Having been out of the political picture for some time and believing that China could never hold out against Japan, Wang, it will be remembered, had left the country with his wife and family for Hanoi. Expelled from the KMT on January 1, 1939, he waited only seventeen days before sending a wire to Chiang urging him to “make a bold decision to end a futile war and to negotiate an honorable peace with Japan.” In referring to Wang’s twelve-point agreement with the Japanese as “the most abject and shameless document in 4,000 years’ Chinese history,” the South China Morning Post joined other papers attacking him as an “arch traitor,” a “Japanese tool,” and “a piece of rotten meat.” Later that month, Chiang sent a man to Hanoi to assassinate Wang, but he failed. In March, a group of Nationalist secret agents entered Wang’s house early one morning and fired dozens of shots, missing Wang himself but killing his secretary. If there had ever been a chance of Wang’s rethinking the situation and turning back to his native China, these attempts at assassination sealed his newfound loyalty to Japan. He was inaugurated as the head of a puppet government in Nanking in a solemn ceremony in March 1940. His defection, according to Luce’s Fortune magazine, was a “godsend” to the enemy. “Here was one of the flaming characters of the Chinese revolution… one of the outstanding figures in the Chinese Government. Suave, handsome, a brilliant speaker, highly emotional… here was a man of unquestioned standing and ability in China, a focus about which all the elements of compromise in Chinese society could gather.” Adopting the old Kuomintang slogans, Wang raised the KMT flag, which now flew over both his Japanese-backed administration in Nanking and Chiang’s government in Chungking. To conscript an army, Wang gave captured Chinese soldiers the choice of serving or being shot. In September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor, 30,000 of these soldiers manged to kill their Japanese officers and returned to serve under the generalissimo.
CHIANG’S OTHER OBSESSION, the Communists, were still busy increasing their bases of operations. After the Sian Incident, the Chinese Communist Party gained 200 seats of the People’s Political Council in Chungking, a group established by Chiang to make policy during the war. Chou En-lai was named deputy minister of the Military Council, and he floated the old idea of allowing members of the CCP to also belong to the Kuomintang. Although Chiang rejected Chou’s plan, it was later found that a number of Communists were, in fact, in key positions in the KMT. One of these men served as an important executive of the Central Bank, and, according to Brian Crozier, “enjoyed H. H. Kung’s unreserved trust.” For a while at least, the Communists had decided to praise their new ally, Chiang Kai-shek, and a “horde of leftist writers” descended on Chungking from various countries to spread the current Communist word.
After Sian—and the resulting absorption of Chinese Communist soldiers into the Nationalist army under Chiang—the Shensi Red Army of 20,000 soldiers had joined the Eighth Route Army of the Nationalist forces. During that same winter of 1937, the government had authorized the creation of another Communist army, the New Fourth Army, built around the soldiers that Mao had left behind three years earlier when he had set out on the Long March. When the Japanese conquered the lower Yangtze Valley, the New Fourth was ordered by Chiang to reorganize itself as part of the Nationalist army. Supposed to fight the Japanese, these two armies set out, under orders from Mao, to enlarge Communist control over whatever areas they could and, in the process, dispose of any Nationalist forces they met on the way. They did this by announcing that the Nationalist soldiers they wanted to eliminate were collaborating with the Japanese, thus killing off all the Chinese soldiers who would not enter their ranks. These encounters were brutal, and the Communists often buried recalcitrant Nationalists alive. In this way, the Eighth Route Army increased from 45,000 men in 1937 to 400,000 in 1940, while the New Fourth Army grew from 15,000 to 100,000. Not only did the CCP win adherents—by fair means or foul—but it propagandized its expansion of territory as hard-won victories over the Japanese. According to White, however, “during the significant campaigns, it was the weary soldiers of the Central Government who took the shock, gnawed at the enemy, and died.”
In January of 1941, the fiction of cooperation between the Nationalist and Communist troops was pretty well dissolved over what came to be called the New Fourth Army Incident. At that time the New Fourth Army, led jointly by a Communist general, Xiang Ying, and a non-Communist general, Yeh Ting, was positioned south of the Yangtze River, not far from Shanghai. A few months earlier, Chiang’s chief of staff had ordered the army to cross the river, move north, and take up a new position in the Japanese-occupied province of Anhwei. Although the leaders protested, the greater part of the soldiers were ferried over the river, leaving behind a detachment from headquarters of somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 people*—commanders, staff, some combat troops, hospital workers, wounded soldiers, teachers, and students. But the local commander of the KMT said that the remaining group must be moved as well. The Communists complained that the route laid out would take them straight into the midst of the Japanese and asked Chou En-lai to take this up with Chiang. The generalissimo approved the change of route and invited Chou to Christmas dinner, where they drank to peace.† Suddenly, Communist headquarters heard that the New Fourth Army was trapped in a narrow valley, surrounded by KMT soldiers who had been hidden in the hills and who had opened fire on them; many were killed, and their commander, General Yeh, was taken captive. When Chou rushed back to tell Chiang what was happening, he was not able to see him but was assured that everything was fine and that the soldiers of the KMT were being told not to interrupt the Communists’ march.
Clearly someone was lying. It could well have been the Communists. According to Chang and Halliday, Mao had purposefully changed the route of General Xiang’s soldiers but had not notified Chiang, since he wanted to get rid of his old enemy, General Xiang. Moreover, Mao wanted to put the Nationalist army in a position where it would have to shoot at the CCP troops, who were not where they were supposed to be, thus forcing Stalin, who had instructed Mao to fight the National Army only if attacked, to support his (Mao’s) attempt to draw Chiang into open war. Or the lies may have come from Chiang, who denied that his soldiers had attacked the Reds, claiming that the Communists had fired on Nationalists first. Whatever the facts, the city of Chungking “buzzed with rumors of an open breach, of an all-out civil war.” As the rumors quieted down, word came that the headquarters of the New Fourth Army had been destroyed and several thousand people, along with its commander, had been killed. Added to this was a report that the KMT had treated its CCP captives “with Japanese ruthlessness.” This was confirmed years later by a university professor, a man who was not a Communist, who told White he had been captured with the group. He said that the KMT soldiers had raped their women captives and that the entire group was force-marched four hundred miles to a concentration camp. On the way, they were made to carry the baggage of the government soldiers, who beat some of them and shot others. Only three hundred people emerged from the journey alive.
But the Communists themselves were acting under false pretenses, as witness a secret directive containing Mao’s instructions to the Eighth Route Army: “The Sino-Japanese War affords our party an excellent opportunity for expansion. Our fixed policy should be 70 percent expansion, 20 percent dealing with the Kuomintang, and 10 percent resisting Japan. There are three stages in carrying out this fixed policy: The first is a compromising stage, in which self-sacrifice should be made to show our outward obedience to the Central Government… but in reality this will serve as camouflage for the… development of our party.”
The story of the New Fourth Army Incident varied according to the politics of the teller, but correspondents on the scene and historians agree that it marked the end of the united front against Japan. Negotiations between the two Chinas stopped, and Chiang cut off all supplies to the Communist armies. Writing a report home from Chungking in March 1941, White noted, “The communists have expanded and flourished
during this war as never before.… Fighting between Chinese and Japanese in China has almost ceased. The Japanese are too wise to use their armies to seal Chinese unity.”
Although White prefaced the above with a warning that the information he transmitted was “as complete an account of opinion and interpretation as I am permitted to send out,” there was an unexpected consequence to the New Fourth Army Incident set in motion by Edgar Snow. Snow knew that the KMT massacre of the New Fourth Army soldiers would never have gotten by the censors in Chungking, so he filed his story through Hong Kong. The report caused a furor in newspapers in the West. According to Snow, his “dispatches had so interested Washington that negotiation for a new Chinese loan was suspended” and “Mr. Morgenthau had gone so far as to intimate that Chungking could expect no further financial aid from the United States in the event of any renewal of civil war.” Naturally, the Chungking government denied everything, and Snow—not for the first time—lost his press privileges. But in the face of other correspondents’ complaints about the suppression of their stories, Chungking was forced to temporarily lift its usual controls over reports filed by foreign journalists.
According to Crozier, the New Fourth Army Incident also strengthened Mao’s position. Mao had never liked the policy of cooperation with the KMT but had been forced to adhere to it, partly because of pressure from Moscow and partly because of the Japanese invasion. “Now,” Crozier said, “the united front was seen to be irrelevant as well as unpractical.” And indeed, early in the following year, Mao called for a meeting of about a thousand members of the CCP, supposedly for a Seventh Congress of the Party. But there was no congress. Instead, Mao instigated a purge, and it is said that during 1942 and 1943, some 40,000 to 80,000 party members were expelled or executed. From that time on until his victory over Chiang in the Chinese Civil War, “Mao Tse-tung’s power was never again seriously challenged.”
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The Japanese… seemed to have an obsession in regard to Chungking; it was as though the continued existence of life upon that rocky spur between the rivers was an insult to their might.
—HAN SUYIN, 1940
IN EARLY May of 1939, seven months after the arrival of the Chinese government in its wartime capital of Chungking, the thick, sulfurous fog that hung over the city throughout the winter lifted, and the Japanese began the first of a series of horrific bombing raids. These assaults, which often lasted eight to nine hours, were designed not only to inflict physical damage but to break the spirit of the city’s inhabitants. The first bombers caused five thousand casualties, since there were no anti-aircraft guns to ward off the planes and no shelters in which people could take cover. Chungking, according to one writer, “resembled nothing so much as a charred, overturned anthill,” with terrified citizens running out of their flaming homes with no place to seek safety.
“The bombing was the worst exhibition of cold-blooded mass murder that the Japanese have so far been able to perpetrate,” May-ling wrote Emma,
… they dropped both demolition and incendiary bombs.… On this sixth day after the last bombing, lines of coffins still stand in front of every heap of wreckage—big ornate coffins for the affluent, wooden boxes for the less fortunate. But the bombs have reduced rich and poor, wise and stupid, to one common level—pieces of burnt flesh which are extracted from the smouldering piles with tongs.… I went to see what was being done in rescue work after the bombings. The areas affected were raging infernos.… Most of the houses which climb the hillsides are made of timber, perched on long poles. They burned like tinder.… Chungking is a city of houses packed tightly together on a long, high tongue of land, girt with cliffs. Houses climb the slopes to the cliffs. They are reached by narrow stone passages, and each house has but one door. There is no escape through the back when incendiary bombs set the front ablaze.… Fathers, mothers watched their children burnt alive. Other children saw their parents struggling to fight across the flames only to disappear in the ruins of falling beams and pillers. The cries and shrieks of the dying and the wounded resounded in the night, muffled only by the incessant roar of the ever-hungry fire… the stench is increasing and living in the vicinity is impossible.
The Australian journalist Rhodes Farmer described one of the worst scenes, which took place in the legation quarter:
The door of the German Embassy was open.… I walked in.… One of the girl secretaries was having hysterics.… “Take a look over the wall. They screamed all night and nearly drove us crazy.”…
The embassy had been built on top of the ancient city wall. I thought I was inured to horror, but when I looked down I nearly overbalanced with nausea. Thirty feet below me were several hundred Chinese. Some were roasted black but others had been so slowly overcome by the blasts of heat that their clothing was not even scorched.… This little community had lived within a pocket formed by the city wall. The fire had blocked their escape and then the wind-driven flames had forced them back against the wall… in nearly every case the top joints of their fingers were just bone. They had ripped the flesh away in their frantic efforts to climb the thirty-foot barrier of smooth stones.… I raged back to the Germans and asked why they hadn’t thrown some ropes or sheets over to the trapped people. One of the Germans said: “The embassy was in danger. There were too many of them. Besides, they were only coolies.”
The bombing raids lasted through the summer of 1939, and it was not until 1940 that dugouts and shelters were carved into the mountains.* Meanwhile, the citizens of Chungking were forewarned about oncoming raids by paper lanterns strung high on the city’s gallows. Along with homes and businesses, the Soviet and British embassies were bombed, as were United Press and TASS (the Soviet news agency), both of which moved underground, as did the vital factories. “Do what you can,” May-ling wrote Emma, “to make your people realize that this death and havoc come to us with the help of American gasoline and oil, and materials for bombs.”
Han Suyin observed Chiang Kai-shek during one of these raids: “Other generals converse in low tones or look over papers. The Generalissimo sits erect and stiff on a hard wooden chair, his arms folded, his back six inches from the back of the chair. He is resting. He is never seen to relax, to slouch or cross his legs; not a muscle moves. Overhead, bombs crash. Others in the shelter start, glance upward. They open their mouths and some stop their ears. Not Chiang Kai-shek. His face wears an expression of curbed annoyance, as though he was trying not to listen to a boring speech. Staring straight before him, he sits motionless—resting.” For May-ling, bomb shelters were a new form of torture. She complained to T.V. that being “obliged to sit for hours in a dark and damp underground enclosure is an ordeal. The humidity there… is very high. I am covered with water blisters which itch like Job’s old sores!”
During that winter May-ling visited hospitals at the front, which, she said, had “improved by at least sixty to seventy percent” from the year before. Doctors and nurses were kinder to patients; delousing equipment had been installed in some hospitals, while others had rigged up makeshift showers, using five-gallon cans with strings attached. Food, however, was still a big problem. Only $.25 (Chinese)* a day had been alloted to each soldier, and this included his ration of rice. As a supplement, some of the hospital superintendents, aided by patients, had begun to grow vegetables. Milk was exceedingly rare, but some hospitals made their own, using soybeans and old-fashioned stone grinders. The G-mo’s wife brought gifts worth $2.00 (Chinese),† a towel, a bar of soap, and a bowl of well-cooked meat.
In the spring, May-ling took her sisters on a series of inspection trips, and in April they made a joint broadcast from Chungking to New York, a carefully orchestrated appeal to the West. Ching-ling gave the introduction, informing “Friends of Democracy” that the “struggle of the Chinese people against the aggression of Japanese militarism” was almost three years old and that the Chinese were “continuing their fight with determination” in spite of the fact that “Japan, with her superior military power,
boasted she would bring [them] to their knees within three months.” Ching-ling then introduced Ai-ling, who spoke witheringly of the “puppet show” government set up by the Japanese, claiming that it “represents nothing in China but the dregs of a political cesspool.” It remained for May-ling to make “a direct appeal to all liberty loving people to see that China is promptly given the justice… she has earned for almost three long years unparalleled in bloodshed and suffering.” The generalissimo’s wife asked “that a stop be put to one of two things: either Congressmen… should stop expressing horror at aggression, or they should stop encouraging aggression by permitting gasoline, oil, and other war materials to be sent to Japan.”* Emma wrote May-ling that she had been “told that there has been some criticism” of this last remark. “It suggests an attempt to put pressure on our sacrosanct lawmakers,” she explained.
During the early months of 1940, the Nazis, who had already taken over Czechoslovakia and Poland, invaded Denmark, France Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, all of which surrendered by the end of June. “Society people dash to the rescue of France at the drop of a hat,” Emma wrote May-ling, “a little less eagerly to the rescue of England.… China is an old story, now, and your average citizen just doesn’t think of it from one month’s end to the next. The big industrialists who are making money in China and should give big gifts there, are also making money in Japan and are afraid of reprisals.”
Nevertheless, in 1940, the U.S. government put an embargo on scrap iron and steel destined to be exported to a number of countries, Japan included, and Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States. Chiang believed that if Japan attacked the United States, China would benefit from more U.S. aid, but he was afraid that it might be the wrong China, i.e., that of the Communists. His fears were not unfounded. One of Roosevelt’s representatives told the generalissimo that the president thought that the Chinese Communist Party seemed more like socialists to him, and that the Nationalists and Communists ought to try to work together.
The Last Empress Page 46