The victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was not only a victory in the war against aggression, but also a great victory in the war of national liberation. The West, which was trying to build a peaceful world after the war, had no interest in it, believing that the Sino-Japanese War was an embarrassing period and had nothing to do with the glory of New China. Few people are willing to look back on this dismal history, because it was the bottom of China's modern history of disasters.
Where is the source of the War of Resistance Against Japan?
For a long time, there has been a lack of unity in the understanding of the starting point and time of China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Among them, the two most representative statements: one is in 1937: from the full-scale outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to the unconditional surrender of the Japanese emperor on August 15, 1945, that is, China fought an eight-year war of resistance; The second is that in 1931, it was said that from the "September 18 Incident" in 1931, that is, China fought a 14-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
What is the difference between eight years and fourteen years? In the six years from 1931 to 1937, although the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was waged in Northeast China, North China, and parts of Central China, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the two largest political forces in China, were mainly busy waging the class struggle of "encirclement and suppression" and opposing "encirclement and suppression." Before the Lugou Bridge Incident, between the white mountains and black waters, where the conditions were the worst and the struggle was the hardest, it was the martyrs of the Northeast War of Resistance who built the Great Wall of the Chinese nation with their own flesh and blood.
After the North China Incident in 1935, the national contradiction between China and Japan gradually rose to the main contradiction in Chinese society, and only then did it begin to transition from the Agrarian Revolutionary War to the War of Resistance Against Japan. On the night of July 7, 1937, when the Japanese army was exercising near the Lugou Bridge in the southwest of Beiping, they asked to enter Wanping County to search under the pretext that a soldier was "missing", but the 29th Army of the Chinese defenders sternly refused. The Japanese then opened fire on the Chinese defenders and shelled the city of Wanping. The 29th Army rose up to resist. This was the "77 Incident" that shocked China and the rest of the world, also known as the Lugou Bridge Incident. The "77 Incident" was not only the beginning of the all-out invasion of China by Japanese imperialism, but also the starting point of the all-out war of resistance of the Chinese nation.
The background and significance of "On the Protracted War".
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan proposed to learn from Europe and the United States and take the road of "enriching the country and strengthening the army". At this time, the Qing Dynasty government was in a period of internal and external difficulties. Subsequently, Japan, which had been planning for a long time, provoked the Sino-Japanese War and forced the Qing government to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki on April 17, 1895, ceding the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands.
The defeat in the Sino-Japanese War alerted a small number of far-sighted Chinese to the question of how to modernize the country; The Eight-Nation Coalition has made more advanced Chinese elements think about the future of the country; The New Culture Movement was an ideological emancipation movement in Chinese history, which explored the truth of saving the country and the people, and created conditions for the spread of Marxism. The May Fourth Movement was a thoroughly anti-imperialist and anti-feudal patriotic movement, and the Chinese proletariat stepped onto the political stage.
The ancient Chinese nation was a "free" national entity, not a "conscious" national entity. The concept of "Chinese nation" was first put forward and used by Liang Qichao in 1902 in his article "On the General Trend of Changes in Chinese Academic Thought", but it was not until the "September 18 Incident", especially after the "July 7 Incident", that "Chinese nation" became a universal recognition and the common name of all ethnic groups in China (different from the Huayi debate in ancient China).
From 1904 to 1905, Japan waged the Russo-Japanese War in Northeast China and Korea. After the war, Japan made Korea its own colony and began to invade northeastern China. In 1914, World War I broke out. Japan seized the opportunity to declare war on Germany and forced the then President Yuan Shikai to accept the "21 Articles" demand, inheriting Germany's rights in Shandong and the right to build railways in China. In 1931, the Japanese army created the "918 Incident", and the Chinese people entered the stage of local resistance (in February 1932, northeast China fell into the hands of the Japanese army). Subsequently, the Japanese army aimed its aggression at North China.
On July 7, 1937, Japan deliberately created the "77 Incident" and launched a full-scale war of aggression against China, launching a full-scale attack in northern, central and southern China, and the Chinese people began an all-out war of resistance. From the Lugou Bridge Incident in July 1937 to the loss of Guangzhou and Wuhan in October 1938, the Kuomintang army resisted stubbornly on the frontal battlefield. In order to destroy the will of the Chinese people to fight, on December 13, 1937, under the direct instruction of its commander Matsui Ishine, the Japanese Central China Dispatch Army carried out organized atrocities against the Nanjing area for six weeks.
Beiping, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing and other places were lost one after another. Those who lost confidence in the war vigorously promoted the pessimistic and disappointed "theory of China's national demise". In September 1937, the Eighth Route Army won a great victory at Pingxingguan, and in March and April 1938, the Chinese army won a great victory at Taierzhuang. Both the "theory of national destruction" and the "theory of quick victory" have seriously interfered with people's thinking, with the former producing a tendency to compromise and the latter producing a tendency to underestimate the enemy. In order to thoroughly refute the "theory of the death of the country" and the "theory of quick victory", Mao Zedong decided to write a book on the theory of the War of Resistance against Japan, to summarize and explain the experience and experience of the war in the past 10 months of the all-out war of resistance, to respond to the concerns of the people of the whole country about the future, tactics and methods of the war of resistance, and to point out the direction of the war of resistance against Japan.
In July 1936, Mao Zedong pointed out in a conversation with American journalist Snow in Yan'an that China and Japan would fight a war sooner or later. The war between China and Japan is protracted. When he went to northern Shaanxi, Mao Zedong read eight books, "The Art of War," Clausewitz's book, the military drill code written by the Japanese, and the Soviets' book on strategy and the coordination of several arms of the armed forces. "The Art of War" had the greatest influence on Mao Zedong's writing "On Protracted War". "On Protracted War" can be said to be the application and development of the idea of "the soldier is expensive to win, not to be long" in the "Art of War". "The Art of War" emphasizes the nobility of soldiers and the speed of war from the perspective of the attack of the strong. "On Protracted War" is an analysis of China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression from the perspective of using the weak to resist the strong, and it is necessary to carry out a protracted war strategically, and to practice a quick decisive battle in campaigns and battles.
In May 1938, Mao Zedong began to write without sleep or food. Zhai Zuojun, Mao Zedong's bodyguard, roughly described the scene:
The chairman sat at his desk in the cave, his pale face illuminated by the faint light of candles. He hadn't slept for two days and two nights, and he was still hunching on the table and writing. When he was too tired and sleepy to write, he asked us to make a basin of water for him to wash his face, and then continued to write.
Five days later, there was a large stack of manuscript paper filled with cursive characters that showed the unruly characteristics of the hairy man. On the seventh day, the chairman suddenly jumped in pain, and the shoe on his right foot was burned by a hole in the brazier, while he was still pondering. He drank a glass of soju and wanted to finish it in one go. However, on the 8th day, he suddenly felt a severe headache, unable to eat or sleep, due to overwork and constant mental stress. The doctor told him to rest, but he continued to write before he got better. On the ninth day, the 50,000-word military theory work "On Protracted War" was finally written.
After repeated revisions day and night, from May 26 to June 3, 1938, Mao Zedong spent nearly 10 days at the Yan'an Anti-Japanese War Research Conference to give a speech on the basic content of his "On Protracted War", which effectively refuted the erroneous arguments such as "the theory of the death of the country" and "the theory of quick victory" that pervaded the society, and strengthened the confidence of the people of the whole country in winning the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Mao Zedong considered disseminating "On Protracted War" on a larger scale, so he sorted out the speech and first printed and circulated it within the party. However, the number of mimeographed "On Protracted War" in Yan'an was limited, and cadres on the front line did not necessarily see it, so Mao Zedong decided to print it in a book and publish it publicly.
Before and after the fall of Nanjing, the Kuomintang relocated a number of important party, government and military organs to Wuhan, which became the temporary capital in the early days of the Anti-Japanese War. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China examined the current situation and assigned Zhou Enlai, Dong Biwu, Ye Jianying and others to Wuhan to set up a delegation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Yangtze River Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which were responsible for continuing negotiations with the Kuomintang, restoring and developing the party organizations in the 13 southern provinces, and leading the anti-Japanese salvation movement.
As soon as "On Protracted War" was published, Zhou Enlai, who was in Wuhan, introduced its basic spirit to Bai Chongxi, and Bai Chongxi greatly appreciated it. Bai Chongxi was the deputy chief of general staff of the Kuomintang Supreme Command at that time. He held that "On Protracted War" is a military masterpiece and the highest strategic principle for defeating the enemy. Therefore, he actively recommended it to Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme commander of the Kuomintang. With the approval of Chiang Kai-shek, Bai Chongxi summed up the spirit of "On Protracted War" into two sentences: "Accumulate small victories into big victories, and exchange space for time." After obtaining Zhou Enlai's consent, the Military Commission issued a general order to the whole country as the strategic guiding ideology in the War of Resistance Against Japan.
From October 1938 to December 1943, with the expansion of the war situation, the extension of the battle front, and the attrition of the long war, Japan was no longer able to launch a large-scale strategic offensive. In the face of the enemy's military attack and political inducement, the Nationalist Government wavered and sought compromise, but in the end it did not give in, and the vast number of officers and men leading the frontal battlefield continued to hold on to resistance. The Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and other anti-Japanese armed forces under the leadership of the Communist Party of China set up anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines and waged extensive people's wars, turning the enemy's rear into the front, stirring up the enemy's peace day and night, and making its plan to consolidate the occupied areas come to naught.
From the local counteroffensive on the battlefield in the liberated areas in January 1944 to the declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union in 1945, the United States sent troops to northeast China, and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that year. On August 15, 1945, Japan announced its unconditional surrender, and the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression ended victoriously.
Without the protracted Japanese invasion, which swept through most parts of China, ordinary people would not have been able to see clearly what a foreign invasion was, what was a sense of family and country, what was patriotism, and what was against the trend of history. It can be said that both the frontal battlefield and the battlefield behind enemy lines are indispensable battlefields to resist Japanese invaders. The Kuomintang, the Communist Party, and other centrist parties all made their own efforts and contributions to the final victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan.
The significance of the War of Resistance Against Japan
On September 2, 1945, with the end of the surrender signing ceremony on the battleship Missouri, China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was finally won. On the same day, the Nationalist Government announced that September 3 was the anniversary of the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, and the whole country would have a three-day holiday. However, for this final victory, China paid a heavy price. The vast territory was in ruins, and the savings of the Nationalist Government's golden decade were lost. The reason why many people don't like the "anti-Japanese drama" and the "spy war drama" that is too mythical is because they interpret this hard-won victory too easily.
However, the victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was the first completely victorious anti-aggression war won by the Chinese people in modern times. Before the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the imperialist countries basically united to exercise joint rule over China in accordance with the system established by the Washington Treaty of 1922. The struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism is generally not faced by a particular imperialist country, but by the entire imperialist camp, and the struggle against any imperialist country will arouse the joint opposition of other imperialists.
After the September 18 Incident, Japanese imperialism invaded China on a large scale in an attempt to break the Washington Treaty system and dominate China. This not only seriously threatens the survival of the Chinese nation, but also harms the interests of the United States, Britain, and other countries in China. After correctly analyzing the situation at home and abroad, the Chinese grasped the main contradictions, united with the socialist Soviet Union and the anti-fascist forces of the United States and Britain to form a world anti-fascist united front, which not only broke the key link of imperialist domination of China (Japanese imperialism, which posed the greatest threat to China), but also legally recovered Taiwan and the Penghu Islands and nearby islands including Diaoyu Dao, which had been cut off by Japan since the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and tempered and strengthened the strength of the Chinese people. It laid an important foundation for the eventual overthrow of all imperialist rule in China.
In late June 1946, after the Kuomintang army of 220,000 troops attacked the liberated areas of the Central Plains, they then invaded other liberated areas, and a full-scale civil war broke out. At that time, the Kuomintang army far outnumbered the Communist army, with an air force, navy, and a large number of heavy weapons and special forces, while the Communist Party did not have a navy or air force, and did not have many heavy weapons, so Chiang Kai-shek believed that the war could be ended quickly, claiming that victory could be achieved in only three to six months. On August 6 of the same year, American journalist Anna Louise Strong asked Mao Zedong: "How long can the Communist Party hold out?" Mao Zedong replied: "As far as our own wishes are concerned, we are not willing to fight even a day." But if the situation forces us to fight, we can fight to the end. It was during this conversation that Mao Zedong famously asserted that "all reactionaries are paper tigers," stressing that "from a long-term point of view, the truly powerful forces do not belong to the reactionaries, but to the people."
Although strategy, tactics, and weaponry are important to the outcome of a war, the fundamental factor that determines a war is the will of the people. War is the consumption of a lot of manpower and material resources. Although Chiang Kai-shek received a large amount of American aid before and after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, this assistance could not support such a large-scale civil war for him. In order to obtain the manpower and material resources needed for the war, we can only step up the looting of the people and make the masses bear heavy and exorbitant taxes. The class nature of the Kuomintang determined that it would inevitably stand on the stand of the landlord class and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. In the vast rural areas, not to mention solving the peasants' land problem and realizing the principle that "the tiller has his land" proposed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, it is not even possible to reduce rent and interest, and the peasants are becoming increasingly impoverished. In order to solve the problem of the war, the Kuomintang had no choice but to adopt the method of "pulling up the strong men," and the combat effectiveness of the army can be imagined.
The Communist Party has always been determined to liberate the poor people, and it is not enough for a few people to be rich, and only when the majority of the peasants live and work in peace and contentment can China truly become rich and strong. At the beginning of the victory of the anti-Japanese resistance, the common people did not believe it, and for them, as long as they could live, they were unwilling to participate in the bloody war. But when the Kuomintang printed money indiscriminately and caused inflation and the people's livelihood was miserable, the common people began to become disillusioned with the Kuomintang and pinned more and more hopes on the Communist Party. The Communist Party has always actively promoted land reform and tried its best to strive for tangible benefits for the common people. Having tasted the real sweetness, the common people took the initiative to follow the party and defend the fruits of their labor.
Wherever the People's Liberation Army goes, the common people will do everything they can to help them, while wherever the Kuomintang goes, the common people will avoid it. It was the wonderful cooperation between the soldiers and the common people that made the Kuomintang suffer in battle after battle. "Down with Chiang Kai-shek and liberate the whole of China" is not a slogan, but a kind of belief, firmly believing that the final victory will be achieved, and that the poor will be liberated and the whole of China will be liberated, even if they can't see it, their next generation will definitely see that day.
The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression lasted 14 years, while the War of Liberation took only three years and eight months to resolve the fighting. "We are all as one, braving the enemy's artillery fire, and marching! Advance! Advance! Enter! "It is precisely by relying on the strength of the common people that the whole of China has been liberated and the Chinese nation has stood up again!