by John Keay
‘The most enduring myth in modern Chinese history, and one of the biggest myths of the twentieth century’, the Long March has since been controversially exposed as just that, a myth.23 According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao was very nearly left behind; he repeatedly led the marchers astray; and like the rest of the leadership, he seldom actually marched, being carried most of the way in a sedan chair. Moreover the whole thing, far from being a saga of heroism and survival, was allegedly a charade masterminded by, of all people, Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang’s son was at the time in Russia and supposedly being detained there as surety for his father’s collaboration. Were Chiang’s forces to annihilate the marchers, it would be as good as a death sentence for one on whom his father doted. Additionally Chiang could not afford to antagonise Moscow at a time when Tokyo posed the direr threat. And finally, while his Nationalist forces did indeed pursue the marchers through Guizhou and Sichuan, this supposedly served a different agenda, namely to wrest those territories from their warlords so that they would be available as a refuge for Chiang and his government in the event of a Japanese invasion.
The Comintern wanted the Jiangxi ‘Reds’ to relocate in the north-west, where they could supply and control them. Chiang’s task, therefore, was to shepherd them there. Instead of decimating the communists, he was to deliver them. With air power and artillery, he could easily have annihilated them; but the planes buzzed without bombing, and the troops and guns were meant to overawe the local warlords. The battles of the march were invention, its year-long duration was due to quite unnecessary diversions, and the hardships encountered were the result of Mao’s miscalculations and his power-thirsty manoeuvrings.
Much of which may be true – the details were always suspect – and none of which detracts from the central importance of the march. Removing from southern Jiangxi to northern Shaanxi, while saving the CCP from possible extinction and proving a strategic masterstroke, lent the party national credibility and set an example of improbable, even heaven-blest, survival. The sacrifices could not be gainsaid. Of the 80,000 who had marched out of Jiangxi, just 4,000 are said to have reached the new headquarters at Yan’an. Desertions accounted for some of these losses, perhaps most; deaths more often resulted from exhaustion and sickness than enemy fire; and since the Long Marchers were reshuffled with another ‘Red’ army en route, the exact number of survivors remains unclear. But disaster or triumph, the march came to be seen as bathed in glory, much like Gallipoli or Dunkirk, and was treated as a suitable subject for inspirational propaganda. Fairbank compared it to ‘Moses leading his Chosen People through the Red Sea’; redemption through flight is something of an apostolic cliché.24 In China, from the Han founder Liu Bang’s repeated withdrawals before the fiery Xiang Yu to the long northward march of the Taipings, precedents aplenty demonstrated the genius of tactical relocation. And while to the average Chinese the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism may have seemed excessively abstract and alien, the march gave them a human dimension and a national relevance.
The march also gave birth to the Mao legend. A tendency to present mid-twentieth-century history in personal terms is not unique to China. In a world dominated by wartime leaders and national heroes – Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Gandhi, de Gaulle – China’s redemption would readily lend itself to a Mao-centred narrative. Post-war reunification, mass indoctrination, implementation of the brand of communism labelled ‘Maoism’ and the cult of the Great Leader’s personality – all ensured that Mao’s story over the next four decades eclipsed China’s. But it was not as simple as that. Without, for instance, the devastation caused by Japan’s invasion and the Second World War, Mao and the CCP might have been a historical irrelevance.
In 1936, within a year of the party setting up its new soviet among the dusty canyons just south of the Great Wall in northern Shaanxi, another heaven-sent opportunity presented itself. Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek was taken prisoner. While on a visit to Xi’an to meet Zhang Xueliang, playboy son of the warlord Zhang Zuolin and inheritor of his army, Chiang’s bodyguard had been massacred and he himself held as a hostage. Zhang Xueliang’s plan was the laudable one of acting as a go-between in bringing the Nationalists, communists and warlords together in united opposition to renewed Japanese incursions. In effect Chiang was to be forced into declaring a new united front and an end to anti-CCP hostilities on pain of being handed over to the CCP. Tortuous negotiations ensued in which the decisive move was made by the Comintern in Russia. For instead of encouraging the CCP to grab Chiang Kai-shek while it had the chance, it ordered the party to cooperate with the Nationalists, secure Chiang’s release and even serve under his command in a united front against the Japanese. Zhou Enlai dutifully relayed this position and Chiang was freed. Not for several years would a united front result; the Nationalists were still too suspicious of the communists. But Nationalist offensives against the Shaanxi soviet were scaled down, Mao and the CCP gained the breathing space to embark on rural mobilisation, and all parties braced themselves for the Japanese onslaught.
Long anticipated, the fatal encounter took place at the so-called ‘Marco Polo bridge’, about 15 kilometres (9 miles) west of Beijing, on the night of 7 July 1937. In defence of their railway and industrial concessions, Japanese troops and Japanese-controlled Chinese forces were by now stationed all over Hebei and Shandong. The affair at the bridge, initially a misunderstanding over training manoeuvres, escalated rapidly because Tokyo was taking a more belligerent line and Chiang Kai-shek was under enormous pressure to stand firm. When the Japanese and their warlord allies swept all before them round Tianjin and Beijing, the same pressure saw Chiang risk opening a second front with a view to drawing off the enemy.
Chiang’s new front was Shanghai, where Japanese troops were few and a Japanese naval fleet looked an inviting target. That it was also China’s most populous city, its biggest port and richest financial centre seems not to have troubled the Generalissimo. Ordered to attack the Japanese fleet, in mid-August Chiang’s Nationalist air force swept low over the city to drop their bombs. They failed to hit a single ship but sent three bombs into the heart of the international concession. One scored a direct hit on the Palace Hotel, a prestigious development on the corniche-like Bund, another just missed the nearby Cathay Hotel and landed in the crowds outside, and a third hit the Great World, an enormous pleasure-drome on Nanjing Road, the main shopping street. There alone 1,000 were killed, nearly all Chinese, and 1,000 more horribly mutilated. It was 13 August, a Friday.
Inauspiciously begun, the Nationalists’ Shanghai front soon retracted to become a Yangzi front. Shanghai itself held out for a couple of months, during which the Japanese brought in aircraft carriers, heavy armour and several divisions of marines and infantry. ‘As many as 250,000 Chinese troops were killed or wounded – almost 60% of Chiang’s finest forces – while the Japanese took 40,000 or more casualties.’25 The city never really recovered. Foreigners fled, business confidence collapsed, and it was in fact the Japanese who terminated the status of its international concession. The Nationalists then began their own Long March, retreating upriver to the capital, Nanjing, which fell in December (1937), to a new capital at Wuhan, which fell in mid-1938, and finally to Chongqing above the gorges in Sichuan, which, though heavily bombed, would serve as the last capital of what remained of Chiang’s Nationalist China until 1945.
It was a similar story farther north, despite valiant resistance and the flooding – intentional for once – of the Yellow River. Meant as a way of slowing the enemy’s advance, the blowing up of the dikes redirected the river for the umpteenth time and inundated an unrecorded number of Chinese civilians. By late 1938 the Japanese had reached Kaifeng. Meanwhile in the south Guangzhou had fallen and Hong Kong was effectively isolated. Worse by far, though, was the madness that had overtaken the Japanese when they entered Nanjing. That city, as fair as any with its graceful Ming palaces and massive walls beneath the wooded slopes of Mount Zijin, had known massacres before. Nothing, though
, could compare with the butchery, rapes and other atrocities perpetrated over a seven-week reign of terror in the winter of 1937/38. As Japanese troops took their revenge on the capital, at least 50,000 Chinese – and possibly half a million – most of them civilians, were gratuitously slaughtered in one of the worst war crimes on record.
By 1939, when the Sino-Japanese war was subsumed within the Second World War, all the coastal provinces were under Tokyo’s control, while its quisling regimes extended deep inland. China was fragmented; but zhongguo, in any meaningful sense, was subjugated. The Nationalists were penned up in Sichuan, desperately short of revenue and dependent for munitions and supplies on the newly built but only fitfully open Burma Road through semi-autonomous Yunnan. The communists were equally marginalised and equally cash-strapped in Shaanxi. There they cultivated self-sufficiency, harboured designs on Gansu and Ningxia, and accumulated manpower while experimentally re-allocating land and classifying and organising its cultivators. Meanwhile the fighting continued and the human tragedies multiplied. Despite massive Allied support for the Nationalists, especially after Pearl Harbor (December 1941) and American entry into the Pacific War, despite the eventual formation of a half-hearted Guomindang-CCP united front, and despite a major Japanese offensive in Hunan and Guizhou in 1944, the military situation remained basically unchanged until Japan surrendered following the August 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
China’s contribution to victory had been in tying down vast numbers of Japanese aircraft, military vehicles and above all troops. In 1945 about two million, half of them in Manchuria, awaited surrender and repatriation. Both the Nationalists, with their promise of a ‘Free China’ now backed by the USA, and the communists, with their ambitions for a People’s Republic backed by the Russians, swooped to secure the surrendered munitions and to claim the abandoned infrastructure, the mines, the factories and the teeming territories. In this race, Manchuria, now a heavily indus-trialised region thanks to Japanese investment and less devastated by the late war than the rest of China, constituted the greatest prize. It had been invaded by the Russians in the dying months of the war, which handed the advantage to the communists. When Nationalist and communist armies both converged on it, the Nationalists, while much the stronger, found their progress slowed by the Russians. The communists, joined by local partisans and some Koreans, were allowed to help themselves to the stockpiled Japanese weaponry and establish themselves in the far north. It was thus in Harbin, the first city run by the CCP, that Lin Biao reorganised his forces as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and in late 1946 began to push south.
By then American attempts to get the two sides to accept a ceasefire
and some form of power-sharing under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership had collapsed. ‘The greatest obstacle to peace has been the complete, almost overwhelming suspicion with which the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang regard each other,’ began General George Marshall’s report on the failure of his mediating mission. ‘They each sought only to take counsel of their fears.’26 The fears proved real enough when in early 1947 the fighting flared into open war and each side assumed its true colours. The communists no longer disguised their revolutionary intent. Lands were confiscated and redistributed, landowners held to account, informants encouraged, and mass indoctrination campaigns organised. The Nationalists, on the other hand, betrayed their old preference for corporate croneyism, indifference to popular sentiment and economic incompetence. A collapse in morale as a result of rampant inflation (500 per cent a month in 1948), famines, rural unrest and student protests undermined the Nationalist regime more fatally than the communist victories. By 1948 the PLA had inflicted a series of disastrous defeats on the Nationalists in Manchuria, leading to mass desertions. All over northern China the CCP’s peasant guerrillas were simultaneously making the countryside a no-go area. More victories and desertions meant that by the end of 1948 most of China north of the Yangzi was in communist hands.
Jonathan Spence likens Chiang Kai-shek’s plight to that of the Ming pretenders after the Manchus had overrun the north in 1644–45. Chiang himself might have been more reassured by those earlier dynasties, stretching back through the Song and the Eastern Jin to the Wu of the Three Kingdoms period, which had made a greater success of their southern sojourn. He certainly considered standing firm south of the Yangzi, while he investigated the alternative possibility of again withdrawing to Sichuan and Yunnan. But in the end he opted for the greater safety of Taiwan, which had been restored to the republic after the defeat of Japan. Art treasures and texts from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, the nearest thing to regalia that he could lay his hands on, were removed there in 1948; and in early 1949, as the PLA overran the south in a series of lightning advances, Chiang himself fled across the Taiwan Strait with about a million of his troops. Other Nationalists were driven into Thailand, Laos and Burma. Many emigrated overseas.
As president of his rump ‘Republic of China’, Chiang ruled on in Taiwan until his death in 1975. In good dynastic tradition he was then succeeded by his son until Taiwan adopted a parliamentary form of government in the late 1980s. Mao, who would die in 1976, outlasted Chiang by just a year. But his ‘People’s Republic of China’, officially proclaimed from Tiananmen, the Heavenly Gate, in Beijing in October 1949, proved markedly more resistant to parliamentary representation.
EPILOGUE
THE QINGMING FESTIVAL, WHEN CHINESE FAMILIES honour their ancestors, generally falls around 5 April. Graves and shrines are swept clean, flowers are arranged, ribbons tied, and the deceased plied with food and token gifts – imitation banknotes, cut-out Toyotas, cardboard cell-phones. Those unable to attend in person can access online catalogues of these make-believe modernities for virtual donation. A new generation is having to reconfigure the traditions of Qingming, because for nearly half a century the festival was in abeyance. It fell foul of Communist contempt for all superstitions and then of the Cultural Revolution’s censure of ‘old thinking’. In 1976 it acquired a positively insidious dimension when on 3–5 April a display of Qingming floral wreaths and poster poems brought crowds of mourners to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. They were protesting against official indifference to the recent death of Premier Zhou Enlai, which they saw as disparagement of a revered and long-serving revolutionary by the hard left leadership of the Cultural Revolution. Cars were overturned and a police post torched. But the main casualty was Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping; accused of orchestrating the affair, he was dismissed from all his Party offices. Sometimes known as the Tiananmen incident, this 1976 protest is now more commonly called the Qingming incident, so avoiding confusion with the more prolonged Tiananmen confrontation of 1989.
Deng of course soon rose again; and thirty years later, on 5 April 2006, Qingming itself was back in favour. Next day the papers were full of it. From Xi’an in Shaanxi came news of lavish ceremonies at a mausoleum lately built to commemorate Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. First of the mythical Five Emperors, the Yellow Emperor was now credited by the China Daily with having fathered the Chinese people and invented the boat, the cart, the long bow and Chinese medicine ‘among other things’. Over $15 million had been subscribed for the emperor’s new shrine, though Shaanxi’s governor insisted that a more fitting memorial would be ‘reunification of the motherland’. He was thinking of Taiwan, from where much of the money and many of the participants had come.
Meanwhile in Shaoxing (Zhejiang province) the Qingming celebrations had focused not on the first of the Five Emperors but the last. This ‘Great Yu’ was he who, by making his son his heir, had founded the Xia dynasty, the earliest in China’s long dynastic pedigree. Among the 3000 who had reportedly attended ‘the ancient rituals’ staged at Shaoxing were the city’s Communist Party secretary, the Zhejiang Party’s deputy secretary, the vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and 115 people with the surname Si, all of whom claimed direct descent from Emperor Yu. A similar assembly, this time
of Kongs, was reported at Confucius’ birthplace of Qufu in Shandong. Out of his now 2 million to 3 million descendants (there’s a DNA test to prove it) luckily only a fraction had turned up; but more were expected for his birthday. Reviled as late as the 1970s, Confucius had been rehabilitated in the 1990s. Confucian injunctions were now eclipsing the slogans of both Marxism-Leninism and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ in official discourse. Pride in those three thousand to six thousand years of continuous civilisation, rather than the recent achievements of the proletariat, had been chosen as the theme of the Beijing Olympics. Emperors, no longer monsters of exploitation, were again being accorded national respect. And Qingming had been reinstated in the official calendar. In fact, in 2008 it was made a public holiday. As the nation headed en masse for the ancestral burial grounds, thousands of extra bus and train services were laid on, incoming charter flights were taking off from Taiwan at the rate of one every fifteen minutes and the traffic jams around Shanghai were said to be the worst ever recorded.
China has transformed itself – and is still doing so – more dramatically than any other region in the world. The rate of change is so fast that it wrong-foots all but the most agile China-watchers. Up-to-the-minute histories written in the 1970s felt obliged to explore, in mind-numbing detail, the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism as adapted by Mao and adumbrated in the opaque pronouncements of plenums and praesidiums. Subjecting Asia’s agrarian masses to an ideology devised for Europe’s industrial proletariat seemed an experiment worth studying. The staggering statistics churned out by annual audits of output and successive five-year plans also proved irresistible. Faith in the efficacy of scientific socialism, planned economics and democratic centralism enforced the idea of progress as product: given the right machine and the right settings, it could be churned out like pig iron. To lubricate the leviathan, campaigns were launched and diktats promulgated-‘the Four Clean-ups’, ‘the Five Antis’ (anti-corruption etc), ‘the Ten Great Relationships’, ‘the Sixty Articles on Work Methods’, and so on. China-watchers needed clear heads and a sceptical turn of mind.