China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (47 page)

Moreover, there were bitter memories among these people of the Kuomintang’s violent attacks on writers and thinkers during the years when Chiang was consolidating his power and terror reigned in the places where artistic creation and intellectual ferment were taking place, Shanghai especially. These were men largely unknown to or forgotten by Chiang’s avid supporters outside of China,
like Qu Qiubai and Hu Yepin, leftist writers and poets, men of eloquence and passion, who sided with the Communists in the early years and were arrested by Chiang’s secret police and killed by firing squads during the 1930s. These events were not forgotten in China, especially among what might be called the cognoscenti, the writers, poets, and playwrights—
Lao She, the author of the celebrated novel
Rickshaw Boy,
is a prominent example—who began to find their voices with the end of the war and who tended to give the Communists but not Chiang Kai-shek the benefit of the doubt. Lu Xun himself always despised Chiang as a dictator, and this dislike was shared by the left-leaning Shanghai intelligentsia that in 1945 was beginning to envisage a future without the Japanese
occupying army. And then there were the suspicions, the sense of alienation, and the fears of the KMT felt by members of what came to be called the third force, the people like Ma Yinchu, often educated in the United States, who didn’t become Communists but who watched with growing disillusionment and anger the KMT’s continued recourse to the tools of repression. And, finally, there were the students, imbued, as young people generally are, with a kind of idealistic impatience, furious at the slothfulness, the corruption, the arrogance of a government that was unable to defend the country, compared to the Communists, who were believed to be waging courageous guerrilla warfare against the hated occupier.

“
China is now divided into two countries: the democratic China, composed of various parties under the leadership of the Communist Party, and the Fascist dictatorship of the Kuomintang,” read a letter from students at Fudan University, handed over to the American vice president,
Henry Wallace, when he was on an official visit to Chiang in the summer of 1944. “The former is positively carrying on the war and protecting the people, while the latter sits back and oppresses the people.”

And so, when the war ended, it was difficult to find independent-minded people ready to proclaim Chiang’s heroism or brilliance. No doubt, millions of Chinese still lionized Chiang, still saw him as the symbol of the wartime refusal to surrender, as the man on the white horse brandishing that sword of patriotic defiance. But the public defection of the immensely prestigious Ma Yinchu, of many of the country’s other famous writers and scholars, and of thousands of restive students suggested a weakness at the core, and it was a weakness that the only other armed force in the country knew how to use for its advantage.

All over China,
the sudden surrender of Japan announced itself in different ways, but the reaction was the same: joy followed by a sober realization that for China almost nothing had been settled by the victory and that, at worst, another war loomed. At a prison camp for American and Allied soldiers in Manchuria, a
Japanese lieutenant announced at the morning roll call, “By order of the emperor, the war is amicably terminated.” The word “amicably” brought raucous, bitter laughter from the soldiers. Most Americans and most Asians had thought the war would go on for a lot longer, but it was shortened by the dropping
of atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, and the simultaneous entry into the war of the Soviet Union, which, in accordance with the promise Stalin made to Roosevelt at Yalta, invaded Manchuria on the day after the Hiroshima bomb.

“
Yenan boiled over,”
Shi Zhe, Mao’s Russian translator, remembered, as news of the end of the war reached the Communists’ headquarters:

The unexpectedness of the end intensified the euphoria that engulfed China, though the giddy mood was tempered by the agonies of the war’s dreadful aftermath. “
In mid to late August, people around the country were showered in happiness and rebirth and people in the occupied zone celebrated until sunrise,” recalled
Chu Anping, a young writer for a new magazine called
Keguan,
or
Objectivity
, one of the many new journals that sprang into existence when the end of the war led the government to relax its strict censorship rules. On the evening of August 10, there were fireworks displays all over China. The head of a government office in Chungking spent ten thousand Chinese yuan on fireworks. “
Most of the people, especially government employees, students, merchants, and other so-called people of the upper class threw themselves into a swirl of revelry,” wrote
Lu Ling, an essayist and playwright, remembering the short-lived euphoria that came with the enemy’s surrender. College students sang lines from “La Marseillaise.” Drums were set up on the streets; the din of hardwood clappers and cymbals, used in Sichuan opera, filled the crowded streets.

Within hours, American planes appeared in China’s skies to drop parachute packs of food and medicine into prisoner-of-war camps. In Shanghai, Theodore White rode down Bubbling Well Road from the airport and found it jammed with Chinese “cheering, waving little American and Nationalist flags.”
At the waterfront, where the peddlers
usually sold dried fish, they were offering silk-screened portraits of Chiang Kai-shek, one small sign that the Gimo was still regarded as the man who had seen China through its ordeal. The White Russian owner of a cabaret offered free drinks to any American in uniform, as well as his “choice of any woman in the house, any race, any color, any size—and he had them all.”

This was more than the end of a war. There was a sense of a new era dawning and the ending of an old one that had begun with the
Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century and included China’s defeat by Japan in 1895—the era of Chinese humiliation. In his memoirs, the writer
Xia Yan, a senior editor for the
Xinhua Daily
and a founder, with
Lu Xun, of the
League of Left-Wing Writers, listed the elements of national shame related specifically to Japan: there was the loss of
Taiwan in the first
Sino-Japanese war; the
Twenty-One Demands of 1915, when China acceded to Japan’s sphere of influence in the northeast; the
Mukden Incident of 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria; the bombing and occupation of Shanghai that year; the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident six years later, when Japan signaled its intent to conquer all of China. “This near hundred years of humiliating history had finally come to an end,” Xia wrote. “The entire
Xinhua Daily
staff went crazy. Actually all of Chungking,
all of China went crazy.”

Chiang Kai-shek learned that the struggle for national survival was over while having dinner with some senior officials and the ambassador of Mexico in Chungking. He and his companions heard cheering and firecrackers from the nearby United States military headquarters. They investigated and learned that Japan had given up. A few days later, Chiang made a radio speech to the Chinese people jubilant over the great victory and, in a show of magnanimity, instructed his people not to exact vengeance against the many hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops and civilians in China. He sent his chief of staff,
He Yingqin, to Nanjing to accept the formal document of surrender from General Okamura, and the day after that, Chinese troops entered Nanjing, the first time in seven years that any Chinese authority except the puppet government had set foot in what had been the national capital. “
I am very optimistic,” Chiang told
Time
in an interview, part of a rhapsodic cover story on China at war’s end that declared the country had never before “been so close to an era of peace and progress.” And at the top of it all, the magazine declared, “moved the alert, taut, indefatigable Generalissimo, the first architect of victory and now the first hope of peace.”

China, however, was materially devastated, deeply divided, and backward, and the rhapsody of victory was soon replaced by a sober and anxious assessment of the problems that lay ahead. The tremendous progress it had made in the ten years of relatively stable Kuomintang government between 1927 and 1937 had been wiped out, except in
Manchuria, which was soon to be systematically stripped of most of its industry by the Russians. Most of the railways were out of operation. Shipping was crippled. The roads were terrible, the bridges and tunnels wrecked, farms were saddled with shortages of everything they needed, from draft animals to fertilizer. All over China, millions of refugees, on the move from their places of wartime refuge to their homes, were without resources or work and faced with a roaring inflation that was making whatever money they had nearly worthless. Already by late 1945 the wheelbarrow had become the common mode of conveyance for money, because so much of it was needed. In November in Shanghai,
a rickshaw race was held for public amusement. Chinese, White Russian, and American women sat in the rickshaws, which were decorated with crepe paper and banners and pulled by Chinese coolies. The winning coolie got seven million Chinese dollars, which was equivalent to twenty-two American dollars, and when he put it in his rickshaw to take away, it took up the same space as the passenger he’d just discharged.

Chiang himself actually had
a firmer grip on reality than Henry Luce and the other editors of
Time
writing about him in New York. “Everybody takes this as a day of glory,” he wrote in his diary. “
I alone feel great shame and sorrow.”

He doesn’t explain why he felt that way, but the devastation of his country must have weighed heavily on Chiang’s mind, the ruination of the great plans he’d had for China when he’d established his government in Nanjing eighteen years earlier. Had it not been for the Japanese invasion, Chiang Kai-shek would almost surely have been president of a unified country with the Communist revolt quelled, national sovereignty fully restored, and the most populous country on the planet on its way to being a significant world power. Instead, he had to worry that rather than enjoy rewards from his stubborn eight-year refusal to surrender to Japan, he would face an even greater challenge to his rule. Stalin and Mao, as he put it in his diary, could “
plunge China into chaos and anarchy.”

Chiang was not alone in this worry. The end-of-war euphoria was quickly replaced by the fear that a new civil war would soon follow. Aside from that, for intellectual leaders like
Ma Yinchu there was the more general anguish about the country’s miserable condition. “
I was excited for a while,” the left-wing poet and essayist
Hu Feng wrote later, remembering the carnival atmosphere in Kunming, the firecrackers exploding, the crowds massing in the streets, the American jeeps flooding into the downtown areas, “but I cooled down pretty quickly.” Hu had studied in Japan in the 1930s and was a prominent member of the
League of Left-Wing Writers after returning to China, a friend of
Lu Xun, a critic of the Communist apparatchiks who tried to impose an ideological orthodoxy on the dissenting culture, an opponent of censorship. “Japan, China’s nemesis for ten years has fallen, but how can China stand on its own in the future? … The victory can cloud people’s minds, but, sadly, my mind isn’t susceptible to being clouded.”

“Within these few weeks,”
Chu Anping, the commentator at
Keguan,
wrote, referring to the few weeks in September and October after the end of the war, “the lands that were once occupied for seven or eight years have been
occupied for a second time,” this time by “indescribably unethical and incompetent national officials.” The country was in terrible condition on every civilian front, he wrote. “Our finances in the recuperated areas are in tatters, and in the great rear areas they are chaotic. Industry is bankrupt. There are closed shops everywhere.… Transportation is a tangle and in the past three months, even the shipping on the Yangzi River hasn’t recovered its normal state. At first there was a lot of regulation; now there are a lot of black markets.”

Most ominously, Chu wrote, the civil war that both the KMT and the CCP promised they wanted to avoid was already occurring, and the
laobaixing,
the ordinary people, who yearn for peace, “can’t do anything but sigh.”
The KMT was corrupt and exhausted, devoid of “vital young people,” while the CCP, as he put it, demonstrated “excessive support of the values of another country,” namely Russia.

For months following V-J Day, literally millions of people were on the loose, trying to get home from the places they’d fled to during the war. At what had been a small stop on the Lunghai Railroad, the major east–west line that had been bombed and strafed repeatedly during the war, an immense crowd of refugees had gathered with no place to go. It rained heavily for days, and so people turned the teahouses, drinking places, restaurants, and other shops along a small market street into dormitories.
Two locomotives exploded in the station, causing hundreds of casualties. People lucky enough to get on trains found that the trains’ roofs were full of holes. “
The waiting area has become a little river,” a visiting journalist, Dong Luoyu, reported, “and people urinated and more than urinated around the station so the stench is terrible.” What China needs, he wrote, is “revolutionary change, a new spirit, but what we see offers no promise.”

Dong moved east along the railroad line, finding that the walls of villages had been destroyed, grass was growing everywhere, “and all we could see were abandoned grass shacks and
barely a human trace.” This was a consequence of the flood and famine of 1943, when the government had broken the Yellow River dikes trying to stop the Japanese advance. “The trees along the roads near the village were all stripped of bark because the people had eaten it,” Dong wrote. “Victory has arrived, but a month later there’s no substantial return of people or any rebuilding.” It’s only when he got all the way to the coast and the former German colony of
Qingdao, where detachments of American marines had landed, that he found anything hopeful. “The market is full of laughter and chatting. American friends are always so youthful and energetic.”