Crocodile tears [By Gu Peili/China.org.cn]

China's contribution to the overall Allied victory during World War II is a topic that is gaining increasing historical attention in the West. I was motivated to write a book about China's wartime role (China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival - US title, Forgotten Ally) because I felt the significance of the Chinese contribution to World War II was not sufficiently understood in the West. To understand this significance, we need to consider the alternative possibilities during one of the worst years of the war, 1938.

A year after the war broke out at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937, much of eastern China lay in Japanese hands. In late October, the temporary military headquarters at Wuhan, Hubei province, fell to the enemy. Many outside observers assumed that China could not hold out.

Yet China did not surrender. Although it had little assistance from the outside world, barring some military aid from the USSR, both the Kuomintang and Communist leaderships continued to plan for resistance. But if Chiang Kai-shek's government had made a different decision in 1938, then China's fate would have been very different. If China had surrendered in 1938, Japan would essentially have treated China as a colony. Japan's forces would also have been freed for an all-out assault on the USSR, Southeast Asia, or even British India.

The Western powers did come to realize China's value. By 1940, significant unofficial flows of finance and supplies were coming to China. By that year, Britain was at war with Germany, and the US was becoming increasingly aware that its Pacific position was in danger from Japan.

On Dec 7 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war became genuinely global, in particular when Adolf Hitler declared war on the US just a week later. Yet there remained a difference between the Western and Chinese views of their roles in the war.

In the Allied view, China was a victim. It had been invaded and deserved sympathy. But in the end, they believed that its most important role was to act as a barrier to further Japanese action in Asia. The Chinese resistance was holding down 600,000 or more Japanese troops. In the early part of the war, this meant that those troops could therefore not be transferred to the rest of Asia easily. But the Americans and British knew that the Chinese Nationalist armies were weakened by four years of resistance and could not easily be deployed outside China itself. Chiang Kai-shek's regime was weakened greatly from within, as corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and sheer exhaustion ate away at its strength.