As students of Sino-Japanese history know, Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka flew to Beijing in September 1972 to normalise diplomatic relations with China, and met premier Zhou Enlai and Mao. Before beginning a discussion of sensitive political issues, including the disputed islands called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, Tanaka started to apologise for Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s.
Surprisingly, Mao told him there was no need to apologise. Japan, Mao said, had done the Communist Party a great favour.
“We must express our gratitude to Japan,” Mao said. “If Japan didn’t invade China, we could have never achieved the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. We could have never developed and eventually taken political power for ourselves. It is due to Japan’s help that we are able to meet here in Beijing.”
In other words, had it not been for Japan’s aggression, the communists would have been wiped out by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army. By forcing Chiang to focus on resisting Japan rather than eradicating the communists, the invasion gave Mao’s forces years to regroup and expand their territorial control.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese war, Chiang’s exhausted troops then had to resume the civil war with the communists, who vanquished them in three years, forcing them to retreat to Taiwan while, on the mainland, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.
Mao’s analysis has been confirmed by one of the foremost historians today, Steve Tsang, director of SOAS China Institute, who wrote in 2015 that Chiang’s decision to confront Japanese aggression “dramatically changed the fortune of the exhausted and heavily depleted CCP (Chinese Communist Party) struggling to survive in the poor northwest of China”. It was a “turning point” for the communist forces.
Tsang said: “Whether the CCP could otherwise have survived Chiang’s ‘final push’ in his extermination campaign cannot be known.” But Mao evidently believed that the communists would have lost and, as he put it, would not have been in power in 1972.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinio...pan-did-communist-party-great-favour-invading
Surprisingly, Mao told him there was no need to apologise. Japan, Mao said, had done the Communist Party a great favour.
“We must express our gratitude to Japan,” Mao said. “If Japan didn’t invade China, we could have never achieved the cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. We could have never developed and eventually taken political power for ourselves. It is due to Japan’s help that we are able to meet here in Beijing.”
In other words, had it not been for Japan’s aggression, the communists would have been wiped out by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army. By forcing Chiang to focus on resisting Japan rather than eradicating the communists, the invasion gave Mao’s forces years to regroup and expand their territorial control.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese war, Chiang’s exhausted troops then had to resume the civil war with the communists, who vanquished them in three years, forcing them to retreat to Taiwan while, on the mainland, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.
Mao’s analysis has been confirmed by one of the foremost historians today, Steve Tsang, director of SOAS China Institute, who wrote in 2015 that Chiang’s decision to confront Japanese aggression “dramatically changed the fortune of the exhausted and heavily depleted CCP (Chinese Communist Party) struggling to survive in the poor northwest of China”. It was a “turning point” for the communist forces.
Tsang said: “Whether the CCP could otherwise have survived Chiang’s ‘final push’ in his extermination campaign cannot be known.” But Mao evidently believed that the communists would have lost and, as he put it, would not have been in power in 1972.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinio...pan-did-communist-party-great-favour-invading
