The calendar is peppered with anniversaries which recall the painful scars left by the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (中国抗日战爭). From the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 7) to the beginning of the Nanking Massacre (December 13), these dates mark an opportunity to remember and learn from the Chinese people’s great struggles against imperialism and fascism.
Today, September 3rd, 2020, marks 75 years since the Japanese army formally surrendered to China, marking the end of the war which began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and intensified by 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (卢沟桥事变). 75 years on, Chinese society and the Communist Party continue to mark these dates with high-profile ceremonies honoring the martyrs of the war. More than 25 million Chinese civilians and soldiers perished in their struggle against imperialism and fascism, accounting for a full one-third of global fatalities during the Second World War.
China’s experience of Japanese imperialism has deeply shaped its history, and the trajectory of the world at large. However, the Chinese people’s contributions to the global victory over fascism has been overshadowed outside of China by a Eurocentric lens and the post-war conflation of fascism and communism. In fact, China’s military efforts played a pivotal role in the Pacific Front in foreclosing the possibility of a combined Japanese-German front in Europe. At the time of Japan’s surrender, more than half of the Japanese military’s 3.5 million deployed soldiers were station in China.
China’s suffering under Japanese invasion an occupation was particularly brutal. Japan’s “three alls” policy—”kill all, burn all, loot all” was designed to “pacify” the Chinese masses under Japanese occupation. Chemical warfare and rape were commonplace. These atrocities continue to inform China’s commitments to a “peaceful rise” and a “community of shared future for humankind,” principles which define China’s 21st century foreign policy.
However, Japan’s defeat solidified the emergence of the U.S. as the principal imperial threat in China’s struggle for national liberation. Tellingly, the U.S. ordered Japanese soldiers to surrender only to imperialist-aligned KMT troops, despite the Red Army’s mass war efforts. Immediately after Japan’s surrender, the U.S. sent 50,000 marines to occupy Northern China to ‘facilitate’ the removal of Japanese troops.
Rather than dismantle the Japanese empire and reconcile with its atrocities, the U.S. appropriated the imperial Japanese apparatus for its own purposes, maintaining much of Japan’s administrative infrastructure for the U.S.’s own military occupations of South Korea and the Philippines. By the time of the Vietnam War, occupied Ryukyu became a staging grounds for U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, the rehabilitation of post-war Japan as a “pacifist” junior partner to U.S. empire coincided with the projection of the crimes of fascism and Nazism onto Communism. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were demonized as the new threat to world peace, ignoring these country’s decisive contributions to the defeat of fascism itself. We remember that it was the Red Armies of the Soviet Union and China that led the global triumph over fascism and imperialism!
We in the West are not taught the scope of this imperialist, genocidal war on China nor of China’s massive sacrifices in the global war against fascism. This is because Japan has been rehabilitated as a junior partner to American imperialism against the so-called “Chinese threat.” Historical revisionism has been a convenient tool for the shifting imperial ambitions of the United States in the post-war era. This has become all too clear as the U.S. has abetted Japanese revisionism in spite of Chinese and Korean attempts to force Japanese reconciliation and redress for the crimes of Imperial Japan’s “comfort women” system of sexual slavery.
Today, we watch as the U.S. corporate media, China hawks, and security experts lionize the legacy of Shinzo Abe as he prepares to step down from power. The Abe’s administration’s calls for a revision to Japan’s pacifist constitution, its support for historical revisionism of Japanese war crimes, and its repeated visits to shrines honoring Japanese war criminals demonstrate a clear violation of Japan’s commitments to peace and reconciliation. Yet Abe’s record of aiding and abetting fascist revisionism has been ignored by the West because Abe’s vision of Japanese nationalism and militarism are useful for the U.S. alliance’s anti-China military buildup.
The U.S.-Japanese imperial alignment endures in the 21st century, with profound consequences for the Chinese people and the peoples of Korea, Ryukyu, the Philippines and beyond.
We remember the martyrs of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression as we work towards peace and an end to imperialism in all its guises today.
(Qiao Collective is a collective of diasporic Chinese writers, artists, and activists committed to opposing U.S. aggression on China and the Global South.)
