Chinese Revolution · CHAPTER 9 ·
Sino-Japanese War stalemate
Chapter 9 of China in Revolution, 1911–1949: “Stalemate — Two Chinas at War”
From 1938 to 1944 Japan held China’s cities, railways and rivers but not the countryside between them. The Nationalists survived in the interior on the Burma Road and the Hump airlift while inflation weakened them and the Henan famine killed perhaps two million; Operation Ichigo in 1944 exposed their weakness.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
After 1938 Japan held China’s principal cities and the routes between them, while much of the intervening countryside escaped secure control. The Nationalist government survived in the poor interior. Supplies reached it by the Burma Road until Japan cut that route, and afterward partly by air over the Hump. The distances that frustrated Japan’s conquest also made China difficult to supply.
The war put the two Chinese rivals under different pressures. Requisition, inflation and the Henan famine weakened Nationalist rule; perhaps two million people died while grain levies continued. Communist forces resisted the occupation and built village administrations with lighter taxation, though they also used coercion. Japan’s 1944 Ichigo offensive exposed Nationalist military weakness and helped set the positions from which the rivals would resume their civil war.
The full story
For six years after 1938, Japan occupied a network rather than the whole of China. Its garrisons held cities, railways and river valleys, but the countryside between these points and lines was much harder to govern. Communist base areas spread across the north, and government guerrillas held mountain districts. Even with about a million troops in China, Japan could guard the routes more securely than it could control the land around them.
The Nationalist government held out in the vast, poor interior known as Free China. At Chungking (the ◆ there), officials worked from tunnels under repeated bombing and refused to surrender. Changsha (the ◆ there) had been burned prematurely by its own garrison in 1938; it subsequently withstood three Japanese offensives. Survival depended on supplies reaching an inland government across immense distances. The blue arrow to Lashio (the ●) marks the 1,100-kilometer Burma Road. Japan cut it in 1942, as Hong Kong, Burma and the Philippines fell. Aircraft flying the Hump over the Himalaya replaced part of the traffic, at a cost of some 600 Allied aircraft. China was too large for Japan to conquer outright, yet that same geography left its defenders desperately short of supplies.
The siege also changed the balance between China’s rivals. Having lost the wealthy delta, the Nationalist government printed money and requisitioned grain to pay for the war. Prices in Chungking rose thousands-fold by 1945. In Henan (the ◆), famine killed perhaps two million people in 1942–43 while levies continued; in 1944 some peasants disarmed retreating government soldiers who had taxed them. The Communists, operating behind Japanese lines, reduced rents, taxed more lightly and built village governments. Their costly Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 encouraged them to conserve their forces, while destructive Japanese sweeps made local protection and organization urgent.
In 1944 Operation Ichigo broke the long stillness on the map. Half a million Japanese troops moved south from Henan toward Indochina, opening the long charcoal corridor. Hengyang (the ✕), a rail city, held out for 47 days against roughly six-to-one odds before falling. Ichigo severed Free China’s rail spine and captured the American airfields Japan had targeted. Japan would lose the wider war, but observers in China and Washington had seen how weak the Nationalist military state had become. Chiang survived Japan with a government less able to win the civil war that followed.
FULL EXPLANATION
The Henan famine and the evidence of a reporter
The Henan famine of 1942–43 killed perhaps two million people. Drought and locusts damaged the harvest, but they cannot by themselves explain what happened. The 1938 Yellow River flood had ruined drainage; war had made Henan a fiscal frontier; and the government went on collecting grain. People ate bark and clay while requisition continued. Theodore White of Time went to Henan against the government’s wishes and saw bodies along the roads. Despite objections from his editor and the government, he published what he found. His reporting brought evidence of a catastrophe into view when officials preferred silence. Amartya Sen later developed a wider account of famine in terms of entitlement: knowing how much food was harvested does not tell us whether people could obtain it. In Henan, the government’s decisions belong in the explanation alongside the damaged harvest.
How do we know the base areas were popular?
Communist administrators sought support without frightening the middle peasant. They reduced rent and interest rather than confiscating land outright, reserved seats for non-Communists on “three-thirds” councils, and put soldiers to work farming in production drives. Party records celebrated these measures. Those records tell us what the party wanted to claim; they do not settle how villagers responded. Chen Yung-fa’s archival research found coercion, opium revenue and managed elections alongside the policies intended to win consent. The balance between consent and control changed as Japanese pressure rose and fell. A movement could be more responsive to peasant grievances than its rivals and also compel people when responsiveness was insufficient. To judge its popularity, we have to examine the evidence in particular villages.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Why the front froze. By late 1938, each Japanese advance created another stretch of railway to protect. Guerrillas could cut the line between garrisons, while Chinese forces avoided the decisive battle Japan wanted. Tokyo tried to wear down resistance through blockade, puppet government and terror bombing of Chungking. Wang Jingwei’s defection gave Japan a collaborationist “National Government” at Nanjing in 1940. Yet China’s size and poverty made it difficult to strangle. Japan could hold the main routes without compelling surrender; China could continue fighting without expelling Japan. That predicament kept the front largely still for six years.
Two ways to finance a war. The Nationalists had a state and a conventional war to sustain after losing much of their tax base. Printing money and procuring supplies made resistance possible, but also brought inflation, corruption and resentment among those whose grain was taken. The Communists had a different undertaking: an insurgency sustained from occupied villages. Rent reduction, progressive levies and production drives paid for a cheaper war and helped win support. Different obligations and resources shaped the two approaches, and their consequences accumulated through 1949.
Occupation and recruitment. Japan’s “three alls” sweeps in north China—burn, kill, loot—devastated whole belts and badly reduced Communist bases in 1941–42. The attacks also gave villagers reason to value local protection. Communist organizers stayed and fought alongside them while the old order failed to protect them. Chalmers Johnson made this connection central to his peasant-nationalism thesis. Chapter 12 considers its weight; here the point is that occupation created an opportunity for Communist organization even as it inflicted terrible losses.
An uneasy alliance. China was promised a place among the Great Powers from 1942, but only limited supplies came over the Hump. Stilwell pressed Chiang to commit armies in Burma while Ichigo threatened his government. Allied officials judged a besieged state against expectations formed in their own unbombed, better supplied economies. In 1944 Roosevelt demanded an American commander for China’s armies, then dropped the demand. The Stilwell crisis revealed how far the allies had come apart and foreshadowed American planning for a postwar Asia less dependent on Chiang.
THE TURNING POINT
Hengyang, June–August 1944. Hengyang held for 47 days in June–August 1944. Its defenders’ courage could not prevent the city’s fall, after which Ichigo advanced essentially unchecked. Washington, Yan’an, Chinese observers and Chiang’s own commanders had reason to draw a sobering conclusion: years of siege had badly weakened the Nationalist state. Japan’s offensive, undertaken for its own purposes, revealed how poorly prepared Chiang’s government was to confront its Chinese rival after Japan’s defeat.
What it changed
The starting positions of the next war. The armies Ichigo wrecked and displaced would be needed again after Japan surrendered. Some of the Nationalists’ best remaining forces were far away in the southwest and Burma; Communist base areas, untouched by the campaign, lay closer to much of the Japanese-held north and Manchuria. A Japanese operation thus helped determine where the two rivals began their race for territory and arms.
American policy divides. The 1944 Dixie Mission sent American officers to Yan’an, while other observers witnessed Ichigo’s damage. Some concluded that the Communists would win a civil war. Washington continued to back Chiang while trying to mediate between the rivals. The tension between those aims would trouble the Marshall Mission.
The reckoning for collaboration. Wang Jingwei’s regime and other puppet governments had armies numbering hundreds of thousands. Their territory and weapons became prizes for both Chinese parties in 1945, while each side’s claim to have resisted Japan became a source of legitimacy. In the occupied east, people expecting liberation encountered corrupt takeover officials instead. That experience shaped their judgment of Nationalist rule.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How did the Nationalists and Communists fight Japan, and why did their different roles matter afterward?
The Nationalists bore the main burden of conventional battle. They fought at Shanghai and Wuhan, defended Changsha three times and faced Ichigo, suffering the overwhelming share of military casualties. One comparison counts 22 major Nationalist engagements against one large Communist offensive, the Hundred Regiments campaign of 1940. Yan’an then conserved its forces. That comparison leaves out another kind of fighting. Communist forces sabotaged and ambushed the occupiers, defended villages and endured brutal reprisals in the north. Their claim to have been the resistance exaggerates their part; the assertion that “they hid for eight years” erases it. Conventional war broke the Nationalists, while the Communists fought the occupation and built their organization. Both regimes later drew legitimacy from the war, and textbooks in Taipei and Beijing still disagree. Van de Ven, Mitter and Yang Kuisong have spent decades challenging official memories on both sides. The dispute itself has become part of the war’s history.
An interesting fact
In 1937–38, as coastal universities fled inland, Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai combined in Kunming as the National Southwestern Associated University, or Lianda. For eight years teaching continued in tin-roofed sheds amid air raids; professors carried libraries inland by the basket. Its faculty and students included many founders of modern China’s intellectual life. Two students, Yang Chen-ning and Tsung-Dao Lee, shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Scholarship continued despite the pressures that were weakening the wartime state.
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