Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  I have waited long for vengeance,

  At last I’ve had my chance.

  I’ve looked the Peanut in the eye

  And kicked him in the pants.12

  But the conflict between Chiang and Stilwell should not overshadow the close cooperation that developed between Chinese and US forces during the final years of World War II. The Americans trained and equipped Chiang’s best troops, his intelligence services, and his administrators. In spite of his general dislike of American society and culture, Chiang knew in which direction world power was turning. And he saw great opportunities for China in it.

  The main benefit China got from its first US alliance was its increase in international standing. At the Allied war summit in Cairo in November 1943, Chiang sat down at the table with the US president and the British prime minister as an equal, though he was kept away from their deliberations on Europe and the Soviet Union. He also got promises of continued US assistance for China after the war and a permanent alliance with the world’s leading power. According to the State Department’s offical records, “President Roosevelt proposed that, after the war, China and the United States should effect certain arrangements under which the two countries could come to each other’s assistance in the event of foreign aggression and that the United States should maintain adequate military forces on various bases in the Pacific in order that it could effectively share the responsibility of preventing aggression.”13 In need of Chinese help to win the Pacific war, Roosevelt gave Chiang’s China status as one of the Big Four allies, with special influence over the occupation of Japan and the future of Korea and Southeast Asia. Well before the Cairo conference, in January 1943, the United States and Britain had relinquished their extraterritorial rights in China. The GMD proudly declared that they had returned China to its proper status: “We, the Chinese nation, after fifty years of sanguinary revolutions and five and a half years of sacrifice in the War of Resistance, have finally transformed the history of a hundred years of the Unequal Treaties of sorrow into a glorious record of the termination of the Unequal Treaties.”14

  ANY SOCIETY PUT UNDER the stress of massive warfare will suffer, not just at the time but for years to come. China was no exception. Everywhere the Japanese armies went, Chinese civilians suffered, through war-induced atrocities, starvation, or the humiliation of foreign control. But those who were drawn through the meat grinder of the defending power, the Guomindang, suffered too. It is likely that more GMD soldiers died from disease and starvation during the war than the number of those who fell on the battlefield. As the GMD armies ran out of supplies, they confiscated the scarce goods and produce of the peasants. And as the war wore on, more and more peasant communities in China cared less who was in control than how hunger and killing could be avoided in their villages. In many areas the Japanese were simply considered one outside power among many, and the population’s anger was sometimes more intense at the behavior of Chinese troops than against the Japanese.

  In economic terms, the war against Japan was a disaster for China. A significant part of what had been constructed in the first part of the twentieth century was destroyed: communications, industry, irrigation. It is often said that regions that depend on basic agricultural production suffer less during wartime than more complex economies, but this was not true for China in the mid-twentieth century. The war with Japan came as a climax of a century of rural deprivation, in which peasant room for survival had become increasingly narrow. Trade, which had always played a key role in the Chinese agricultural economy was impeded, and in some areas stopped. Access to fertilizers and water was limited. Henan province went through a large-scale famine in 1942–1943, in which drought and military procurements combined to kill off two to three million people and make another three million homeless. While peasants in the province starved, Chinese armies continued to requisition grain and conscript laborers. As the American journalist Theodore White described it,

  There were corpses on the road. A girl of no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death; her eyes were open and the rain fell on them. People chipped at bark, pounded it by the roadside for food; vendors sold leaves at a dollar a bundle. A dog digging at a mound was exposing a human body. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools to eat the green slime of the waters.15

  The war made between 60 and 90 million Chinese into refugees. Some went to the cities to survive, creating new urban environments, both in the occupied zones and in GMD territory. Crime and exploitation thrived, and life for refugees and city dwellers alike became chaos.16 Even those who tried to work with the authorities were stifled by what they saw as unreasonable demands by the state and by uncertainties about the future. Choices that were made today could be utterly nonsensical tomorrow, and behavior that was lauded in society one morning could bring about the death penalty by the following afternoon. For the bloated and terrorized cities, wartime was not so much about collaboration or resistance as it was about survival or death, or at least about possessions or penury. Abhorring the Japanese and feeling abandoned by the GMD government, most urban Chinese, rich and poor, exited the war disillusioned and downcast.

  Despite its overall failure to deliver for the population, the GMD did succeed at increasing production and at organizing a sometimes unwilling populace for resistance. The government’s problem was of course that two-thirds of production and almost all of its income went to fight the war. Like governments elsewhere, it attempted to compensate for this permanent crisis by becoming more centralized and efficient (which often meant brutal). It also benefited from the use of experts who returned to China for patriotic reasons and who mostly recommended increased state control. Some of the methods that the Communists later used to rule China were first tested out by the GMD during the war against Japan. Production quotas, price controls, and militarization of the population were cherished aims of the wartime GMD leaders (though most intended to relax these corporative arrangements after the war). But in spite of all of the regime’s calls for unity and sacrifice, its biggest problem was handling its own finances. It was deprived of almost all of its prewar tax base, which was located in the productive and relatively prosperous eastern coastal regions, areas largely controlled by the Japanese. And so the GMD never achieved any kind of fiscal stability during the war. New taxes, especially the new land tax in kind from 1942 on, were seen as unfair and an attempt to shift the burden onto the peasantry in the government-held zones.

  The war against Japan both made and unmade China.17 On the one hand, it furthered ideas about centralization, effectivization, and a modern state that were to come to fruition in the late twentieth century, long after the war ended and under a new Communist government. On the other hand, it brought almost limitless destruction and dislocation to many parts of China, and influenced peoples’ lives in ways that underlined abandonment and brutalization. For those who lived through it, there is little doubt that the war was more about destruction and loss than about renewal and modernization. It took China’s suffering to a new level and made it, in the eyes of the Chinese, the country that the rest of the world had scorned and abandoned.

  WITHIN CHINA, THE CCP turned out to be one of the main beneficiaries of the war. The Japanese threat helped the Communists survive the onslaught by the GMD. The war made it possible for the party to mobilize in its new bases in the northwest and behind the overextended Japanese lines, where the GMD state had collapsed. When the war began, the CCP was a small group, but in 1945—with 1.2 million members and 900,000 men and women under arms—it was a force to be reckoned with. Even more important than its numerical expansion, though, was the ability the party had gained to work with all segments of Chinese society through a system of centralized decision making. The war had made it possible for Mao Zedong and the group who had promoted his leadership to achieve two very different goals at the same time: Make all party members obey a secret and cloistered Mao-centered inner organization but present a mod
erate and cooperative outward image. It was a stunning transformation that would help the party gain from the war and succeed in Chinese politics after the war was over.

  The CCP had been advocating a united front against Japan, but immediately after the war started, it was less than clear how the party should behave. The Comintern wanted the party to put military pressure on the Japanese, but Mao resisted appeals for large-scale warfare against the enemy, whether they came from Stalin or from Chiang. Instead, he emphasized guerrilla tactics, meaning—most often—a clandestine presence behind Japanese lines aimed at building the CCP as a party. From 1939 to 1945, the CCP mainly fought either to preserve its own territory or to avenge Japanese atrocities against the civilian population in rear areas where the Communists operated politically. The CCP killed many more Chinese—whether GMD, collaborators, or just local forces who got in the way—than Japanese. But Mao needed to maintain good relations with Moscow, so in late 1940 he embarked on the Hundred Regiments Campaign. It was a response not just to Stalin’s repeated calls for action but also urging from his own CCP officers. The Hundred Regiments Campaign was a set of offensives against the Japanese in northern China, but it was poorly coordinated, and the results were near disastrous for the Communists. Four times as many CCP soldiers were killed as those from the imperial army. And after it was over, the Japanese took a terrible revenge on the local population.

  By 1941 Mao’s forces were fighting something close to a civil war against the GMD. The worst battles were in Anhui province, where Chiang was determined to stop CCP expansion and force the party to submit to his authority. But government victories were not solid enough to deter the Communists and took much-needed GMD forces away from the battles with the Japanese. Throughout the rest of the war, Mao stuck rhetorically to the Comintern’s policies, calling for a continued united front and for a new coalition government, while concentrating on expanding CCP positions. Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern head, told Mao in December 1943 that he considered the CCP policy “to wind down the struggle against China’s foreign occupiers, along with the evident departure from a united national front policy” to be “politically mistaken,” but Mao stuck with his policy of emphasizing the internal over the external and it brought great returns.18

  While the united front policy toward the GMD was neglected, Mao put in place another form of united front within the areas controlled by the CCP. Instead of executing landlords and businessmen, dividing up land and confiscating savings, as had been done before, the Communists now proclaimed what they themselves called a moderate policy of rent reduction, collaborative farming, price caps, and credit schemes. In the name of national resistance, the CCP had a policy for everyone: peasants (who got a guarantee against starvation), landlords (who got money and stable prices), company owners (who got predictable taxes and property guarantees), and workers (who got a minimum wage). Instead of Marx and Lenin, the party began talking about a “reasonable tax burden.” In the western Shandong borderlands, salt-producing locals had made use of the wartime receding of the state to avoid much-resented taxes and thereby achieve prosperity. In that region, the CCP became very popular with its promise of protecting local welfare and tax reduction. In other parts of the country, the party recruited members and soldiers, promising to maintain the stability that the CCP had brought to the area and to punish collaborators.19 The war, in other words, provided a near perfect foil for the Communists to spread their influence.

  While they built up the party, Mao and his followers carried out ruthless inner-party campaigns to destroy their old Communist rivals. And they worked to gain the undivided and unquestioning loyalty of those who had joined the party since 1937. These campaigns, known as zheng feng or rectification, criticized, arrested, and even executed those who would not accept the party’s new tactics and the recentering of party literature and programs on Mao and his understanding of the CCP’s historical mission. Instead of the internationalist Marxism that the party was born of, Mao and his supporters brought in writings that underlined the party’s role as the redeemer of the Chinese people after a hundred years of denigration and weakness. Instead of Communist materialism, the CCP began preaching to anyone who cared to listen that they could achieve liberation by the force of will. China, Mao told his inner-party audience, was not weak and poor. It was strong, because the CCP brought it the revolutionary spirit that would set it free.

  WHILE THE CCP UNITED, the GMD seemed to fragment. Many leaders questioned Chiang’s authority. Wang Jingwei was one such. He had been one of Sun Yat-sen’s closest associates and a key founder of Chinese nationalism. Jailed by the Qing authorities in 1910, he became a hero on his release after the 1911 revolution, and later served several times as prime minister during the republic. A left-winger within the Guomindang—much in the spirit of Sun himself—Wang stood for cooperation with the CCP and fervent anti-imperialism, even after Chiang Kai-shek had attacked the Communists in 1927. As a result, Wang became Chiang’s main rival within the party, and the personal relationship between the two leaders went from bad to worse. In 1937, Wang at first joined the government in its flight to Sichuan, but upset many of his colleagues by insisting that Western imperialist powers were greater threats to China in the long run than Japan, which, after all, was a fellow Asian nation. By 1939, Wang was in Hanoi, where, after Chiang’s agents had tried to kill him, he fully threw in his lot with the Japanese. In March 1940 he became head of what he called a reorganized Guomindang regime at Nanjing. In November, Wang signed a peace treay with Japan which recognized Manzhouguo and gave the Japanese special rights over the territory it claimed to control. In reality, Wang’s regime was entirely dependent on Tokyo’s support for the five years it existed.

  But for all his reputation as a traitor, Wang Jingwei was no simple stooge of the Japanese. His political journey in the 1930s had taken him from a vague socialism to a position that emphasized Asian racial values and cooperation against the dominant Western powers. Wang believed that China was wasting its strength fighting Japan. Instead it should join in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere that Tokyo was about to create and build its power in Japan’s image. In January 1943 Wang’s regime declared war on the Allies, and it remained a quarrel some ally of the Japanese empire until its capitulation in August 1945. But although the collaborationists managed to recruit soldiers to fight alongside the Japanese, there were never any doubts about who were calling the shots. Wang’s legitimacy, even within his own regime, was entirely built on his ability to get the Japanese to do less harm in China than they otherwise would have done. The “reorganized” Guomindang were generally seen as traitors, but as traitors who could serve a useful purpose for some.

  For most Chinese during the war years, the goal was survival, pure and simple. They needed an outcome for themselves and their families, and to avoid being harmed by the armies they encountered. In urban China, mostly occupied by Japan, this often meant finding some modus vivendi with the occupiers. Most tried to avoid Wang Jingwei’s regime, not just because it was considered traitorous but also because it was considered inefficient. If one needed to deal with the new regime, many thought, better deal directly with the Japanese. Of course, all-out collaboration was as difficult in Japanese-occupied China as it was in German-occupied Europe. A central part of the occupiers’ ideology was their own national or ethnic superiority, and even those who wanted to take over Japanese ideals could not become Japanese. In parts of China, especially those that had suffered the most during the social and political turbulence in the early part of the century, the desire to work with the newly arrived power was great. This was especially true among the elites, who saw the Japanese as a protection against unruly peasants and workers. But even those who tried to find an ideological position that allowed collaboration were often put off by Japanese brutality and fiats. As in German-occupied eastern Europe—Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine—to collaborate was not always easy or safe.

  In the cities, the occupiers immediate
ly tried to find ways of getting industrial production going again after the fighting ended. At first, the Japanese confiscated Chinese enterprises at will, running them through army units or Japanese business conglomerates, the zaibatsu. But output still dropped 50 percent from prewar levels, and Tokyo’s dreams of using China’s industrial capacity to make their armies in China self-sufficient and to help supply Japanese forces elsewhere turned out to be a chimera.20 Overall output was down, probably as a result of supply difficulties and Chinese workers being less than enthusiastic. But Japanese production in China had also fallen from prewar levels. Before the war, half of all textile mills in Shanghai were Japanese-owned but many had been destroyed in the fighting. The zaibatsu were reluctant to invest in China; many found that they could not make a profit. As with all occupiers, the fall-back position was a mix of the carrot and the stick. Chinese owners were allowed to get their factories back if they would collaborate with the war effort. Many did. But in strategic areas of production—a term that widened and widened as the war went on—the Japanese army instituted direct control through corporatist companies that produced directly for the war. Neither approach was successful. The imperial army had confiscated most ships and trains for the war effort, so the market had little chance to work. And price setting did not stimulate production. All the way up to 1945, Japan faced the classic occupation dilemma: The occupiers wanted to increase production. Their collaborators wanted managers that were politically beholden to them. And the workers resented unskilled and collaborationist managers as well as the occupation itself. It was not a scenario for success.