The bespectacled gent looking off-camera with the bemused grin is indeed Gen. Joseph Stillwell. Picture was taken in Maymyo in April 1942. Generalissimo Chiang and the Madame Chiang are undoubtedly grinning them selves at the irony of this historical photo - they both loathed Stillwell as he clearly saw through the game they were using, playing the USA, Britain and Russia off against each other to build the 'new dynasty' in China that they felt was their entitlement.
BTW, Chiang many times made it clear to anyone who cared to listen that he would halt aggression against the Japanese, not a formal alliance just a cessation of hostility, if he didn't continue to receive his due tonnage of material support each month. He was loosely allied with Mao and the Communists but recognized that he faced them after the war as a rival for control of Mainland China. He needed to build his reserves of military hardware to face this. So he was very sparing in his application of goods received to fight the Japanese at this time. Sparing - heck, he had to be cajoled, threatened, bribed and made promises to just to get him to supply trucks he was given to move his troops to within marching distance of the front lines.
This is one of the reasons he, Chiang kai-Shek, favored Chennault abd his group over Gen Stillwell. Chennault was his key to receiving aid. Roads were closed - the British didn't want to spare the manpower to rebuild them. Although they did commit a great number of Indian troops for this...all to naught. So Chennault and his airplanes held 2 key advantages for 'Peanut' or 'Peanut Head' (Stillwells' radio code name for CKS.)#1 - Chennaults planes could fly into the theater with supplies for Nationalist troops and CKSs' warehouses. #2 - Chennaults pilots could fly the Nationalist 'Air Force' fighter planes and hit Japanese troops so his troops would not have to fight (and he(CKS) wouldn't have to use the supplies he was demanding from his allies to fight the Japanese.)
For Chiang kai-Shek it was
all about the end-game ---He wanted power to control China. He made his alliances with this solely in mind - His power base.
From Wikipedia:
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The question as to which political group directed the Chinese war effort and exerted most of the effort to resist the Japanese remains a controversial issue.
In the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japan Memorial near the Marco Polo Bridge and in mainland Chinese textbooks, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) claims that it was the Communist Party that directed Chinese efforts in the war and did everything to resist the Japanese invasion. Recently, however, with a change in the political climate, the CCP has admitted that certain Nationalist generals made important contributions in resisting the Japanese. The official history in mainland China is that the KMT fought a bloody, yet indecisive, frontal war against Japan, while it was the CCP that engaged the Japanese forces in far greater numbers behind enemy lines. This emphasis on the CCP’s central role is partially reflected by the PRC’s labeling of the war as the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese War of Resistance rather than merely the War of Resistance. According to the PRC official point of view, the Nationalists mostly avoided fighting the Japanese in order to preserve its strength for a final showdown with the Communists. However, for the sake of Chinese reunification and appeasing the ROC on Taiwan, the PRC has now “acknowledged” that the Nationalists and the Communists were “equal” contributors because the victory over Japan belonged to the Chinese people, rather than to any political party.
Leaving aside Nationalists sources, scholars researching third party Japanese and Soviet sources have documented quite a different view. Such studies claim that the Communists actually played a minuscule involvement in the war against the Japanese compared to the Nationalists and used guerrilla warfare as well as opium sales to preserve its strength for a final showdown with the Kuomintang.[5] This is congruent with the Nationalist viewpoint, as demonstrated by history textbooks published in Taiwan, which gives the KMT credit for the brunt of the fighting. According to these third-party scholars, the Communists were not the main participants in any of the 22 major battles, most involving more than 100,000 troops on both sides, between China and Japan. Soviet liaison to the Chinese Communists Peter Vladimirov documented that he never once found the Chinese Communists and Japanese engaged in battle during the period from 1942 to 1945. He also expressed frustration at not being allowed by the Chinese Communists to visit the frontline,[6] although as a foreign diplomat Vladimirov may have been overly optimistic to expect to be allowed to join Chinese guerrilla sorties. The Communists usually avoided open warfare (the Hundred Regiments Campaign and the Battle of Pingxingguan are notable exceptions), preferring to fight in small squads to harass the Japanese supply lines. In comparison, right from the beginning of the war the Nationalists committed their best troops (including the 36th, 87th, 88th divisions, the crack divisions of Chiang’s Central Army) to defend Shanghai from the Japanese. The Japanese considered the Kuomintang rather than the Communists as their main enemy[7] and bombed the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing to the point that it was the most heavily bombed city in the world to date.[8] The KMT army suffered some 3.2 million casualties while the CCP increased its military strength from minimally significant numbers to 1.7 million men. This change in strength was a direct result of Japanese forces fighting mainly in Central and Southern China, away from major Communist strongholds such as those in Shaanxi.
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I have heard it said that Japanese archives indicate that Japanese forces took 90% of their casualties fighting the Nationalists. There’s another anecdote that 200 Nationalist generals got killed, whereas only 2 Communist generals were killed in the war. The real problem with Stilwell is that he tried to win WWII on the back of the Chinese military - something that was not within the ability of the Nationalists. It could be argued that Stilwell, by destroying the cream of the Nationalist armies in forlorn hopes against the Japanese military, is the true author of the Chinese Communist victory in 1949*. The best people that the Nationalists managed to recruit were fed into the Japanese meatgrinder, even while the Communists conducted what amounts to an extended period of rest and recreation during WWII.
* This victory cost us another 100,000 men in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. My view is that Stilwell has a lot to answer for.