The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

by Dikötter, Frank

  The tide turned in 1948. For months on end the communists had launched one assault after another in Manchuria, continually hammering the nationalist-held cities. Chiang, determined to hold on at all costs, kept on pouring more troops into the region to make up for the dead and wounded. The loss of Manchuria, he confided in his private journal, would open all of north China to the communists. He was staking everything he had on one huge gamble rather than retreating and holding the line along the Great Wall.24

  In December 1947, in more than a metre of snow and a temperature of minus 35 degrees Celsius, Lin Biao launched a massive assault across the frozen Sungari River. The People’s Liberation Army, as the communist troops now called themselves, had no air cover, but a thick, icy mist and glacial weather severely limited the nationalists’ use of aeroplanes. Pressing their military advantage, most of the 400,000 troops swarmed south and laid siege to the cities along the railway, destroying several government divisions.25

  Shenyang, just south of Changchun, was Manchuria’s stronghold, and one of the country’s best arsenals. Lin Biao cut the railway between Beijing and Shenyang and laid siege to the city. Inside this island of dwindling resistance, a civilian population of 1.2 million, swollen to 4 million by people fleeing the communists, was blockaded for ten months. Also trapped were 200,000 nationalist soldiers. Droves of people soon abandoned beleaguered Shenyang. Planes of General Claire Chennault’s commercial airline shuttled in and out, evacuating about 1,500 passengers to safety each day, but few could afford to bribe their way on board. Fights broke out at the airfield, as the crack of artillery could be heard in the distance. At night people huddled together in a bomb-blasted hangar. The majority, over 100,000 a month, left by train, rattling west towards the edge of the city’s defence perimeter where the line came to an end.26

  People who were too poor or too sick to leave were soon starving. As early as February, Shenyang was short of food, fuel and ammunition. Vitamin deficiencies caused thousands to go blind, while countless others, many of them children, were wasted by noma, a gangrenous disease that destroyed the face, by pellagra, by scurvy and by other diseases of malnutrition. As a foreign reporter noted: ‘I walked down the desolate streets past the emaciated bodies of the dead in the gutters, pursued by unbearably pitiful child beggars and women crying out for help.’ Shops along empty streets were boarded up, the red-brick factories standing derelict, many of them bombed during the war and then looted by Soviet troops in 1946. People survived by eating bark and leaves and by pressing soybean cakes, normally used as fertiliser or as cattle fodder. Others picked through the debris on the streets.27

  A flood of misery poured out of Manchuria – refugees escaping from beleaguered cities, farmers fleeing a bloodied countryside, most of them stumbling forward on foot, a few hobbling on crutches or sticks. In the summer of 1948, some 140,000 pressed their way through the military lines around Shenyang and joined the exodus every month. Then they had to trek across a stretch of wilderness infested with armed gangs who capitalised on the chaos of civil war. But an even greater danger loomed 30 kilometres north of Jinzhou, where the railway crossed the Daling River. The nationalists stood guard on the opposite shore, and fired on anybody who tried to wade, swim or take a boat towards them. The only way across the river was through the twisted girders of the blasted railway bridge. For a fee, local guides would strap the refugees on their backs with rope and pick a passage over the broken bridge, their human burden looking down in terror at the swirling waters far below. From Jinzhou they were packed on refugee trains to Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall dipped into the Bohai Sea. Here they found a makeshift refugee centre serviced by a single tap with running water. Many people quickly moved on to Beijing and Tianjin, even though few could be housed or adequately fed.28

  The coup de grâce came in September 1948. Lin Biao staged a frontal attack on Shenyang and deployed close to 300,000 men to encircle Jinzhou, the lifeline to Manchuria. Military engineers blew holes in the city walls. After sustaining 34,000 casualties, Jinzhou fell on 15 October, its remaining 88,000 prisoners being marched off by the People’s Liberation Army. A rescue force of 90,000 men, hacking its way through enemy lines outside Shenyang, walked straight into a trap: they were outnumbered and crushed a week later by Lin Biao. In Changchun, the remaining 80,000 troops handed over the city to the communists. Fighting continued in Shenyang for a week, often in bloody hand-to-hand combat inside the city after the walls had been demolished by artillery fire. When the senior remaining officer surrendered on 1 November, the battle for Manchuria was over.29

  Overnight prices in Shanghai rose four- or fivefold. On the international market the gold yuan sank to a tenth of its original value. A wave of defeatism swept nationalist China. The United States began to ship out the wives and children of its military personnel and advised its citizens as far south as Nanjing and Shanghai to evacuate the area. All over the country panic set in, as an army of 750,000 communist fighters, reinforced with tanks, heavy artillery and other weapons captured from the nationalists, marched across the frozen plains of Manchuria through the Great Wall in a southward thrust against Beijing.

  General Fu Zuoyi, the nationalist commander in the north, stood little chance as the communists swiftly moved to cut the railway lifelines along the Northern Corridor, which stretched from Kalgan to the port of Dagu. They surrounded Tianjin, China’s third largest city, in November 1948, and soon forced Fu Zuoyi to pull his troops back inside the walls of Beijing. Lin Biao drew a siege ring around the city and cut off electricity and water supplies. Within a week the airfields outside the city walls were in communist hands. Soon a strange silence set in over the imperial capital, only occasionally disturbed by shell explosions or machine-gun bursts. At first Fu, one of the most distinguished military leaders in the war against Japan, seemed determined to defend Beijing. Trenches were dug and street barricades hastily erected as soldiers went from house to house commandeering billets. To allow cargo planes to deliver supplies, an airstrip was built on the polo ground of the old legation quarter, in the very heart of the ancient city. In the freezing winter, gangs of padded-gowned forced labour pulled down telephone poles, trees and even buildings on the approach to the runway. Martial rule was imposed. Lorries with teams of policemen and soldiers carrying sub-machine guns and broad swords careened through the streets, reminding the population of their military presence. Outside the city walls, thousands of homes were needlessly levelled, ostensibly to provide a good field of fire for the defending troops.30

  But everybody in Beijing knew what had happened to Changchun, turned into a ‘city of death’ by the very general who was now camping outside the city walls. Fu Zuoyi fell into a depression, tormented by the prospect of seeing Beijing, the cultural heart of China, desecrated for no good reason. At first he asked Chiang for permission to resign, but when the Generalissimo refused, he resumed the secret negotiations he had opened with the People’s Liberation Army through his daughter, who was a member of the communist party. After a forty-day siege, a surrender document was signed on 22 January 1949. All of the 240,000 troops under Fu were absorbed into the communist army. The treatment that he and his troops received served as an inducement to other nationalist commanders and officers to defect.31

  For eight days the imperial capital seemed to float in a twilight zone, as the nationalists, some of them still armed, wandered about the city freely as it awaited the communists. Very little changed. In this strange vacuum, Beijing celebrated the Chinese New Year as best it could. Shops were crammed with lanterns traditionally placed outside front doors to welcome the New Year – in the shape of lions, brilliant green rabbits or yellow tigers. But Chiang Kai-shek’s portrait on Tiananmen Square was removed.

  On 31 January 1949 a vanguard of the People’s Liberation Army finally entered the west gates of Beijing. A lorry opened the procession, its loudspeakers blaring the continuous refrain, ‘Welcome to the Liberation Army on its Arrival in Beiping! Welcome to the Peopl
e’s Army on its Arrival in Beiping! Congratulations to the People of Beiping on their Liberation!’ Then came the soldiers, marching six abreast in full battle regalia, red-cheeked and seemingly in high spirits. Students followed the soldiers, carrying two large portraits, one of Mao Zedong, the other of Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the army. A military band, more soldiers and government employees closed the parade. Most of Beijing was relieved to have survived the siege, but people were cautious with the soldiers, ‘watching them from the kerbs along their route [and] expressing no emotion more intense than curiosity’. Scattered nationalist troops looked on in silence. Jia Ke, then a young communist soldier, remembers that ‘Everyone crowded around our boys as they sat quietly on the ground. They wanted to get a good look at us. They were very curious. I felt very proud.’32

  The communists had fervent supporters. Dan Ling, a schoolboy of sixteen, was one of them. All classes were cancelled on liberation day, and Dan was among those selected to carry either a banner flag or a star-shaped paper lantern on a sorghum stem to welcome the People’s Liberation Army. He joined the crowd with his fellow students at Xidan, an important shopping area a kilometre west of Tiananmen Square. As the crowd swelled with thousands of curious onlookers, the students were pushed back and forth and soon became separated. Dan tried to elbow his way forward but did not manage to catch even a glimpse of the parade. Abandoning his flag, by now torn to shreds, he spotted a trolley bus and climbed on board, the conductor too distracted by the spectacle to notice that he did not have a ticket. His face pressed against the window, Dan saw the rifles, the bayonets, the bandoliers and the simple but neat uniforms devoid of rank insignia. He witnessed the discipline of the troops and was filled with joy.33

  On Tiananmen Square, a hastily sketched portrait of Mao Zedong was raised. Mao himself only entered the city several months later, driving to the Summer Palace on the outskirts in a bullet-proof Dodge limousine made in Detroit for Chiang Kai-shek’s personal use in the 1930s.34

  While the Northern Corridor was being annexed by Lin Biao, an even more bloody campaign was in progress near Xuzhou. As in Manchuria and in the north, the war hinged on control of the country’s arterial railways. Xuzhou was a vital junction where the trunk line running from Beijing southward to Nanjing intersected with the only east–west railway, meandering from the country’s far west to the Yellow Sea. Xuzhou was the key to Nanjing, the nationalist capital, as well as to the prosperous Yangzi Valley.

  In November 1948 over a million men surged towards Xuzhou in one of the greatest battles in Chinese history, also known as the Huaihai campaign. On their march out of Manchuria, the communists fielded a force of almost 400,000 men who marched past Beijing in the rush towards Xuzhou. Another 200,000 swept in from the neighbouring province of Shandong, where guerrilla fighters controlled large parts of the countryside. The nationalists deployed 400,000 troops in the flat, rich, water-laced plains around the railway junction. The bald and stocky General Chen Yi, commander of the communist troops, swiftly cut all railway lines and subjected the main airfield to artillery bombardment. Du Yuming, the general who had fought Lin Biao in Manchuria, desperately moved his men over rutted roads and torn-up rail tracks to establish a new line of defence to the east of the city, using the autumn floods to defend the swampy ground to the north and north-west.35

  Fighting in the countryside was ferocious, as both sides battled for the country’s heartland. Nationalists and communists deployed tanks and heavy artillery, while government planes controlled the skies, using cloudless days and nights to wreak havoc on the enemy. Ancient towns with moats and walls were pounded. Orange flashes of shell explosions came from villages caught in the crossfire, leaving behind nothing but wrecked houses, smouldering amid fields sown with winter wheat. In a village just north of Caolaoji, everything had been set ablaze by mortar shells. Amid the smell of burned thatch and straw, children and women poked forlornly through roofless huts and blackened walls. On a slope in front of the ruins, an old woman bundled up in a black padded jacket rocked in silent grief. All her belongings had been lost. As one communist general later reminisced, the People’s Liberation Army wiped out village after village with blanket shelling: ‘In fighting Du Yuming, we practically flattened the villages, using thousands of shells and countless bombs.’ A returning pilot reported that every village in sight was burning: ‘the fields were covered with bodies’.36

  The communists were supported by some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children, conscripted by a tough party leader called Deng Xiaoping: he imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when his orders were not met. These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, carrying food and material on their backs to the front, but they were also used as human shields, forced to march in front of the troops. Dense waves of unarmed villagers overwhelmed the nationalists. Lin Jingwu, an ordinary soldier in the trenches, remembered years later that his hands went numb from firing bullets into a sea of civilians. He felt sick at the idea of firing at them and tried to close his eyes, but kept on shooting.37

  People fled the rust-red plain in droves. Trains packed with refugees rattled past the bodies of men, women and children lying beside the tracks, ‘looking like rag dolls’. They had lost their grip and slipped at night from the tops of trains after their hands froze from the cold. The lucky ones – women in ragged tunics with babies on their backs, men clutching bundles of their remaining possessions – had tied themselves to the train roofs. Others were jammed between the carriages.38

  Xuzhou was a repeat of Shenyang: uncoordinated troop movements, a confused command structure, constant meddling by the Generalissimo, inaccurate field intelligence and low morale among the soldiers created a disaster. Under relentless fire, the nationalists soon retreated inside Xuzhou, becoming entirely dependent on airdrops to stay alive. They quickly ran out of food. Horses were slaughtered, while civilians scoured the streets for bark and roots. Just outside the city walls, women and children in small villages caught between enemy lines froze to death in their mud huts as there was no fuel for fires. Evacuation planes flying back to Shanghai were crammed with soldiers ‘dying in their blood and excrement’, in the words of one pilot. Panic set in as rumours spread that Chiang had ordered the city to be bombed to prevent any equipment from falling into enemy hands. One by one, the trapped divisions surrendered, as communist loudspeakers boomed out offers of food and shelter. Du Yuming, disguised as an ordinary soldier, was captured as he tried to slip away. By 10 January 1949 the battle was over. The communists had dealt a fatal blow to the nationalists.39

  Once the north had surrendered, the demise of the nationalists was a foregone conclusion. The communists issued a harsh eight-point proposal for peace on 14 January 1949. Two weeks later, a defeated Chiang Kai-shek, for twenty-two years the dominant figure in China, stepped down. Clad in a simple khaki uniform without insignia, from a small drawing room in the Ministry of National Defence in Nanjing he read a formal statement handing over the peace talks to his vice-president.40

  But it was too little, too late. Everywhere people were apathetic, beaten down by inflation and heavy taxes, sometimes even openly hostile to the nationalists. Despite a muzzled press, the abuses of an increasingly repressive regime were widely reported. The brutal methods used by the police in the hunt for underground agents in particular alienated large sections of the urban population. A powerful propaganda machine presided over by Zhou Enlai mercilessly exploited every failing of the nationalist regime. In this war of images, the communists managed to project a vision of democracy and social reform, largely because nobody besides a few visiting journalists on guided tours ever managed to spend time in their home territory. But, most of all, people were tired of war. After more than a decade of fear and violence, they craved peace at any cost, even under communism.

  The communists, meanwhile, used the peace negotiations to rest and regroup. Along the village roads north of the Yangzi River a ste
ady stream of wheelbarrows and donkey carts were building up food reserves. Engines were being dismounted from lorries and installed on river craft. By the end of March close to a million troops swarmed along the north bank of the river that divided the northern and southern halves of China.

  As the communists prepared to cross the Yangzi and take all of China, the British government sent a naval sloop from Shanghai to rescue its citizens stranded in Nanjing, the capital on the south bank of the river. The Amethyst, with a five-metre Union Jack painted on each side of its grey steel hull, looked like a quaint reminder of a bygone age, when foreign gunboats policed the waters of the Yangzi. Midway between Shanghai and Nanjing, two artillery shells from the north bank hit the sloop. Crippled, it swung helplessly with the current and ran aground on a mud bank. Two white flags were hoisted but the shelling continued for days on end, killing forty-four sailors. The Royal Navy frigate remained trapped for ten weeks before it managed to slip its chain and escape, as the communists demanded that Britain, the United States and France withdraw their armed forces from all of China. Mao saw in the Amethyst the perfect symbol of old China and ordered his troops to ‘brook no foreign interference’. The attack on the Royal Navy made headlines around the world. Mao was delighted.41

  The Amethyst incident put foreigners in Shanghai on alert. A few days later the communist troops started their final campaign. Nanjing offered only token resistance as the People’s Liberation Army crammed junks, sampans and launches to cross the Yangzi to the sound of bugle calls and martial music. The city was already weakened by large-scale defections of soldiers. Looting by civilians was rampant. In the bustling commercial district of Fuzimiao, shabbily dressed men, women and children pillaged in a good-humoured way, laughing and shouting to each other as they hauled sofas, carpets and bedding from the upper floors of the two-storey villas to the lawns below. ‘A grinning soldier, who had thrown away his rifle, gingerly carried off a lamp in each hand. An old woman, her grey hair pulled back in a bun, wearing a ragged black tunic and hobbling away on tiny feet, bound in the old custom, happily carried off four elaborately embroidered cushions.’ Everything down to the sash windows and plumbing fixtures was stripped from the Ministry of Communications. The floorboards were broken up for firewood. Crowds besieged the airport, trying to force or bribe their way on to planes, while soldiers swung their bayoneted rifles to keep them at bay. A nationalist general barked orders at underlings loading a grand piano aboard an aircraft.42