ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on research on the War of Resistance conducted in the 1980s in China itself. That scholarship resulted from deep dissatisfaction among contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) historians with earlier accounts. According to a recent review by leading PRC historians, these held that ‘the victory in the War of Resistance depended entirely on the CCP and the correct leadership of our Great Leader Mao Zedong, and was completely the result of the bitter protracted War of Resistance carried out by the people and the armies in the rear of the enemy’. 1 Earlier histories were wholly negative about the Nationalists:
Because it was compelled to wage a war of resistance, in the beginning the KMT implemented a strategy that depended entirely on the government and the army [instead of the people], so that a great deal of national territory was lost. When the period of stalemate began [after the Battle of Wuhan in October 1938], the KMT pursued the War of Resistance only passively while actively opposing the CCP. At the eve of victory, the Chiang Kaishek Clique prepared to steal the fruits of victory to imprison China in the dark society of semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism. 2
