Did Mao Zedong and Chinese communists collude with the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese War?

Upvote:0

Just by looking at the sequence of events you can ballpark whether the CPC was anti-Japan or was playing a part in the Romance of Three Kingdoms.

January 28 - March 02, 1932. Shanghai incident. KMT vs. Japan. Result: cease fire; KMT suffered 13,000 casualties including 4000 KIA.

March 22 - May 08, 1932. Su Jia Port battle. CPC vs. KMT. Result: Complete CPC vicotory. KMT lost 30,000 men, including 15,000 captured. CPC lost 500 men, captured 2000 rifles. Zhang Guotao, the CPC head, recounted this battle in his memoir, saying that Mao's guerrillas tactics were unfit because the KMT was playing defence and was hiding behind forts, and CPC commanders used siege tactics to lure and ambush KMT's reinforcements.

Needless to say, KMT's battle against Japan inspired neither admiration nor sympathy on the CPC side; the wounded beast was mauled again by its own kind.

Upvote:3

You may be overlooking the role of a "fourth" group of people: Chinese collaborators with the Japanese such as Wang Jing Wei.

Basically, the Japanese found many willing collaborators in former KMT-held territory, and none in Communist held territory. The Nationalist territory also held what was left of China's industrial capacity. Finally, when Japan decided on a "going south" strategy (against former European possessions in modern Vietnam, Myanmar, etc. instead of "north against Russian Siberia), nationalist territories offered a better link to the new Japanese conquests.

For all these reasons, Japan found Nationalist territories more lucrative than Communist territories. After 1941, Japan concentrated its efforts south, against Nationalist territories. The Communists were more than happy to acquiesce in this strategy; their doctrines called for seizing the more rural areas of the country (held by Nationalists), before the more urban areas (held by the Japanese). This led to an "implicit collusion" between the Japanese and the Communists.

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