World War IIEssay Preview: World War IIReport this essayGrowing domestic opposition to the Nationalist governments policy of self-strengthening before counterattacking in N China and Manchuria led to the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped at Xian in Dec., 1936, by Chang HsÑŒeh-liang . Chiang was forced to agree to a united anti-Japanese front with the Communists as a condition for his release. The situation was tense, and in 1937 full war commenced. A clash (July, 1937) between soldiers of the Japanese garrison at Beijing and Chinese forces at the Marco Polo Bridge was the pretext for Japanese occupation at Beijing and Tianjin. Chiang Kai-shek refused to negotiate an end to hostilities on Japanese terms and placed crack troops outside the Japanese settlement at Shanghai. After a protracted struggle Shanghai and the national capital, Nanjing, fell to the Japanese. The Chinese broke the Huang He dikes (June, 1938) to slow the enemy advance. In late 1938, Hankou and Guangzhou were taken.
Japanese strategy was aimed at taking the cities, the roads, and the railroads, thereby gaining a net of control. Thus, although the Japanese by 1940 had swept over the eastern coastal area, guerrilla fighting still went on in the conquered regions. The Nationalist government, driven back to a temporary capital at Chongqing, struggled on with little help from outside. Chinese resources were inadequate, and the supplies sent over the Burma Road were far from sufficient. The Chinese cause continued to decline despite vast resistance and bloody fighting. Dubious of Chinas ability to sustain a protracted war, Wang Ching-wei broke with Chiang Kai-shek and established a collaborationist regime at Nanjing (1940).
The Maoist state continued to develop at a massive and alarming rate. The Chinese Communist Party sought to consolidate its political control to its own advantage, and in December 1941 the military advanced into the southern province of Gansu, forming the “Taoist China.” In a move coordinated against the British at the start of the war, this new government was led by a senior officer in the Nationalist regime led by Zhang Yi-kang. Although the army under Zhang’s leadership made progress against the invaders and took control of Gansu at about the same time as the Maoist regime, it still lacked the support of the general population. Within months the general population had been starved of food, and as much as half the provinces were destroyed.
In a remarkable way, the collapse of the Red Army, which had crushed the remnants of the Tsar’s and Imperialist armies during the last few decades, made life so much more difficult for the British in Beijing as a whole. While the United States faced huge, mass population growth at home, China became a state-controlled economy in its own right. Over time, the Chinese Communist Party and China itself became increasingly interested in a wider spread of development, and their ability to sustain continued military operations in the North China Basin grew dramatically. During the early 1930s it was obvious that the communist movement was not well prepared to continue expanding as a country in any great way. During the 1930s, the military made major efforts to consolidate its power and consolidate its strategic position, and during the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the military developed a more systematic, and aggressive, strategy of expanding and growing its military reach. The PLA’s strength greatly exceeded that of the United States. Even in the 1940s, the PLA government’s ability to organize and implement successful operations and counter-strategies was significantly reduced because of this weakness. In May 1942, during the opening of the Nanjing military air base, Mao Zedong said that it was crucial to conduct strikes in the “Great Fire Wall”—The Great Wall-with the Great Spirit of China—at night for the sake of securing victory and securing territorial gains. The military’s leadership could not only make its forces extremely mobile, it also possessed a huge and persistent army, particularly in the north, who could not be completely eradicated from its position of authority. This military force would undoubtedly be under enormous pressure on the entire North China Basin, and on all the rest of China’s regions, from the provinces along the way to the northern provinces, but the PLA leadership never showed the slightest signs of realizing the importance of this strategic and military initiative. Although the PLA could not defeat the Allied invasion and even then it could hardly achieve its goals because of the lack of the resources required.
Eventually, the military establishment was compelled to