Session 12: The Military Situation in China at War's End

This session featured two papers, one by Professor WANG Chaoguang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Modern history, Beijing) and the other by Professor MOMMA Rira (Ministry of Education, Tokyo), which related to the question of how the disposition of the combatant forces in China at the end of the war contributed to the unfolding of postwar military and political events in that country.

After the failure of the Japanese army's Ichigo campaign, and as it became clearer that Japan would defeated by the United States, the various political/military factions in China, particularly the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang, scrambled to enhance their postwar positions. What developed, according to these two presentations, was an odd system of multilateral relations between Nationalist, Communist, puppet, and Japanese forces. At first, it seemed that that the core areas of the North China plain and the lower Yangzi region would be pivotal in the postwar balance of power, but when the Communist armies rolled into Manchuria early in the fall, the once peripheral region become vital to the outcome of the emerging Nationalist-Communist struggle.

Thus, the Wang and Momma papers, in addition to chronicling the last phase of the Sino-Japanese War, provided a background to an understanding of the Chinese civil war that was to follow. Together, they presented an intriguing story in which both the Communist and Nationalist forces are seen negotiating with the Japanese army, each side trying to use the large weapons and supply stockpiles of that army, either to contain or reduce their adversaries. Most importantly, the Wang and Momma papers and the discussion that followed their presentation highlighted the significance of war termination in international conflict and the problems of demobilization, repatriation, and reconstruction that inevitably follow the termination of hostilities.