The War of Resistance:
1937-45
HI 168: Lecture 9
Dr. Howard Chiang
OVERVIEW
-
Rehash
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident
Nanjing Massacre
The Second United Front
Japanese Marches Southwards
Collaboration
Chinese Communism without Mao (New
4th Army)
- Mao Zedong and the Yan’an Years
REHASH
1. Reorganization of the Nanjing
government
2. Halt to all civil war
3. Release of patriotic leaders
4. Release of all political prisoners
5. Lifting of restrictions on the mass
patriotic movement
6. Guarantee of political freedom
7. GMD should follow Sun’s testament
8. National Salvation Convention
MARCO POLO BRIDGE
- July 7 at the Lugouqiao or Marco Polo
Bridge
- the Japanese forces demanded a
house-to-house search in Wanping
- On July 29, Japanese forces occupied
Beijing  Tianjin on July 30  Wusong
on September 1  Nanjing in December
 Shanghai in November
- On November 20, National Government
relocated to Chongqing
NANJING MASSACRE
- Charles Maier (2000):
“The Nanjing rampage seems all the more atrocious in
that it involved not what has seemed so horrifying
about the Holocaust—its bureaucratized planning and
mechanical execution—but the often gleeful killing of
perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians by
individual soldiers using sword and bayonet as well as
bullet. The killings were all the more appalling in that
they were unnecessary for the military objective,
continued after the victory was secured, and
apparently involved such joyful or at least indifferent
murder.”
NANJING MASSACRE
- 2 aspects stand out:
1. scale of brutality unparalleled
2. testimonies of Chinese victims were
supported by eye-witness reports of
foreign residents
- Nanjing memorial site: “Victims 300,000”
- Japanese historians, esp. right-wing
nationalist historians, and Japanese
history textbooks continue to deny the
very fact of the massacres
Iris Chang
THE SECOND UNITED FRONT
- Zhu De and Peng Dehuai were sent by
Mao Zedong to Nanjing to negotiate with
the National Government
- Aug. 22, the CCP’s Red Army was redesignated the Eight Route Army
- Sep. 6, the CCP’s Shaanxi-GansuNingxia Soviet base  Border Region
- Oct. 12, Red Army south of Yangzi after
the Long March became New 4th Army
JAPANESE MARCHES
SOUTHWARDS
-
Dec 1937-May 1938, Shandong + Henan
Oct 25, 1938, Wuhan
Oct 21, 1938, Guangzhou
Feb, 1939, Island of Hainan
Apr 1939 to Jan 1942, 3 “Battles of
Changsha”
- “Three All”: kill all, burn all, destroy all
- Dec 1941, Hong Kong; Jan 1942, Malay
Peninsula; Feb 1942, Singapore; Apr
1942, the Philippines
WWII Participating Countries: Allies (Green) and Axis (Blue)
COLLABORATION
- Collaboration: actions that had the
effect of maintaining Japanese power,
attaining Japanese ends, or making
Japanese control tolerable
- “provisional government” – Beiping
- “Reformed government” – Nanjing
- Wang Jingwei – believed in peaceful
accommodation with Japan’s “new
order of East Asia”; expelled from GMD
on Jan. 1, 1939; hanjian (漢奸) – “traitor”
Wang Jingwei
CHINESE COMMUNISM WITHOUT
MAO (NEW 4TH ARMY)
- One important group of the CCP did not
participate in the Long March  became
the New Fourth Army (more modern and
cosmopolitan than Mao’s group?)
- In 1940 and 1941 (in Southern Anhui),
New 4th attacked by GMD troops 
severed the Second United Front
- Jan 20, 1941, New 4th established new
headquarters in Jiangsu, independent
from the GMD
LONG MARCH OF 25,000 LI
-
1 Li = 500 meters
1. Guizhou
2. Sichuan
3. Shaanxi
4. rest rejoined
Significance:
- away from Japan
- Party meetings
(Edgar Snow)
He Zizhen (1928)
Mao Zedong (1927)
MAO AND THE YAN’AN PERIOD
- Mao’s two rivals:
Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming
- Autumn 1938: the Central Secretariat
- 1942-44: the Rectification Movement
the CCP focused on defining their ideological
standpoint, reorganizing the party into a tight
Leninist structure, and rewriting the history of the
1930s to show that the leadership of Mao Zedong
and his colleagues had been correct throughout
all the political crises and controversies and was
the only legitimate authority in the Party
MAO AND THE YAN’AN PERIOD
- 1942-44: the Rectification Movement
- Feb 1942, “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work”
- Aim: the eradication of dogmatism in the CCP
- a thinly disguised attack on Wang Ming
- 3 Phases: Phase 1 study and discussion, Phase
2 investigation of Party work, Phase 3 final report
- Style of management: consolidation and control
- to restrict the free-thinking and broad-minded
approach that many of émigrés had arrived with
- to persuade them putting their talents at the
disposal of the Chinese Communist Party without
question
MAO AND THE YAN’AN PERIOD
- At the end of the war:
- 19 Communist base areas spread across Northern
China in the provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Shandong,
Hebei, Rehe, and Liaoning, with Communist units in
Anhui and Jiangsu
- Communist regimes stretched over a roughly
250,000-square-mile area
- Mao claimed that there were 1.2 million CCP
members
- Communist military forces had increased almost
tenfold from the opening of the war: from 92,000 in
the 8th Route and New 4th armies in 1937 to 910,000
in 1945