China's resistance war revisited,
revised By Li YongYan
Last
week Xinhua News Agency reported that the Memorial Hall
to the Chinese People's Anti-Japanese War near the Marco
Polo (Lu Gou) Bridge outside Beijing will undergo a 50
million yuan (US$6 million) "reform", the second such
facelift since it opened to the public in 1987.
Why is a memorial in periodic need of reform?
According to its curator, the current displays are "old
in form and content, unable to meet the audience's needs
for knowledge about the war". He goes on to explain how
to reform a historical museum: "First goal is to give a
full presentation of the war. Second is to expose the
atrocities committed by [the] Japanese army during the
war." The Chinese nation's patriotism and unity will be
given prominent display also.
Sixty years after
World War II, before and during which the Sino-Japanese
war was fought, from 1937-45, China is still groping for
a complete picture of what can be called the largest
resistance war against foreign invasion in its history;
a war in which a reported 30 million Chinese were
killed. In searching for reasons for this, a sympathetic
outsider may offer an innocent rhetorical question: "It
is never an easy job to collect, collate, organize and
display all that much data, right?" Wrong. The Chinese
version of the war has been incomplete and inadequate
because Beijing wants it that way.
The
propaganda began even before the war ended. On April 25,
1945, the communist army's commander-in-chief, Zhu De,
boasted that the troops under communist control "have
become the main force in the war. Without us, the
strongest resistance would be gone against the
Nationalist government's attempt at surrender. They
would have surrendered several times but for us."
Since then, the smear campaign against the
political foe has escalated. The officially sanctioned
history of both the Chinese Communist Party and the
People's Republic of China depicts Chiang Kai-shek as a
traitor who first carried out a non-resistance policy
and then fled to the mountains in southwestern China's
Sichuan province. So the leadership in the fight against
the Japanese invaders "fell on the communists".
Very glorious indeed, except that the facts
don't jibe with the myth.
When government forces
chased Mao Zedong into northern China's barren hills in
the mid-1930s, his Red Army totaled no more than 30,000
defeated, disoriented men. The 1937 breakout of total
war with Japan gave him the biggest respite. He
immediately maneuvered a merger with the Nationalist
government. Overnight, the Red Army became the 18th
Group Army in the order of battle under the command of
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Upon receiving the
appointment as commander of the 18th Group Army, Zhu De
declared on July 15, 1937, "We will unconditionally obey
the orders of the central government." In a newspaper
article in December of the same year, the general
secretary of the Communist Party, Zhang Wentian, wrote,
"In this war with Japan, [the] Kuomintang [Nationalist
Party] under Mr Chiang Kai-shek is in a leadership
position. That is an undeniable fact. We should state
our sincere support for the government under the
leadership of Mr Chiang, for this is our people's own
government, and it is our communists' central
government, too." One year later, Mao Zedong wrote to
Chiang, praising his leadership: "Every Chinese admires
you." Five years into the war, a communist statement
still called on all Chinese, military and civilian
alike, to support chairman Chiang's leadership in the
war against Japan.
A great many did. By one
estimate, more than 3 million Nationalist troops as well
200 general-rank officers laid down their lives in some
40,000 battles of various scales. By comparison, half a
million communist casualties were recorded. One of the
few major battles by Mao's army, the Hundred Regiment
Battle, became a criminal act when Mao purged his
defense minister, Peng Dehuai, in the post-revolution
years. The charge, according to Mao, was that "the
battle exposed our strength and caused the Japanese to
re-evaluate our strength and focus on us. That did
Chiang Kai-shek a big favor."
So Mao retracted
his claws and sat out the war in the caves. But if he
didn't do much, he certainly talked a lot. In 1942, he
delivered a keynote speech at a symposium on, of all
things, arts and literature. The seventh plenum of the
Communist Party's sixth Congress convened in May 1944
and lasted until April of the next year, only to be
carried over into the seventh Congress, which lasted
another 48 days. Small wonder that in the five thick
volumes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, his
orders to the Red Army during the resistance war were
far outnumbered by those during the civil war that
erupted following the Japanese surrender. And his
strength grew 20-fold, to 1.2 million strong - unexposed
- at the end of the war.
No doubt, the Japanese
committed countless, unpardonable atrocities during the
hostilities. But both the communist government in
Beijing and the Nationalist government in Taiwan have
forgiven Tokyo's war retribution. The Nanjing Massacre
was never mentioned in mainland China until after 1978.
Before that, Chiang Kai-shek was depicted as a worse
enemy to the Chinese people than the marauding Imperial
Japanese occupying army. The policy was to refuse to
honor the Nationalist soldiers who died fighting the
invaders. A recently revealed 1950s document from the
Interior Ministry of the People's Republic of China
said, "We need not and should not provide any pension to
them."
Those monuments and tombs erected by the
Nationalist government to the fallen dead were all
destroyed by the succeeding government. Protesters to
the Japanese emperor's visit to China were rounded up
and detained well in advance. In a particularly striking
contrast, Beijing released from prison 95% of Japanese
war criminals in 1956 and the balance by 1964, but kept
Nationalist prisoners of war locked up until 1975. So
the POWs in the civil war did seven more hard years than
the Japanese aggressors.
As for national unity,
it is better left unsung rather than displayed in a
public exhibition. When Tokyo announced its
unconditional capitulation in August 1945, 1.4 million
Chinese troops also surrendered to the Chinese
government. They had switched their loyalty to the
Japanese masters and turned their guns on the resistant
forces. Treason on a scale like this is only comparable
to France's Vichy collaboration. So much for
"patriotism".
China is probably the only World
War II victor country in the world that doesn't hold
large commemorations on VJ (Victory over Japan) Day
anniversaries. That helps produce a lack of interest
from among the Chinese themselves. The anti-Japanese war
memorial received 1.2 million visitors a year for the
first 10 years, from 1987-97, when it went through the
first renovation. The pilgrimages have fallen to nearly
half that number since. To make the picture more blurry,
Chinese textbooks have added so many layers of paint
that it is hard to tell the original color. That
explains why China's demands for Japan to be truthful in
the latter's history books meet with only sneers.
The 50 million yuan budget to redo history once
again might be better spent on converting the memorial
to a shrine to honor the Chinese heroes, regardless of
their political affiliations, who laid down their lives
in the anti-aggression war.
Li YongYan
is an analyst of Chinese finance, political and social
trends.
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