finally in the position of wartime ally.
The Second World War prompted the
War prompted the first collective
Western bow to Chinese dignity, the relinquishment by Britain
and the United States in 1943 of all special rights in China,
the complex of privileges acquired in the "unequal treaties".
Britain had earlier given up certain concessions and
settlements; but this was the first general renunciation. It
was made
made easier by the fact that all the possessions in
question were in Japanese hands; and the modern reader is
struck by how late in the day the change occurred. Other
Western states followed suit. (The new Bolshevik regime had
won credit by making a similar gesture as early as the
nineteen twenties.) There was a short honeymoon period in
relations between China and Britain. But the accumulated
a half were not so easily
felt by the Chinese as an
resentments of a century and
dissipated. Britain was still
oppressive imperialist presence, visible in its string of
consulates and merchant houses, still enjoying a dominant
commercial position and still esconced in its original base,
in Hong Kong. Frictions developed over the implementation of
the 1943 agreement and in the councils of the war leaders
Britain, unlike the United States, was seen as undervaluing
the Chinese contribution to the struggle and the strategic
importance of the Far Eastern theatre as a whole.
So civil war succeeded the Anti-Japanese War; and the
Chinese agony, which had passed through the stages of the fall
of the Qing dynasty, the irresponsibility and corruption of
the Republic, the chaos and violence of the warlord era and
the horrors of the Japanese invasion, now entered on its final
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