the Manchu prince regent. He failed, was caught, and was sentenced to death.

Rather than create a revolutionary martyr, however, the Qing Dynasty commuted

his death sentence to life in prison. After the sudden success of the Republican

Revolution in 1912, Wang was released to a hero's welcome. When Sun Yat-sen

died in 1925, Wang even briefly became Sun's successor as head of the Nationalist

Party. But when cadets from the Nationalist military academy, headed by Chiang

Kai-shek, moved suddenly in 1926 to end a nine-month-long antiforeign boycott

in Guangzhou (Canton) without even consulting Wang, Wang Jingwei resigned

in humiliation and went off to Paris. After the Japanese stopped negotiating with

Chiang Kai-shek in 1938, they established what they euphemistically called a

Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanjing. By 1940, they had

persuaded Wang to serve as its leader. Although the verdict of history is undoubt­

edly that Wang Jingwei collaborated with the enemy during wartime, he appears

to have been no simple opportunist. Wang seems to have sincerely believed that

cooperation with Japan was the best way to protect Chinese interests in a time of

extreme vulnerability. At her war crimes trial after the war, Wang's widow (Wang

himself having already died) still vigorously defended her husband's record- to the

applause of her courtroom audience - arguing that he had not given up an inch of

Chinese territory that had not already been lost and that he had done all he could

to defend China's sovereignty. 29

Elsewhere in Asia, in the former European colonies, cooperation with Japan

during World War II could actually hold some nationalistic appeal. In the Dutch

East Indies (now Indonesia), for example, wartime association with Japan did

little to damage Sukarno's credentials as a nationalist hero. In China, though,

the focus of nationalist outrage was not Western imperialism but Japanese. Aside

from great atrocities like the Rape of Nanking and the mounting horrors of a

war that eventually cost China some twenty million dead, there were also routine

humiliations like the need to bow to Japanese sentries on the streets of China's

occupied coastal cities. These wartime memories planted lasting seeds of bitterness in China.

269

270 A History of East Asia

But for Japan, too, the war was hardly going very well either. Predictions of a quick and easy victory had proved false. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor

added the weight of U.S. and other Allied military power into the balance against

Japan, Japan had already lost 185,000 dead in China, and Japan's economy was already under severe strain. It was in growing exasperation with this "quagmire" in China that Japanese strategists began to look south.

The huge costs of waging war on a continental scale in China, especially when com­

bined with Japan's strategic ambition to simultaneously gear up quickly for military

self-sufficiency, drove Japan from a surprisingly robust export-led recovery from

the Great Depression in the early 1930s to what would turn out to be a fatal

dependency on heavy industrial imports by the end of the decade. Increased mili­

tary spending after 1936led to inflation, which raised the cost of Japanese products

and made them less competitive as exports. Government controls over imported

raw materials favored those with military applications rather than materials, such

as cotton, that could be used to manufacture textiles for reexport. Government

control also funneled new investments into war industries rather than consumer or

export-oriented businesses. As a direct result of her quest for self-sufficiency, iron­

ically, Japan therefore only became more critically dependant on such imported things as machine tools, iron, and oil. 30

A February 1938 National Mobilization Act put all economic resources in Japan under government control. One of the first effects was the imposition of rationing

and other austerity measures. Beginning in 1938, gasoline was strictly rationed in

Japan. Rice, matches, sugar, and charcoal had joined the list of rationed items by

1940, and in May 1940, Japanese stores were forbidden to sell any nonessential goods. Not only Western-style clothing but even traditional Japanese kimonos were replaced by khaki "people's uniforms" and peasant pantaloons for women. 31

Ever since defeating Russia in war in 1905, Japanese army planners had antic­

ipated a future war of revenge with the Russians. The communist revolution in

Russia only seemed to make such a war more inevitable. Some Japanese army officers, notably Ishiwara Kanji, the mastermind of the takeover in Manchuria,

had even opposed intervention in China south of the Great Wall because it would

deplete vital resources and distract Japan from the more important confrontation

with Russia (which he expected would precede the final showdown with the United

States). In fact, Japan actually did engage the Soviet Union in a little-known but bitter struggle during the summer of 1939, at a place called Nomonhan on the

border between Mongolia and Manchuria. Soviet armored forces proved discon­ certingly effective in this action, however, and Japan suffered heavy loses. Even

as Japan was being mauled by the Soviets at Nomonhan, meanwhile, Germany

signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Japan, which

had already signed an anti-Comintern pact (opposing communism without specif­

ically mentioning Russia) with Germany in 1936, and reached a formal alliance

with the Axis powers Germany and Italy in 1940, responded by arranging its own

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in 1941. Despite Hitler's betrayal of his pact

with Stalin and invasion of Russia soon afterward, the Soviet agreement with Japan

held. The Soviet Union would remain neutral in World War II in the Pacific until

the very last days. Meanwhile, Japan hoped that its Axis alliance with Germany and Italy would

make other powers (such as the United States) reluctant to intervene against

Japanese interests in Asia. Largely in an effort to cut off supplies to Nationalist

China, by July 1941, Japanese troops had occupied French colonial Indochina

(Vietnam). The French, who by this time had been defeated and forced into

cooperation with Hitler's Germany in Europe, did not resist in Vietnam, but the

United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands imposed economic sanctions

on Japan, notably including embargoes on oil and scrap metal. These sanctions

had real teeth. In 1940, 80 percent of Japan's total oil supply came from the

United States. 32 Japan's principal alternative to American oil was Dutch colonial

Java (in what is now Indonesia). Japan's predicament, therefore, had become quite

daunting. Going to war against Japan's own largest supplier of vital war materials (the

United States) hardly seemed sensible, especially since the United States was also

much more populous and more extensively industrialized than Japan as of 1941.

But Japan's options were limited. By late 1941, Japan's stockpiles of oil were

dwindling alarmingly, while the United States was already beginning a massive

military buildup. If Japan was to have any chance of victory in a war with the

United States, it would have to begin soon. Some leaders in the Japanese army

were, moreover, confident that Japanese fighting spirit would overcome the material

disadvantages. At an imperial conference on November 5, 1941, a decision was

made to go to war if no settlement had been reached by December. The imperial

navy drew up plans to temporarily paralyze U.S. forces by striking at the U.S.

Pacific Fleet based in Hawai'i. A Japanese aircraft carrier task force sailed for that

purpose on November 26 and struck at Pearl Harbor on December 7.

The attack achieved complete surprise, and most of the American battleships

anchored in Pearl Harbor were at least temporarily put out of action. A simul­

taneous Japanese invasion of British Malaya also began. British Hong Kong

fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day, and on December 26, Manila, in the

American-controlled Philippines, was declared an open city. On the Malay penin­

sula, Japanese troops hacked their way through the jungle to attack the British

fortress at Singapore from its relatively unguarded rear. Singapore fell to the

Japanese on February 8, 1942. On March 9, the most valuable prize of all, the

Dutch island of Java, with its rich supplies of oil, rubber, and tin, surrendered. In

May 1942, the last American holdouts in the Philippines, on the island of Cor­

regidor, surrendered. By this time, there were even rumors of a possible Japanese

invasion of British colonial India and talk of evacuating all of northern Australia.

Japan needed just a few more victories to complete the ring of defensive island

fortresses it envisioned in preparation for the eventually expected Allied counterof­

fensive. These last few victories were denied to Japan, however. All the American

aircraft carriers had miraculously escaped the slaughter at Pearl Harbor simply by

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being out of port at the time of the attack. On May 8, 1942, an American aircraft carrier task force intercepted a Japanese invasion fleet heading for Port Moresby, New Guinea. In the resulting naval air battle of the Coral Sea, located between Aus­ tralia and New Guinea, although neither side won a decisive victory, the Japanese

were forced to cancel their invasion of Port Moresby. In June 1942, Japanese forces staged successful amphibious landings on actual U.S. soil in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. This was only intended as a diversion, however, as part of an elaborate plan

to lure out and sink the remainder of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Thanks to some good luck, and the fact that the Americans had broken the Japanese code and were able to decipher Japanese messages, the U.S. fleet surprised the Japanese instead. In the ensuing naval air battle of Midway Island, beginning June 4, 1942, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk to the American loss of only one. This battle of Midway became the crucial turning point of the war in the Pacific.

Instead of serving as an impenetrable defensive shield, Japan's island empire in the Pacific proved to be full of holes. U.S. submarines, sailing deep into Japanese waters with relative impunity, almost immediately began to wage an aggressive

campaign to cut off the flow of essential raw materials from Java, and elsewhere, to the factories on the Japanese home islands. As a result, Japan's industrial economy ground to a standstill, and Japan was increasingly unable to replace the ships and planes it lost in battle. Japanese-held islands in the Pacific that were especially strongly fortified could furthermore simply be bypassed, or skipped over, in the Allied counteroffensive, in a process called "island hopping."

The Allied counteroffensive began with landings on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, in August 1942. A fiercely fought battle for supremacy there raged for some six months before the Allies finally drove the Japanese from Guadal­

canal in February 1943. From there, the Japanese Pacific island empire was rolled up in a two-pronged counteroffensive, with Allied land forces (under the command of General Douglas MacArthur) driving up from the south through New Guinea to the Philippines and the navy island hopping across the central Pacific from the Marianas to Okinawa.

American industrial productivity, meanwhile, was unleashing a tsunami of steel against the Japanese Empire. Until late 1943, the U.S. Pacific Fleet never had more than four aircraft carriers at any given time, but by the end of 1944, the U.S. Navy

had nearly a hundred aircraft carriers in operation in all theaters of the war. 33

By October 1944, General MacArthur had assembled a massive fleet consisting of some seven hundred ships for his long-promised return to the Philippines. Japan committed her last remaining warships to their defense, and in the naval battle of Leyte Gulf - the largest naval battle in world history - the Japanese were decisively defeated. In desperation, Japan even began to resort to suicide (kamikaze, or "Divine Wind," a reference to the typhoons that had scattered the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion fleets) attacks on Allied ships.

In November 1944, air raids on the Japanese home islands began with long­ range B-29 bombers based in the Marianas. Altogether, some sixty-six Japanese cities were reduced to charred rubble. Incendiary bombs ignited raging conflagra­ tions among the mostly wooden Japanese houses. Of Japan's major cities, only the

274 A History of East Asia

Figure 9.4. Japanese representatives arrive aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to participate in surrender ceremonies at the end of World War II, September 2, 1945. National Archives.

ancient imperial capital of Kyoto was spared. Before long, Allied aircraft enjoyed

almost complete command of the air above Japan. Yet the unconditional surrender

demand that had been adopted by the Allies at the Casablanca conference in 1943

remained unacceptable to Japanese authorities. Some Japanese leaders still hoped

that by winning one last major battle, and inflicting unacceptably heavy casualties on the Allies, Japan might be able to obtain better terms. The bottom line for

many Japanese authorities was a deeply felt need to preserve the national polity embodied in the imperial institution.

After Germany was defeated in May 1945, Japan found herself fighting alone against almost the entire world. During the summer of 1945, the Japanese made

a futile attempt to request Soviet mediation in negotiating an end to the war,

not realizing that Stalin had already pledged, at the Yalta Conference in Febru­

ary, that Russia would enter the war against Japan after Germany surrendered.

On August 6, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On August 8, the

Soviet Union unleashed a massive assault on Japanese forces in Manchuria. On

August 9, a second atomic bomb was detonated at Nagasaki. Even then, on

August 10, the Japanese government still broadcast a message indicating that Japan would be willing to accept Allied surrender terms only if the preservation of the

emperor could be guaranteed. The U.S. response, approved by both Britain and

The Dark Valley (1930-1945)

the Soviet Union, was to agree, but with the crucial modification that "the author­

ity of the Emperor ... shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied

Powers."34

This answer was still unsatisfactory to many in the Japanese army. After consid­

erable more debate, however, the emperor himself finally broke the deadlock on

August 14 with a decision to surrender. Even then, the night before the emperor's

prerecorded surrender speech was scheduled to be broadcast, a group of army offi­

cers rebelled and attempted to destroy the recording. They failed, however, and at

noon on August 15, 1945, the Japanese people heard the voice of their emperor

for the first time, speaking in hard-to-comprehend formal court language. Without

ever actually using the word surrender, and noting (with considerable understate­

ment) that recent developments in the war "did not turn in Japan's favor," the

emperor called on his people to "endure the unendurable."35

Formal surrender documents were signed aboard the American battleship Mis­

souri on September 2, 1945 (see Figure 9.4 ). World War II was over. In East Asia,

Japan had been catastrophically defeated and lay in smoldering ruins, having suf­

fered some 2. 7 million war dead. Korea was to be liberated from Japanese colonial

rule but would initially be subject to divided zones of Soviet and American military

occupation. China had been on the winning side. But China, where World War

II first began in 1937, had also suffered horribly from the war, and the postwar

situation in China remained unencouraging. Almost alone in the world, the United

States emerged from World War II actively strengthened. In the aftermath ofWorld

War II, the U.S. economy accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of all goods and

services on earth. 36 Few people could have predicted then that in the following

decades, East Asia would reemerge to become (at least in purely economic terms)

perhaps the single most successful region of the planet, or that it would be Japan

that would lead this spectacular economic "miracle."

For Further Reading

On the rise of ultranationalism in prewar Japan, see Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total T%r: The Search for Economic Security, 1919-1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1987); W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [ 1987] 1991); Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the "West (Princeton University Press, 1975); Ben-Ami Shillony, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton University Press, 1973); and George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1969). Concerning Manchukuo, an excellent volume is Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of T%rtime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

On Nationalist China, see the fine biography of Chiang Kai-shek by Jay Taylor, The Gen­ eralissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Parks M. Coble Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1980] 1986); Lloyd E. Eastman, Jerome Ch'en, Suzanne Pepper, and Lyman P. VanSlyke, eds., The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 1991); and James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912-1949 (New York: Free Press, 1975).

275

276 A History of East Asia

Studies of early Chinese communism and the rise of Mao Zedong include Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1951] 1979); and the short biography by Jonathan D. Spence, Mao Zedong (New York: Viking, 1999). Edgar Snow was an American journalist who scooped an early interview with the guerilla leader Mao Zedong and published a still extremely valuable account of Mao's early years as Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, [1938] 1968).

For World War II in China and Japan, see John Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at war, 193 7- 1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 1972); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WVrld war II (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and WVrld war Two (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986); Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific war, 1931-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, [1968] 1978); and Barbara W Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1972). A still-valuable account by contemporary American journalists reporting from China is Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder out of China (New York: William Sloan Associates, [ 1946] 1961).

World War II in the Pacific is covered by John W Dower, war without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific war (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American war with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985).

10 Japan since 1945

The Showa Emperor's surrender speech was broadcast over the radio airwaves

on August 15, 1945, and on August 28, a few days before the formal surrender

ceremonies were conducted aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, the

first small advance party of what would eventually become an Allied occupation

force reaching up to a quarter million persons touched down in a C-4 7 trans­

port plane at an airport outside Tokyo. These first Allied arrivals were uncertain

what sort of reception they might encounter. The Japanese, too, were anxious and

uncertain what sort of behavior to expect from the arriving foreign army of occu­

pation, whose soldiers had until recently been such bitter enemies. Many Japanese

were relieved that the war was finally over, but many were also, understandably,

apprehensive. With relatively few exceptions, however, the arriving Allied forces

were treated with respect and even privilege- until1951, for example, the Japanese

government provided occupation authorities with free servants whereas the occu­

pation authorities, for their part, behaved with marked magnanimity toward their

defeated foe. Not a few participants in the occupation discovered a lifelong love

and fascination for Japanese culture. 1 In retrospect, the usual verdict is that the

postwar Allied occupation of Japan was an overall great success.

Although it is conventionally referred to as an Allied occupation, it was over­

whelmingly an American affair. Unlike postwar Germany (and Korea), defeated

Japan was not divided into separate zones of occupation by the different Allied

powers. A multinational Far Eastern Commission was eventually established in

Washington, D.C., and a four-power Allied Council for Japan was sent to Tokyo,

which included British, Chinese, and Soviet representatives, but a single, uni­

fied supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP) was appointed for the

entire region. The officer assigned this command was the senior American general

Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), who set up his headquarters in the Daiichi

building in Tokyo at the end of August 1945. Most of the occupation personnel

were also American.

277