Japanese occupation of China (1937 - 1945) [individual assignment]
The Japanese Occupation of China 1937-45: The Divided Opposition and its Consequences by David White
(excerpts)
During the eight years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), China suffered continual crushing and humiliating defeats at the hands of Japan and was subject to a devastating, brutal occupation of much of the nation.
Japanese attitudes towards China governed Japanese behaviour towards the Chinese. Belief in their own racial and cultural superiority and the influence of the Bushido code of conduct allowed the invaders to justify their treatment of Chinese people. Iris Chang has written that, “Teachers [in the 1930s] instilled in boys hatred and contempt for the Chinese people, preparing them psychologically for a future invasion of the Chinese mainland.” Japan had already fought and defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), annexed her colony of Korea and the island of Formosa, taken over the German concession ports at the end of the First World War, and in 1931 occupied the vast northern region of Manchuria which became an imperial possession with a puppet Chinese emperor. Repeatedly, China proved incapable of resisting Japanese aggression.
China’s inability to defend her own sovereign territory was linked to her lack of national unity. Unlike Japan’s reaction of unity and modernisation, China’s response to predatory European imperialism was division, the collapse of the Qing dynasty, descent into warlordism, economic stagnation and recurrent civil war.
The horrendous Japanese behaviour mentioned earlier was graphically displayed early in the war. After the fall of Shanghai in November 1937, the capital of Nanking, was vulnerable to a Japanese attack. During a six-week reign of terror between December 1937 and January 1938, 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered in Nanking, few of them during actual combat. Civilians, including women, children and the old, were indiscriminately slaughtered. The methods of killing were particularly gruesome and frequently designed to inflict the maximum pain and terror, including disembowelling, beheading, bayoneting, burying alive, setting on fire, suspension on meat hooks, crucifixion, tearing apart by dogs, bludgeoning and drenching in acid.
Widespread rape of women of all ages was practised, most frequently gang rape, often followed by the murder of the victims. The Japanese high command became concerned about the proliferation of mass rape, not out of concern for the welfare of the Chinese women, but because they feared the loss of discipline among their own troops, the spread of venereal diseases, and international condemnation. Their “solution” was to force up to 200,000 women into state-sponsored prostitution, herding them into sordid military brothels where they were treated like disposable chattels and abused relentlessly.
Japanese atrocities continued throughout the war years, ranging from torture to indiscriminate aerial bombing to the killing of prisoners and the random massacres of civilians. With scant regard for the humanity of the Chinese, chemical, biological and bacterial weapons were deployed hundreds of times, including several occasions when fleas infected with bubonic plague bacilli were dropped from the air on Chinese towns causing epidemic outbreaks.
The consequences of such barbarism are difficult to assess. For some Chinese it seemed it was safer to collaborate. This was what the Japanese wanted, aiming to install compliant puppet regimes wherever possible. Wang Jingwei, a former ally of Chiang, agreed to be set up in Nanking by the Japanese as head of the “New Government of China” despite his hostility to the invaders.
Japan’s offer of membership in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Scheme was dependent upon participants accepting subordination to Japanese policies, priorities and directions. The sham nature of this arrangement was encapsulated in her pseudo-racial appeal as fellow-Asians resisting European imperialism, while at the same time practising her own brand of blatant oppression of her neighbours based on an unambiguous assertion of racial superiority.
The simplest summary of the effect of the Japanese occupation on Chinese society was death – 10,000,000 deaths – and unimaginable suffering for many more tens of millions. China was hugely impoverished and her pre-war social and economic problems magnified. Chiang’s and his Kuomintang government’s failure to resist the Japanese effectively, their continued corruption, their unwillingness to offer anything to the downtrodden peasantry, and their disregard for the lives of their subjects in a quest for a China which was a projection of their own ambitions and elite-centred nationalism, undermined their credibility and support. Increasingly it was the Communists who were seen as the active resisters, more willing to put aside their differences with the Nationalists in the interests of national liberation, and fighting for a fairer as well as a patriotic cause.
Questions for experts
1. What are the main points of the Japanese occupation of China?
2. What factors influenced the behaviour of Japanese in China?
3. Compared with (to) the Nazi and Soviet occupations what differences did the Japanese one possess?
4. Why did the regimes like Nazi, Soviet and Japanese not behave slighter towards the populations they occupied?
5. Are the authoritarianism and totalitarianism as such predisposed to atrocities? Why do you think so?