Red Star over China (59 page)

The centripetal spread of economic, political, and social interests, the process of so-called “unification”—the very measures which created the system—at the same time required, for their own preservation, that ever widening groups be focused in the center in an attempt to resolve the insoluble—the deepening conflict of class interests. And the more Nanking tended to represent different and wider class interests throughout the country—the nearer it came to achieving democracy—the more it was forced to seek a solution of self-survival by resistance to the increasingly greedy demands of Japan.

The guarantees of increased Communist influence, the guarantee against future annihilation campaigns, therefore, were seen by the Communists to be inherent in the organic economic, social, and political relationships of the country—precisely those formations which had resulted in the present situation. These were, first of all, a wide popular demand among both the armed and unarmed masses for continued internal unity, for improved livelihood, for popular government, and for resistance to Japan in a common struggle for national freedom. Second, the Communist Party's “guarantees” lay in the leadership it could continue to give to the movement for those demands throughout the country, and in the actual military and political fighting strength of the Communist Party.

In the spring of 1937 the temporary diminution in Japanese pressure on China, a pause in the invasion of Inner Mongolia, the opening of Anglo-Japanese conversations for “cooperation in China,” and the hopes of the British Government to mediate a Sino-Japanese agreement and a “fundamental peace” in the Far East caused some people to wonder whether the Communist estimate of the political scene was not in error. Was it not reckless gambling to pivot a strategy on the central inevitability of an early Sino-Japanese war? Now that internal peace was established
in China, now that the Reds had ceased their attempts to overthrow the Kuomintang, Japan was really turning a conciliatory face to Nanking, it was argued. Japan's imperialists realized that they had pushed the Chinese bourgeoisie too far and too fast along the road of surrender, with the result that China's class war was canceled in the universal hatred of Japan. They now saw the wisdom of enforcing a new and friendly policy toward the Chinese bourgeoisie, in order to renew its freedom to engage in internal conflict. And such a Tokyo-Nanking
rapprochement
would destroy the Communists' political influence, which was too heavily based on
k'ang jih
—the “resist Japan” movement.

But history in flood must seek its outlets according to the laws of dynamics. It cannot be forced back into its preflood channels. Japan could not revert to a static policy in China even though Japan's ablest leaders realized the imperative necessity for a halt. And this Red prescience seemed fully vindicated on July 8 by the Liukochiao Incident. Japanese troops, holding “midnight maneuvers” (quite illegally) on Chinese territory at the town of Wanping, about ten miles west of Peking, claimed to have been fired on by Chinese railway guards. The incident gave the Japanese Army the pretext. By the middle of July the Japanese had rushed some 10,000 troops into the Peking-Tientsin area and had made new imperialist demands, capitulation to which would have meant virtually the acceptance of a Japanese protectorate in North China.

The Communists' conception of that situation, and of the kindling events which it must set in motion, was that the growing pressure of the whole nation for resistance, not only here but everywhere that new acts of aggression occurred, would oblige Chiang Kai-shek's regime to take a position in which, if Japan did not reverse her policies and make amends for the past, there was no way out but war. Which meant that there was no way out but war. And the Communists continued to interpret such a war not only as a struggle for national independence, but as a revolutionary movement, “because to defeat imperialism in China means the destruction of one of its most powerful bases” and because
the victory of the Chinese revolution itself “will correspond with the victory of the Chinese people against Japanese aggression”
(Mao Tse-tung). According to Mao Tse-tung's analysis of the breaking-point politico-economic tension in Japan, China, and throughout the world, this settlement in human destinies could not be delayed for any important length of time.

The Reds foresaw that in this war it would become necessary to arm, equip, train, and mobilize tens of millions of people in a struggle which could serve the dual surgical function of removing the external tumor of imperialism and the internal cancer of class oppression. Such a war, as they
conceived it, could be conducted only by the broadest mobilization of the masses, by the development of a highly politicalized army. And such a war could be
won
only under the most advanced revolutionary leadership. It could be initiated by the bourgeoisie. It would be completed only by the revolutionary workers and peasants. Once the people were really armed and organized on an immense scale, the Communists would do everything possible to establish a decisive victory over Japan. They would march with the Kuomintang as long as it led the resistance. But they would be prepared to take over this leadership whenever the government faltered, turned “defeatist,” and exhibited a willingness to submit to Japan—a tendency which they anticipated would appear soon after the first great losses of the war.

Probably the Nanking regime fully understood those objectives of the Communists, and hence they would seek out every possible road of compromise; they would, if they could avoid the internal consequences, make further concessions to Japan, at least until the odds seemed very greatly in favor of the regime's ability not only to enter a war with power, but to emerge from it with that power still intact, and with the internal revolution still in abeyance. But the Communists were sufficiently content with their own analysis of the course of history behind them to be satisfied with the chart of direction which they had chosen for the voyage ahead, through events which would
compel
Nanking to make a stand for its own survival. They foresaw that Nanking might continue to vacillate, that Japan might continue to feint and maneuver in myriad ways, until the utmost agony of antagonism was reached between the interests of Japanese imperialism and the national interests of China externally, and between the Chinese and Japanese masses and their landlord-gentry rulers internally, until the moment when all the physical restraints and oppressions became utterly intolerable, the barriers of history broke down, the mighty catastrophe bred by imperialism was set loose, Frankenstein-like, to destroy imperialism, and
le déluge
swept forward.

Thus “capitalism digs its own grave,” thus imperialism would destroy imperialism, in that only a great imperialist war would release the forces that could bring to the Asian masses the arms, the training, the political experience, the freedom of organization, and the mortal weakening of the internal policing power which were the necessary accessories for any conceivably successful revolutionary ascent to power in the relatively near future. Whether or not, even then, the “armed masses” were likely to follow Communist leadership with final success depended upon many variable and unpredictable factors—internal factors first of all, but such factors also as the policies in the East of America, Great Britain, France,
Germany, and Italy, and to the very greatest extent the policies of the U.S.S.R.

And that, I believed, was the contour of the Communist picture of the future as China waited for Japan to strike. One might not follow all of it, but this at least seemed certain—that what Lenin had written more than twenty years before was still true: “Whatever may be the fate of the great Chinese revolution, against which various ‘civilized' hyenas are now sharpening their teeth, no forces in the world will restore the old serfdom in Asia, nor erase from the face of the earth the heroic democracy of the popular masses in the Asiatic and semi-Asiatic countries.”

And another thing seemed equally certain. Neither could the democratic Socialist ideas for which tens of thousands of youths had already died in China, nor the energies behind them, be destroyed. The movement for social revolution in China might suffer defeats, might temporarily retreat, might for a time seem to languish, might make wide changes in tactics to fit immediate necessities and aims, might even for a period be submerged, be forced underground, but it would not only continue to mature; in one mutation or another it would eventually win, simply because (as this book proves, if it proves anything) the basic conditions which had given it birth carried within themselves the dynamic necessity for its triumph.

What had happened to the Chinese of this book in seven years since the Liukochiao Incident, when Japan began her attempt to conquer China in July, 1937? For one thing, the passage of time had vindicated the judgment of Mao Tse-tung and other Communist leaders that the achievement of national unity for the struggle against Japan was more important than any other immediate objective of the revolutionary movement.

In this perspective the Sian Incident now loomed as a happening of decisive importance in contemporary Chinese history. Few remembered how close China came to adherence to the Anti-Comintern pact, just before the Sian affair, but it was now quite clear that after it there came the final parting of the ways between Tokyo and Nanking. Sian made certain that China would be on the anti-Fascist side of the coming world struggle.

In other respects time had confirmed the validity of the ideas for which the revolutionaries whose stories were told in these pages had fought and died. It had brought immense prestige to the survivors, and to their greatly increased following, during the long ordeal now drawing to a close. A revolutionary movement demands of its leader the ability to know a little ahead of anyone else what is going to happen; and in this respect Mao Tse-tung had been so successful that millions of Chinese now reposed as much confidence in his judgment as in that of Chiang Kai-shek.

However they might feel about the Communists and what they now
represented, most Chinese would admit that Mao Tse-tung accurately analyzed the internal and international forces involved, and correctly depicted the general shape of events to come. Civil war did end and the Communist Party and the Red Army not only survived but were strengthened. Mao's suggestion that at a certain stage in the war' part of the Kuomintang would betray China and turn puppet for the Japanese was long resented; but after the defection of Wang Ching-wei, deputy leader of the KMT and second only to the Generalissimo, it could not be denied that Mao had intimately understood the contradictory elements in the Central Government.

Again, Mao predicted that the war would be long and difficult, and this must be one of the few instances in history in which an advocate of armed struggle did not promise his adherents a speedy triumph. His candor disarmed in advance the kind of defeatism that preys upon shattered illusions. On the other hand Mao helped to build up a more durable self-confidence in the nation by correctly estimating the enormous staying power guaranteed by China's own human and material resources, when mobilized in a revolutionary way. And he indicated the kind of strategy and tactics which China would have to adopt to hold on until the national war merged with the world war, including Japanese attacks on the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Americans, which he warned were inevitable in a period when many Europeans and Americans thought otherwise.

By 1944 the Chinese Communists provided the leadership in North China for what was much the largest guerrilla organization in the world. Stretching from the Yangtze Valley to the Mongolian steppe, and to the mountains and rivers of southern Manchuria, thousands of villages behind the Japanese lines made up the pattern of this “people's war.” Its organizers were youths chiefly inspired and trained by the Eighteenth Group Army—the combined Eighth Route and New Fourth armies. These forces were led by Chu Teh, P'eng Teh-huai, and other veterans of the former Red Army of China, who now had behind them an amazing record of survival and growth through seventeen years of difficult civil and national war.

Foreign observers who visited the guerrilla districts in 1943 estimated that behind the Japanese lines the Eighteenth Group Army had organized and given crude training to militia numbering about 7,000,000 people. These were the reserves of the main fighting units. In addition, there were said to be some 12,000,000 members of various anti-Japanese associations which helped to clothe, feed, house, equip, and transport the regular troops, and were their eyes and ears. Official data showed partisan penetration in 455
hsien,
or counties, of North China and in 52,800 villages,
with a population of more than 60,000,000. From three-fifths to two-thirds of the so-called conquered territory was in guerrilla hands most of the time.

For nearly seven years the Japanese had been trying to exterminate these tireless enemies. Eighth Route regulars numbered hardly 50,000 men in 1937, and diverted only a few divisions of Japanese troops. But that vanguard multiplied in every direction. In 1944 more than half of Japan's 350,000 troops in China proper (excluding Manchuria) and some 200,000 puppet troops were occupied in defending fortified areas against the Eighteenth Group Army and in fighting punitive actions against it. Japanese military reports put its strength at from 500,000 to 600,000.

In every one of the provinces occupied by the Japanese, which covered an area three times the size of France, partisans had set up village and county councils. They had established four “border” governments in bases held throughout the war, except for brief intervals; and each of these regional governments represented liberated areas of several neighboring provinces. These behind-the-lines regimes performed nearly all the functions of normal administration. They had their own postal system and radio communications. They published their own newspapers, magazines, and books. They maintained an extensive system of schools and enforced a reformed legal code recognizing sex equality and adult suffrage. They regulated rents, collected taxes, controlled trade and issued currency, operated industries, maintained a number of experimental farms, extended agricultural credit, had a grain-rationing system, and in several places had undertaken fairly large afforestation projects.