Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II

331 Pages·2014·1.439 MB·English

by  Hans van de Ven

Negotiating China’s Destiny
in World War II

Negotiating China’s Destiny
in World War II
Edited by
Hans van de Ven,
Diana Lary, and
Stephen R. MacKinnon
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permis-
sion of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Negotiating China’s destiny in World War II / edited by Hans van de Ven,
Diana Lary, and Stephen MacKinnon.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-8966-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. China—Foreign relations—1912–1949. 2. China—Politics and
government—1912–1949. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history.
4. World War, 1939–1945—China. I. Van de Ven, Hans J., editor of

compilation. II. Lary, Diana, editor of compilation. III. MacKinnon,

Stephen R., editor of compilation.
DS775.8.N44 2015
940.53'51—dc23 2014005256
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9311-7 (electronic)

Typeset by BookMatters in Sabon 10/12.5
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Diana Lary
Part I: Old Empires and the Rise of China
1. France’s Deluded Quest for Allies:
Safeguarding Territorial Sovereignty
and the Balance of Power in East Asia 11
Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere
2. British Diplomacy and Changing Views
of Chinese Governmental Capability
across the Sino-Japanese War, 1937– 1945 35
Rana Mitter
3. An Imperial Envoy: Shen Zonglian in Tibet,
1943– 1946 52

Chang Jui-te
4. The Evolution of the Relationship between
the Chinese Communist Party and the
Comintern during the Sino-Japanese War 70
Yang Kuisong

5. Canada-China Relations in Wartime China 91

Diana Lary
Part II: Negotiating Alliances and Questions of Sovereignty
6. Declaring War as an Issue in Chinese
Wartime Diplomacy 111
Tsuchida Akio
7. Chiang Kai-shek and Jawaharlal Nehru 127
Yang Tianshi
8. Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin during
World War II 141
Li Yuzhen
9. Reshaping China: American Strategic Thinking
and China’s Ethnic Frontiers during World War II 156
Xiaoyuan Liu
10. Northeast China in Chongqing Politics:
The Influence of “Recover the Northeast”
on Domestic and International Politics 174
Nishimura Shigeo
Part III: Ending War
11. The Nationalist Government’s Attitude toward
Postwar Japan 193
Wu Sufeng
12. Postwar Sino-French Negotiations about Vietnam,
1945– 1946 205
Yang Weizhen
13. The 1952 Treaty of Peace between China and Japan 220
Hans van de Ven
Conclusion 239
Stephen R. MacKinnon

Notes 245

Index 293
Acknowledgments
We first wish to record our thanks and appreciation for the leader-
ship of Ezra Vogel. The Chongqing conference of which this volume is the
product was the fourth in a series of, so far, five conferences on the Second
World War in China. The first four were held in Harvard (2002), Maui
(2004), Hakone (2006), and Chongqing (2009). Each brought together
Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars; each has resulted in a conference
volume. Ezra is one of the few Western scholars fluent in both Chinese and
Japanese. He is a scholar deeply committed to fostering understanding
based on serious research. His vision of a generally shared consensus on
the war has not yet been fully realized, but his organizational abilities and
his generosity of spirit have set us on the way to a much deeper apprecia-
tion of the extent to which China and much of Asia were shaped by the
war. His enthusiasm and his ability to enlist the cooperation of colleagues
have been critical to the project. Ezra has been an inspiration to us all.
The aim of the conferences was to bring Chinese and Japanese scholars
together to discuss, jointly with Western scholars, the 1937– 1945 Sino-
Japanese War, still a disputed and often difficult topic in the relationship
of the two countries. Without the enthusiastic and thoughtful cooperation
of leading scholars in China and Japan, it would not have been possible
to convene the conferences. Yang Tianshi in China and Yamada Tatsuo in
Japan played a large role in finding the best paper writers.
We also wish to record our gratefulness to the Mellon Foundation.
Without its support, this project would not have been possible. In addi-
tion, we thank Harvard University for making the publication of this book
possible. We thank Yin Shuxi for providing excellent draft translations.

The Chongqing government was generous in hosting the 2009 conference
in the city that was the Chinese capital during the Second World War and

doing so again four years later.

vii

Contributors
Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere is a French historian who was educated
at the École Nationale des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and Peking
University. Her many publications include Educational Reform in Early
Twentieth Century China (1988) and L’Evolution de la Societe Chinoise
a la Fin de la Dynastie des Qing, 1873– 1911. She has received honorary
degrees from the Russian Academy of Sciences and Aberdeen University,
and in 2010 she was named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.
Chang Jui-te teaches at the Chinese Cultural University in Taipei and
holds concurrent positions at the Institute of Modern History of the Aca-
demia Sinica and at Taiwan Normal University. He received his PhD from
the latter university. His publications include The Management of China’s
Modern Railroads: An Analysis of its Political Dimension (1974), The
Beijing-Hankou Railroad and the Development of the North Chinese
Economy (1987), and The National Army’s Personnel System during the
War of Resistance (1993).
Diana Lary is Professor Emerita of the University of British Columbia.
She was educated at SOAS, University of London, and was among the first
British students to teach and study in the People’s Republic of China. She
has written on Chinese warlords and migration. Her publications relat-

ing to wartime China include China’s Republic (2007) and The Chinese

People at War (2010), and she has co-edited Scars of War: The Impact of
Warfare on Modern China (2002).

Li Yuzhen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern His-
tory, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She learned Russian at the
Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1959. After teaching there and at the
Capital University, she moved in 1979 to the Institute of Modern His-
tory, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, focusing on Chinese-Soviet and

ix
x Contributors
CCP-Comintern relations. She has published Sun Yat-sen and the Comin-
tern (1996) and The Kuomintang and the Comintern (2012), and she has
translated a sourcebook, The CPSU, the Comintern, and China (1997).
Xiaoyuan Liu teaches Chinese history and international relations at
Iowa State University and is also affiliated with East China Normal Uni-
versity. He has published A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United
States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese
Empire, 1941– 1945 (1996), Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of
Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hege-
mony (2006), and Recast All Under Heaven: Revolution, War, Diplomacy
and Frontier China (2010).
Stephen R. MacKinnon was educated at Yale University and the Uni-
versity of California at Davis. From 1979 until 1981, he lived in China,
teaching and researching at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Since
1971 he has taught at Arizona State University. He has done extensive
research on Chinese journalism and Republican history. His publications
include China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in
the 1930s and 1940s (1987), Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an
American Radical (1988), Power and Politics in Late Imperial China:
Yuan Shikai in Tianjin and Beijing, 1901– 1908 (1980), and most recently
Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (2008).
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China
at Oxford University. He also presents the BBC’s flagship arts and ideas
program, Nightwaves. Educated at Cambridge University, he has published
Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937– 1945 (2013), the widely used
textbook A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World
(2005), and the monograph The Manchurian Myth (2000).
Nishimura Shigeo is a Professor of Foreign Studies at Osaka Univer-
sity. His books include Revolutionaries against Colonialists: A History of

Northeast China, 1900– 1949 (1993) and On the Colonization of North-
east China and the Rise of Anti-Japanese Survival Movements (1987). He

has also written a biography of Zhang Xueliang (1999).

Hans van de Ven: After earning a PhD at Harvard University, Hans van
de Ven began teaching at Cambridge University, which he still does. His

research has focused on Chinese military history as well as China’s glo-
balization in the 1850– 1950 period. His publications include From Friend

to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party (1991), War