The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957
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But Chiang Kai-shek was not the only one making a claim on the territory of China. Two days after Hiroshima had been bombed, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, keeping to a promise Joseph Stalin had made to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta in February 1945. At the Soviet holiday resort on the Black Sea, Stalin had demanded control of the Manchurian seaports of Dalian and Port Arthur as well as joint control with China over Manchuria’s railways in exchange for breaking his non-aggression pact with Japan. Roosevelt made these concessions without consulting his wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin also requested two months’ supply of food and fuel for an army of 1.5 million men. This, too, Roosevelt accepted, as hundreds of shiploads of lend-lease material were sent to Siberia, including 500 Sherman tanks.7
As a result, even as they raced to reach Berlin and occupy half of Europe before the Americans, the Soviets still managed to keep almost a million troops in Siberia. On 8 August 1945 they poured across the Amur River into Manchuria with tactical aircraft in support. Armoured trains carrying elite troops moved east along the Chinese Eastern Railway towards Harbin, making gains of up to 70 kilometres a day. A separate drive from Vladivostok was launched southwards into Korea, where the port of Rashin was soon captured. The Japanese had few aircraft and offered little effective opposition. Within days the Russians had won control of all strategic points in Manchuria.8
Not far away, a mere hundred kilometres south of the Great Wall, Mao Zedong was counting his troops. After several years of collaboration, a civil war had erupted between the communists and the nationalists in 1927, and in 1934 Mao Zedong and his supporters had been forced to retreat deep inland to evade Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. A year later, some 20,000 survivors of the Long March had set up headquarters in land-locked Yan’an, far behind enemy lines, many of the troops living in cave dwellings. After a decade of consolidating his authority, Mao controlled some 900,000 guerrilla fighters in rural pockets across the north of China. He was ready to strike.
But Mao could be overly optimistic in his assessment of the balance of power. He had grandiose plans to incite a rebellion in Shanghai and take over the country’s financial powerhouse. Impulsively, he ordered 3,000 undercover troops to enter the city and prepare for a general uprising, which, he hoped, would precipitate a revolution. When reports indicated that his forces were hopelessly outnumbered, with little popular support, he persisted with his strategy. Stalin intervened, telling him to restrain his troops and avoid open confrontations with the nationalists. Mao reluctantly agreed. As the Red Army occupied Manchuria, Mao came up with a new vision: his aim was now to link up with the Russians and claim a belt of territory reaching from Outer Mongolia across all of Manchuria. Four armed groups moved north, including 100,000 troops of the Eighth Route Army under the command of Lin Biao. They soon met up with the Red Army.9
But Stalin’s immediate concern was to ensure the departure of the American military from China and Korea. The United States, after all, had a monopoly on the atom bomb and Stalin was wary of another world war. In order to achieve this goal, he openly proclaimed his support of the Chinese National Government and in the Sino-Soviet Treaty recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of a united China. On 20 August 1945, Stalin also sent a message to Mao asking that his troops avoid any open confrontation with the nationalists and consolidate their position in the countryside instead. Mao was obliged to reverse course.10
In a weak and divided China, a fearsome prospect unfolded: the Soviet Union could prop up the Chinese Communist Party, leading to the division of the country into a Russian-dominated north and an American-protected south. Negotiations between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek resumed the day the Red Army invaded Manchuria. In Moscow, T. V. Soong, one of Chiang’s most eminent statesmen, had few bargaining chips to put on the negotiating table. In his dealings with Stalin, he had to agree to the concessions Roosevelt had made at Yalta: Port Arthur, a natural harbour on the south tip of Manchuria, would become a Russian naval base, while the Soviets would use the modern port of Dalian on equal terms with China. The Soviet Union and China would co-own the South Manchurian Railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway, both built by imperial Russia. In exchange Stalin recognised the sovereignty of the Chinese National Government over all of China and pledged to turn Manchuria over to Chiang Kai-shek.
With the Sino-Soviet Treaty in his pocket and assured of Moscow’s backing for his government, Chiang invited Mao to join peace negotiations and discuss the country’s future. At considerable personal risk, Mao flew to Chongqing in the company of Patrick Hurley, the American ambassador. Chiang and Mao had not seen each other for twenty years, and put on contrived smiles at a formal reception held on the first night, toasting each other with millet wine. Mao stayed a full six weeks, wrangling for concessions even as pitched battles between the communists and the nationalists continued on the ground. Eventually, on 18 September, Mao proclaimed: ‘We must stop [the] civil war and all parties must unite under the leadership of Chairman Chiang to build a modern China.’ A formal statement was made on 10 October, the anniversary of the 1911 revolution that had led to the overthrow of the Qing empire. Back in Yan’an a few days later, Mao explained to his comrades-in-arms that the agreed statement in Chongqing was ‘a mere scrap of paper’.11
Stalin had publicly given his support to Chiang, but he also wanted to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party as a check on the Chinese National Government – and its American backers. In August he allowed the communists to take over Kalgan. In the nineteenth century, caravans of camels regularly assembled from all over the empire in this key gateway through the Great Wall to carry tea chests to Russia. Kalgan was still called ‘Beijing’s Northern Door’: whoever controlled the old city was in a strategic position to attack Beijing. The Japanese had turned it into an economic and industrial centre, and also left behind an enormous cache of ammunition and weapons, including sixty tanks.12
In other cities in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, Soviet troops were instructed to equip communist units with Japanese arms and vehicles. The exact amount of logistical and military assistance the Soviets gave to the communists is difficult to estimate, but Moscow later claimed that 700,000 rifles, 18,000 machine guns, 860 aircraft and 4,000 artillery pieces were handed over. Behind the scenes, the Soviets recommended that the communists deploy most of their troops in Manchuria. Mao, still in Chongqing, ordered the main force of his guerrilla units to pour across the Great Wall into Manchuria in September. There, with Soviet acquiescence, the communists took in demobilised soldiers, puppet troops and bandit fighters. By the end of the year, Mao had managed to assemble a motley army of 500,000 troops.13
Chiang knew full well that the Soviets were co-operating with the communists in Manchuria, but he was in no position to quarrel with Stalin. He also understood the strategic and economic significance of Manchuria, with its steel mills, huge reserves of iron ore and coal, dense forests and rich farmland. He put General Du Yuming in charge of reclaiming the region. His troops were denied permission to land in Port Arthur and Dalian, now under Soviet control following the Sino-Soviet Treaty. When in October 1945 ships from the US Seventh Fleet sailed instead to Yingkou, a minor harbour with rail connections to the interior, they found a communist garrison. Disembarking further south at Qinhuangdao, General Du breached the Great Wall at Shanhaiguan and lunged forward along the railway, meeting little opposition from communist troops. He covered the 300 kilometres from the Great Wall to the industrial base of Shenyang in less than three weeks. Chiang pleaded with Moscow in the hope of being allowed at least to partition Manchuria. Under pressure to fulfil their commitments to the nationalist government, the Soviets relented and allowed nationalist troops to be airlifted into Changchun, further north along the railway from Shenyang.14
The reason for Soviet reluctance soon became apparent: cities had been subjected to a wave of looting by the Red Army. James McHugh, one of the first businessmen allowed into Shenyang, reported that the troops had been let loose ‘f
or three days of rape and pillage’. They ‘stole everything in sight, broke up bathtubs and toilets with hammers, pulled electric light wiring out of the plaster, built fires on the floor and either burned down the house or at least a big hole in the floor’. Women cut their hair and dressed like men in order to avoid rape. In Shenyang, ‘factories lay like raddled skeletons, picked clean of their machinery’. The city, one reporter wrote, ‘has been reduced from a great industrial city into a tragic, crowded way station on the Russian-controlled railway to Dairen [Dalian]’. The systematic plundering of Manchuria’s industrial infrastructure would later be valued at US$2 billion.15
The Soviets delayed the withdrawal of their troops from Manchuria for five months, and the last of their tanks only rumbled across the border in April 1946. They handed the countryside over to the communists, and allowed Lin Biao to deploy his forces on the outskirts of all major cities. His Eighth Route Army, equipped with Japanese weapons, attacked the nationalist garrison in Changchun and killed most of its 7,000 soldiers. Harbin, Manchuria’s ice city bordering Russia, was turned over to Mao on 28 April.
President Truman, instead of assisting his wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek, sent George Marshall to broker a coalition government between the nationalists and the communists. Chiang was dependent on continuing American economic and military assistance and had little choice but to acquiesce, even though the prospect of any lasting agreement between both camps seemed more remote than ever. The communists, on the other hand, had nothing to lose: they used the truce to regroup and expand ever further in Manchuria, entrenching themselves in the countryside away from major cities and the railways. The suave and unassuming Zhou Enlai, Mao’s envoy to the peace talks, was a master of deception, cultivating a close relationship with Marshall to present the communists as agrarian reformers keen to learn from democracy. Zhou even persuaded Mao solemnly to declare that ‘Chinese democracy must follow the American path.’ Mao would agree to almost anything on paper, as long as nobody was checking what he was doing on the ground. When the Red Army pulled out of Manchuria, Marshall came to believe that Stalin had given up on China. His willingness to help Chiang started to waver.16
Chiang realised that American support was slipping, but was determined to dislodge the communists from Changchun. His troops met little opposition. In early June 1946, Lin Biao and his army of 100,000 men beat a chaotic retreat towards the north. Chiang’s New First and New Sixth Armies went in pursuit, harrying the communists across the Sungari River. Chiang’s troops were now within striking distance of Harbin, the only city still in communist hands. Lin Biao’s troops were in a state of collapse, as soldiers deserted in large numbers. When interviewed, Zhao Xuzhen, who was a soldier at the time, remembered that even military officers, party members and political instructors absconded in a chaotic retreat: ‘some went home, some became bandits, and some surrendered.’ But once again Marshall advised Chiang to halt the nationalist advance and proclaim a ceasefire. The American envoy had just visited Yan’an, where Mao had skilfully projected an image of liberal reform and democracy. Marshall even wrote to Truman that the communist forces in Manchuria were ‘little more than loosely organised bands’.17
The communists used the peace talks to recondition their troops, integrate the 200,000-strong army that had served under the Japanese and recruit more soldiers from the countryside. Other recruits were prisoners of war, criminal elements, Korean units and Manchurian exiles returning from the Soviet Union. All were subjected to harsh training and ruthless discipline, often with the help of hundreds of Soviet technical advisers and military experts. The Russians even opened sixteen military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Some Chinese officers went to the Soviet Union for advanced training, others were given refuge in the Russian enclaves of Port Arthur and Dalian. While the Soviets stripped much of Manchuria’s wealth, they left the military arsenals of Dalian untouched. With the help of Japanese technicians and local workers, these were put to work, churning out bullets and shells by the million. Logistical support also continued to arrive across the borders, by rail and by air. In North Korea alone, a full 2,000 wagons were allocated to the task. In return, the Chinese communists sent shipments of more than a million tons of grain as well as other products across the border from Manchuria to Russia in 1947.18
While the Russians were helping the communists transform their ragtag army of guerrilla fighters into a formidable war machine, the Americans became so disillusioned with the nationalists that they started cutting off deliveries of armaments. As trainloads of equipment moved back and forth across the border between Manchuria and the Soviet Union, the United States began refusing to license military equipment for China, including sales for which the government had already paid. Then, in September 1946, Truman imposed an arms embargo. It lasted until July 1947 – when the nationalists were allowed to purchase a three-week supply of infantry ammunition.19
For a while the nationalists battled on, trying to hold on to the cities along the railway that cut through the extensive Manchurian plain, enclosed by heavily forested mountain ranges. In the ebb and flow of warfare, the nationalists lost several cities only to recapture them in bloody battles with retreating communist troops. These were no longer skirmishes in a guerrilla war: hundreds of thousands of troops clashed in giant confrontations that involved artillery and air support, often in temperatures that fell to minus 20 degrees Celsius. Manchuria, by 1947, was turning into a death trap. Chiang kept on pouring his best troops into Manchuria, but Mao never let up, determined to wear down his enemy in a pitiless war of attrition. In Manchuria alone the communists recruited or conscripted approximately 1 million men. In battle after battle, Chiang’s best government troops were destroyed. The nationalists also suffered from poor morale, their troops ensconced in cities for months on end, badly paid and without adequate provisions. Supply lines were extended to breaking point, running through the Great Wall along the Beijing–Changchun railway, which was often sabotaged by communist demolition squads. Military equipment was worn out, and in some cases soldiers were so short of ammunition that they could not fire a single practice shot. Lorries were for the most part broken down, but could not be repaired as the sale of spare parts was prohibited under the arms embargo.20
As Zhang Junmai, a veteran diplomat, campaigner for parliamentary democracy and unsparing critic of the nationalist government, later noted, even if an efficient government had existed it would have been no match for the combined forces of Moscow and Yan’an. But Chiang’s government barely functioned. The nationalists faced a mammoth task in taking over a country the size of a continent, and one that had been laid waste by eight years of warfare. Even south of the Great Wall, they endured constant harassment from guerrilla troops: the communists plundered towns, looted villages and left behind millions of homeless people. They controlled large parts of the countryside in Hebei and Shandong, cutting off fuel, energy and food supplies to the cities and feeding inflation. Transport, the key to recovery, had been gravely impaired by the Japanese and was now shattered by the communists, who blew up railways and dynamited bridges. In pitiless partisan warfare, everything that tore society apart operated to the communists’ advantage.21
Most of all, the nationalists were caught in a vicious cycle that predated their clash with the communists. Ever since Japan had invaded China in 1937, they had been unable to finance the war by selling bonds. Taxation covered only a small portion of the cost of the war. The only way forward was to issue paper currency. This meant that the brunt of the war effort fell on the middle class, undermining the standard of living of people on fixed incomes such as schoolteachers, college professors, government employees and, of course, nationalist soldiers and officers. ‘In 1940, 100 yuan bought a pig; in 1943, a chicken; in 1945, a fish; in 1946, an egg; and in 1947, one-third of a box of matches.’ By 1947 the cost of living was approximately 30,000 times what it had been in 1936, a year before Japan attacked China. Chiang tried
to tame inflation in 1947 by banning the export of foreign currency and gold bullion, imposing a ceiling on interest rates and freezing all wages, but these measures had no lasting effect. By 1949 people could be seen wheeling their money in carts.22
For army officers or tax collectors alike, the salaries of government employees were held down to extraordinarily low levels. Soldiers were grossly underpaid, and even officers could not support their wives and children on their regular income. Graft, embezzlement and corruption therefore became rampant in many forms. Tax collectors accepted bribes. The police extorted money by threatening the poor with arrest and imprisonment. In the army, officers withheld salaries, inflated the bills or sold military equipment on the black market. There was no easy solution to the problem. Raising government salaries would have increased inflation, which in turn would have affected the cost of living, leading quickly to the absorption of salary rises and the reappearance of corruption.
The nationalists needed help. They required financial assistance to curb inflation, rebuild the country and buy arms and munitions. Beginning in April 1948, the Marshall Plan, designed by the very man who had tried against all odds to engineer a coalition between Chiang Kai-shek and the communists, provided US$13 billion in economic and technical assistance to help the recovery of Europe. This sum did not include the $12 billion in aid that Europe had received between the end of the war and the start of the Plan. Even after Truman had been obliged to abandon the arms embargo on China, which was no longer consistent with the Truman Doctrine – proclaimed by the president in March 1947 and committing the United States to supporting Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling under Soviet influence – support for the nationalists was minimal. The United States failed to deliver a paltry $125 million of military help in time even after a Republican majority finally pushed Congress to provide an aid package, which was only passed in April 1948, bringing the total military aid received by China after Victory over Japan Day to something between $225 and $360 million.23