When interviewing a guest, journalists are free to ask whatever questions they want. But they can’t have their own facts.

The ABC’s Sarah Ferguson is in a privileged position, as anchor of the network’s premier TV current affairs program, 7.30.

She and her production team are free to choose whom they interview and ask any question they want.

We, as viewers, live with whatever bias they have, or simply switch off.

But Ferguson should not be allowed to make misleading statements, such as the false summary of the Chinese Communist Party’s role in World War II she provided in her interview with former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr on Wednesday 3 September.

As Carr summarised the Chinese story — the Japanese invasion of China that began in 1931 and ultimately led to one million Japanese troops being tied down fighting the Chinese — Ferguson chimed in:

“Well, there’s no question that that was a significant event, and I think it’s fair that we should point out to viewers that, of course, as you know, it was the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang, who defeated the Japanese, not the guerrilla forces of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Her statement is propaganda at its best, denigrating the role of the communist fighters of the day and, of course, belittling today’s Chinese Communist government.

In fact, the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists formed a temporary alliance to tackle the Japanese and neither can claim to have solely defeated the Japanese.

Here I must provide a few sources. Take, for example the account by the Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, Odd Arne Westad, in his book Restless Empire. On page 256 he says the Chinese Communist Party had been promoting a Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese United Front from 1935 onwards and by the spring of 1937 there was a form of limited co-operation to fight the Japanese in place between the Nationalists and the Communists.

On page 261, Westad says the fluidity of the frontline was such that both the Nationalists and the Communists turned to guerrilla war and this led to over-extension of Japanese lines and exposed military outposts.

The National WWII Museum: New Orleans says in 1937, as the Japanese invaded the great cities of the East, Chiang Kai-shek had to move to the interior while the Chinese Communists held out in their base in northwest China.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says in its summary of the Second Sino-Japanese war 1937-1945 that, “The communists were particularly successful in using guerrilla methods to resist Japan. The rapid Japanese advances broke down the established patterns of politico-military control. Communist troops and organisers moved into the vast rural areas behind Japanese lines. They organised village self-defence units, created local governments, and expanded their own armies, the Eighth Route Army, operating in the mountains and plains of north China, and the New Fourth Army in the lower Yangtze valley.”

and

“The scattered areas controlled by the  Communist Party and its armies grew during the war until they covered large parts of north and east China. In these border regions and ’liberated areas’, the regime was popular with the people. This was partly the result of economic and social reforms, which improved the conditions of the peasantry, and partly the result of the system of local government, which encouraged wide participation of the public through mass organisations (even though control was held firmly by the party). The army was also popular because of its good discipline and close relations with the common people upon whom it depended for existence.”

As is its way, “balance” for the ABC on any foreign affairs subject is to find a US commentator, usually a Democratic Party=leaning individual to speak on the matter, whether it be the war between Russia and Ukraine, or China, or the Middle East.

Rarely do we hear a Russian, a pro-Communist Chinese government official, or a Palestinian provide balance on these subjects.

So it was on Saturday, 6 September, that Radio National’s Nick Bryant found former US secretary of state, Ambassador Nicholas Burns to speak on China’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII.

Here we got another dose of distorted, US-centric history.

Bryant pointed out that the Chinese see World War II very differently from those in the West.

Burns opened his response by saying that US president Franklin D. Roosevelt took China very seriously in World War II.

“We had 500,000 American troops in China by the end of the war, demobilising the Japanese armed forces, ferrying them back to the home islands of Japan,” he said.

Burns said Roosevelt insisted that China be a permanent member of the UN Security Council and America recognised that China paid a huge price in World War II.

Burns then had to add: “The Soviet Union came in very late, August 1945.”

It is true that the Soviet Union officially declared war against Japan in August 1945.

But as early as 1937, and well before the Americans did anything, the Soviets sent arms, planes and pilots to combat the Japanese.

According to Westad, (page 258) during the first year of the war, the Soviets provided the Chinese Government with 348 bombers, 542 fighters, 82 T-tanks, 2118 vehicles, 1140 artillery guns and 9720 machine guns.

In the summer of 1939, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a war for control of Mongolia and Nuomen Han. The Japanese forces were soundly defeated by the Red Army under General Georgii Zhukov.

The Soviet Union entered World War II when invaded by Germany on 22 June 1941. It was in no position to manage a two-front, Western and Eastern war. The war with Germany was its priority.

It should also be added here that the US did not enter World War II at all until five months after the Soviet Union, when the US was attacked by Japan on 7 December 1941.

It’s also worth noting that in July 1940, Britain was considering limited forms of co-operation with Japan and closed the roads through Burma that had brought vital supplies to the Chinese. At the same time, the French authorities in Vietnam, who were now loyal to the Vichy-regime in France, cut off supplies to the Chinese from the south.

And it should not be forgotten that in November 1938, well after the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the then Australian Government supported the export of pig iron to militaristic Japan, and passed an anti-union act to enable the government to suppress the Waterside Workers’ Federation that opposed the export.

In the West, views of World War II are grossly distorted by Hollywood movies. Few seem to be aware of the huge Soviet losses, the Soviet success in halting the German offensive at Stalingrad, or the major turning point of the world’s largest tank battle at Kursk. Even less do we hear about the war in China, which tied down one million Japanese troops who might otherwise have been employed attacking Australia.

Every death is a tragedy. But the US, which was never invaded, came out of the war relatively unscathed. In contrast, China and the Soviet Union saw their territory destroyed and paid a huge price in lives lost, as shown by the table below.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.