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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 14, 6 April 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
After nearly three years of costly and exhausting warfare and a dozen false starts, the Japanese imperialists have finally set up a puppet government to “rule” the territory they have conquered in China.
Shaded in on a map, this territory appears to comprise about one-quarter of China – all the main industrial centers, all the railroads, virtually the entire coastline, the principal fertile valleys – with a population estimated at about 185,000,000.
Actually, the reality is much less impressive. The power of the puppet government is measured by the thin line of Japanese guns and bayonets guarding the long lines of communication that thread the conquered territory. Within those lines that power has not yet been able to assert itself unchallenged. Beyond those lines the main Chinese armies, still strong and intact, continue to resist the Japanese conquest.
The puppet government emerges from a situation of military stalemate. The Japanese army command has, indeed, already announced that it intends to advance no further. But even its attempts to broaden the foothold it won with great difficulty around Canton and Nanning in the Southwest have proved fruitless. Again and again, sizeable expeditionary forces have been forced to return ignominiously to their bases at Nanning, Swatow, and Amoy, after finding the interior impenetrable.
What the Japanese militarists really hope for out of the new Nanking regime is a bridge to peace with Chiang Kai-shek. They have abandoned all their loudly-proclaimed intentions to wipe out every vestige of the Kuomintang. Instead, the puppet government is launched with all the Kuomintang trappings. It takes the same name as the Kuomintang government, the same general form, the same flag, the same titles and labels. Wang Ching-wei, puppet-in-chief, assumes the title of “acting president,” pending the “return” of the official president, Lin Sen, from Chungking.
This amounts to a Japanese admission of defeat. The Japanese now want the cheapest and quickest way out of the quagmire. The European war is already casting its shadow into the Pacific and the Japanese realize that they have to preserve their military strength for the greater tests that lie ahead. They can’t throw their weight around in wartime diplomatic and military-political maneuvers so long as they remain bogged down in China.
Through their puppet government they hope, therefore, to re-establish some kind of “peace” in China through a deal with Chiang Kai-shek or some of his Kuomintang associates at Chungking. Secondly, they hope to use it as a diplomatic lever in their relations with France, Britain, and the United States, especially in the intricate bargaining that is going on to determine Japan’s precise position in the war, its position toward Germany, and its position toward the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, to head their miserable little puppet government, the Japanese imperialists have accepted the services of the one-time leading “leftist” of the Kuomintang, Wang Ching-wei.
There is a rich subject here for the student of political personality. Wang is a man who in his time has professed to accept the most radical of political programs and who for a period of years was regarded as the chief spokesman of the radical petty bourgeoisie of the country. He was swept along on the crest of the great mass movement of workers and peasants which almost succeeded in bringing about the revolutionary transformation of China fifteen years ago. In 1927 he became the “most reliable ally” of Joseph Stalin.
When Chiang Kai-shek, then another of Stalin’s revolutionary luminaries, turned on the mass movement and crushed it, Wang, after a brief period of clinging to lesser generals, finally crawled like the proverbial whipped cur into Chiang’s camp. Side by side with Chiang from 1932 to 1937 – with a few brief intervals of exile decreed by his master – Wang took part in the brutal regime of terror and repression and bloodsucking which ruled as the Kuomintang government at Nanking.
When Chiang and some of the other generals finally took up arms to resist the Japanese invaders who threatened their own power, Wang deserted again and crawled this time ... to the Japanese, for his final and crowning act of capitulation.
As a political force, Wang has long since been spent. He, lived off the capital of his 1927 radicalism until his entry in Chiang Kai-shek’s camp lost him the little genuine prestige he had left, even among his petty bourgeois associates. Even his new masters, the Japanese, hold him in supreme contempt. When and if they make their deal with Chiang Kai-shek, Wang will complete the final cycle of his career by being kicked away again. By that time there will be no causes left for him to betray.
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