US files mirror Chinese fighters in war

Editor's Note: From 1937 to 1945, China fought a war to resist Japanese aggression, led by the Communist Party of China mostly in the north and the then ruling Kuomintang party largely in the south. Professor Tonglin Lu talks with Ed Zhang of China Daily about the roles of the two forces as reflected in some previously little-known documents in the US wartime intelligence archives.

History doesn't necessarily reveal its lessons by itself. Sometimes it takes someone to discover them, as Professor Tonglin Lu at the University of Montreal, Canada, where she teaches comparative literature and films, has been doing recently.

Lu is also the coordinator of a project at the school of humanities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which is studying the international reaction to Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression from 1937 to 1945.

And perhaps no one else is more suitable for the job. Lu is the daughter of the legendary General Lu Zhengcao, a former officer in the Kuomintang army who, after most of the KMT troops were driven away by the Japanese, took his unit to join the Communist-led army in the north of China which was fighting a guerilla war against the invaders.

Due to many things that almost immediately followed the end of World War II, and the bias that they gave rise to, until recently that part of history was presented in a one-sided way on either side of the Taiwan Straits, she said, adding that it is a rather regrettable thing. And with both sides claiming the leading role and relegating the other a bit, quite a number of interesting and illuminating details were ignored or missed.

History is never black and white, Lu said. For her, it is indisputable that both the Communist Party and the KMT were determined fighters against the Japanese aggression. In fact, she pointed out, despite the belligerent rhetoric that both sides used to apply against each other, on the strategic level they actually collaborated better than most people realize.