【正文】 ich natural resources of SouthEast Asia, and convinced that the Western powers were preoccupied with the war in Europe, the Japanese leaders agreed to broaden the scope of imperial expansion beyond the China theatre. They hoped, although without conviction, that they could attain their goals in the south by diplomacy. This decision inevitably altered the character of the China war and also led, within little more than a year, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the Chinese side, strategic and political considerations had persuaded the Nationalist leadership to wage a war of attrition. Chiang Kaishek claimed that the Japanese were spreading their resources of men and equipment too thin by advancing across the expanse of China.’ The longer our enemy struggles, the more he involves himself in difficulties。 while the longer we struggle, the stronger and more determined we bee. Chiang, like the Japanese, also wished to avoid decisive battles, because he anticipated that the Western Allies would ultimately be drawn into the struggle against Japan. Initially he looked to the Allies merely for material aid and for economic sanctions against Japan. But after Pearl Harbornews of which was greeted joyously in Chungking— he expected that Great Britain and especially the United States, with its enormous technological resources, would assume the major burden of defeating Japan. By 1943, the American ambassador to China, Clarence E. Gauss, observed that ‘The Chinese have persuaded themselves that [they] are too tired and too worn and too illequipped to make greater effort, especially when such effort may not be necessary。 88000 in 1942。 officers were intensely loyal to Chiang Kaishek. Most of the Nationalist forces, however, were direct descendants of warlord armies, manded by men who had risen to prominence independently of the central government. Their loyalties were therefore conditional and attenuated, and they were jealous and fearful of Chiang Kaishek’s growing power. Lung Yun, governor of Yunnan, for example, resisted central government encroachments upon his provincial power, and provided a refuge for intellectuals critical of the Chungking government. Governor Yen Hsishan, mander of the Second War Zone in North China and vice chairman of the Military Council, ruled his native Shansi as an autonomous satrapy. He prohibited units of the Central Army from entering his war zone, and maintained his own political party (the Democratic Revolutionary Comrades’ Association) as a counter to the Kuomintang. Indeed, since 1941, Yen had even maintained close and amiable relations with the Japanese. Other generals with provincial origins, such as Li Tsungjen (Kwangsi), Hsueh Yueh (Kwangtung), Yu Hsuehchung (Manchuria) and Fu Tsoi(Suiyuan) had lost their specifically regional bases, but retained mand of armies that were loyal to them rather than to Chiang Kaishek. The relationship between those nonCentral Army manders and the central government had been altered by the outbreak of war. Throughout the Nanking decade, the power of provincial militarists had been waning. Crucial to Chiang’s growing power had been his control of a politically loyal and relatively proficient army. But the destruction of Chiang’s best troops at Shanghai, including the bulk of his elite Germantrained divisions, caused the military balance within the Nationalist forces to shift back toward the nonCentral Army manders. Chiang’s political authority diminished proportionately. Throughout the war, Chiang endeavoured to right the political and military balance between himself and the regional manders by inserting KMT cadres into the provincial armies and by rebuilding his central forces with newly trained officers and modern equipment. These efforts excited the suspicions and animosity of the regional generals. They plained that the central government discriminated against them by sending their divisions into decimating bat with the Japanese while Chiang held his own forces safely in reserve. They were angered by inequitable allocations of fresh supplies, for Chiang distributed the bulk of new weapons and ammunition, including LendLease equipment from the United States, to his own forces rather than to the less trustworthy provincial armies. Domestic politics, in short, underlay Chiang’s conduct of the war, and he took advantage of it 4 to enhance his central power. No modern state, of course as Chiang’s supporters have argued could easily tolerate subversively independent attitudes among its military manders. Yet the means that Chiang employed to enhance central government powers may not have been the most efficacious. In any event, the antipathies of the provincial militarists grew keener as the war progressed. In 1944, a coalition of the leading provincial militarists was actually plotting to overthrow Chiang’s government. Meanwhile many nonCentral Army manders simply defected to the Japanese. Twelve of these generals defected in 1941。 and in 1943, the peak year, fortytwo defected. Over 500,000 Chinese troops acpanied these defecting generals, and the Japanese employed the puppet armies to protect the occupied areas against Communist guerrillas. One of the deepest flaws in the Nationalist army, exacerbated during the war, was the poor quality of the officer corps. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, senior American officer in China after October 1944, characterized the Nationalist officers as ‘incapable, inept, untrained, petty… altogether inefficient. This was also characteristic of the non Central Army senior manders, most of whom had gained distinction and position as a result less of their military skills than of their shrewdness in factional manoeuvring and timely shifts of loyalty. Even the senior officers who had graduated from the Central Military Academy, ho