CHINA LOST 14 MILLION PEOPLE IN WORLD WAR II. WHY IS THIS FORGOTTEN?

 Historian Rana Mitter believes a better understanding of China's future actions can follow a truer understanding of its World War II past.

When looking back at World War II, the victors see their own military contributions the clearest. Hence the United Kingdom spotlights the Battle of Britain and El Alamein, the Russians Stalingrad and Kursk, and the Americans D-Day and Midway. The contribution of China, whose war was the longest and among the bloodiest, tends to be forgotten in the West, and for years was little commemorated even in China.

A new book, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945, by Oxford historian Rana Mitter, aims to sharpen this fuzzy picture by presenting the Middle Kingdom’s eight-year war against an invading Japan—a war that had been under way more than two years before the Nazis invaded Poland, which is the usual starting point for histories of World War II. “Essentially,” Mitter explained in an interview with Pacific Standard, “the politics of the Cold War covered over that what is coming to be realized, I think, as one of the great missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of World War II.” Now, however, a combination of archives in China opening up and a new political attitude by its leaders has cracked the historical window.

Why does any of this matter now? Mitter says the experience of World War II shapes Chinese attitudes today, especially between China and the United States and China and Japan, “two of the legs of a very important set of relationships in the Asiatic region. ... I would argue very strongly that by looking at what happened in terms of a history in those years, you get a great deal of insight into what is important in that region now to people there and what will be important for the next decade to come.”

This has been edited for length and clarity.

The British title of the book is China’s War With Japan. In the U.S. it’s Forgotten Ally. Can you tell me what was the decision-making process in choosing titles?

To some extent it has to do with the way in which some things are marketed. China’s War With Japan is not just the U.K. edition; it’s also the edition that’s being sold in East Asia, India, Australia, and a whole variety of places. And I think it’s fair to say, for instance, that if you were to buy the book in Hong Kong or Singapore, it’s probably not fair to say that China is the forgotten ally, because there, of course, the memory of the Asian war is still strong. So in that sense, it’s more of a descriptive title of what the book is about. The North American market, and the United States in particular, the title Forgotten Ally was chosen in quite an intentional way because obviously you know it’s a history of China and why it matters today in terms of that period.

But it’s also a reminder to the American public that there was this very important historical moment that has been forgotten and which is important for two reasons, one of which has to do with the very contemporary significance of understanding why Sino-American relations and Sino-Japanese relations, which are crucial to the shaping of the world, let alone the region, remain very volatile.

But the second reason actually has to do something with historical justice. Regardless of the many flaws of the Chinese government at the time, Chiang Kai-shek’s government, I think it’s fair to say that they never, neither then nor now, have been given sufficient credit for what has often been regarded as a purely American victory in Asia, and particularly the Pacific.

But the Chinese contribution up to now has generally been mostly dismissed or regarded as very minor, secondary, and not really worth bothering with. I think as we move decades and decades away from the events themselves, it’s no longer tenable to retain that position.

In an image suddenly salient with the civil war in Syria, Japanese artillerymen fire chemical weapons into Chinese positions in 1941. 

So why did this get lost? China was one of the Big Four at the end of the conflict, and the China lobby was very strong in the U.S. And then 14 million people who died make another fairly compelling argument. What happened?

It’s a good reason to remember that on its own. I would say that one of the single facts, which is worth remembering if you want to annoy an official in the Chinese Communist Party, is to remind them that the reason, the primary reason, that China today has a seat in the permanent five on the United Nations Security Council, the top table of global diplomacy, is not because of anything that Chairman Mao did. It was because of the wartime efforts of Chiang Kai-shek, and essentially as a direct result of China’s involvement on the Allied side in World War II.

China now finds itself—more than 65, 70 years nearly after the end of World War II—as the only non-European, non-white power to sit at that top table. 

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