Free China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein Page A

the one man who can make Chinese unity and independence a reality. He and he alone can untangle the present situation because, in spite of some of the things he has done, he is China.”
    A sort of squaring of circles begins to emerge in views like those of Mansfield and others, in which Chiang was deemed to be a deeply flawed leader, strangely disconnected from the suffering of his people and the abuses inflicted on them by his own government. Yet at the same time these hardheaded, unsparing analyses are accompanied by the judgment that his destiny and China’s destiny are one and the same. For the first of several times in its subsequent experience shoring up right-wing dictators against Communist revolutionaries, the United States depended on an Asian leader whose performance was unsatisfactory but who was nonetheless the American choice for the future.

CHAPTER THREE
    The Devastated Country
    T heSino-Japanese War was devastating and unnecessary. For eight years it raged across China creating an immeasurable degree of death, destruction, and loss—loss in the conventional senses of death and material damage but also the loss of commonality, of humanistic relations among the Chinese themselves, as the struggle to survive overwhelmed the country’s capacities for compassion, mutual aid, and fellow feeling.
    The main and climactic battles of this war took place between 1937 and 1945, but it could be said to have started in 1895 when Japan, resurgent, implacable, and unrestrained in its pursuit of international prestige—which meant emulating the major European powers in their scramble for colonial possessions—made a colony of the entire island ofTaiwan, which had belonged to China for centuries. But Japan’s major goal was the possession of Korea and Manchuria, the vast landmasses just across the Sea of Japan that were stepping-stones toward the even larger prize, which was China. China, normally the dominant country in northeast Asia, was weak, in political disarray, and incapable of defending its historic interests in Korea or in its farther-flung provinces, like Manchuria, which became contested territory between Japan and the other powerful nation in the area, imperial Russia.
    In 1905, Japan announced itself as a major player in the contest for colonies when it soundly thrashed Russia in a war with the chief characteristic of many colonial wars: the two combatants fought it entirely on the soil of a third country, China, which was not a combatant. TheRusso-Japanese War marked the first time that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a major conflict. Japan’s armies outfought and outmaneuvered the Russians both on land and, perhaps even more important, at sea. In the decisive land battle for Mukden, the largest Manchurian city (now called Shenyang), the Russians lost ninety thousand men. In the decisive naval confrontation, in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, the Japanese fleet under the command of Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated the Russian fleet, most of which had sailed eighteen thousand miles from its home port in the Baltic Sea. Only three Russian ships escaped. Russia lost all eight of the battleships in its fleet and five thousand men—compared to Japanese losses of three torpedo boats and 116 men. Russia agreed that Korea would be part of Japan’ssphere of influence, and Japan seized the whole country in 1910. Japan was awarded the southern half of the Sakhalin Island chain, which had belonged to Russia, and it took over the special colonialist rights that Russia had had in southern Manchuria, including a lease on the port of Port Arthur and control over the South Manchurian Railroad. From that point on, it became a constant Russian ambition to recover these losses, and this, as we will see, was to have major consequences for China and the United States.
    As a result of its victory, Japan was the indisputable great power in Asia and the fastest-rising power in the world, a country