Characters

"China has not been conquered. China will not be conquered. As long as one Chinese soldier remains, we shall fight on."

Chiang Kai-shek was born on October 31, 1887, in Fenghua, Zhejiang province, into a modestly prosperous merchant family. His life traced the full arc of modern Chinese history — from the collapse of the Qing dynasty through the warlord era, the anti-Japanese war, defeat in the civil war, and four decades ruling Taiwan. He was one of the most consequential and most controversial leaders of the 20th century: a man who unified China under the Nationalists, survived eight years of Japanese invasion, and yet lost China's mainland to the Communists. Chiang received military training in Tokyo at the Shimbu Military Academy and later joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary Nationalist movement. After Sun's death in 1925, he maneuvered brilliantly to become the Nationalist Party's dominant figure and launched the Northern Expedition (1926–1928) that nominally reunified China under Nationalist control. His brutal 1927 Shanghai Massacre, in which he turned on his Communist allies and killed thousands, began a decades-long civil war with Mao Zedong's forces. When Japan launched full-scale invasion in 1937, Chiang faced an impossible strategic situation. His armies were outgunned and outfought by the Imperial Japanese military. His response — what he called 'trading space for time' — meant deliberately sacrificing China's most productive and populated regions to exhaust Japan in a vast continental hinterland. This strategy required calculated catastrophism: the Yellow River flood of 1938, which he authorized, killed half a million of his own civilians to slow Japan's advance. The abandonment of Nanjing led to the massacre of 200,000–300,000 of his citizens. Chiang believed — correctly, as it turned out — that Japan would eventually be drawn into a wider war that would bring American power to China's side. His relationship with American General Joseph Stilwell became one of the war's most poisonous partnerships. Stilwell despised Chiang, whom he called 'Peanut,' believing him corrupt, incompetent, and more concerned with husbanding resources for the post-war civil war than fighting Japan. Chiang reciprocated the contempt and in 1944 demanded Stilwell's recall — which Roosevelt granted. The episode damaged Chiang's relationship with Washington at a critical moment. Chiang's ultimate defeat in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and retreat to Taiwan with two million Nationalists shaped the Cold War for decades. He ruled Taiwan with an iron hand until his death in 1975, insisting to the end that the Nationalist government was the legitimate government of all China. The question he posed — which China is the real China? — remains unresolved.

"Our strategy should be to employ our main force to fight in dispersed operations... to avoid decisive engagements with a superior enemy."

Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, in Shaoshan village in Hunan province, the son of a prosperous peasant farmer. His rise from provincial schoolteacher to ruler of the world's most populous nation is one of the most dramatic political trajectories in history — and the Second Sino-Japanese War was the crucible in which his eventual victory was forged. By 1937, Mao led the Chinese Communist Party's battered survivors of the Long March — a ragged army of perhaps 30,000 who had trekked 6,000 miles through murderous terrain to reach their base in Yan'an in northern Shaanxi. The Japanese invasion paradoxically rescued Mao from near-certain destruction. The Xi'an Incident of December 1936 forced Chiang Kai-shek to accept a Second United Front with the Communists against Japan, halting the Nationalist campaigns that had nearly eliminated the Communist movement. The war gave Mao eight years to rebuild. Mao's strategic genius during the war was his insight that the Communists should not waste their strength fighting Japan in conventional battles — that was Chiang's job. Instead, Mao's Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army should expand into the vacuum created in the Japanese-occupied countryside, building mass political organizations, training guerrilla forces, and governing liberated zones. His treatise 'On Protracted War' (1938) provided the theoretical framework: Japan was strong but overextended; China was weak but vast; time was on China's side if the Communists could build bases that outlasted Japanese occupation. While Chiang's Nationalist armies bore the overwhelming burden of conventional fighting — absorbing Japan's main blows at Shanghai, Wuhan, and in hundreds of costly battles — Mao's forces grew exponentially. By 1945, the Communist armies had expanded from 80,000 to nearly one million troops, with a political base controlling territory inhabited by 100 million people. The Communists had fought Japan — most famously at the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 — but always on their own terms, conserving strength and building political organization. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Mao and Chiang raced to seize Japanese-held territory. The civil war that followed, though ostensibly about who would govern China, was in many ways decided by the eight years of contrasting wartime strategies. The Communists emerged stronger, better organized, more politically legitimate, and in control of vast rural populations. Chiang's Nationalists emerged weaker, more corrupt, economically devastated, and having lost the goodwill of many of the urban elites who might have sustained them. On October 1, 1949, Mao declared the People's Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.

"I told the men that they must comfort the wounded Chinese soldiers, protect the ordinary people, and refrain from plunder."

Iwane Matsui was born on July 27, 1878, in Aichi prefecture, Japan. A career military officer who rose to become one of Japan's most senior generals, he is remembered primarily as the commander responsible for the Nanjing Massacre — an event he later claimed he tried to prevent, and for which he was executed as a war criminal in 1948. Matsui graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and spent his career rising through the ranks, serving in the Russo-Japanese War and in various staff and command positions. By the 1930s he was a general officer with a reputation as a China specialist who had cultivated relationships with Chinese political figures. He believed in Pan-Asian solidarity and saw himself as a friend to China — an attitude that makes his role in the events of December 1937 all the more complex and contested. Matsui was recalled from retirement in 1937 to command the Shanghai Expeditionary Force. After the brutal three-month Battle of Shanghai, his forces pursued the retreating Chinese army toward Nanjing. He entered Nanjing on December 17, 1937, four days after the city fell, in a triumphal procession. What had already begun — and what continued for six weeks — was a systematic campaign of murder, rape, looting, and destruction that killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed prisoners of war. Matsui's command responsibility for the Nanjing Massacre was the subject of intense debate at his trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The prosecution argued he knew the massacre was occurring and failed to stop it. The defense argued he was ill during much of the critical period and issued orders against misconduct that his subordinates ignored. The tribunal found him guilty of war crimes under the doctrine of command responsibility. He was executed by hanging on December 23, 1948, at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. Until his death, Matsui maintained that he had tried to restrain his troops and was heartbroken by the atrocities. He built a Buddhist shrine at his home called Koa Kannon, where bones of Chinese war dead were interred alongside Japanese, and prayed there daily. Whether this reflected genuine remorse, an attempt at spiritual atonement, or a means of managing his own guilt remains debated by historians.

"Guerrilla warfare is the inevitable method of a weak nation fighting a stronger enemy. We turn the enemy's strength into his weakness."

Zhu De was born on December 1, 1886, in Yilong County, Sichuan province, into a poor tenant farming family. He became one of the founders of the Chinese Red Army and the Eighth Route Army's commander during the Second Sino-Japanese War — the military architect of Chinese Communist guerrilla warfare who built the army that eventually defeated Chiang Kai-shek. Zhu De's early life was one of remarkable social mobility for a peasant's son in late Qing China. He studied at the Yunnan Military Academy and served as an officer in the Yunnan Army, reaching the rank of brigade commander and becoming an opium addict — a habit he later broke with characteristic willpower. He traveled to Germany in 1922 and joined the Chinese Communist Party in Berlin, then studied military science in the Soviet Union. He returned to China in 1926 and played a key role in the Nanchang Uprising of August 1927 — the first major armed Communist revolt against the Nationalists, now celebrated as the founding of the People's Liberation Army. During the anti-Japanese war, Zhu De commanded the Eighth Route Army, which became the primary Communist military force operating in northern China. He developed and refined the guerrilla warfare tactics that Mao had theorized — mobile war, avoiding direct confrontation with superior Japanese forces, attacking supply lines and isolated outposts, building political organizations in liberated areas. His forces fought in the Hundred Regiments Offensive of August 1940, the largest Communist military operation of the war, in which 400,000 troops simultaneously attacked Japanese rail lines, cutting communications across North China. Zhu De and Mao Zedong were inseparable during the war years — so closely identified that the Communist forces were often called the 'Zhu-Mao Army.' But Zhu De was the military practitioner where Mao was the political theorist. After the Communist victory in 1949, Zhu De became Commander-in-Chief of the People's Liberation Army and a major figure in the new state. He survived the Cultural Revolution despite being criticized by Red Guards, and died on July 6, 1976, at the age of 89, two months before Mao.

"I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it."

Joseph Warren Stilwell was born on March 19, 1883, in Palatka, Florida, and grew up in New York. His name in the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War is inseparable from one of history's most spectacular command failures of interpersonal chemistry — an officer of genuine brilliance who was comprehensively wrong about everything important while being factually right about almost everything he observed. Stilwell spoke fluent Mandarin, having served in China during the 1920s and 1930s, and was considered the US Army's foremost China expert when he was appointed in 1942 to serve as Chiang Kai-shek's Chief of Staff and commander of US forces in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. His mandate was essentially impossible: to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to commit his best forces to offensive operations in Burma, thereby reopening the Burma Road supply line to China, while simultaneously training and equipping Chinese divisions to fight effectively. Stilwell's contempt for Chiang — whom he privately called 'Peanut' in his diaries — was genuine and mutually destructive. He believed Chiang was a corrupt coward who was hoarding American Lend-Lease supplies and US-trained divisions for the post-war civil war rather than fighting Japan. He was largely right in this assessment. But Stilwell's remedy — demanding personal command of all Chinese forces, browbeating Chiang in front of subordinates, and constantly threatening to cut off supplies — was diplomatically catastrophic and ultimately unworkable. The relationship deteriorated through a succession of crises: the Burma retreat of 1942, the airlift over the Hump, the Salween River offensive, and finally the Ichigo disaster of 1944. When Ichigo overran four US airbases and devastated Chinese armies, President Roosevelt sent Chiang an ultimatum demanding Stilwell be given full command of all Chinese forces. Chiang refused and demanded Stilwell's recall instead. Roosevelt, recognizing that deposing Chiang in wartime was not a viable option, recalled Stilwell in October 1944. Stilwell returned to the United States — publicly in disgrace but privately convinced history would vindicate him. It largely did: his assessment of Nationalist corruption and Communist military effectiveness proved prescient. He died of cancer on October 12, 1946.

"Today I lead you to battle. Today we will fight to the death. I will not return alive."

Zhang Zizhong was born on August 11, 1891, in Linqing, Shandong province. He became one of China's most celebrated military heroes of the Second Sino-Japanese War — the only Army Commander-level officer killed in action during the entire conflict, and a man whose reputation had first to overcome the stigma of apparent collaboration before his sacrifice could be properly honored. Zhang Zizhong rose through the ranks of the Northern warlord armies to become a trusted commander under Song Zheyuan, who controlled the Peking-Tientsin region in 1937. When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident erupted on July 7, 1937, Zhang Zizhong was in a position that destroyed his reputation in China: as mayor of Tientsin, he was left behind to negotiate with the Japanese while Song Zheyuan and the main Nationalist forces withdrew. His negotiations, which he believed were buying time, made him appear to be a Japanese collaborator to the Chinese public. He returned to Nanjing to find himself condemned as a traitor, spat upon in the streets, and publicly denounced. Zhang Zizhong spent the rest of his life proving the condemnation wrong. Given a chance at command — because Chiang Kai-shek needed experienced officers and Zhang Zizhong begged repeatedly for an opportunity to redeem himself — he became one of China's most aggressive and effective battlefield commanders. He fought with ferocious courage at the Battles of Taierzhuang and in the defense of Wuhan, winning a reputation as one of the few Chinese generals who consistently went on the offensive. His tactical skill and personal bravery under fire earned him his troops' absolute loyalty. At the Battle of Zaoyang-Yichang in May 1940, commanding the 33rd Army Group, Zhang Zizhong crossed the Han River with a small force to disrupt Japanese encirclement operations. Surrounded, with his radio destroyed and communications cut, he refused to retreat. On May 16, 1940, he was shot multiple times while personally directing a rearguard action. His last message to his commanders ordered them to fight to the last man. He was 48 years old. When his body was recovered, the Japanese military — recognizing him as a worthy enemy — wrapped it with full military honors before the Chinese retrieved it. Chiang Kai-shek wept publicly at his state funeral. He remains, to this day, one of China's most revered national heroes.

"China is not the China of the old days. The spirit of resistance of the Chinese people has been awakened."

Soong Mei-ling was born on March 5, 1898, in Shanghai, the youngest of three remarkable Soong sisters whose lives intersected with the fate of modern China. Educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she was American in speech, manner, and cultural reference in a way that no other figure in the Nationalist leadership could match. When she married Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, she became far more than a political wife — she became China's most effective voice to the English-speaking world. Madame Chiang's role in the Second Sino-Japanese War was without precedent in the history of wartime diplomacy. She served as Chiang's primary interpreter and foreign policy advisor, organized the Chinese Air Force, supervised relief organizations, and most importantly conducted a sophisticated and brilliantly effective campaign to win American public and political sympathy for China's cause. She understood American politics, American media, and American Christian opinion — the last because she herself was a devout Methodist — with an intimacy no Chinese official could match. Her 1943 tour of the United States was a diplomatic triumph of the first order. She addressed a joint session of Congress on February 18, 1943 — only the second woman ever to do so — and received a standing ovation that reduced hardened politicians to tears. Her speech combined appeals to Christian values, democratic solidarity, and Wilsonian internationalism with elegant English rhetoric and elegant personal presentation: small, beautiful, dressed in Chinese silk, she was a figure of extraordinary charismatic power. She toured American cities to packed arenas, met with Roosevelt repeatedly, and generated enormous public pressure for increased American aid to China. Madame Chiang outlived her husband, her China, and virtually everyone she had known. After the Communist victory in 1949, she retreated first to Taiwan and then to the United States. She lived in her family's estate in Lattingtown, New York, lobbying in the corridors of American power for decades, convinced the Nationalists would reclaim the mainland. She died on October 23, 2003, in New York City at the age of 105 — having outlived the century in which she made history.

"It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general."

Hideki Tojo was born on December 30, 1884, in Tokyo, the son of a general. He became the dominant military-political figure of wartime Japan and the face of Japanese militarism at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal — a man who directed the expansion of the war across Asia and the Pacific, and who was hanged for it in 1948. Tojo graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1905 and spent three decades rising through the army hierarchy. He served in various staff and command positions, developing a reputation as an efficient, hard-working, humorless administrator and a fierce proponent of military expansion. By the late 1930s he was a major figure in the 'Imperial Way' faction of the Japanese military that advocated aggressive expansion in Asia. As Vice-Minister and then Minister of War, he was a key advocate for Japanese expansion into China and, later, for the attack on the United States. Tojo became Prime Minister in October 1941, at the very moment Japan was completing its planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Prime Minister and simultaneously serving as Army Minister and later as Chief of the Army General Staff, he concentrated more power in his person than any Japanese leader since the Meiji era, earning comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini. He directed Japan's war across the Pacific and in China, the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, and across Southeast Asia — initially with stunning success, then with grinding attrition as American industrial power began to tell. The fall of Saipan in July 1944 — which brought American bombers within range of the Japanese home islands — was the political crisis that ended Tojo's government. He resigned in disgrace and was replaced by a succession of Prime Ministers who moved toward the war's end. When Japan surrendered, Tojo attempted suicide with a pistol but survived. He was arrested by American military police, tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against peace, and hanged at Sugamo Prison on December 23, 1948 — the same day as General Matsui.

"We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable."

Hirohito was born on April 29, 1901, in Tokyo, and became Emperor of Japan in 1926 upon the death of his father. His role in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the broader Pacific War remains one of the most contested historical questions of the 20th century: was he an all-powerful divine emperor who directed Japanese aggression, a constitutional monarch who was controlled by his militarist generals, or something in between? Hirohito came to the throne under the title Showa — 'Radiant Japan' or 'Enlightened Harmony' — at a moment when Japan's military was increasingly asserting independent authority over foreign and domestic policy. The Manchurian Incident of 1931, in which the Kwantung Army seized Manchuria without the Emperor's prior knowledge, established the dangerous precedent of military actions presenting the imperial court with faits accomplis. Hirohito reportedly opposed the coup attempt of 1936 firmly, and his role in the decision to go to war in 1941 is genuinely debated — recent scholarship based on his wartime diaries and the records of imperial conferences suggests he was more actively engaged in decision-making than the passive figurehead his post-war defenders claimed. What is clear is that his name and divine authority were used to sanctify Japanese aggression. Imperial rescripts justified the war in China as liberating Asia from Western imperialism. Soldiers fought and died in his name. Kamikaze pilots dedicated their lives to him. The imperial seal appeared on orders that led to atrocities from Nanjing to the Philippines to Burma. America's decision — primarily MacArthur's — to preserve Hirohito as Emperor after Japan's defeat was the central political decision of the occupation. The argument was pragmatic: Hirohito's voice had ended the war, and his cooperation would be essential to the occupation's success. He issued a declaration in January 1946 renouncing his divine status. He never apologized for Japanese wartime conduct in terms that fully satisfied Japan's neighbors. He died on January 7, 1989, having reigned for 62 years — the longest-reigning Japanese emperor in history.