A Study On Chiang Kai-shek And Several Issues Of The Anti-Japanese War

China’s Anti-Japanese War is a whole-national war comprised of each individual’s history,and each participant played an equally important role in it.Chiang Kai-shek was a member of the Anti-Japanese War camp,so the research on his personal experience has universal significance.Meanwhile,because Chiang occupied an important position in the Kuomintang and the Nationalist Government,the study on his thoughts,words and deeds during the Anti-Japanese War also has particular significance.In view of both the availability of historical data and the accumulation of related studies,the historian circle now really has to review and rethink about the research on"Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese War".However,this is an important subject that involves many orientations of modern Chinese history,which is definitely impossible to be accomplished by a single scholar and an individual study.Therefore,this dissertation selects the following several issues to investigate:why Chiang Kai-shek resisted Japan,when he began the preparation and how he prepared,how he prepared to fight against Japan and decided to start the war,what military and political tactics he adopted at the early stage of the all-out war,and what diplomatic strategy he applied to resist Japan.Sun Yat-sen was keenly aware that Japan had the ambition of dominating the East Asia,so he had designed for the Kuomintang the revolutionary strategy of"Recovering Korea and Taiwan,Consolidating China".In order to achieve the primary goal of reunifying China,Chiang Kai-shek vigorously pursued support for Japan,and advocated cooperation and friendship between China with Japan.But it fundamentally conflicted with the invasive policies of Japan’s foreign expansion,which was demonstrated by the Jinan Incident.From the two aspects of excecuting Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary strategy and current situations,Chiang Kai-shek had to resist the Japanese.After the occurrence of the Jinan Incident,Chiang Kai-shek started the preparation of resisting the Japanese.The successive outbreaks of The Mukden Incident and the incident of January 28 forced Chiang and his staff to adjust the domestic and foreign policy and take the resistance of the Japanese as the first priority.However,Chiang failed to draw a fundamental resisting-Japan policy in a short period of time,and put his main attention on the internal stability.In the summer of 1935,when he found the base area for protracted resistance against the Japanese,Chiang decided the basic plan of the Anti-Japanese War,and then started to promote the wartime preparation of fighting against the Japanese.After the outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,Chiang Kai-shek took the opportunity to promote the construction of national defense in North China,and urged all parties to accelerate the implementation through battle orders.Due to the intense domestic anti-Japanese sentiment,Chiang could no longer compromise with Japan and accept Japan’s unreasonable demands.But Chiang was not ready for the war,so he applied a risky trick of "achieving peace by war",which aimed at affecting Japanese’ psychology.However,the influence of Japanese militarists prevailed,and there was no hope for peace.The Japanese troops captured Peiping and Tientsin quickly.Chiang Kai-shek had no choice but to fight back.The Chahar and Songhu Campaigns took place soon thereafter.Without ample preparation,Chiang Kai-shek opened the Shanghai battlefield hastily.As a result,the goal of eliminating Japanese armies quickly in Shanghai failed,and the Songhu Campaign tended to expand,which forced Chiang to rethink the whole war situation and strategy.Fighting against Japan for a long time in Shanghai was consistent with the political strategy of arousing international concern and interference.Moreover,because of the failure of North China battlefield,Chiang had no choice other than"inducing the enemy to the South",that is to induce the Japanese armies to put the main battlefield in Shanghai.Therefore,Chiang tried to maintain the Shanghai situation,and was slow to make the determination of giving up the Shanghai battlefield,which resulted in the precipitate retreat of the Chinese armies in the end.It greatly influenced the subsequent development of the war until the Wuhan Campaign ended.In the contest with Japan,in addition to military preparations and resistance,Chiang Kai-shek competed fiercely with Japan in diplomatic field,which can be called "an invisible battlefield".Chiang’s diplomatic tactics were to resort to international justice,take the side of the anti-aggression and international justice invariably,endeavor to involve Britain,the United States,the Soviet Union and other countries into the Sino-Japanese dispute.But before the outbreak of the Pacific War,Chiang achieved little.After the outbreak of the Pacific War,though Britain and the United States formed an alliance with China,the intrinsic nationalism and "inferiority complex" of Chiang’s personality was always in tension with the colonialism,hegemonic discourses and "superiority complex" of the British and Americans.As a consequence,the Sino-British relationship hardly improved,and the effect of the Sino-American cooperation greatly discounted,which enormously affected on the cooperative fighting against Japan.Exploring the issues above,this dissertation aims to elucidate the historical logic of Chiang’s resistance against Japan,and shed some lights on the subject of "Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese War" and even the whole history of Anti-Japanese War.