The fourteen-year Japanese invasion of China, from 1931 to 1945, is surely the darkest chapter in modern Chinese history. The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), then China's ruling party, paid a staggering price in the war of resistance. Yet in the CCP's own party history, it is the Communist Party that is portrayed as the leader of China's resistance against Japan, always the ‘mainstay’ of the war effort. In reality, the CCP spent the war conserving its own strength, and its leader Mao Zedong even colluded with the Japanese military.
Ignoring the Kuomintang's Enormous Contribution and Sacrifice, the CCP Insists It Was the ‘Mainstay’
The 2021 edition of A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party still describes the CCP as ‘the mainstay of the whole nation's War of Resistance against Japan.’ The Kuomintang's enormous investment and staggering sacrifices in the war are dispatched in a single passage: ‘At the time, the Kuomintang displayed a certain degree of enthusiasm for resisting Japan. Its forces fought in the battles of Beiping-Tianjin, Shanghai, Xinkou, Xuzhou, and the defense of Wuhan, and won the Battle of Taierzhuang, shattering Japanese imperialism's plan to conquer China in three months — but they failed to fundamentally turn the tide of the war.’
By contrast, the Brief History devotes considerably more detail to the only two battles the Communist Party actually took part in during the war — the ‘Pingxingguan Victory’ and the ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive.’ It stresses their importance in these terms: ‘The Pingxingguan Victory was the first major victory won by Chinese forces on the offensive against Japan after the outbreak of nationwide resistance, and it shattered the myth of Japanese invincibility.’ As for the Hundred Regiments Offensive, it ‘dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese army's ‘cage’ policy’ and ‘boosted the nation's confidence at a low point in the resistance.’
In fact, the ‘Pingxingguan Victory’ was only a very small part of the Battle of Taiyuan, which was led by Nationalist forces. On the Communist side, only Lin Biao's unit of the Eighth Route Army — fewer than a full division — took part in the fighting. The Brief History makes a point of stating that ‘the Pingxingguan Victory annihilated a thousand Japanese soldiers,’ but says not a word about the fact that the Battle of Xinkou alone, part of the same Taiyuan campaign, killed or wounded roughly twenty thousand Japanese troops — setting the record for the highest number of Japanese casualties inflicted in any battle in North China.
The ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive,’ launched in August 1940, was a battle plan devised by Eighth Route Army field commanders, not by the CCP Central Committee, which had previously authorized only a small-scale operation involving 23 regiments. The offensive was later criticized within the Party for years on the grounds that it had ‘prematurely exposed our strength to the enemy.’ Peng Dehuai, deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army and the officer who actually directed the Hundred Regiments Offensive, later had this held against him as one of his ‘crimes’ of ‘opposing Chairman Mao’ when he was purged during the Cultural Revolution.
Historical records show that the Kuomintang organized 22 major campaigns on the scale of the Battle of Taiyuan during the war (with both sides committing more than 100,000 troops), along with 1,117 large-scale battles (involving tens of thousands to a hundred thousand troops) and 38,931 small and medium-scale engagements involving fewer than 10,000 troops.
In the process, Nationalist forces suffered more than 3.41 million casualties, and 206 Nationalist generals gave their lives in the war. More than 4,300 pilots died in the skies, 2,468 aircraft were shot down, and the navy's fleet was virtually wiped out. Seventy-five percent of the Kuomintang's military strength was consumed by the war.
By comparison, according to the CCP's own statistics, its guerrilla forces behind enemy lines suffered just over 610,000 casualties in total. Only one senior CCP general, Zuo Quan, died in the war.
The fullest acknowledgment the CCP has ever given to the Kuomintang's role in the war came in 2005. On September 3 of that year, marking the sixtieth anniversary of victory over Japan, then General Secretary Hu Jintao said: ‘The forces led by the Kuomintang and the Communist Party respectively took on the tasks of fighting on the front lines and behind enemy lines, forming a joint strategic effort against the Japanese invaders. The front-line battles, fought mainly by Kuomintang forces, included a series of major engagements — especially the battles of Shanghai, Xinkou, Xuzhou, and Wuhan in the early period of the nationwide resistance — which dealt heavy blows to the Japanese army.’
This marked the first time the CCP had acknowledged the significance of the Kuomintang's front-line battles. For a time afterward, official CCP narratives even spoke of the war as being ‘jointly led’ by the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. In recent years, however, even this limited acknowledgment has been walked back.
In 2019, the film The Eight Hundred, which depicted the Kuomintang's ‘Eight Hundred Heroes’ making their last stand at the Sihang Warehouse on Suzhou Creek during the Battle of Shanghai, had its release pulled three separate times, reportedly for ‘excessively glorifying the Kuomintang's wartime achievements’ and presenting only ‘fragments of history.’ In his speech marking the 75th anniversary of victory over Japan, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping likewise made no mention of the Kuomintang's contribution to the war — the words ‘Kuomintang’ appeared only once in the entire speech, in the phrase ‘the Kuomintang army's Eight Hundred Heroes.’ By the time of the new edition of the Brief History, the Kuomintang was credited with nothing more than having ‘displayed a certain degree of enthusiasm for resisting Japan.’
In response to the CCP's claim to have been the ‘mainstay’ of the war, historian Xin Haonian, author of Whose New China?, posed the following question in a 2005 public lecture on which party truly served as the mainstay of the resistance: ‘Let me ask everyone: in the Battle of Shanghai, the Republic of China committed 700,000 troops and Japan 500,000. The two armies faced off, 1.2 million soldiers in all, in a decisive battle for Shanghai. Now let me ask — could the Red Army in northern Shaanxi, thousands of li away from Shanghai, led by Mao Zedong, with only thirteen thousand rifles, twenty thousand men, and the resources of three counties, possibly have led a decisive battle of that magnitude, involving over a million men?’
When explaining the CCP's claimed role as ‘mainstay,’ party historians typically avoid the stark disparity in military strength described above, and instead emphasize claims such as: ‘The Chinese Communist Party was the first to advocate resistance against Japan and the first to take up the struggle, making it the national vanguard that rose up against Japanese imperialist aggression’; ‘The Chinese Communist Party proposed and resolutely upheld, consolidated, and developed the anti-Japanese national united front, making it the political core leading the whole nation's unified resistance’; and ‘The vast behind-enemy-lines theater opened up by the Chinese Communist Party, and the people's anti-Japanese forces it led, were the decisive force in sustaining the resistance and winning ultimate victory.’
So, at this moment of national peril for the Chinese people, what did the Chinese Communists actually do?
The Resistance in the Northeast Was Not Led by the CCP from the Start
In the CCP's own narrative, the resistance in the Northeast following the ‘September 18 Incident’ marked the earliest point at which the Communist Party played its role as ‘mainstay.’ The Party claims it ‘was the first to advocate resistance against Japan and the first to take up the struggle,’ and that it ‘independently led the resistance in the Northeast.’
In October 2017, China's Ministry of Education changed the official term from the ‘Eight-Year War of Resistance’ to the ‘Fourteen-Year War of Resistance,’ moving the starting point of the war from the 1937 ‘July 7 Incident’ back to the 1931 ‘September 18 Incident.’ Outside observers believe this change was intended to highlight the CCP's claimed leadership of the resistance in the Northeast, in an effort to seize control of the historical narrative of the war.
It is true that the CCP issued five documents opposing the Japanese invasion after the September 18 Incident, and that in 1932 the Chinese Soviet Republic, based far away in Ruijin, Jiangxi, did formally ‘declare war on Japan.’ None of this, however, proves that the CCP led the resistance in the Northeast.
The resistance in the Northeast was first carried out by the Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army. According to an article titled ‘The Rise and Development of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army,’ published by the Yang Jingyu (a CCP anti-Japanese-alliance leader) Martyrs' Cemetery and Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army Memorial Hall, the Volunteer Army was ‘an anti-Japanese armed force spontaneously organized after the September 18 Incident, built on the various peoples of the Northeast, some patriotic officers and soldiers of the Northeastern Army, and mountain-and-forest militia bands,’ and ‘its composition was extremely complex, encompassing virtually every stratum of society at the time.’
The article admits that the CCP at the time simply lacked the strength to lead this force, stating: ‘Although the CCP's Manchuria Provincial Committee and local party organizations did send a number of party cadres to work within some Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army units, and this played a positive role in their resistance struggle, the Party's strength was too weak to influence the decisions of the Volunteer Army's leadership, or to resolve the problems posed by the Army's complex composition and mixed ideological currents.’
Worse still, a 2013 article by the CCP Central Party History and Literature Research Institute states that the CCP's 1932 ‘Northern Bureau Conference’ ‘caused enormous damage to the Party's actual work in the Northeast.’ The conference instructed the Manchuria Provincial Committee to ‘carry out land revolution, establish Soviet political power, and defend the Soviet Union by force of arms’ in the Northeast. The article notes that this policy, by mistakenly excluding the Volunteer Army and mountain-forest militias, left Party organizations in the Northeast severely isolated, ‘causing the Party's work within the Volunteer Army to end in failure.’ This policy was not revised until the end of January 1933.
The Northeast Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army eventually grew to as many as 300,000 troops by some counts, or 500,000 by others. But in 1933, after being encircled and suppressed by Japanese forces, the Volunteer Army suffered massive losses and came close to complete collapse.
In February 1936, following instructions from the Comintern, the CCP's Manchuria Provincial Committee combined its own units with the remnants of the Volunteer Army to form the ‘Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army.’ At its peak, the United Army numbered roughly 30,000 troops — less than a tenth the size the Volunteer Army had once reached. Of its eleven corps, only seven were under direct CCP leadership.
A 2017 article in Xinhua Daily Telegraph states that even the CCP-led Northeast United Army was not closely connected to the Central Committee, owing to geography: ‘The physical distance, combined with the underdeveloped communications of the time, made it extremely difficult for the Northeast United Army to stay in contact with the Party Center.’ The article adds that, ‘because the Shanghai party headquarters was severely compromised by traitors around the same time, and the Central Red Army subsequently embarked on the Long March, contact between the United Army and the Party Center was completely severed, leaving it like a ‘motherless child.’’
By 1940, the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army had lost most of its bases and guerrilla areas, and its ranks had dwindled to fewer than 2,000 men. The force eventually turned to the Soviet Union for help and was ultimately incorporated into the Soviet Red Army as the 88th Independent Rifle Brigade, also known as the ‘United Army Training Brigade.’ In 1945, it was disbanded by Soviet Far Eastern forces.
After the September 18 Incident, the CCP Called for Overthrowing the Nationalist Government and ‘Defending the Soviet Union by Force of Arms’
So what did the CCP actually do in the six years between the September 18 Incident and the July 7 Incident?
It is true that on September 20, 1931, just three days after the September 18 Incident, the CCP Central Committee issued its ‘Declaration on the Violent Occupation of the Three Northeastern Provinces by Japanese Imperialism.’ In it, the Party condemned the Japanese invasion — but also called on workers, peasants, students, the poor, and soldiers alike to rise up and overthrow the Nationalist government, which at the time led all of China.
That same day, Wang Ming, then acting general secretary of the CCP Central Committee, delivered a speech calling for ‘defending the Soviet Union by force of arms.’ In a document titled ‘The Party's Urgent Tasks Arising from the Worker-Peasant Red Army's Breaking of the Third Encirclement Campaign and the Gradual Maturing of the Revolutionary Crisis,’ the Central Committee laid out the ‘great historic mission’ for the entire Party: ‘to defend the Soviet Union by force of arms, and to oppose the imperialists' predatory wars.’
As a branch of the Comintern, this was not the first time the CCP had called for ‘defending the Soviet Union by force of arms’ at Moscow's direction. In 1929, when an armed clash broke out between the Soviet Union and China over the Chinese Eastern Railway, the Comintern instructed the CCP to ‘defend the Soviet Union by force of arms’ and to organize large-scale mass demonstrations against the Kuomintang and in support of the USSR. The CCP responded enthusiastically. Chen Duxiu, one of the Party's founders, was expelled from the Party for opposing the call to ‘defend the Soviet Union by force of arms.’
For the early CCP, the Chinese nation was not, as Xi Jinping now claims, something it existed to defend — China was not even considered its motherland. In the second year after its founding, the Party adopted an explicit resolution declaring: ‘Soviet Russia is the world's first state of workers and peasants, the motherland of the proletariat, the motherland of the toiling masses... the working classes and toiling masses of the whole world should do everything in their power to protect Soviet Russia.’
On November 7, 1931 — less than two months after the September 18 Incident — the Chinese Soviet Republic and its provisional central government were established in Ruijin, Jiangxi, at the Comintern's instruction. This government's basic mission was to overthrow, by violent revolution, the very Nationalist government that was leading the resistance against Japan.
In April 1932, the CCP Central Committee issued a declaration of war against Japan, which CCP party history cites as further evidence of the Party's leadership in the resistance. CCP propaganda materials note that ‘this came nine years before the Nationalist government formally declared war on Japan.’ But the declaration did not call on the public to resist Japan first — its first priority was to ‘organize a people's anti-Japanese volunteer army and seize weapons from the Kuomintang warlords’ in order to arm itself, ahead of directly engaging Japan.
Wang Guilin, the late history professor at Beijing Normal University, wrote in 2001: ‘In 1931, Japanese imperialism launched the September 18 Incident and went on to occupy vast swaths of Chinese territory. China faced an unprecedented crisis, a matter of national life and death. Yet in line with Comintern and its own party resolutions, the Chinese Communist Party's key slogan was ‘defend the Soviet Union by force of arms’ — placing itself outside the Chinese nation's struggle against the invader.’
For the CCP, no ‘anti-Japanese’ action is more celebrated than the Central Red Army's 1934 ‘Long March.’ In their jointly issued ‘Declaration on Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation’ of November 1935, Mao Zedong and Zhu De claimed that the CCP had sent ‘the main force of the Red Army on a 25,000-li Long March, enduring untold hardship, to head north and resist Japan.’ Yet countless historical accounts have since shown that the ‘Long March’ was nothing more than a ‘major strategic retreat’ by the Central Red Army after its defeat in the fifth Nationalist ‘encirclement and suppression’ campaign — or, more accurately, simply a ‘great flight.’
Regarding what the Red Army actually did in the years between the September 18 Incident and the July 7 Incident, Xie Youtian, author of The Mystery of How the CCP Grew Powerful, writes: ‘The Chinese Communist Party was never a force resisting Japan — it never fired a single shot at Japanese troops. What it did instead was use the Red Army to attack the Nationalist government, dividing the forces of resistance; or exploit the public's, and especially young students', enthusiasm for resisting Japan, colluding with self-interested politicians to agitate for immediate war, thereby sabotaging the Nationalist government's war preparations and strategic decisions.’
In fact, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly suspended its ‘encirclement and suppression’ campaigns against the CCP's Soviet base areas because of the 1931 September 18 Incident, the 1932 Shanghai War of Resistance, and the 1933 Great Wall campaign. Xie Youtian writes that the CCP's actions ‘meant that the Nationalist government, while fighting Japanese forces head-on, was repeatedly struck by armed attacks from behind. Their conduct deepened the suffering and crisis of the Chinese nation, and worked to the advantage of Japan's aggression.’
The CCP's revolutionary strategy of violently overthrowing the Nationalist government remained unchanged even when it issued the ‘August First Declaration’ on August 1, 1935, calling for the formation of an anti-Japanese national united front. The declaration's actual strategy was ‘oppose Chiang, resist Japan.’
The ‘Anti-Japanese National United Front’ Was Adopted by the CCP to Meet Soviet Demands
When CCP party historians discuss the Party's claimed role as ‘mainstay’ of the resistance, they invariably stress that the CCP was the first to propose the ‘anti-Japanese national united front,’ making it ‘the political core leading the whole nation's unified resistance.’ What these historians never mention is that the CCP's original proposal for a ‘united front’ stemmed from the Comintern and the Soviet Union's own need to build an anti-fascist united front.
Harvard professor Tony Saich writes in his new book, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party: ‘This crucial strategic shift once again came from Moscow, from the Seventh Congress of the Comintern held in July and August of 1935. Amid growing alarm over German and Japanese intentions, the Seventh Congress called for building an anti-fascist united front encompassing all elements, all classes, and all anti-fascist nations.’
CCP propaganda materials will sometimes admit that, ‘in accordance with the new policy on building an international anti-fascist united front adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern,’ Wang Ming, the CCP's representative to the Comintern, drafted the ‘Letter to All Compatriots on Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation.’ After receiving approval from the Soviet Union and the Comintern, Wang Ming issued this declaration on August 1, 1935, in the name of the Chinese Soviet Central Government and the CCP Central Committee — which is why it later became known as the ‘August First Declaration.’
On the one hand, the ‘August First Declaration’ ‘called on the entire Chinese people to mobilize, end the civil war, and unite to resist Japan.’ On the other hand, it also urged people to ‘break through the manifold oppression of the Japanese invaders and the ‘bandit’ Chiang, and bravely join with the Soviet government and the anti-Japanese governments of the Northeast to organize a unified national defense government and anti-Japanese allied army for all of China.’ It is worth noting that, at the time, the CCP Central Committee and Mao Zedong were still in the midst of the Long March. In the CCP's own words, the publication of the ‘August First Declaration’ ‘marked the basic formation of our Party's strategy for building the anti-Japanese national united front.’
On November 28, 1935, after arriving in northern Shaanxi, Mao Zedong and Zhu De jointly issued the ‘Declaration on Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation,’ regarded as the moment the CCP formally established its anti-Japanese national united front. Yet this front did not include Chiang Kai-shek. The declaration stated: ‘Whatever the political faction, armed force, social group, or individual — so long as they are willing to resist Japan and oppose Chiang, we are not only willing to conclude anti-Japanese, anti-Chiang agreements with them, but are willing to go further and organize with them a joint anti-Japanese army and national defense government.’
The CCP's stance of ‘opposing Chiang while resisting Japan’ only shifted to ‘allying with Chiang to resist Japan’ after the ‘Xi'an Incident’ of December 12, 1936, and even then only because of Soviet intervention. The Xi'an Incident was the crucial turning point that made the formation of a genuine united front possible, since it was only afterward that Chiang Kai-shek accepted the CCP's conditions — and this entire shift was driven by the Soviet Union.
In the early hours of December 12, 1936, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang Kai-shek. The CCP has always maintained that it independently and autonomously decided on a strategy of resolving the Xi'an Incident peacefully. But what the CCP's party history does not say is that, upon first learning Chiang had been detained, Mao Zedong and some other Communists wanted to put Chiang Kai-shek on ‘public trial’ and have him ‘executed’ — a position that met with fierce opposition from Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Xie Youtian, author of The Mystery of How the CCP Grew Powerful, writes: ‘The Soviet Union believed that only China's war of resistance could tie Japan down and reduce the threat Japan posed to the Soviet Far East, and that only Chiang Kai-shek — not Zhang Xueliang, who was not a viable substitute — could lead China's confrontation with Japan.’
Because the Comintern and Stalin also disapproved, the CCP Central Committee abandoned its plan, agreed with Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, to establish a Soviet-backed ‘Northwest National Defense Government’ and a broad northwestern alliance, and instead resolved to open negotiations with the Nanjing government.
Harvard's Tony Saich says that Chiang Kai-shek ultimately accepted the CCP's terms and agreed to form a united front with it because he believed the Soviet Union could help China's war effort — and the Soviet Union did indeed go on to provide four years of aid to China's resistance.
Saich says: ‘Given the Nationalist military's shortage of firepower, Soviet support was crucial. This also required Chiang to reach some kind of political arrangement with the Communists. As a result, Chiang stopped resisting Mao's demands, allowed the CCP to keep its own base areas, and agreed to reorganize the Communist forces — turning the northern Red Army into the Eighth Route Army and the southern guerrilla forces into the New Fourth Army.’
On September 22, 1937, the CCP Central Committee issued its ‘Declaration on Cooperating to Meet the National Crisis,’ which included four conditions: to strive for the realization of the Three Principles of the People; to abandon the ‘Sovietization’ movement; to abolish the Soviet government; and to give up the independence of the Red Army. On the 23rd, Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement effectively recognizing the legal status of the Communist Party, and only then was the anti-Japanese national united front, based on Kuomintang-Communist cooperation, formally established.
Chiang Kai-shek became the internationally recognized commander-in-chief of China's war effort, with even the CCP acknowledging itself as his subordinate. Having been on the brink of extinction, the Communist Red Army — thanks to the Soviet Union's support for Chiang's resistance against Japan — achieved the Second United Front between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, gaining a rare and precious historical reprieve.
The CCP's Policy: ‘Seventy Percent Expansion, Twenty Percent Dealing with the Nationalists, Ten Percent Resisting Japan’
Yet once absorbed into the united front, the CCP did not focus on resisting Japan. Under the cover of ‘legality,’ it concentrated instead on expanding its own strength, and ultimately seized power and overthrew the Kuomintang.
Even years later, exiled to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek could not let this go. On October 10, 1965, in his ‘Message to All Compatriots in the Armed Forces and Among the People on the 54th National Day of the Republic of China,’ Chiang wrote: ‘I never imagined that the Communist bandits, wolfishly ambitious under the traitor Mao, would play their wicked ‘double game’ — that even before the ink was dry on their declaration of surrender, and even as Japan's full-scale invasion was underway, they would openly proclaim their intention to devote ‘seventy percent to expansion, twenty percent to dealing with the Nationalists, and ten percent to resisting Japan.’’
On September 2, 2015, Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou also cited this policy in a speech in Taipei marking the 70th anniversary of victory over Japan, using it to criticize the CCP for distorting historical facts and erasing the Nationalist government's contribution to the war whenever it commemorates the resistance. He reaffirmed that the Nationalist government was the sole government that led China's resistance against Japan, and that Nationalist forces leading the war effort was a historical fact.
The account of the ‘seventy-twenty-ten’ policy originated with a low-ranking officer who broke with the Communist Party, having served under Yang Chengwu, commander of the Independent Regiment of the Eighth Route Army's 115th Division. This officer, named Li Faqing, said that in September 1937, as Yang Chengwu was heading to Shanxi to fight, Mao Zedong instructed him: ‘The war between China and Japan is an excellent opportunity for our Party to grow. The policy we have decided on is: seventy percent devoted to expanding ourselves, twenty percent to compromise, and ten percent to fighting Japan.’ Li also said that this directive reflected principles secretly decided at the CCP's Luochuan Conference in August 1937.
Historians have found no direct documentary evidence of this ‘seventy-twenty-ten’ policy in CCP archives. Yet its underlying spirit is nonetheless reflected between the lines of CCP leaders' own memoirs.
Former CCP leader Zhang Guotao, in his memoir My Recollections, described the Luochuan Conference this way: ‘He [Mao Zedong] warned those present not to be swept up by patriotism, not to go to the front lines to play the anti-Japanese hero... He argued that the Eighth Route Army should stick to guerrilla warfare, avoiding direct confrontation with Japanese forces, evading strength and striking at weakness, circling around behind Japanese lines to wage guerrilla war. The main task was to expand the strength of the Eighth Route Army and to establish CCP-led guerrilla base areas behind enemy lines.’
Zhang Guotao's account is consistent with the basic spirit of the Luochuan Conference as later publicly described by the CCP itself, whose own propaganda materials state: ‘Given the disparity in strength between the enemy and ourselves, and the particular characteristics of the Red Army, the Central Committee set the strategic guideline the Red Army was to follow at the conference. Mao Zedong indicated that the Red Army's basic task was to wage independent, self-reliant guerrilla warfare, while conducting mobile warfare under favorable conditions, establishing anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines, pinning down and destroying the enemy, coordinating with allied forces, and preserving and expanding the Red Army. The conference determined that the Red Army would launch independent, self-directed mountain guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines, so that guerrilla warfare would take on the strategic task of supporting the front-line battlefield, opening up a theater behind enemy lines, and establishing anti-Japanese base areas there.’
The CCP has always claimed to be the leader and main force of the war of resistance, yet across fourteen years of war, the only battles it ever repeatedly cites are the ‘Pingxingguan Victory’ and the ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive.’ This itself indirectly confirms that, even if the exact ‘seventy-twenty-ten’ figures are not precisely accurate, the underlying spirit they describe was real — the CCP rarely engaged in the fighting between Japan and Nationalist forces.
Pyotr Vladimirov, the Comintern's special envoy stationed in Yan'an, wrote in his Yan'an Diary: ‘In effect, the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army stopped fighting Japan altogether starting in 1941 — the Hundred Regiments Offensive was their last engagement against Japanese forces. Both armies received orders forbidding any offensive action against Japan, including instructions to retreat whenever attacked.’
Yang Kuisong, a history professor at Peking University, has written that it seems unlikely the CCP formulated a formal ‘seventy-twenty-ten’ policy in the early period of the united front. He acknowledges, however, that ‘after Kuomintang-Communist relations changed sharply in 1939, by 1940 the CCP Central Committee had indeed placed military expansion in a decisive position,’ and had drawn up concrete plans for a major expansion — ‘under the overall task of persisting in guerrilla warfare, to sweep away the offensives of all capitulationists and diehards, to link the whole of North China together with northern Anhui and southern Jiangsu into a single unified anti-Japanese democratic base area under the control of the Communist Party's progressive forces, while also vigorously developing central and eastern Hubei’ — along with the practical steps for carrying it out.
According to the latest edition of the Brief History of the CCP, by the end of 1940 the armed forces under Communist leadership had grown to 500,000 (not including the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army), along with large numbers of local militia and irregulars, and had established sixteen anti-Japanese democratic base areas across North, Central, and South China.
By the end of the war, CCP forces had grown to roughly 1.32 million troops, with a further 2.6 million or more in militia forces. The Party's anti-Japanese democratic base areas, or ‘liberated areas,’ numbered nineteen, covering nearly a million square kilometers and home to close to 100 million people — a scale utterly incomparable to the CCP at the start of the war, when it numbered fewer than 50,000 and was fighting simply for its own survival.
The CCP's genuine offensive against Japan only began on August 10 and 11, 1945. With Japan's surrender just days away, Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, issued seven successive orders directing the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and anti-Japanese guerrillas in South China to launch immediate offensives across North, Central, and South China. In the week before Japan's surrender, the CCP swiftly ‘recovered 250 county-level and larger cities’ in these regions.
This last-minute burst of activity inevitably raises the suspicion that the CCP was simply ‘picking the peach’ — swooping in to claim credit at the last moment. Historian Xin Haonian writes in Whose New China? that ‘the one who plucked the great peach of victory in the war of resistance was none other than Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party.’ Mao himself had once accused Chiang Kai-shek of rushing down from Mount Emei the moment victory was won, simply to ‘pick the peach’ — that is, to swoop down and seize the fruits of a victory he had done nothing to earn.
Mao Zedong Colluded with the Japanese Army and Betrayed the Kuomintang
Later evidence has shown that the CCP not only failed to seriously fight Japan, but actually colluded with the Japanese military during the war and betrayed the Kuomintang.
In December 2015, Toshi Endo — director of the International Exchange Center at Tokyo Fukushi University and professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba — published a book titled Mao Zedong: The Man Who Conspired with the Japanese Army. The book argues that, in order to weaken Nationalist military strength during the war, Mao Zedong sold Nationalist military intelligence — obtained through the Kuomintang-Communist alliance — to Japan, using the war to build up CCP strength in preparation for eventually defeating the Nationalist army.
Endo's key piece of evidence is the memoir Recollections of Shanghai, written by Eiichi Iwai, who headed the ‘Iwai Agency,’ a Japanese Foreign Ministry intelligence organization stationed in Shanghai during Japan's invasion of China. According to Iwai's account, during the war Mao Zedong dispatched CCP agents such as Yuan Shu and Pan Hannian to Shanghai and Hong Kong to make contact with Japanese intelligence organizations including the ‘Iwai Agency’ and the ‘Mei Organ,’ with the aim of weakening the Nationalist army's resistance and reaching cease-fire agreements with Japanese forces.
In an interview with Voice of America, Endo said she believes that colluding with the Japanese army was Mao Zedong's own personal decision and action, carried out by a tiny handful of agents, and was not a collective decision of the CCP at the time — other senior CCP leaders had, in fact, no knowledge of it at all.
She also believes that the later arrest of Pan Hannian — regarded as the most outstanding operative in the CCP's clandestine intelligence apparatus after it came to power — along with other CCP agents, was connected to this earlier episode. In 1955, Pan Hannian was secretly arrested and later sentenced to fifteen years in prison. A growing body of historical evidence shows that the order to arrest Pan Hannian came directly from Mao Zedong himself.
Pyotr Vladimirov, the Comintern's special envoy to Yan'an and a correspondent for TASS, also wrote of Mao Zedong's collusion with the Japanese military in his Yan'an Diary, published in 1973. He recorded: ‘I happened to see a cable from New Fourth Army headquarters. This headquarters report made unmistakably clear that Mao and others had maintained long-standing contact with the supreme command of the Japanese Expeditionary Army... The telegram also made clear beyond doubt that reports on contact with Japanese army headquarters were being sent to Yan'an on a regular basis.’