Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia by Barak Kushner;Sherzod Muminov;

Author:Barak Kushner;Sherzod Muminov;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 6

ANTI-IMPERIALISM AS STRATEGY: MASKING THE EDGES OF FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS IN CIVIL WAR-ERA CHINA, 1945–1948

Matthew D. Johnson

The unraveling of Japan’s empire in China did not occur immediately, but in media terms its disappearance was swift. Reporting on the trials of people accused as traitors and collaborators was perhaps the most visible evidence of the shedding of imperial legacies.1 Military participants in the struggle against imperialism such as the Nationalist Party (KMT) of Chiang Kai-shek and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of Mao Zedong also used anniversaries, first-hand accounts, and other forms of official and unofficial remembrance to portray themselves as authentic champions of the Chinese people and saviors of the nation.2 These public aides-mémoires also had international currency: they served to shame a reindustrializing Japan and to delegitimize domestic political rivals accused of having resisted or avoided participating in the national salvation effort.3 Nonetheless, the rapid forgetting of the war of resistance was an observable and widespread phenomenon even prior to the CCP victory over the KMT for control of the Chinese mainland in 1949.4

Yet disappointingly for many patriots in China, the empire’s unraveling did not bring an end to the longstanding situation of powerful external actors—foremost among them the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union)—involving themselves in China’s insecure state of internal affairs. While China’s war of resistance faded as a reality, it was quickly replaced by the KMT–CCP civil war, which had continued even during the years of total war against the Japanese Occupation. The dilemma was that Chiang, Mao, and others had to grapple with the reality of international alliances of necessity, at the same time making sure that they were not being perceived as mere tools of new imperialist forces. This chapter examines the strategies and rhetoric through which the USA and Soviet Union sought to play an influential role in the postwar landscape of a de-imperializing East Asia through political stagecraft, networks, and media. In revisiting propaganda in this way, my goal is to read statements about the impact of international forces on China not as ideology in the narrow sense of reflecting actors’ systematic beliefs but as part of carefully constructed “masks” by which the CCP, KMT, USA, Soviet Union, and other lesser-known (and comparatively far weaker) political forces such as the Democratic League attempted to build up popular support through appeals to anti-imperialism, all the while pursuing supranational agendas of accommodation and coalition-building.

The chapter’s primary argument, which complements the findings of other work in this volume on the reconstruction of postwar East Asia, is that creating systems of postwar order and control—in this case, control over public opinion—not only engaged many of the same powerful approaches and actors that had characterized the 1937 to 1945 wartime period but also necessitated engagement with new, quasi-imperial “edges” in the form of American and Soviet interests. The result of this contradictory state of affairs, which has remained relatively unexplored in the histories of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) to

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