Originally posted by Achinz
Fair enough as it goes but this was quite inconsistent with his decision to stake his best in Shanghai to start with, given that the Japanese were certainly vastly superior in military technology and discipline.
I'm not too conversant with that part of the Sino-Japanese war, so can't really comment on it. But I think to appease his Shanghai supporters (the business people) and also succour national support, he'd have to put up a show of resisting at least. 'Sides, I think he was caught off-guard - the Japanese were attacking thru the Great Wall at that time, and they were also landing their forces in Shanghai thru amphibious operations. The KMT military wasn't exactly a fully professional Western-style force.
In any case, Chiang (I'll continue to use the old Wade-Giles transliteration for older names) himself must be held responsible for the poor quality of KMT military leadership as he was well-known for surrounding himself with "yes-men", favouring loyalty above competence.
I don't think he has much of a choice - as his forces crept northwards during the Northern Campaign, they absorbed defeated 'warlord' forces and their commanders per se.
Of course he shld have installed a better, more professional military leadership. In fact, he was doing exactly that in the 30s - with help from... Germany (of all nations - the rest didn't want to help IIRC). The Japanese put an end to that with their invasion.
Fr the end of the Northern Campaign in 1927-28 to the full Japanese invasion in 1937 was only a decade or so. Sufficient for the KMT to fully modernize their military? Particularly when they're engaged in extermination campaigns against the Communists as well as busy with other stuff (like economic development etc).
This could readily be accounted for by land size and geography. The SE Asian countries were smaller and those easily reached by sea such as islands (in the Indonesian and Philippines archipalagos and famously Singapore) and peninsulas (Malaya, Thailand, Indochina) were easily taken. Which is equivalent to what happened in China with the conquest of the coastal strip and plains all the way from Manchuria to the old Canton. It was the vastness of the Chinese landmass and its difficult hinterland terrain that provided the barrier and aided the defence of both KMT and CCP forces.
Perhaps. But the British and US forces in particular shld have performed better... considering their vastly superior std compared with the threadbare KMT forces.
I have to disagree here. Given the technological edge of the Japanese, guerilla warfare was the superior strategy. The CCP guerilla harrassment of the Japanese was more widespread and intensive than implied above. To give a quaint analogy if there are sufficient ants biting at different parts of the body, the larger human would stop in his tracks to get rid of the painful nuisance.
The Japanese could absorb that; with their burn all, kill all campaigns across N China. Unlike a Western nation, they had no qualms about bleeding themselves holding on to the N Chinese plains and killing and destroying whole villages in reprisal.
I'll stand by my notion that the Communists didn't impact the IJA all that much in N China - except for holding down large numbers of Japanese troops maybe.
The guerillas did in fact distract the Japanese from a more coordinated attack elsewhere eg Chongqing, which bore the brunt of aerial bombardment just because it was a conventional target on held territory.
I think the KMT forces in the middle Yangzi were a greater barrier to the Japanese advancing on Chongqing than what the guerillas did further north. In fact, these forces managed to counterattack (under heavy US pressure to act), at least once before the operation ran out of steam and was roll-backed by the Japanese.
Things are always more complex in fact. I would say that the mooted Japanese factor is irrelevant in the long run. There is overwhelming evidence for the impossible political state of affairs of Chiang and the KMT. No less a hands-on observer than General Joseph Sillwell, the first US military advisor to China, had these to say about Chiang and his policies:
He was seeing the KMT as at Chongqing when irresistible rot had already set in.
The KMT China as administered fr Nanjing was a different creature altogether. Granted it was still oppressive - Jiang being the Chinese mini-equavalent of Hitler and Stalin but there was hope for the future. The KMT had managed to get most of the Western powers to quash their 'unequal' treaties with the Chinese, and were improving on their tax base and economic development, esp in their Lower Yangzi base.
Given time, it would have come out to more. Witness the development of Taiwan, with the KMT having no distractions (they had nothing else to do in any case).
), otherwise try read some objective books on the issue (probably hard to find) It's absolutely horrandous and ridiculous netherless. (yet it's not killing 100 million as Mr Saravok and others would want you to believe) 
