How China rewrote the history of its WWII victory

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 151.

On 2 September 1945, Japanese forces officially surrendered to the Republic of China, ending the brutal occupation which began in 1937. Since the end of the subsequent Chinese Civil War, this victory has been marked separately by the People's Republic of China, and the Republic of China (Taiwan).

In mainland China, the communist government's role in the victory over Japan has been largely overemphasised over the decades, while the nationalist contribution has been downplayed or even extinguished from commemorations.

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However, it was the nationalist government, the Kuo-min-tang (KMT), under Chiang Kai-shek, that led the main military campaigns of resistance against the Japanese and formally accepted their surrender in 1945.

Dissonance over who fought the Japanese harder, the KMT or the communists, or who is properly honoured in war memorials, now extends to the Taiwan question. Since the 1990s the island nation's politics has drifted away from the militaristic KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party now sees Japan as a diplomatic ally.

Meanwhile, China's state-owned media and its adjacent entertainment industry have fused the historical narrative of the war into a unified struggle that echoes the brief accommodation the communists and nationalists reached by 1938.

This has resulted in modern China marking the beginning of the war from 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria, until 1945 – labelling this a 'Chinese people's war of resistance' greater in scope than the previous 1937-1945 framing.

As far as the mainland is concerned, all of China was swept by the terrible ordeal and Japan's crimes are a timeless evil that sullied the course of Chinese history – never mind who was in charge of the government at this time.

The end of Japanese occupation

It took three weeks for the KMT to formalise the total surrender of all Japanese forces and civilians in 1945. Although Tokyo announced its decision to the allies on August 10 it was not until September 3 that Japanese soldiers in China were ordered to lay down their arms and a few more days passed until a formal agreement was smoothed out.

To mark the occasion a nationalist general with a sizeable retinue was sent to the former capital Nanking, still occupied by 70,000 Japanese soldiers. The venue itself was emblematic of modern China's statehood, being a war college for nationalist officers.

The once unrepentant General Yasutsugu Okamura and his staff were seated along a table and signed the act of surrender that was delivered to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on the same day: September 9, 1945.

Japan's capitulation in China was far from straightforward. By Chiang Kai-shek's reckoning there were 1.3 million enemy soldiers left in the mainland. When the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in early August it quashed and captured the million-strong Kwantung Army.

An estimated one million Japanese civilians were scattered among China's ravaged cities and 170,000 more soldiers were garrisoned in Formosa. Annexed by Japan in 1895 and subjected to a brutal ethnic cleansing, the fate of this island known today as Taiwan was decided at the Cairo Conference in 1943 when Chiang himself agreed on post-war territorial arrangements with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt.

The calamity of the war against Japanese aggression, which is how China recognises the conflict from 1937 until 1945, took such a severe toll on the country's population, that there was little to no relief once the Japanese left.

Impact of WWII on China

China began sliding toward a new crisis soon after the KMT finalised a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, while allowing 50,000 U.S. marines to land in the north and help repatriate Japanese POWs home.

The economic and humanitarian cost to China during WWII was immense, with 2 million soldiers perishing along with 14 million civilians. Contemporary historians now revise the death toll as high as 18 to 20 million (according to the Library of Congress Asian Reading Room), on par with the Soviet Union's losses during the war. Nonetheless, as soon as the mutual enemy was defeated, the civil war between the communists and nationalists simmered anew.

The communist leader and firebrand Mao Zedong shredded the KMT's tepid announcement of Japan's defeat in mid-August. Rather than the generous reassurance that China would not seek revenge on Japan, as uttered by Chiang himself, Mao blamed the KMT for their lack of co-operation and constant intrigues.

According to Mao, it was the communist forces who kept the Japanese divisions away from southern China's 'free' heartland where 200 million Chinese were spared the horrors of conquest.

This was a bizarre claim to make. In fact, the communists had fought short-lived campaigns against the Japanese in the early 1940s, which mostly took place in central China and the northeast.

Furthermore, the Imperial Japanese Army had reached the southern coast of China by late 1944 and even Hong Kong and Hainan island were seized as early as 1941 and 1939, respectively.

By 1947 the civil war was once again in full swing, despite heroic attempts by the U.S. envoy Gen. George C. Marshall to organise a coalition government.

In circumstances that echo current world politics, the United States was trying to solve the China question by bringing together two irreconcilable factions. Once the communists triumphed, and Mao Zedong and his circle were ensconced in Peking (Beijing) by October 1949, the entire fabric of China's national politics was in tatters.

The reeling nationalists of the KMT rebuilt their state on Formosa and organised a string of small garrisons on outer islands facing the Chinese coast as a primary line of defence for a coming invasion.

In supreme irony, by the early 1950s as the U.S. was extending support for the KMT in Taiwan, retired Japanese army generals were visiting Taipei incognito for briefings with their temporary secret allies.

The coming decades made the Peking-Taipei-Tokyo axis a complicated one. In his final years even Mao Zedong revised his views on Japan and welcomed a restoration of diplomacy. So did his successors, despite constant efforts in China to memorialise Japanese atrocities during the war of aggression, including the controversy surrounding 'comfort women' or the enslavement of women in Japanese-occupied areas.

Since the 1990s, immense monuments and exhibitions have emerged chronicling this painful and dark history, while at the same time Japan became the most reliable foreign investor in the mainland.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 151. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!