Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
I was thinking more along the lines of neither the Nationalist nor the Communist guerrillas having a sanctuary or an external source of supply. Neither of them could duck across a line of control or border into a place the Japanese would not go. The only thing they could do if they chose was to move far enough away that the Japanese Army didn't feel like following.
Both the Communists and the KMT found effective sanctuary within China: they couldn't duck across a border, but they could duck deeper into the China, which is a big place.

Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
For guerrilla forces or insurgencies, without sanctuary or supply things are close to impossible.
This I think is exaggerated, and a dangerous assumption: it leads counterinsurgents to focus on whatever bad folks are providing that sanctuary instead of looking at the issues in their own goals, policies, and practices. To use a current analogy, that kind of thinking could lead us to think that our goals, policies, strategies, and tactics in Afghanistan aren't a problem, everything would be fine if it wasn't for Pakistan.

I don't think either Mao or the KMT had any particular desire to fight the Japanese more than they had to. They'd have been quite willing, not unreasonably, to let the Americans fight the Japanese while they prepared to fight each other. Lack of supply would be a constraint, but no amount of supply will get people to fight if they don't think it's in their interest to fight.

I think there are a number of reasons why guerrilla/counterguerrilla warfare in China hasn't received much attention. Most original source material would be written in Japanese or Chinese and heavily biased in both cases: there weren't many neutral observers on the ground. At the time this aspect of the fight was largely seen as a fairly insignificant adjunct to the dominant conventional warfare, and it didn't get much study in any theater. We also don't see much written on SWJ about, say, guerrilla resistance to German occupation in Russia or the Balkans.

I think there's also a sense that there's little to be learned from Japanese counterguerrilla practice in particular because it was so diametrically opposed to current practice and to what is currently considered acceptable. Japanese COIN was not notably pop-centric and placed a fairly low priority on winning hearts and minds.

As an aside, some time ago I looked into the differences between material published by Americans on guerrilla resistance to Japanese occupation of the Philippines and accounts coming from Filipinos. The differences were striking, to say the least. Even where written records exist they must be very carefully filtered for bias.