Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (8 page)

By the spring of 1925 China seemed ready for revolution. On May 30 demonstrators gathered in front of a Japanese-owned factory in Shanghai’s International Settlement, protesting their dismissal from work there. As the crowd grew to tens, then hundreds, chants of “Kill the foreigners” became louder. Panicking, an officer of the British-run Shanghai Municipal Police force directed his men (Chinese constables led by Indian Sikh officers) to shoot into the crowd. They shot eleven workers dead, and in doing so, sparked a national protest movement of demonstrations and boycotts. All across China, in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing, workers and students rallied against the imperialists who could wantonly shoot Chinese citizens in their own country. On June 23 the situation spiraled, as British troops fired at a crowd in Guangzhou that included schoolchildren and students, killing 52 people. Professors at Peking University spoke for many when they expressed their shock at what had happened: “The tragedy which has taken place . . . has filled the Chinese nation with horror and indignation . . . Some Chinese students, who were merely young boys and girls, paraded as a manifestation of protest . . . Would any right-minded person regard these boys and girls as rioters and treat them with bullets and rounds of machine guns?”
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Anger against foreign imperialism appeared to have reached boiling point.

But Sun Yat-sen was not there to see that anger. On March 12, 1925, aged fifty-nine, he had died of cancer, succumbing just as his dream was about to be realized. The sudden likelihood that Sun’s dream of unification might be fulfilled now brought the growing tension within the party leadership to a head. On July 1, Wang Jingwei was named head of the Political Council that controlled the new National Government declared at Guangzhou in 1920.
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The same meeting also elected Chiang Kai-shek to the Military Council, an important recognition of his growing status. Over the next few months, rapid changes in the febrile political atmosphere would allow Chiang to concentrate more and more power, particularly as key figures such as the Soviet adviser Mikhail Borodin came to mistrust Wang, whom they regarded as flashy and out for personal glory. The quieter, more solid-seeming Chiang appeared an increasingly attractive candidate for their support.

Wang Jingwei’s leadership was formally confirmed by the party’s Second National Congress in January 1926, but it was clear that Chiang’s star was also continuing to rise.
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Chiang’s political direction was changing, too. Up to this point, he had been associated with the left of the Nationalist Party, even allowing his son to go to Moscow to study. But by early 1926, Chiang had started to cater to the more conservative elements in the party, who had become convinced that the Soviets were planning to use the Communists to undermine the Nationalist leadership. Chiang became convinced that his own life was in serious danger from leftist plotters. In March Chiang placed Guangzhou under martial law, disarming the strong Soviet and Chinese Communist presence in the city. Although he swiftly released the senior Chinese Communists (including Zhou Enlai) and Soviet advisers who had been held under arrest, it was clear that the Nationalist troops supported Chiang and that power had shifted to him. Wang Jingwei, enraged, tried to use the party’s military to reverse Chiang’s position, only to find that his ideological preeminence counted for nothing against Chiang’s force of arms.

On June 5, 1926, Chiang was officially placed in charge of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), the military force that served the Nationalist Party. In an ironic echo of the way in which Sun Yat-sen’s own power and prestige had been rendered null by the greater military power of Yuan Shikai in 1912, Chiang’s ability to command force now brought him victory over Sun’s supposed heir. That military power was important, for there was a great deal for the NRA to do. Over the next two years the Nationalist army fought or coerced its way to control over most of China’s central and eastern provinces, a campaign termed the Northern Expedition. In fact, it was a drive to complete the national unification that had been lost in the wake of the 1911 revolution.

Month by month, the major coastal provinces fell to the Nationalists and their army, and despite Chiang’s increasing suspicion of the Communists, they also continued to play a major role in the new revolution. Mao Zedong was one of those who undertook his political apprenticeship in the fervor of the Northern Expedition, trying out policies that would eventually dominate all of China. Early on, he made it clear that he regarded the alliance as merely temporary:

As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, its right wing must be considered our enemy; even if it is not yet our enemy, it will soon become so. Its left wing may be considered as our friend—but not as our true friend, and we must be constantly on our guard against it. We must not allow it to create confusion within our ranks!
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Mao was also beginning to develop ideas that were at odds with those of the party leadership. He was convinced early on that China needed a peasant revolution, rather than an urban one, although he was not the first revolutionary to think of the idea. In 1927 he wrote one of his best-known pieces, “A Report on the Peasant Situation in Hunan,” which described the way in which the CCP had managed to foment a genuine class war in the rural areas of Mao’s home province. The Hunan Peasant Provincial Association, which claimed some 5 million members, mobilized the poor peasants, arming them and encouraging them to attack the richer landlords. But the violence in Hunan merely mirrored the conflict that now gripped all of China.
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The NRA continued its advance, terrifying many foreigners who assumed that this Soviet-backed, Communist-allied army would upend their comfortable lives. Greater success increased the real tensions between the left and right wings of the alliance. Chiang Kai-shek’s military supremacy over the other leaders was clear, as was his increasing distaste for the Communist presence within the United Front. The Soviets were bankrolling the Expedition, making it impossible for Chiang to end the alliance with them, but he had already begun to put plans in place to tip the balance of power when the moment was right.

That moment came in April 1927, when the greatest prize, the city of Shanghai, fell to the Nationalists. The British had already anticipated the rise of a more coherent nationalism in China and while they did not welcome it, they were prepared to deal with the country’s new, more assertive face. The British settler community in Shanghai was less sanguine, and armed itself against what they feared would be leftist marauders. Some even termed Chiang “the little red general.”

But in fact the greatest victims of the capture of Shanghai were not the foreigners (who were anyway mostly safe in the concession areas), but the Communists. They had infiltrated much of the city, awaiting the joyous moment when the NRA would arrive. What they did not know was that Chiang had used his secret society contacts with the Green Gang, the largest criminal outfit in the city, to have all known Communists rounded up and murdered. Many thousands were massacred in the space of a few days; some were kidnapped and tortured first. In later years, Chen Lifu, one of Chiang’s close associates, would admit, “It was a bloodthirsty way to eliminate the enemy within. I must admit many innocent people were killed.”
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The killings put a sudden end to the alliance between the Nationalists and Communists. Chiang was in power, and had formally established himself as the ruler of a Nationalist government, but his victory was stained with the blood of his former allies.

Wang Jingwei refused to accept Chiang’s new preeminence. At first, he attempted to create his own separate Nationalist government in Wuhan, but it quickly became clear that there was no military backing for an alternative to Chiang. Wang, still believing himself to be the true heir to Sun Yat-sen, refused to serve under his rival. Mao Zedong, along with his Communist comrades, also rejected the idea of Chiang as China’s leader. As members of the Communist Party, their lives were now in danger. Mao, along with senior colleagues such as Zhou Enlai, slipped away to the rural hill country of Jiangxi province in inland China, seeking refuge from the new government’s troops and hoping to rebuild their shattered revolution.

In 1928 Chiang Kai-shek formally established his government with its capital in the central Chinese city of Nanjing. Chiang moved the capital from Beijing (now renamed “Beiping” or “northern peace”), because he wanted to make sure that his seat of government was in the place where his military and economic control was strongest. For although China was formally united under Nationalist rule, the reality was that its control was partial at best. The provinces of the Yangze delta, such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui, were reasonably firmly under Chiang’s command. But the further one went from Nanjing, the less secure the Nationalist government’s control was. The Northern Expedition was supposed to have put an end to warlordism, but in many cases the Nationalists had had to reach uneasy agreements with the local militarists, lacking confidence in their ability to conquer them by force of arms. The coal-rich province of Shanxi remained effectively autonomous under the rule of Yan Xishan (a progressive militarist who had campaigned strongly against footbinding). The provinces of Manchuria in the northeast were the fiefdom of Zhang Xueliang, “the young Marshal.” In northern China regional warlord Song Zheyuan attempted to solidify influence, while the Japanese sought to increase their influence from Manchuria into the areas south of the Shanhaiguan pass. In far-off Qinghai in western China, the feuding uncle and nephew Ma Lin and Ma Bufang ran the province, and from 1933, Xinjiang, to the north, was governed by Sheng Shicai. Xinjiang bordered the Soviet Union and was effectively under Soviet control from 1937 (although Sheng would turn suddenly and viciously anti-Soviet in 1942). Xinjiang was one of the areas of the country that looked vast on the map, but where very few people actually lived; the most populous parts of the country by far were the east and the south. Perhaps most crucially for a country that might face the threat of invasion from the east, the fertile western province of Sichuan was not under full Nationalist control. Its militarist leader, Liu Xiang, ruled from Chengdu and was deeply wary about allowing any further encroachment from Nanjing.
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Chiang’s shaky grip on large parts of China was an immense obstacle to achieving a genuine unification: Nanjing could not rely on tax collection or military recruitment from huge swathes of the country that it claimed to rule.

Chiang had built his new state at a time of international turmoil, and it had the chance to gain status on the world stage. President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration in 1918 of the right of peoples to self-determination, as part of his Fourteen Points, was the trigger for much soul-searching about what modern, independent societies outside Europe might look like. This gave the Nationalist government a special role in the eyes of the imperialist world: until the end of the Second World War, it was a very rare example of a non-Western, nonwhite society that was at least partly independent. Three major powers in particular would be crucial in shaping the world’s attitude toward China in the wartime years.

If Britain was the most pragmatic in its approach, this was probably because there was relatively little ideological content in the empire’s presence in China. The British had forced their way in to trade, and trade they did; until the 1920s, Britain was the single largest investor in China. Unlike the British presence in India, cultural interaction with the Chinese was limited, and there were few efforts to convert them to British customs and habits, not least because the British had never had a full colonial structure in China. The British presence was deeply exploitative, racist, and often brutal, but British diplomats were also capable, on occasion, of a remarkable clarity of vision and were ready to recognize the Nationalists as different from the warlords who had preceded them.
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In December 1926 a statement from the then British foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, was published which argued that the foreign powers should recognize the new potency and legitimacy of Chinese nationalism. Although the powers should still protest violations of their treaty rights, Chamberlain felt, they should realize that the time had come to make an accommodation with this powerful new political force.
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At that point, the Nationalists had not yet won the power struggle, and the British position therefore showed a notable level of foresight.

The United States simultaneously maintained two contradictory views of China. On the one hand, the US shared in all the imperial rights that the European powers enjoyed there: they had extraterritoriality, as well as representation on the Shanghai Municipal Council, and had been important actors in the opium trade. Chinese migrants to the US were subjected to severe and often violent racial discrimination, and from 1924, under the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, Chinese (and Japanese) immigration to the US was effectively banned. Yet within China itself, many Americans felt that they had a special role, and regarded themselves as somehow different from the imperialist powers of the Old World. The missionary influence was key to this belief. By the early twentieth century, funding from American missionaries in China had paid for some of the most important modernizing institutions in the country, such as the Peking Union Medical College, founded in 1906. In addition, missionaries spread throughout China, operating at a village level in a way that few other foreigners ever did. There were of course numerous European missionaries, but the attention of Britain and France tended to be focused more on their own colonies, and that left China’s souls up for grabs. It also helped that influential figures in the US had connections with China. Henry Luce, founder of
Time
magazine, was born in China, and his magazines would prove a vital source of propaganda in favor of Chiang Kai-shek during the war with Japan. Pearl Buck was the daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries, and wife of the agronomist and missionary John Lossing Buck. She lived in China through much of the Nationalist era, and wrote novels that made her one of the most popular authors in America. Books such as
The Good Earth
(1931) and
Dragon Seed
(1942) told the stories of peasants fighting poverty and banditry to secure a better life.
The Good Earth
reaped the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and then, in 1938, Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature.