A most important aspect of their work was the collection of food and clothes for the Eighth Route Army. Once, after weeks of careful preparation, they collected 60 hundredweight of grain from sympathetic families and carted it all away in one night. They followed this up with repeated collections of clothing and shoes—articles made especially for the front by women of the village who sat sewing in the open street day after day. The strutting sentries in the pay of the Japanese never knew that the shoes put together within reach of their hands were destined for the feet of their enemies.
An equally important task was the collection of intelligence. This was T’ien-ming’s specialty. He kept close watch on all the activities of the enemy troops and the puppet government. Every few days he met with an Eighth Route liaison man either at his uncle’s home in Little Gully or on Great Ridge Mountain south of Long Bow Village. There he had a small plot of land that he could visit without suspicion. When he had something to report he made a little pile of stones, and one day later at an agreed time the army man always appeared.
T’ien-ming passed on to him whatever he or the others learned about troop movements, the numbers in the fort, how many horses they had, how much grain, whether they could be easily taken, who came to Long Bow from other places, what they did there, who were the important collaborators, and whether they could be won over.
He took back with him to the village news of the resistance in other places, reports of victories on far-flung battlefronts and of the extension of Liberated Areas to new regions, and news of the outside world where, according to the puppet press, all trends pointed toward victory for the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” He also delivered the letters which the puppet village head, Shang Shih-t’ou, found lying in his courtyard. It was the hope of the Fifth District leader that Shang Shih-t’ou could be persuaded to co-operate with the Anti-Japanese government just as T’ien-ming’s uncle was doing in Little Gully. But the letters, as we have seen, elicited no response.
When the Fifth District leader found that Shang Shih-t’ou could not be weaned from his treasonous course, he reported the matter to the county government. The Long Bow puppet leader was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. A detachment of Eighth Route soldiers was assigned to carry out the sentence. Several times they entered the village at night, but were unable to find where the condemned man slept.
T’ien-ming then thought of a way to bring him home, at least for a while. He personally got in touch with Shang Shih-t’ou’s wife’s aunt and encouraged her to spread the rumor about Shih-t’ou’s nocturnal doings that led to his capture.
A tip from T’ien-ming also brought to an end the career of the marauding Kuomintang commander, Fan Tung-hsi. Not wishing to foment civil war, the Eighth Route commanders had left Fan Tung-hsi’s forces more or less to themselves. They hoped eventually to persuade them to join the liberation struggle. But as time went on and Tung-hsi’s crimes increased, the peasants of many communities demanded that something be done. One evening Tung-hsi brought ten men into Long Bow for a night of carousal. Word was quickly passed to the hills. The Eighth Route Army sent a squad on the double. In the early hours of the morning they surrounded the house where the men were staying. When Fan Tung-hsi refused to surrender, they fired the whole courtyard. Fan Tung-hsi and his ten colleagues burned to death. It was shortly after this that the rest of the detachment, under Shih Jen-pao, surrendered to the Japanese and were incorporated into the puppet Fourth Column.
In between collections of grain and clothing, the gathering of intelligence, the frequent trips to the hills, and the backbreaking work of making a living from Long Bow’s hard soil, the young men of the underground took what time they could to study politics. The county leaders regarded them as the nucleus for the future transformation of the village and hoped to develop in them a revolutionary consciousness. In the Liberation Areas beyond the reach of the enemy this was done by daily study in every armed unit, every government office, and every mass organization. Regular schools were also set up where outstanding fighters and workers were sent to learn political theory. For underground workers such organized instruction was much more difficult. The best they could do was talk with the district leader whenever there was an opportunity and learn from him about the protracted war they were fighting, the united front of all classes that made it possible, and the New Democracy which Mao Tse-tung predicted once victory was won. The district leader also gave them the writings of Mao Tse-tung on these subjects. None of them was able to read well but they worked through them as best they could. In this way they made their first acquaintance with such basic concepts as classes, the importance of labor as the source of wealth, stages in the development of society, and the necessity of land reform as the key to China’s future.
The development of the peasants’ political consciousness did not proceed very far. The war intervened. In 1943 the village leader of Ku-yi, their main contact, was killed. So was the underground leader of the Fifth District. Such a strict blockade was set up north of Long Bow that it was all but impossible to get through to the Liberated Areas. For awhile the Long Bow underground lost touch with the county and district government altogether. To make matters worse, So-tzu and Lai-pao had no food to carry them through the winter and had to leave to look for work in Taiyuan. They took with them a few dollars that had been collected for the support of the resistance front. This left a bad impression with those villagers who had contributed it. When the two men returned in the spring they refunded the money, re-established contact with the district government and set to work once again, but this time underground activity was more dangerous than ever and the people were more afraid to act.
The enemy had not been idle. Kuo Te-yu, former head of public affairs, had replaced Shang Shih-t’ou as village head. He made exposure of the underground his main task. Afraid, like his predecessor, to sleep at home, he made a practice of lodging in the homes of those whom he suspected of resistance activity. He and his brother, Kuo Fu-kuei, the new head of the police, spent many a night on Fu-yuan’s k’ang hoping to surprise and kill the Eighth Router Ts’ai-yuan, should he arrive from the hills for a visit. During the day they hauled one peasant after another into the village office for questioning and did not hesitate to beat half to death those who were slow in answering. Thus they spread a net to take advantage of any break that could lead them to their quarry. The Eighth Route Army, decimated by the “Three All” campaigns of the two previous years, was too hard pressed to intervene.
Under such conditions the slightest slip could lead to disaster. A cousin’s illicit love affair in another village almost cost T’ien-ming his life. This cousin, who lived in Little Gully, got involved in an affair with a girl from Li Village Gulch, the first village to the south of Long Bow. He was wont to climb over her compound wall and stay all night, much to the distress of her family who spread a rumor that he was a member of the Eighth Route Army. They had no idea that this was really so, but said it for revenge.
Their revenge was not long in coming and must surely have satisfied the most macabre sense of injury. The troops in the fort in Long Bow, having heard the rumor, conducted a search for the young man and found him in T’ien-ming’s home. Both he and T’ien-ming were arrested, taken to the fort, and tortured when they refused to talk. The next morning T’ien-ming’s cousin was beheaded with a fodder-chopping knife. T’ien-ming would have suffered the same fate but for the fact that the soldiers had no real information about him. All the men in the village insisted that he was nothing but a hardworking peasant who meant no harm to anyone. They put their thumb-prints to a document guaranteeing his behavior. This, plus a sum of money realized through the sale of T’ien-ming’s half-interest in a donkey, secured his release. Without the donkey it was difficult to see how he could survive the next crop season, but at least he walked the streets alive.
“Shen So-tzu and Kung Lai-pao were not so lucky. A drug addict named Tseng Tung-hsi, who made a practice of smoking
heroin with the commander of the puppet troops, somehow learned the details of the underground village government. He passed the information on. So-tzu, Lai-pao, and Fu-yuan were immediately arrested. Eighteen days of torture and near starvation failed to break them down. So-tzu was shot, Lai-pao cut to pieces with a samurai sword, and Fu-yuan finally released.
Fu-yuan was released because the puppet forces were afraid his brother Ts’ai-yuan would bring the Eighth Route Army back for revenge and because his family was in a position to pay a handsome ransom. The puppet commander Wen Ch’i-yung demanded and got $7,000 in puppet currency (probably worth about $70 in U. S. currency at that time), a large quantity of heroin, a guarantee of Fu-yuan’s good behavior from the whole village and a promise from Fu-yuan that he would entice his brother into a village ambush within six months.
This condition almost drove Fu-yaun to suicide. “The demand that I betray my brother frightened me,” he said years later. “I was determined to do no such thing. Every time I heard the puppet soldiers’ boots pounding the wooden bridge as they crossed the moat, I thought they were coming for me. I ran to the well and sat beside it. I was determined that they should never take me alive again. Whenever our dog barked at night, people thought my brother had come. I killed the dog.
“When I got a little better and was able to walk I tried to leave for the mountains but the rest of the family would not let me go. Their thumb-prints were on the guarantee. They said that if I disappeared they would all be killed and the whole village punished. Finally I went to stay with some poor relatives in another village.”
These tragic events occurred only a few weeks before the war ended. The two leaders of the Long Bow underground, too poor to buy their way out, died rather than betray their comrades. They thus saved the lives of half a dozen young men whom they had had time to organize and educate. On this half dozen devolved the task of Long Bow’s reconstruction.
9
The Whirlwind
If the sharp sword be not in your hand,
How can you hope your friends will remain many?
The Liberator
Emperor Wu Ti
THE EMPEROR of Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 10, 1945.
Long Bow Village was liberated by the Eighth Route Army and the People’s Militia of Lucheng County on August 14, 1945, after three days of fighting.
Why, if the war was over on August 10th, should there have been a bitter battle for Long Bow that lasted until the 14th? Research into this question throws considerable light on subsequent events in China.
The local resistance forces had to fight their way into Long Bow Village because, within a few hours after the Japanese surrender, Chang Kai-shek issued two orders which brought his “Trojan Horse” strategy to its infamous fruition. The first commanded the Eighth Route Army to stop where it was and to take no action against the Japanese or puppet troops which it confronted. The second directed the puppet troops, over 400,000 of whom garrisoned the North, to maintain “law and order,” resist any advance on the part of the Eighth Route Army, and hold all occupied territory pending the arrival of representatives from Chungking. Within a very short time, leading puppet politicians and generals were appointed officials of the Nationalist administration and officers of the Nationalist Army. The Japanese were ordered to surrender to them and to them alone. General MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, gave full American backing to this move by issuing a general order making Chiang Kai-shek’s forces sole agent for receiving the surrender of the Japanese forces in China proper.*
By this extraordinary maneuver, Chiang attempted, without firing a shot, to re-establish traditional gentry power throughout those vast areas of China where for eight long years of war the Communist-led Eighth Route Army, New Fourth Army, South China Anti-Japanese Brigade, with the aid of the People’s Militia had held at bay 69 percent of the Japanese forces in China and 95 percent of the puppet troops.*
From the military point of view this was an audacious strategy. When viewed in terms of troop numbers, fire power, and the strategic location of forces, it looked like a sure formula for victory. At a minimum Chiang expected the puppet forces to hold their own until, by massive airlift and naval ferry, the Americans helped him shoehorn into the North the newly equipped and trained divisions which he had been holding in reserve in the hinterland. Then with his most modern armies in position, Chiang expected to liquidate the Liberated Areas in a matter of months.
Politically the maneuver was disastrous. The destiny of nations is rarely determined by manpower or fire power alone. Chiang and his American advisers reckoned, as usual, without the people of China. What to them seemed a brilliant coup appeared to the vast majority of the Chinese people a ghastly betrayal of everything for which they had fought and suffered. This was particularly true in the Liberated Areas where the population had borne the full fury of the Japanese assault and hated the puppet troops with a hatred more bitter than that which they nursed against the Japanese themseleves. When Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh ordered the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army to take the offensive and force the surrender of the troops that faced them, millions of militia men and tens of millions of ordinary people gave them the most enthusiastic support. Within a few days several hundred thousand square miles of territory with a population of over 50 million people were liberated.**
Finding himself unable to stem the popular tide by the use of puppet troops turned patriot by decree, Chiang made a further desperate move. He ordered the Japanese Army back into battle. On August 23, 1945, Ho Ying-ch’in, Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist Armies, directed Yasugi Okamura, Commander-in-Chief of Japan’s forces in China, to defend the positions they already held and to recover the territories recently lost to the Liberated Areas.*
Simultaneously, the American military, by no means confident of Chiang’s strength, and fearful lest neither his “Trojan Horse” puppets nor the demoralized Japanese could hold out against the Communist-led offensive, dumped 50,000 marines into the port of Tientsin and deployed them rapidly north and west along the main trunk railroads. The marines paid special attention to the line to Mukden.
Fanning out along the railroads, ostensibly to help take over from the Japanese, American forces became involved in skirmishes with Eighth Route guerrillas whose survival depended on smashing the tracks. More than once American marines and ex-puppet Kuomintang forces conducted joint operations against the “red bandits” who were “disrupting communications.”** No more damaging coalition of forces could possibly have been assembled in a planned and conscious effort to dissipate the “reservoir of goodwill” which American wartime policy had built up in China. The attack on the Liberated Areas brought China to the brink of all-out civil war, and made the United States an aggressor in the eyes of millions of Chinese.
Such were the events taking place on a national and world scale which made a battle for Long Bow Village necessary. The village was not surrendered to the popular forces that surrounded it. It had to be taken.
Even though the Japanese contingent of the garrison had been withdrawn sometime in July, the forces in the Long Bow blockhouse were still formidable. One hundred men of the puppet Fourth Column, well equipped with modern Japanese weapons, were entrenched there. Additional manpower was provided by several dozen new recruits who made up the Ai Hsiang Tuan or “Love the Village Corps,” a creation of the Shansi provincial Kuomintang working through the puppet administration. The “Love the Village Corps” was a last-minute attempt to give collaborators and “running dogs” the status of “patriots” and provide some framework in occupied territory for the return of the Kuomintang to power. The Long Bow youths who joined this corps were young men who had collaborated in one way or another with the Japanese during the years of the occupation. They were the street captains, Self-Defense Corps rank and file, and minor village officials who had been conscripted or appointed, often against their will, to posts in the apparatus of oppression. Fearing re
venge at the hands of the victorious Eighth Route Army, they asked for protection in the fort and many took an active part in its defense.
But all the remnant puppet forces and the last-minute irregulars organized by the Kuomintang were no match for the Eighth Route Army and its supporting militia. The seasoned anti-Japanese troops surrounded all the strong points that flanked the Changchih-Lucheng highway simultaneously and still had several hundred regulars to spare for the biggest blockhouse of them all, at Long Bow. They did not immediately storm its stake-lined moats and mud walls but moved quietly into position, probed the defenses, and exchanged scattered shots in order to play on the nerves of the defenders while their own “Trojan Horse” tactic had time to bear fruit. The Trojan Horse in this case was T’ien-ming. He had joined the “Love the Village Corps” and gone inside the fort to feel out sentiment, count the defenders, and estimate their weapons and ammunition. After three days on the inside, T’ien-ming came out with a report that food supplies were almost gone and morale close to zero. By that time the militiamen from all over the county had been brought up. The fields were alive with armed men. They clogged every strip of corn and tall kaoliang that served as cover in the open countryside and overflowed into the cotton and potato patches. Peasants in the village estimated their number at well over a thousand. When, in the dead of night, the bugle sounded the call to attack, militiamen and regulars swarmed over the walls from all sides. The battle was soon over. The Fourth Column surrendered unconditionally.
Like a string of Chinese firecrackers exploding on New Year’s Day, the attacks followed one another down the valley. Dozens of occupied villages were liberated within a few hours. Leaving the militia to mop up the rear, the main attack units then moved southward to surround the walled city of Changchih where the Japanese troops still held out in force.
Fanshen Page 14