Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 5 Episode 3: Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

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Season 5 Episode 3: Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is Jeffrey Sachs, president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thrilled today to be joined by Professor Rana Mitter, who is the ST Lee Chair in U.S.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Asia Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, an old haunt of my own, and so I'm absolutely delighted.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Rana Mitter is a great scholar of uh geopolitics, of modern history, and of China's relations uh and Asia's relations with the United States.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: He was trained at uh University of Cambridge, uh, all his degrees.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was a longtime professor of the history and politics of modern China at University of Oxford, uh, where he was also director of Oxford's China Center.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a remarkable career.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to speak to you today, Ron, about your superb 2013 book, which is so relevant today and from which I learned so much: The Forgotten Ally, China's War with Japan, 1937 to 45.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the book is uh about the World War II in China, and it's an unbelievable story.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, first I want to say to everybody listening, get the book, read the book.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's absolutely stunning and startling, and I think you'll feel like uh I did.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you'll learn so much every page, and you'll ask, how did I not know that?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because the scale of World War II as it took place in China is staggering.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: The dimensions are absolutely unbelievable.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I want Rana to tell us about that.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: But well over 10 million dead, I think one estimate 14 million uh Chinese died in this part of World War II, Japan's invasion of China, 80 million refugees.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the numbers are completely mind-boggling.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, uh this war transformed Asia.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It led to the emergence of the People's Republic of China.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was formative for the China we have today, which is uh one of the two leading powers of the world, arguably number one in many dimensions, but at least one or two in almost every dimension.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so superlatives apply to every dimension of this history, and yet it's hardly known.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: When I grew up and learned about World War II, which was ended only nine years before I was born, so it was not a distant memory, of course.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was born, I'm a baby boomer, uh born uh in the aftermath of World War II.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: That was a war mainly against Hitler, but also we had the war in the Pacific, and that was a war against Japan.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: China, you heard a little bit about, but not very much.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the name Joe Stilwell from my youth, who was we're going to hear about, who was an American advisor to the Chinese leadership.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I knew about the Flying Tigers uh because they looked cool to a kid, the uh airplanes uh and the air force that was trained by General Chenault.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, China didn't figure in the story because the Pacific was Douglas MacArthur's war of island hopping on the way to Japan, culminating in the atomic bombs being dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and China wasn't mentioned in that whole story.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, here we have in your brilliant account, Rana, a whole world-shaking history that most of us don't know, and that's why you so appropriately titled it the Forgotten Ally.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And just one more word, sorry for the long monologue, everybody, because you don't want to listen to me, you want to listen to our guest, uh Professor Rana Mitter.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: But China had a celebration or an anniversary of the end of the war, the victory over Japan in August 2025.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was the 80th anniversary.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as I know, maybe other than a few uh junior diplomatic officials, there were basically no leaders from the United States or Europe for our lead ally in Asia in a war of such cataclysmic dimensions.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually when I picked up your book, Ron.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I should have picked it up uh a dozen years earlier, but I was shocked and I realized I didn't understand the war.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't understand what happened.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I read your book and I said, oh my God.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: First, I need to talk to you about it.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But second, how can such a vast history not be known?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Over to you.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, Jeff, could I say what a delight it is to be here talking to you?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, first of all, thank you so much for your very generous uh take on the book.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Really looking forward to our conversation today uh about that.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: But also, you know, I know that you have very long experience with China as well, you know, from the development, economics, uh, climate fields, and these are very important things in the present day.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I imagine that although we'll talk a lot about history, we may yet venture to some of the more contemporary end of things too.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really valuing this opportunity to be able to be in dialogue with you about that.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: But let's get to your precise question.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And let me lay out briefly two reasons I think that we don't in the wider world tend to have much awareness of China as a key player in World War II.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And just to be very clear, you know, put my position on the table, the book makes the argument.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I make the argument that I do think that China is actually a central actor in all sorts of important ways.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: The previous interpretation, as you say, if there was one, was you know, it was very sad, China was a victim, but it didn't really do anything very much in the war.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I do think that picture is is really just not correct at all.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, two reasons for that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so, as you mentioned, uh the 80th anniversary, just held a few months ago.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the actual parade was on the 3rd of September, but as you say, in late August there was a lead up to all of that with various activities.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was actually in Beijing myself for a part of the earlier part, and I'll get back to that one a little bit because it was an interesting experience.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about how you later how I'm sure China itself sees this.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: But on the day of the parade itself, there was a big parade, you know, a lot of weaponry, uh leaders who were there, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, but not leaders from the uh the West.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think two things are going on here.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: The first is on the Western side.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it is still the case that this part of the history of World War II is just not well understood or well known in the Western world.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, the European war, as you say, the war against Hitler, which of course uh was vitally important.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: The conclusion of that was essentially also determined by the contributions of the United States and the Soviet Union.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, these two big actors who uh again came to the aid of the British Empire, which had been there holding on, but without the US and the USSR, you wouldn't have got that um Allied victory over the Axis.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: On the Asian side, of course, the deployment is slightly was slightly different in that the Soviet Union was neutral for most of that war, but the United States played a key role, particularly after 1941, after Pearl Harbor, in terms of taking the lead.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And as you've said, the story that's come back to us in the West has mostly been about the Pacific War.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, you say the island hopping, Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, these are names that many people will know, even if you don't know the detailed history of that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that turned that part of the story really into a narrative about the US versus Japan.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the British Empire playing a role, but China, very secondary.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: What that left out was essentially the story really from 1937 onwards.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: In the official Chinese interpretation, you actually started in 1931, which uh keen listeners will know was the invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: But let's start with 1937.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is the outbreak of war at the Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Beijing, and this leads to this conflagration which lasts for eight years.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem with remembering that war in the Western world really came from the fact that four years after the end of World War II in 1945, you get the communist victory in China, the civil war, which ends with Chairman Mao Ma Zadong, essentially sitting on top of the gate of heavenly peace, or not sitting, that's not fair, but you know, basically giving a public announcement in which he announces the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So China went from World War II ally to Cold War adversary in the space of less than five years, whereas Japan, of course, went the other way around from being World War II enemy to being Cold War ally in exactly the same period of time.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, scrambled the way that historiography happened.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: In Europe, France and Germany were both under, you know, the American umbrella essentially, the Marshall Plan and all of that, which meant that they could also take time to think about shared history and understand that shared opposition to Nazism, which had brought the Americans and British and others into Europe and created a new narrative of history.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: That never happened in East Asia because Communist China and US allied Japan just sat in different strands.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that has obtained all the way up to present day that essentially the historiography of wartime China has not been part of the central narrative, certainly in the Western world, and even Japan, in some ways, it's more concentrated on the Pacific War with the Americans than the Sino-Japanese War with the Chinese.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's amazing just to say that four years after the end of this uh tumultuous uh war uh of such magnitude, the United States was now allied with its enemy and uh in opposition to its ally.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was four years that uh that in that in which that happened, an unbelievable flip.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: So not to flip too far ahead, uh Jeff, but I would say that the post-war years, you know, 1945 to about 1950, are fascinating in terms of how much changes in Asia.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's even though it's a short period, it's well worth looking at in terms of understanding that.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I want to just add one note, though, to flip the story the other way around, because one of the effects of that communist victory in 1949, and this is a big point of the book uh Forgotten Ally, and part of my reason for wanting to write it, is that the Chinese also chose to forget large parts of their own war history.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: To put it very simply, and we can dive into the details later on, the new Communist Party rulers did not want to give any sort of credit to the nationalists, the Guomindang, the KMT, as they're sometimes known, who had been very much on the forefront of fighting against the Japanese.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: The Communists also played an important role.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we have to get out of the sort of Cold War idea that only one side fought the Japanese.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you're in mainland China, you used to say only the Communists fought them.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you're on Taiwan, you said only the KMT fought them.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, of course, both fought, but in different ways.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: But let's be honest, Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists were not a popular flavor of uh government in Mao's China, and therefore it became difficult to commemorate the war because so much of it had been fought by the nationalists.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the reasons that even 80 years on, it's still politically sensitive because of the situation with Taiwan to be able to commemorate that part of the history.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the reasons that that parade in Beijing told part of the story, but not all of the story.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And just for all the listeners to be oriented, four years of civil war after the story we will tell, because we don't want to forget the main story in this.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end, when the communists had the victory, Mao Zedong had the victory, and Shang Kai-shek lost the mainland in the civil war, the nationalists decamped to Taiwan and established the Republic of China in Taiwan in opposition to the mainland, which was then ruled by uh the People's Republic of China.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the United States chose as its ongoing ally in 1949 the government in the island of Taiwan, the Republic of China, Shankai-shek, and not the uh People's Republic of China, which governed the vast mainland of China.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: So all very sudden, rapid confusing, but also to understand why that great mainland war battle was forgotten on all sides in some sense, uh, as you say.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell You summarized it brilliantly, uh Jeff.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: We may get back near the end to some of the aftermath, but uh understanding what happened just after World War II explains why, even now, that history is contentious.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: But as you say, we should definitely make sure that we do concentrate on the war, the war against Japan itself, because that's the Titanic struggle that really reshapes things.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell To get there, I actually I want to start before the war, uh, if we can.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here are two Asian powers, Japan and China.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they uh engage in what is actually the second, or you could even call it the third war, because Manchuria is another uh part of this story, but the second Sino-Japanese war, the first one being in the 1890s and then starting in 1937.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Japan says this is in the interest of a pan-Asian society.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: What are they fighting?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: How can it be?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Also, you look at a map, it's to me strange and ironic.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: The islands of Japan, not exactly what you would look at as dominant, are fighting this vast, much more populous country of China, starting back in the 1890s and then really continuing.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I I want you to explain where this war come from between China and Japan.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, Jeff.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So let me try and summarize it in a kind of top line that maybe gets to the heart of the question and give you a little bit of detail about how I see this cataclysm emerging in the 1930s.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd say that at its most basic, you could define the crisis over probably more than half a century that led to the war between China and Japan coming from the clash of two rival ideological forces.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And those two forces, on the one hand, were Chinese nationalism, and the other one was Japanese imperialism.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So to take Chinese nationalism first, essentially that period we've talked about, let's call it the 18, you know, late 19th century up to the 1930s, but maybe kind of kick uh getting into kind of high gear, so to speak, by the 1880s, 1890s.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is a China that's on the back foot.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: In 1839, British warships appear in the harbour of Guangzhou, known as Canton in those days, down in the south of China, and basically blast China open, you know, pretty much under the force of arms to sell opium into China, but also to bring the Bible, to bring various ideas of global trade.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, ideas and drugs come together at the same time.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of China that rules China, hates this idea, but basically they have no match for the power of industrialized warfare that is at their gates, at their doorstep, at their harbour.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And basically, most of China from that period on, for the next few decades, is trying to sort of push back and readapt itself in the face of an industrialized imperial modernity, mainly from the West.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Japan comes in later, we'll get to that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but nonetheless, in a world where China, whether it likes it or not, is being forced into what we might call an early form of globalization.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the globalization of empires rather than genuinely free sovereign countries working with each other.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I I often uh try to describe 1839 as if the cocaine uh traffickers uh invaded the United States to say you have to be open for business.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: How dare you close your borders to our cocaine?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it could be a Columbia invasion uh led by the the narcos.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the British First Opium War was.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Rather extraordinary how cynical it is, by the way.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: It is extraordinary, and it's one of the things that, you know, to this day, to be fair, you know, politicians across the spectrum in Britain.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody really tries to make an apology.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh nobody tries to make an excuse, I say.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Many people make apologies, but nobody tries to argue that this was legitimate now.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, it was very much part of that wider message of we're actually opening up trade rather than the question of what we're uh we're we're selling.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Trading.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we could certainly kind of query the uh the product.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it was part of that.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: You buy opium, we'll buy your tea.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um absolutely well actually actually just uh because I have you know an extremely distinguished economist that I'm talking to, I'll detour for thirty six for three seconds and just say, as you will know, I'm sure, it was actually the trade deficit that the West had with China that pushed this.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because of course, huge amounts of silver, particularly New World silver, was going into China because they were selling stuff the West wanted.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted tea, they wanted that beautiful blue and white porcelain that we still think of as you know, Xingda Jun China.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, the Britain sort of had to think, well, what on earth can we sell to stop all this, you know, this cash heading to China?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it turned out, of course, opium grown in Bengal, in one of the uh relatively newer colonies of the British Empire, was the one product that could flip the trade deficit in the other direction.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's really important for people to understand that American slavery and the conquest of the Americas was over uh the desire for sugar to a large extent, and cotton.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the imperial wars of Asia were for tea time in Britain.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So very nice.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably a separate conversation about addictive substances and how they change political economy, but we'll we'll we'll we'll park that for now.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: What I want to get to is the early 20th century, where essentially, as you might expect, it's it's pretty natural, there is a backlash in China against all of these developments.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially the idea that China is no longer in control of its own destiny, this great imperial power in its own right, you know, this huge civilization that has essentially dominated East Asia, if not necessarily, you know, sometimes in territorial terms, but also in terms of culture, the Confucian culture, the philosophical background that shaped Japan, shaped Korea, shaped Vietnam.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: This was all part of a kind of cultural dominance of the region that was now being put into fast reverse.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so in particular, well, many groups of people, but China's youth, educated elite youth in particular, began to feel that Jiang war, national salvation, rescuing China, was the key task without which nothing else could really recover again.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: And you find this in many areas, but just to take one example that's become iconic.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: On the 4th of May 1919, young patriotic students march outside uh the Gate of Heavenly Peace, you know, the old forbidden city in Beijing, not Tiananmen Square, which is what is there today, because the square wasn't built to the 1950s, but the Gate of Heavenly Peace dates from the Ming Dynasty and they were demonstrating.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because the Treaty of Versailles, after World War I, in which China had actually sent a lot of workers, although not soldiers, but many workers to the Western Front in Europe, did not result in China getting some of those territorial possessions back from Germany, which had been defeated.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And although this particular demonstration was just a few hours long, the site of 3,000 young, you know, China's finest in terms of intellectual achievements, these young, educated students from some of the places that today are, you know, top schools in China, Peking University, Beda, these people are demonstrating and saying we have to do something to save China.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And their solution is what they call Mr.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Science, in other words, knowledge, education, and Mr.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Democracy.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, getting a more uh participatory form of government going.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: The last emperor had been overthrown by the stage.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: He'd gone in, he was five years old and he was off the throne at the end of 1911.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: China became technically a republic, but in fact torn apart between different militarist leaders.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So this very chaotic China was, on the one hand, unable really to pull itself into a Where it could push back against outside interests, but at the same time also being driven at the elite level by a stronger and fiercer sense that national salvation, a nationalist message, had to win through somehow to actually push back against the outside world.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: And just funnel it for now on that.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: The guy who eventually brings this to a conclusion in the pre-war period is not Mao, and he and his communists are certainly beginning to rise at this point, but they're put on the famous Long March in the 1930s.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're on the run actually during much of this time.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, it's a man whose name was world famous at the time, now slightly forgotten, Chang Kai-shek, Zhang Jeshu, the leader of the KMT Guomindang Nationalist Party.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'll call them the Nationalists with a capital N, but you'll find any of these names for them in many of the history books of the time.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And through a great deal of brutality and blood, he was not a very democratic figure.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: He managed to pull China together into a sort of sort of fairly effective national government by 1928.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that is basically where the scene starts in terms of him trying to solidify China's government in that 1920s period.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to say again for uh listeners to underscore this brilliant description, this happens uh in very distinctive ways, but all over the world.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, different parts of the world, different ancient societies, civilizations confronting suddenly this vast military power of the industrial age.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: China was still largely an agricultural society, even towards the end of the 19th century.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: But now was Britain militarized, and then by the end of the 19th century, Japan, uniquely in the Asian countries, also industrialized and therefore bringing an industrial army to bear on China.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this question of where do we fit in is also felt by the Turks.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's felt by the Persians, it's felt by all these great civilizations around the world that suddenly, in one century, find themselves in a completely different world because European imperialism isn't just a political or military idea, it's based on this new industrial technological might that seems irresistible.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody's asking, what happened to us?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get back?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: What are we going to do?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so on.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff, this is exactly right.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Turkey there as one example.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: They, of course, in the end, under Atatürk in the early 20th, in the early 20th century, create this new, you know, quite uh fierce, in some ways confrontational, uh nation-state.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: But you mentioned Japan.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Japan really is the one country that at this point manages to find its own pathway out of the dilemma.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: So again, for reasons of time, I won't go into full details, but essentially in 1868, there's something that's basically almost an industrial and political revolution within China, known as the Meiji Restoration, Meiji Ishin.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: But this is actually a change by part of China, uh sort of Japan's more uh elite, but sort of, as you might call it, sort of secondary elites, who overthrow, you know, the shogun.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is a name that people might have heard about, the old Tokugawa rulers, and instead not only take over power, which is not uncommon in a coup anywhere, but actually undertake the most thorough modernization of pretty much any country in the world at high speed.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: They changed from the samurai sword culture to a conscript army with modern firearms.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: They changed from a very elite educational system based on Confucian books to uh essentially mass popular education with Western science as part of the uh of the agenda.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of having the kind of pre-modern non-democratic political culture based on the shogun, instead you get the introduction through the influence of Germany and Bismarck, actually, as much as the influence of France or Britain, parliamentary government.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: And uh in 19 uh in the early 20th century, Japan becomes a parliamentary monarchy.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And also looking at collecting all the various things that a top-table, top-tier state is supposed to have in the world of empire, of course, is colonies.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that Japan's new elite leaders decide they have to do, you know, it's almost inevitable as far as they can see, is to colonize.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Britain, France, and Germany and plenty of other countries, even Austria-Hungary, have colonized most of Africa.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: They've colonized large parts of Asia.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Where are the Japanese gonna go?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, mainland China, the area just across the water, is both culturally familiar and a place where they feel like so many imperial powers.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they have a civilizing mission.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Poor old China, they say, is being kicked away by all these Westerners, you know, it's falling apart.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's the Japanese duty, say the imperialist leaders, to actually take it over so that we can make it better.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I have to say this is an excuse that's not exclusive to uh the Japanese at this time, but nonetheless, they adopt those methods very well and they add a particular twist that you mentioned at the beginning, um, Jeff, which is they tell the Chinese, you ought to accept imperial rule from us because we're Asians.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's a pan-Asian idea.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, we Asians should stick together, and yeah, okay, you basically have to do what we say and learn Japanese and you know have your economy basically tied to ours for our benefit for a while, but it's all for your own good.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so that rise of Japanese imperialism, which became more and more extractive, more and more rapacious in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and more and more territorial.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they take over bits of territory.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: Taiwan, 1895.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Korea, which is not Chinese but nonetheless was heavily influenced by China, becomes a colony in 1910.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: 1920s, much of North China is informally colonized by the Japanese, not formally.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: 1931, they launch a coup in Manchuria, again, not a formal colony, but essentially a client state under Japanese control.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: So by the time we get to 1937, we have an increasing sense of outrage amongst Chinese nationalists that their country is still being, in a phrase of the time, sliced up like a melon, and Japanese Empire puts its foot on the gas and insists on increasing its presence on the mainland, particularly after the Great Depression of the late 1920s, when autarky emerges, economic blocks emerge, and Japan's elites feel, in their own minds, they have no choice but to double down on their Chinese empire.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that sets the stage for the cataclysm.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you remind me of uh what I found to be the most poignant moment in another wonderful book, Japan and China Facing History, by uh my late colleague.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm sure did you know Ezra Vogel personally?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say I knew Professor Ezra Vogel well, not as well as I would have liked, but certainly he was a great mentor and and uh uh exemplar for years.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So Ezra Ezra Vogel was a mentor to me and uh and a uh wonderful friend and senior colleague, and he was a great expert on China and Japan at Harvard.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: He was the first person to take me on a trip in Japan, if you can imagine visiting Japan with Ezra Vogel uh in 1981.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: That must have been I have to say, Jeff, it may be like going with a rock star because Ezra Vogel was one of the most famous Westerners in Japan at that time, having written a famous book called Japan as number one about their economic model.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: So you were basically going there with Taylor Swift.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was the most popular person in the world there, exactly.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: They swarmed around him.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we we had a fantastic time.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: But he was sad that his two great loves of uh his studies for his whole life were Japan and China, and they were, of course, at war and at odds.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he tells the story exactly what you relate, that Japan decided must have colonies.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he tells a story in that book of Japan and China facing history of in 1894 when Japan attacks China, and two senior diplomats, you will know them, I don't remember who they were exactly, but two senior diplomats uh who were friends, Chinese and Japanese, meet.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the Japanese diplomat is forlorn, and he asks his his Japanese counterpart, why are you attacking us?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're under threat from from the Europeans.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're Asian, and you're attacking us.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the Japanese uh friend turns to him and says, but you must understand, we've joined their club.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I just found it so, oh God, the Japanese decided, well, we're now an industrial power.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're part of Europe, in effect, in this way.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're part of the imperial club.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And people should remember also the United States, which finished its own continental imperialism in 1890, is usually dated, began its own internal international imperialism in the very same decade of the 1890s, taking over the Kingdom of Hawaii and then the Spanish-American War to gain the Philippines and to gain Puerto Rico and Cuba for a few years.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this was the high imperial age.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Japan invades China 1894 to 1895, invades Manchuria 1931, and you brought us to just the edge of this uh incredible saga in 1937.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe if you could pick up from there, it's the Great Depression.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Japan is the still the uh imperial industrial power of Asia, though much smaller in population and land area, certainly, than China, but it feels that it must invade China.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why I mean again, going into the motivation for these sorts of things takes you obviously into the minds of people who have, in some ways, become part of a kind of groupthink.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is a phrase that we've heard in many later years, you know, the Vietnam War, you know, other examples, where something seems inevitable until you kind of have perspective it goes wrong, and then you come back with perspective and realize that actually many of the presumptions you made in the first place were wrong.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the presumptions the Japanese made were that, first of all, that club you mentioned, the world of empires was, you know, forever, that essentially ideas and aspirations that people had, Chinese, you know, Southeast Asians, whatever, for national identity, were in some way inauthentic or could be controlled.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, we know that the nature of empire is that in practice it runs on uh a certain level of collaboration with those who actually are living on a day-to-day basis.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, India was uh ruled by a relatively small cadre of Western, you know, British uh officials who were working with large numbers of Indian elites who were essentially assimilated into the system until essentially the precious became too great and nationalism became a greater uh a greater force.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think Japan thought at that point that, first of all, in terms of economic autarky, they really needed to have control of the Chinese mainland, Manchuria, and all these places for uh for food, you know, for growing rice, wheat.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they had hoped to find oil in Manchuria.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was there, but they actually never found it.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was finally the Chinese communists who found it after the uh the war.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: But it would they weren't wrong, it was there.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Coal, which they absolutely did uh produce in huge amounts uh again in in Manchuria.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: So there are material elements to it.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: But also going back to the ideological basis, Japan had found itself in a position where it genuinely believed that it was the superior actor in Asia because it had industrialized so fast that it was technologically superior, and that in some ways, you know, I've mentioned the word civilizing mission again.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is slightly more complex in the case of China and Japan, because China had been the leading civilization or culture, if you want to call it that, in Asia for such a long time, for you know, thousands of years.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: And yet Japan at that point nonetheless felt that in some ways they were doing China a favour by uh showing how they could adapt their civilization into a modern form.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: They had the key for modernization showing.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's worth noting one thing again, because it you know, complexity is always important in things.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just as many of those who became the top Indian nationalists spent years training in London, you know, Gandhi was a barrister, of course, famously a London barrister, and figures like um Song Gore, the you know, future leader of Senegal, um, were educated in France, in Paris.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: So Tokyo actually became a metropolis for many Asian nationalists, including Chinese nationalists, who actually took scholarships and went to Tokyo to learn Japanese.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: One of the people who studied in a Japanese military academy was none other than Shankai-shek, who learned a very great deal of what he needed to know about military practice because he had studied under Japanese sponsorship at that time.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a complexity, but nonetheless, that sort of culmination of the idea that the imperial mission meant that they had to expand in China was part of the league.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: That said, let me just do the moment, if I may, because I think it's an important turning point on 7th of July 1937, when the war breaks out.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because understanding, I think, that it's slightly different from the outbreak of war two years later in Europe might be a good point of comparison.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect that many listeners will know the European story about Hitler quite well.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not this story.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: The outbreak of war in the end in 1939 in Europe was perhaps not unexpected.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the summer had been a very kind of dark one, and the sign that a confrontation was coming between Britain and France and Germany over Poland, as it turned out, was uh something that was in the air.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't quite how it was in China in 1937.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bit more like the outbreak of the First World War, which famously came with the shooting of the Archduke in Sarajevo.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was the symptom rather than the cause, because in fact the bigger forces behind uh the Archduke's uh assassination essentially led to the outbreak of a continental war there.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially, what happened on the 7th of July in 1937, outside Beijing, a little village called Wamping, at a place called the Marco Polo Bridge, uh, which is a you can go there today, actually, it's now a kind of big site and memorial, uh memorial to the war.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's uh a kind of marble bridge, actually very, very beautiful and attractive.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Marco Polo wrote about it in his uh his travel account.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: And just near here, there were Japanese troops garrisoned under those terms I've mentioned that they were allowed to sort of station troops in in North China, and they clashed with a group of local Chinese troops.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it was actually quite a binar incident of a sort that had basically happened many times before.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the Japanese government decided that they would use this as an opportunity to up their demands.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is terrible, this clash is an outrage.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: You must give us control over one of the major railway junctions in northern China.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And Chiang Kai-shek goes to his cabinet, essentially, you know, his leadership group, and says, okay, is this the moment where, yet again, we basically make concessions, or is it finally time to stand firm?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: There are people telling him that the first is better.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: There are various quite distinguished scholars, Hu Xu, Zhang Menglin, professors, say, look, a bit like Neville Chamberlain and Daladier in Europe, say, look, China is too weak, it's too agrarian, we don't have enough well-trained troops.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Give it a few years, wait till you know, 1940 or something.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: But in the end, Chiang Kai-shek, we have his diaries, fortunately, which are available at the Hoover Institution in uh in Stanford, and you know, these have been a treasure trove for historians.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he writes, he wrote them very, very assiduously.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: He basically said, This is the moment.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: We actually have to stand firm.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why at that point he not only pushes back near Beijing, where the initial outbreak has happened, but opens up to a wider continental war within China, a second front at Shanghai, then as now the great outward-looking port of China, and the conflagration begins in which the whole of China is then plunged into war from the summer of 1937.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: The ferocity of the wars is absolutely unbelievable.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: The ferocity of the Japanese and the barbarity of it, if I could put it that way, because it's mass mass murders, mass rapes.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's shocking, actually.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: What can one say about that actually?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell The devastation visited on China during World War II is absolutely one of the defining reasons that China's history in the later 20th century went the way it it it did.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: But sticking to the war, I'll give you the words of one very significant figure, a man named Jiang Qingfu, who was a distinguished professor and then was uh handpicked actually by Chiang Kai-shek to become his ambassador to the Soviet Union and then went on to various other distinguished roles.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: He became China's first ambassador to the UN.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: But he was a historian in his soul first and foremost, and he had the wider perspective.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he was giving a speech actually in the US, uh just actually at the just a couple of years after the war, in which he said the war was Titanic.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: It came and it devastated everything.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the level of disruption caused in China during those eight years of war, 1937 to 45, was something, in some sense, that really changed the uh uh the fortunes of China because it caused so much human suffering.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Just a couple of quick examples.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you mentioned briefly, perhaps one of the better known examples that the rape of Nanking, as it was known at the time, the Nanjing Massacre.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let me give a couple of other ones that perhaps are less well uh well known.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: One is what was done to China's capital city.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in case people don't know, uh during the duration of the war it moved to the city of Chongqing, or Chungqing, as it was known in the the West at the time for uh for eight years, nineteen thirty-seven up to forty-six, in in fact.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now uh Chongqing was a difficult city to attack by land, which is why they chose it.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard for the Japanese to get up river.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, in the nineteen thirties, they were able to use the terrifying new technology of aerial raids, air raids.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect many people have heard of the London Blitz, but the Chongqing Blitz came first.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it happened for months and months and months, years and years.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh certainly between 1938 and 41 are the key times for those air raids.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: One particular air raid, 3rd to 4th of May 1939, there were repeated sorties by Japanese um uh uh bombers over the city, uh about I think 17 in a row, just firing of dropping bombs and incendiary devices uh onto Chungqing.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was a wooden city, it's a very impoverished and internal Chinese city, um, and basically the place became a sea of fire.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh during that raid, I think something like 11,012,000 Chinese were were burned to death.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: But in addition to that, the rubble, the destruction of this attempt to try and keep the flag flying in China was part of that.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: One other example, devastating in scale.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you had at the beginning those sort of numbers in the millions.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just to be clear, the number of Chinese war dead doesn't just include those who died in combat, although there's you know probably at least two million of those if we can rely on the somewhat ropey statistics.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: But one statistic which should be remembered is four million, because that was probably three and a half to four million people, the number who died in the famine that devastated Henan province, one of the central breadbasket provinces of China, between 1942 and 43.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need to take Chinese word for it.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: We have one of the great reporters at that time, Theodore White, Teddy White, who became, of course, a big aide to JFK, I think, in later years.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in his book Thunder Out of China, a biographer of him, yeah, yeah.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course, absolutely.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And in his book Thunder Out of China, he talks, he gives this devastating image of a young woman who has died of starvation out in the countryside of uh of Hana.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, her lips were blue with death.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, she had starved to death at that point.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's one person.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: Multiply that by nearly four million, and you have an idea of just in one incident is too small to talk about it, but one devastating set of events, that famine, caused directly by the war, the kind of continued battering that China took on a human scale throughout those years.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you about China's role in the broader war?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine that Japan's commitment to the mainland of China was so vast that it played an important military role in America's ultimate victory over Japan.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that sense, it's central to the military story as well, not only the devastation of China.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is right.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let me again, because it's such a huge story, we want to kind of concentrate on on key issues, give you just two quick examples of where China is a turning point in military terms.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is in a date that isn't always associated with World War II, because for the European side it's slightly early.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1938.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: A year into the war, you know, a year after that July 7, 1937 outbreak, China is, you know, on its uppers.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, you know, fighting back, but it has no formal allies.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, a little bit of unofficial assistance actually from Soviet uh fighter pilots, but not that much, to be honest.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And a little bit of unofficial finance from the British.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: But overall, China, officially speaking, is on its on it on its own.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: At this point, lots of people, including a lot of Western diplomats, think that China's gonna have to do a deal one way or another.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow they're gonna have to compromise the Japanese and surrender.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if that had happened in, let's say, summer of 1938, the entire history of World War II and the world would be different.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because China would have become a sort of semi-colony of Japan, the Asia War, you know, might have there been a guerrilla fighting perhaps, but it would have calmed down.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: And actually the chance that came three or four years later to join the European war against Hitler, together with the Asian war, would never have occurred in that way.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: So China's decision, with the united front of Chiang Kai shek and the nationalists, and the Communists, uh, amongst whom Mao was an important but not yet completely dominant figure, fighting back against Japan, basically saying no, we don't we refuse.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: To surrender at this point, long before Winston Churchill had said that, is a really important turning point in terms of the Chinese war effort.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: The second one I will mention is the one that essentially vindicated there, Jeff, which is that after four and a half years of not quite solar fighting, but pretty close to that, Pearl Harbor, of course, uh is the turning point for the United States.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's the economic sanctions, particularly oil and rubber sanctions that FDR's administration puts on the Japanese that does push Japan into making this sort of breakneck decision to uh to launch the Pearl Harbor attack.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then, yes, China is made part of the military command of the Allies, the British and the Americans, not the Soviets, who are neutral at this time.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: And yet during the next four years, there's essentially a kind of ambivalence on the part of the Western Allies, because on the one hand, you know, there's a phrase I think I think FDR himself uses it, keep China in the war.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, the quagmire that keeps millions of Japanese troops um f having to fight in the mainland of China instead of being redeployed to uh you know the Pacific is important.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, China is told pretty clearly that it's at the back of the line when it comes to overall victory.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: They have to do Europe first, Europe first policy, pretty well known.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Stalin, of course, wants to concentrate on winning on the Eastern Front, so the Soviets are also complicit with uh with this.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: And China's being told that you have to hang on.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: We will give you assistance, but no Western ground troops.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh air cover, yes, and a certain amount of Air Force assistance.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: General Chinault, you mentioned the uh champion of air power.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: General Stilwell has sent us an American uh chief of staff to Chiankai shek, but this doesn't mean American boots on the ground, to use a phrase that we hear rather a lot these uh these days.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: So Chiankai shek and the communists are basically continuing to fight the Japanese in the Chinese mainland, and that ability to hold them down is militarily important, but to some extent they never really get the credit for it because it's not the kind of I always hesitate to use the word, but the kind of glamorous fighting that involves the offensive.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the Hollywood uh It's not a Hollywood version.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's very unglamorous, you know.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a the words, if I may, of one of the great historians of the war and my old teacher, Hans van der Ven of Cambridge University, he uses the phrase meat grinder, and this is a war that has no glamour to it whatsoever, but it's vitally important to at least keep many, many hundreds of thousands of Japanese held down on the Chinese mainland.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus Can I ask you a question?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: I my my favorite president uh by far is uh Franklin Roosevelt, and I tend to regard him in many ways as a political and strategic genius.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I tend to give him a lot of credit for recognizing and building China as one of the main allies of World War II, out of not only a kind of tactical idea that let them uh be part of the meat grinder, but more as a grand vision of the post-war that China should be a world leader.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: I give them a lot of credit, so I want to know whether I'm right about that.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I see the Cairo conference in 1943 as a very Roosevelt kind of moment, uh a positive one.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, now I I'm gonna share the you know the your your enthusiasm for FDR's contribution.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, an extraordinary figure of you know, the New Deal and then Doctor win the war, I think was one of the phrases that his campaign has used about it.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not gonna take that away from someone who was, you know, an extraordinary transformational global figure.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not to go again too far down a rabbit hole, but uh I sometimes wonder that you know there was an assassination attempt on FDR even before he was inaugurated.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: And had he been hit at that time, John Nance Garner of Texas would have become president of the United States.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know what the 20th century would have been like, but it would have been very different, not least because I don't think Cactus Jack was a great new New Dealer.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a different podcast that we'll take up another tie.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think two things are true at the same time.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the important one, I think, or at least the one that's lasting, is exactly what you've said, which is that Roosevelt, and it was still not entirely clear why, but somehow maybe you know he had kind of young adult visits to Asia.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he'd seen China a little bit, I think, and Japan, and uh, you know, this maybe stuck in his mind.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: And family business from the 19th century, right?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And family business.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's right.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Roosevelts, of course, are you know an extraordinarily kind of uh wealthy and wide-ranging and influential family, so yeah, it's not not surprising in a sense.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: But FDR himself, I think, did have this vision of China being raised to being what do you call one of the four policemen.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's going to be uh the Americans, the British, the uh uh Soviets, and the Chinese.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: That came in part because of, you know, essentially the idea that there needed to be collective security that was better than the old League of Nations, that the Americans had to be right at the heart of it, in the way that they weren't in the interwar league uh structure.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: Also, he shared the belief of many of the American policymakers at the time that sustaining Western empires in Asia should not be a key task for the United States.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, liberation in the end of the Philippines in 1946 uh happened under Harry Truman, but you know, that was part of the agenda as well, of course.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the anti-imperialism was genuine.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And by elevating Chen Kai-shek and the nationalists, he was able to demonstrate that this America was not an America that supported the idea of racial hierarchy in empire.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: This didn't do much.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say it, of course, reduced the racial hierarchy in the deep south of the United States, but nobody said everyone was ever going to be consistent, and FDR needed all those democratic votes from the uh the deep south as uh uh as well.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that was, I think, one part of the uh uh of the reasoning that went on there.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, that went on to become what we now think of as the P5, the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, which actually was brought into being at San Francisco in April 1945, just as the moment really when Rezevelt lay dying.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he was, you know, not long for this world at this point.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: But essentially putting China into that structure was something that he had wanted for a long time.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the Cairo Conference, uh, and this is of course the Allied conference with Churchill, FDR Chiang Kai shek, and I should also add the redoubtable Madame Chiang Kai shek, Sungling, who was Wellesley college educated, fluent English speaker who was Churchill and Roosevelt's sort of um interpreter to uh her husband, and that put China at the top tier of diplomacy for the first but not the last time.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I do have to give the flip side briefly as well.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of material provision to China, this was definitely China at the back of the line.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now, many people pointed out correctly that wartime China was not necessarily the most promising avenue when it came to providing financial support, corruption, black marketeering, dodgy goings on, particularly with uh Dr.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: H.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: H.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Kung, uh, the brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek, aka the most corrupt man in China, is what they they said at the uh at the time.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, there's often a sort of putting cut for the horse thing going on here.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: A trapped, besieged government in the interior of China with very little access to trade routes and with its currency being subverted by the Japanese much of the time, it's unsurprising that you have a kind of hugely corrupt uh secondary economy emerging at that time.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of the overall provision, it's worth noting that when you look at lend lease, which was the primary way in which essentially supplies were made to the Allies by the United States, for each of the four years of the war from 1941 to 1944, less than 1% of total lend lease was actually given to China.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of it went to the British Empire and the Soviet Union.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And even in that last year, 1945, you know, the number ticks up to slightly over 1%.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, in terms of the total US financial commitment, even though the numbers look big compared to the Soviets and the British, you know, with limited resources again, to be fair, uh, even the United States can't pay for everything.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: This was a lot of very, in some ways, useful rhetoric and important in boosting China's image, but the money wasn't always there.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, fair enough.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh very sad and uh the tough, I mean the very tough parts of war.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: I still I dream of uh Roosevelt's vision uh that you would have this uh real partnership of countries because he got along, he he felt he could get along with Stalin.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: He felt he could uh get along with uh basically that he was wily enough and visionary enough that he could get along with anyone.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I wonder, of course, this is now moving from history to fancy, but I I am of the belief that had he survived and not had his stroke on April 12, 1945, uh, that he would have found a way to avoid a Cold War with Stalin, and he would have even found a way to cooperate with Mao Zitong, that he was that kind of person because ideology was not his point.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: He understood power, but he also understood the gains of cooperation.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: Am I just in a fanciful world or is this uh No, uh I mean again, this is like one of the ways, let's suppose JFK had lived, what would have happened with Vietnam.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what I'd say, which to some extent I think gives your thoughts uh significant weight, uh Jeff, is that the world that was being created at Yalta and Potsdam was also a world in which post-war East Asia was going to be heavily American-oriented, bearing in mind that it was Chiang Kai-shek's China, nationalist China, that everyone, including Stalin, thought was going to be around for quite a while.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: So in that scenario, you'd have had Japan that, of course, would have still been uh oriented towards the US, as indeed it did become.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have had Southeast Asia still under European dominance, but nonetheless, you know, beginning to emerge into independence and freedom, and a nationalist China that actually would have been, you know, not just purely pro-Western, but certainly oriented in that direction.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that actually pulled that apart was not lack of intention on Chiang Kai-shek's part, but the fact that the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists just after the war ended, 1946 to 49, changed the stakes so considerably when it became apparent that the nationalist government could not sustain itself.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Stalin actually, you know, at the end of World War II in 1945 in August, when the war, you know, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, the Chinese delegation of Chiang Kai-shek's representatives was actually in Moscow negotiating with Stalin at that particular moment.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: We've seen their diaries, they're available to say, you know, how they spotted things going.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: And their intention was to do a deal with Stalin that would essentially backstop certain demands that he had in Manchuria for the price of saying actually the Soviets will not interfere with or undermine the nationalist government of China.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: And for a while, they actually stuck to it 1945 to 46, so much so that the uh the Chinese communists under Mao felt, you know, pretty, you know, they were quietly pretty ticked off about this.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they felt abandoned.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 1946, 47, as a civil war between the nationalists and China turns.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: After General George Marshall, you know, a great American who in the end couldn't really work things out, he tried to get a coalition government going between the communists and nationalists, but both sides in the end decided that zero sum, one side was going to win, one side was gonna lose.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: That was the way that they would go.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that brought FDR's dream of a China built into a new kind of more pragmatic world order, essentially, you know, crushing to uh to the floor.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to talk to you, Rana, for hours more.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I I hope we can find the time to do that.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm learning so much.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: And with apologies, I just want to jump to the present and one particular issue because uh we're uh at the end of our hour.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and not even the issue of US and China, but actually the issue of Japan and China.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: I find something very strange.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have so many friends in Japan, and I've taken a sabbatical in Japan, and I admire Japanese uh society and culture and economy in many ways, but I don't like Japan's anti-China animus.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: And to my mind, Japan invaded China many times, and rather than the rhetoric of China's our threat, China's our enemy, we must militarize.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would rather hear from Japan, let's get over this uh horrible history, let's uh make amends and uh let's uh try a different approach.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the politics uh of today.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just wonder if you have any reflections on that.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know both sides very, very well.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Am I just naive as I often am, or could it go another way?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, you're not naive at all, uh Jeff.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that you go to the region and you know visit and talk to people there is something that you know more people should do, and I hope that they will, particularly younger people.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: I take the following view, and again, I apologize at the end here, I'll try and keep it keep it short, but there is a complexity around this that I think is important for people to consider when they work out where to go next, which of course is the key thing.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: In China, one of the things that I think is not helpful is something I hear over and over again, which is a very blanket statement that, you know, Japan doesn't apologize for its war crimes and that, you know, it's basically just carrying on the history of the 1930s and 40s.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't true.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Japan is a liberal democracy that has freedom of speech, it has, you know, uh free media, you know, has all sorts of things that were not true in the 1930s and 1940s.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: And putting a sort of crude equation of the pre-war Japan and Japan today is like saying that basically today's Germany is basically like the Third Reich, and this is you know it would be a uh a foolish comparison.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Absurd.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: So what I do think is the case is that there are areas of Japanese society when dealing with war memory that concentrate on particular topics that veer away from the China War.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh let me explain briefly what I mean by that.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you go to the Shoa Kan, which is one of the you know great museums, you've probably been to it in Turkey, which tells of you know the horrific suffering of the Japanese people during World War War II, and that should be remembered.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the causes of the war sort of don't really get much um airplay, as it were, at the beginning of the of the museum.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do have accounts of Japan's war, well, it's it's certainly the case that Japan's war responsibility, the phrase uh sensor seekini war responsibility is one that's very well recognized within the historiography.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, it's widely debated in many areas.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: I sometimes remind Chinese friends, and I think it's important, that one of the most horrific atrocities of that period, the Nanjing Massacre, was first exposed to the wider world in the post-war period by Japanese journalists, people like Honda Katsuchi, who wrote in the Asahi Shimun, at a time when China was actually not talking about it very uh very much.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's important to understand that Japan has been considered that part of its own history.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: But having said that, I think that there is a big concentration, even today, in the historiography, the films about the war, uh, you know, novels on the Pacific War.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, Japan still now, when it remembers the war, spends far more time remembering the war against the Americans than the war against China.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: There is far less popular culture.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, again, I've seen a lot of the wonderful manga and uh, you know, uh animated movies and you know other uh products of the memory and attempt to kind of process that particular period.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the war in China is just something that doesn't really come up very much.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: Almost as if, you know, before the war, in the Imperial Japanese days, they used to talk about the China War as a China incident.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was not an incident, it was a full-scale and bloody conflict.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in some ways it's that sort of need to expand the consideration of the whole war, rather than what at least some Chinese claim, which is a refusal to deal with the war, which isn't really the case uh at all, that involves, I think, the importance actually of understanding the history, of understanding these things do have their complexity.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: There are questions of right and wrong.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think we haven't been uh shy about making our views on that clear, but at the same time, blanket condemnations or excusals also fail to capture some of the granularity of what's going on, which is one reason why I think, you know, keeping that con which you mentioned the late wonderful Ezra Vogel.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was very keen on keeping conversations going between the Chinese, the Japanese, and the West about the legacy of the war.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: And even though he's no longer with us, I hope those conversations will continue and deepen for many years to come.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let me thank you for this wonderful conversation.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: So rich, so informed.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that every listener can see uh what a remarkable historian you are and how rich your insights.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: We've been speaking with Professor Rana Mitter, the S.T.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Lee Chair in U.S.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: Please uh do read this remarkable, remarkable book, Forgotten Ally, China's War with Japan, 1937 to 1945.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: It will not only open your eyes to this uh momentous period of history, but it will help you to understand deeply all of uh the current issues that we face in the world.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: Rana, I'm really grateful to you for your work, but uh especially for being with me today on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Jeff, thank you so much for your wonderful conversation.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate your time.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Great, thanks so much.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 1:01:54
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