No Matter What, the Republic of China Was a Victorious Nation in WWII!!!

2006/2/11 11:34:24

Brother Zhongzheng's haplessness makes for excellent material for the audience to chatter about. History is always interpreted politically, and interpretation is always meant for spectators. But no matter what, the Republic of China was a victorious nation in WWII, and Brother Zhongzheng was the nationally recognized supreme wartime commander of the Republic at the time. This was even amusingly reflected in the forms of address used in the numerous letters Mao Runzhi wrote to Brother Zhongzheng around the 1940s.

And the first elevation of China's international standing since 1840 was precisely achieved during the Republic. The photograph of the Big Four historically attests to this. China, for the first time since 1840, went from being a victim of others' "spoils-sharing" to a participant in the "spoils-sharing." Becoming a founding member of the United Nations, thereby securing a historic position among the five great powers—this too was achieved during the Republic.

The Republic was indeed somewhat hapless, but among the current five great powers, France at the time had its entire country conquered—was the Republic more hapless than that? The gentleman who fled to England eventually became the president of France, and his degree of presidential haplessness was probably no less than Brother Zhongzheng's. When the Big Four gathered, this fellow didn't even have a shadow present. Later he managed to catch the last bus, and somehow the French still treated him as a hero. So what if a good-for-nothing succeeds—sometimes you can only let a good-for-nothing succeed. That's how history works. Don't understand? Go read a book!

The Chinese love to gab, and the characteristic of gabbing is a fondness for hypothesizing that cows can fly in the sky. Brother Zhongzheng becoming the supreme commander of the wartime resistance is usually characterized as a pie that fell from the sky. But this was the result of comprehensive competition under the circumstances of the time. Why him and not someone else? History itself is the best answer—there aren't this many hypotheses that need hypothesizing. So what about Xi'an? Why wasn't Brother Zhongzheng finished off right then and there so he could go verify his religious ideals? That too was the result of comprehensive competition. At the time, even Mao Runzhi understood that Brother Zhongzheng should be kept—what else is there for anyone else to say?

The victor becomes king, the loser a bandit—Brother Zhongzheng eventually lost, and that was his own fault. But in 1945 he won, and this victory has been historically recorded in the United Nations Charter and preserved to this day: Article 23, Paragraph 1 of the United Nations Charter stipulates: "The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council."

Nobody wins forever. History can be dramatized, ridiculed, fictionalized, politically narrated, or mythologized, but history is not something talked into existence. Victory can only pertain to specific matters, and as for people, there is no winning or losing—so-called victory over others ultimately ends as a pile of ash. If one insists on comprehensively determining victory or defeat by a person's final outcome, then—all are ash!