| Author |
Message |
Andreas
Board Royalty
Joined: Feb 27, 2004
Posts: 6316
Location: 31 N 121 E
|
  Posted:
Dec 04, 2004 - 12:24 PM |
 
|
| Post subject: China's resistance war revisited, revised |
Interesting article from Asia Times.
By Li YongYan
Last week Xinhua News Agency reported that the Memorial Hall to the Chinese People's Anti-Japanese War near the Marco Polo (Lu Gou) Bridge outside Beijing will undergo a 50 million yuan (US$6 million) "reform", the second such facelift since it opened to the public in 1987.
Why is a memorial in periodic need of reform? According to its curator, the current displays are "old in form and content, unable to meet the audience's needs for knowledge about the war". He goes on to explain how to reform a historical museum: "First goal is to give a full presentation of the war. Second is to expose the atrocities committed by [the] Japanese army during the war." The Chinese nation's patriotism and unity will be given prominent display also.
Sixty years after World War II, before and during which the Sino-Japanese war was fought, from 1937-45, China is still groping for a complete picture of what can be called the largest resistance war against foreign invasion in its history; a war in which a reported 30 million Chinese were killed. In searching for reasons for this, a sympathetic outsider may offer an innocent rhetorical question: "It is never an easy job to collect, collate, organize and display all that much data, right?" Wrong. The Chinese version of the war has been incomplete and inadequate because Beijing wants it that way.
The propaganda began even before the war ended. On April 25, 1945, the communist army's commander-in-chief, Zhu De, boasted that the troops under communist control "have become the main force in the war. Without us, the strongest resistance would be gone against the Nationalist government's attempt at surrender. They would have surrendered several times but for us."
Since then, the smear campaign against the political foe has escalated. The officially sanctioned history of both the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China depicts Chiang Kai-shek as a traitor who first carried out a non-resistance policy and then fled to the mountains in southwestern China's Sichuan province. So the leadership in the fight against the Japanese invaders "fell on the communists".
Very glorious indeed, except that the facts don't jibe with the myth.
When government forces chased Mao Zedong into northern China's barren hills in the mid-1930s, his Red Army totaled no more than 30,000 defeated, disoriented men. The 1937 breakout of total war with Japan gave him the biggest respite. He immediately maneuvered a merger with the Nationalist government. Overnight, the Red Army became the 18th Group Army in the order of battle under the command of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Upon receiving the appointment as commander of the 18th Group Army, Zhu De declared on July 15, 1937, "We will unconditionally obey the orders of the central government." In a newspaper article in December of the same year, the general secretary of the Communist Party, Zhang Wentian, wrote, "In this war with Japan, [the] Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] under Mr Chiang Kai-shek is in a leadership position. That is an undeniable fact. We should state our sincere support for the government under the leadership of Mr Chiang, for this is our people's own government, and it is our communists' central government, too." One year later, Mao Zedong wrote to Chiang, praising his leadership: "Every Chinese admires you." Five years into the war, a communist statement still called on all Chinese, military and civilian alike, to support chairman Chiang's leadership in the war against Japan.
A great many did. By one estimate, more than 3 million Nationalist troops as well 200 general-rank officers laid down their lives in some 40,000 battles of various scales. By comparison, half a million communist casualties were recorded. One of the few major battles by Mao's army, the Hundred Regiment Battle, became a criminal act when Mao purged his defense minister, Peng Dehuai, in the post-revolution years. The charge, according to Mao, was that "the battle exposed our strength and caused the Japanese to re-evaluate our strength and focus on us. That did Chiang Kai-shek a big favor."
So Mao retracted his claws and sat out the war in the caves. But if he didn't do much, he certainly talked a lot. In 1942, he delivered a keynote speech at a symposium on, of all things, arts and literature. The seventh plenum of the Communist Party's sixth Congress convened in May 1944 and lasted until April of the next year, only to be carried over into the seventh Congress, which lasted another 48 days. Small wonder that in the five thick volumes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, his orders to the Red Army during the resistance war were far outnumbered by those during the civil war that erupted following the Japanese surrender. And his strength grew 20-fold, to 1.2 million strong - unexposed - at the end of the war.
No doubt, the Japanese committed countless, unpardonable atrocities during the hostilities. But both the communist government in Beijing and the Nationalist government in Taiwan have forgiven Tokyo's war retribution. The Nanjing Massacre was never mentioned in mainland China until after 1978. Before that, Chiang Kai-shek was depicted as a worse enemy to the Chinese people than the marauding Imperial Japanese occupying army. The policy was to refuse to honor the Nationalist soldiers who died fighting the invaders. A recently revealed 1950s document from the Interior Ministry of the People's Republic of China said, "We need not and should not provide any pension to them."
Those monuments and tombs erected by the Nationalist government to the fallen dead were all destroyed by the succeeding government. prοtesters to the Japanese emperor's visit to China were rounded up and detained well in advance. In a particularly striking contrast, Beijing released from prison 95% of Japanese war criminals in 1956 and the balance by 1964, but kept Nationalist prisoners of war locked up until 1975. So the POWs in the civil war did seven more hard years than the Japanese aggressors.
As for national unity, it is better left unsung rather than displayed in a public exhibition. When Tokyo announced its unconditional capitulation in August 1945, 1.4 million Chinese troops also surrendered to the Chinese government. They had switched their loyalty to the Japanese masters and turned their guns on the resistant forces. Treason on a scale like this is only comparable to France's Vichy collaboration. So much for "patriotism".
China is probably the only World War II victor country in the world that doesn't hold large commemorations on VJ (Victory over Japan) Day anniversaries. That helps produce a lack of interest from among the Chinese themselves. The anti-Japanese war memorial received 1.2 million visitors a year for the first 10 years, from 1987-97, when it went through the first renovation. The pilgrimages have fallen to nearly half that number since. To make the picture more blurry, Chinese textbooks have added so many layers of paint that it is hard to tell the original color. That explains why China's demands for Japan to be truthful in the latter's history books meet with only sneers.
The 50 million yuan budget to redo history once again might be better spent on converting the memorial to a shrine to honor the Chinese heroes, regardless of their political affiliations, who laid down their lives in the anti-aggression war.
Li YongYan is an analyst of Chinese finance, political and social trends.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FL04Ad06.html |
_________________
If it has tits, tires, or a transom, there's gonna be issues! |
|
|
|
fukuman
Wonder Wit
Joined: Sep 18, 2003
Posts: 3699
Status: Offline
|
| Posted:
Dec 04, 2004 - 03:03 PM |
|
|
i guess its hard to find the facts now, but to what extent did the Russians aid the communists? apparently as a believer that the communists were not ready, they chose an expedient alliance with the KMD. but others suggest that they gave him Manchuria, japanese arms dumps and the 'breadbasket' of china .
an interesting article |
|
|
|
|
Andreas
Board Royalty
Joined: Feb 27, 2004
Posts: 6316
Location: 31 N 121 E
|
| Posted:
Dec 04, 2004 - 03:18 PM |
|
|
It is intriguing to see how many countries are still struggling to come to terms with their history. There were a lot of things in that article which I did not know to the full extent. |
_________________
If it has tits, tires, or a transom, there's gonna be issues! |
|
|
|
|
Edgewood
FooSlinger
Joined: Jan 28, 2004
Posts: 3906
Location: Colonial Shanghai
|
| Posted:
Dec 05, 2004 - 09:47 AM |
|
|
When Prime Minister Tanaka visited Mao on a state visit, he tried to offer a formal apology. Mao refused it, saying that China and the Party were grateful that Japan had come across. Without Japan, he said, the Party would never have made it into power. It wasn't the last time a formal apology was refused, on the same grounds.
The Japanese government also, at the request of the Party, made a massive payment covering compensation and cleanup. They paid every kuai the Party asked for. Not a single jiao of the money went towards the cause, instead being diverted into leaders' pockets.
But I'm sure the locals know better, of course. |
_________________
Conlige suspectos semper habitos |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
Forum FAQ
Search
Preferences
Watched Topics
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
