China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Kusano Fumio, ‘Chinese Communist Guerrilla Warfare’ (1948)1

  The overthrow of the enemy is the aim in war; the destruction of hostile armed forces, the means both in attack and defence.

  Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)2

  Preserving their forces rather than wasting them on territorial operations that were unlikely to succeed was an important part of the Communists’ strategy. When in November 1945 Nationalist armies entered the Liaoxi Corridor, the strategically important slice of land that connects Manchuria to north China, the Communist commander-in-chief in Manchuria, General Lin Biao, wrote to Mao Zedong:

  Our forces which have engaged in battle are completely exhausted and have lost their cohesion. Their combat strength is weak and we have many new recruits who have not been trained … we lack arms and ammunition and are not receiving resupplies. We do not have enough uniforms and shoes, we are not accustomed to eating sorghum, and we have no money. From our general headquarters down, we have no maps, we do not know the terrain, our communication systems are in chaos, the local people are not yet supportive, and there are many bandit groups.3

  Mao approved Lin’s request to move his troops 200 kilometres north.4

  When Chiang Kaishek went on the offensive in 1946, the Communist forces again fell back, allowing the Nationalists to take territory. An anonymous British intelligence officer travelled for six months through north Jiangsu while the Nationalist forces were clearing the Tianjin–Nanjing and Longhai railways. At first it seemed to him that the Nationalists ‘would destroy the Communist forces in the area’. However, he soon learned that, while ‘that was the aim, it was never achieved. The Communist New Fourth Army withdrew practically intact.’5 These offensives gained the Nationalists little except broken railways and endless harassment from guerrilla units on their flanks and in their rear.

  Waiting – ‘waiting for failure to ripen before plucking it’, as Lionel Lamb put it in October 1948 – was also part of the Communists’ operational strategy.6 They could not fail to notice that the Nationalists were feeling increasingly overwhelmed by their problems, that growing sections of both urban and village Chinese were turning against them, and that the Americans’ impatience with Nationalist strategies was intensifying day by day. Waiting for these processes to deepen made eminent sense.

  Wrecking was another element of the Communists’ strategy, one that speeded up Nationalist disintegration. They pulled up large sections of railway line, not only to hamper Nationalist troop movements but also to damage local economies. In north Jiangsu, the Communists ‘stripped everything in a most thorough matter. Most of the industrial plants are stripped of vital parts … the dykes of the Grand Canal and various rivers have been broken.’7 A UNRRA report from the capital of Shandong province, Ji’nan, stated that the Communists prevented coal, wheat and cotton from reaching the city by blocking rail traffic and occupying coal mines.8 In southern Hebei, ‘all bridges have been completely destroyed’, the UK Consul General in Tianjin reported.9 In their destruction of railway tracks, the Communists were nothing if not thorough; in Hebei they had the rails sawn into pieces and carried off into the mountains. The UK Foreign Office’s China Department concluded from information from a range of sources that the Communists were following a policy of ‘systematically wrecking any communications and plants essential to the economic life of the country’.10

  But victory did not simply fall into the laps of the Communists. Prevailing by default as the last man standing would not deliver what they wanted; in order to have the authority to impose their vision of the New China, they needed an overwhelming victory. For that they would have to mobilise the population, recruit large armies and equip and train them to fight serious battles. These were not easy or painless processes. They needed a helping hand.

  Village China in Revolution

  Kusano Fumio, whose remark provides one of the epigraphs for this chapter, was a Japanese civil servant who worked for his country’s Foreign Ministry in Beijing throughout the War of Resistance and went on to become a China specialist writing extensively on Chinese communism after the war. In a document translated by the CIA in 1948, he wrote that a ‘guerrilla army is generally placed in such a circumstance that it must choose between wholehearted support and bitter conflict with the masses. If an army is to be successful in guerrilla warfare, it must first win wide popularity with the masses … and it must strive not to be confused with bandit groups.’11

  When General Lin Biao’s troops arrived in Manchuria, they were entering an area in which there were a variety of hostile forces, including local militia, criminal gangs, groups of bandits and the puppet Manzhouguo Army which the Japanese had used to help them control the region. Lin Biao’s men were driven by these various forces to north Manchuria, where they set about building a new base area. Imposing order was their first task. They began by conducting a bandit extermination campaign, clearing the area one county at a time.

  Dealing with minor bandit groups was easy: they were surrounded and disarmed, or driven into the hills, where the harshness of the winter ensured their rapid diminution. Larger forces posed a tougher challenge. Xie Wendong, a local commander of the Manzhouguo Army, initially agreed to incorporate his troops into General Lin Biao’s but then went over to the Nationalists. It took many months before General Lin was able to destroy them. First he picked off Xie’s weakest units and destroyed all the food and arms stockpiles he could locate. Then he cut off Xie’s support in the villages, no doubt by punishing those found to be supplying Xie’s troops, and chased as many of them as pos sible into the mountains. When the Communists finally captured Xie Wendong himself, they did not kill him immediately but paraded him through several villages in the area. Having got their message over loud and clear, they executed him at a mass rally.12

  For the Communists, securing popular support was far from straightforward because, like the Nationalists, they were facing a desperate economic situation. A combination of the pressures of war, recruitment drives which now exceeded the limits they had set for themselves during the War of Resistance, and bad weather meant that in Yan’an in late 1946, out of a total population of several million people, 40,000 were short of food. In February 1947, that figure rose to 200,000, and 400,000 two months later. The result was starvation and fleeing refugees.13 In Manchuria, grain requisitions in 1947 reached 23 per cent of the harvest on average, and exceeded 30 per cent in its most northerly province, Jilin. Communist work assignments took up a third of the villagers’ time, reducing the amount they had available for agricultural work. In 1947 in Shaan-Gan-Ning, another north China base area, the rural population paid more than 6 million litres of grain as tax and worked half of their time for the Communists. In one county, a local Communist official pleaded for a reduction in taxes and work quotas. The villagers for whom he was responsible paid 60 per cent of their earnings in taxes and, out of a population of 20,000, 4,500 were serving in the Communist forces. Of the remaining 15,500, nearly all of whom were subsistence farmers, 10,760 could not till their own land because of the work they were performing for the Communists.14 Much land was left uncultivated. By 1947, these exactions reached levels considered unsustainable in the long run even by the Communists themselves.15 Without any counter-vailing programme, the Communists would have ended up ‘in bitter conflict’ with the population, as Kusano Fumio argued.

  To avoid this, they opted for land revolution. ‘China’s irrational landholding system is the greatest obstacle to our country’s democratization, industrialization, independence, unification, and wealth and power,’ declared the Central Committee of the CCP on 10 October 1947, at that year’s anniversary of the 1911 Revolution.16 An outline land law published the same day declared: ‘China’s rural system is unjust in the extreme … landlords and rich peasants, who make up less than 10 per cent of the rural population, hold approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the land, cruelly exploiting the peasantry.’17 The law ordered the confiscation of all land owne
d by landlords and rich peasants, ancestral shrines, temples and schools, and for it to be distributed to ‘all the village people’ equally.18 Collectivisation was not yet on the agenda; that would come in the 1950s.

  The historian Ch’en Yung-fa has demonstrated that a large amount of land had in fact already been redistributed before the publication of the land law.19 The Communists had halted land seizures at the beginning of the War of Resistance, but after Japan’s surrender they confiscated land from people they designated as collaborators, evil gentry (wealthy and powerful local families) and local tyrants (people exploiting their positions of power in the government or other local institutions). Not yet willing to declare their intent publicly, the Communists disguised land revolution as the implementation of Sun Yatsen’s call to return ‘land to the tiller’. But land revolution it was.

  Land was hugely important to China’s peasants, far more so than money – especially at this time of high inflation and general food shortages. But the aim behind land revolution was not just to give China’s peasants pieces of land and so make them beneficiaries of the revolution; by and large that had already been accomplished. ‘The land revolution that Mao Zedong had always wanted … in truth was closely connected with war mobilization,’ concluded Ch’en Yung-fa.20 This was not only because in land revolution the peasants received the land but also because the Communists retained the money confiscated from large landowners and rich peasants. Land revolution was also a way of inspiring and mobilising village China for the fight to come.

  Clausewitz wrote On War after the French Revolution. While ancien régime Europe feared its populations, the levée en masse conscripted the French masses into the army. It was their energy and passion that enabled revolutionary France to trounce the professional standing armies of its opponents. Clause-witz stressed the importance of what he called ‘moral forces’, the commitment to the fight made by the armed forces and the broader population.21 The land revolution was a way for the Communists to gain the support of village China by exemplifying in practice that it would stand up for the poor, that it was opposed to the abuse of their positions by the locally wealthy and powerful (including Communist officials) and that it had the power to enforce its will.

  William Hinton’s famous 1966 book Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village illustrated the process. Educated at Harvard and Cornell Universities, Hinton was a UNRRA tractor technician who stayed in China after the organisation brought its activities to a halt in 1947, when he took up the post of English teacher at Northern University in Shanxi province.22 When he learned of land revolution, he was thrilled: ‘I want to see and take part in it more than I have ever wanted to do anything in my life.’23 Fanshen became a classic. Based on numerous interviews, eight months of observation and attendance at countless village meetings in the village of Long Bow in Lucheng County, Shanxi province, the book provided a vivid account of land revolution. It succeeded in giving voice and face to those Long Bow villagers who had bene fitted from the land revolution, something missing not just from the accounts of those who opposed it, but also from Communist reports, in which statistics and generalisations, rather than individual human stories, dominated. Hinton followed the Communists’ preferred narrative – naturally so, given his sympathies – but also laid bare the innards of land revolution.

  Hinton began by sketching out economic relations in Long Bow, as was only appropriate for a supporter of the Communist cause. The Catholic Church, a local mutual aid society and ‘a handful of families’ owned most of the land in the village. One landlord, Sheng Jinghe, owned twenty-three acres. He lived on the rents paid to him for his land as well as ‘usurious interest rates, profits from commercial and industrial offices, the spoils of public office, and graft or commissions from the management of temple, church, and clan affairs’.24 Another landlord, ‘the Catholic Fan Buzi’, owned fourteen acres, plus ‘a flock of sheep, a distillery, and a liquor store’.25 But most Long Bow villagers were poor. One told Hinton that during a recent famine ‘the whole family went out to beg … Many mothers threw new born children in the river … We had to sell our eldest daughter.’26

  Communism made its appearance in Long Bow during the War of Resistance, a linkage stressed in Hinton’s narrative in order to underscore the Communists’ patriotic credentials. The Japanese requisitioned labour, built fortifications, imposed a new village leadership and recruited a militia in the village. One resident, Shi Fuyuan, had joined the Communists and regularly slipped back into Long Bow, using his connections to build up a small network of sympathisers. Among the early recruits were ‘the poor nephew of the village head’ of a neighbouring village and ‘the hired labourer Shen Suozi’. Their first assignments were simple. They collected food, clothing and shoes for the Communists and passed on information about Japanese troop movements.27 They also helped Communist guerrillas enter the village and kill a local collaborator.28

  Following Japan’s defeat, Long Bow Communists used the Chinese New Year, a time of celebration and excitement but also often used for settling debts, to attack landlord Sheng Jinghe. The Long Bow Peasant Association decided that Sheng Jinghe owed ‘400 bags of milled grain’ to pay for past exploitation. As they entered his home:

  It was very cold so we built bonfires [in the courtyard] and the flames shot up toward the stars. It was very beautiful. We went in to register his grain and altogether found but 200 bags of unmilled millet – only a quarter of what he owed us. Right then and there we decided to call another meeting. People all said he must have a lot of silver dollars – they thought of the wine plant, and the pigs he raised on the distillers’ grains, and the North Temple Society and the Confucius Association. We called him out of his house and asked him what he intended to do since the grain was not nearly enough. He said, ‘I have land and a house.’ ‘But all this is not enough,’ shouted the people. So then we began to beat him. Finally he said, ‘I have 40 silver dollars under the kang [his bed].’ We went in and dug it out. The money stirred up everyone. We beat him again. He told us how to find another hundred after that.29

  Land revolution was violent, and meant to be so: it was a display of power.

  Sheng Jinghe, by now 500 Chinese dollars lighter, fled the village the very next day for a nearby city, as many landlords in Communist areas did. One purpose of land revolution was to polarise the population between urban and rural, between rich and poor, and between the defenders of an abusive status quo and the standard bearers of a better future.

  In 1947, when the land revolution had gone public, Zhang Chunxu, the Communist village head, was made to confess his sins in front of a village gathering. ‘A hush settled over the room and soon spread even to the rowdy crowd outside’ as he began to speak, declaring: ‘I chose the best piece of land for myself’ when land was confiscated from landlords in 1946. In allocating tax quotas, he admitted, he had demanded too much from poor peasants. After long discussion, the meeting agreed to impose a fine, which Zhang Chunxi could pay after the harvest, and to suspend his Party membership for five months.30 An important part of land revolution was the punishment of local officials, including Communist ones. In a culture where local officials are habitually held responsible for all the ills that befall the people for whom they are supposed to care, that formed an astute way of demonstrating that the Communist Party was on the side of the good and, just as importantly, that it had the power to enforce its will.

  In the spring of 1948, the land revolution was declared to have been completed. In Long Bow, a final meeting was convened. Members of the audience ‘rose to their feet and bowed their heads three times before a large poster-style portrait of Chairman Mao’ before singing the Internationale. A new Communist culture was being embedded into village life to replace that of the Nationalists. Party members who had survived the intense vetting process took to the stage.31Among them was Zhang Chunxi; his sins had been forgiven. This was the first time Long Bow Communist Party members acknowledged their Party mem
bership in public. While the Party membership of a number of them had been widely surmised, that of others, especially those who were normally looked down upon, occasioned some startled remarks.

  The public unveiling of the local Communist Party branch also took Hinton by surprise. ‘With Kuomintang [Guomindang] assassins still roaming the countryside, with the Civil War battlefront only a hundred miles away, with a massive counter-attack still under preparation by Nationalist generals, who could guarantee the life of a Communist? If Governor Yen [General Yan Xishan]’s troops ever returned, every active revolutionary in the village would most certainly be hunted down and killed.’32 That, of course, was the point. The Long Bow Communists had made a step from which there could be no return.

  For those on the wrong side of land revolution, the process was terrifying and regularly fatal. Even though he was enthusiastic about it in general, Hinton acknowledged that ‘at least a dozen people were beaten to death by angry crowds; some hardworking small holders were wrongly dispossessed; revolutionary leaders at times rode roughshod over their followers.’33 One Pastor Wang, in charge of a locally influential church, ended up in front of a ‘people’s court’ after he refused to hand over to the Communists the contributions his flock had made to the church. ‘A meeting of the various societies was convened. Pastor Wang was accused before the group of being unproductive and depending on the offerings of the church members.’ When Pastor Wang defended himself, the Communist official in charge of the meeting asked the audience: ‘“Do you all approve of what Mr Wang has said?” The reply was given in a prompted chorus. “We disapprove.” They were asked, “If you are not satisfied, how will you act?” They answered, “Drag him”. Therefore several men took a rope and tied Pastor Wang’s feet together. The village people pulled on the rope and dragged him around the village.’ This process was repeated several times. The property of the church was confiscated and Pastor Wang was accused of being a Nationalist spy.34 Pastor Wang’s sister tried but failed to secure his release. We do not know what happened to him, but it is unlikely that he survived.