Fight against Japan a joint endeavor
There is no doubt that the Communist Party of China's fight behind the enemy lines and Kuomintang's frontline battles during the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were interdependent and mutually supportive.
The CPC could not have established its guerrilla bases and survived the battle behind enemy lines without the KMT-led frontline battles, in which a large number of Japanese soldiers were trapped and killed. Likewise, the KMT army could have suffered greater losses if the CPC-led guerrillas had not blunted the might of the Japanese army.
In other words, the long war of attrition in China exhausted the strength of Japan, leading to its surrender in WWII in 1945. It would be pointless to evaluate the wartime contributions of the CPC and KMT only on the basis of the numbers of their casualties and military equipment without mentioning their different roles in the eight-year war.
True, as China's then ruling party that controlled most of the military power in the country, the KMT, especially its frontline forces, played a key role in the beginning of the resistance. It is also obvious that the CPC became a major force fighting the Japanese army during the later stages of the strategic stalemate and counterattacks.
For halting the civil war and joining the CPC to fight the Japanese, the KMT surely deserves credit and praise. But its resistance was strictly confined to governments and troops, which were even assigned to hinder civil support and the CPC's development.
The CPC, which faced many critical challenges since being formed, on the other hand, was consistent in pursuing the goal of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It launched China's first anti-Japanese struggle right after the Sept 18th Incident in 1931, which marked the beginning of the country's war against Japanese aggression. Also, it proposed the establishment of the anti-Japanese national united front with the KMT, encouraging more Chinese to join the fight.
The author Qu Qingshan is director of the CPC Central Committee's Party History Research Center.
