AT CHINA’S Victory Day parade on September 3, Xi Jinping delivered a warning — the world stands at a crossroads between peace and war, and to prevent a catastrophic conflict engulfing the world again, nations must learn from history.

That China was the first country to resist fascist aggression, its most consistent opponent, fighting for 14 years (1931-45) at a cost of some 35 million casualties, is little understood in Britain: for most people the victory of WWII was won by the West.  

In fact the Chinese people’s resistance held down some 50 to 60 per cent of Japan’s forces which otherwise would have been used to intensify the fighting in the Pacific and Burma theatres, even opening up a second front against the USSR. Had the USSR not been able to concentrate all its forces against Hitler, the Allies’ war in Europe could well have been lost.

Japan’s expansion into the Pacific in 1941 forced Churchill and Roosevelt to recognise China as an ally and an equal. Britain abrogated the Unequal Treaties (barring Hong Kong)  in January 1943, and, as an allied power, China became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945. Why has all this been forgotten in the West and why should we remember this today?

China’s display of military defence on September 3 was in total contrast to its weak and divided state in the 1930s in the face of Japanese aggression, a reassurance to the Chinese people that their sacrifices of over eighty years ago would not occur again.

China’s war dates from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, an aggression which shattered the League of Nations’ fragile structure of peace. Local resistance was brutally suppressed but Chiang Kaishek chose instead to concentrate his forces against the CPC’s bases.  

Beyond words of condemnation, the world’s major powers took no action, emboldening Japan and the forces of fascism worldwide further. Japan’s invasion of 1937, following the 1936 German-Japan Anti-Comintern pact, was an act of world war. Under pressure from the left wing of the KMT, Chiang ended the anti-communist drive, joining the CPC-initiated United Front to resist the aggression.

The Chinese people stood virtually alone. While Britain leaned towards appeasement, even closing China’s supply route along the Burma Road in 1940, US loans came too little and too late. For a couple of years, the USSR supplied military and financial aid, sending advisers and volunteer pilots under a secret agreement with the KMT. The heroic 10-month stand of Wuhan in 1938 against grinding Japanese savagery, gained China a high international profile.  

Rallying to support the “Madrid of the East,” anti-fascist and anti-imperialist groups such as the China Campaign Committee in Britain organised in solidarity. As George Hardy, CCC trade union organiser, put it: “Assisting China now against the menace of fascism in the Far East, is simultaneously to defend the people of Europe against fascist aggression, directly involving the British.”

China turned to self-reliance: as the threat of national extinction awakened a national collective consciousness, China — its salvation — became the mission.  

With Shanghai and other coastal cities falling in the last months of 1937, millions of traumatised refugees fled inland, with no clear destination and few belongings, a hitherto unseen movement of people which overwhelmed the inland cities as well as the Red Army bases.  

The entire population was to be rallied to the war effort to provide health and social welfare, care for the war orphans, the manufacture of blankets and uniforms. China was the country most transformed by war — socially, culturally, politically.

Class and gender relations were shattered as the Westernised city-elites began to rebuilt their lives in the semi-feudal hinterland, the urban and the rural mixing together. Mass rallies and campaigns in both Nationalist and CPC base areas sought to raise consciousness in an unprecedented mobilisation and politicisation of the population. A new movement of popularising Chinese culture, absorbing and transforming folklore forms — songs and stories — created a modern culture of resistance.  

While the United Front threatened to fray at times as the Nationalists blockaded Red base areas, under pressure from his left wing, Chiang held out in the war of attrition, refusing to surrender. The wartime capital, Chongqing, suffered seven years of bombing. When US forces became involved after 1941, a certain disillusionment set in as the influx of aid began to corrupt the government.

The CPC areas were to expand from covering a population of one million with an army of about 30,000 in 1937 to a population of 100 million and army of 900,000 in 1945.

Forging close links between the party, army and rural population, Mao saw resistance as integral to the revolutionary process, transforming the national democratic movement in due course into a social revolution.

The US, Britain and China defeated Japan together, the CPC using inter-imperialist rivalries to advantage. But the promise of a new UN order of peace and equality was sidelined as priorities changed: the US and Britain determined now to “maintain Anglo Saxon superiority” over post-war Asia. The Chinese people though had not fought so hard for so long against Japanese imperialism to become hostage to the US: they battled on under CPC leadership to establish an independent People’s Republic in 1949.

Nor did the end of world war end war in east Asia as the European colonial powers attempted to regain their hold. But after four years of conflict, the Dutch accepted an independent Indonesia in 1949; the French were defeated in Dien Bien Phu in 1954; US-led forces were fought to a standstill in Korea; and the communist-led guerilla struggle in Malaya persisted up to 1960. As Mao, interviewed by Edgar Snow in 1936, saw it, China’s revolution was a key factor in world revolution — when it came to power, peoples of colonial countries would rise up and win similar victories of their own.

Suppressing this, the imperialist powers fabricated the myth of the US, with Britain, as saviours of the world from fascism, so claiming alone the right to global leadership. The UN has never fully realised its role: although no major powers have gone to war, the imperialist powers cling to dominance.

Today, as in the early 1930s, world order is in a state of flux with Israel this time meting out unimaginable and unrestrained brutality. From 1931 the international community allowed fascist forces to accumulate: this is the history China is calling the world to reflect on.

We cannot understand international developments without understanding the rise of China, and we cannot understand China without understanding both its transformation through war and its transformative role in WWII. China we are told wants to dominate the world, to displace US — so we must increase our military strength and arm its neighbours. In reality, it is the US that has abandoned world order, pushing the UN into irrelevance amid unending wars and disruption, and it is China, with its enduring goal of a peaceful world forged through the great sacrifices of the past, that is stepping forward now to finally realise the promise of the WWII victory for a new world order with the UN at its core. Herein lies the deep significance of China’s VJ-day commemoration.

My takeaway from September 3 is the message of international solidarity: the victory over fascism was achieved by many such acts of people like Norman Bethune and other doctors, who had supported the international brigades in Spain and then volunteered for China; the Friends Ambulance Unit which had some 300 people mostly British operating in China; the Chinese fishermen who helped rescue hundreds of British POWs left to drown by the Japanese when their transport ship, the Lisbon Maru, sank; the several thousand Chinese merchant seamen who served in bringing essential supplies to Britain from the US, braving the battle of the Atlantic.

China has not forgotten: its repeated call for a “shared future for humanity” resonants because we shared a history, that of world war. If we are stop to the spread of terror again today we must together draw on that WWII spirit of internationalism with its striving for peace and international co-operation.

Jenny Clegg was one of the international friends specially invited to attend the 80th anniversary commemoration of the victory of the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war.