A tentative partnership: The United States and China contemplate the postwar disposition of Japan and the Japanese Empire, 1942-1945

During the Pacific War, an American-Chinese cooperation occurred in blueprinting a new Asian security system to override the Japanese Empire. The formulating of this system involved policy preparations for postwar control over Japan proper and for the re-arrangement of Japanese imperial possessions, namely, Korea, Manchuria, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and the Japanese Mandated Islands. These intricate undertakings unfolded in three dimensions. At the national level, the preparatory operations proceeded within a complex of various, often uncooperative, planning agencies, which, in China, included a Research Committee of the Supreme National Defense Council, the Waichiaopu and Chiang Kai-shek's personal aides, and, in the United States, the State Department, the military planning apparatuses and the White House staff. This situation tended to compromise consistency and uniform presentation of official policies. Then, to the wartime Sino-American association, the planning for postwar disposition of the Japanese Empire at once opened a field for cooperation and engendered a cause for discrepancies. Basically, the Kuomintang regime was disposed to defer to Washington's intentions, but the two countries' respective cultural, historical and physical linkages to East Asia and their disparate economic, political and military conditions tended to generate incompatible postwar schemes. Furthermore, the American and Chinese planners could not consider incapacitating the Japanese enemy without simultaneously envisaging the postwar relationship among the Allied powers in East Asia. On this score, the ongoing Kuomintang-Communist conflict in China and the ascending Soviet power in Northeast Asia pointed to uncertainty, creating difficulties for the long-range American and Chinese strategic planning to identify a probable postwar adversary. From the Roosevelt-Chiang consultation at Cairo in 1943 to the Soong-Stalin negotiations in Moscow on the verge of victory, Chungking and Washington displayed a shift of attention from subduing the current enemy to contending with new postwar rivals, i.e., the Chinese Communists and the USSR. The study draws on extensive source materials of both the English and the Chinese languages, including unpublished archival materials of the United States, private manuscript collections of relevant American and Chinese wartime officials, and published official records of the two governments.