China at War by Hans van de Ven

Author:Hans van de Ven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd.
Published: 2018-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

— TEN —

THE TURNING POINT

The two great tyrants of the Earth: Time and Chance

Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of History of Man (1803)1

Three military campaigns in 1944 would have a profound impact on the world order that emerged after 1945. On 6 June the Allies implemented Operation Overlord, landing 130,000 troops in three waves on the Normandy coast. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, by which the Russians inflicted the largest defeat on German forces of the entire war, destroying the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Central. By August, both operations had succeeded. The drives into Germany from the west and the east that then followed would bring the Nazis to their knees. A Europe divided into a Soviet-dominated eastern zone and a democratic west had its origins in these developments.

These were Allied successes. The third major campaign of 1944, Japan’s Operation Ichigo, marked an overwhelming defeat. For Ichigo, Japan mobilised no fewer than 500,000 troops, 100,000 horses, 1,500 pieces of artillery, 800 tanks, 15,000 mechanised vehicles and a large number of aeroplanes,2 making it Japan’s largest campaign on land of the Second World War. Ichigo’s forces slashed through Nationalist armies as if they did not exist, clearing them from the provinces of Henan, Hunan and Guangxi. By October 1944, Sichuan was the only large Chinese province still in Nationalist hands. A Chinese collapse appeared a distinct possibility.

The worst did not come to pass. However, Ichigo inflicted serious damage not just to the military forces of the Nationalists but also on their domestic and international reputation. In 1943, Chiang Kaishek had been riding high, having secured an end to the unequal treaties and having been feted at Cairo as a world leader. He had also felt strong enough to publish a statement of his vision of China’s past and future, China’s Destiny, and so claim to transcendent authority. In China’s post-monarchical political culture, such statements have become a key aspect of leadership legitimation. Mao Zedong Thought was written into the constitution first of the Communist Party and then of the People’s Republic. Each leader since has published collections of articles intended to suggest he has formulated a distinct political vision uniquely appropriate to his times, a vision usually summarised by a catchy phrase, such as Deng Xiaoping’s ‘the Four Modernisations’ or Jiang Zemin’s rather less successful ‘the Three Represents’.

‘The unequal treaties’, Chiang Kaishek charged, had divided his country, enfeebled its people and destroyed its economy, thus causing its humiliating decline in the nineteenth century.3 Even though no less a person than Sun Yatsen had led the 1911 Revolution, the Republic had been shipwrecked by warlordism and the fact that most Chinese were uneducated. Now, however, a new China was being forged in the heat of battle under Chiang’s leadership, a China that was comfortable with modernity but also with its political and cultural traditions, especially Confucianism. In Destiny, Chiang promised that after the war he would implement constitutional rule and democracy. Now that China had rid itself

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