FOOTNOTES:
[1] Miff, P., Heroic China, New York, 1937, p. 14. This valuable pamphlet is by one of the Comintern's leading expounders of Marxism as applied to China. Trotskyist Marxism is represented by a far fuller, more careful work by Harold Isaacs, cited, together with the following, cited on p. 20, n. 16. Edgar Snow, the distinguished American journalist, operates on the basis of an independent, unacknowledged type of Marxism, which shows itself in consistent prejudice against the Kuomintang, and in a soul-hungry search for a dialectical, inner meaning of things with which to supplement common-sense observation; his "Things that Could Happen," Asia, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (January 1941), employs Hegelianism at tenth-remove to analyze the future. It leads to a frequent implication of motives and to subjective interpretations which rearrange fact as it ought to be in terms of a rational economic dialectic (i.e., an occult pattern which provides a uniform key to all human experience). Thus, in his Red Star Over China, p. 306, he ascribes the massacre of Reds by Kuomintang officers to the fact that the officers were the sons of local landlords, enraged by expropriation of the land. Land-expropriation is a class motive; a moment's reflection would reveal that previous massacre of the officers' families by Communists would be a better common-sense motive for blood-thirstiness. This feature of diluted Marxism would not be worth mentioning were it not common to so many books about Communists written by self-proclaimed "non-Communists" habituated to the dialectic. It is found in the writings of Agnes Smedley, Victor Yakhontoff, Anna Louise Strong, and I. Epstein, to mention but a few.
[2] Sheean, Vincent, Personal History, New York, 1937; Malraux, André, Man's Fate, New York, n.d.
[3] Kung-ho-kuo is the Western-type term for Republic; the Kuomintang uses Min-kuo or Folk-realm. Su-wei-ai is a phonetic representation of "Soviet"; the characters, not intended to have meaning, are unconsciously humorous in that their lexicographical signification is "Revive (and) maintain dust!"
[4] Based on the Party Constitution, Kung-ch'an-tang Tang-chang [Party Constitution of the Communist Party], [Chungking?], XXVII (1938), p. 1-21. The entire Constitution is reprinted below as Appendix II (E), p. [359].
[5] Harold Isaacs, in the work cited, has many passing references to this phenomenon; his caustic indictment of Ch'en Shao-yu (Wang Ming), p. 438 ff., is a case in point. Note Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Li Li-san, Chang Kuo-tao—in China, as in Russia, most of the founders and early leaders of the Communists have been set aside.
[6] Snow, Edgar, work cited, p. 348 ff.
[7] Twin Stars of China, cited, p. 66. Major Carlson adds to this description in his The Chinese Army, cited, p. 35 ff. Most enthusiastically, he attributes to the Red Leaders honesty, humility, selflessness, truthfulness, incorruptibility, and a desire to do what is right. He praises their superb tactical abilities, their efficiency as organizers, their competence as leaders. He accepts the statements made by the Communist leaders as matters of good faith, and does not question their sincerity. Since he is the only qualified military visitor to put his impressions on record, these appraisals are valuable.
[8] Snow, Edgar, Red Star Over China, cited, p. 111-167.
[9] Chang Kuo-tao, T'ou-li Kung-ch'an-tang Mien-mien-kuan [An Impartial Survey of (My) Departure from the Communist Party], Kuangchou [Canton], 1938, p. 27 ff.
[10] The same, p. 10.
[11] The Resolutions of the Enlarged Sixth Plenary Session of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of China comment as follows: "The danger of the 'Right' opportunists lies in the fact that they execute the tactics of an anti-Japanese National United Front at the expense of the independence of the party, politically and organizationally distorting the policy of the proletariat [sic] in building an Anti-Japanese National United Front so that the working class and the Communist Party become tails of the bourgeoisie rather than the vanguard." (Italics inserted in translation.) New China Information Committee, Resolutions and Telegrams of the Sixth Plenum, Central Committee, Communist Party of China, November 6, 1938, Hong Kong [1939?], p. 9. The demand for vanguard position from a minority party still technically illegal, and the damning of the Government and Kuomintang as "bourgeois," are continuous features of Communist policy. Their concept of cooperation is, as in Germany, Spain, and elsewhere, cooperation under Communist leadership.
[12] Ch'ao Shê [The Morning Club], Niu-wu Yen-lun Chien-t'ao Kang-yao [A General Review of Fallacious Utterances], Chungking, XXIX (1940), p. 7. The work is a Kuomintang reply to Communist theses in a debate on the nature of national union.
[13] Statement of Col. Ch'in Po-k'u to the author, Chungking, July 29, 1940.
[14] An early statement of National Salvation views is found in Wang Tsao-shih, "A Salvationist's View of the Sino-Japanese Problem," The China Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 4 (Special Fall Number, 1937), p. 681-9. The author is one of the Seven Gentlemen.
[15] Statement by the head of The Third Party, Dr. Chang Pai-chün (Chang Peh Chuen), to the author, Chungking, August 2, 1940. The translations were also supplied by Dr. Chang.
[16] Letter to the author, dated October 24, 1940.
[17] E.g., John Gunther in his Inside Asia, New York, 1939, p. 272.
[18] By far the most complete summary of the minor and minuscule parties is to be found in two articles by a young Chinese newspaperman: Shen, James, "Minority Parties in China," Asia, Vol. XL, no. 2 (February 1940), p. 81-3; and a second installment, in the same periodical. Vol. XL, no. 3 (March 1940), p. 137-9.
Chapter VII
GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS OF THE JAPANESE AND PRO-JAPANESE
Facing the National Armies, and encircling the guerrillas, lie the Imperial Japanese forces. Frank agents of Imperial policy, they—unlike the Hitler-Mussolini contingents in Spain—make no pretense of subordination to their Chinese allies. Publicly and legally instruments of the Japanese state, their function is to destroy the Chinese government, to control and bend Chinese society to the Imperial purposes, and to protect Chinese who come forth as allies. The Japanese Empire is accordingly itself militarily extended to China; occasional, half-hearted attempts to deny the ensuing international complications have been sternly rejected by other great powers. The United States is not alone in insisting on full Japanese responsibility for everything that happens within the zone of Japanese control.
The position of the Japanese army as a governing engine, unacknowledged colonial machinery of a vast unassimilable colony, is not one relished by the Japanese people or by their leaders. Even in the case of Manchoukuo, the Japanese played a half-deception on themselves by pretending that they were extending the area of their influence, not the extent of their responsibilities. In part this distaste for overt control is based on the ease, cheapness and irresponsibility of indirect rule, employed in varying degrees by the British in Malaysia, the French in Indo-China, and the Soviets in Outer Mongolia. The Japanese like to think that they are aiding China, and incidentally themselves, to a New Order in East Asia—autarkic, stable, racially independent of the Whites, militarily secure. They do not like to contemplate the slaughter of innocent people for sheer conquest, or to consider the hopeless immensity of trying to overwhelm China. This complicates their position.[1]
For if the status of the Japanese army in China is clear, its purposes are not. The war aims of the Japanese are confused. Japan's goal is defined by overtones of the inexpressible—in economic motivation, once valid, no longer meaningful; in rationalizations so long reiterated that they become genuine; in the toss and push of world affairs, tempting Japan's leaders to this opportunism or that; in sheer sentiments of Japanolatry, Emperor-worship, racialism, archaic resentment against China, fellow-feeling for the Chinese orientals, and plain fear. A few Japanese know exactly what they want. The policy as a whole, the policy of the Imperial state, encompasses ill-assorted economic, political, strategic, racial and purely ideological objectives.
Even at the simple level of institutional control, the Japanese aim in China has been ill-defined. The restoration of the Manchu monarchy in Manchoukuo was an appeal to monarchist legitimism, to the Chinese past, and to common Confucianist values. When the Japanese came further into China, it was at first expected that they might install Mr. Chin P'u-yi as Emperor of all China, and rehabilitate him in the Palace-museum he left when a youth. Instead, they apparently attempted to create a chain of linked, reactionary, agricultural Chinese states, mixed in form—a federation of princes in Inner Mongolia, an Empire in Manchoukuo, republics elsewhere. They began by going as far as to create a dozen or more ephemeral pro-Japanese agencies—for a while one might legitimately have expected that a Nanking government follow a Peking government, a Hankow government, a Canton government, ad infinitum. But the trend was reversed when the Autonomous East Hopei Anti-Communist Government of Mr. Yin Ju-kêng was merged with the Peking regime, and—as pressure rose in Japan for a settlement of the China affair—a China-wide Japanophile government was first contemplated, and then established. The establishment of these institutions has not meant the abdication of the Imperial Japanese forces from the government of China. The pro-Japanese governments were and are civil auxiliaries of the Japanese army; their influence has in no case extended beyond the immediately effective reach of the Japanese infantry. Even in planning the long-range permanent settlement of Chinese affairs—on her own terms—Japan does not propose to withdraw all her troops from China.