Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (39 page)

Nonetheless, the Nationalist blockade continued, with disastrous effects on the economy of the Communist base area. Then, in early 1940, Chiang terminated the financial subsidy from the Nationalists. Making matters worse, after very good harvests during the first two years of the war, the yields in 1939 and 1940 were much poorer. The bad harvests also created problems for the Nationalists, as the food price index in Chongqing rose by nearly 1,400 percent in 1940–1941.
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But prices rose in the isolated and impoverished SGN area: in 1941 one needed 2,200 yuan to buy what would have cost 500 yuan in 1940.
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The CCP now had a much larger population to deal with, and severely reduced resources. The solution they turned to was a radical form of economic self-sufficiency. “Production campaigns” were launched which over the next few years would greatly increase the amount of land that fell under cultivation, as well as boosting the production of cotton, rearing of livestock, weaving of cloth, and extraction of products including salt, coal, and even some oil and gas.
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This idea would prove psychologically powerful, as the inward economic turn created a new distrust between the Nationalists and Communists, which would resonate throughout the rest of the war, and for years afterward.

By the summer of 1940 the two major Communist armies dominated much of north and central China. In August of that year, the Eighth Route Army under the command of Peng Dehuai launched the only major conventional military offensive by a Communist army during the war: the Battle of the Hundred Regiments. Some 40,000 troops (in 22 regiments, although more troops joined in until the total number of regiments was 104) launched an all-out assault on railway lines, roads, bridges, and other elements of the infrastructure necessary for Japanese control in north China. The fighting continued until October, and invited a massive and brutal Japanese counterassault.
³³

Meanwhile, the New Fourth Army penetrated south of the Yellow River, and just to the north of the Yangtze River, into areas previously dominated by the Nationalists. The Subei region, and the Anhui province to the north and west of Shanghai, became a Communist stronghold under the senior New Fourth Army commander Xiang Ying. In July the Central Military Commission proposed that the Communist troops should concentrate north of the former path of the Yellow River (which had changed after the breaching of the dikes in June 1938). Relations between Xiang Ying and his Nationalist counterparts, Generals Gu Zhutong and Shangguan Yunxiang, had been friendly enough, but now positions hardened. On the Communist side Zhou Enlai may have supported the plan, but Mao appears to have strongly rejected it.

On October 19, He Yingqin, chief of the General Staff under Chiang Kai-shek, told Zhu De, commander of the New Fourth Army, that all Communist troops must be moved, including any troops which had previously been authorized to take positions south of the Yangtze. On December 9 Chiang gave his orders: by December 31 he wanted all New Fourth Army troops to be north of the Yangtze, and by January 31 all New Fourth Army and Eighth Route Army troops must be north of the Yellow River. He made his views clear in a confidential message to Gu Zhutong. If the deadline was breached, “then you must take care of this matter; no more tolerance.”
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Xiang Ying received ambiguous commands from Mao, telling him at one moment to move his troops north, but at others, to take a roundabout route suggesting something less than urgency.
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Mao himself may not have been sure what he wanted to achieve, half hoping and half fearing to provoke an incident with the Nationalists.
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Then, on December 26 , he sent a furious message to Xiang Ying, warning him not to trust the Nationalists. Mao was already beginning to shift the blame. Despite his own vacillations, if a calamity happened to the New Fourth Army in Anhui, he wanted the local commander, not himself in Yan’an, to take the blame.
³⁷

On January 4, 1941, troops of the New Fourth Army began to move south, not north. The Communists argued that this was necessary to avoid marching through the areas controlled by Japanese troops. The Nationalists suspected that it was, instead, a move to expand CCP areas of control. Shortly afterward, clashes began between the two sides.

Dong Nancai was one of the New Fourth Army officers on the move, serving under Xiang Ying’s deputy (and rival), Ye Ting. Dong recalled that the move happened in deep winter, and that conditions were cloudy and very cold. At various points the troops rigged up temporary bridges to cross water, although sometimes “because the people were too many, the speed was too slow, burdens too heavy, there were some comrades who fell in the water, and had to brave the cold to swim across the river.”
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Over the next two days the army came up against Nationalist troops, with no quarter given on either side: “even [our] cooks took their kitchen knives,” such was the ferocity of the battle, although the Communists emerged victorious. As they went on, the troops had to negotiate between sudden, deadly skirmishes with the enemy, and dangers from the surrounding environment: some men fell to their deaths from the steep mountain ledges.
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During these encounters the overall commander, Xiang Ying, disappeared; it is not clear whether he was struck by terror and deserted his post, or whether he was trying to find another way to strike back against the attacking Nationalists.
⁴⁰
Then he suddenly reappeared, telling party headquarters on January 10, “The day before yesterday, we tried to break out of the circle, but we were prevented, and were surrounded . . . there was a huge possibility that we would be eliminated . . . I planned to take a small number of troops, and find a sideways path out.” He admitted, “This action of mine was really terrible. I await punishment.” The party’s headquarters was not slow to reply, calling him a “coward” and a “waverer.”
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Yet even Xiang’s return could not compensate for the overwhelming strength of the Nationalist forces. Gu Zhutong’s attack led to the death or capture of 9,000 of Xiang’s troops.
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Xiang Ying himself was murdered in captivity on March 14.

But the Nationalist military victory turned into a public relations firestorm. The immediate response from most outside observers was not that Communist troops had refused to obey orders, but rather that Chiang had treacherously turned on his allies in the hopes of defeating his domestic enemies, while ignoring the Japanese. On January 15 Mao sent a message to Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying declaring that “all of Chiang’s talk about virtue and morality is a pack of lies and should under no circumstances be trusted.”
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Public opinion, both domestic and international, came down firmly against Chiang’s act.
Time
magazine observed:

This was a victory for the Whampoa . . . clique of Chinese generals who hate & fear the Communists and are jealous of the publicity given to the Fourth and Eighth Route Armies. But it was no victory for China. What has kept the Communists fighting for Chiang is the fact that they fear Japan more than they fear Chiang. If Japan (or Russia) could convince the Communists that they have less to fear from Japan (or Russia) than from Chiang, China’s jig would be up.
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Chiang knew that he could not afford to drive the Communists to turn their fire on him rather than the Japanese. He abandoned plans to push Communist forces north of the Yangtze, and made no serious attempt to do so for the rest of the war years. Meanwhile, the Red Army knew that it could develop without worrying about suppression by Chiang.

Mao’s indecision had made him, in part, responsible for Xiang Ying’s inability to stage a successful retreat, and the former must surely accept some of the blame for the clash. Nevertheless, the battle was a victory for Mao in the struggle to control his own party. Xiang Ying had been a rival, with his own autonomous area of control. Now, his defeat and death bound the future of the CCP even more tightly to Mao’s actions in Yan’an.
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Overall, the “New Fourth Army Incident,” as it became known, which had seemed such a disaster for the Communists, was to prove a major turning point in the upward rise of the fortunes of the CCP—and of Mao.

In fact, the resolution of the “New Fourth Army Incident” marked the conclusion to one of the most important years in the history of Chinese politics. The internal struggle of ideas going on during 1940 was evident to informed observers at the time. Early in 1941, US ambassador Nelson Johnson sent a detailed assessment of the political situation to Washington, in response to another report forwarded to the US by Major Evans Carlson, an American military officer who had undertaken an extensive tour of the Chinese interior. The difference between the two messages illustrated the growing rift in American opinion about the politics of China. Carlson, and his traveling companion, the New Zealander Rewi Alley, were increasingly sympathetic to the Communists, having traveled in their areas of control in 1938 and being impressed by their discipline. Carlson characterized the Nationalists as moving toward “fascism” and demanded that in return for funding from the US, Chiang’s government should be forced to institute more “democratic” structures.
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Johnson disagreed strongly. The Nationalists wished to retain power, which was “only normal and natural,” but during the war years they had established the National Political Consultative Council, a body on which various parties including the Communists were represented. He also pointed out that the CCP were able to publish their own newspaper in Chongqing in a way that would not have been possible before the war. One might have expected the Nationalists to use the excuse of war “to extinguish . . . all political opposition,” but instead they had preferred to “muddle along.” Johnson also felt that the influence of the various cliques within the Nationalist Party had been exaggerated. Chiang Kai-shek, in contrast, had “grown in stature, as he has come to be recognized as the symbol of united resistance to Japanese encroachment”; in the end “it is he who makes the final decisions.” Johnson did agree with Carlson’s assessment that Chiang’s government was reluctant to sponsor a mass popular movement driven by anything beyond a widespread sense of anti-Japanese anger, although he did note that the Nationalists had undertaken cooperative movements and county-level reforms. But Johnson did not agree that American assistance to China should be predicated on wholesale political reform by the Nationalists. Chiang was determined to fight the Japanese, and the US should support him in that endeavor. In a remarkably prescient comment, Johnson observed:

It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have been feeling their way along toward a new evolving form of government. A definitive form of government has not yet been established and may not be established for decades; it may or may not be in the form of a democracy, but it will be a type of government that will be adapted to the needs of China and its people.
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Johnson’s comment was astute and one that has resonances even in contemporary China, ruled by a party Communist in name but hardly at all in policy. Once again, the discord stemmed from the different claims to ownership of the legacy of Sun Yat-sen. The year 1939 saw a growing centralization of power in the person of Chiang Kai-shek, as he took up the title of “director-general” of the party, giving him an equivalent status to Sun Yat-sen. Sun’s philosophy of the “Three People’s Principles” of nationalism, democracy, and livelihood for the people (
minzu
,
minquan
,
minsheng
) had been only patchily implemented at best in the ten years that the Nationalists had ruled at Nanjing, but at least some intention to act upon them was visible during the war.

However, Mao used the occasion of one of his most important speeches to seize Sun’s legacy for the Communists. As relations with the Nationalists worsened in 1939, Mao’s previously more conciliatory language began to change. On January 9, 1940, he gave a speech, published as a longer article shortly afterward. Its title, “On New Democracy,” showed a change in political terminology. Unlike the term
minquan
, which Sun had used to define democracy, and which translated more as “popular rights” (that is, something which government might bestow upon a citizenry), Mao used the term
minzhu
, whose elements implied instead “popular rule,” with the implication of direct control.

Chiang’s advocacy of the Principles, he argued, was little more than an attempt to preserve the economic status quo and downgrade the importance of communism. Mao proposed a “New Three People’s Principles,” espousing a Communist program much more openly. Requirements included an alliance with the USSR, to be given priority over unity with the imperialist powers; cooperation with the Communist Party; and assistance to the peasants and workers. Yet although these principles were explicitly proposed in opposition to the Nationalists, Mao took care to confirm that they were “a development of the old Three People’s Principles, a great contribution of Mr. Sun Yat-sen.”
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Wang Jingwei’s regime in Nanjing was the third government simultaneously to take the ideas of Sun Yat-sen and find within them the threads of a different policy. For Wang, it was Sun’s attachment to pan-Asianism that was most critical, since it provided the basis for an argument that collaboration with Japan was in fact a version of the nationalist project that Sun had pursued. Wang’s regime also launched a campaign of public mobilization called the New Citizen Movement
(Xin guomin yundong)
, which claimed to incorporate the civic elements of Sun’s program. It was also an echo of the New Life program of moral exhortation launched by Chiang’s regime in 1934 to rejuvenate the country, and which was now being used to define wartime relief and rehabilitation programs.
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