Opinion | Zhu De's Forgotten Claim to the USS Missouri Surrender

More than 81 years have passed since Japan's surrender, yet one question about that moment continues to provoke debate: was there ever a realistic possibility that Zhu De (朱德), commander of the Communist Eighth Route Army, might have boarded the USS Missouri (BB-63) to accept Japan's formal capitulation on behalf of China?

The question sounds implausible on its face. During the Second World War, the internationally recognized government of China was the Nationalist government based in Chongqing, led by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正). It was Chiang who appointed General Hsu Yung-chang (徐永昌) [name to verify], Chief of the Military Operations Bureau, to represent China at the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. History records no other Chinese representative that day.

But history also records something less comfortable: the Allied powers were far from unanimous that Chiang's government had the unqualified right to represent all of China at that ceremony. And within the United States government itself, serious voices argued for a fundamentally different approach — one that would have upended the entire postwar settlement in Asia.

Before Emperor Hirohito accepted the Potsdam Declaration, Japan had never formally recognized the Chongqing Nationalist government as a legitimate sovereign adversary. In Japanese diplomacy, the valid Chinese government remained the Nanjing regime led by Wang Ching-wei (汪精衛), a collaborationist administration installed under Japanese auspices. This created a fundamental ambiguity: if Japan did not recognize Chongqing as China's government, on what legal basis did Chiang's representative have exclusive authority to accept the Japanese surrender?

One reason the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was precisely to force Japan into unconditional surrender before this ambiguity could be exploited — and to ensure that Japan's Imperial General Headquarters would order the China Expeditionary Army to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek's representatives, not to those of Mao Zedong (毛澤東).

From the British and Soviet perspectives, placing Hsu Yung-chang on the Missouri was an arrangement that served American interests, not an acknowledgment that Chongqing had earned, through eight or fourteen years of resistance, the moral authority to speak for all Chinese who had suffered under Japanese occupation.

Even within the United States, the question of whether Chiang deserved to monopolize China's surrender rights was contested. Military commanders — General Albert Wedemeyer, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and General Douglas MacArthur — persuaded President Harry Truman that Chiang was indispensable to American strategic interests. They argued not only for backing Chiang's exclusive right to accept Japanese surrender in the China theater, but also for deploying U.S. naval and air power to transport Nationalist troops back to the occupied territories, given that Communist forces had dramatically expanded their reach in the final phase of the war.

A competing faction within the State Department reached the opposite conclusion. These "China hands" argued that the Nationalist government had already demonstrated it could not govern postwar China effectively. In their reading, Communist victory was inevitable — but Mao's Communists were, at their core, nationalists who would ultimately break with the Soviet Union, much as Josip Tito was already charting an independent course in Yugoslavia. Therefore, the United States should not waste its support on a corrupt and failing Chiang, but should instead cultivate Mao as a postwar partner capable of containing Soviet expansion in Asia. From this premise, they actively opposed granting Chiang exclusive authority to represent China at the surrender.

The British had already acted on precisely this logic in Europe. Winston Churchill, after observing that Tito's Communist Partisans were the most effective resistance force in Yugoslavia, made a coldly pragmatic decision: he abandoned the royalist Chetniks — ideologically closer to Britain — and transferred all diplomatic and military support to the Communists. His calculation was that Tito, once properly supported, might be induced to break free from Soviet control after the war. Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) trained Communist resistance movements across the Balkans and, in Southeast Asia, armed the Malayan Communist Party's Anti-Japanese Army against the Japanese — partly to counter American anti-colonial pressure and preserve British imperial interests in the region.

In Hong Kong and the surrounding territories, British forces cooperated with the Communist East River Column (東江縱隊), which helped the British Army Aid Group rescue prisoners of war and functioned as an underground Commonwealth auxiliary — a role that also served to check Nationalist attempts to reclaim Hong Kong in the chaos of Japan's defeat.

This British pattern of pragmatic alliance with Communist forces directly influenced American diplomats in China. In February 1945, Chargé d'Affaires George Atcheson Jr. and Foreign Service Officer John Service jointly wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, recommending that if Chiang continued to resist military cooperation with the Chinese Communists, Washington should replicate Churchill's Yugoslav strategy in China: cut off all diplomatic and military aid to Chongqing, redirect support to Yan'an, and recognize Mao Zedong as the supreme commander in the China theater.

Some officers of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the wartime predecessor of the CIA — advanced a more moderate but related argument: the Communists, operating in north China, Manchuria, and areas adjacent to the Korean Peninsula, were geographically better positioned to strike at Japan's core territories. They proposed dual aid to both Nationalists and Communists, calibrated to each side's anti-Japanese effectiveness. Ambassador Patrick Hurley considered even this more limited proposal a betrayal of U.S. policy and complained to President Roosevelt. Under the combined pressure of Hurley and Wedemeyer, the effort to engineer a "Titoist" turn in Mao's movement was ultimately suppressed before Japan's surrender.

The fatal obstacle to the Atcheson proposal was logistical, not political. In 1945, no aircraft flying from India over the Hump route had the range to deliver meaningful quantities of strategic supplies directly to Yan'an in northern Shaanxi. The British could resupply Tito's partisans from Allied-controlled airfields in Italy, flying across the Adriatic to his island base of Vis — evacuating wounded fighters and even training Yugoslav air force personnel. The United States had no equivalent route to the Chinese Communist base areas, unless the Soviet Union tore up its neutrality pact with Japan and reopened the northwestern overland corridor. And since the whole point of backing Mao was to wean him away from Moscow, inviting Soviet involvement would have defeated the purpose entirely.

The more pragmatic alternative proposed by Foreign Service Officers John Davies and John Service was a "two Chinas" framework: provide simultaneous aid to both Chongqing and Yan'an, calibrated to whichever side fought the Japanese more effectively, and then allow both parties to negotiate postwar power-sharing from positions of relative strength. Davies argued specifically that after Japan's surrender, the United States should not airlift Nationalist troops back to north China — leaving the north to Communist-administered surrender and the south to the Nationalists, thereby creating conditions for a genuine democratic coalition government.

Zhu De himself moved on this logic immediately after Hirohito's announcement. He issued two public declarations: one ordering Japanese General Yasuji Okamura (岡村寧次) to surrender to Communist forces, and another addressed to the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, asserting that Yan'an held surrender rights no less legitimate than those of Chongqing. He did not claim the right to accept all Japanese forces in China — but he demanded that Japanese troops surrounded by Communist units surrender to the Communists, not to the Nationalists.

Had the domestic surrender been divided between the two Chinese parties on anything approaching equal terms, the logical extension would have been a joint representation at the international ceremony — something closer to Hsu Yung-chang and Zhu De both boarding the Missouri, rather than Zhu De replacing Hsu entirely. A historical precedent existed: at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War, the Chinese delegation had included representatives from both the Beijing and Guangzhou governments. At the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, Communist representative Tung Pi-wu (董必武) had participated as a member of the Republic of China delegation led by T.V. Soong (宋子文).

In purely military terms, Zhu De's demand was not without logic. The bulk of the China Expeditionary Army's command structure was concentrated in Nanjing and Shanghai — areas where the Nationalist central army's main strength was hundreds of kilometers away in southwest and central China, and where the Communist New Fourth Army operated in the surrounding countryside. Had Okamura genuinely surrendered to the nearest available Chinese forces, he would effectively have been surrendering to the Communists. With approximately two million Japanese military and civilian personnel in China, a surrender to Zhu De would have been tantamount to the entire Japanese presence in China capitulating to the Communists — making Zhu De's appearance in Tokyo Bay more probable than Hsu Yung-chang's, not less.

International politics is not determined by who has sacrificed the most — and the Nationalist forces, despite bearing the overwhelming burden of conventional resistance to Japan across eight years of war, found themselves in 1945 too depleted to retake the occupied territories on their own. Wedemeyer had to rebuild and reequip select Nationalist units — the so-called "Alpha Force" — before they could mount effective offensive operations. The Nationalist government's catastrophic failure during Japan's 1944 Ichi-Go offensive, the largest Japanese land operation of the entire Pacific War, had already convinced American observers that Chongqing lacked the institutional capacity to govern postwar China. Corruption was rampant, conscription was brutal and indiscriminate, and civilian loyalty had largely collapsed.

The Communist forces had not defeated Japan. Their actual military contribution was considerably smaller than the Nationalists'. But the Communists had spent eight years operating inside Japanese-occupied territory, maintaining proximity to the civilian population and cultivating an image — however manipulated — of shared sacrifice. In American strategic terms, they appeared to offer greater independence from Moscow than the Nationalists' dependence on Washington, and potentially a more stable basis for postwar East Asian order if they could be brought into alignment with U.S. interests.

Wedemeyer, Nimitz, and MacArthur did not necessarily dispute the State Department's assessment of Chiang's failings. But they judged that Communist control of China posed a greater threat to American interests than a flawed Nationalist government. Whether they viewed the Chinese Communists as Soviet proxies or as future independent actors hostile to the United States, their conclusion was the same: Chiang, despite his weaknesses, remained the only viable partner. Eight years of resistance without surrender counted for something, even if it counted for less than Washington's strategic calculus.

The United States therefore deployed naval and air assets to transport Nationalist troops back to coastal cities and the major occupied urban centers, and applied direct pressure on Japan's Imperial General Headquarters to ensure that Okamura surrendered to Chiang's representatives, not to the Communists. This American intervention resolved an immediate crisis for the Nationalist government. Had one million surrendering Japanese troops instead joined the Communist forces — equipped and uniformed as People's Liberation Army soldiers — the civil war that followed would have ended far sooner and far more decisively against the Nationalists. Even with American support, Chiang's government on the mainland survived only until 1949. Without it, 1945 itself might have been the end.

The Chinese Communist narrative of the war years has long been distorted by state propaganda, and it deserves to be treated critically. But dismissing the Communist wartime role entirely as myth is equally inaccurate. Mao Zedong unified mainland China within four years of Japan's surrender not through military propaganda alone, but because he offered something that most Chinese people in that era desperately wanted and the Nationalist government had demonstrably failed to provide. By 1945, every Chinese person knew Japan would be defeated by American power. The question of which Chinese army had killed more Japanese soldiers had ceased to matter politically.

Zhu De himself carried personal authority that extended well beyond Communist circles. The American left-wing journalist and feminist activist Agnes Smedley was captivated by him. So was Marine officer Evans Carlson, sent to China by Roosevelt in the early years of the war to observe the resistance. Carlson later organized and commanded Marine Raider battalions in the Pacific — at Makin Island, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan — and reportedly hoped that one day U.S. Marines might land on the Chinese coast and fight alongside Zhu De's Eighth Route Army against Japan.

Even within the Nationalist military establishment, Zhu De commanded respect. Kuo Chi-chiao (郭寄嶠) [name to verify], a Nationalist army corps commander during the war and a relative of former Premier and Defense Minister Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), had served alongside Zhu De on the Shanxi front and came away with a positive impression. For the Soviet Union and Britain, a shared Chinese representation at Tokyo Bay — or outright Communist representation — would have made considerably more sense than an arrangement driven entirely by American preference. But Japan had been defeated primarily by American power, and MacArthur held the authority to set the terms. Neither London nor Moscow was in a position to override him.

MacArthur, Nimitz, and Wedemeyer's commitment to Chiang was partly personal and partly a matter of wartime solidarity. But it was primarily driven by American geopolitical interest. At Yalta, Roosevelt had ceded Dalian and Port Arthur to the Soviet Union. For the U.S. Navy to monitor Soviet naval movements in northeast Asia, it needed to control Qingdao and retain the capacity to station forces in Taiwan. Wedemeyer additionally feared that if the Communists controlled the Chinese mainland, Soviet influence would not stop at the Korean Peninsula but would extend into Indochina, providing a foundation for Ho Chi Minh's Communist movement to expand.

These strategic calculations are what kept Chiang's government viable on the mainland for four additional years after the war's end. Had Washington instead followed Britain's Yugoslav strategy — shifting support to the Communists as the more effective anti-Japanese force — it is entirely plausible that the officer accepting Japan's surrender in Taipei in August 1945 would have been Communist General Chen Yi (陳毅), not Nationalist Governor Chen Yi (陳儀). The two men share a name but occupied opposite sides of the civil war.

Looking back across the period from 1931 to 1945, Chiang Kai-shek's most significant achievement may not have been his refusal to surrender to Japan — though that refusal was real and consequential. It was his sustained ability to retain American support through years of military reversal, institutional dysfunction, and diplomatic pressure. Without that support, Taiwan itself might not have been preserved.

The author is a military historian.

Original Article in Chinese

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