At one point, Chang wrote in his diary that he had seen the British ambassador of the time, looking very humble after Pearl Harbor, and he said, they are looking very humble today, I would not have believed this at this proud Anglo-Saxon race. That was Rana Mitter, author of a new book on the history of China in the Second World War. When Mary Antoinette was giving birth, the room was so crowded, she could hardly breathe that people had to back off because it was such a great honour to be there as a culture. And that was Kate Williams, who has been talking to us about Royal Byrthe's in centuries past.
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Rana Mitter is a historian at the University of Oxford and a presenter on Radio 3's Nightwaves. He specialises in the history of China and has devoted his latest book to China's role in the Second World War. Although its story is rarely told in the West, China actually spent twice as long fighting Japan as either Britain or the United States and lost around 15 million lives in the process.
Rana seeks to explore the history of this forgotten ally in an article for our July issue and he joined me down the line from Oxford a couple of weeks ago to expand on the story. I began by asking him how China and Japan had come to blows in the first place.
China and Japan had been in conflict for many decades before war broke out in 1937. It wasn't a simple relationship. Many young Chinese went to Japan to study. They regarded it as the most prosperous and in some ways the most inspiring nation of East Asia. But Japan had also become much more militarist, particularly during the Great Depression of the late 1920s. Japan took a strong turn towards an imperialistic and in some ways very expansionist few of the world. It felt it had a destiny on the Asian mainland and that China was the target of that destiny.
At the same time, Chinese nationalism was rising in the early 20th century. Young people in particular, but many others, felt that China had been given a bad deal, particularly after the opium wars of the mid-19th century. That China essentially had been invaded over and over again by the British, by the French, by the Japanese, by the Americans. That it was time for the country to create a new and more positive vision of itself.
So these two visions of Asia, one that was based in Chinese nationalism, and one that was based in Japanese imperialism, were growing and coming into almost inevitable conflict by the 1930s. That meant that in the summer of 1937, the two forces finally came into conflict. The nationalist leader of China, Shanghai Shaik, saw that there were troop movements in northern China, where there were Japanese garrisons stationed there. And he took this decision. Is this going to be the scenario for the next few years and decades to come that every time the Japanese invade further into China, a little bit here, a little bit there, we don't have to say yes, or are we finally going to have to make a stand? He decided to make a stand. Japan went to war, but the consequences will be devastating for both countries for the next 80 years.
But am I right to say that Japan had already been making incursions into China for quite a few years already by 1937? Japan had been making huge incursions into China during the decades before 1937. As early as 1895, Japan gained its first colony in China. And that was the island of Taiwan, which it won at the end of the first war between China and Japan. That was just a shorter skirmish. It was about a year or so. And the end result was that the balance of power shifted in Asia. Four millennia China had been the big brother, the senior member of the Asian Brotherhood in the Asia Pacific region.
But because it had improved its technology, it had developed its weaponry, developed its economy. Japan, the little brother, fought against China in a clash between them in 1894, 1895, and it won. And it was about its first colony, the island of Taiwan.
Then over the next few years and decades, the Japanese managed to use their newfound strength to take more and more territory, parts of the northeast of China, known as Manchuria, in the war against Russia in 1904 to 5. At the Treaty of Versailles, which we mostly think of as a European issue, in fact, Japan was granted some of the former German colonies on the Chinese mainland, sparking a huge upsearch in Chinese nationalism that became known as the May 4th movement because of the student demonstration on the 4th of May 1919 that protested the Japanese incursion.
But the really big sign that something was brewing in Asia, that there would not be peace between China and Japan, was in 1931. Specifically, on the 18th of September, when really in a coup in a very unexpected move, middle-level Japanese army officers who had been stationed in the Japanese occupied parts of Manchuria, up in the northeast of China, suddenly made a move, a lightning strike, in which within just a few days and weeks they had occupied the whole of the northeast of China, the whole of Manchuria.
This is a territory that's the size of France and Germany combined. It has a lot of mineral resources, coal. It's an immensely valuable and economically significant part of China, and within just a few days and weeks it was under Japanese control. Technically, they said it was not a colony. They claimed that the local Chinese had begged out, to the called out to the Japanese, begging them to set up an independent state there because they couldn't stand the appalling rule of the Chinese government anymore. And they called it Manchukuo, a term meaning country of the Manchus. But nobody was really fooled. This was a state under Japanese rule.
They also became essentially a sort of dagger pointing at the heart of mainland China. Once the Japanese had stationed troops ultimately over 100,000 of them in the northeast of China, it was probably only a matter of time before hawkish and more militarist figures in Tokyo decided that it was time to go into the mainland as well. And so in 1937, when the two countries did properly come to blows, how prepared was China for a war of this nature?
China did not want a war with Japan in 1937. The very best scenario would have been at least 10 and probably more years before they went to war. In other words, they were underprepared. Since the 1920s, China had been undergoing a rapid but very flawed modernization under its nationalist government. The leader was a man named Changkai Shek. A name who brings vague bells these days, but is no longer as famous as he was in the early 20th century. But he had basically fought his way to power in China and set up a capital at Nanjing in 1928.
All the way he had managed to commit an act of gross betrayal against his former communist allies. He had been working with the Chinese Communist still a very young fledgling party. And then he had brutally turned on them in 1927, massacring them first in Shanghai and then in the southern city of Guangzhou or Canton. So Changkai Shek had come to power in 1927 and 28, but he had done so with his hands dipped in the blood of his former allies, you might say.
I said that for the next nine or ten years until about 1937, China developed in a whole variety of ways. The amount of roads doubled from around 20,000 to around 40,000 miles of proper metal roads, railways increased again, or less double in number from about 10,000 to 20,000 miles. But one of the most significant developments was the army.
The Chinese army had up to that stage not really been modern and well-trained in the way that Western armies had been. The Japanese army was far superior to being very much reworked along the German model from the late 19th century, which is why they had managed to make so many spectacular conquests on the Chinese mainland even by that stage. So what are Chang's chief methods, chief aims, was to improve the quality of the Chinese army. And he turned to the country that was still most respected for its land army in Europe.
And that was Germany. Now, this might seem a surprise because of course Germany had been defeated in World War I by this stage. But the Chinese military leaders had many of them seen the way in which the Japanese had drawn on German experience to train the army across the sea. And they thought that maybe some of the same techniques would be good for China. So various advisors, including men named Hans von Siegte and Alexander von Falkenhhausen German generals and senior officers, came to China and put the elite, the most crack troops of Chang Kai-shek's army through a training program.
The problem was that by 1937 there weren't nearly enough of these troops, these modern troops trained to fight against the Japanese, maybe some 30,000 or so, which in an all-out war wasn't going to be nearly enough. And while the total manpower that China had at its disposal, technically speaking in 1937 was some 2 to 4 million people depending on how you counted the various armies, most of them were very ill-equipped in terms of modern technology. The soldiers were often recruited straight from the countryside and given only very basic training. And in terms of weaponry, technology, equipment, the Chinese army was woefully behind the Japanese one when war broke out in 1937.
So how did this war between Japan and China then become embroiled within the Second World War? The war between China and Japan started as a regional war. It started as a war between China and Japan only. And for a long time the world would rest the world so it was separate for everything else that was going on. But it was clear by 1939 of course that war was breaking out across the Eurasian landmass. You then of course get the Declaration of War against Germany by Britain and France.
So you have two wars happening in Eurasia at the same time, one on the far eastern end in China and one at the far western end in Western Europe. What of course was the key factor that was missing from both of these to make them global was the Americans. Both Winston Churchill in Britain after 1940 and Shanghai Shek in China from 1937 knew that the one key that could really turn in the lock of victory was to bring the Americans to bring a powerful, technologically enabled ally into the war. We often think in Britain about the way in which Winston Churchill talked about the importance of never surrendering and of holding out until the Americans could actually come in. We often forget that China was making exactly the same calculations.
Chang Kai Shek, the Chinese leader, could have surrendered to the Japanese as early as 1938 when the situation looked really bad. He refused to do so. He insisted on continued resistance until the Americans could be brought in. And as we know it's a well-known story. The increasing desperation of Japanese imperialism in the Asia Pacific made the make bolder and bolder moves by 1940-41. They insisted on more territorial conquests so as to secure the oil, the rubber, the other metal and mineral resources that existed in East Asia.
As a result, the Roosevelt administration in the United States became increasingly concerned. And finally, the Americans and the Japanese came to a showdown in December 1941. The realization that there will be war between the two of them and Pearl Harbor on the 8th of December 1941. And that was the moment that finally made the war global. The Asian side, including China, the European side and the Americans all in one war together. So from this point onwards, you had China, America and to some extent Britain all fighting against Japan.
Did they become close allies to these countries? Since then the British Empire, China and the United States formally became allies against the Empire of Japan in early 1941. We'll note of course the Soviet Union remained neutral against Japan and in fact would remain so all the way until the very last week of the war in August 1945. But nonetheless, the alliance did not mean that the three Allied powers, China, the US, the British Empire were operating in smooth friendship and alliance. It was a very bumpy and a time-saving toxic alliance.
And the example that shows us really clearly is the disastrous campaign in Burma in spring 1942 from February to about May June. This was supposed to be a thrust to send the Japanese back. They had become very bold. They had invaded large parts of southern Burma. And a quarrel quickly broke out between the Allies as to whether it was a good idea or not to try and take Burma back. The British and the Chinese were more cautious. But the two sides also didn't wish to cooperate with each other very strongly.
The British commander, General Wavell, was unenthusiastic about Chinese assistance. And Shanghai Shag thought that it would be a good idea if the Chinese preserved their strength. They were already very weak by 1941 and launching out in 1942 into Burma would have been perhaps a step too far. The American commander-in-chief, General Stillwell, General Joseph Stillwell, was known as Viniga Joe and not without reason.
He was a pretty a-sur-big, pretty tussly phrased sort of character. And he had been placed even as an American as the chief of staff of the Chinese armies and argued that even though there were no American troops on the ground in Burma, the Chinese troops should be used as part of an assault to try and get southern Burma back. A kind of bold attack that would eventually push the Japanese back to where they had come from.
The attack was a disaster. Stillwell's Chinese troops were quickly surrounded. His tactic of trying to strike against the Japanese proved disastrous. The ill judged. And in fact, many of the troops never made it out of the Burma jungle alive. Some of those who did actually made it to India rather than to China. And the scene was set up for a continuing distrust and even contempt mutually between the Chinese, the American and the British sides in what became known as the China Burma India Theatre.
So it wasn't alliance, but it was one where the allies didn't really trust each other and China always seemed to come off last.
这并不是联盟,而是在这种联盟中盟友彼此并不完全信任,而且中国总是似乎处于劣势。
What kind of relationship did the leaders of these countries develop with each other? The leaders of the wartime alliance were all really larger than life characters in one where another president Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chang Kai-shek of China was stolen in the background as a neutral, but very much there in terms of calculations. And the relationship between them was extremely wary.
Chang Kai-shek kept a very extensive diary, which has now been made available to researchers in the Hoover Institution in America. And it's absolutely fascinating to see the way in which he characterizes the various leaders.
We tend to think, and I think understandably and rightly, that the British and the Americans were fighting in the cause of freedom against the Axis. And therefore, the slogans and the phrases that we tend to associate with them are very, very much heroic ones.
This isn't the way that it seemed to Chang Kai-shek and he characterised them in often very negative terms. So Winston Churchill, he regarded as being basically the last of the imperialists, someone who despised the Chinese just as he despised the Indians and refused to allow them to be treated as full and equal partners. And the relationship between the Chinese and the British for that reason was pretty toxic during the war.
At one point, Chang wrote in his diary that he had seen the British ambassador of the time looking very humble after Pearl Harbor. And he said, they are looking very humble today. I would not have believed this at this proud Anglo-Saxon race. So there was really a touch of racial tension going on there.
Roosevelt, he was more in favour of partly because Roosevelt was more favourable to the Chinese and also was doing more in financial and other terms for the Chinese resistance. But he still felt that Roosevelt didn't really take China seriously. And at one point, Chang and his diary came up with a marvellous characterisation of the relationship between the four countries, China, the Soviets, the British and the Americans. He said, it's as if some weak person has met a hooligan, a kidnapper and a bully. And that's the relationship that China has with these three other powers.
So that was for his private diary, but it was a pretty frank and pretty negative characterisation of the other allied leaders by Chang.
所以那是他的私人日记,但张的描述其他联盟领导人非常坦率和负面。
What kind of assistance were countries like Britain and the United States providing for China in the war against Japan? The assistance of the Allies, the other allies were providing fraud for China during the war was pretty limited. There were several reasons for this and not all of them were unjustifiable.
The first is that in the last resort, China's greatest value was to stay in the war. There was no realistic prospect that large numbers of Chinese troops were going to take part in the Pacific campaign or were going to thrust out from beyond Chinese territory. The exception was Burma where they fought without great success in 1942 and with a limited amount of success in 1944. But apart from that, China's main business was keeping China afloat. And for that reason, the amount of assistance that was given was limited.
The term lendlies is perhaps the best known one for the kind of American financial and material assistance that was given to the Allies. But it's worth noting that throughout the war, except for the very last year, 1945, less than 1% of the total amount of lendlies given to all of the Allies was given to China. The vast majority of it was given either to the Soviet Union or to the British Empire.
The Burma here tales, which are all true of corruption and blackmarketering and the misuse of foreign resources in wartime China. It has to be remembered that the total proportion of assistance that was given by the Allies to China was very small. The other thing that bear in mind though is that China was pretty much cut off from the rest of the world by 1941 by the time of Pearl Harbor. Because China had made this brave, but in many ways very risky decision to fight alone against China in 1937. Its entire eastern seaboard with the ports were cut off.
After the fall of France in 1940, Vichy France was neutral, but the Japanese invaded French Indochina, preventing the Indochinese ports being used to get to China. The only real supply that remained for the Burma Road was also cut off after Pearl Harbor. So the only real supplies that remained for the Chinese were the very perilous hump journeys, the flights that went from British India over the so-called Burma hump, a very perilous Himalayan route really, into wartime Chongqing, the Chinese capital. And the amount of goods that could be transported on those flights was of course very limited, adding to the scarcity of goods which increased inflation, blackmarketering and corruption. So in terms of supplying China, there was a sort of toxic circle emerging, a sort of vicious circle by the end of the war that meant that China's position became weaker and weaker, even as it continued to resist.
Now, in the article that you've written for the magazine, you talk about the huge losses that China suffered during this war. How was it able to continue fighting for all of eight years while suffering losses in nature? China suffered some of the most tremendous losses of any country during World War II. The numbers were never fully statistically compiled, but the best estimates that we have is that something like 14 to perhaps as many as 20 million Chinese were killed during the war, not as many as the horrific loss of life in the Soviet Union, but still huge. Some 80 or more million Chinese became refugees at some point during the war, and the vast majority of the industrialisation that had been started in China simply went by the board. It disappeared pretty much.
Now these facts, led many people at the time, logically, to ask, can China continue to resist? And many people thought it would fall within a few months and years of the beginning of the war. It didn't do that. It continued to resist to the end, all the way to August 1945, but it did so at a terrible price. On troops, for instance, the first tens of thousands of best-trained, German-trained Chinese troops were killed very early in the war. Most of them were killed in places like the Battle of Shanghai in the autumn of 1937. So to keep recruiting, the Chinese army had to use more and more brutal tactics. At first, they used a lottery system and they used incentives such as families being given food when their soldiers, their sons signed up for the army.
But by the end, they were simply conscripting people, grabbing people out of villages, tying them up literally with ropes, and taking them to camps that were a long way from home so that even if they managed to undo their ropes, they wouldn't simply be able to run back to their home villages. Other things involved terrible decisions such as the lack of food in China to feed the army. This led to grain requisitioning the grabbing of the peasants grain out in the provinces of Hanan, in Central China, in mid 1942, 1943. And this led to a massive famine. Something like four million Chinese were killed starving to death in the famine of 1943, because the food had to be taken for the army, otherwise the armies would have collapsed. But at the same time, no provision was made for the peasants.
So China did survive till the end in 1945, almost miraculously, but the price that it had to pay to do so in terms of the sufferings endured by its own people, visited on it by its own nationalist government, were essentially the building blocks for the communist revolution. By the time the war against Japan ended, the country was ripe for a change of government, and we no longer have trust or confidence in the nationalist government that had, as they saw it, abused the country so strongly to stay in the war. And as a result, the way was clear for Mao Zedong to actually launch the communist revolution, which would take over China just four years later.
And speaking of that, what was the role of the communist within China during the war? It's very important to understand the different roles of the two major forces that resisted Japan during the war, the nationalists under Chen Kayshek and the communist under Mao Zedong.
We sometimes hear history written in two extremes. Some people suggest often in China itself that the communists were the only people who did any fighting. Chen Kayshek and the nationalists did very little, and the communists were in the vanguard of all the fighting. Others more recently have suggested that the communists really did no fighting at all, they were simply waiting for the Japanese to be defeated by the nationalists and the Americans and keeping their forces safe for a civil war, which they would win.
Neither of these positions is quite accurate, I think. Really the nationalists and the communists were carrying out different sorts of warfare. The big set piece battles were almost entirely carried out by Chen Kayshek's nationalists, some four million men under arms at its height. And this included the big set piece battles, places like Changshan, Tyra Dhuang, and Wuhan. On the other hand, the communists who were up in the north of China carried out a great many very important guerrilla campaigns.
They knew that they could not win on their own, but they did a great deal to harass and hassle the Japanese invaders in the north of China in the areas around the railway lines where they had appeared. So I think what it's fair to say is that the vast majority of the battle fighting was not done by the communists. It was done by their nationalist opponents and temporary allies, but the communists also played a significant role in the guerrilla resistance against the Japanese, as well of course as beginning to fomend the social revolution, which would eventually come to rule all of China.
You mentioned there about being temporary allies, so were the communists and the nationalists able to put aside their differences during this period? The communists and the nationalists had essentially been at Dagger's Drawn, or we should say, the stock guns drawn really between 1927 when the two sides fought each other and Chiang Kai-shiek essentially turned on his former communist allies and the outbreak of war in 1937.
But by the mid-1930s, it was very clear to all observers that war with Japan was an extremely strong likelihood. And as a result, secret negotiations, feelers started to go out between the communists and the nationalists at that point. And the sides realized that while they were enemies with each other, it was also very important that they should be united in the fight against Japan, which they could see would be a more immediate battle that was on its way.
And assistance in creating this rather unlikely alliance came from a rather unlikely source. That was Joseph Stalin. Stalin made it very clear that he did not think that the communist, the Chinese communist, should try and fomend a revolution, which would overthrow Chiang Kai-shiek. And his reason for that was very simple. If Chiang Kai-shiek was the only really recognized major Chinese leader at the time fell, then who knew who would replace him? He might well be replaced by one-ging way, one of his deputies, who was much perceived as being much more pro-Japanese and might well bring about some kind of collaboration with Japan.
So in the interests of Stalin, despite the fact that his anti-communism was very much at odds with Chiang Kai-shiek's anti-communist nationalism, for reasons of strategy, he advocated that the communists and the nationalists should form an alliance together. That meant that when one warlord, a man named Zhang Xiaoliang, who was called the Young Marshal, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shiek in December of 1936, thinking that this might force him into an alliance with the communists against the Japanese. There was a great lot of flurry in China, in which Stalin was also at some level involved, trying to make sure that Chiang Kai-shiek was freed, because observers from all sides realized that he was essential. He was the one figurehead who would be necessary if China went to war with Japan and would embody the resistance.
The communists were important, but they weren't nearly as central to that as was Chiang. We were talking earlier about the huge losses that China suffered. How was it that despite achieving many victories, Japan wasn't able to secure victory over China? Japan was a young country in a hurry, by 1941 and Pearl Harbor. It was a country that felt it wanted to expand its empire, as had many other imperial powers, Britain, France, most notably, and yet felt it wasn't getting its historical destiny.
And therefore, when it had launched its war into the Chinese mainland, it did so with this spirit of, in some ways, racially tinged and certainly very triumphalist, imperial intention. But the Japanese had swallowed a bit too much of their own propaganda. They genuinely come to believe much of the racially tinged and highly patronizing language that they had used about the Chinese, claiming that China was weak, that it was a country that was corrupt, whose army wasn't worth much, and whose people would welcome the firm hand of Japanese imperial rule.
When they invaded China, they found this was very much not the case. Although they knew they couldn't win, the Chinese armies continued to resist both communist and nationalist against the Japanese. The wider population also continued in many cases to fight back against the Japanese invaders. And by mid-1938, the Japanese realized that far from a quick conquest of the Chinese mainland, which is what they had expected to have, they were bogged down in the middle of China. They managed to get to the city of Wuhan in central China, but could not thrust in further west to take the wartime capital of Chongqing, which sat in the southwest on top of cliffs, which made it very, very difficult to invade.
So the Japanese found themselves bogged down in what became minus the China quagmire, and it's highly nearly a million Japanese troops were placed in China desperately trying to bring about the surrender of Chang and the destruction of the communists. As a result, the stakes heightened in East Asia as a whole. By 1941, the Japanese decided that they had to essentially expand the conflict to the whole of East and Southeast Asia, together the resources they needed to conquer the whole region. But a large part of this was also based on the idea that they had to put more resources into finally conquering China.
However, they simply couldn't do it. The amount of troops was one thing, but the amount of control that they had over the countryside, that they had over the resources of China, was always very, very limited. Because Chang's nationalists continued to resist, they refused to allow a total surrender to the Japanese. And that meant that large parts of the grain growing parts of China, which fed the country, some of the railways, and a great deal of the, at least some of the financial resources of China remained with the resistance. And that proved an impossible barrier for the Japanese to overcome. They were technologically enabled. They were a strong country, but in the end they had limited resources and were never able to make that final thrust that would defeat the Chinese. They made one last try in 1944 during the massive Operation Ichigou, as it became named, the last big thrust into central China, when over half a million Chinese, sorry, Japanese troops were put into the battle. But even there, though they destroyed many parts of the last Chinese defense in central China, they were not able to make the central, the final conquest of the Chinese territory. Even by the end of the war in 1945, they never managed it.
So how important do you think the Chinese contribution was to the overall Allied victory, particularly in Asia? The final Chinese contribution to the victory, the Allied victory in World War II in Asia, shouldn't be either underestimated or overestimated. It's not the case that China was the central battlefield on which the war was won or lost. In Asia, in the end, that was the Pacific, where the Americans and the British and their allies fought off an island to Ireland, and then finally, of course, through the bombing and threatened invasion of the Japanese, home islands brought the war to an end.
But I think it's fair to say that without the Chinese resistance for eight long years, that task would have been much harder. Let's not forget that China could have surrendered very early on in 1938. Many observers, including British and American diplomats, thought that it might do so. Had it done so, the whole of China would have fallen to Japan very early on. It would have been a massive land base for the Japanese army, a stable, pacified China, which with its mineral resources, its railways, its huge manpower, many of whom might have been put into a Japanese supporting collaborationist army to fight the Allies.
At the same time, it's also important to understand that the Chinese were also a very large part of Asia's population. 600 million people or so lived in China at the time. And for them, victory in war was also important, the idea for many of them of a nationalist victory, of creating a strong nation state for themselves, was an important end goal in and of itself. So, I think it's fair to say that the Chinese contribution was very important for the Allied cause, you have to just do the virtual history and think what would have happened if they had surrendered early.
But we shouldn't forget that the importance of China was not just for the other Allies. It was also for the Chinese themselves. They are today a very large proportion of the world's population. And they judge at least part of their own history of relationships with the Western powers in terms of what was done and what was not done for them and to them during the Second World War. That was actually something I was going to come onto.
How do people in China today view this war? Oddly enough, after more than 70 years, the Second World War is becoming more and not less important in everyday Chinese conversations, whether it's on television, whether it's in books, whether it's even in video games, which of course multiplayer video games have become very, very big in China. And many of the games that are most popular are themed on fighting the Japanese in World War II. So World War II is still very present in the popular culture of China if you know where to look.
But it's not necessarily entirely happy occurrence that this is being remembered because the way in which many young Chinese think about this today is as a war where China was not given sufficient credit for its contribution by the Allies. There is a sense that China has become a forgotten ally, the last of the four powers along with the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, that actually continued to resist, that continued to fight, that didn't just surrender, as of course one has to say, France did. And for that reason, there's often strongly nationalistic feeling in China today, that there hasn't been sufficient acknowledgement of the Chinese contribution, and that just as China today is seeking to play a wider role in the world, so it is that they also played a role in the past.
One has to say it's also being used in a very nationalistic way often in China, in which the history is sometimes distorted. It's not at knowledge for instance that many Chinese, as to be said, collaborated with the Japanese during the wartime, including Wang Jingwei, the former nationalist leader, who went over to the Japanese side. These are stories that are still very difficult to tell in China because they break up this heroic nationalist narrative of the Chinese simply resisting against Japan.
At the same time, there's also a lot of interest in remembering aspects of the war. One of the big hits on Chinese television, a couple of years ago, was a program which found the veterans of the war, who had fought not for the communist armies, but for the nationalist ones.
These men had not been allowed to tell their stories under the rule of Chairman Mao because of course he maintained very strongly the idea that the only people who had really fought effectively in China were the Chinese communists. But finally with the softening of attitudes in the 1990s and 2000s, it became possible for the nationalist veterans of Burma and of China to talk about their experiences and their record. And the television program telling their stories actually became something of a big hit as Chinese people for the first time saw a hidden wartime story that had never before been told.
You mentioned before about how the Chinese feel that their contribution has been overlooked. And I think it probably is true here in the West that we don't think about China as one of the major allies. Why do you think that's the case?
I think we don't tend to think of China as a major ally for two reasons. One is political, very quickly after 1945, China changed from being a tentative but real wartime ally to being the enemy. The communist revolution under Chairman Mao meant that it became this large, closed, sullen Asian giant with which we did very little trade or business. And therefore understanding and getting into its history became harder and it seemed less important in many ways.
By that stage of course Japan was also a Western ally and therefore the relationship between China and Japan in our eyes had rather flipped around and reversed. The other reason though I think is that we have over the last few decades been expanding our understanding of the global nature of World War II thanks to the opening of the archives and also more global perspectives.
For instance, it took really until the 1980s and 90s when Russian archives started opening up for people to realise in the West quite how central the Soviet contribution had been to World War II. In recent years there's been a lot more attention to the empire contribution to British wartime experience. So the knowledge that over a million Indians fought on the empire side in World War II has come much more centrally into the story which used to be of fighting simply alone in the British Isles without the empire coming into the story. And I think China is one of the last pieces of that jigsaw.
Now that the Chinese archives are opening up enabling books like mine to be written and now that Chinese and other Western researchers are working together on this history, this is very much a joint effort I would say between the Chinese side and the Western side. People are beginning to realise the devastating scale of the war in China and also the important contribution of China resisting, staying in the war and ultimately making the Allied task easier of defeating Japan. So I think a combination of politics, changing politics and changing history and historiography have really changed the situation and China is now going to be much more central in our understandings of the total story of World War II.
That was Rana Mita. China's war with Japan, 1937 to 1945, the struggle for survival has just been published by Alan Lane. And as I mentioned, Rana has written an article for our July issue which is out now in organ news agents and in our many digital formats.
It's not long now until the Duchess of Cambridge is due to give birth to the latest Royal baby. Hers and Prince William's child will be third in line to the throne, regardless of its sex, but this hasn't always been the case. And as our section editor Charlotte Hodgman found out when she spoke to historian and royal expert Dr Kate Williams, the British Royal family's quest for a male heir has often been an eventful process.
So when discussing the importance of royal babies, most people will probably think of Henry VIII and his desperate quest for a male heir. But what was Henry's reaction to the birth of his only surviving son, the future Edward VI and 1537, and how did this differ to the birth of Mary and Elizabeth before?
When he finally had a son, the future Edward VI in 1537 Henry was overjoyed. He was really thrilled. This was completely different to the births of Mary and Elizabeth. Mary, all she was to him, was an indication that his wife would one day be able to have a son, of course. It didn't happen. Elizabeth was a complete disappointment who really secured her mother's doom. Edward VI, completely different. It was joy, it was jubilation, not just for the King, not just for his court and for the whole country.
And how did people react then, how did people celebrate? When the Prince was born at two o'clock in the morning on the 12th of October, it was a great celebration for the country. Two thousand gunfires were shot from the tower, bonfires were lit across the country, church bells rang. This was the sun, this was the future King that everyone had been waiting for.
So was there disappointment then at the births of Mary and Elizabeth? Is that what the general feeling was it? There was great disappointment at the births of Mary and Elizabeth, Mary, while they're less so because when she was born, essentially the King and the people thought that she was just going to be a girl and then Catherine of Arrogone would then go on to have lots of sons as was often the case. But because that didn't happen, well that was completely different. But initially, her birth was just an anticlimax, really, not the sun that everyone had hoped for, but still she was a girl, she was proof that her mother could carry a healthy child.
But really, essentially in history, the only point of girls is to prove that the mother can carry a healthy child. Boys are what is wanted, what is important. Girls can be useful as marrying into other families, essentially as securing bloodlines, but they aren't actually what a King wants. They do not secure the succession. Really, when you look at the history of the British monarchy, a lot of it is about the search for a son. Women are just not important. This is completely the case for Henry VIII. What was different about the birth of Elizabeth was that everyone thought that was going to be a son. It was really Anne-Belin's last chance and that was an incredible disappointment. That's a huge disappointment and it did secure her mother's doom and as well, the doom of many of her supporters as well.
The fact she wasn't a boy was absolutely terrible to Henry VIII. Of course, any child is a blessing, but a girl is of a small blessing, particularly for the royals, particularly for women like Anne-Belin, who had staked her future, her hopes, had staked a lot on having a son. How are fertility issues and childless marriages viewed to society then? Nowadays it's a not-and-common choice to be child-free, to choose not to have children and that's fine. That's just not the case in history. In history you have children and often you have as many children as you can to secure your succession if you are royal. So if you are not royal to secure your property, the more children you have, the more people you have to look after you in your old age, the more people you have to bring money in and of course without proper contraception, a lot of people didn't have any choice.
So nowadays our notion of a large family is probably about four children. We find that one of the large amount of children, but when we look back in history, in the cheetah times in the 18th century, in the 19th century we see families of 13, 14, 15 and that's not uncommon. And certainly they're all by the same woman as well. So when you look back in history, people who found themselves childless, very much excluded from society, women, or they had nothing to talk about to other women, and men, simply men believed in their virility. And a man who believed in his virility would feel very humiliated next to a friend, a business associate who had ten sons.
This was exactly the case for Lord Nelson surrounded by his captains who had huge amounts of sons, lots of budding, blossoming daughters, and he had no children. So really a man wants a son and a man wants as many sons as possible. And that for wife is what you need to secure your position, to secure your love, to secure your future. What you need is as many sons as possible. We have to remember also that really up until the late 19th century, a man would never leave any money to his wife, he would leave it to his son and expect the sons to look after their mother. And so if there were no sons, it would be left to a distant male relative, and the woman would have much less security. So a woman was expected to have many sons, a man too. And that was what was, simply was the case.
The idea that you might not have children was just, would just be anathema to the tutors to those in the 17th and 18th century. When you were unhealthy, it meant you were riddled with disease, it meant that essentially you had a problem. And one thing we also have to remember is that infertility was always the woman's fault. It was never the man's fault, it was the woman's fault. So if a woman couldn't have children, it was her own fault. And so it was her responsibility to try and huddle people who might give her cures. And throughout history, cracks, witches, witch doctors have offered cures for infertility, and they have not been for men but for women. And did people often do things to try and get a son as well rather than a daughter? People would take potions and lotions to try and have a son rather than a daughter, but many fertility experts were at least the vaguely honest ones had to say, look, I can guarantee you a child, but I can't guarantee you a sex, but at least that's a start.
So how were robust announced to the nation? When a child was born, the news was announced to the populist by usually by the firing of gunfire, then of bonfires, church bells also rang. And this would usually spread quite quickly across the country. The church bells would be ringing in even the smallest of villages. So people would know rather fast that their royal child had been born. And of course, by the newspaper age, it was also announced in the newspapers. I read that on until 1948, home secretaries were present at the birth of a royal baby, which is something that quite surprised me.
What in why did this tradition begin? Royal births in Britain have always been to an extent public because the court itself was such a public institution. I mean, while the less so been in France, when Mary Antoinette was giving birth, the room was so crowded, she could hardly breathe that people had to back off because it was such a great honor to be there as a culture. But Royal births were always quite public in British culture. Ministers would be outside, but as life became rather more private to the court, they became more of a delineation between public and private. We definitely see that by the Victorian court.
What happened was the dignitaries would go and they would be arranged outside the room and they would be watching. Queen Victoria actually said she didn't want the dignitaries in the room with her because she had to deal with them later. But the tradition was that the ministers had to be there to assent that this was actually the royal child. That there have been no suggestions of exchanges of bedpans that was actually the illegitimate child. What changed this tradition was when Princess Elizabeth was giving birth to the future prince Charles.
Her father George VI realized that if the home secretary was present at birth, actually this would mean that the home secretary of every commonwealth country would have to be at the birth. And that he thought was simply too much, too undignified, too much of a circus and it wouldn't really be the kind of place that he wanted for his daughter to give birth to her first child. So he decided it had to be stopped. And I think by then everyone thought it had been a rather outdated and ridiculous institution anyway.
Certainly when Queen Elizabeth II herself was born in 1926, the home secretary had to leave discussions about the general strike. So really by the 20th century people began to think that the home secretary probably has nothing better to do than be sitting around waiting for a royal birth that might take some days to happen. And who else would have been present at the birth for a royal baby? Initially, Royal birth would rather well attended, there would be much more public affairs.
By the time of Queen Victoria, a royal birth would really only be attended by the obstetrician, by the nurses, by the medical staff and the dignitaries would be usually just outside. And what happened was the royal father was not usually present. He simply was waiting outside or in the case of Prince Philip, he was actually playing squashed while Prince Charles was born. And so when William is apparently going to be at the birth and that's going to be some difference in royal tradition.
Are there any other strange traditions that have surrounded royal birds? Apart from the fact that the home secretary had to be present in the 20th century, the perhaps strangest thing about royal birth was that they simply didn't take place in a hospital or medical setting. They took place at home and that was even if they were a cesarean section as in the case of Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. So Princess Diana was the first person to break tradition to actually go and have a baby in the hospital.
It's quite recently really, isn't it actually for that to happen? Me until the modern royal family, most royals have actually remained in their palaces for medical care and theatres have had to be set up in their palaces. So for example, George the sick had a lot of intense operations near the end of his life and the doctors had to come to him in Buckingham Palace. So there's only more recently than the idea that the royals have to go to hospital like the rest of us to both have their operations and indeed have their babies.
The future Queen Victoria was born in 1890 and there was quite a bit of a consternation about her choice of name at her birth. Why was this and what else has to be considered when choosing the name of a royal baby? Royal babies are usually called vat additional names. It's not a place for innovative names. The same names are used over and over again. When Queen Victoria was born in 1890, she was a little girl who was very far from the throne. Her father, Edward Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of George III and that meant it very unlikely that he would ever ascend.
His older brothers didn't have surviving the Jitter-Mate children, she was the first one and he of course was delighted with her and he became convinced she was going to be Queen and he said she's the strong one, she's the tough one. My brothers are not so strong as I am, he said she'll be Queen. And as a consequence, he wanted a Queen me name for her. He wanted her to be called something like Elizabeth, just like Elizabeth I to show that she was going to be Queen.
But that wasn't what happened. The Prince Regent who was in charge of the Christening because George III was in Capraffa dated through Madness, he said I will decide on the day. And Charles I was Alexander after the Saur, her godfather but she couldn't have that as her given name, it was just too Russian.
They needed something else. On the day of the Christening, the Archbishop was standing there with the baby over the font and still the Prince Regent had not decided on her name. The Archbishop was begging, saying what's it going to be? Finally, the Prince Regent said give her the mother's name after that of the Saur.
And the mother's name was the French name Victor. And so the Anglicisers had to become Victoria, Alexandre and Victoria. Well, well to us that wouldn't seem very controversial at all at Anglicising a French name. At the time, it was a shocking act. It was a ludicrous name, it was completely invented and still worse, it was French.
Considering the British had been at war with the France bitterly until 1815, only four years ago, this was a rather extreme choice. What the Prince Regent's choice was saying was this girl will not come to the throne. She's called this ridiculous name. It really is the equivalent of a, something like I say, the equivalent of Kylie being Anglicised into Princess Kyliea. If rather than being friends and allies with Australia, we had been at bitter war with them for the last bitter years and we were in terror of them invading us.
So Australia would be the enemy. So it really is very like that. And you simply can't have a queen called Queen Kylie. It just wouldn't be at all dignified. She was the first person ever in the entire world ever to be called Victoria.
And of course, it didn't matter when she was just a small girl. She was just born to be married off into other royal families irrelevant. And as it became clearer, as she grew older, that there were no other successes to the throne. Her father died, his elder brothers died, their children did not survive. And Victoria by the age of 12, it was pretty clear that she was going to be the queen.
Well, what were they going to do? They were stuck with this queen. You had this ridiculous name. And in fact, there was talking parliament about changing her name to Elizabeth. But Victoria's mother, at the last minute, put her foot down. And simply, if it hadn't been for her, we might have had Elizabeth II then in Elizabeth III now.
So what made the Prince Regent do that, do you think? The Prince Regent was very resentful of the fact that his brother had had a child. He had lost his own daughter, Prince the Child, and he two years earlier in childbirth. And he hadn't managed to produce another child. And he hated his brother for having a child. And what he wanted to say was, your puny little girl will never come to the throne because I hate you and I hate her, even though she was just a baby.
那么,您认为是什么原因促使摄政王做出那样的举动呢?摄政王对他的兄弟有了一个孩子非常不满。他失去了自己的女儿,名为Prince the Child,两年前在分娩中不幸去世。他没有再生育儿女。他恨他的兄弟有了一个孩子。他想表达的是,即使她还只是一个婴儿,你那个微不足道的女孩永远不会继承王位,因为我憎恶你,也憎恶她。
And the word he went to show was that she was an irrelevant child who would mean nothing to the royal family. He turned out not to be correct. And how much input would former Kings and Queens have had in the upbringing of their offspring? Once the baby was born, their education was often controlled by the monarch of the time, not necessarily by their parents.
And the monarch of the time would be showing them off as the heir, and they would usually be very complicated systems of tuition in place. So royals tend to get the best education at the time available for those of their sex. So for example, Elizabeth I had this marvelous education by which she was, you know, speaking, learning classics, incredibly prolific at three, she could speak Latin at three, I mean, incredible.
And even Victoria herself in a time when female education was really in the doldrums, no girl schools taught maths, as part of a special subject, for example. Victoria had a very wide-ranging education in history, in geography, in German, in French, in music, and drawing as well, and comprehension. So actually, royals tend to get the best possible education.
In terms of being brought up by their parents, that's not always the case. They were usually pretty soon after birth, handed over to the royal wet nurse and the royal nanny, and then they live in the nursery. And while the strict regime and their parents tend to pay them a visit, usually in the evening, before their dinner, it really wasn't until the 20th century that matters began to change.
And that was with the birth of Elizabeth II herself. She of course wasn't meant to be queen. Her father wasn't first in line to the throne. And when she was born, she was looked after by a nanny for much of the day, but also her parents spent a lot of time with her playing, giggling, reading books. And that was rather innovative at the time.
It certainly was very different to the way in which the future George VI had himself been brought up by George V and Queen Mary, who gave them a very strict and very kind of excessively ordered childhood, which was not very happy. So from Elizabeth II onwards, matters began to change. And certainly, nanny's had less of a role. The royal nanny had less of a role. Nanny's played an important role in Prince Charles's life and also in the lives of William and Harry. But certainly it looks like, with a forthcoming royal baby, the role of the royal nanny is going to be much less.
Did the treatment of Princess Differ to that of their female siblings? Infant princes were treated in a very different fashion to their female siblings. Their female siblings were really bred for marriage. They were seen as irrelevant. And over and over again, you see examples. Safe example. George III had seven sons, six daughters. That was a surviving children. And the daughters were really kept close in Windsor Castle. They had to keep doing their embroidery. So only one of them was allowed to marry during the lifetime of George III. But the sons were given this freedom. They were given a lot of money. They were given properties. They could really do as they please. I mean, that wasn't great because they lived to excess. But still, royal princes were much more favored, were much more admired, were much richer, and much more independent than their sisters, which of course reflected the inequalities in society.
The only time we really see a royal princess favored when she had siblings was in the case of Queen Victoria, who Albert and Victoria adored their eldest daughter, Princess Vicki. They had really hoped not for a child who was a girl. Victoria had said, if I have a nasty girl at the end of my trials, I will drown it. And when the girl was born, Albert wrote to his brother, saying, Albert, father of a daughter, you will laugh at me. But despite this, Princess Vicki was a family favorite. She was adored by everyone. Albert and Victoria doted on her. This was to the detriment of her brother, the future, April the 7th, when he was born, the public had greeted him with delight. He was the first legitimate male heir for years, for decades, for 80 years. But actually, in reality, he was not loved in the family. His mother and father brought him a poor reflection, not as good, not as clever, not as engaging, not as loving as the perfect Princess Vicki.
So the very stages of the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy have been followed quite closely by the media. Would you say that this is unusual, or has it always been a similar degree of public interest in Royal Beards? Royal babies have always created huge public interest, particularly the question of whether or not it's going to be a boy or a girl. The governess of the future, Elizabeth II, said, royals are only private in the womb. That's the only time in which they're private. And that's even not quite the case anyway, because they're disgust. They're talked about, even when they're not even born yet. And people are fascinated by the next Royal Baby.
And the Royal Baby has all kinds of effects on society and economy. For example, when Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent, was about to give birth to her child, it was said that if she gave birth to a girl, the stock market would rise by two and a half percent. If she gave birth to a boy, it would rise by five percent. So that was what they wanted to have, a little boy. And that history would be fascinated by whether a child is going to be born. And of course, this is more important when it's the first child, by the 10th, by the 11th child, people aren't really so interested. But what they want is a boy. What they want is the healthy boy, the young boy, the heir to the throne, the future king, who's going to be strong enough to take the next generation of royals that took govern the country, to reign or to rule.
And that's a big difference with the current Royal Baby to be, because simply it doesn't matter whether it's a girl or a boy. Because if it's a girl, it will inherit, if it's a boy, it will inherit. It's not the same as previous generations. That was Kate Williams talking to Charlotte Ardraman. Kate explores five notable royal birds in our July issue, which as I said before, is out now in organ news agents and digitally. And that's almost all for this week.
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