Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (50 page)

No longer just first among equals, Mao saw his status continue to rise as “Mao Zedong Thought” became synonymous with ideological correctness in the base area. The study of Mao’s thought became the basis on which party membership was decided. Of twenty-two important texts that would-be party members had to master (in a list issued in April 1942), eighteen were by Mao.
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But thought reform was buttressed by the work of Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng. As part of his training in the party’s underground days, Kang had been sent to Moscow in 1936. Stalin’s purges were then at their height, with the worst phase named the
Yezhovshchina
after Genrik Yezhov, the NKVD chief who headed it (and would eventually be consumed by it in 1938). Under NKVD training, Kang had set up an Office for the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries in Moscow, and used it to send out execution orders against CCP members in China who were classed as “renegades” or “counterrevolutionaries.” Many of them were guilty of nothing more than knowledge of embarrassing episodes from Kang’s past such as his one-time cooperation with the Nationalists.
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Kang Sheng rivaled Dai Li in sadism. But unlike Dai Li, who was fiercely devoted to Chiang Kai-shek, Kang Sheng was more pragmatic in his relationship with the CCP leadership. He saw Mao’s star rise in the 1930s and hitched himself to it.

Kang’s moment would come with Mao’s declaration of the Rectification in Yan’an in 1942. The immediate target was clear. Mao wanted to demonstrate his dominance over Wang Ming and the other Communist leaders who had spent time in Moscow (known as the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”). But there was a wider target too: the individualism and lack of discipline exhibited by so many of the party’s prominent intellectuals. The romantic era of joining the underground and running off to Yan’an in protest against China’s ills was over. Instead, party membership meant building a machine to rule China. Among the prominent intellectuals who took issue with Mao’s declaration was Ding Ling, the writer whose frank short story “The Diary of Miss Sophie” had caused a literary sensation in 1920s Shanghai. After a long and dangerous journey, Ding Ling had arrived in Yan’an in January 1937, and she became one of the region’s best-known literary figures. Her fiction combined revolutionary conviction with skepticism about the party’s commitment to the ideal of women’s emancipation, an issue that always seemed to take a backseat to class struggle in CCP rhetoric. Her short story “When I Was in Xia Village,” published in 1941, had a highly ambiguous character at its center, a young woman named “Purity” who becomes a prostitute behind Japanese enemy lines as a cover for espionage. When she returns to her home village, her sexual history leads the locals to freeze her out for her “immoral” behavior. The story’s power lay in its nuance and refusal to conform to black-and-white moral categories.
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After Mao’s speech inaugurating the Rectification Movement, Ding Ling responded with an editorial, published in March 1942, entitled “Thoughts on March 8,” the date of International Women’s Day. In her essay she pointed out that even in the revolutionary atmosphere of Yan’an, women were judged differently from men. “Women cannot transcend their times,” she pleaded. “They are not ideal, they are not made of steel . . . I wish that men, especially those in positions of power . . . would see women’s shortcomings in the context of social reality.”
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Another young writer and translator, Wang Shiwei, wrote an essay entitled “Wild Lily” which also criticized smug attitudes in Yan’an and accused senior cadres of having lost their true revolutionary spirit.
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Mao did not take long to react. In April, Ding Ling was fired from her position as literary editor of the Yan’an party newspaper,
Liberation Daily
.
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Other refugee intellectuals would also discover that their reception in Yan’an had grown chilly. On May 2, three months after the Rectification Movement had been formally launched, over a hundred writers and artists gathered on wooden benches in the Yangjialing district of Yan’an. They were awaiting Mao, who was due to open that day’s event: the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature. Ever since they had arrived at Yan’an, leftist thinkers and writers found themselves torn between their loyalty to their hoped-for revolution and the party they admired, and their convictions that as artists they must be true to their own visions.

Mao’s opening comments were punctured by the sound of gunfire from Nationalist positions nearby, but he made himself perfectly clear nonetheless: artistic vision must be subordinated to the needs of the war—and the revolution. In Yan’an the audience for literature and art consisted of “workers, peasants, soldiers, and revolutionary cadres,” and it was time for artists to “learn the language of the masses” rather than indulge in “insipid” and “nondescript” works that favored self-indulgence over political robustness.
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The three conferences that followed this introduction over the next few weeks marked a powerful change in the relationship between the Communist Party and the intellectuals who supported it. Speaker after speaker stood up to harangue, repent, and denounce. Hu Qiaomu, who would later become the chief propagandist for the party in the 1970s, declared that the great Chinese writer Lu Xun, who had died in 1936, should have accepted the formal leadership of the party (he had been a fellow traveler but never joined): that he had not been was “not to his credit.” One literary writer, He Qifang—declaring “I urgently need to be reformed”—made a powerful self-criticism, a plea for forgiveness by the party. At the end of the Forum, on May 23, Mao came back to stress that this had been the beginning, not the end of the changes. “Intellectuals who want to serve the masses,” he said, “must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well.” Mao added an ominous coda: “This process may, and certainly will, involve much pain and friction.”
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Mao’s words marked a severe change of mood in Yan’an. Not only was it much harder for people to enter the region, but it also became very difficult to leave.
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The city was cut off from the outside world not only by enemy blockade, but also by a new hardness of the party line. An earlier atmosphere of openness and collective enterprise gave way to a much more all-or-nothing environment. Ideas of pluralism and “new democracy” were replaced by a turn toward party control.

Kang Sheng was the mastermind behind the “pain and friction” that underlay the Rectification process. He used a classic Soviet technique of accusing loyal party members of being Nationalist spies. Once they had confessed under torture, their confessions could then set off an avalanche of accusations and arrests. As the war worsened in 1943, and the Communist area became more isolated, Kang stepped up the speed and ferocity of the purges. When colleagues asked whether there could really be as many secret Nationalist agents in Yan’an as Kang’s roundups seemed to indicate, he replied, “We can talk about that after their arrest. When they’re locked up, we can interrogate them.”
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In public, he portrayed the movement as being for the good of the party and its members. “Why does the Communist Party take so many pains to rescue you?” he asked in a speech of July 1943. “Simply because it wants you to be Chinese, and not be cheated into serving the enemy.” He made it clear that “leniency has a limit.” When it came to those who refused to admit their guilt, “we must use stern methods to stamp them out.”
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Psychological pressure was key to the campaign. One technique was literally to confine the accused within a circle and to refuse to let him or her exit until there was a confession. One victim recalled the process with terror more than half a century later. “Do you believe in the Party?” she was asked. She replied that she did. “Then if . . . we say you’re a problem,” came the reply, “you’re a problem.” She remembered that at the time, she felt as if she had wanted to jump off a cliff.
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The intellectual Shi Bofu was imprisoned after accusations of spying. His wife Gao Luoying “confessed” that she had intended to murder the prominent party intellectual Zhou Yang. She suffocated herself and her three children to death in her cave home with carbon monoxide gas. “She’d cut herself off from the Party, and therefore from the people,” Zhou Yang responded on hearing the news. “You can see how great her hatred for the Communist Party was, because she killed herself and her children.”
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But “rectification” was by no means purely psychological. The movement involved physical punishment and often flat-out torture. A document from one of the educational institutions in Yan’an, the Lu Xun Art Institute, belied the school’s cultured-sounding name, revealing that techniques there had included tying up and beating the ideologically recalcitrant. The Art Institute even maintained its own labor camp, which some inmates suggested was as bad as the ones run by the Nationalists. Wang Shiwei was one of those who fell victim as the party organized protests against him. First, posters appeared denouncing him. Then he was expelled from the party as a “Trotskyist” and finally detained incommunicado. He was eventually executed in 1947. Ding Ling was also heavily criticized, and was forced to recant the views expressed in her “Thoughts on March 8.” She was exiled to two years’ work in the countryside.
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When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, many outside observers found the phenomenon of the Red Guards, who persecuted and tortured their class enemies, inexplicable. But a quarter century earlier the Rectification Movement had provided a clear blueprint. It marked the moment when Mao’s China came into being. It was not immediately obvious because the outside world was hardly focused on what was happening in the blockaded northwest region where the Communists were based. Yet the signs of the state that would become the People’s Republic of China less than a decade later were there. What had been a radical opposition party was now unmistakably a party of government, with millions of people under its rule. The “Yan’an Way” policies that balanced land reform and progressive taxation would be part of the early years of the PRC. So, too, would the terror tactics. Enemies of the people would be publicly humiliated, beaten, or killed by their new masters.

The years following Pearl Harbor saw a distinct and growing division in the choices of the major political actors. In the early years of the war, both the Nationalists and Communists had stressed the pluralist and cooperative parts of their program. This was a sensible move for parties that had to gain as much leverage as possible both with their own people and with the outside world. Nor was the language of pluralism simply a smoke screen for the creation of a dictatorship. Particularly before 1941, both the Nationalists and the Communists had made an effort to appeal to those outside their own parties. But both Chiang and Mao ultimately envisaged a modernized China in which only one party would have a dominant role, a goal not compatible with true pluralism. Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists believed that a modern state was the same thing as a liberal state. In fact, the reverse was true. Drawing inspiration from Lenin, both parties recognized and accepted the use of terror as part of the mechanism of control. The disaster of war, and the growing social crisis within China, began to chip away at the technocratic and tolerant side of both regimes and solidify the power of those elements who favored violence and coercion.

At the same time, each of the three regimes operating in wartime China had its own interpretation of what terror meant and how it should be implemented. For Li Shiqun and Ding Mocun, control of the streets and personal aggrandizement were much more of a priority than any ideological commitment. Dai Li’s motive was less venal. While he loved power and was clearly a sadist, he was driven by a loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, whom he regarded as the keystone preventing China’s collapse. Yet Dai’s desire to create a corps of agents who would act as the regime’s terrifying but incorruptible eyes and ears was crippled by the dishonesty and violence that characterized so many in the MSB. The public saw the agents not as ideological stalwarts, but as weak men given power to exercise for their own benefit. The Communist terror of Kang Sheng was different. The purpose of Rectification was not to line anyone’s pockets. Rather, it envisioned—and achieved—one clear aim: it would bring together radicalized ideology, wartime isolation, and fear to create a new system of political power. The war against Japan was giving birth to Mao’s China.

Chapter 16

Conference at Cairo

O
N FEBRUARY
18, 1943, the most elite audience in Washington, DC, packed the chamber of the House of Representatives. The charismatic speaker was Song Meiling, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, only the second woman and the first private citizen ever to address a joint session of Congress. She had made the journey to raise China’s profile in the US, worried that rumors of corruption and unwillingness to fight might turn American public opinion against financial and military assistance for China. Meiling’s appearance created a storm of excitement. Wearing a simple black cheongsam and jade jewelry, she stood next to Vice President Henry Wallace as she charmed, then hectored, the assembled politicians. She told the story of an American pilot who had bailed out over China on his way back from one of the Doolittle Raids and had been greeted by the peasants who saw him “like a long lost brother.” She said the pilot later told her that “he thought he had come home when he saw our people; and that was the first time he had ever been to China.” Her peroration ended with the demand that “it is necessary for us not only to have ideas and to proclaim that we have them, it is necessary that we act to implement them.”
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It was a clear challenge to her audience: give priority to aid for China, and stop criticizing its policies.