{"id":18113,"date":"2015-09-03T17:44:42","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T16:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=18113"},"modified":"2015-09-03T17:44:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T16:44:42","slug":"the-position-of-china-in-world-war-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=18113","title":{"rendered":"The position of China in World War Two"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In China today, the Communist Party mounted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-asia-china-34125418\">a massive military parade<\/a> through Beijing&#8217;s\u00a0Tiananmen Square (the name means \u2018The Square of Heavenly Peace\u2019) to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War. Except, of course, that the Japanese were not defeated in China (they capitulated after the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japan itself) and the Communists played a minor role in combating the Japanese invaders (most of the resistance came from the Nationalists).<\/p>\n<p>The book I am currently reading &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B0053UTIOG?keywords=%26%2334%3BThe%20Storm%20Of%20War%26%2334%3B&amp;qid=1439560769&amp;ref_=sr_1_8&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-8\">&#8220;The Storm Of War&#8221;<\/a>, an \u00a0account of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts &#8211; notes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Western accounts of the war often minimise, to the point of sometimes ignoring it altogether, the experience of China, despite the fact that fifteen million of those who died in the conflict &#8211; a full 30 per cent &#8211; were Chinese. It was the Chinese who held down half of Japan&#8217;s fighting strength throughout the war, and around 70 per cent of the effort was undertaken by the Kuomintang (Nationalist) forces under their generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, based at Chunking. By contrast the Communists under Mao Zedong were, as Max Hastings has put it, at best merely &#8216;an irritant&#8217; to Japan.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Remember those figures: 15 million Chinese dead and almost a third of all the victims of the war. They don&#8217;t teach that in British or American schools, do they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In China today, the Communist Party mounted a massive military parade through Beijing&#8217;s\u00a0Tiananmen Square (the name means \u2018The Square of Heavenly Peace\u2019) to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War. Except, of course, that the Japanese were not defeated in China (they capitulated after the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18113"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18117,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113\/revisions\/18117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}