Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (12 page)

In 1935 the dictatorships in Europe stepped up their aggression. In Italy, Benito Mussolini, fired by visions of re-creating the Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia, one of Africa’s last independent states. In Germany, Hitler defied the provisions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that prevented rearmament, announcing that the army would be increased to half a million troops. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin observed these moves with alarm. The USSR had been weakened by political purges and mass starvation, and was in no shape to deal with an invasion either from Germany in the west or Japan in the east. On August 1, 1935, the USSR and its international organization, the Comintern, declared a worldwide front against fascism. The CCP was to abandon its policy of opposition to Chiang and give him its full support.
²³

Chiang and Mao both understood that Moscow’s new line had the potential to change Chinese domestic politics utterly. For the Communists, it was galling to have to embrace a former ally who had turned on them without warning just a decade earlier. And Chiang also knew that his hope of finally crushing the CCP might well be slipping away. A war with Japan was now likely, and if it happened, he would need Soviet assistance to defend China. To serve that end, he might have to abandon any hope of destroying the final Communist holdouts, even though the party had been greatly weakened by the Nationalists.

Parallel negotiations among Chiang, the Soviets, and the CCP continued through the summer and autumn of 1936. Officially, the CCP obeyed Stalin’s demand for unification with the Nationalists. Chiang, in turn, publicly declared that the Communists were nearly routed, and that he had no need to deal with them. But negotiations between the sides for a joint effort against Japan, with Zhou Enlai in the lead for the CCP, continued in secret. By early December both parties had agreed in principle that the Red Army would come under central military command and that the most radical Communist policies, such as confiscation of land, would be ended. The agreement had been made verbally, but not in writing, when Chiang Kai-shek decided to inspect troops at the northern city of Xi’an.
²⁴

On December 12, 1936, China awoke to extraordinary news: Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped. Troops serving under the militarist leaders Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng had surrounded his villa and were holding him hostage. (Zhang had ruled Manchuria until the Japanese invasion of 1931. After that, although he had had to flee his home provinces, he had remained in command of substantial forces below the Great Wall.) The militarists demanded that Chiang cease attacking the Communists, and instead lead a united front against the Japanese.

For the next two weeks the Chinese public remained transfixed as a series of frantic negotiations took place. Mao’s old fellow student He Yingqin now threatened to launch an attack on Xi’an to rescue the Generalissimo. James Bertram, an American journalist sympathetic to the CCP, was in Xi’an at the time, and recalled feeling a civil war was about to break out: “A fleet of Government planes roared low over the roofs of Sian [Xi’an],” he recorded. “The sound of their engines cannot have been very reassuring to the Young Marshal’s prisoner.”
²⁵
However, Chiang’s wife Song Meiling vetoed the idea of a full-scale assault on the city, fearing that her husband might be killed in the battle (and wondering whether that was He’s intention, a ploy to seize power himself). She traveled to Xi’an and was able to stay with Chiang while he remained captive. Meanwhile, back in Nanjing, H. H. Kung took to the airwaves, “asserting that there could be no dealings with armed rebellion, no truce with the ‘Communist bandits,’ and assuring the nation that the dignity of the Government would certainly be upheld.”
²⁶
But Kung’s reference to the Communists hid a more complex reality, as it emerged that Zhang Xueliang had made a terrible error.

In the previous months’ confusion, Zhang had not been privy to the secret talks that had already laid the ground for an alliance between the Nationalists and Communists, and far from being hailed as a new leader for the nation, his actions were viewed as treachery by the Nationalist government and the wider public. Negotiations continued for two weeks, with both Chinese and foreign observers completely at a loss to know whether the country’s leader would be released or killed.

Zhang Xueliang is today seen in China as a patriot who was shocked by the Generalissimo’s unwillingness to face the “real” threat of Japan, and his insistence on fighting his fellow Chinese, the CCP. In this version of events, Zhang kidnapped Chiang in order to force a change of direction. In fact, Zhang’s motivation may well have been more straightforward: Chiang was likely to deprive him of his military command. But the most important factor that saved Chiang was quite simple: few Chinese leaders would have benefited from his death or deposition. Many high-level members of the CCP, such as Mao, were very keen to execute Chiang after he was captured. But other figures were more wary, including former warlord opponents of Chiang such as Yan Xishan of Shanxi province. They realized that if Chiang was killed, there was nobody else of his stature to rule China. Chiang’s great success, and his key to maintaining his own position, was in keeping control over a Nationalist Party that consisted of factions in strong disagreement with each other. If Chiang died, potential successors such as T. V. Soong were unlikely to command wide support. And if Wang Jingwei took over, there was a greater likelihood of accommodation with Japan.

One actor who found the prospect of Chiang’s death terrifying was Stalin. His support for the Communists had been variable in quality and consistency, and had plunged the party into trouble as often as it had helped. Yet his advice was still taken very seriously. Now Stalin made it clear that the CCP had to settle its disagreement with Chiang and obtain his release. Stalin knew that Chiang’s death would not be to the advantage of the small, beleaguered Communist Party. Instead, someone like Wang, assisted perhaps by He Yingqin, might well take over. A pro-Japanese China would place the USSR in grave danger. By 1936 the Anti-Comintern Pact (which Chiang had seriously considered joining) threatened to encircle the USSR with a hostile Germany on one side and Japan on the other. If China also turned toward the Axis, then the Soviet Red Army might have to fight a war—without allies—on two fronts. Since Stalin had spent much of the 1930s purging the Red Army of its best officers, this could have been disastrous. Whatever else happened, Chiang must be restored to power. He was anti-Communist, but had swallowed his principles enough to establish diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933. More important, he was implacably anti-Japanese.
²⁷

The abduction of Chiang mesmerized China. Had Zhang Xueliang realized that his goal of a united front had in effect already been agreed, he might never have kidnapped Chiang at all. In that sense, Zhang was a victim of the tendency of both Chiang and the top CCP leaders, including Mao and Zhou, to keep their plans secret and also to pursue several lines of strategy simultaneously and sometimes contradictorily. In the end it was Zhou Enlai who negotiated Chiang’s release. Chiang gave his assurance that he would now lead an all-party resistance against Japan. To the public, it looked as if Chiang had been compelled into an alliance against the Japanese, but in fact the terms of this arrangement were very similar to those agreed upon in secret before the kidnapping took place.

When Chiang was released, there was an outpouring of national rejoicing. Despite the many flaws in Chiang’s government, the public had been forced to contemplate China without the Generalissimo and realized that it would be a weak and vulnerable country indeed. By escaping the threat on his life, Chiang had made himself indispensable. The American ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, wrote of the startling boost to Chiang’s fortunes in a report to Secretary of State Cordell Hull just a month after the kidnapping. “Whereas the outstanding developments during the first half of 1936 increased the precariousness of China’s position,” Johnson suggested, “the significant events of the second half, in their larger aspects, have had the opposite effect.” He suggested that several factors had “tended to unify and strengthen the Republic and even to cause the Japanese, at least temporarily, to adopt a decidedly less aggressive policy towards China.” Among those factors were Chiang’s success in putting down an attempted uprising by the southwestern faction of militarists, as well as a strong defense of Suiyuan province in north China against Japanese attempts to expand into the area, which provoked “an amazing manifestation of nationalism.” But entirely unpredictably, the other factor was the outcome of the Xi’an crisis, which “fostered another spontaneous outburst of nationalism throughout the country and caused universal rejoicing when the Generalissimo was released on Christmas Day.”
²⁸
Chiang’s moment of greatest peril turned out to be his most triumphant.

Chiang did exact retribution on his kidnappers: Zhang was placed under house arrest and only released on Taiwan in 1990, more than half a century later. But Chiang did not go back on the idea of a new united front. It was clear to him that the threat from Japan was simply too great to allow another civil war to break out. Under the terms of the new United Front between the Nationalists and Communists, the armed forces of both sides would cease action against one another and would make preparations for war against a foreign invader.

The atmosphere on the other side of the Sea of Japan was becoming yet more turbulent. On February 16, 1936, young army officers attempted to overthrow the government, which they claimed was doing too little to relieve poverty at home and build up Japan’s military strength. They managed to assassinate senior figures including Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyô. Prime Minister Okada Keisuke only escaped because the plotters murdered his brother-in-law by mistake. Although the coup failed and its ringleaders were executed, there was much sympathy for their cause in high circles, leading to greater political tension.
²⁹

Japanese politicians became yet more determined to show a strong hand in China. Hirota Kôki became prime minister just two weeks after the attempted coup. His government became more and more concerned that if China were not pacified, it would stand in the way of a future Japanese confrontation with the Soviet Union. In late 1935, the Comintern had made Japan one of the areas of key concentration for their activities, and clashes had begun to arise on the border between Manchukuo and the eastern USSR. “Japan is destined sooner or later to clash with the Soviet Union,” said Itagaki Seishirô (then chief of staff of the Kwantung Army) to Foreign Minister Arita Hachirô, “and the attitude of China at that time will gravely influence operations.”
³⁰
“Japan is extremely concerned over the current situation in north China,” stated one army spokesman on May 15, “particularly the menace of the Communist army, which is advocating an anti-Japanese campaign . . . If . . . it became necessary to cope with an emergency, we are concerned that we could not . . . be able to carry out our full responsibilities.” It was true that there had been thrusts into the area by Communist armies, as well as fears about the safety of Japanese residents. But these fears now gave the Japanese army an opportunity to place a new force in north China whose commander would be appointed directly by Tokyo.
³¹

By spring of 1936, the Japanese increased the number of their troops in north China from 2,000 to a permanent brigade of 5,600, with troops based around major cities including Tianjin and Beiping. Throughout 1936, further incidents of violence took place against Japanese in various parts of China, all of which further fueled Japanese demands to increase their armed presence in China. In August 1937, the top Japanese civilian and military leadership agreed to a fundamental set of demands that they would make of China, including an anti-Communist military pact, the lowering of tariffs on Japanese imports, and the employment of Japanese military “advisers.” The demands were part of a more wide-ranging general statement of policy, which included the longer-term conviction of the army that they must go to war with the USSR and the determination by the navy that Japan should expand its influence in Southeast Asia.
³²
However, discussions between Chinese foreign minister Zhang Qun and Japanese ambassador Kawagoe Shigeru over the next few months ended with no agreement between the two sides. The first months of 1937 saw a more moderate civilian prime minister in Tokyo, Hayashi Senjûrô, but military commanders in the field remained strident in their opposition to China’s Nationalist government.

On March 3, 1937, the Chinese foreign minister, Chiang’s old classmate and friend Zhang Qun, perceived as moderate in his attitude toward Japan, was replaced by Wang Chonghui, a former judge at the World Court in The Hague, who seemed to endorse a tougher line toward Tokyo. The perceived change of mood in China then filtered back into Japan, souring public faith in the moderate Hayashi Senjûrô government (which had replaced Hirota’s in January 1937), particularly as a string of isolated anti-Japanese incidents in China in the spring of 1937 were interpreted by Japanese politicians and public as part of a wider conspiracy.
³³
On June 4, 1937, the Tokyo government fell, and a new government was appointed in which Prince Konoye Fumimarô became premier, and Hirota Kôki, a hard-liner, was now made foreign minister. Meanwhile, Japanese influence in north China continued to consolidate. While the region was technically under Chiang’s government, in practice it was the Japanese who controlled it, mostly through uneasy agreements and understandings with local Chinese commanders who were as wary of Chiang as they were of Tokyo. Central Army troops whose commanders were based in Nanjing were forbidden to move north of the Huai River.