by Philip Short
Poor intelligence compounded the nationalists’ difficulties. Kang Sheng's campaigns against GMD special agents, grotesque though they were, made it impossible for Chiang's men to penetrate even low-level communist units. By contrast, the nationalist command was infiltrated by communist sympathisers at every level. Chiang's assistant Chief of Staff, General Liu Fei, to all outward appearances a typical GMD career soldier, pompous and bureaucratic, was a communist mole. So was Hu Zongnan's personal secretary, who had forewarned Mao of the plan to capture Yan'an. So was the head of the GMD's War Planning Board, Guo Rugui. In the major battles at the close of the civil war, the PLA commanders knew every nationalist move in advance.
Morale – or the lack of it – was equally important. Chiang's was a conscript army. Press gangs went out to the villages and carried men off from the fields, leaving their families to starve. At the reception centres, where they were supposed to receive basic training, they were held under heavy guard. In some places, even in midwinter, their clothes were taken away at night to try to stop them escaping. ‘The poor fellows slept naked,’ an American observer reported, ‘some 40 or 50 crowded together into a space approximately 10 by 15 feet. The sergeant told us they kept warmer and slept better … close together.’ After being enrolled, they were marched, roped together like prisoners, to their units, often hundreds of miles away at the front. Frequently they had no food or water, because their rations had been ‘squeezed’ by corrupt officers. In one march, from Fujian to Guizhou, a hundred recruits arrived out of the thousand that had set out; in another case, only seventeen were left alive out of seven hundred. Nor were these atypical cases. One year almost half of the 1.67 million new recruits perished or deserted before they reached their units. When the survivors did arrive at the front, many took the first opportunity to run away. It was not unusual for a nationalist unit to lose 6 per cent of its men through desertion each month. Those who remained were chronically malnourished, with no medical treatment available. Colonel Barrett of the Dixie Mission reported seeing nationalist soldiers ‘topple over and die after marching less than a mile’.17
Having been treated like wild beasts, the troops behaved accordingly. Another American officer reported:
I visited villages [in pro-communist areas] which Chiang's soldiers had occupied and looted. Whatever they could not haul away on stolen oxcarts and pack animals they rendered useless … They had mixed corn, wheat and millet with manure to render the grain inedible. Deep-water wells … were filled with earth … In a village school, the nationalist soldiers had defecated, as they had done elsewhere, and had splashed human excrement on the walls. A young woman … reported to me that she had been dragged from one blockhouse to another and raped for many days. An old woman, past 75, was the only one in a village evacuated by the nationalists just before we arrived. She was sitting, unable to walk, because she too had been raped many times.18
In some districts, the communists’ inability to protect the population from reprisals of this kind turned the peasants against them. The nationalists had used the same tactics, to similar effect, in Jiangxi in the early 1930s.
Mao responded by stepping up land reform, which had been put on hold during the war against Japan as a concession to the united front. ‘Local tyrants and evil gentry’ were hauled before mass meetings for summary judgement and execution. Class relations in the countryside were deliberately polarised, to give the poorest sections of the peasantry an incentive to commit themselves to the communist cause. But there was a balance to be struck. ‘The battle for China,’ Mao insisted, ‘is a battle for the hearts and minds of the peasants’. If land reform were too radical, middle peasants and other potential allies would be alienated. In the winter of 1947, the Chairman started putting on the brakes.19
In the cities, Chiang's regime had lost the trust of the population. It had started after Japan's defeat, when GMD carpetbaggers – ‘thieves, highway robbers (worse than socialists)’, as one Shanghai merchant described them – arrived from Chongqing to take over the municipal administration, ostracising the urban elite which had survived the occupation. Then came the civil war, which the middle classes blamed on Chiang's refusal to make peace, rather than on the communists. To cap it all, the tyranny of one-party rule, enforced by public executions and backed up by the secret police; the assassination of liberal dissenters; hyperinflation, eroding salaries, as the government printed money to finance the war; and pervasive corruption, making legitimate business impossible – all turned against the Guomindang the very groups that had previously been its core supporters.
But if these were the symptoms of the nationalist disease, the root lay in the system of rule Chiang Kai-shek had created. It was too weak and faction-ridden to impose itself by force, too corrupt and careless of public welfare to command broad-based support.
That did not make it a pushover. Alongside disaffected, half-starved regular troops, Chiang had well-trained, well-equipped elite units, which had served with courage against Japan and did so again against the communists. The United States poured in arms and equipment worth, by State Department calculations, some 420 billion dollars in present-day terms, more by the communists’ reckoning. Chiang himself declared in June 1947 that his forces had ‘absolute superiority’ over the PLA in battle techniques and experience, and were ‘10 times richer … in terms of military supplies’.
Against that, Mao relied on the ‘collective will of the masses’. It proved to be more than enough.
Two years earlier, at the Seventh Congress, he had recounted an ancient folk-tale about the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain, the view from whose door was obstructed by two great peaks to the south. He and his sons took their hoes, and began to dig them away. When another villager mocked him, the Foolish Old Man replied: ‘When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons … High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher, and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we dig them away?’ As he carried on digging, Mao said, God was moved by his faith and sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs:
Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these two mountains be cleared away?20
For the rest of Mao's life, the story of the Foolish Old Man would serve as a metaphor for his efforts to transform China. Japan's abrupt collapse in August 1945, like the nationalist collapse three-and-a-half years later, merely strengthened his conviction that, beside the power of the human will, all else was secondary. It was not the atom bomb that defeated the Japanese, Mao insisted, it was the struggle waged by the masses:
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the US reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.
All reactionaries are paper tigers … Hitler … was a paper tiger. So was Mussolini, so was Japanese imperialism … Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters … are all paper tigers too … We have only millet plus rifles to rely on, but history will finally prove that our millet plus rifles is more powerful than Chiang Kai-shek's aeroplanes plus tanks … The reason is simply this: the reactionaries represent reaction, we represent progress.21
With this invincible certitude in the rightness of their cause, the communist armies began preparing, in the autumn of 1948, for the three climactic battles that would determine China's modern fate.
The overall plan of campaign was drafted by Mao early in September.22 Lin Biao struck first, at Jinzhou, a heavily fortified junction on the railway line into Manchuria from Beijing, with a force of 700,000 men. After
a fierce battle, lasting thirty-one hours, the city fell on October 15. But then events developed in a way Mao had not foreseen. A nationalist relief column, 100,000-strong, set out from Shenyang. Feigning a march south, Lin sent his main force north. The entire column was wiped out. Changchun, which Lin's forces were also besieging, surrendered at the same time. Shenyang, left with half its garrison, followed suit on November 2. Not for nothing was Lin regarded as the communists’ greatest commander. In the space of seven weeks, Chiang had lost the whole of Manchuria, and half-a-million of his best troops. Overnight, the military situation was transformed. Not only were the nationalists in wholesale retreat, but, for the first time since the war had begun, the communists outnumbered them.
Zhu De then ordered Lin to make a 600-mile forced march to the south, to encircle Tianjin and Beijing. There his North-Eastern Army joined up with Nie Rongzhen's North China Field Army, giving him a combined force of almost a million men, the largest the communists had ever assembled. The nationalists had 600,000 troops.
Again, Mao drew up a plan of operations. Lin was told that the main task was to cut off the enemy's escape. The nationalists, Mao warned, were ‘like birds startled by the twang of a bowstring’. Only when the ring was complete should the attack commence, and then the target should be Tianjin, not Beijing as Chiang would expect.23
Meanwhile, the Central Plains and East China Armies, commanded by Liu Bocheng and Chen Yi, had launched the third great battle, 400 miles to the south.
The Huaihai campaign, as it was called, was fought across four provinces – Anhui, Henan, Jiangsu and Shandong – in an area bounded by the Grand Canal in the east and the Huai River in the south. It lasted just over two months. Each side fielded approximately half-a-million troops, but the communists had the aid of two million peasant auxiliaries, directed by an ad hoc Front Committee, headed by Deng Xiaoping, to provide logistical support. As in Manchuria, the battle began with the destruction of one of Chiang's weaker units. Relief columns were blocked by communist guerrilla action, and when large-scale reinforcements set out, they marched into a gigantic trap which Liu Bocheng had set near Xuzhou. By January 10, when the Huaihai campaign ended, 200,000 nationalist soldiers were dead or wounded, and 300,000 had surrendered.
While Chiang was still reeling from that defeat, Lin Biao tightened the vice around the two northern cities. Tianjin fell on January 15. A week later, the nationalist commander in Beijing, General Fu Zuoyi, negotiated the capital's surrender, ostensibly to save it from communist bombardment. His 200,000 troops were integrated into the PLA, and he himself was later given a sinecure in the new communist government.
The day before Beijing surrendered, Chiang Kai-shek resigned the presidency (while remaining as party leader).24
In four months he had lost 1.5 million men. The communists who, two-and-a-half years earlier, had been ready to accept a minor role in a coalition administration now demanded that he be punished as a war criminal, that the government resign, the constitution be abrogated and the remnants of the nationalist army be absorbed into the PLA. Peace talks opened with Chiang's acting successor, Li Zongren, but quickly collapsed. On April 21, Liu Bocheng's army began crossing the Yangtse. Nanjing fell three days later; Hangzhou on May 3; Shanghai on May 27. By then Chiang had already decided that he would have to abandon the mainland and transfer his headquarters to Taiwan. There, he would wait for the war that he was certain would one day come between America and Russia, at which point he and his pro-American army would return in triumph to China to reconquer their lost lands.
With the Generalissimo went the nationalist air force and navy, some of the best remaining army divisions and 300 million dollars in gold, silver and foreign currency reserves. Deprived of funds and ammunition, nationalist resistance slowly ebbed away. In the south-west fighting would continue for another year, in some places even longer. But to all intents and purposes, the battle for China was over.
The nationalist collapse faced Mao, and the Party as a whole, with the challenge of administering, not just a border region or a base area, but a country three times the size of western Europe, devastated by decades of war and containing nearly a quarter of the world's population. Foremost among his concerns was how to deal with the newly conquered cities.
Mao's wariness of urban life had its roots in the experiences of his youth in Beijing and Shanghai. He never quite threw off the feeling of being a country bumpkin, a peasant's son among city slickers.25 He had studied in one great metropolis, Changsha, and had lived and worked, apparently happily, in two others, Canton and Wuhan. But he would always regard the city as a slightly alien place. Throughout the civil war, Mao's strategy had been to win control of the countryside; the move to the towns could come later. Apart from one moment of panic, in August 1945, when in a knee-jerk reaction at the end of the war, he had ordered ill-prepared urban uprisings in Japanese-occupied cities from Shanghai to Beijing (all of which, fortunately for him, were called off before any damage was done),26 this gradualist approach was maintained until the end of 1948. The PLA was instructed to ‘take medium and small cities and extensive rural areas first; take big cities later.’27
The following March, however, the question of ‘shifting the centre of gravity from the rural areas to the cities’ could no longer be postponed.28
That month Mao embarked on a series of speeches, setting out before the Party hierarchy the economic and political programme the new regime would follow. Urban living standards must be raised, he said, to win the loyalty of the urban population. Major industries and foreign-owned companies would be nationalised, but other forms of capitalism would continue. China would be ruled by a coalition government, headed by the Communist Party but including a number of small progressive parties, mostly splinter groups formed by ex-GMD leftists, to represent sympathetic non-communists from the bourgeoisie and the liberal intelligentsia.29 The new system was to be known as a ‘people's democratic dictatorship’, which, as in the Chinese Soviet Republic, twenty years before, signified that the fruits of democracy would not be shared by all:
[The reactionaries say:] ‘You are dictatorial.’ Dear Sirs, you are right, that is exactly what we are … Only the people are allowed the right to voice their opinions. Who are ‘the people’? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasant class, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Under the leadership of the … Communist Party, these classes unite together to … carry out a dictatorship over the lackeys of imperialism – the landlord class, the bureaucratic capitalist class and the GMD reactionaries and their henchmen – to suppress them and [ensure] they behave properly … The democratic system is to be carried out within the ranks of the people … The right to vote is given only to the people and not to the reactionaries. These two aspects, namely, democracy among the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, combine to form the people's democratic dictatorship.30
For all those who happened to be on the wrong side of this class divide, these were sobering words. Mao insisted that people would be punished only if they broke the law. But he also described the judiciary as an instrument of class violence.
None the less, in 1949, the majority of China's citizens, and many foreign residents, too, looked to the advent of communist administration as bringing not repression but release from the graft and rottenness that had marked the final stages of nationalist rule.
Alan Winnington, a British journalist who was with the first PLA detachment to enter Beijing, found the streets lined by a mass of ‘shouting, laughing, cheering people’.31 Derk Bodde, then carrying out research at Qinghua University, wrote in his diary of ‘a new feeling of relief’ in the city. ‘There is no doubt in my mind’, he added, ‘that the communists come here with the bulk of the population on their side.’32 The foreign captain of a Hong Kong tramp steamer, one of the first ships into Tianjin after the communist takeover, was dumbfounded to find a port without ‘squeeze’. Not only were bribes refused, he reported, n
o one would accept even a cigarette.33
The maintenance of this climate of probity, of hard work and plain living, in a country where, all through history, officialdom had been synonymous with corruption, was of great importance to Mao. The Party, he warned, was heading into uncharted territory where it would face new and unfamiliar dangers:
With victory, certain moods may grow within the Party – arrogance, putting on airs like a hero, wanting to rest on our laurels instead of striving to make further progress, pleasure-seeking and distaste for hardship … There may be some communists who were never conquered by enemies with guns, and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up against them, but who cannot withstand the sugar-coated bullets [of the bourgeoisie] … We must guard against this. The achievement of nationwide victory is only the first step in a Long March of 10,000 li. It is silly to pride ourselves on this one step. What is more worthy of pride lies still ahead … The Chinese revolution is a great revolution, but the road beyond is longer and the work to come greater and more arduous … We should be capable not only of destroying the old world. We must also be capable of creating the new.34
To that end, Mao said, cadres would have to put aside the things they knew well, and master the things they did not know. The Russians, he told them, had also been ignorant of economic construction when their revolution truimphed, but that had not stopped them building ‘a great and brilliant socialist state’. What Russia had done, China could do, too.
On the afternoon of October 1 1949, Mao mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace, overlooking Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and, surrounded by the Communist Party establishment and its progressive allies, formally announced the founding of the People's Republic of China.35