Leseprobe

175 China was not represented at the Potsdam Conference. With the exception of the Potsdam Declaration, it was also not a topic on the official conference agenda. However, the results of the conference were important enough to have them made available to an interested Chinese audience in the form of a small brochure in the country’s official language, which was sold for 200 Yuan or 40 US cents. 1 This undoubtedly had less to do with the immediate results achieved at Cecilienhof Palace and more with the global interest of Chinese elites and the changing international status of the Republic of China result- ing from the Second World War. China, which was still under imperial- ist control, had won back its formal sovereignty during the war, albeit temporarily and with restrictions. Beyond that, the Big Three granted the country victor status, but at the same time treated it as a junior partner. In Potsdam, no decisive groundwork was made; essentially, the conference only confirmed previously drafted resolutions. The initial position When the Potsdam Conference began at Cecilienhof Palace, China had already been at war with Japan for fifteen years. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931 initially only worsened the long-standing political and military crisis, because after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1911, China had been at war almost without interruption, even if it was not raging in all areas of the coun- try to the same degree. Although the Republican revolution was itself a short civil war between radical and conservative elites, the young republic decayed into feuding warlord dominions starting in 1916, which could only be curbed in the mid-1930s by the Nationalist regime formed in 1928 under Chiang Kai-shek. On the other hand, this new leader provoked a civil war against the Communist Party of China, the former ally of the National Party (Guomindang, GMD), in the spring of 1927. Despite massive anti-Japanese protests all across the country, Chiang initially made fighting Communist bases his priority, until a combination of domestic and foreign policy factors caused him to change tack in the mid-1930s, thus allowing a second, if loose, united Nationalist-Communist Front against Japan to form that lasted until 1941. 2 China’s external weaknesses contributed to its inner fragmen- tation. During the nineteenth century, imperialist states had taken away important areas of its national sovereignty, especially the exter- ritorial jurisdiction over Western foreigners and sovereignty regarding customs issues. At the end of the 1890s, several great powers leased coastal base colonies for 99 years under the threat of violence if their demands were not met. Beyond this, they pressed the Chinese government to grant concessions for the building of railway lines and mines. The First World War smashed the imperialist united front; the German Empire lost its privileges in China in the Treaty of Versailles Thoralf Klein ← Chinese soldier guarding a line of P-40 fighters of the “Flying Tigers”