China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein Page A

invaded. But of the continental European countries only theSoviet Union experienced full-scale war on its own territory for more than a few months. The Soviet Union was at war for a total of nearly five years, the United States for nearly four. China’s war, excluding the initial Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, lasted eight full years.
    By the time of Stilwell’s departure and Wedemeyer’s arrival in the fall of 1944, China was exhausted, its armies decimated, its people demoralized, disoriented, and desperate, its economy in ruins, and its government, led still by Chiang Kai-shek, discredited by the depredations it had been powerless to prevent. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians had died, many millions more were displaced, reduced to penury and desperation. Numerous cities were literally smoldering ruins, the economy of much of the countryside wrecked. Students of the war have estimated property damage at about the equivalent ofone hundred billion dollars, which means that the country’s industrial capacity was one-quarter of what it had been at the beginning of the war.
    Some areas of China, a very big country, were not very adversely affected by the war, or were largely untouched by it, most conspicuously Manchuria andTaiwan, both of which were underJapan’s control and had actually benefited economically from Japan’s insatiable need for goods. Other areas, especially what was known as the dahoufang, consisting of the vast inland provinces including Sichuan, Shanxi, Guizhou, Gansu, and Yunnan, were mostly unoccupied by Japan and not directly touched by the war. Even areas that were more central and that Japan did invade, like Hunan and Henan provinces, saw little actual fighting between the initial Japanese invasion of 1937 and the ferociousIchigo campaign that Japan initiated in the spring of 1944. In many parts of unoccupied China, the Chinese, resourceful and energetic as always, made do, as people always strive to do even under the worst of circumstances. Human creativity does not grind to a halt even in concentration camps and occupied territories. “When no outside pressure brought terror and wild dispersal, a provincial city seemed able to bumble along in peaceful autonomy just as it had during the centuries of imperial rule,” wrote the American travelerGraham Peck, who toured much of China in 1940 and 1941, just before the American entry into the war.
    Refugees created new communities. A class of newly wealthy entrepreneurs emerged. Known as “guerrilla merchants,” they packed their bags with silk stockings or fountain pens and took them by junk or on horse carts from the cities under Japan’s control to the towns and cities that weren’t. Traveling in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, Peck found “boom towns, packed with new restaurants and hotels, noisy all night with gambling and drinking games” where there had been only quiet fishing villages before, bypassed by the river steamboats. The smuggling was technically illegal but was nonetheless taxed by local military commanders and customs officials. A few months later, in 1941 in Henan province, Peck met a former official who had lost his job and become a guerrilla merchant instead. He reported that the town of Jieshou, the busiest smuggling port in Honan, had better restaurants, Chinese or western, than Chungking. Loyang, the provincial capital six hundred miles northeast of Chungking on the Yellow River, “sheltered well over a hundred thousand people, clattering about the routines of Chinese urban life in fair prosperity,” almost as if there were nowar, and in striking contrast to miserable, overcrowded, rubble-strewn Chungking. The Japanese armies were fifty miles away.
    But this semi-prosperity, which existed in spite of rather than because of the activities of China’s government, could come crashing to an end at any time. Only two weeks after Peck’s arrival, regular Japanese bombings of Loyang commenced—surveillance