The clash between China and Japan did not begin in 1937. It had been brewing for decades. The story of the first half of China's twentieth century is the story of its love-hate relationship with its smaller island neighbour. The hatred became more prominent as the years went on, reaching its climax with the devastation visited on China's territory by the atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s. But in earlier years, Japan had been mentor as well as monster. It was an educator: thousands of Chinese students studied there. It was a refuge: when Chinese dissenters such as the prominent revolutionary Sun Yat-sen were threatened by their own government, they fled to Tokyo. And it was a model: China's reformist elites looked to Japan to see how an Asian power could militarise, industrialise and stand tall in the community of nations. For good or ill, a large proportion of the history of twentieth-century China was made in Japan. It became a commonplace in both countries that Japan and China were 'as close as lips and teeth'.
But if they were so close, how did the two nations come to fight one of the bloodiest wars in history? To understand the origins of their conflict, we must return to the late nineteenth century. To be Chinese during this period was to face a depressing range of political problems - floods, famines and foreign invasions among them. And looming over all of these challenges was the greatest existential crisis in China's history. ...
This problem would be highlighted when a new threat appeared in the early nineteenth century: imperialism from the West. The new arrivals were different from previous conquerors who had established new dynasties. They did not share a Chinese view of the world, nor of China's central place within it. ... British traders had established the East India Company in 1600 and now sought a market for the products that emerged from their possessions in southern Asia.
One crop that grew particularly well was the opium poppy, which produced a sticky black paste that could be smoked for a powerful narcotic effect. … Mass-market opium was a British innovation. The imperial court became convinced that a powerful and destructive force was being unleashed upon the population, and Lin Zexu, a high official of the Qing, was sent to the port of Guangzhou (Canton) to destroy the stocks of the drug held by the British traders there. Lin was successful in the short term, capturing the opium after besieging the traders in their 'factories', but he unwittingly provoked a war…Chinese defences turned out to be no match for destructive British firepower, backed up by gunboats, and the court was forced into humiliating surrender.
In 1842 representatives of the Qing dynasty signed the first of what are still known today as the 'unequal treaties', the Treaty of Nanjing. It forced open new ports for foreign trade, including Shanghai, and ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain, without any reciprocal benefits for the Chinese themselves. The treaty marked the start of the 'century of humiliation', during which China lost control of its sovereignty and was at the mercy of foreign powers; even today, the phrase has the power to call up collective memories of a dark period in China's history. …
The treaties allowed Christian missionaries to travel extensively in the interior of China. Missionaries were not always welcome, as their presence was often backed (implicitly at least) by the presence of foreign gunboats. Yet Christianity did find many converts in China, particularly as the faith also brought new educational and medical teaching in its wake.
However, nobody could have foreseen the terrible consequences of one particular conversion in the 1850s. A young man named Hong Xiuquan from Guangdong province had repeatedly failed the examinations for the civil service bureaucracy. After his fourth failure, he fell into a trance, in which he recalled various Christian tracts distributed by an American missionary many years previously. Hong's visions led him to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to earth to drive the Manchus from China and establish the Taiping Tianguo - the 'heavenly kingdom of great peace'. Hong founded a movement that became known as the Taiping, and despite its unpromising beginnings, it snowballed into the greatest civil war that China, and perhaps the world, has ever seen. Between 1856 and 1864 the Taipings established what was effectively a separate state within China; its capital was at the great city of Nanjing, and millions of people lived under its rule….
But decades of atrophy meant that the official Qing armies, inheritors of the Manchu warrior tradition, were no longer capable of defeating a large and fanatical rebel group. Instead, the court decided to contain the problem by putting it in the hands of trusted local officials, who raised 'New Armies' to defeat the Taiping. … Although the immediate problem of the Taiping was solved, the devolution of military authority from the centre to the provinces had laid the grounds for a culture where autonomous militarists, often known as 'warlords', rather than a central Chinese government could lay down the law. …
In the second half of the nineteenth century, while China floundered, its traditional 'little brother' had taken a very different path. After the first Opium War, it was Japan's turn to confront the West, this time led by the United States. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour, requesting that Japan abandon its centuries of near- isolation and open itself to a wider range of trading partners. Perry's demand was politely issued, but it was backed up by the force of gunboats. The next decade and a half saw a major crisis in Japan as the shoguns, the Tokugawa family who acted as regents on behalf of the emperor, found they had no solutions to offer to ward off the foreigners….
After a short civil war in 1868, the Tokugawas were replaced by a very different sort of aristocratic elite, who decided that the way to repel Western imperialism was to embrace wholesale modernisation. … The reformers carried out their actions in the name of the emperor, whose reign-title was Meiji ('brilliant rule'), and the period has therefore become known as the 'Meiji restoration'. In reality, it was nothing less than a revolution. … By 1900, within just three decades, Japan had been transformed. It had a disciplined, conscripted army, and a constitution and parliamentary system...
Japan had also secured another essential element of a powerful modern nation state in the late nineteenth century: an empire. In 1894-5 Japan took on China for control of the Korean Peninsula….Twenty thousand Japanese troops made a daring assault on the fort of Weihaiwei, on the coast of China's northern Shandong province, and turned their guns on the ships of the Chinese navy, sinking five of its finest vessels…. In 1904-5 Japan pulled off an even greater coup. It fought for influence in Manchuria, the northeastern province of China, where Russia had established a colonial presence. Japan paid a heavy price: over 80,000 of its troops were killed by wounds or disease. But thanks to Japan's military skill, the war ended with Russia's defeat. … The Japanese then built on their gains by setting up the South Manchurian Railway. Much more than a transport network, this was a commercial semi-governmental organisation modelled in part on the British East India Company. It gave Japan a strong foothold on the Chinese mainland. … By the early twentieth century, Japan was an Asian power that had remodelled itself as an empire with continental ambitions. In stark contrast, China had been thoroughly humiliated….
The rule of the Qing proved highly brittle. A local uprising quickly ignited and was sufficient to bring the whole system down. By the end of the year, the dynasty was on the brink of collapse. Yuan Shikai, the warlord who controlled the Beiyang army, the biggest in North China, went to the court with a proposal. In return for the abdication of the six-year-old emperor, Puyi, Yuan would ensure that the imperial household was given suitable accommodation and an income. On 12 February, 1912 the last emperor of China abdicated, and China formally became a Republic.
At first, there were high hopes for the Republic. But from the earliest days, it was clear that power lay not with the political parties and Parliament, but with the militarists. … Europe became caught up in its own crisis just a year later, as the Great War broke out. This gave Japan, now unquestionably the strongest power in the region, the opportunity to bolster its own position in China while the Europeans were distracted. In January 1915 the government of Prime Minister Okuma Shigenobu presented Yuan Shikai with a set of territorial and political demands that would give Japan immense advantages in everything from trading rights to the placement of Japanese 'advisers' within the Chinese government. Yuan's position was still weak, and in May thirteen of the original demands were formalized by treaty. Yuan remained president until 1916, when he died of uraemia. For the next decade, China was split among warring militarist factions. Although the international community recognized whichever government was installed in Beijing at any given moment, many felt that China was a geographical expression rather than a country.
CHINA'S WAR WITH JAPAN
1937-1945: THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books India)
Pages: 388,
Price: Rs 699
Excerpted with permission
