China Praises Nationalists’ Role in WWII

In a remarkable alteration of its view of history, China’s Communist Party is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II with a flood of new materials recognizing the role played by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in fighting Japan.

The latest sign of the turnabout came Monday in Peking with the premiere of a feature-length documentary, “Flames of the Anti-Japanese War,” which will soon be shown throughout China.

The movie dwells at length on the wartime efforts of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, and concludes with a picture of a smiling Chiang and Mao Tse-tung toasting each other to mark the Japanese surrender.

Over the last month, the Communist regime has also opened an exhibit of photos of Kuomintang generals in the military museum here, placed a new picture of Chiang in the separate museum of the Chinese revolution and emphasized the Nationalists’ role in a number of seminars, essays and newspaper articles.

During the war and throughout the four decades since it ended, the official viewpoint of Chinese Communists has been that Chiang and the Kuomintang held back from fighting the Japanese because they wanted to save their resources for the civil war against the Communists.

“The Kuomintang ruling clique adopted a passive attitude toward the war of resistance and sat like spectators watching its outcome,” said a textbook by Communist Chinese historians published only four years ago.

Now, ironically, the Communists’ revised version of World War II tends to give more credit to Chiang and his forces than they are generally accorded by Western historians.

“The Chinese army fought courageously in the Burmese theater,” asserts the narrator in the documentary film premiered Monday. That would have come as news to Gen. Joseph Stilwell, the American officer assigned to Chinese forces in Burma, who retreated from there in 1942 with the statement, “We got a hell of a beating.”

The reassessment of World War II is in line with the Communist Party’s current effort to persuade the Nationalist government of Taiwan to enter into negotiations on reunification.

Chinese sources said last spring that the regime headed by Deng Xiaoping has decided that China should try to break the deadlock with Taiwan now, while the aging Kuomintang leaders with strong ties to the Chinese mainland are still in power.

‘Wash Blood With Blood”

The new World War II documentary at one point mentions Taiwan’s current president, Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek. The film points out that his mother, Mao Chieh-ju, was killed during the war, and it recalls the words that Chiang Ching-kuo wrote on her grave: “Wash blood with blood.”

Earlier this month, a Taiwanese government spokesman, commenting on the Peking regime’s re-evaluation, said the Chinese Communists had finally decided to tell the truth about World War II because they could not distort history and fact.

The historical re-evaluations of the war being published in China give some praise to the role of the United States in China during the war. The new documentary shows pictures of Stilwell and of Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault, who headed the Flying Tigers, a group of American volunteer pilots in China.

No Mention of Hiroshima

But greater credit is given to the Soviet Union, whose troops entered the war against Japan on Aug. 8, 1945. One article last week by the New China News Agency said a Soviet “offensive” succeeded in “speeding the surrender of Japan.” The article did not mention the U.S. use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Huan Xiang, a leading Chinese historian, wrote recently that China won the war primarily on the basis of its own strength and not because of foreign help “as believed by some Western historians.”

Among the many other commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the Japanese surrender, authorities here have unveiled a new memorial in Nanjing (Nanking), where, by Chinese estimates, Japanese troops killed more than 300,000 people in 1937.

The regime has also opened a new museum near Harbin on the site where Japanese germ-warfare experiments were conducted.