American Scholar: The cost and contribution of China's bloody World War II have been forgotten by the West

The Wall Street Journal website published a signed article entitled "Review of Rana Mitte's Works" on October 1. The author, Howard French, a professor at the School of Journalism at Colombia University, said in the article that Rana Mitte's "The Forgotten Allies" is an important and convincing historical book about China's experience in World War II. By carefully examining China's role in the Allied war operations, the often thankless price China paid in their own anti-Japanese struggle, and the impact of China's war trauma on the country's post-war development, this book once again gives new meaning to the question of "who lost China".

The author begins by writing: "For decades, our understanding of that global war has not been able to give an appropriate explanation of China's role. Even when China was taken into account, it was just a minor player, a small actor playing a role in a war that brought the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to the limelight."

Coincidentally, academia today's blind eye to China's contribution to World War II is similar to its early indifference to the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union. It was only towards the end of the Cold War that Western historians began to pay more generous praise to the Russians and allow more moral complexity to be preserved in a history of war that was not entirely a struggle between totalitarianism and freedom.

Mitt's work gives China its due historical evaluation. The book records that since 1937, China has delayed 800,000 Japanese invading troops, thereby consuming Japan's destructive energy and preventing it from investing in other war zones. During the horrific 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the 10th Army of the Japanese Army gang-raped women, used male civilians as targets to practice killing, and tied hundreds of captured prisoners together and burned them with gasoline.

China has also paid the price in other, less easily recognized ways. The world's most populous country made large investments in infrastructure and industrialization in the early days to enter the modern era, which were wiped out in the war. Most of the country's railway network, closed roads and factories were destroyed.

The article points out that in this book full of fascinating anecdotes, the main character is Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Kuomintang of China and wartime head of state. The West's ambivalence towards Chiang Kai-shek weakened its war support for China. As the author writes,"The West's accusations of China's war actions, especially the role played by the Kuomintang, are based on claims that the China regime is too corrupt and unpopular to gain support. A popular joke in the United States during the war used homophones to pronounce the name of the China leader as 'cash my check'." This is not entirely fair. "The actual situation is more complicated: a Europe-first strategy meant keeping China in the war at the lowest cost, and Chiang Kai-shek was repeatedly forced to put his troops on the battlefield in ways that were beneficial to the allied geostrategic interests but detrimental to China's own goals."

The article believes that it is in this sense that it may be said that wartime China was lost, or even more than once. Time and time again, Franklin Roosevelt and his generals hesitated in making decisive commitments to provide financial, material, and personnel support to the Kuomintang, thus opening the door for the Japanese advance. Relations with Chiang Kai-shek were ultimately pushed to the brink when the Allies insisted in 1942 that Chiang send the main force to stop the Japanese occupation of Myanmar, at a time when China itself was facing one of the largest Japanese offensives of the war. Chiang Kai-shek wrote at the time: "I am convinced that the policy of the United States is nothing more than ill-intentioned use of us."