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本帖最后由 满仓 于 2013-10-23 16:27 编辑
【中文标题】关于二战，世界亏欠中国
【原文标题】The World’s Wartime Debt to China
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】RANA MITTER
【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/the-worlds-wartime-debt-to-china.html?ref=china
中国宣称维持亚洲和平的同时，对东海和南海的水域主权表现出绝不退让的态度。这种带有挑衅的措辞，对很多观察者来说（尤其是对亚太地区中国那些心神不定的邻国们来说），是一种被压抑多年之后的爆发，这来源于北京在国际舞台上不断提升的影响力。
但是另一方面，一个被人淡忘的事实也在其中起到了推波助澜的作用。中国在二战期间对于同盟国战胜日本所做出的贡献从未得到过充分的认可，也没有转换成它在亚太区的政治资本。中国对此一直耿耿于怀。
中国抵抗日本的侵略，是二战期间不为人知的一段伟大战争。尽管中国第一个加入同盟国，抵御轴心国的进攻，但是与1945年8月才加入太平洋战争的美国、英国、甚至苏联相比，它完全被忽略了。之后，是意识形态领域上的冷战，中国的贡献再一次被放在一边。
20世纪初期，中国对国家完整的主权领土的渴望情绪，与日本强烈的亚洲大陆帝国主义政策发生了撞击。战争爆发于1937年7月，在之后的8年时间里，蒋介石的国民党军队和毛泽东率领的力量相对薄弱的共产党游击队，共同谱写了一篇伟大的抗日战争史诗。
中国的军事力量尽管远远比不上强大的美国和英帝国，但依然在战争中扮演了重要的角色。4万名中国士兵在缅甸与美军和英军并肩作战，帮助保卫连接印度腊戍和阿萨姆邦的史迪威公路。中国军队独自阻挡了80万名日本士兵。
中国为此付出了惨重的代价。至少1400万中国人死亡，8000万人在战争期间流离失所。中土帝国见证了累累暴行，1937年南京大屠杀举世震惊，但还有一些同样血腥但并不为人所知的暴行。1938年东部城市徐州被屠城，徐州会战失利让中国对中部地区失去了控制权；1939年对临时首都所在地重庆的地毯式轰炸，两天的空袭中有4000人死亡；幸存者的描述是“一片火海”；以及1941年摧毁共产党北方根据地的“三光政策”（烧光、抢光、杀光）。
这样的局势给当时依然贫穷、孤立的中国带来了巨大的压力。而且，蒋介石政府的一些政策让情况更加恶化。蒋政府决定收缴农民的粮食作为军队的供给，这个政策让1942年河南省大饥荒更加严重。一位政府观察员在他的回忆录中写道：“用一个孩子只能换来几个花卷。”这样的错误举措让国民党政府显得既腐败又低效，成了美国一个令人尴尬的盟友，尽管它在抗击日本的战争中做出了巨大的贡献，远远超过共产党。
盟军在1945年取得胜利之后，新成立的联合国以永久性常任理事国的方式来承认中国对战争胜利所做出的贡献，但仅此而已。内战之后，蒋政府在1949年被共产党打败，毛似乎也没有什么理由把击退日本侵略者的功绩据为己有。中国在战时的盟友并没有在国内宣扬它的丰功伟绩，逃往台湾的国民党政权是一段尴尬的回忆，新的共产党政权则是一个恐怖的力量。在西方看来，中国在几年时间里，从一个战时的伙伴一下子变成了共产党巨兽。
遗留到今天的一个重大后果是，亚洲地区的老对头从未达成一个类似于1945年之后成立的北大西洋公约这样的组织，北约随后被欧盟所取代。美国决定把中国排除出由它主导的战后世界权力核心集团，中国和日本因此从未签订正式的和平协定。这也意味着，多年来西方历史学家弱化了中国在二战中的角色。
但是近年来，中国内部的政治开放姿态向世人展示出历史战争的新画面。蒋和毛已经作古多年，中国政府一直努力在国际舞台上扮演更重要的角色，同时提醒世界它与西方合作的历史。
北京为了让台湾最终回归大陆，对蒋的遗产采取了一系列示好的措施。中国的电影制作人和学者现在可以更自由地谈论国民党的战时贡献，无论是通过电视剧还是学术文章的方式。中国社会科学院历史学家杨天石的一部长篇、带有歌颂性质的蒋的自传在大陆热卖。蒋在战争期间位于重庆郊外的别墅，被设计成一个神圣的旅游胜地，其中的图片和介绍文字把他描绘成一个坚决抗击日本人的爱国者。这种大规模恢复蒋的声誉的行为在毛的时代完全不可想象。
对历史的这种修订对今天的东南亚地区有深远的影响。如果说美国在1945年率领盟军击败日本，让他有理由以今天的姿态出现在环太平洋地区，那么中国的领导人认为，为什么同样做出了重大贡献的中国，不能在该地区发挥同样的影响力呢？北京正在努力兑现一张蒋介石在七十年前写下的一张地缘政治支票。
原文：
OXFORD, England — At the same time that China has stated its desire for peace in Asia, the country has been making assertive claims over waters in the East and South China Seas. The confrontational rhetoric suggests, to many observers (and to China’s uneasy neighbors in the Pacific region), a sense of pent-up entitlement, stemming from Beijing’s growing importance in the world.
But another, little-remembered factor is also at play: China’s lingering resentment that its contributions to the Allies’ victory against Japan in World War II were never fully recognized and have yet to translate into political capital in the region.
China’s resistance to Japan is one of the great untold stories of World War II. Though China was the first Allied power to fight the Axis, it has received far less credit for its role in the Pacific theater than the United States, Britain or even the Soviet Union, which only joined the war in Asia in August 1945. The Chinese contribution was pushed aside soon after the conflict, as an inconvenient story in the neat ideological narrative of the Cold War.
In the early 20th century China’s growing desire for national sovereignty rubbed up against Japan’s rising imperialism on the Asian mainland. War broke out in earnest in July 1937, and during the eight years that it lasted, both the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and, to a lesser extent, the Communist fighters answering to Mao Zedong engaged in extraordinary feats of resistance.
Though far weaker and poorer than the mighty United States or the British Empire, China played a major role in the war. Some 40,000 Chinese soldiers fought in Burma alongside American and British troops in 1944, helping to secure the Stilwell Road linking Lashio to Assam in India. In China itself, they held down some 800,000 Japanese soldiers.
The costs were great. At least 14 million Chinese were killed and some 80 million became refugees over the course of the war. The atrocities were many: the Rape of Nanking, in 1937, is the most notorious, but there were other, equally searing but less well-known, massacres: the bloody capture in 1938 of Xuzhou in the east, which threatened Chiang’s ability to control central China; the 1939 carpet bombing of Chongqing, the temporary capital, which killed more than 4,000 people in two days of air raids that a survivor described as “a sea of fire”; and the “three alls” campaign (“Burn all, loot all, kill all”) of 1941, which devastated the Communist-held areas in the north.
These strains placed immense pressure on what by then was a weak and isolated country. But some of the Chiang government’s policies made matters worse. A decision to seize the peasants’ grain to feed the army exACerbated the 1942 famine in Henan Province. “You could exchange a child for a few steamed rolls,” one government inspector recalled in his memoir. Such missteps made the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government seem corrupt and inefficient, and an embarrassing ally for the United States — even though the Nationalists did the vast majority of the fighting against Japan, far more than the Communists.
When the Allies won in 1945, China’s contribution to the victory was rewarded with a permanent seat on the Security Council of the new United Nations, but little more. After a civil war, the Chiang regime fell to the Communists in 1949, and Mao had little reason to recognize its contributions to the defeat of Japan. China’s wartime allies also did little to remind their own people of its role in their victory: The Nationalist regime — which fled to exile in Taiwan — was an embarrassing relic, and the new Communist regime was a frightening unknown. For the West, China had gone from wartime ally to threatening Communist giant in just a few years.
One major consequence that remains of great relevance today is that the old enemies of Asia never struck a multilateral settlement of the sort that took place in the North Atlantic after 1945, with the formation of NATO and what has become the European Union. The United States’ decision to put China on the sidelines of the postwar world order it dominated has meant that China and Japan never signed a proper peace treaty. And it has meant that for many years Western historians treated China’s role in World War II as a sideshow.
But recently a new political openness within China itself has allowed a different picture of the war years to emerge. Chiang and Mao are long dead, and the Chinese government has been trying to claim a greater international role by reminding the world of the benefits of its past cooperation with the West.
Eager to eventually reunify the mainland with Taiwan, Beijing has also adopted a more favorable attitude toward Chiang’s legacy. Chinese filmmakers and academics now have license to talk more freely about the Nationalists’ wartime contribution, whether in television dramas or scholarly articles. A lengthy and sympathetic biography of Chiang by Yang Tianshi, a historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been a big seller on the mainland. Chiang’s old wartime villa outside Chongqing has even been restored as a shrine of sorts, with pictures and captions describing him as a patriot who stood firm against the Japanese — a rehabilitation of Chiang’s reputation that would have been unimaginable under Mao.
This revision of history has significant consequences for East Asia and Southeast Asia today. If America’s leadership in defeating Japan in 1945 continues to justify a U.S. presence around the Pacific today, Chinese leaders feel, why shouldn’t China’s contribution to the same goal earn it some clout in the region? Beijing is trying to cash in today a geopolitical check Chiang Kai-shek wrote nearly seven decades ago.
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