The 14-year-long war of Japanese invasion of China, which began in 1931 and ended in 1945, was one of the darkest pages in China’s modern history, and the Chinese Nationalist Party, the ruling party of China at the time, paid a heavy sacrifice for the war against Japan. However, in the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party history, the CCP was the leader of the Chinese people’s resistance to Japan and was always the “mainstay” of China’s war against Japan. In reality, the CCP kept its strength and even collaborated with the Japanese army.
Ignoring the huge investment and heavy sacrifices made by the Kuomintang, the CCP insisted that it was the “mainstay”
The latest edition of “A Brief History of the Communist Party of China” in 2021 still calls the CCP “the mainstay of the national anti-Japanese war”. The new version of the Brief History of the Communist Party of China passes by with a paragraph about the huge commitment and heavy sacrifices made by the Kuomintang in the war against Japan: “At that time, the Kuomintang showed a certain degree of anti-Japanese enthusiasm, and the Kuomintang army conducted such battles as Pingjin, Songhu, Xinjiang, Xuzhou and the defense of Wuhan, and won the Battle of Taierzhuang, which crushed the Japanese imperialists’ plan to ‘destroy China in three months’. plan to ‘destroy China in three months’, but failed to fundamentally turn the tide of war”.
Instead, the brief history describes in some detail the “only two” battles in which the Chinese Communist Party participated during the war – the “Great Victory at Pingxingguan” and the “Battle of the Hundred Regiments”. The Brief History also highlights the importance of these two battles in this way. “The Pingxingguan Victory was the first major victory achieved by the Chinese army against Japan after the outbreak of the All-National War of Resistance, shattering the myth that the Japanese were ‘invincible’.” The “Hundred Regiment Battle” dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese “cage” policy and “boosted the confidence of the whole nation when the anti-Japanese situation was relatively low”.
In fact, the “Pingxingguan Great Victory” was only a very small part of the Taiyuan Campaign, which was dominated by the Kuomintang army. Only less than one division of Lin Biao’s army fought in the Eighth Route Army under the Chinese Communist Party. A brief history of the Battle of Taiyuan emphasizes that the “Great Victory at Pingxingguan destroyed 1,000 Japanese troops”, but does not mention the fact that the Battle of Xinkou alone killed and wounded 20,000 Japanese troops, setting a record for the highest number of Japanese troops destroyed in North China.
The Battle of Hundred Regiments, which began in August 1940, was planned by the commanders of the Eighth Route Army, not the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The CPC Central Committee had previously approved only a small-scale battle that included 23 regiments of troops. The battle was later criticized for years within the CCP for “prematurely exposing our strength to the enemy. The specific commander of the “Hundred Regiments Battle”, Peng Dehuai, the deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army, was later liquidated during the Cultural Revolution, and the conduct of the “Hundred Regiments Battle” was one of his “sins against Chairman Mao”. The “Hundred Regiment Battle” was one of his “sins against Chairman Mao”.
History shows that the Kuomintang organized 22 major battles like the Taiyuan Battle during the war (with more than 100,000 troops from both China and Japan). In addition, the Kuomintang organized 1,117 major battles (with tens to hundreds of thousands of troops committed); 38,931 small and medium-sized battles with less than 10,000 troops.
At the same time, the KMT army suffered more than 3.41 million casualties, 206 generals died in the war, more than 4,300 pilots spilled their blood, 2,468 warplanes were shot down, and all naval vessels were lost. Seventy-five percent of the Kuomintang’s military strength was consumed in the war.
In contrast, according to the Chinese Communist Party’s own statistics, more than 610,000 casualties were suffered by the anti-Japanese forces behind enemy lines. Only one senior general from the CCP side died in the resistance, Zuo Quan.
The greatest recognition of the CCP’s role in the war came in 2005, when Hu Jintao, former general secretary of the CCP, said in a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of the war on September 3, 2005: “The anti-Japanese armies led by the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Communist Party of China were tasked with fighting in the frontal and rear battlefields respectively, forming a joint strategic posture to fight the Japanese invaders. The strategic posture of the Japanese invaders. The frontal battlefield, with the Kuomintang army as the main body, organized a series of big battles, especially the battles of Songhu, Xinkou, Xuzhou and Wuhan at the beginning of the national resistance, which dealt heavy blows to the Japanese.”
This was considered the first time that the CCP affirmed the status and role of the Nationalist frontal battlefield. For some time afterwards, in the official narrative of the CCP, the statement that the Chinese resistance was “jointly led” by the Kuomintang and the Communist Party appeared. This limited acknowledgement, however, has changed in the last two years.
In 2019, “Eight Hundred”, a film depicting the Nationalist “Eight Hundred Heroes” defending the Sihang Warehouse on the Suzhou River in Shanghai during the Battle of Songhu, was pulled three times for allegedly “over-glorifying the Nationalist Party’s war effort” and merely showing The film was withdrawn three times for allegedly “over-glorifying the achievements of the Kuomintang” and only showing “fragments of history. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), also stopped mentioning the KMT’s dedication to the war in his speech on the 75th anniversary of the war. The word “Kuomintang” appears only once in the entire text, in the phrase “Eight Hundred Strong Soldiers of the Kuomintang Army. In the new version of the Brief History, the Kuomintang only shows “a certain amount of anti-Japanese activism.”
Faced with the claim that the Chinese Communist Party was the “mainstay” of the war against Japan, historian Xin Hao-nian, author of the book Whose New China, mentioned this question in a public lecture in 2005 about who was the mainstay of the war between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang: “Let me ask you, in the Battle of Songhu, the The Republic of China invested 700,000 troops and Japan invested 500,000 troops. The two armies fought against each other, and 1.2 million troops fought a decisive battle in Shanghai. I ask, could the Red Army in northern Shaanxi, 3,000 to 4,000 miles away from Shanghai, led by Mao Zedong, with 13,000 guns, 20,000 men, and the resources of three counties, have led such a decisive battle of a million men as the Songhu Battle?”
When explaining the “mainstay” role of the CCP, experts in CCP history usually avoid the above-mentioned obvious facts about the comparison of forces and instead emphasize that “the CCP was the first to put forward anti-Japanese ideas and take the lead in the anti-Japanese struggle, and was the national vanguard that rose up to resist Japanese imperialist aggression “The Chinese Communist Party advocated the establishment of the anti-Japanese national united front and resolutely maintained and consolidated its development, and was the political leadership of the entire nation in uniting against the war”, and “the vast battlefield behind the enemy lines opened up by the Chinese Communist Party and the people’s anti-Japanese armed forces led by it were the decisive forces in persisting in the war and winning the war”. The vast number of battlefields behind the enemy lines opened up by the Chinese Communist Party and the people’s anti-Japanese forces under its leadership are the decisive forces in persisting in the war and winning it.
So, what did the Chinese Communists do when the Chinese people were facing national peril?
The resistance in the Northeast was not led by the CCP at the beginning
In the narrative of the CCP, the anti-Japanese war in the Northeast after the September 18 Incident was the earliest beginning of the CCP’s role as a mainstay. The CCP “was the first to put forward anti-Japanese ideas and to carry out the anti-Japanese struggle” and the CPC “independently led the anti-Japanese war in the Northeast.
In October 2017, the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Education changed the term “eight-year war of resistance” to “14-year war of resistance”, advancing the starting point of the war from the July 7th Incident in 1937 to the September 1st Incident in 1931. The “September 18th Incident” in 1931. It is believed that the CCP’s move was to highlight the leadership of the CCP in the Northeast and to seize the right to speak about the war against Japan.
It is true that the CCP issued five documents against the Japanese invasion after the September 18 Incident, and the Chinese Soviet Republic in Ruijin, Jiangxi Province, did “declare war on Japan” in 1932, but these do not prove that the CCP led the resistance in the Northeast.
The resistance in the Northeast was initially carried out by the Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army. According to an article entitled “The Rise and Development of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army” in the “Cemetery of the Martyrs of Yang Jingyu (leader of the Chinese Communist Party’s Anti-Japanese League) and the Memorial Hall of the South Northeast Anti-Japanese League,” the “Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army “The Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army is a spontaneous armed force organized by the people of all ethnic groups in the Northeast, a part of the patriotic officers and soldiers of the Northeast Army, and the mountain forestry team after the September 18 Incident, and “its composition is extremely complex, including almost all social classes at that time. Its composition was extremely complex and included almost all strata of society at that time.
The article acknowledges that the CCP did not have sufficient power to lead this force. The article says: “Although the CPC Manchurian Provincial Committee and local party organizations had sent a group of party cadres to work in some of the anti-Japanese volunteers and played a positive role in the fight against Japan by the volunteers, they were too weak to influence the decisions of the leaders of the anti-Japanese volunteers and were unable to solve the problems of the complicated composition and ideology within the volunteers.”
Not only that, but a 2013 article by the Institute of Party History and Documentation of the CPC Central Committee noted that the 1932 “Northern Conference” of the CPC Central Committee “did great harm to the actual work of the CPC in the Northeast.” The “Northern Conference” called on the Manchurian Provincial Committee of the CPC to “carry out agrarian revolution, create Soviet power, and arm the Soviet Union” in the Northeast. According to the article, such a policy caused the abnormal isolation of the Northeast Party organization and “brought about the failure of the Party’s work among the volunteers” because of such mistakes as the exclusion of the volunteers and the mountain forestry units. Such a policy was not changed until the end of January 1933.
The Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army later grew to 300,000, and some say 500,000, but in 1933, due to the Japanese siege, the Volunteer Army suffered huge losses and nearly disintegrated.
In February 1936, the Manchurian Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, in accordance with the directives of the Communist International, united its troops and the remnants of the volunteer army to form the “Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army”. The “Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army” was almost 30,000 strong at its peak, less than a tenth of the size of the volunteer army period. There were 11 armies in total, only 7 of which were under the direct leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
“A 2017 article in the Xinhua Daily News said that even the Communist Party-led Northeast Resistance League was not closely linked to the CPC Central Committee due to objective geography. “The geographical distance combined with the then-undeveloped means of communication made it extremely difficult for the Northeast Resistance to communicate with the Party Central Committee.” The article adds that “due to the serious destruction of the Party Central Committee organs in Shanghai by traitors at the same time and the subsequent long march of the Central Red Army, then the contact between the Resistance and the Party Central Committee was completely interrupted and became ‘motherless children’.”
In 1940, the Northeast Anti-Japanese League lost most of its base areas and guerrilla zones, and its forces ended up with less than 2,000 men. In 1945, the group was disbanded by the Soviet Far Eastern Army.
“After the September 18 Incident, the Communist Party called for the overthrow of the Nationalist government and the “armed defense of the Soviet Union”.
What did the Communist Party do in the six years between the September 18 Incident and the July 7 Incident?
Indeed, on the third day of the September 18 Incident, that is, September 20, 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued the “Declaration on the Violent Occupation of the Eastern Provinces by the Japanese Imperialists”. In the declaration, the CPC condemned the Japanese invasion and called on all workers, peasants, students, poor people and soldiers to rise up and overthrow the Nationalist government, which was leading the whole China at that time.
On the same day, Wang Ming, Acting General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, also delivered a speech on “Armed Defense of the Soviet Union”. In this speech, entitled “The Urgent Tasks of the Party Arising from the Breaking of the Third Siege by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and the Maturing of the Revolutionary Crisis”, the CPC Central Committee set the “great historical task” for the whole Party: “Armed defense of the Soviet Union against the imperialist bandit war”.
In 1929, during the armed conflict between the Soviet Union and China over the “China Eastern Railway”, the Communist International called on the Communist Party to In 1929, during the armed conflict between the Soviet Union and China over the “China Eastern Railway”, the Communist International called on the CCP to “arm the Soviet Union” and organize mass demonstrations against the Kuomintang and for the Soviet Union. The Communist Party responded positively to this demand. Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the CCP, was expelled from the Party for opposing the “armed defense of the Soviet Union”.
For the early CCP, the Chinese nation was not, as Xi Jinping said, the one they were defending, and China was not even their motherland. In its second year of existence, the CCP made the following clear resolution, “Soviet Russia is the first country of workers and peasants in the world, the fatherland of the proletariat and the toiling masses. …… The working class and the toiling masses of the world should do their best to protect Soviet Russia. “.
On November 7, 1931, less than two months after the outbreak of the September 18 Incident, China, at the request of the Communist International, created the Chinese Soviet Republic and the Provisional Central Government in Ruijin, Jiangxi, which insisted on the violent overthrow of the Nationalist government leading the war effort as its basic purpose.
In April 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a declaration of war against Japan. This manifesto is used by the CCP party history as another evidence of the CCP’s leadership in the search for resistance against Japan. CCP propaganda materials say that “this was nine years before the Kuomintang government officially declared war on Japan.” However, instead of calling on the people to resist Japan first, the declaration first “organized a popular anti-Japanese volunteer army to seize the weapons of the Kuomintang warlords” to arm themselves and fight directly against Japan.
In an article published in 2001, the late Wang Hilin, a professor of history at Beijing Normal University, said, “When the Japanese imperialists launched the September 18 Incident in 1931 and subsequently occupied a large area of Chinese territory, China encountered an unprecedented crisis and faced the question of the survival of the nation. However, the key slogan of the Chinese Communist Party, in accordance with the resolutions of the Communist International and its own party, was ‘armed defense of the Soviet Union’, placing itself outside the struggle of the Chinese nation against the enemy”.
For the CCP, the most famous “anti-Japanese” action was the “Long March” of the Central Red Army in 1934. In the “Declaration of Anti-Japanese Salvation” jointly issued by Mao Zedong and Zhu De in November 1935, the CPC sent “the main force of the Red Army on a long march of 25,000 miles to fight against Japan through hardships and difficulties”. There are countless sources about this experience, but the “Long March” was just a “strategic transfer” of the Red Army after the failure of the Fifth Anti-“Siege”, or to be more precise The “Long March” was nothing more than a “strategic transfer”, or to be more precise, a “great escape”.
Regarding the actions of the Red Army in the years from September 18 to July 7, Xie Youtian, author of “The Mystery of How the Chinese Communist Party Grew”, said, “The Chinese Communist Party was never an anti-Japanese force and never spared a single shot to the Japanese army. What they did was to use the Red Army to fight the National Government and to disperse the anti-Japanese forces, or to use the anti-Japanese enthusiasm of the people, especially the young students, in cooperation with politicians with ulterior motives, to incite immediate resistance to war and to undermine the war preparations and strategic decisions of the National Government.”
On the contrary, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership suspended its “war against the Soviet Union” in 1931 because of the “September 18 Incident” in 1931, the “Shanghai War” in 1932, and the “Great Wall War” in 1933. The “siege” of the Communist Party’s Soviet Union was halted in 1931, 1932 and 1933. Xie Youtian said that the Communist Party’s actions “led to repeated armed attacks on the back of the Nationalist government, which was fighting head-on against the Japanese army. By their actions, they aggravated the suffering and crisis of the Chinese nation in favor of Japanese aggression.”
This revolutionary strategy of the CCP, which aimed at the violent overthrow of the National Government, remained unchanged even when the CCP issued the August 1, 1935 Declaration calling for the establishment of an anti-Japanese national united front. The strategy of the August 1 Manifesto was “anti-Chiang and anti-Japanese”.
The “Anti-Japanese National United Front” was formulated by the CPC in response to the Soviet Union’s request
When talking about the CPC as the “mainstay” of the anti-Japanese struggle, experts in CPC history emphasize that the CPC first proposed the “anti-Japanese national united front” and was therefore the “political leadership of the national unity against the war. “. However, what CCP experts fail to mention is that the CCP first proposed the “united front” out of the need to establish a united front against fascism by the Communist International and the Soviet Union.
In his new book, From Rebels to Rulers, A Century of Communism, Harvard professor Tony Saich says, “Once again, this most important strategic shift came from Moscow, from the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held between July and August 1935. Because of growing anxiety about German and Japanese intentions, the Seventh Congress of the Communist International called for a united front against fascism, including all components, all classes and all anti-fascist states.”
Communist propaganda materials sometimes acknowledge that “in accordance with the new guidelines of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International for the establishment of an international anti-fascist united front,” Wang Ming, the Communist representative to the Communist International, drafted a “Letter to All Compatriots for the Salvation of the Country against Japan. After the approval of the Soviet Union and the Communist International, Wang Ming issued this manifesto on August 1, 1935 in the name of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, so that this manifesto came to be known as the August 1 Manifesto.
On the one hand, the August 1 Manifesto “calls upon the Chinese people to mobilize to stop the civil war and unite against Japan”, and on the other hand, it calls upon everyone to “break through the oppression of the Japanese and Chiang’s bandits and courageously join with the Soviet government and the anti-Japanese governments in the northeast to organize a unified national defense government and an anti-Japanese allied army for the whole of China. “. It is worth mentioning that at that time, the CPC Central Committee as well as Mao Zedong were actually still tossing and turning on the Long March. In the words of the CPC, the publication of the August 1 Declaration “marked the basic formation of our Party’s strategic front for the establishment of the anti-Japanese national united front”.
On November 28, 1935, Mao Zedong and Zhu De, who had arrived in northern Shaanxi, jointly issued the Declaration of Anti-Japanese Salvation, which is considered to be the symbol of the CPC’s establishment of the anti-Japanese national united front. However, this front did not include Chiang Kai-shek. The Manifesto stated: “No matter what political faction, no armed force, no social group, no individual, as long as they are willing to resist the Japanese and oppose Chiang, we are not only willing to conclude anti-Japanese and anti-Chiang agreements with them, but also willing to go further and organize with them an anti-Japanese allied army and national defense government”.
The CCP’s attitude of “anti-Chiang and anti-Japanese” did not change until after the Xi’an Incident on December 12, 1936, when the Soviet Union intervened and became the “United Front against Chiang and Japan”. The Xi’an Incident was an important turning point in the formation of the anti-Japanese united front, because it was only after the Xi’an Incident that Chiang Kai-shek accepted the terms of the Chinese Communist Party, and all this change was due to the role of the Soviet Union.
In the early hours of December 12, 1936, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng abducted Chiang Kai-shek. The Communist Party has always emphasized that it made its strategy to resolve the Xi’an Incident peacefully on the basis of “independence”. However, what Chinese Party history does not say is that when they first learned of Chiang’s detention, Mao Zedong and some Communists wanted Chiang to be “tried” and “executed”, and that the Communist attitude was strongly opposed by Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Xie Youtian, author of the book The Mystery of Communist Growth, said, “The Soviet Union believed that only China’s war against Japan could delay Japan and reduce the Japanese threat to the eastern part of the Soviet Union; only Chiang Kai-shek could lead China against Japan, and Zhang Xueliang was not an adequate substitute.”
Moreover, because of the disapproval of the Comintern and Stalin, the CPC Central Committee abandoned its plan to establish a “Northwest Defense Government” and a Northwest Alliance based on Soviet support with Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, and resolved to turn around and negotiate with the Nanking government.
According to Harvard’s Sage, Chiang finally accepted the CPC’s terms and agreed to build a united front with it because he believed that the Soviet Union could help China in the war. The Soviet Union did later provide four years of assistance to the Chinese resistance.
The support from the Soviet Union was crucial, given the lack of force in the Nationalist army,” Sage said. It also required him [Chiang] to come to some kind of political arrangement with the Chinese Communist Party. Chiang thus stopped resisting Mao’s demands and allowed the CCP to retain its own base areas, and also accepted the reorganization of the CCP army into the Eighth Route Army in the north and the guerrilla forces in the south into the New Fourth Army.”
On September 22, 1937, the CPC Central Committee issued the “Manifesto for the Nation”, which included four conditions: struggle for the realization of the Three People’s Principles, abolition of the Sovietization movement, abolition of the Soviet regime and independence of the Red Army. 23, Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement actually recognizing the legal status of the Communist Party. The anti-Japanese national united front was then formally formed.
Chiang Kai-shek became the internationally recognized commander-in-chief of China in the war, and the CCP was also recognized as his subordinate. The Red Army was on the verge of extinction, but the Soviet Union supported Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance to Japan, thus achieving a rare historical turnaround with the Second Communist Party of China.
The Communist Party of China was “seven parts development, two parts response, one part anti-Japanese”
However, the integrated Chinese Communist Party did not focus on the anti-Japanese struggle, but concentrated more on its own development under the name of “legality”, and eventually seized power and overthrew the Kuomintang.
On October 10, 1965, Chiang Kai-shek said in his “Letter to the Compatriots of the People’s Army and the People’s Republic of China for the 54th National Day Commemoration”: “At first, I did not think that the Communist bandits were so ambitious that they played with their evil ‘two hands’ and surrendered. declaration, the ink has not yet dried, just when the Japanese army is in full invasion, still openly threatened to ‘develop in seven parts, respond in two parts, and resist Japan in one part’.”
On September 2, 2015, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou also mentioned this approach in his speech in Taipei to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory in the war against Japan, using it to criticize the Chinese Communist Party for distorting historical facts and erasing the Nationalist government’s contribution to the war against Japan in commemorating the war. He also reiterated that the national government is the only government leading China in the war against Japan, and that it is a historical fact that the national army led the war against Japan.
The “July 21” policy originated with a junior officer who had left the Communist Party under Yang Chengwu, the head of the 115th Independent Regiment of the 8th Route Army. The officer, Li Faqing, said that in September 1937, Mao Zedong instructed Yang Chengwu, who was on his way to fight in Shanxi, that “the Sino-Japanese war is an excellent opportunity for our party to develop, and we have decided on a policy of 70 percent development for ourselves, 20 percent compromise, and 10 percent fighting against Japan.” Li Faqing added that the instruction was a principle secretly decided by the Luochuan Conference of the Communist Party in August 1937.
Historians have not found any evidence of this “July 21” policy in the Communist Party archives. However, such a spirit is reflected in the memoirs of CCP leaders.
In “My Memories,” former CCP leader Zhang Guotao has this to say about the Luochuan meeting: “He (Mao Zedong) warned the congregation not to be deluded by patriotism and not to go to the front as anti-Japanese heroes; ……. He advocated that the Eighth Route Army should stick to guerrilla warfare, avoiding frontal clashes with the Japanese, avoiding reality and bypassing the Japanese rear to fight guerrilla attacks. The main task was to expand the strength of the Eighth Route Army and to establish guerrilla bases led by the Chinese Communist Party in the enemy’s rear.”
Such a statement by Zhang Guotao is also very consistent with the basic spirit of the Luochuan Conference, which the CCP later talked about publicly. Propaganda materials of the CCP said, “According to the situation of the enemy’s strength and our weakness and the characteristics of the Red Army, the Central Committee of the CCP determined at the meeting the strategic guidelines to be implemented by the Red Army. Mao Zedong pointed out that the basic task of the Red Army was to adhere to independent guerrilla warfare and to conduct movement warfare under favorable conditions, to create anti-Japanese bases behind enemy lines, to pincer and destroy the enemy, to cooperate with friendly forces in combat, and to preserve and expand the Red Army. The conference determined that the Red Army should let go of the independent mountain guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear, so that the guerrilla warfare would take up the strategic task of cooperating with the frontal battlefield, opening up the battlefield behind the enemy and establishing the anti-Japanese bases behind the enemy lines.”
The CPC has always said that it was the leader and main force of the war, but in the history of the 14-year war, the CPC has repeatedly mentioned only the “Pingxingguan Victory” and the “Hundred Regiments Battle”. This also proves that even if the data of “July 21” is not entirely accurate, such a spirit at least exists. The Chinese Communist Party rarely intervened in the battles between the Japanese and the Nationalists.
In his Yan’an Diary, Peter Vladimirov, the Communist International Commissioner in Yan’an, wrote: “The 8th Route Army and the New Fourth Army had in fact ceased fighting against Japan since 1941, and the Battle of the Hundred Regiments was the last battle against Japan. The 8th Route Army and the New Fourth Army were instructed that they were not allowed to conduct combat operations against Japan, including retreating if they were attacked.”
Yang Kueisong, a professor of history at Peking University in China, has written that it should have been unlikely that the CCP formulated the ‘July 21’ policy in the early days of the formation of the United Front, but he acknowledges that “after the sharp change in the relationship between the two parties in 1939, and by 1940, the CCP Central Committee did “placed military development in a decisive position and specifically planned ‘under the general task of upholding guerrilla warfare, sweeping away all attacks by surrenderists and stubborn factions, and turning the whole of northern China up to northern Anhui and southern Jiangnan into a democratic first anti-Japanese base under the administration of progressive Communist forces, while greatly developing Ezhong and The goal of the development of ‘Ezhong and Erdong’ and its practical steps”.
According to the latest edition of “A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party,” by the end of 1940, the Communist-led armed forces had grown to 500,000 men (excluding the Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army), with a large number of local armies and militias, and 16 democratic anti-Japanese bases had been created in North, Central and South China.
By the end of the war, the Communist army had grown to about 1.32 million and the militia to more than 2.6 million; there were 19 anti-Japanese democratic bases, or liberated areas, under the leadership of the CPC, covering an area of nearly 1 million square kilometers with a population of nearly 100 million. This was a scale unmatched by the CCP at the beginning of the war. At that time, the CCP had less than 50,000 people and was worrying about its survival.
The real attack of the CCP on Japan began on August 10 and 11, 1945. With a few days to go before the Japanese surrender, Zhu De, the commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, issued seven consecutive orders ordering the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in southern China to swiftly launch an offensive in northern, central, and southern China. A week before the Japanese surrendered, the Communist Party quickly “recovered 250 cities above the county level” in these areas.
This performance of the Chinese Communist Party makes people feel that it is suspected of “plucking peaches”. Historian Xin Hao-nian said in his book “Who is New China” that “it was none other than Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party that plucked the peach of victory in the war. Mao Zedong once accused Chiang Kai-shek of coming down from Emei Mountain to “pick the peach” immediately when the war was won, meaning that he had come down to “snatch” the fruits of victory.
Mao Zedong colluded with the Japanese army and betrayed the Kuomintang
It was later revealed that the Chinese Communist Party was not only not serious about the war, but also colluded with the Japanese army and betrayed the Kuomintang during the war.
In December 2015, Yoshitomo Endo, director of the Center for International Exchange at Tokyo Welfare University and professor emeritus at Tsukuba University in Japan, published the book “Mao Zedong, the Man Who Conspired with the Japanese Army”. The book points out that Mao Zedong sold the KMT military intelligence obtained from the Kuomintang cooperation to Japan during the War of Resistance in order to weaken the KMT army; Mao used the War of Resistance to grow the power of the Chinese Communist Party and pave the way for the future defeat of the KMT army.
An important piece of evidence for Endo is the memoirs of Eiichi Iwai, the owner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ secret service agency in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of China, “Shanghai in Retrospect. According to Iwai’s record, during the war Mao Zedong dispatched Chinese communist agents Yuan Shu and Pan Hannian to Shanghai and Hong Kong to contact Japanese secret services such as the Iwai Kōkan and the Mei Organs in an effort to weaken the Japanese resistance and sign an armistice agreement with the Japanese.
In an interview with Voice of America, Yuki Endo said she believes that the collusion with the Japanese army was a personal decision by Mao Zedong and then carried out by a very small number of spies, and that this was not a collective decision of the CCP at the time, and that the rest of the CCP hierarchy did not know about it.
She also believes that the arrest of Pan Hannian, the best agent on the CCP’s covert front after the establishment of the CCP, as well as other CCP spies, should be related to this experience. in 1955, Pan Hannian was secretly arrested and later sentenced to 15 years in prison. A growing body of historical evidence proves that the arrest of Pan Hannian was ordered by Mao Zedong himself.
Peter Vladimirov, a Communist International correspondent in Yan’an and a TASS correspondent, also wrote about Mao’s collusion with the Japanese army in his “Yan’an Diary” published in 1973. He wrote: “I overheard a call from the headquarters of the New Fourth Army. This headquarters report confirms completely and clearly that there is a long preserved connection between Mao and others and the Japanese dispatcher high command …… The telegram undoubtedly also shows that reports relating to the contact with the Japanese command were sent to Yan’an on a regular basis.”
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