China, Nationalist

Despite Germany s surrender, Japan continued to resist the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allied Forces. Knowing that the U.S. would shortly have enriched uranium and plutonium bombs ready for use enabled Truman to avoid extending Japan an offer of surrender that allowed the Emperor to continue to rule. On July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Declaration was issued via radio to Japan. President Truman, Chiang Kai-Shek of Nationalist China, and Winston Churchill of Great Britain called on the Japanese government to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction. 4 Japanese leadership rejected the declaration on July 29, 1945. 

Further confusion is caused by the popular and political use of nationalist as the label for anti-communist governments and parties in China, Korea and Vietnam. This obscures the way in which communist movements mobilised anti-imperial and ethnie nationalism against the state nationalism of the governments they opposed. 

Following the 1911 revolution, the Ministry of Health of the nationalist government sought to curtail or eliminate traditional Chinese medicine. However, after the communist revolution of 1949, the new government reversed the ban on traditional medicine, establishing a number of traditional medical colleges and institutes whose role is to train physicians and further investigate the uses of herbs. Even in Western hospitals in China, apothecaries are available to dispense herbs upon request. 

Jonathan Marshall, "Opium and Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China—1927A5," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3 (1976) 19 18. 

Revisionists were more concerned with the interplay between this superiority complex and the hundred years of ignominy that China had suffered under unequal treaties imposed by Western powers after the Opium War of 1842. The China specialists at the Senate hearings presented an image of China derived from three main historical observations. First, it was historically a very big, ancient, isolated, unified, and self-sufficient empire, and because of this, an intensely ethnocentric great power. Second, because of its humiliation under the Western gunboat diplomacy of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were ultra-nationalistic and had a... 

Later, the China specialists who articulated the Resurgent Power image of China portrayed the attack as arising from historical, nationalistic Chinese territorial claims, rather than from communist expansionism. See Iriye, ed., US Policy toward China, pp. 91-3, 112.. 

Sino-American Alliance Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia. London M. E. Sharpe, 1997. 

Strategy and delivery intersected on July 26 and synchronized. The Indianapolis arrived at Tinian. Three Air Transport Command C-54 cargo planes departed Kirtland Air Force Base with the three separate pieces of the Little Boy target assembly two more ATC C-54 s departed with Fat Man s initiator and plutonium core. Meanwhile Truman s staff released the Potsdam Declaration to the press at 7 p.m. for dispatch from Occupied Germany at 9 20. It offered on behalf of the President of the United States, the President of Nationalist China and the Prime Minister of Great Britain to give Japan an opportunity to end this war ... 

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