by Emily Hahn
9 THE INCIDENT 1936–41
A number of other military leaders, too, were convinced that breaking point had been reached. Hu Han-min died suddenly, but he had followers. It seems strange that they should not have realized the Generalissimo was of their mind: no one but a madman would have planned to remain non-combative until he was squeezed to death. But it was a tense period and Chiang Kai-shek had never been a communicative type.
By this time, more forbearance with Japan was almost impossible. Yet the Japanese, like Chiang’s generals, evidently did not realize that he was getting ready to act against them. They crowded the Kuomintang back and back. Every so often a Japanese national in China would be killed by a mob or murdered by some unknown hand: within a year the toll amounted to seven of these unfortunates, and after each occasion the Japanese Ambassador insisted on tighter and yet tighter controls. Their demands for more “economic co-operation” were an old story by this time. In 1936 the Japanese diplomats in Nanking complained that Chinese schoolchildren were being taught to hate Japan; they demanded a revision of Chinese textbooks forthwith. Their insistence that Manchukuo be recognized mounted to a pitch of shrillness. While they talked in terms of diplomatic courtesy—or at least in what passed for courtesy—to the Foreign Minister in Nanking, they permitted and even encouraged large-scale smuggling in the North. Customs barriers and the whole tariff system upon which China’s revenues depended were being wiped out. Goods came in untaxed; silver flowed out freely, as it had done ever since America went off the gold standard. Foreign brokers made fortunes out of the disturbed situation, while Nanking’s coffers were drained.
For months the Generalissimo parried Japanese demands with what appeared to be indifference. All conversations between their representatives and his government were carried on through lesser lights. The crucial moment when his attitude suddenly stiffened was not marked by any drama. He left it to the Foreign Minister to say one day in October 1936, almost casually, that China rejected Japan’s demands separately and distinctly and wanted abrogation of the Tangku truce. This jolted the Japanese; they had not realized the moment of decision was so near at hand. They retired to chew it over. Perhaps, they thought, it was only a passing mood on Nanking’s part.
But it was not going to blow over. Signs of a change in Chiang’s policy were next perceived in the North, where Japanese expansion was now moving in its customary methodical manner to the region of Suiyuan Province. Here the invaders incited the Mongols who roved the plains above the border to cross over and claim adjacent territory. The Chinese resisted. Chinese had resisted before, always with the same disastrous results; this time it was different. They were better equipped and altogether in good heart. They drove back the Mongols, recaptured territory which had long been in enemy hands, and occupied Pailingmiao. There had not been such a thrill of pride in China since Hankow extraterritoriality was abolished. The rejoicing was loudest, as is usually the case, at the farthest point from the actual battlefield. City clerks in Canton and Shanghai whooped and rallied, and turned again to their ordinary peacetime pursuits. Resistance in Suiyuan was nice for the ego, but it didn’t really impinge on life. In Sian, on the other hand, this crumb of hope was really only a crumb. The Tungpei men grunted and went on complaining.
For more than a year the routed Reds had plodded their way on the Long March to the Northwest. According to their rather scanty reports they were heroic and angelic the whole time. Villages turned out to do them honor; only the satanic Nationalists tried to impede their progress, as usual always in the most unfair manner. (An American writer indignantly describes Chiang Kai-shek flying over their retreating ranks merely to gloat.) According to equally prejudiced Nationalist reports the Reds were a scourge on the countryside, snatching food from starving village children, commandeering houses by the dozen, and laying waste the farms. One jaundiced foreign observer merely said wearily, “A plague on both their houses.” Though nobody loves an army, the Reds on the whole behaved better than the hordes of war-lord mercenaries.
Toward the end of 1935, as the vanguard neared the northwest provinces, Yen Hsi-shan sprang to attention, for the Reds were obviously headed in the direction of Shansi. Yen had never come out definitely for or against them. He had treated with this or that local Red leader in his time; an unusually conscientious war lord, he was attracted by some of the Marxist theory. But Communism, flourishing and benevolent in its early phases of agrarian reform, was one thing; a large military band of refugees was quite another. Shansi was much better off without them; Yen was in full accord with the Generalissimo on this point, and when the first Communists to arrive made tentative gestures toward settling into Shansi, he sent them about their business. There were a few battles in the southwest of the province. The Reds were all driven out before the end of March 1936.
They settled down in Shensi next door, in Pao An, a desolate territory where there was no resistance from the few farmers who occupied it. From March until December they stayed there, recuperating from their ordeal and reorganizing. They announced their soviet republic and sorted out the situation. They claimed to number about fifty thousand in all, though on other occasions they said that their ranks had shrunk during the Long March from ninety thousand to five thousand.
Moscow was acutely interested in their whereabouts. Like Chiang Kai-shek, the Russians viewed with alarm the rapid progress of the Japanese. They did not wish to do anything about it themselves, but they decided on a change of policy for the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly it was time to stop harrying the Generalissimo and help him instead. When Mao’s rival, Chang Kuo-t’ao, protested against being forced into such a sudden reversal, he was reminded, as even the best Communists must be from time to time, that he must take the long view. Mao Tse-tung didn’t protest against the new policy, and in the final showdown that is why the big men in Moscow allowed him to wrest complete control from Chang Kuo-t’ao.
In August 1936, in Moscow, a proposal was approved and adopted: there was to be a national revolutionary struggle against Japanese imperialism “and its Chinese servitors.” In October, Chiang had occasion angrily to reject the united-front conception during a hurried visit to Sian to interview Chang Hsueh-liang. The Reds captured Yenan in December and moved in close to the Young Marshal’s headquarters.
Chiang’s visit to the Young Marshal on the twenty-second of October was in response to an urgent call for help and advice. The Generalissimo found Chang Hsueh-liang co-operating well enough, on friendly relations with General Yang Hu-cheng, who headed the Shensi forces, but neither man was attending to what should have been his chief duty, fighting and suppressing the Communists. Hsueh-liang explained that his men were unwilling to carry on any longer with the campaign. They had been reluctant since the beginning, agreeing with the Reds, with whom they were fraternizing nowadays, that the real war should be with the Japanese and not with them at all. Moreover, the soldiers were convinced that Chiang was using them where he should have been employing his own Nanking troops, favoring his people at their expense.
Recently the troops had acquired an even more cogent argument against anti-Communist action. They knew that the Reds had made a handsome offer, that in return for cessation of hostilities and a rightabout of objective they promised they would give up their aims. No more attempts to undermine the Kuomintang, no more anti-Nanking propaganda, no more of anything except earnest co-operation against the Japanese. In fact, they wanted to stop being Communists. Could anything be fairer?
Nobody realized how well convinced the Young Marshal himself was by these arguments. Chiang seems to have taken his talk as a statement of his men’s feelings rather than his own. Nor did the Generalissimo know that Chang’s colleague Yang Hu-cheng was already converted. Chiang treated his two generals like prefects who have failed to keep their dormitories in order. He blew up in one of his well-known histrionic rages, so often used to good effect in military conferences. He pounded the table and insisted upon more action along the
lines already laid down. Then he went and spoke to some of the cadets himself in the Sian Military Academy. Chiang’s oratorical style and content have never been flexible, to put it mildly; he hammered it in again and again that the Reds were the enemy and Japan only a secondary menace. The students flared to anger. Some leaped to their feet and argued with the Generalissimo and assailed his theories; altogether there was a most spirited row, and nobody felt at all calmed down by its sequel, when Chang Hsueh-liang expelled three of the insurgents.
Just to show how unmoved he was, Chiang repeated the whole speech at another school at Loyang on his way home. But still he was not satisfied that he had stamped on the mutiny, and he sent word to his secret agents that they should redouble their watchfulness in Sian. As one immediate result, three of the hottest-tempered local firebrands disappeared overnight. The Army seethed with anger. Chang Hsueh-liang raided the party headquarters, found the students, and restored them to the school.
On October 31 Chiang would be fifty according to Chinese count, and fifty is a very important age in his country. Months ahead of time the government collected contributions for a fleet of airplanes, China’s birthday present to the Generalissimo. There was a big ceremony at the Nanking airport, with a fly-past of new planes spelling out the national hero’s name and age. Thousands of spectators crowded the field; the only ones missing were the Chiangs themselves and a few other V.I.P.s who had been called to Loyang for an emergency military conference. Yen Hsi-shan met them there, and Chang Hsueh-liang, and many more. “I must tell you,” the Young Marshal had written, “that I cannot control my army much longer.”
Chiang’s diary, which was soon to become famous, gave no hint in the entries for the first week of December that he foresaw danger to himself. But he was wary of the general situation. One of his best divisions had been sent to Sian to encourage the others by taking the field against the Communists. They were promptly ambushed and overpowered. Moreover, Yang Hu-cheng’s troops, though they were Shensi men and not aggrieved exiles like the Young Marshal’s forces, had held an unofficial vote and decided unanimously that they must fight Japan and leave the Reds alone. On the seventh of December, therefore, Chiang, with an assorted set of generals and bodyguards, flew up to Sian for a conference.
He went to lodge at Lintung, a hot-springs resort on Lishan Mountain, with his guard and the leader of the hated secret police, who was his nephew. The hotel wasn’t big enough for the whole party, and the subsidiary generals and officials were put up in town, fifteen miles off, in the Sian guesthouse. For several days there were interviews, with much squabbling and jockeying for position. As life would not have seemed normal without a student demonstration, on the ninth a parade of youths started out to march to Lintung from town. The police, ordered to break it up, fired in the customary wild manner and wounded two of the children.
Chiang’s secret police reported that a mutiny was brewing. The Red secret police reported in their turn that Chiang’s police were planning to break up the mutiny. Back and forth went the rumors. The boiling of the town was almost audible, like that of a giant teakettle. Foreign interpreters of the Communist point of view were tipped off, and started to gather, mostly from their watching posts in Peking, with freshly sharpened pencils at the ready.
The evening of the eleventh arrived. There had been a stormy conference among the Shensi commanders, some of whom were averse to waiting for action from the Kuomintang. They must hurry up and mutiny, they insisted, or they would find themselves imprisoned before they knew it. Yang Hu-cheng was especially determined, and at last, before dinnertime, he had his way and the mutiny was agreed on. He and Chang Hsueh-liang had been asked to dine at Lintung with Chiang Kai-shek, but the Young Marshal presented himself alone to Chiang and explained that Yang was entertaining the smaller fry in Sian. He seemed ill at ease, ate with small appetite, and took his leave early, after introducing Chiang to a general, Sun Ming-chiu. Sun was really there to spy out the land.
Sian is a cold country, and this was December. Outside, the bare, rocky land was covered with a light snowfall that would probably be there until spring. It was still dark, very early in the dawn of December 12, when the coup got under way. The Generalissimo had waked up as usual at five o’clock and started the day with his exercises. He was just beginning to get dressed when he heard shots at the front gate. Most of the guard on the hotel were Chang Hsueh-liang’s men; Chiang had brought only his own bodyguard and twenty extra soldiers. Two of his personal guards went out to investigate; they did not come back.
Chiang decided, with anger but without undue surprise, that a few of Chang Hsueh-liang’s troops had revolted as the Young Marshal had long warned him they might. He did not appreciate the full extent of the mutiny. Even when his lieutenant sent word back to the bedroom that the attackers had penetrated as far as the second gate into the hotel, he did not understand that this was a big matter. The lieutenant also reported that the back of the hotel grounds were not yet cut off, and so with two of his men the Generalissimo, just as he was in nightshirt and no shoes, ran out a back door and made for the wall gate at the side. Somewhere in the excitement he lost his false teeth.
The wall gate being locked, they ran around inside to a point as far back of the building and up the hill as they could reach. It was only about ten feet high, as Chiang said in his memoirs, and apparently easy to get over. They scrambled to the top and jumped off. In the dark they did not see that the drop would take them straight into an empty moat, much lower than the inside level. Chiang fell thirty feet to the bottom and injured himself badly. For several minutes he couldn’t move. Then the guards helped pull him out of the ditch, and with their aid he walked painfully to a little outlying temple where some of his men were stationed. They took turns helping him beyond that, up the hill.
Chiang was in acute pain and it was terribly cold for a practically naked man to go mountain climbing, but even now he wasn’t really worried. Moving slowly as he had to, it took him half an hour to reach the top of the hill. In the gathering daylight his party was plainly visible to the watchers below, and firing suddenly commenced from all sides, killing some of his companions. Chiang began to realize the scope of the affair. He and the surviving guards hastily took refuge in a cave halfway down the mountain slope. For nearly an hour and a half they hid there, listening to their pursuers running back and forth, searching. They heard firing in the hotel, and then the firing ceased. Then somebody spied the Generalissimo and cried out to his companions. Chiang overheard them arguing as to whether or not to shoot him before they took any other action. They weren’t quite sure who he was.
“I am the Generalissimo,” he called. “Don’t be disrespectful.” He added that they should kill him; it was a suggestion he was to make repeatedly throughout his durance, not hysterically but in a spirit of propriety.
But they did not seem inclined to kill him. The superior officer who came running to handle the affair was that same General Sun Ming-chiu who had been brought into his apartments and introduced by Chang Hsueh-liang the previous night. He knelt down—“with tears in his eyes,” noted Chiang—and courteously requested the Generalissimo to go down the mountain. Chiang wanted to go into the hotel to put on some clothes and lie down to rest his back, but when through the doorway he saw that the place was wrecked and corpses lay all over the floor, he changed his mind. One of the corpses was that of his nephew, who was summarily executed as soon as the rebels got hold of him.
Throughout the proceedings Chiang scolded Sun Ming-chiu as if the general were one of his own erring cadets. He was outraged, furious, shocked; he was anything but cowed. He demanded that the Young Marshal be brought to him. Sun replied that Chang was in Sian, and very politely requested His Excellency too to go into town, where he would be more comfortable. Chiang told him to hold his tongue. Sun saluted, manifestly unmoved. At last Chiang agreed to go into town. No one had as yet explained exactly what was up or who was in the conspiracy.
The Gene
ralissimo noticed that he was taken to Yang Hu-cheng’s headquarters. “A feeling of doubt arose in my mind,” he said. Why Yang’s place? Then he saw that the guards wore the armlets of Yang’s army, and he remembered that Yang had not come to dinner the night before. No doubt he was already imprisoned, reflected Chiang, and his troops taken over by Chang Hsueh-liang. Even now the possibility of the general’s being actively engaged in this rebellion never entered his mind.… “Yang is an old comrade of our Party and has been in long association with the revolutionary movement. It was my strong conviction that he had taken no part in the revolt.”
News of the snatch sent China into a panic. The generals and statesmen who made up the Generalissimo’s party had been surrounded and efficiently arrested while all hell was popping at Lintung. Many of their names were included, arbitrarily, in a message Chang Hsueh-liang now sent to Nanking informing the government briefly of what had happened and outlining an “eight-point program” that they wanted Nanking to promise to follow in exchange for their lost leader including: reorganization of the government; an end to civil war; immediate release of certain political prisoners; release of all political offenders in China; guaranteed liberty for the people to hold meetings and organize.
Nanking did not at first consider the program. The stunning news of Chiang’s capture overshadowed all bargaining possibilities. No foreign observer had ever before seen anything like it in China for unanimity. In provinces like Kiangsi, where until ten years before the people couldn’t have cared less who was head of the government, everyone took the event as a blow. Children were sent home from closed schools to chastened households. The treaty ports were silent and worried. In Communist territories there was rejoicing, but in all the rest of China there were sorrow and apprehension, and much indignation against the Young Marshal. Chiang’s personal appearances and wide travels had accomplished the miracle: China was a nation at last.