Introduction

Nationalist China played a major role in the Second World War by engaging the main body of the Japanese Army. This prevented the Japanese Army either attacking the Soviet Union in the rear or reinforcing its defensive island chain in the Pacific and so causing America heavy casualties. In terms of suffering and destruction, the Soviet Union topped the list with some 27 million dead and around 40% of its economy shattered.[1] China was a close second with approximately 20 million dead, 45 million refugees and an equal level of destruction to its economy and infrastructure.[2] Yet the Soviet Union was counted as one of the ‘Big Three’ great powers, while China was not, even though she was the fourth signatory on the Charter of the United Nations and the second signatory on the surrender document of the Japanese Empire, signed on the deck of the USS Missouri.[3] This poses the question of why Nationalist China was put forward as a great power and yet failed to gain recognition as one by the end of the war. The historiography of this subject underwent a major shift around a decade ago, shifting away from the 1970’s viewpoint of a Nationalist China that was ‘an incompetent, corrupt, and militarist regime’, and a mechanised, American, Pacific War.[4] In addition it challenges post war re-interpretation of events in America in the 1950s as well as Japanese historiography.[5] New research shows that the war interrupted Nationalist China’s modernisation process, forcing her to fight an agrarian war of resistance in three separate, ‘nested’ wars, the internal Chinese Civil War (1911-1949), the regional Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), and the global Second World War (1937-1945).[6] Using this viewpoint, this essay will first examine the reason why China was promoted as a great power, then examine the forces opposing this process, firstly within America itself and secondly in the wider world, finishing with an assessment of the effect on the process of Nationalist China’s military situation. Given the space constraints facing this large subject, Communist China will only be mentioned in passing.

The Four Policemen Concept

President Roosevelt was keen even before America entered the war, to create a new world order after it, both to cement alliances during the war and to ensure American hegemony at the end.[7] The initial steps were the Atlantic Charter at the Arcadia summit (December 1941), the Declaration by the United Nations (January 1942) and finally Washington granting Nationalist China great power status in May 1943.[8] However there were limits to this policy, as calls for a Pacific Charter went unanswered.[9] Roosevelt’s aims were strategic, to ‘keep China in the war’ and political, by having an Asian ally, it countered Japanese claims of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. Also, the post-war stabilisation of Asia required a strong counter weight to the Soviet Union in the region and to weaken British imperialism.[10] The ‘Four Policemen’ concept was launched; ‘On May 2,1942, President Roosevelt declared that "in the future an unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity not only in Eastern Asia but in the whole world."’.[11]

The concept envisaged the United Nations being overseen by four great powers, Britain and the Soviet Union in Europe, China and the Soviet Union in Asia, with the USA providing financial and economic assistance. These policemen had ‘the power to deal immediately with any threat to the peace and any sudden emergency which requires this action’ either by embargo or military action.[12] The reasoning behind this structure was based on two key, American policies, Isolationism and the Open Door. Roosevelt did not believe that Congress would allow him to station US troops in a defeated Europe longer than two years and back in 1937 at the Nine Power Treaty conference, he had failed to gain either public or Congress support for the use of military action in support of treaty obligations.[13] Nor had America ever joined the League of Nations. The Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937 had meant that the United States could not supply arms to China, although she could supply loans. Although the defeat of the Ludlow Amendment in 1937 started to reverse the isolationist agenda, nonetheless as late as 1940 during the Presidential election campaign, Roosevelt was forced to state ‘I am not going to send your boys into any foreign wars,’.[14]

Balancing isolationism was America’s need for trade. The Open Door policy started in 1899 based on free trade and freedom of navigation, but in reality it was an attempt to break open European empire’s spheres of influence.[15] Trade with Asia represented just 6% of overall trade in 1930, nonetheless Americans continued to regard Asia in general and China in particular as a potentially large market for US goods.[16] The Four Policemen policy, including promoting China as a great power, was Roosevelt’s solution to the conflicting American desires for free trade and not getting involved in defending it. Roosevelt’s strategic plan to build up China during the war faced some serious opposition within America from various groups, the most effective of whom was the military establishment. The uncomfortable truth was at the start of the war, America had a small armed forces and military industrial base so there was fierce competition for resources. For most of the first two years of the war, China’s low priority in Allied strategy forced both the United States and Britain to fight a proxy war, where much was promised, little delivered and symbolism counted for a great deal.[17] The most effective opponent to a commitment in China was George Marshall, who was committed to the ‘Germany first’ policy and wanted the Western powers to ‘leverage its maritime position’ to avoid casualties.[18] He promoted a decisive strike against Germany by America’s small, 90 division army and opposed any diversion of resources to other theatres.[19] In a similar vein he opposed the strategic bombing of Japanese Home Islands by B-24s and B-29s from China on the grounds that it could be done more cheaply by the United States Navy (USN). He and Secretary of War, Stimson, moved slowly to implement the Presidents direct order to support the offensive.[20] Marshall’s opposition was not purely strategic, after all he was the founder of the American concept of a modern, mechanised war, the ‘Benning Revolution’. This was totally at odds with Chiang Kai-shek’s, agrarian, defensive war concept.[21] Alongside the US Army, the USN and Douglas MacArthur’s campaign in the south-west Pacific claimed a large slice of US production both before and during the war.[22]

The support for China from American public opinion, grew steadily between 1937 and 1941.[23] This was fuelled by a largely false view of Nationalist China, nonetheless it grew strongly in 1943 when Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Meiling) made a tour around the United States to a rapturous reception.[24] She was only the second woman and the first private citizen ever to address a joint session of Congress[25] The irony, was that as public and Congressional opinion shifted in favour of the Nationalists, official attitudes began to decline from 1943 onwards as the Western Allies strategic situation improved and China became more exhausted.[26] Public support was bolstered by Protestant churchgoers connection with the long standing, missionary movement in China.[27] Their accounts of the initial Japanese incursion into China would shape American opinion although this was often a skewed view.[28] China was seen as a fledgling democracy and one ripe for conversion to Christianity, a belief encouraged by the fact that General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were both Methodists. The improvement in public perceptions resulted in a reduction in America’s racist, discriminatory, legislation which had originally been enacted in 1882 against Chinese immigrants recruited to work on the transcontinental railways.[29] Further laws were introduced in 1924 to halt Asian emigration entirely however, Soong Meiling’s tour in early 1943 sparked off a campaign for repeal, headed up by such luminaries as Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (Sai Zhenzhu)[30]. Buck was an influential writer on China, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature 1938 and was a doughty campaigner for racial equality.[31] Nonetheless there was considerable opposition from patriotic societies, labour organisations and trade unions, veterans and West Coast business interests.[32] In the end the 1924 Act was repealed, yet China was granted only 105 visas a year for entry into the USA.33 In reality, American racism was undefeated.

While America presented a swirl of competing views with regard to China, the British Empire adopted a dual approach, supporting Nationalist China with arms and financial support through Hong Kong and the Burma Road during the period from 1937 to 1941, while at the same time trying to appease the Japanese.[34] This was largely down to self-interest with one billion US dollars (60% of Western investment) committed in Shanghai, Canton, Hong Kong and dozens of smaller trading posts.[35] Outside this, the Empire had little time for the Nationalists, even though Chiang Kai-shek made a visit to India in 1942 and persuaded the Indian Nationalists to delay their bid for independence until the post-war settlement.[36] This failure to make use of the leader of the largest Asian, ‘free’, nation was a missed opportunity.[37] However, there were numerous sources of friction as China sought to roll back hundreds of years of British imperialism, such as cancelling extraterritoriality, claims that were supported by American anti-colonialism.[38]

In many ways, the USSR held a stronger hand and played it better. Lenin had recognised the Sun Yat Sen Revolution in 1923 as a socialist one, and from this point onwards the USSR supported Nationalist China even at the expense of Chinese Communists, through a concentration on an anti-fascist ‘United Front’.[39] This arrangement ceased with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in August 1939 and the refusal of China to veto the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations during the 1940 Finnish War.[40] However by this point Nationalist China had already served its purpose, as by 1941, the Japanese Army had a million men and 3.18 billion yen (33% of total expenditure,) bogged down in a war of attrition in Central China.[41] Committed to the China theatre, she was unable to attack the rear of the USSR when Germany attacked in June 1941. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Stalin was confident enough to demand retention of Outer Mongolia under a Soviet proxy regime and control of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, both key Chinese war aims.[42] Presciently Chiang Kai-shek recorded in his diary ‘This meeting of the three leaders has already carved the seeds of the Third World War.’

Betrayed by his closest ally, Chiang Kai-shek was equally distrustful of the Americans, in large part due to the character of the man they sent to be his Chief of Staff, Lt General Joseph Stilwell.[43] Stilwell made an already delicate situation far worse by his personal invective and a refusal to consider China’s ‘nested war’ circumstances, concentrating on fighting a conventional war against the Japanese.[44] He destroyed the Nationalist’s best armies with his campaign in Burma in 1942, then abandoned them to escape to India, and again in 1944 insisted on a Burma campaign with the remaining, key units of the Nationalist army.[45] Southern China lay exposed to the Japanese ‘Ichigo Offensive’ which caused huge military and territorial losses.[46] Stilwell had been caught lying before in 1943, now he decided to do so again in furtherance of his own position .[47] Only this time he was sacked and his replacement General Albert Wedemeyer was both hugely capable and diplomatic.[48]

Nationalist China at start of the Sino-Japanese War was confronted by the failure of the 1912 Revolution and the 1926 Northern Expedition to build a unified nation state. The country remained poor, agrarian, undeveloped, the periphery under control of warlords and trade under the control of imperialist Europeans.[49] Threatened with Japanese expansion in the north, fighting a civil war against the Communists and trying to hold together a power base of six loosely aligned factions, Chiang Kai-shek had little option other than to fight in 1937.[50] Hoping to bring Western powers to his aid, he used his best German trained troops in a climactic battle at Shanghai and thereafter sought to outlast his enemies in the interior. Once America joined the war in 1942, the problem was how best to use US aid to survive and to improve China’s standing before the post-war settlement.[51] In this Chiang was hampered by US concentration on fighting the global war, while he also had to fight the regional and civil wars. Grandiose plans to recapture Burma, and to build a modern 90 division army withered in the lack of any real support from America or Britain[52] From mid-1943 the Americans switched to strategic bombing of Japan from Chinese bases however, within a year the advance of the USN across the Pacific rendered this plan moot and the Ichigo offensive destroyed it.[53]

Central to this strategic picture was the allocation of the limited supplies (650,000 tonnes between 1942-45,) that could be flown over the Himalayan route known as the ‘Hump’.[54] This had to divided between the US 20th Bombardment Group, commanded from Washington and bombing Japan, Claire Chenault’s US Army 14th Airforce, supporting Nationalist ground troops, Joe Stilwell’s Chinese armies based in India and Chiang’s Nationalist forces in central China.[55] Since Stilwell controlled most of this allocation (all bar 20th Bombardment Group,) what little was allocated to the Nationalists, less than 500 tons a month or 10,000 tonnes up to May 1944, actually went to Stilwell’s own ‘Y Force’ in Yunnan for Burma operations. No wonder the Nationalist armies facing the Ichigo Operation collapsed in the face of the largest offensive by the Japanese Army in the war. American supplies were so important because China had only been able to build a limited manufacturing base between 1912 and 1937. This was due in part to European empires siphoning wealth through tariff free borders and the constant civil war to establish control of central China.[56] Similarly land reform was delayed, as it conflicted with Chiang’s landlord supporters, however limited reforms and good harvests ensured a stable food supply up to 1940. Even this small industrial base was lost in the Japanese invasion of the coastal plain when only 11% of Shanghai’s industry was evacuated to Wuhan.57

The situation grew steadily worse as the eight-year war continued, the flooding of the Yellow River basin in 1938, the imposition of a grain tax to feed the armies in 1941, inflation of 235% and the Henan famine in 1942.[58] The Nationalist government faced a huge welfare demand and the refugee crisis changed Chinese society for good, with the scale of the problem measured in millions.[59] Under such enormous pressures, it is no wonder that the Nationalist state began to buckle under the strain. Not that America noticed: Americans for the most part either refused to recognize Chiang’s problems or could not have cared less about China’s post-war fate.

Our main aim was simply to see to it that, in spite of her exhaustion and the terrible sacrifices and privations of her people, she should ‘play an active role in this war’. General Albert Wedemeyer[60]

Conclusion

The concept of the ‘Big Three’ powers reflected the political, diplomatic, economic and military reality of the three main protagonists in the war against the Axis Powers. Other smaller or occupied powers such as Canada, France and Poland wielded limited influence, yet took little part in the main decisions concerning strategy or the post-war settlement. Moreover, even within the Big Three, they each had their own geographic sphere of influence determined by their military power and the other two members had limited ability to effect changes in policy within another’s spheres. Given this geopolitical reality, Roosevelt’s efforts to promote Nationalist China as a fourth great power seem strange and doomed to fail. China was economically under developed, agrarian, lacking industry and transport infrastructure, with her trade compromised by European colonial powers. Warlords controlled the provinces on the periphery and foreign powers occupied provinces in the north of the country. She had been in the middle of a civil war when the regional Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 and was largely isolated from foreign assistance in the global war started in 1941.

In order to understand Roosevelt’s decision to support China’s candidacy, one has to consider three key factors, one political, one social and one military. The first factor was the USA lack of engagement with the outside world before the start of the Second World War. She had not been a member of the League of Nations and Isolationism was a potent force with American voters. Given this Roosevelt doubted if Congress would station American troops in Europe longer than two years after the end of the war. So, while the USA could exert diplomatic and economic influence, she would need to exert military influence through a proxy. The second factor at work was American lack of understanding of the realities of Nationalist China. Even within the State Department, there was limited knowledge and the reason that Marshall sent Stilwell to China, was that he was the only American field officer who spoke Chinese. Public perceptions of China were even more limited and largely based on the writing of Christian missionaries and businessmen’s visions of potential trade. Roosevelt based his support for China on these shaky foundations. The third factor was practical, military and shared by both the USA and USSR. They both needed the Sino-Japanese War to continue so that the Japanese Army was tied up fighting China and unable to deploy against them.

Given that this war started before either the German-Soviet War or the Pacific War, there was little incentive to support China to any great extent in a material way. Yet the prospect of great power status had great symbolic cachet for Chiang Kai-shek. Bearing in mind these factors, Roosevelt’s decision to promote the ‘Big Four’ was a rational one because it met his short-term military aims, as well as his post-war need for a counter balance to Soviet influence in the Pacific. Yet the policy foundered ultimately, because it was not based on reality. China was a long way away from the path to a modern, Christian, democratic future, and was instead a large, agrarian peasant society. Sun Yat Sen’s revolution had failed while Lenin’s had succeeded.

Imperial Japanese Army capture of Hong Kong severed a major Chinese import route

Footnotes

1 Mark Harrison, ‘Counting the Soviet Union’s War Dead: Still 26-27 Million’, Europe-Asia Studies 76, no. 1 (2019): 1036–47; Mark Harrison, ‘Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: Comment’, Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 6 (2003): 939–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966813032000123097.

2 Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 250–53; Richard B. Frank, Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: July 1937-May 1942, Illustrated Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 88–89.

3 John W. Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, in China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937-1945, ed. James Chieh Hsiung and Steven I Levine (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), ch. Conclusion, para. 1 and 8. 4 S.C.M Paine, The Wars for Asia: 1911-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.187; Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (Bloomington, IL.: Stanford University Press, 2013), p.449. 5 Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.9; Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston, MA .: HMH, 2013), p.9-12. 6 Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.xii, 3 ,5; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.12.

7 Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, para. The Formation of China’s Alliance with the United States 1.

8 Jonathan Fenby, Alliance: The inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage, 2006), p.97; ‘Preparatory Years: UN Charter History’, The United Nations, n.d., https://www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un/preparatory-years#deco; Xiaohua Ma, ‘The Sino-American Alliance During World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts’, American Studies International 38, no. 2 (2000): p.41; Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, ch. Chiang’s Payoff, para. 4-6.

9 Chan Lau Kit-Ching, ‘The Hong Kong Question during the Pacific War (1941-45)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2, no. 1 (1973): p.58, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086537308582393.

10 Ma, ‘The Sino-American Alliance During World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts’, p.55.

11 Ma, p.42.

12 Fenby, Alliance: The inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another, p.243.

13 Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.101; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.214.

14 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.232-3; Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.102-3.

15 Charles R. Kitts, The United States Odyssey in China, 1784-1990 (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1991), p.85-87, https://archive.org/details/unitedstatesodys00kitt.

16 Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.171-2.

17 Chan Lau Kit-ching, ‘Symbolism as Diplomacy: The United States and Britain’s China Policy During the First Year of the Pacific War’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 16, no. 1 (2005): p.75, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592290590916149; Franco David Macri, Clash of Empires in South China: The Allied Nations’ Proxy War with Japan, 1935-1941 (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 2015), p37, 341.

18 Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.197-8.

19 Fenby, Alliance: The inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another, p.168.

20 Jay Taylor, ‘Chapter 5 Chiang and His American Allies’, in The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), p.230.

21 ‘Marshall and the Benning Revolution’, George C. Marshall Foundation, 23 January 2015, https://www.marshallfoundation.org/blog/marshall-benning-revolution/; Peattie, Drea, and Ven, The Battle for China, p.451.

22 Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.138.

23 Frank, p.97; Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, China’s diplomacy towards the Powers para 7.

24 Kitts, The United States Odyssey in China, 1784-1990, p.84; Jonathan Fenby, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost (New York, NY.: Simon and Schuster, 2015), p.191.

25 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.296-7.

26 Mitter, p.158 & 298.

27 Kitts, The United States Odyssey in China, 1784-1990, p.58.

28 Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.96.

29 Ma, ‘The Sino-American Alliance During World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts’, p.44.

30 Ma, p.47; Pearl S Buck, The Good Earth, 1931; ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1938’, NobelPrize.org, accessed 16 December 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1938/buck/biographical/.

31 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.51-2.

32 Ma, ‘The Sino-American Alliance During World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts’, p.47.

33 ‘Milestones: 1937–1945 - Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1943’, Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute, United States Department of State, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937- 1945/chinese-exclusion-act-repeal.

34 Kit-Ching, ‘The Hong Kong Question during the Pacific War (1941-45)’, p.56.

35 Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, ch. Chinese Nationalism and the Powers, para. 7.

36 Fenby, Generalissimo, 7–8; K. C. Chan, ‘Britain’s Reaction to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Visit to India, February 1942’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 21, no. 2 (1975): p.58, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 8497.1975.tb01141.x.

37 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.245-6. 38 William Roger Louis and Hedley Bull, The ‘Special Relationship’: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (Oxford.: Clarendon Press, 1989), p.265; Kit-Ching, ‘The Hong Kong Question during the Pacific War (1941- 45)’, p.67; Kit-ching, ‘Symbolism as Diplomacy’, p.75. 39 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.44-45, 103; John W. Garver, Chinese-Soviet Relations, 1937-1945: The Diplomacy of Chinese Nationalism (Oxford.: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.58. 40 Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.124; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.215. 41 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, The Battle for China, p.425-6.

42 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.352-4.

43 Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, ch. The Formation of China’s Alliance with the United States, para. 5 to 6.

44 Garver, ch. The Stilwell Incident, para 1 and 2.

45 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.332-3.

46 Mitter, p.318; Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.202-3.

47 Taylor, ‘Chapter 5 Chiang and His American Allies’, p.228; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.337-9.

48 Peter Chen-Main Wang, ‘Revisiting US-China Wartime Relations: A Study of Wedemeyer’s China Mission’, Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 59 (2009): p.246, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670560802576000; John J. McLaughlin, General Albert C. Wedemeyer: The Strategist Behind America’s Victory in World War II, and the Prophet of Its Geopolitical Failure in Asia (Havertown PA: Casemate Publishers, 2012), p.10.

49 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.48; Garver, ‘China’s Wartime Diplomacy’, para. Chapter 1 para 1.

50 Frank, Tower of Skulls, 2.

51 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, The Battle for China, p.425; Paine, The Wars for Asia, p.5.

52 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, The Battle for China, p.429-30.

53 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, p.431, 437; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.318.

54 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, The Battle for China, p.255.

55 Peattie, Drea, and Ven, p.299-300; Taylor, ‘Chapter 5 Chiang and His American Allies’, p.212.

56 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.182.

57 Frank, Tower of Skulls, p.109.

58 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, p.5, 266-7, 271-3.

59 Mitter, p.120.

60 Wang, ‘Revisiting US-China Wartime Relations’, p.246.

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