West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Although this might seem to lead to the inevitability of Pearl Harbor and Japan-U.S. war, the situation, Conroy points out, actually remained complex. As the “entangled” changed to “mired,” Japan scrambled to redefine its mission. Moderates reentered some of the decision making alongside the right wing. The Japanese looked for a Chinese to head Japan’s China, and found a prominent one: Sun Yat-sen’s former right-hand man, Wang Ching-wei. Seeking to garner the acceptance of as many Chinese as possible, Japan redefined the enemy in China as no longer all three of the poisonous Western ideologies—nationalism, democracy, and socialism (Sun’s Three People’s Principles), but now only “the communist virus.” Chiang Kai-shek was invited into the Japanese anticommunist alliance, but he declined for the moment, remaining part of the KMT-communist “second united front.” So it seemed to the Japanese, who were in a mood to compromise, that to claim Wang as the true KMT leader, the word “true” meaning truly anticommunist, would prove that Japan’s China was really the best way for the Chinese to move toward China’s China. After all, Bolshevism represented an infiltration of foreign, Western ideas.

A Personal Note

Hilary Conroy’s account of the Far East 1937–1941 omits some events—the so-called Yenan Way— going on deep in China’s interior during those years, a subject I am familiar with from a portion of my own doctoral research. I was attracted to the purity of the revolutionary ideal in the Yenan story and simultaneously to the reports of a new democracy detailed by such Americans as Missouri journalist Edgar Snow, State Department representative John Stewart Service, and much later historian Mark Selden in his 1971 book, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China.¹⁴ In 1975 I wrote, “This New Democracy, as Mao called the base area government of this period, had many progressive aspects. It protected the peasants against exorbitant rents. It guaranteed democratic rights. It supported universal education. It was elected through universal suffrage. It was markedly free of corruption. Communists played a leading role in it, alongside non-Communist progressives and middle-of-the-roaders.”¹⁵