Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (34 page)

The Communists also advanced in central China, setting up a base (the JinChaJi base) in the border lands between Shanxi and Hebei, as well as in northwest Shanxi (JinSui) and the Taihang mountains of southeast Shanxi (the JinJuLuYu base). In Shanxi province the provincial militarist Yan Xishan had formed an alliance of convenience with the Communists, despite (like Chiang) being hostile to the party by instinct. Yet in the first months Shanxi’s capital city of Taiyuan became the headquarters for the CCP’s North China bureau, overseen by Liu Shaoqi. Communist influence led to a significant military victory at Pingxingguan on September 25, 1937, when forces from the Eighth Route Army coordinated with local troops and helped to ambush and slaughter part of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Fifth Division.
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The initial years of the war saw significant expansion of the Communist Party and its allied forces. Between 1937 and 1941 the number of members rose from some 40,000 to 763,447, and from a total force of some 92,000 at the start, the combined Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army rose to some 440,000 troops over the same period.
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Within the Communist base areas, there were also local militias, many of whose recruits divided their time between normal agricultural activity and military service, reducing the fear (prevalent in the Nationalist areas) of young men being recruited to the army and leaving the family without a breadwinner. Rather than the Nationalist policy of trying (not always successfully) to redistribute grain to military families, the Communists sought to lessen the distance between military service and everyday rural life. In addition, until 1940, the Nationalists subsidized the economy of SGN with an injection of some C$600,000 (then US$180,000) per month, providing valuable income for a desperately impoverished region. (Following the termination of Nationalist financial support, Stalin authorized a monthly payment to the CCP of some US$300,000.)
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The Communists wanted mass mobilization and were significantly more enthusiastic about popular participation in political activity than the Nationalists. But just like their rivals, the CCP did not wish to surrender the right to ultimate power. Their vision of democracy did mean widening political participation, but it was never liberal or fully pluralist. In their zone of control, the Nationalists had sought to broaden political involvement via the National Political Consultative Council, which allowed participation from other parties while retaining ultimate control of government for the Nationalists.
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The Communists also sponsored wider participation in local assemblies while ensuring that the party made the real decisions. To criticize these systems (as observers did) as empty and lacking in real political power misses some of the point. They were not designed to measure up against pluralist models of liberal democracy, but rather against premodern systems in which imperial subjects had no inherent citizen rights to participation in government at all. Yet these ideological systems were also a sign of how reluctant the dominant parties were to share real power.

Yan’an, like Chongqing, became an idea as much as it was a physical place, and both cities stood in contrast with occupied China. Chongqing became symbolic of a new compact between state and society, namely that in a newly forged China the state should demand much more of its population as it faced a test that could destroy the nation, and that the citizenry should expect much more in return from those who governed them. The underlying compact in Yan’an was similar, but raised to an even greater level, with revolution rather than reform at the heart of the Communist project. Russia’s revolution in 1917 had also taken place in the middle of an international war, but the methods that Mao and his party used were very different from the top-down Bolshevik seizure of power. Mao made it clear that the primary task was to rally around the cause of the united front against Japan, and that class warfare would take a secondary place for the time being. Instead, the Communists took their time to develop genuine instruments of mass mobilization.

Not everyone was pleased with the growing status of the Communists in wartime China. Chiang, of course, was deeply distrustful of their intentions. So also was his colleague and rival Wang Jingwei.

Chapter 11

Flight into the Unknown

O
N NOVEMBER
26, 1938, Zhou Fohai and his aide Mei Siping were among a small number of Nationalist officials called to a secret meeting at the house of Wang Jingwei in Chongqing. Mei had just returned from Shanghai. Had Chiang Kai-shek known about this, Mei would have been instantly arrested, for he had spent the past few days in detailed, fevered conversation with senior Japanese military figures. Their demand was simple: Wang Jingwei should defect and establish a rival government to Chiang’s in Japanese-occupied eastern China. A draft agreement had been signed by both sides, and a declaration had been prepared for Japanese premier Prince Konoye to announce the birth of the new government. But it would be cataclysmic for Wang, with his long revolutionary history, to make such an irreversible move, however deep his resentment against Chiang and his anxieties over China’s fate.

Wang could not make up his mind. After the meeting, he looked disconsolate. Zhou Fohai was furious at Wang’s indecision. “At home,” he wrote, “we discussed Wang Jingwei’s character. He has no definite ideas, and it’s easy to change his mind. That’s why he’s failed these last ten years. But on this matter, although he will go back and forth, he will eventually carry out the plan.” Zhou’s judgment was perhaps a little harsh. Wang had, after all, risked execution for the revolutionary cause in his younger days; now they were asking him, a senior minister in the Chongqing government, to risk his life again, for there was no doubt that Chiang and the Communists would regard a defection as treason.

The next day Wang was still undecided, but Zhou was more forgiving. He reflected a little later that though Wang was hesitant and lacked self-control, he was also amenable to advice. “This is a big matter . . . I don’t blame him for needing to think about all the options,” Zhou wrote. “Even I’ve had to do the same.”
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Within a few days Wang seemed to have been won over. However, to put the defection into action was not an easy task. The principal actors needed to leave Chongqing, where the agents of Chiang’s security chief, Dai Li, kept an eye out for suspicious behavior. So Wang would have to go to the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, and Zhou Fohai would go on ahead to the southwestern city of Kunming. Kunming was in Yunnan province, under the control of the militarist leader Long Yun. Long Yun, who was an ethnic Yi (Lolo), not a Han Chinese, was one of those provincial commanders who had a turbulent relationship with Chiang. While he recognized the authority of the Nationalist government in theory, he regularly welcomed dissidents who found Chongqing’s atmosphere too oppressive. Yunnan was also close to the border with Indochina, part of the French Empire.

In common with Chiang Kai-shek, and, in his later years, Mao, Wang had a strong wife. While he was indecisive, she, Chen Bijun, was anything but, and she may have helped tip the balance. “Madame Wang was an outstanding woman,” recalled Gao Zongwu, the head of the Asia Bureau of the Foreign Ministry, who would become close to Wang:

and her influence on Wang Jingwei was very strong. Her aggressive and strong attitude was a compensation for the femininity and good looks and gentle movement of Wang Jingwei . . . Those who offended her would never get to see Wang Jingwei again; this was her greatest power.
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Gao also claimed that it was Chen Bijun’s strong will that had captured for her the handsome Wang as a husband, rather than her looks. “She always resented Wang Jingwei’s youthful appearance,” Gao claimed, “because it made people think she was his mother.” This ungracious comment runs in a long line of asides in Chinese history about strong and frightening women who sit behind the throne. In fact, Chen had many qualities that had no doubt impressed Wang, not least her own revolutionary commitment, as well as her immense courage and fierce loyalty to her husband. One factor that may well have weighed on Wang’s mind when deciding whether to leave Chongqing was Chen’s increasing conviction that Chiang was trying to assassinate him.
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The atmosphere among the defectors now became feverish as they made preparations to leave. At every moment it seemed that Chiang, who was away from his capital, might find out what they were doing. “I’ve heard that Chiang will be coming back before the 10th,” Zhou wrote on December 1. “I have an inexplicable feeling, like a schoolboy who hears that the teacher is coming.” And now Wang began to waver again, his anxiety manifesting itself in a stream of telephone calls. One day he was furious about a public statement issued by the Weixin government (the client government set up by the Japanese in north China), which seemed to claim sovereignty over all of China; another day he read reports in the Hong Kong and Shanghai newspapers (that is, those outside Nationalist control) attacking him, and wanted to know how to respond.
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Zhou Fohai became increasingly worried that, though the defectors had placed their hopes on Wang, they could not depend on him.

On December 5 Zhou boarded a flight to Kunming. As far as the officials who saw him off at the airport were concerned, it was just a routine business trip. For Zhou, however, it was the start of his journey into the political unknown:

We took off at 10:45 a.m. Farewell, Chongqing! The survival or destruction of the country, and my own success or failure, all depend on the success of this trip! . . . At the moment that the plane left the ground, was that the ending of my political life?
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Once in Kunming, chance encounters left Zhou feeling jumpy. “Today I heard people speaking the Chongqing dialect,” he wrote. “I miss Chongqing. I’m not happy and I miss the past. This is a shortcoming in my psychology.” His absence from home now set him thinking about his past life and in particular a lover long since gone. “I miss my dead friend, Man Qiu,” he wrote disconsolately. “Even writing the words ‘dead friend’ is very painful.”

Then news from Chongqing threw him into despair. Wang had canceled his departure. Chiang was back in town, and fearing that he would get wind of the plot, Wang was refusing to move. Mei Siping, now in Hong Kong, had to scramble to delay the announcement in Shanghai that would declare the opening of negotiations between Wang and the Japanese. Zhou could not sleep. “I worried worse than ever before in my life,” he wrote. Should he go back to Chongqing and wait for another opportunity? After all, very few people knew that his visit to Kunming was anything other than routine.
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Perhaps he could still change his mind, with nobody the wiser?

But Zhou decided that he could not return to Chongqing. If he went back to the capital now, he would only be delaying the decision for a few more days, and worse still, he might not be able to leave again. “If heaven does not let China die,” he wrote, “then Mr. Wang
will
be able to leave Chongqing.”

Zhou’s insomnia continued. Away from Chongqing, he could not get to the mercurial Wang to persuade him to change his mind. And Wang seemed to be shrinking away from the decision. On December 17, Chen Chunpu, a relative of Wang’s wife Chen Bijun, told Zhou that Wang had canceled his tickets to Hanoi. “I don’t know what to do,” Zhou wrote; “I saw five visitors, made a big effort, but inside I was really depressed.” Zhou now reversed position: perhaps it made more sense to return to Chongqing, observe the situation, and wait for a better opportunity. “My feeling was 80 percent to head back to Chongqing,” he reflected, and “20 percent to head on to Hong Kong.”
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He still feared that Chiang might find out about the plot; if he did, Zhou could expect to be arrested immediately.

On December 18 Zhou went out into the streets and saw bands playing on the streets and policemen keeping guard. Clearly a major leader had arrived in town, but who? If it was Chiang, then Zhou’s defection was over before it had begun. But if Wang had reached Kunming, the plan was finally under way.

After the fall of Wuhan, Chiang Kai-shek had made it clear that the government had no intention of surrender, declaring that “this is a national and revolutionary war.”
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Chiang had never ceased to believe that the war of resistance was part of a decades-long attempt to fulfill Sun Yat-sen’s mission of establishing a stable and legitimate republic. Over his career, Chiang had seen success interwoven with retreat, and it was quite plausible that the war against Japan was merely the latest of many setbacks. He also believed that Wuhan, which had been defended at the cost of so much blood, was no longer essential to his strategy. New routes to supply Free China from the northwest and northeast were being established, and the Nationalists were now defending several crucial lines. “We’ve developed confidence over the last five months of fighting the enemy,” Chiang declared—that is, since Taierzhuang.
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But Chiang was still facing huge challenges. By late 1938 there was still no likelihood of significant international intervention in China. The CCP continued to maintain control in parts of northern and central China, but the Nationalists knew that they would be forced to rely on their own resources to avoid defeat. Chiang’s old refuge of Guling was no longer available to him, but he used the mountain retreat at Nanyue in Hunan province to call together senior officers and lecture them on the failings of their tactics so far. The first Nanyue military conference opened on November 25, 1938. Chiang delved into China’s history, both ancient and recent, to inspire his listeners. First he cited the classic of Chinese military strategy, Sunzi’s
The Art of War
. “If the enemy comes to us, we can take advantage of him,” Chiang quoted. “If he does not, then we can attack him.” Chiang declared that the Japanese, pulled in all the way along the Yangtze, were exactly where the Nationalists wanted them. Just a few weeks before, on October 12, the Japanese had landed at Bias Bay (also known as Daya Bay) off the coast of Guangdong province in southern China, and within ten days had captured the great southern port of Guangzhou (Canton).
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Yet even this shocking loss was now spun as part of an overall strategic success. “Wait for the enemy,” Sunzi had counseled, “and it will be easy to capture the location you want.” The first stage of the war was over. Now it was time for the second, defensive stage, to begin.
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