Who really fought Japan: Nationalists or Communists?

The short answer

• 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.

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.