“There is an old Chinese saying,” notes Chun. “‘In Guizhou, the weather does not have three days of sunshine. The land does not have three leagues of level ground. The people do not have three coins in their pocket.’ Even by that standard Guizhou in 1945 was a God-forsaken place. Along the roads refugees had dropped and died like leaves from trees.”

Chun learned an ugly truth about the source of refugees when he was scouting the road to the town of Dushan, where the Japanese advance had halted with the onset of winter. “I remember coming down the hill to Dushan,” says Chun, “But it was gone. There was nothing left over a foot off the ground. It had been burned and destroyed, not by the Japanese, but by the Nationalists. It was part of their scorched-earth policy.”

By the end of the war, the Nationalist army under Chiang Kai-shek would seldom confront the Imperial Japanese Army. Instead, the Nationalists would strategically retreat, burning what was left behind, sending refugees fleeing, and stockpiling the lend-lease supplies given to them by the Americans.

http://catalyst.berkeley.edu/v6n1/alumnus-morrison-chun-on-wwii-in-china/