Eighty-seven years ago today, the Lugou Bridge Incident broke out, marking the beginning of the Chinese National War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
The deepest memory of the war among the Chinese is the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression from the outbreak of the Lugou Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937 to the unconditional surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. Since the Opium War in 1840, China resisted imperialist aggression for the longest time, the largest in scale, suffered the heaviest losses, and suffered the most sacrifices.
First, the Chinese nation has reached the most dangerous time
Before the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, China had been sacked by wars of aggression many times.
In the First Opium War of 1840-1842, the British Empire, with its 19,000-strong army, forced the Qing Dynasty to sign the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing, ceding Hong Kong Island and paying 21 million silver dollars in compensation.
In the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860, 18,000 British and French troops drove straight in, attacked the Chinese capital, killed people and set fires, and burned the Old Summer Palace.
In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan, and the indemnity was 200 million taels of silver, and the scale of land reparations was unprecedented.
In 1900, the Eight-Nation Coalition attacked Beijing, although there were many countries, more than 30,000 troops, but less than 20,000 troops attacked Beijing, and Beijing fell in 10 days, and the amount of compensation reached an unprecedented 450 million taels of silver.
Why is it that a large country in the East, which is described by the West as accounting for one-third of the world's GDP, is so vulnerable to strong ships and artillery, and has repeatedly ceded land and paid reparations, lost power and humiliated the country?
Someone looked for the reasons for the defeat in armaments. At that time, a Macao newspaper commented:
"China's equipment, all over the world, is the weakest and most useless equipment, and what it does is just a lie on paper. The soldiers of his kingdom are said to be 700,000 people, but there may not be 1,000 of them. ”
There are also those who look at the root causes in the system. Kang Youwei, the initiator of the Wuxu Restoration, played to Emperor Guangxu to remove weakness, and the way to go to weakness was to "refuse peace", "move the capital", "train troops", and "change the law"; Then he mentioned "enriching the country", "raising the people", "clergy", and "training soldiers".
The analysis is more profound, is Yan Fu, the general office of the Translation Bureau of Beijing Normal University. The graduate of the Royal Naval College, in Montesquieu's Franco-Italian Papers, Vol. 5, said:
"Since the Qin Dynasty in China, it doesn't matter what the world is, it doesn't matter what the country is, it's just a family, and the prosperity of a surname is a concubine for hundreds of millions of trillions, and its prosperity is also the prosperity of this family, and its death is also the death of this family. One of the Sons of Heaven is the Constitution, the State, and the King, and his family will die with it. Those who take care of their interests are also interested in one family, and they are not for the sake of the world. ”
Yan Fu's words point out the source of China's weakness. With more than 2,000 years of feudal rule, the influence of the concept of "under the world, it is not the king's land, and the shore of the land is not the king's minister" is deeply rooted in China. When Western countries began to build modern nation-states in the mid-17th century, the Chinese nation fell far behind. The rulers of the feudal dynasty, with blood and surname as the core, are only responsible for the surname and family, and are not responsible for the nation.
This situation, in turn, leads the people to think that the whole world is the emperor, and if it is defeated, the emperor will be defeated, and what does it have to do with me to cut the emperor's land and compensate the emperor. This kind of situation, in which there is only dynastic security and no national security, has left national security in a fragile state full of holes from the very beginning in terms of the people's psychological cultivation and the people's mental state.
And that's exactly what happened. When the First Opium War broke out in 1840, the resistance that took place in Sanyuanli after the British landed did not become a common phenomenon, and more people took the initiative to sell livestock, vegetables, and grain to the invaders. In 1860, the British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace, and some people around the park also joined in looting the park's property. In 1900, when the Eight-Nation Coalition attacked Beijing, there were people's carts behind them to help transport supplies and supplies; The allied forces surrounded Beijing, and were guided by the people to attack the city through the waterway under the Guangqu Gate.
Climbing the wall to besiege the palace, there are also people helping to build ladders and escalators. An impressive photograph of groups of Chinese standing with their hands in their hands, watching numbly, as coalition troops fish through the waterway under the Guangqu Gate, climbing up the dirt slope one by one. This is the situation described by Sun Yat-sen: "40,000 Chinese, just a plate of scattered sand." ”
After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China, the phenomenon of old China being kicked out of the country and being burned, killed and looted has not ended. China, ruled by the Beiyang warlords, attended the Paris Peace Conference as the victorious power in World War I. At a time of excitement when people were cheering for the victory of "justice over might," the "five powers" of Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan manipulated the peace conference and transferred the rights and interests of the defeated Germany in Shandong, China, to Japan.
The Beiyang warlord government fell, and the government of the Republic of China first lost Northeast China in 1931 in the "918" incident, and lost North China after the "77" incident in 1937. People have repeatedly condemned imperialism for its aggressive, bloodthirsty, and predatory nature, but they have seldom pondered why the Japanese Kwantung Army dared to launch the "September 18" Incident in the face of the 190,000 Northeast Army with 19,000 troops? Why did the Japanese North China Garrison Army dare to launch the "77" Incident against Song Zheyuan's 29th Army, which had about 100,000 troops, with 8,400 troops?
Before the Xinhai Revolution, Wang Jingwei assassinated the regent Zaifeng and was arrested in an attempt, and Prince Su Shanqi said something when he interrogated Wang Jingwei:
"Of course, there is a reason for your revolution, it is to see that the Qing Dynasty is too bad. If your revolution succeeds, I don't think you will be much stronger than us. ”
The Xinhai Revolution was successful, the imperial system was overthrown, and the state of the country was as Li Dazhao said in "The Great Mourning":
"Before the revolution, the trouble of our people was an absolute monarch; After the revolution, the troubles of our people were in dozens of autocratic governors. In the past, a country had an absolute monarch, and now a province has an autocratic governor. The former is an absolute monarch with the power of a tyranny, not necessarily as the governor of today. ”
The head of the city changed the king's flag, the warlords fought, and the lives were ruined. In the 20 years from 1911 to 1931, there were 478 warlord melee fights in Sichuan province alone. How can this state of state and society, which is seriously internally strife, fragmented, and scattered, not become the target of slaughter by the great powers?
Seishiro Itagaki, a Japanese class-A war criminal and the culprit of the "918" Incident who was sentenced to death by hanging by the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo in 1948, said the following in August 1931 when he was mobilizing the Kwantung Army for combat:
"From the psychological point of view of the Chinese people, it is their ideal to live and work in peace and contentment, and as for politics and the military, they are nothing more than a profession of the ruling class. Politically and militarily, the only thing that is politically and militarily connected with the population is the collection of taxes and the maintenance of law and order. It is therefore a very different state from the situation of modern states, which, in the final analysis, is nothing more than the addition of the name of the state to such a region with autonomous tribes. Therefore, from the perspective of the history of real national development of the general public, the sense of state is undoubtedly very weak. No matter who is in power and who is in charge of the military, and who is responsible for maintaining law and order, this will not hinder the overall situation. ”
This could not be clearer than to show that the aggressors dared to take risks again and again, because they saw through China's state of internal friction, government decay, and social disintegration. Over the past 100 years, these lessons have become more painful and heavier than the other. A Chinese can only sing "the big knife cut off the devil's head", and cannot understand that history.
If we do not understand how we have declined to such a point, and if we do not understand how weak China's military, how politically corrupt, and how disorganized its society was, we will not understand how great and profound disasters this weakness, decay, and sloppiness will bring. "If you are backward, you will be beaten" is more manifested in China: "being beaten for weakness," "being beaten for internal friction," "being beaten for decadence," and "being beaten for sloppiness." Tian Han and Nie Er composed "March of the Volunteers" in 1935, and they had already sung such words: "The Chinese nation has reached the most dangerous time. ”
Second, we Chinese have surrendered, is there still China?
Because of the state of China at that time, the Japanese invaders despised the war. They thought they would be able to force China to its knees in a short period of time. The "Guiding Outline for the War against China in the Use of Force in North China" formulated by the General Staff Headquarters of the Japanese Army decided to solve the 29th Army of Song Zheyuan stationed in the Beiping area in two months and defeat the Central Army of the Kuomintang in three months.
On the face of it, their basis is sufficient. Militarily, the Chinese army was defeated again and again: North China, Songhu, Nanjing, Xuzhou, and Wuhan...... Politically, high-ranking officials, military personnel, and politicians of the Nationalist Government have also defected. The last emperor of the Qing Dynasty soon became the head of the puppet "Manchukuo". In November 1935, the traitor Yin Rugeng established the "Hebei Eastern Defense Communist Autonomous Committee" in Tong County.
In December, another "Jicha Political Affairs Committee," sandwiched between the Japanese and the Nationalist Government, with the main purpose of exercising "autonomy in North China," issued a document declaring that "Jicha and the two provinces have a special relationship with Japan," and that it also signed the "Sino-Japanese Agreement on the Defense of the Communist Party in North China" and the "Four Principles and Eight Points" of "Economic Cooperation" in North China with the Japanese garrison, thus seeing that North China would become the second puppet "Manchukuo."
Seishiro Itagaki of the Japanese Kwantung Army became the father of traitors in the Northeast. Kenji Dohihara, a Japanese garrison in North China, became the father of the traitors in North China. China's three puppet regime leaders, Wang Kemin, Wang Jingwei, and Liang Hongzhi, took office one after another. The contradiction between Wang Kemin and Wang Jingwei actually originated from Wang's surrender to Japan earlier, and he put on old qualifications in front of Wang and did not take Wang in his eyes. For this reason, Wang Jingwei tried every means to raise Liang Hongzhi and suppress Wang Kemin everywhere, making another big traitor, Zhou Fohai, sigh repeatedly: "In this endgame, there is still such intrigue, and the Chinese really have no interest!" ”
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, 58 brigade commanders, chiefs of staff and above of the Nationalist Government defected to the enemy, and some units mutinied in formation. During the entire eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the number of puppet troops assisting the Japanese army in the war was as high as 2.1 million, exceeding the number of invading Japanese troops, making China the only country that exceeded the number of puppet troops in World War II. Doesn't this state of affairs reveal the collective spiritual and personality decay, and how can it not greatly contribute to the arrogance and madness of the aggressors in destroying China?
When asked about his dreams, Yu Pingbo, a professor at Tsinghua University, asked a rhetorical question: "Where are our heroes?" "The whole nation longs for a hero to come out and stand up to the sky.
Yang Jingyu, commander-in-chief of the First Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army, insisted on resisting under extremely difficult conditions, never surrendered, and fought to the end, leaving only himself. If the people around you are sacrificed, they are mutiny. The traitor Cheng Bin, the commander of the first division of the First Army of the Anti-Japanese Alliance, Yang Jingyu's most trusted person, led his troops to surrender to the enemy in 1938 and formed the "Cheng Bin Advance Team", destroying all Yang Jingyu's secret camps in the deep mountains and old forests, and forcing Yang Jingyu into a desperate situation. The traitor Zhang Xiufeng is the commander of the military guard platoon, an orphan whose parents died, and was raised by Yang Jingyu.
In February 1940, he defected to the enemy with classified documents, guns, and funds for the Anti-Japanese Union, and provided the Japanese army with Yang Jingyu's breakthrough route. This person was Yang Jingyu's personal guard, and he knew the law of Yang Jingyu's activities, and his rebellion caused Yang Jingyu to die soon. The traitor Zhang Xiruo, a special machine gun shooter of the 1st Division of the 1st Army of the Anti-Japanese Alliance, shot Yang Jingyu after the mutiny under the order of Ryuichiro Kishitani, the head of the puppet Tonghua Provincial Police Department.
There is another person who can hardly be called a traitor: Zhao Tingxi, a villager of "Baoan Village" in Mengjiang County, who went up the mountain to chop wood and found Yang Jingyu. Yang Jingyu hadn't eaten for several days, and he lost one of his cotton shoes, so he said to Zhao Tingxi and a few other villagers, go down the mountain and help me buy a few steamed buns, buy a pair of cotton shoes, give you money, don't tell the Japanese. Zhao Tingxi went down the mountain in a panic, and soon reported to the Japanese: Yang Jingyu was on the mountain. Cheng Bin, Zhang Xiufeng, Zhang Xiruo, and Zhao Tingxi are all Chinese, and they are all Chinese who have lost their blood and can only be slaves to others in the end.
Before Zhao Tingxi reported to the Japanese, he saw Yang Jingyu on the mountain who had not eaten for several days, and his face, hands, and feet were covered with chilblains, and said to Yang Jingyu: "I think it is better to surrender, and now Manchukuo does not kill those who surrender." If he surrendered, the Japanese planned to make Yang Jingyu the military minister of the puppet "Manchukuo" and use his influence to subdue the Northeast Anti-Japanese Alliance. Yang Jingyu was silent for a while, and said to Zhao Tingxi: "Fellow countryman, we Chinese have all surrendered, is there still China?" ”
This sentence is really shocking. In the midst of ice and snow, surrounded on all sides, communist Yang Jingyu used his entire life to write a Chinese who stood up to the sky. The reason why there is still China today is because there are such earth-shattering heroes who cry ghosts and gods, and when they are the darkest, most difficult, most helpless, and most people are in despair, they use their souls and blood to support the backbone of the Chinese nation.
At that time, geologist Ding Wenjiang faced the dark predicament of the domestic economy withering, political chaos, and the encroachment of the Japanese invaders step by step, and said a sentence with great internal strength:
"As long as the minority of the minority, the excellent of the excellent, refuses to sit still, there will always be hope for this nation."
It was at this most difficult moment that the Communist Party of China (CPC) transformed its class responsibility into national responsibility, and transformed it from a pioneer in the class struggle to a mainstay of national survival.
At the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War, Germany "mediated" between China and Japan. In a secret telegram to the German Foreign Office, German Ambassador to China Todmann described Chiang Kai-shek's attitude towards "mediation" as follows:
"He (Chiang Kai-shek) secretly told me that if he agreed to Japan's demands, the Chinese government would be swept away by the tide of public opinion, and there would be a revolution, and the only result would be that the Chinese Communist Party would have an advantage in China, which would mean that Japan would not be able to negotiate peace with China, because the Communist Party would never surrender."
When Wang Ching-wei, vice president of the Kuomintang, and more than 20 members of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang had defected to the enemy, Chiang Kai-shek's remark that "the Communists never surrendered" could be regarded as the deepest impression left on him by the Communists. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Peng Dehuai have very hard bones.
Throughout the War of Resistance Against Japan, none of the senior leaders of the Communist Party surrendered to the Japanese, and none of the Eighth Route Army or the New Fourth Army became puppet armies. Mao Zedong said:
"This army has an indomitable spirit, it will overwhelm all enemies, and it will never be subjugated by them. No matter what the hardships are, as long as there is one person, that person will continue to fight. ”
At the critical juncture of the nation's peril, the Chinese Communists have injected unprecedented spiritual spirit into the Chinese nation.
3. The deepest roots of the greatness of war are found among the people
The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was a war between a weak and semi-colonial country facing an imperialist power.
On July 17, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek delivered the Lushan Speech, in which the 1,900-word manuscript mentioned the "weak country" six times, and also pointed out:
"If we want to be safe and sound, we can only let our troops have unlimited access to our land, and our own army will have to endure restrictions and cannot be free to stay in our own land, or people will shoot at the Chinese army, and we cannot return the gun.
In other words, people are swordsmen, and I am fish and meat! We are on the verge of this miserable world. This is unbearable for even the nations of the world with a little personality. ”
On the evening of July 31, Chiang Kai-shek publicly issued the "Letter to the Soldiers of the Anti-Japanese War": "Since peace is hopeless, the only way to resist the war is to the end." The Nationalist Government then organized the Battle of Songhu, the Battle of Nanjing, the Battle of Taiyuan, the Battle of Xuzhou, and the Battle of Wuhan...... The resolute resistance of the Nationalist Government on the frontal battlefield took the Japanese invaders by surprise.
What the aggressors did not expect was the emergence of another battlefield - the battlefield behind enemy lines led by the Communist Party. This is a strange scene that appeared on the Chinese battlefield of the World Anti-Fascist War.
It should be said that the Japanese side's plan to dismember and occupy China has never been hasty and rudimentary. This can be seen from the extensive and meticulous intelligence work it did in China before and after the First Sino-Japanese War and the meticulous military preparations it completed in China. Around the 30s of the 20th century, from the Huanggutun Incident in June 1928 to the "Nakamura Incident" in June 1931, the "Wanbaoshan Incident" in July, and the "September 18" Incident in September, from the "128" Incident in 1932 to the "Zhangbei Incident" in 1935 and then to the "77" Incident in 1937, Japan has been advancing toward the predetermined goal in an orderly manner by constantly creating and exploiting crises.
But this round it was wrong. The biggest mistake it made was to think that history would simply repeat itself, and that it would conquer China just as Chiang Kai-shek's Central Army could conquer China by defeating Chiang Kai-shek's Central Army, just as it would obtain a generous land indemnity by destroying the Qing Beiyang Naval Division and defeating the Qing Dynasty Army in the First Sino-Japanese War. This is its main strategic calculation. It did not expect that a completely new force would emerge in front of it: the Communist Party of China, and that the people mobilized and organized by this party would build an impassable mountain for the aggressors.
Before the July 7 Incident, the Japanese rulers thought that China would be destroyed in three months, and they only saw the weakness of the Chinese government.
On July 31, 1937, more than 20 days after the "77" incident, Chiang Kai-shek revealed to his cronies that "it could be supported for six months", and he only saw the limited resources in the hands of the Nationalist government.
In May 1938, Mao Zedong published "On Protracted War", which saw the tremendous energy contained in the Chinese people. If a weak country is not to be wiped out and to defeat a strong country, it must mobilize the people, organize the people, arm the people, and rely on the people. Only by mobilizing the whole people and waging a people's war can we protracted the war of resistance and defeat the Japanese aggressors.
The Japanese invasion sharpened the national contradictions between China and Japan, greatly surpassed the class contradictions in China, and opened up a new and broad space for mobilizing the people of all strata. The experience of the famous scientist Qian Weichang is very typical.
In 1931, Qian Weichang was admitted to five famous universities at the same time: Tsinghua University, Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, Wuhan University and Central University with double hundred grades in Chinese and history. But in September of the same year, the "918" incident occurred, and he heard the news on the radio and took the case:
"The government said don't resist, because people have airplanes and artillery. I became angry after hearing this, and I made up my mind. I said I'm going to learn airplane artillery! ”
Qian Weichang is very talented in literature and history, but he only scored 5 points in physics, 20 points in mathematics and chemistry, and 0 points in English because he has not studied it. For the sake of this desire in his heart, he worked extremely hard. Five years later, he graduated with honors from the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. The desire to resist Japan turned Qian Weichang, who should have been a literary historian, into the father of modern Chinese mechanics.
Qian Weichang is the epitome of a generation of intellectuals. "On the banks of the Yellow River, there is a group of outstanding descendants of the Chinese nation." During the Anti-Japanese War, there was a trend of intellectuals joining the anti-Japanese ranks. After the "77" incident in 1937, on the hundreds of miles of highway from Xi'an to Yan'an, groups of young men and women rushed to Yan'an every day.
In December 1943, Ren Bishi said at the work conference of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee: "There are more than 40,000 intellectuals who arrived after the Anti-Japanese War. "This is a sight never before seen in the Agrarian Revolutionary War. The participation of a large number of intellectuals has improved the quality of the contingent, strengthened the confidence of the Chinese people, broadened the prospects for development, and made important contributions to the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
The vast region of China is still rural, and the largest number of people are still farmers. Opening up and developing anti-Japanese base areas in the rural areas is the core and key to truly mobilizing the people, organizing the people, arming the people, and relying on the people to fight a protracted war against the Japanese aggressors. As the troops of the Nationalist Government retreated on the battlefield, the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army resolutely advanced behind enemy lines, and successively established numerous anti-Japanese base areas in the vast rural areas of North, Central and South China, and by 1940 they had a population of 100 million.
The Japanese aggressors had no idea at all that they would have to face two armies of a completely different nature, two battlefields of a completely different nature. In the early days of the war, the Japanese army went all out to attack Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government troops, and basically did not pay attention to the Communist-led Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army. As they moved deeper and deeper into China, the situation changed more and more than they expected.
In December 1939, Yukio Kasahara, chief of staff of the Japanese North China Front, said:
"The fatal scourge of the law and order war in North China is the communist army. Only by breaking down this anti-war organization, which is based on the organic integration of the military, the government, the party, and the people, can we be the foundation for public order and rectification at the present stage. ”
By the time the Eighth Route Army launched the "Battle of 100 Regiments" in August 1940, 9 divisions and 12 brigades of the Japanese army had been crucified in North China, which seriously restrained the Japanese army and consumed Japan's national strength.
The Japanese army was shocked by the fact that all the people in the battlefield behind enemy lines were soldiers and all the people participated in the war, and the situation in which the army and the people unanimously fought against the invaders. In his "North China Public Security War", it is recorded:
"The inhabitants are generally hostile to us, and the enemy has done its work thoroughly, and there are no inhabitants at all in the areas where our army is attacking, so it is extremely difficult to find guides, porters, and even gather information. In addition, it is not easy to clear the empty room and search for hidden materials. ”
Asaeda, a staff officer of the First Army of the Japanese Army, recalled:
"The anti-fighting spirit of the Eighth Route Army was very strong (in the Battle of the Hundred Regiments), and the residents of the communist areas all started to support the Eighth Route Army, and even women and children used bamboo baskets to help transport grenades. Some of our troops are often caught off guard by the enemy with large swords in their hands and fall into a bitter battle. "The 3rd Brigade of the Japanese Army's Independent Mixed Brigade reported on the encounter in the southern Hebei operation: "Two special agents captured the local residents and asked them to lead the way, and when they approached the enemy village, the residents who led the way suddenly shouted loudly, 'There are two traitors here, everyone come out and arrest them!'" A squadron of the Okamura detachment, when it broke away from the main force of the brigade and advanced, the local residents who led the way led it into unfavorable terrain, which left me surrounded by the communist troops. ”
This is exactly what Mao Zedong said: "The deepest roots of the great power of war are found in the people." "Mobilizing the masses, organizing the masses, and arming the masses is the magic weapon of the Communist Party.
"North China Public Security War" Review:
"The relationship between the communist army and the people is different from that of those in power in the past. The CCP and its military are concentrating all their efforts to understand the people and win the hearts and minds of the people, not only in Japan, but also in Chongqing. ”
Second Lieutenant Shinichi Yamaguchi of the Japanese Army fought with the armies of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and his comparison and summary of the two completely different combat methods is as follows:
"It is better to fight a large-scale battle than to fight a high-scale battle against the elusive communist army. Later, I took part in the battle at Laohekou, and I recall that during my four years in China, I never had any more distress than when I was stationed in Shishilizhuang (southern Hebei) as a captain. ”
A true story happened in a village in the mountains west of Handan, not far from the residence of Second Lieutenant Shinichi Yamaguchi. It happened suddenly that day, and the children were chasing and playing, and the Japanese devils who appeared out of nowhere surrounded the village at once. Several cadres of the district party committee who were in a meeting did not have time to escape, and they were all trapped in the village and mixed with the villagers.
It is a vibrant village, with more than 1,000 children out of 5,000 people. The Japanese chose the breakthrough. They took out the sweets and gave them one by one, "Eat, eat, Missymisi, whatever you want is not from the village."
Unexpectedly, none of the more than 1,000 children received candy. Break the clenched hand, stuff the sugar into it, push the sugar out like a coal, and hold it tightly again. Japanese sugar fell on the ground covered with dust.
Decades later, one of the children was asked, "Why are you so bold?" Really not scared at all? ”
The gray-haired old man replied: "No one is beaten by copper and iron, why don't you be afraid!" But the candy can't be connected, and when you do, you will become a traitor. ”
The old man doesn't have much culture, he can't describe exaggeration, and he talks plainly. He and his friends relied on the morality passed down from generation to generation, relied on the intuition of the croppers, and adhered to the rough and unpretentious consciousness of the stick in the face of the catastrophe, "As soon as you take it, you will become a traitor."
This moral appeal and conscience deterrence are so powerful that the barking wolfdog and the loaded three-eight cover are helpless. These children are emotional. More than 1,000 children live in the same village, and it is indispensable to fight and bleed each other.
But in the face of the machine guns that were put up and the candy stuffed over, on the conclusion that "as soon as you take it, you will become traitors", they have no one to teach them, they do not need to discuss, and they are actually close to each other. This is a gene that has been passed down from generation to generation, a national spiritual agreement that does not need to be spoken.
In the old days, the so-called "species". More than 1,000 children, all of them of a kind. In any nation, there is no lack of spark accumulated in life. The key to the mass work of the Communist Party is to ignite these fires. Ignite it, and the people will not fall, will not be swallowed up by darkness, will not be conquered by the invaders.
This is precisely where the great tragedy of the Japanese aggressors lies: they have to face not only the frontal battlefield led by Chiang Kai-shek, but also the battlefield behind enemy lines led by Mao Zedong to face the millions of ordinary people who have come to their senses and begun to fight heroically to defend their own interests.
Fourth, the lion of China has woken up
The Chinese nation has been in decline for a hundred years and has endured hardships. Napoleon said: China is a sleeping lion, and the world will tremble when it wakes up. Napoleon meant: this lion is better not to wake up. In fact, this lion has also been sleeping, sleeping for a long time.
Around the time of the First Opium War in 1840, Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan tried to awaken the lion. Lin Zexu told Wei Yuan to write the "Atlas of the Sea Kingdom", and the idea of transforming China into a modern country had already been born, but it did not cause repercussions in China. After the First Opium War, the book reached Japan, but it caused a strong shock and became an important impetus for Japan's Meiji Restoration. Wei Yuan's popularity in Japan far exceeds that in China.
To wake up this sleeping lion, it will take an even more painful defeat. This defeat came: the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. The Beiyang Naval Division was wiped out. Japan, the traditional "small state" of the "small state", was also able to force China to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki and obtain unprecedented land cession and reparations. Liang Qichao said: Evoking the great dream of our country for a thousand years has really started from the First Sino-Japanese War. The sleeping lion begins to awaken. The process of awakening is still a decades-old process.
After the First Sino-Japanese War, Kang Youwei's "Book on the Bus" in 1895 marked the awakening of the Chinese bureaucratic and doctor class. Some people in this stratum have begun to realize that there is something wrong with the country as a whole and that it must be addressed.
The May Fourth Movement that broke out in 1919 was the awakening of Chinese intellectuals. This class, which takes the traditional "paradise" as its pleasure, fully participates in the process of national political history by "punishing national thieves internally and fighting for national power externally".
The All-People's War of Resistance in 1937 was the true awakening of the whole nation of the Chinese nation. For the first time, the Japanese invaders occupied China's land, killed Chinese people, and slaughtered China's cities, aiming at the entire Chinese nation, so that for the first time, this nation had no distinction between classes, regions, and the suspicion of ruling and being ruled.
Without the most painful fall, there will be no most glorious rise. The cost is enormous. During the eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, 35 million military and civilians were killed and wounded, tangible property losses of more than $600 billion, and intangible property losses were countless. In this long-suffering process, the people's level of consciousness and organization have progressed to an unprecedented historical high.
After the start of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, Zhou Fohai, director of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang, said a sentence:
"None of the elements of the Chinese, the elements of things, and the elements of organization can be compared with Japan, and the war will be lost."
This question has been answered by the hard-fought victory of the War of Resistance. Zhou Fohai, who became a traitor, was sentenced to death by the Nanjing High Court, and the sentence was changed to life after Chiang Kai-shek signed an amnesty, and he died of illness in prison in 1948.
In 1938, at the most difficult stage of the Anti-Japanese War, the historian Jiang Tinghuang issued another question in his book "Modern History of China":
"The Chinese nation in the past hundred years has only one question at all, and that is: Can the Chinese modernize? Can you catch up with the Westerners? Can science and machinery be utilized? Can we abolish our sense of family and hometown and organize a modern nation-state? If so, the future of our nation is bright; If not, our nation has no future. ”
The qualifications to answer this question are left only to the Chinese Communists.
For the sake of the survival, development, prosperity, and prosperity of the nation and to stand on its own feet among the nations of the world, China must build its own new-type nation-state on the basis of a feudal, semi-feudal, colonial, and semi-colonial social body. The founding of the Republic of China in 1912 was the beginning of this arduous quest. More than 30 years of practice have proved that it is unstable, unsustainable, and not prosperous, and in the end it can neither complete salvation nor complete revival. China urgently needs a political regime and state system that can be stable, sustainable, prosperous, and fulfill the dual historical missions of national salvation and national rejuvenation.
The birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949 is a great gift from the Chinese Communists through sacrifice and struggle for the Chinese nation, which has suffered so much. New China not only eliminated the traces of feudalism and semi-feudalism and colonization and semi-colonization from the roots, but also eliminated the sloppy state of "scattered sand" in society from the roots, and the Chinese people were mobilized and organized as never before, creating the first modern nation-state in Chinese history that was sustained, stable, prosperous, and prosperous, and capable of fulfilling the dual mission of salvation and rejuvenation.
Looking back today, we can clearly see that without the national awakening achieved in the midst of national peril, without the mass organizations formed in the all-people War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and without the fighting contingent tempered in the resistance to aggression, this victory would not have come so quickly.
The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was the first national liberation war in which the Chinese people won a complete victory against foreign aggression since 1840, and was a turning point for the Chinese nation from decline to rejuvenation. The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 was the landmark end of the proposition of national salvation that began in 1840, and it was also the symbolic beginning of the proposition of national rejuvenation.
Americans Bruce Lassett and Harvey Starr, in their book World Politics, say: "Historically, most nations have been formed through the experience of war. ”
China is no exception. In our own words, it is "to defeat the aggressor and build a new China".
Harvard University professor Joseph Nye said that "generally speaking, the mark of a great power is its ability to win wars," which is also very good. It was the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in which all people worked together to overcome the national disaster that made China begin to enter the ranks of great powers. The profound national awakening, unprecedented national unity, and heroic national struggle displayed by the Chinese people in resisting foreign aggression were the decisive factors for the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the key support for continuing to realize the great national rejuvenation today and in the future.
On the eve of the founding of New China, Mao Zedong said: China must become independent, China must be liberated, and China's affairs must be advocated and handled by the Chinese people themselves, and no imperialist interference will be allowed in the slightest. This speaks to the hearts of all Chinese for more than 100 years.
As President Xi Jinping said at the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France in Paris in March 2014, "the lion of China has woken up."
(The author is an expert on national security strategy and a major general; Source: Kunlun Ce Network, revised and released)