Chiang surrounded Mao’s Yan’an sanctuary with four hundred thousand soldiers. Cut off from most of the rest of world, Mao once again set out to build a self-sufficient economy. He confiscated land left uncultivated by the landlords in the rugged region where Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia Provinces met and distributed it to the landless. Mao abolished all forms of taxation for the first year to give peasants and small merchants some breathing space, and he later collected a progressive single tax on land.
Mao rebuilt his army, made up of willing recruits from the peasantry to whom he had given land. Mao now had China’s only true national fighting force, with volunteers drawn from nearly every province. He didn’t have the highly paid generals and fancy equipment that absorbed most of Chiang’s army funds, and since everyone from officers down to the rank and file ate and dressed alike and there was very little difference in living quarters, Mao’s peasant armies existed on very modest sums.
Mao’s warriors had a six-day workweek, arising at five for a day of exercise, meals, military drills, political lectures, writing classes, games, and sports, and then going to bed when taps sounded at nine. Officers and soldiers mingled freely, with little formality. In Mao’s army, unlike Chiang’s, opium smoking was prohibited, and there were no swarms of prostitutes following the men.
Chiang constantly complained to his foreign helpers that he couldn’t fight the Japanese without outside assistance, but Mao preached that the Chinese could do it primarily by themselves. Mao saw the Japanese military as surrounded by hostile Chinese people whom he could inspire and train to offer effective resistance. Japan’s supply lines were long, and the Japanese had to guard them and their provisions, forcing them to fight debilitating rearguard battles nearly constantly. Mao told author Edgar Snow,
China is a very big nation, and it cannot be said to be conquered until every inch of it is under the sword of the invader. If Japan should succeed in occupying even a large section of China, getting possession of an area with as many as 100 or even 200 million people, we would still be far from defeated.68
Western military thought held that the combatant who had the best and most weapons would prevail. Mao taught the opposite: “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale.”69
Colonel Joseph Stilwell was the U.S. embassy’s military attaché in China in 1936. It was his second tour of duty there and he had traveled the country and was fluent in Chinese. Stilwell understood Chiang’s strategy of yi-yi zhi-yi, passively waiting for a barbarian to oust the barbarian Japanese. He visited the Chinese army’s front lines, where he had been told Chiang’s troops were preparing for aggressive military action against the Japanese. Stilwell wrote, “No evidence of planned defense against further Japanese encroachment. No troop increase or even thought of it. No drilling or maneuvering.”70 Stilwell also observed Mao’s warriors, about whom he noted, “Good organization, good tactics. They do not want the cities. Content to rough it in the country. Poorly armed and equipped, yet scare the Government to death.”71
As Mao slowly but surely solidified his claim to the Mandate, Henry Luce placed Chiang Kai-shek on Time’s cover for the fourth time. Under a handsome picture of the Generalissimo looking confident in his Western-style uniform, a white-gloved hand gripping his sword, the caption read: Premier of China. Good roads, good morals, good bombs are his answer to Japan. Readers learned that the “Christian Miss Soong” had convinced “Southern Methodist Chiang” to convert. After becoming a Christian, the Generalissimo “proceeded to conquer all China.” Time claimed that Chiang’s “brain and will have driven the Chinese people to extraordinary achievements,” that Chiang “succeeded in uniting the Chinese people in a way that has not been known for centuries,” and that he “was unquestionably the greatest man in the Far East, recognized joyfully as such by Chinese.” Chiang had even “rammed some rudiments of Christian conduct and morality” into his soldiers.72
About Mao Zedong and his growing movement, Luce made no mention. About Chiang’s inactivity against the Japanese invaders, Luce said that Southern Methodist Chiang was simply “turning the Christian other cheek.”73
Chapter 6
THE FIRST WISE MAN’S NEW CHINA
The United States has handled Chiang very badly. They have let him get away with blackmail.
—Mao Zedong1
In the summer of 1934 the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang vacationed with their favorite sycophants—American missionaries—in the cool mountain resort of Kuling on the Yangtze between Nanking and Hankow, high above the Four Hundred Million. Mayling courted these men, who enjoyed sitting with one of the most beautiful women in the world. She spoke to them of “the importance of spreading American culture in China,” coyly solicited their opinions, wrote down their best ideas, and complimented and thanked them for helping to create New China.2 The missionaries in turn continued to write to audiences across the United States about how the Christian Miss Soong and Southern Methodist Chiang were champions of the American way.
The missionaries noted that Chiang didn’t have programs to help the peasants the way FDR’s New Deal was helping the common man in the United States. Sterling Seagrave wrote, “Mayling was quick to grasp their point. She went to Chiang with an idea, and he agreed with surprising speed. Mayling sat down with the missionaries to work out the details of China’s ‘New Deal.’ She called it the ‘New Life Movement.’ ”3
The term new life appealed to the American missionaries, with its allusion to the resurrection of Christ combined with the social consciousness of the New Deal. Mayling proclaimed, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see New Life.”4 Millions of Christians in America nodded their heads in agreement. The relatively few of the Four Hundred Million who heard it wondered what she was talking about.
Mayling refashioned Chinese virtues into an American style that the missionaries could translate to the target audience in the United States. Americans saw China as filthy, and Mayling would scrub it clean with theological conviction and public-hygiene campaigns. Americans were heartened to learn that she was asking the Four Hundred Million to wash their hands and faces three times daily, to bathe at least once a week, even to stop smoking. (The Christian Miss Soong stopped smoking in public, though she constantly chain-smoked menthol cigarettes as she sat at her desk writing her New Life dicta.) Laura Tyson Li wrote in Madame Chiang Kai-shek that Mayling was New Life’s “driving force”:
She and Chiang flew around the country, evangelizing the movement to Chinese and foreign missionaries alike. She formulated much of the movement’s propaganda and often wrote the English versions herself. She wrote articles for American publications and gave interviews to foreign journalists extolling the movement’s aims and achievements.5
Madame Chiang splashed New Life slogans on buildings, and missionaries loved to quote these sayings to the people back home, not realizing that the Chinese victims of Mayling’s Americanization paid the words little attention. To counter Mao’s success, Mayling claimed, “We are giving the people what the Communists promised but could not perform.”6
For his part, Chiang saw New Life as a vehicle to further discipline his countrymen. Blue Shirt terror squads beat people up for spitting in the street, for drinking alcohol with their meals in restaurants, for dressing improperly, and for many other infractions. Those who dared to criticize Chiang disappeared and didn’t return.
As usual, Time magazine explained New Life with an American comparison:
What Chinese officialdom needed, the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang had decided, was a big dose of the castor oil of Puritanism. The tablespoon with which they dished this out they called the New Life Movement, and with every ounce of Nanking’s authority they dosed all China. Batch after batch of local mayors and magistrates were ordered to Nanking, drilled and exhorted there in the primary d
ecencies—to stop wiping noses on sleeves, to stop taking bribes from litigants. They were warned that he who did not practice the new Puritanism might expect the worst—and this was no empty threat.7
While New Life made a lot of positive noise in the United States, it flopped in China. The American ambassador to China, Nelson Johnson, observed, “It is doubtful whether the personalities interested in the movement are sufficiently pure themselves to give the movement much prestige.”8
It wasn’t only the Luce press that constantly pushed the Soong-Chiang party line. American missionaries in China promoted articles supposedly penned by Chiang; in one item, titled “What the Sufferings of Jesus Mean to Me,” Chiang (or someone) wrote, “Now I have become a follower of Jesus in his plan for saving the world.”9 Americans learned that Chiang’s favorite Christian value was love—“love for the emancipation of the weaker races, and for the welfare of the oppressed people.”10 Certainly some missionaries knew that Chiang was a one-party despot with legions of Blue Shirt thugs terrorizing the populace. They also knew that Chiang’s government was still a weak collection of warlord states held together by Ailing and Chiang through financial payoffs. But for reasons of either blind faith or strategic amorality, these men of God overlooked Chiang’s shortcomings. The Missionary Review of the World wrote, “China has now the most enlightened, patriotic and able rulers in her history.”11
In the fall of 1936, Chiang received troubling reports about troops allied with him under the command of a warlord, thirty-five-year-old Marshal Xueliang Zhang. Based in the city of Xian in North China, closest to the forces of both Mao and the Japanese, these two hundred thousand troops were now growing resentful because it was their Manchurian territory that Chiang had ceded to the Japanese to buy time. It had been five years, and now they wanted their homeland back.
Mao declared, “The core of our policy is to work with Chiang to resist Japan.”12 On April 9, 1936, Marshal Zhang met with Mao’s emissary Zhou Enlai. Zhou argued that Chinese should not be fighting Chinese and that Zhang should unite with Mao to oppose the Japanese in Manchuria. In defiance of Chiang Kai-shek, Zhang heeded Zhou and even agreed to supply Mao with weapons in a joint campaign against Japan.
Chiang—who knew about Zhang’s contacts with Mao—warned Zhang not to be taken in by him. Meanwhile, Chiang prepared another Bandit Extermination Campaign—his sixth. On December 4, 1936, he flew to Xian to confront Marshal Zhang. In a tense meeting, Zhang asked Chiang to follow Mao’s wish of unifying China by resisting Japan. Chiang countered with his policy of resisting after unity, which meant crushing Mao first.
On Wednesday, December 9, ten thousand students demonstrated in the streets of Xian demanding that Chiang end the civil war and unite with Mao to fight Japan. Police shot and wounded two of the students. At five in the morning on December 12, a two-hundred-man detachment led by Marshal Zhang’s personal guard, twenty-eight-year-old Captain Ming Jiu Sun, set out to kidnap Chiang. When Captain Sun captured Chiang, he said, “The [northeast] army demands that you fight Japan as soon as possible, for their homes have been seized by the enemy, and all of China suffers because of their loss.” Chiang snorted. “I am the leader of the Chinese people, I represent the nation. I think that my policy is right, not wrong.”13
When he learned that Zhang had Chiang in custody, Mao at first wanted Chiang put on trial as a traitor. But many—including Zhou Enlai, Marshal Zhang, and Joseph Stalin, who supported both sides—feared the greater disunity to war-torn China that would result.
The Xian incident was worldwide news, but press reports were mostly speculation, as the central character—Chiang—was incommunicado, and the marshal’s lips were sealed. The world wondered, Was Chiang alive or had he been murdered? Who was holding him and why?
Behind the scenes, Zhang asked Chiang to put aside differences with Mao and recommit to a United Front to fight the Japanese. These were humiliating conditions for Chiang. When Zhang proposed a patriotic United Front with Mao, Chiang shouted that Mao was duping Zhang and that the smart strategy was to oppose Mao rather than Japan.
Madame Chiang bravely flew to Xian to confront her husband’s captors; T.V. also came along to ease negotiations with payoffs. Chiang grudgingly agreed to halt the civil war. After thirteen days in captivity, Chiang suddenly appeared back in Nanking and announced a new United Front with Mao against the Japanese.
China Hand John Service was now serving in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. By the age of twenty-eight he had already lived in four different provinces, mastered three Chinese dialects, and developed wide contacts with Chinese of all social strata. He was well aware of the ordinary man’s desire for Chiang and Mao to unite and oppose Japan. Service later recalled, “I remember seeing Chinese weep when Chiang was released.”14
The scraps of information leaked about Chiang’s time in captivity did not accurately portray the Generalissimo’s reluctance to participate in a United Front or reveal that he had caved in to Mao’s demands.15 Simplifying things for her American audience, Pearl Buck wrote, “The differences between Chiang Kai-shek and his followers and the Communist leaders and their followers were as grave and as irreconcilable as the differences between the black and white races in our own country. But for the sake of the defense of China those differences were put aside.”16
The Soong-Chiang bunch used their Bibles to project their version of the Xian incident. In a Good Friday sermon, the Generalissimo claimed he had remained strong because of the example of “the forty days and nights Christ passed in the wilderness withstanding temptation.”17 Another story stated that when Mayling appeared at her husband’s prison door, Chiang claimed that her arrival had been predicted in a Bible passage he had just read: “Jehovah will now do a new thing, and that is, he will make a woman protect a man.”18 As Chiang explained,
I have now been a Christian for nearly ten years and during that time I have been a constant reader of the Bible. Never before has this sacred book been so interesting to me as during my two weeks’ captivity in Xian.… I found myself placed under detention without a single earthly belonging. From my captors I asked for but one thing, a copy of the Bible.… The greatness and love of Christ burst upon me with new inspiration, increasing my strength to struggle against evil, to overcome temptation and to uphold righteousness.… The many virtues of Christ I cannot possibly enumerate.… Entreating forgiveness for His enemies, He cried, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Truly great is the love of Christ.19
The Chinese public was elated that Chiang would abandon his commitment to “unity before resisting” in favor of Mao’s more popular “unity by resisting.” On New Year’s Day 1937, a Chinese newspaper editorialized, “From today China will have only the united front, and never again will there be internal hostility.”20 Suddenly Chiang was a national hero, the leading symbol of China’s unity. But while Chiang spoke of a second United Front with Mao, in private he prepared for his sixth Bandit Extermination Campaign.
In 1938, Pearl Buck traveled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature for her depiction of the Noble Chinese Peasants. Just one year before, her most famous book had been brought to celluloid life. Most of the Chinese characters in The Good Earth were white actors made up to look Asian, as the Chinese Exclusion Act meant that there were very few Chinese actors in Hollywood. Even the two main characters, Wang Lung and O-Lan, were played by white actors, since Paul Muni, a white actor, had been cast in the leading role of Wang Lung, and movie-industry codes did not allow the portrayal of a sexual relationship between members of different races.
The characters in The Good Earth movie, Wang and O-Lan, were played by white actors, Paul Muni and Luise Rainer, made up to look Chinese. (Courtesy Everett Collection)
The summer of 1937 represented the nadir of Chiang’s efforts to make Franklin Delano Roosevelt his barbarian. That July, the Japanese expanded from Manchuria into central China and took Beijing, ancient home of the Son of Heaven. Mao wanted Chiang to
fight the Japanese in northern and central China, but in one of the most disastrous decisions in military history, Chiang decided to battle the Japanese in the city of Shanghai, in China’s south. Chiang chose Shanghai for its publicity value—there were more Americans there than in any other Chinese metropolis. Chiang’s goal was not to beat the Japanese but to attract the sympathy of the Americans so that they would step in and oust them. Ambassador Johnson heard Soong-Chiang syndicate members speak of “the responsibility of America… to preserve the independence and integrity of China.”21
The fighting in Shanghai was horrendous. The Japanese landed their superior forces, and Chiang threw thousands into the doomed struggle. These battles in and around China’s biggest city received the international press attention the Soong-Chiang bunch sought. As Steven Mosher wrote in China Misperceived, “The new images of the Chinese provided by Pearl Buck and others could not have come at a better time. When a few years later the Japanese escalated their piecemeal attacks to all-out war, it was not the nameless, faceless masses of China who took up arms against the invaders, but Buck’s Noble Chinese Peasants.”22
The China Mirage Page 16