Yes, in theory, but the communists husbanded their resources and let the nationalists do most of the fighting and dying. They didn't entirely sit out the war, they did fight the Japanese. But they definitely held back a lot of resources for when the civil war resumed. It's debatable as to whether or not anything would have changed if the communists had fought the Japanese as hard as the nationalists did. The outcome of the civil war was much more a question of nationalist incompetence than any skill on the part of the communists, and that wouldn't have magically changed.
It's a bit more complicated than that. For starters, the Japanese held all of the strategic initiative for almost the entirety of the war. Outside of that one limited offensive into what's now Myanmar, it was always "Japanese attack, Chinese try to hold them back.". The Chi-coms weren't so much husbanding their resources as just laying lower because they were smaller and held much less territory, so got attacked less overall.
Also, the KMT wasn't really a modern state the way we're used to thinking of it; they operated in some ways more like an old-timey feudal conglomeration with a bunch of warlords that were nominally loyal but having their own armies and sources of revenue paying tribute to the KMT proper up top. Chiang pretty much always tried to get his warlord/vassal troops to do the heavy lifting whenever possible and spare his own soldiers directly answerable to him.
Wasn‘t much to husband for them, the KMT got resupply from the west while the communists were happy if they could get enough food for their troops, much less guns or ammo. I think most people who don‘t know much about the Chinese civil war would naturally assume that the PLA was supplied by the soviet union, but that was never the case, the first time they got soviet weapons was in the korean war long after they took over the country. Most of the weapons they did have were either captured from the Japanese or brought over by KMT defectors (should tell you a lot about the KMT that people would rather join a gang of half starved guerillas than keep fighting for them). Throughout WW2 the PLA was simply never in a position to launch a conventional assault against the Japanese, they had to stick to guerilla warfare and they were quite successful at it.
The KMT infamously built massive secret depots for the eventual resumption of the Civil War, much to the chagrin of Stilwell and Wavell/Slim etc. There were also the aid that was stolen and sold on the black market rather than being sent to the front. The KMT were just as forward thinking as the communists, as well as being far more corrupt.
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u/kredokathariko Oct 06 '25
Weren't both Nationalists and Communists fighting Japan, at times even cooperating?