Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  In the countryside there were not many more options available than in the cities. Local elites often chose to collaborate, but their return for doing so was minimal. They resented the Wang Jingwei regime and got little from it. They sought stability, but the Japanese either could not or would not provide it. The situation in one county is illustrative. Neihuang in northern Henan province had suffered from various civil wars prior to the 1930s. But in the years before the Japanese attack, the GMD had gradually asserted control against bandits, Communists, and secret societies. When the Japanese approached in 1937, local GMD leaders fled south. Prisoners broke out of jail and public storage facilities were raided. Bandit groups begin to operate openly. On the very day in March 1938 that the imperial army prepared to take control of the county, two squads of bandits clashed near the Japanese advance. The invaders, believing they were coming under attack from a nearby village, arrested all the men they could find, stripped them naked, and put them in a house, which they torched with kerosene. Anyone trying to escape was shot. Eighty villagers died. Throughout the war, civilians in the county were preyed on by criminals, occupiers, and wannabe authorities. The GMD could offer no protection. No wonder that villagers in the region were eager to accept security from the CCP when it started to operate in the county in 1944.21

  THE JAPANESE ARMY MADE little progress in 1942–1943. Many observers expected the China front to be relatively uneventful for the remainder of the war. But the Japanese High Command did not plan for status quo. It knew that if Japan should have any chance of winning the war, it would have to knock the GMD out of the fighting first. In 1944 it started the largest offensive yet on the Asian mainland, intending to break Chinese resistance and establish direct land links between north China and Southeast Asia. The Japanese planners almost succeeded. By early 1945 the GMD regime was in dire straits and may not have survived the war in spite of the Allied victories in the Pacific and Southeast Asia if it had not been for Japan’s sudden capitulation.

  As so often happened during the war, Japanese planners could not agree on what was the most important objective of what they called Operation Ichigo (Number One). Some emphasized supply lines, others destroying the GMD. As the offensive developed, they came much closer to the second objective than the first. The GMD regime in Chongqing was suffering from an acute economic and social crisis in 1944 that made determined resistance difficult. The government’s attempts at collecting new taxes had mostly failed, leaving much ill will among the population. Supplies of all kinds were running out, and famine had begun in parts of GMD-held territory. Under such circumstances it is only natural that resistance against further conscription increased. Half of all desertions and anticonscription revolts happened in the last year of the war. The GMD’s proudest achievement, the alliance with the United States, meant little to most people. Why, many were asking, did the United States not do more to help China? If Washington could send substantial forces of its own to guard Brazil against an Axis invasion, why could it not send a single regular soldier to fight in China? And the GMD’s response to its funding crisis, to print more money, led to runaway inflation that impoverished almost everyone, including its own supporters. The combination of all these ills forced active support for the government to its lowest point in the war just when it needed it most.

  Operation Ichigo began in April 1944. In less than a month it had driven the GMD’s forces out of Henan province. It had also conquered the capital of Hunan, Changsha, where the Chinese had been resisting since 1939. The Japanese forces then drove south into Guangxi province, capturing Guilin in November and began moving toward the GMD’s stronghold in Sichuan from the south and east. Ichigo’s successes were in part due to poor planning by Chiang’s US advisers. But it also exposed how the GMD’s economic and political weakness was eroding its ability to resist. Even though the Japanese began running out of steam in the spring of 1945, when they had to redeploy their forces to the near Pacific, the GMD’s counteroffensives were largely ineffective. Chiang was still seen as a hero by most Chinese, but his party’s capacity to govern had taken a serious drubbing in the latter stage of the war.

  Unlike the GMD, the CCP could make use of the war to expand. When Ichigo drove the GMD out of key parts of central China, the Communists could begin to build their own political institutions behind the overextended Japanese lines. They could also, where needed, attack the decimated government forces, as they did in the Shandong-Jiangsu border area. To their surprise, the CCP could also begin their first contacts with the Americans. Fed up with Chiang’s cautious strategy, Washington attempted to mobilize other power holders, including the Communists, against Japan. Mao had been told by the Soviets that Stalin expected the Soviet-American alliance to continue after the war had ended, and the CCP chairman interpreted the US overtures as part of this new international framework. CCP contacts with the Americans would help push Chiang and other anti-Communists toward compromise in postwar China. CCP hopes were high when President Roosevelt’s representative to China, the vain and utterly naïve Oklahoma lawyer Patrick Hurley, during a high-spirited visit with the Communists, put his name to a demand for a coalition government in China that Mao himself had written. Hurley also promised US supplies for the CCP, in preparation, Mao thought, for American landings on the coast.22

  But it was not Hurley’s visit to what he called “Indian territory” that harmed the standing of the GMD most. Nor was it the party’s failure to offer effective government during wartime. It was rather the feeling that spread, especially among China’s educated classes, that the international system that the GMD so desperately wanted to join had little to offer China. China’s involvement with capitalism on a global scale had not been a happy one, and many people longed for a new economic strategy after the war that would benefit the Chinese people. Like war-weary peoples everywhere, the Chinese in 1945 wanted peace and a solution to problems at home. If Chiang Kai-shek was able to deliver that, people would follow him. If not, they would start looking for an alternative.

  IN FEBRUARY 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta to map out the postwar future. Unlike in Cairo in 1943, Chiang was not invited and he was furious at the snub. He resented that China was being, yet again, used as a bargaining chip among great powers. Still, he found the outcome of Yalta useful. The Generalissimo recognized his regime’s military weakness and feared that a Soviet entry into the war against Japan could have disastrous consequences for China’s unity. Therefore he wanted the United States to regulate the Soviet role in East Asia, and US guarantees concerning Soviet behavior were what the secret Yalta protocol gave him. Chiang also wanted the war to end soon and believed, like Roosevelt, that a Soviet attack on Japan was the only way of effecting this. Chiang’s condemnation of Yalta—similar to that of Charles de Gaulle, who also had not been invited—was therefore more about form than content. He wanted a deal with the Soviets, and he wanted it fast, but he needed the Americans to work out the framework.

  The 11 February 1945 secret Yalta text on Japan, agreed to after Stalin had got much of what he wanted on Europe, speaks for itself:

  The leaders of the three great powers—the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain—have agreed that in two or three months after Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe is terminated, the Soviet Union shall enter into war against Japan on the side of the Allies on condition that: The status quo in Outer Mongolia (the Mongolian People’s Republic) shall be preserved. . . . The commercial port of Dairen [Dalian] shall be internationalized, the pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union in this port being safeguarded, and the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base of the U.S.S.R. restored; the Chinese-Eastern Railroad and the South Manchurian Railroad, which provide an outlet to Dairen, shall be jointly operated by the establishment of a joint Soviet-Chinese company, it being understood that the pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union shall be safeguarded and that China shall retain sovereignty in Manchuria. . . . It is understood th
at the agreement concerning Outer Mongolia and the ports and railroads referred to above will require concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The President will take measures in order to maintain this concurrence on advice from Marshal Stalin. The heads of the three great powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated. For its part, the Soviet Union expresses its readiness to conclude with the National Government of China a pact of friendship and alliance between the U.S.S.R. and China in order to render assistance to China with its armed forces for the purpose of liberating China from the Japanese yoke.

  After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the race was on for who would win the peace in East Asia. GMD representatives were in Moscow negotiating with the Soviets, but the talks seemed to be going nowhere. The United States was increasingly concerned over tensions with the Soviets in Europe, and Chiang tried to use this anxiety to win US support for only minimal concessions to Stalin. Meanwhile, the Soviet dictator’s negotiators pushed for the widest possible control of postwar Manchuria. Unless they got their way, Chiang was told, the Soviets could easily choose to work with the CCP and/or postpone their offensive against Japan.

  On 6 August the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people. Three days later it used another nuclear weapon against Nagasaki, killing 60,000. The same day the Soviet Union attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria. Stalin could not wait any longer if he were to get his slice of the Japanese empire. Chiang’s negotiators signed a treaty with the Soviet Union giving Stalin what he had been promised at Yalta, but getting a promise that Moscow would cooperate only with the Chinese government. Japan capitulated unconditionally the following day, though Stalin, for good measure, continued Soviet operations for another two weeks, making sure that his troops occupied as much territory as possible.

  Within a month in mid-1945, the international situation in East Asia had been turned upside down. Japan has ceased to exist as an independent power, though there were still 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and close to 1.5 million civilians in China, including Manzhouguo and Taiwan, after capitulation. The Soviet Union occupied Manchuria and the northern part of Korea, where more than 700,000 Red Army troops were stationed. The collaborationist regimes had collapsed. All over China, GMD forces were preparing to take over, helped by their US allies. The CCP seemed to have little access to the spoils of war. Though his party was exhausted and his army on its knees, Chiang was triumphant. He was now ready to build the unified and strong central state that had eluded him for twenty years. But first he had to repatriate the Japanese and deal with those Chinese he saw as traitors.

  Though under strong pressure to exert draconian revenge, the Generalissimo wanted to be as lenient as possible with former enemies willing to accept the new GMD state. Around 25,000 collaborators were put on trial, less than 0.005 percent of the population. It is a remarkably small number if one thinks of the parallel figures for France (close to one percent) or Norway (more than three percent), both of which had seen much less warfare than China. Although much dislocation came out of confiscations and fines against industrialists and businessmen who had worked with the Japanese in the occupied cities—imposed, some people thought, as much in order to line the pockets of returning GMD officials as for an official purposes, the sentences passed on leading collaborators were mild. Even the second in command of the Wang Jingwei regime, Zhou Fohai, was spared the death sentence (Wang himself had died in 1944). The collaborationist leaders among minorities mostly survived. Prince Demchugdongrub, the head of the much-feared Japanese-supported separatist regime in Inner Mongolia, lived out his life as a curator in a history museum in Hohhot. Puyi, the Manzhouguo emperor, and the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, worked as a gardener in Beijing after his release from Soviet captivity. Unless they much later became part of the Communists’ show trials, top pro-Japanese traitors in China stood a better chance of survival than World War II collaborationists anywhere else.

  WHEN CHINA’S WAR OF RESISTANCE against Japan ended, the international situation had already been transformed. Not only Japan, but also Britain, France, and Germany were gone as great powers in East Asia. The Soviet Union remained, now stronger than ever. And the United States had become the other main power, in control of Japan and with strategic interests in Southeast Asia, both in terms of resources and shipping routes. All Chinese political groups had to take this new international landscape into consideration when they made up their minds about the policies to pursue. As leaders everywhere else, those in China were uncertain whether some form of cooperaton between the United States and the USSR would continue after the war, or whether there would be conflict. The answer to this question, they knew, would determine how advantage could be had in foreign affairs.

  Inside China, Chiang Kai-shek’s prestige was at an all-time high. While many people resented the way the Guomindang had conducted the war—the unnecessary losses, the economic mismanagement, the lack of democracy—little of this clung to the Generalissimo himself. Chiang was seen, across the country, as a genuine national hero, who had known when to fight the war and had had the courage to persist against all odds. Of course Chiang’s and China’s international standing furthered his domestic prestige. The American president, Harry Truman, had accepted China as a great power, and given it one of the five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, had formally recognized Chiang’s regime as China’s central government and publicly called on all other parties—including the Chinese Communists—to cooperate with it. In 1945, China seemed poised to regain its position as the main country in the region, and Chiang seemed set to create the fully unified China that he, and so many other Chinese, had dreamed about since their childhood. Nationalism, defiance, and international cooperation had made China strong, Chiang told his countrymen, and there were bright times ahead.

  “It is my sincere belief,” the Generalissimo said in his victory message, echoing the Confucian values that were so close to his heart, “that all men on earth—wherever they live, in the East or the West, and whatever the color of their skin may be—will some day be linked together in close fellowship like members of one family. World war is indivisible and world peace, too, is indivisible. It has encouraged international understanding and mutual trust which will serve as a powerful barrier against future wars.”23

  CHAPTER 8

  COMMUNISM

  CHINESE COMMUNISM WAS BORN in the fear of the future that many Chinese intellectuals felt around the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. If their country was to be rescued, they would need a model that could make China rich and strong, an example among nations, not a pariah. Those who lived through the May Fourth Movement and became Communists found such a model in the Soviet Union. To them, and they were a minority, Lenin and the Soviets had already constructed a new kind of country out of the ruins of the Russian empire, a new Soviet state that combined advanced modernity with social justice. To young Chinese like Mao Zedong, Soviet Communism was having your cake and eating it: The country, which had been an empire, remained, but reborn as a new state with equality and justice for all. The Confucian idea of rectitude married the modernity of organizational power and technology that the Soviets provided, a modernity that was even more advanced than that of the imperialist powers, which had humiliated China in the past. It was, for both means and purposes, a perfect instrument for those who came to believe in it.

  It cannot be emphasized enough that what inspired the first Chinese Communists was Leninism rather than Marxism. It was the organizational ideals of the Soviet revolution rather than Marx’s predictions about world capitalism that fired their minds. Marxism in China was always the preoccupation of a minority on the Left, rather than a faith that imbued the whole party. What preoccupied the generation that founded the party and their immediate successors—all the way up to the late 1980s and Deng Xiaoping—was building an organization and a state t
hat would employ the tools that Lenin and Stalin had used to create a modern, powerful Soviet Union: party power, hierarchy, militarization, and strict regulation of the lives of party members and all citizens. Marxism was understood to mean the science of society that ensured that the Communists, not just in China but worldwide, were on the right side of history: Eventually all the world would move toward socialism. But the detailed understanding of capitalist modernity that Marx had attempted was not at the center of Chinese Communism. Das Kapital, Marx’s main work, had not been fully translated into Chinese before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.1

  Part of the reason why Marxism was only of peripheral use to the Chinese Communists was that their party was forged in war. There was almost no time to stop fighting and study texts. After 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek nearly succeeded in wiping out the CCP, the remnants of the party took to the hills, only to have to fight successive expeditions that Chiang launched against them. Even though the party leadership stayed in contact with Moscow and the Comintern, the priority was always survival and reorganization, as the CCP was driven further and further toward the edges of China. The rise of Mao Zedong was, somewhat grudgingly, sanctioned by Moscow, but as recognition of the fact that his organizational genius had rescued the party from oblivion rather than his skills as a theoretician. There is no evidence that Mao ever seriously studied Marx beyond the basic texts that were translated into Chinese in his youth. Mao, and the leadership that he formed in the late 1930s, were warriors, first and foremost, survival artists who learned to extricate themselves from the most precarious of military crises.

  The basic problem for the CCP before World War II was in numbers. At its first peak in 1928 the party had had around 40,000 members, a drop in the ocean of the Chinese population. By 1937, after its Long March to the north, it had around the same number, although with another 40,000 nonmember soldiers and civilians working alongside it. Without a breakthrough in recruitment and territory, the party would never be able to challenge the Guomindang for power in China. That breakthrough, as we have seen, came with the Japanese attack on China in 1937. With GMD power knocked out in most of the country, and with Mao’s decision (with Comintern blessing) to move the party’s public profile toward the political center and emphasize the defense of the nation, CCP membership skyrocketed. In 1938 it had more than 200,000 members. By 1945 it had 1.2 million. It was ready to do battle with its domestic and foreign enemies.