by DANIEL MORLEY
Beijing announced that henceforth the Nanking Massacre (1937) and the victory against Japan in World War II (1945) would be celebrated by two days of national commemoration. PHOTO/Voltaire Net
If the Japanese leadership had not planned the Marco Polo Bridge Incident which sparked the full-scale war, they didn’t let that show. By October, only three months after the war started, the Japanese had already reached the most westerly point of the entire war.
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They succeeded in totally destroying China’s air force in only a few weeks, which enabled them to mercilessly bomb civilians for the remainder of the war with no threat to themselves, like shooting fish in a barrel (Guillermaz, op cit. pp287). Between 1939 and 1941, the temporary capital of ‘free’ China, Chongqing, was bombed 268 times, with 4,400 being killed in the first two raids (Eastman, op cit.). Within a year Japan had effectively taken control of all the lucrative areas of China it desired – that is the industrially developed and agriculturally productive North and East of the country. In a number of key battles that were all over by the end of 1938, the Japanese brutally crushed any hopes of an effective Guomindang led resistance.
Losing 15 of 18 Provinces
We have argued that a far more effective means of fighting the Japanese would have been to organise a revolutionary war of resistance by mobilising the hundreds of millions of Chinese workers and peasants on a socialist programme to make the occupation impossible. Given that the CCP sacrificed this perspective for one of collaboration with the militarily stronger but politically reactionary Guomindang, it is our duty to honestly assess the calibre of this fighting force with which the CCP had allied at such great political cost.
Evidently, the Guomindang did not match up well to the Japanese since it only took the latter twelve months to achieve all it wanted – the control of North and East China and the total destruction of the Chinese air force. The anti-Japanese ‘united front’ for which Mao argued so vociferously failed spectacularly to defend China. But how and why?
In Defense of Marxism for more