Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (48 page)

The Communist policies in Yan’an saved the region from collapse and also showed that there was an alternative to the increasingly destructive cycle that was corroding the relationship between the Nationalist government and its people. Yet Mao did have one major advantage in stabilizing the region. While there were some 40,000 troops stationed in the ShaanGanNing region that he controlled, his commitment to guerrilla warfare meant that he was not required to raise the large standing armies that the Nationalists needed in order to participate fully in the wartime alliance. One of the favorite accusations of Chiang’s Western allies was that the Nationalists were unwilling to recruit enough troops to make a proper contribution to the war, and were hoping that the Westerners would win it for them. (This was at the heart of Graham Peck’s indictment of the regime.) Yet these same observers, many of whom admired the Communists, did not acknowledge the crippling burden (in an already stretched economy) of having hundreds of thousands of economically unproductive soldiers on call. Nationalist China was, in a different way, as besieged as Yan’an. Yet the lower burden of military expenses meant that Mao could deploy his tax revenues in ways not open to the Nationalists.

As long as life in the Nationalist zone continued to become harsher and more unequal, the Communists provided hope and an obvious point of comparison. One newspaper advertisement that appeared in Kunming, in the southern part of the Nationalist zone, on December 28, 1943, pierced the core of the quiet anguish of the increasingly destitute middle class:

To those who want to adopt a child: a couple working in an educational institution do not have the capacity to bring up a child and want to give up their own (to be born next spring) without conditions. Stable families who are able to nurture and educate a child but have not been able to have children, and are willing to adopt, please write to . . .
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In any country this would have been an act of desperation. In China, where having children to carry on one’s ancestral line was (and is) so central to the culture, this was a sign that the experience of war had distorted life almost beyond recognition. The only hope was that the war might end before China itself collapsed. In that atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and social breakdown, all of China’s regimes, whether under Chiang, Mao, or Wang, would resort to new and terrible techniques to control their people.

Chapter 15

States of Terror

T
HE FIRST DAY OF
February 1942 marked a turning point in the history of China’s Communist Party. On that day, at the opening of the Party School in Yan’an, Mao addressed over a thousand party cadres and laid down a stinging critique. “There is something in the minds of a number of our comrades,” he declared, “which strikes one as not quite right, not quite proper.” Mao attacked a variety of “ill winds”: in one case, he compared the verbose and jargon-ridden political writings of some activists to the “eight-legged essay,” the stiff and formal exercise which candidates traditionally had to compose in the imperial examinations. Mao also took aim at the educated elites who had joined the revolution in Yan’an. “We all know that there are many intellectuals who fancy themselves very learned and assume airs of erudition,” chided Mao. “Many so-called intellectuals are, relatively speaking, most ignorant and the workers and peasants sometimes know more than they do.” Mao also warned against “sectarianism,” declaring that party members who wanted “independence” were actually seeking “fame and position and want to be in the limelight.” He reminded members that they were, after all, part of a Communist movement, and that the “Party not only needs democracy but needs centralization even more.”
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The speech marked the formal opening of the Rectification Movement. The campaign’s name in Chinese,
zhengdun zuofeng
, implied a “corrective wind.” It would turn out to be a harsh blast indeed. It marked a thorough ideological shakeout for the party, portrayed, in the language of the time, as a chance to “rectify the Party’s work style.” It included intense devotion to the study of Mao’s works, and a thoroughgoing, almost religious commitment to the goals of the Chinese Communist Party. Those who declined to take part could expect pressure: psychological at first, but then something less abstract and more sinister.

One witness to Mao’s ideological whirlwind was Peter Vladimirov, who had been sent as Soviet adviser to the CCP in May 1942. Bewildered, Vladimirov wrote that “not only party members but even soldiers and civilians are now required to cram [Mao’s] speeches,” adding that “all that, in the conditions of arduous war and economic difficulties . . . looks ridiculous.” In his view, the campaign was evidently meant to “cover up something very serious, something that Mao . . . needs very badly.”
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But Vladimirov had missed the point. The Rectification campaign was not a screen for something else. It was central to Mao’s mission of a thorough reinvention of Chinese society. And it was only the “arduous war” that allowed Mao to fulfill his goals so successfully. The war experience was crucial to the formation of the modernized Communist state, underpinned by terror in service of the revolution that Mao sought to build.

It was not only the Communists who used the heightened circumstances of war to remodel their states. So too did the Nationalist regimes of Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing and Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. As the economic climate worsened, Chiang’s government began to lose the precarious pluralism that had marked its earliest wartime phase. From the very start of the war, there had been light and darkness in the Nationalist program. One side of it was open and modernizing, symbolized by the plans to institute welfare relief, build technologically advanced facilities such as arsenals, and political participation from nonparty members. The other was darker and more inward-looking, harking back to Chiang’s connections to the criminal underworld and the intrigue that had brought him to ultimate power in China. Wang Jingwei’s state, of course, experienced a crisis of legitimacy from the start, and was defined by its need to justify its pro-Japanese stance during the war.

As China’s physical isolation deepened and its military and economic crisis worsened after Pearl Harbor, the Nationalists tried to shore up their bureaucratic and social infrastructure. In turn, the Communists and the Nanjing regime tried to create rival states in response to the weakening of the government in Chongqing. The essential element of that infrastructure in all three governments—intricately linked to their functioning, but rarely mentioned—was state terror. Each regime had its supreme leader: Chiang, Wang, Mao. But behind each of them was a shadowy figure, in charge of a security apparatus empowered to enforce the will of the state through psychological pressure, and use torture on those who refused to obey. China’s wartime existential crisis provided a perfect excuse for the rival, yet parallel, states to use similar techniques, from blackmail to bombing, to achieve their ends, and mute the criticisms of their opponents. If each of them paid tribute to Sun Yat-sen in public, they also each paid court to the thinking and techniques of Stalin in private.

There were three masters of these techniques. For Chiang, it was Dai Li, the man nicknamed “China’s Himmler.” For Wang, it was Li Shiqun, a burly and deceptively genial former street hoodlum. And for Mao, it was Kang Sheng, trained by one of the world’s greatest experts in the abuse of human bodies and minds: the head of the Soviet NKVD, Genrik Yezhov. The three of them would profoundly shape China’s wartime regimes and fuel the zero-sum struggle for power. Dai Li’s involvement with American intelligence would help create a fog of war that would lead to disastrous consequences for Allied operations in China. Li Shiqun’s machinations would force Zhou Fohai, Wang Jingwei’s most loyal follower, into yet another fateful personal decision with profound implications for the Chinese who served Japan. And Kang Sheng would create the structures that went on to shape the even greater terror that would one day define the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These men were implacable enemies. The irony was that they were engaged in three different facets of exactly the same project: using the war to create a strong Chinese state, with modernization and terror as its
yang
and
yin
.

Since Chiang’s earliest days as a revolutionary, Dai Li had been at his side. A young man from Zhejiang province on the make in the 1920s, Dai Li had become involved in the underworld intrigues of Shanghai Green Gang boss “Big-Ears” Du Yuesheng, a connection that had led to a close friendship with his fellow Zhejiang native, Chiang Kai-shek. At the Huangpu Academy, while the Northern Expedition was being planned, Dai Li had begun to spy on his Communist colleagues, and Chiang, after his victory in 1928, placed Dai Li in charge of the regime’s military intelligence. From the earliest days, Dai Li was simultaneously mysterious and notorious, careful to prevent pictures of himself from being publicly disseminated. When the war broke out, Dai Li became even more central to Chiang’s regime. He had a reputation among Chinese and foreigners alike not just for brutality but for all-out sadism. One tale of Dai Li’s role in the purge of the Communists in Shanghai in 1927 held that he heated up locomotive fire boxes at a railway siding, then threw in tied-up prisoners, whose screams as they burned to death were drowned out by the whistling of the engines. John Keswick, head of the British Special Operations Executive in China, simply declared that Dai Li “would never hesitate to bump anybody off. A real blower-upper.”
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As the war ground on, Dai Li concentrated his power in an organization known blandly as the Military Investigation and Statistics Bureau (MSB, or
Juntong
for short). In fact, the MSB was a personalized instrument of enforcement by means both legal and otherwise. Mere mention of the MSB and its headquarters at Wanglongmen in south Chongqing was enough to terrify most ordinary citizens in wartime Chongqing. The phrase “I’m with Wanglongmen” could open the door to everything from free train rides to gratis brothel visits. For anyone foolish enough to cross an MSB agent, or to voice a political opinion that was judged subversive, the punishment could be a visit to a jail where the alleged dissident would be left to the mercy of gangs. Torture and kidnapping were an ever-present threat. The atmosphere of menace was heightened by the knowledge that the city was infested with MSB informers, mostly low-lifes who survived on bringing in a few denunciations each year and were unscrupulous about methods or accuracy. Many of the agents themselves had been recruited in Wuhan from the gangs there and brought upriver to Chongqing.
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Dai Li’s particular obsession, amply fueled by his master Chiang Kai-shek, was the Communists. The United Front agreement had permitted the CCP a bureau in the temporary Nationalist capital, at Hongyancun (Red Crag) in Chongqing’s western suburbs, as well as the right to publish the
Xinhua ribao
, the Communist newspaper. But at all times, the MSB kept a close eye on Communist activities, with a Nationalist Party office located within the same complex of buildings at Hongyancun. The Communists nonetheless brought off some major coups under Dai Li’s nose in Chongqing. A young woman named Zhang Luping managed to infiltrate Dai Li’s telecommunications headquarters, allowing her group access to the traffic from hundreds of MSB radio stations. Highly placed agents inside the government included General Yan Baohang, a top military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, who was able to leak details of the upcoming invasion, Operation Barbarossa, to Moscow (only to have it dismissed by Stalin as “Oriental nonsense” just days before Germany invaded the USSR).
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In general, though, Communist activity in Chongqing was limited: the city was simply too dominated by the Nationalists to be safe for the opposition. Instead, party members in Sichuan concentrated in Chengdu, or else went further afield: Guilin in Guangxi province was a major Communist center during most of the war. Freest of all in the southwest was Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. The warlord Long Yun, who ruled the province, maintained an uneasy relationship with Chiang’s regime, and allowed large numbers of political dissidents of all types to gather in the city. Lianda, the Southwest United University, which was made up of a combination of some of China’s greatest universities in exile (including Peking, Nankai, and Tsinghua), was a hotbed of radical thinking.
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Dai Li assumed a new importance to China’s American allies after Pearl Harbor because of his role at the top of China’s major intelligence organization. The Americans were already cooperating more closely with Chinese intelligence than were the British, thanks in part to an incident in June 1940 when Dai Li, transiting through the Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong, had been arrested by the colony’s authorities and hustled off to the public jail for a night before being released in a diplomatic flurry the next morning. The incident added to the already strongly anti-British tone of the Chiang regime.
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The US-China alliance now allowed cooperation between Dai Li and US rear admiral Milton Miles (known informally as “Mary,” a joking reference to the silent-movie star Mary Miles Minter), under the banner of the Sino-American Cooperation Organization (SACO). SACO’s name leaves a very sour taste in today’s China, where it is associated with anti-Communist activities and the jailing and torture of political dissidents. At the time, it was one of the most powerful agencies in China, overseeing intelligence activities there, including those of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

The American presence in China was complicated by the rivalry of generals Stilwell and Chennault. Stilwell was now thoroughly hostile to Chiang, whereas Chennault admired him and was even close to the Generalissimo and his wife Song Meiling. The Americans differed on tactics too: Chennault continued to insist that airpower would be crucial to a swift victory in China, whereas Stilwell remained sure that the war would only be won by long, hard campaigns on the ground.
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