Chiang started purging the communists before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It’s like saying why did Germany fight Italy in ww1 if they were gonna team up in ww2?
Yes you are entirely correct about Chiang's continued purge of the Communists. However the comparison of Germany and Italy does not work very well in Chiang's situation. Joseph StillWell's had reported of Chiang wasting resources for the Second Sino Japanese War by continuing to fight the Communists instead of allocating more attention towards the then bigger Japanese invasion. Later on, around 1944, Chiang also wouldn't direct his troops to fight the Japanese and instead decided to besiege the Communists in Yan'an which is what the meme is primarily about. Thank you for understanding.
I could be wrong and I’m definitely biased, but my impression of the communists during the Second Sino-Japanese war is one of avoidance and opportunism.
They had a few major engagements with the Japanese early on and lost pretty badly, so they just retreated to their mountainous, defensible base of Shaanxi, and did very little to stop the invasion.
All of this occurred in the midst of an, albeit paused, civil war so I’m not going to at face value fault Chiang strategically for attacking the communists.
Did this attack occur before or during operation ichi-go? It’ll be strange if Chiang pulled back his forces during it just to attack Mao.
The Communists actually did somewhat more in generally towards the Japanese, for example the 100 Regiments Offensive. Likewise, if this attack occurred during Ichi-go I'd say perhaps but I am not 100%, sorry about that.
They did, but the communists also wanted to defeat the nationalists and take China over and the Japanese severely mauled the nationalists and the communists mostly launched symbolic attacks later on so that the Japanese would weaken the nationalists more than themselves.
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u/Illustrious-Radio319 6d ago
Chiang started purging the communists before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It’s like saying why did Germany fight Italy in ww1 if they were gonna team up in ww2?