Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (review)

When Japan invaded China in July 1937, the Chinese Communist movement was isolated in a remote section of northwest China around the town of Yan’an. It controlled a population of less than two million people. Eight years later when Japan surrendered the communists ruled much of north China, including a population of over one hundred million. The party itself rose from 40,000 members at the start of the war to over one million at the end. This massive expansion put Chairman Mao Zedong in a position to defeat the Nationalist Government led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in a four year civil war, culminating in the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949.

How the Chinese Communists managed to achieve this wartime expansion has long been a central topic of academic scholarship on modern China. The author of Village China at War begins with a lengthy discussion of earlier scholarly work so as to fit his new study into the existing framework. Early scholarly treatments tended to advance sweeping answers. Chalmers Johnson identified peasant nationalism created by Japanese invasion and atrocities as the key factor. Others looked at the radical social programs of the communists as garnering the support of the impoverished population of rural north China. The opening of archives in China since the 1980s and the revival of scholarship on the mainland allowed for much more detailed studies of individual base areas. Gatu provides an overview of some of the key studies which generally reveal rather divergent conditions in north China.

Dagfinn Gatu positions his study midway between the two approaches. In what is essentially a comprehensive examination of state building by the Chinese Communist Party, he examines the sweep of north China but incorporates the extraordinary variety of regional conditions. He brings two major strengths to this study. The first is his use of extensive Chinese documents including a group he found at Nankai University in Tianjin. The second is that the author, who teaches at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, seems equally as comfortable with Japanese materials as Chinese and uses extensive collections, including records of Japanese military intelligence compiled during the war. This resource is often overlooked by Western academics and provides a contemporary Japanese perspective on the achievements and failures of the communists.

Those expecting a military history of the war will be disappointed. There are no treatments of battles and only scant references to military campaigns. Yet war infuses this account. Gatu rightly points out that all of the organizational efforts of the communists were deeply influenced by war. Military costs dominated government spending, leaving limited resources for other programs. Operating in one of the poorest areas of China, the communists attempted to extract money for the war while gaining the support of the peasantry.

This book is not an easy read. It assumes considerable familiarity with previous scholarship. But the key difficulty is the complexity of the topic itself. Conditions across vast north China varied dramatically from open plains where Japanese forces looted with some ease, to remote mountainous areas which favored the communist defenders. Japanese atrocities intimidated peasants in some areas who saw the communist guerrillas as inviting retaliation. But where the communists could provide some security from attack, they became entrenched. The condition of the Japanese military itself varied over the eight years, with the expansion of the war following Pearl Harbor the most critical factor. This study emphasizes the enormous demands the war and the mobilization program of the communists placed upon a region with very limited resources. As such it is an important addition to the scholarly work on the success of the Chinese Communist Party during the war.