Correspondence
Glasgow, C.2, 22/8/56.
Sir.
In the Socialist Standard for August your contributor F. Offord, says “At the conclusion of the Second World War when the Japanese capitulated to Russia their arms and ammunition and their control of Manchuria were handed over by Stalin, not to the Communists who had borne the brunt of the Chinese war against the Japanese, but to their mortal enemies the Nationalists.”
These statements are not merely incorrect—they are the very reverse of the truth. When withdrawing from Manchuria, the Russians, instead of handing over Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek, whose authority they had by treaty recognised, gave advance notice to the Communist forces who were able to take up positions before the Nationalists arrived. The Russians surrendered immense quantities of captured Japanese arms to the Chinese Communists and this was one of the principal factors in ensuring Mao Tse-tung’s success.
Neither is it true, but the very opposite of the truth, to say that the Chinese Communists bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan. The Communists reserved as much of their strength as possible for the coming struggle for China while the Nationalist forces were exhausted by their long and terrible campaign against the Japanese. Lin Yutang did not exaggerate when he said, in 1945: “For every Japanese the Communists claim to have killed they have killed at least five Chinese; for every town they have captured from the Japanese, they have captured fifty towns from the Chinese.”
The Communists directed their struggle mainly against their own countrymen and the immense aid which Russia gave them was a direct breach of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship of August 1945 in which Stalin recognised the National Government as the central Government of China.
Yours faithfully.
H. W. Henderson.
On Mr. Henderson’s first main point that Russia surrendered to the Chinese Communists the arms and ammunition left by the Japanese in Manchuria and also assisted, with advice, he does not give proof of his assertion. As for the statements in the article, they are fully supported by the following quotations from the generally-recognised historian on China, Professor C. P. Fitzgerald, and quoted from his work Revolution in China. “Late in the war, in 1945, Stalin could say to Harry Hopkins that he did not regard the Chinese Communists as a serious factor, and recognised only Chiang’s Government as that of China. … It was this regime [that of Chiang Kai-shek] that the victorious powers recognised as the legitimate Government of China. The Communists were treated as dissident forces who should properly submit to the authority of Chiang Kai-shek. Their claim to share in the surrender of the Japanese, or to administer the provinces in which they had maintained resistance for eight years, was not accepted ” (page 83). On page 86 is a description of how Chiang Kai-shek (the leader of the Nationalist Kuomintang Party) obtained “the surrender of the Japanese to the forces of the Kuomintang, not to those of the Communists.”
As to which side bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan—on page 64 “Chiang devoted his time and his German-trained armies to fruitless campaigns against the Communist rebels in South China. Huge sums of money were wasted on these vain attacks, heavy losses of material, many casualties among the best trained troops. None of these troops were ever permitted to fight the Japanese. . . .” On page 77, “. . . the Communists, who had ten years of experience of guerrilla warfare behind them, could be sure of being able to keep the field, for years if need be, till they, and they alone, represented Chinese resistance.” Again, on page 80, “.The Nationalist Government, from the end of 1939, never made any further military effort to recover lost territory . . It did not engage to any serious extent in guerrilla warfare behind the Japanese lines. This task was left to the Communists. . . .” Incidentally it was the constant fight against the Japanese which the Communists maintained that was such an important factor in rallying the patriotic Chinese behind the Communist Party, and that, in turn, really was a factor which enabled the Communists eventually to conquer China.
F. OFFORD