A History of China (75 page)

In 1928, the communists appeared to be doomed. Li Dazhao, one of the ­earliest leaders, had been executed; Guomindang forces and allies had easily suppressed the Autumn Harvest Uprising of August 1927 and the Canton Commune of December 1927; and the Communist Party leadership was in disarray, with nearly all its members subscribing to Stalin’s views but with some dissenters. In early 1928, the remaining communists had been forced to withdraw from the cities, where much of the proletariat, their alleged prime constituency, resided. The Western countries tended to support the Guomindang, while the USSR, the communists’ alleged ally, could not or ­perhaps was unwilling to provide military or economic assistance to them. They had few resources and did not control any key economic centers. Their ray of hope was various groups’ increasing disillusionment with Guomindang policies and governance.

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) appeared on the historical stage at this time. After the failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927, he gathered the remnants of that disastrous outbreak and led them to the Jinggang Mountains in a remote region of his native province of Hunan. Shortly thereafter, ­continuous Guomindang attacks compelled Mao and his supporters to move eastward to a rural area in Jiangxi province. Here Mao organized the Jiangxi Soviet (which lasted from 1931 to 1934) in imitation of the USSR, and here too he began to justify communist reliance on peasants, whom traditional Marxists had considered to have a petty bourgeois attachment to land ownership. Mao challenged the communist dependence on the proletariat by analyzing the peasants of China and by identifying some as potential allies or almost semiproletarians. He asserted that rich peasants, who often had their own land and tools and a grain surplus, would not support a communist revolution. On the other hand, he suggested that the communists could trust the middle peasants, who barely eked out a living, and the poor peasants, who had insufficient food and would, on occasion, be on the verge of starvation. Those on the fringes of rural society – beggars, the unemployed, seasonally employed laborers – could also be potential supporters. The bulk of the rural population could supposedly be attracted to the communist message, and, since the vast majority of Chinese lived in the countryside, the communists, according to this theory, had a vast potential pool of support.

Mao thus not only questioned Marxist orthodoxy but now also tailored his policies to accommodate his theoretical formulations. Not wishing to alienate any segment of the peasant population, he did not encourage radical efforts. A few landlords were executed, and land owned by some landlords and rich peasants was confiscated. However, moderation prevailed in his Jiangxi Soviet. Mao was relatively weak and was more concerned about building up a military force. He depended upon Zhu De (1886–1976), who remained loyal to him throughout the ups and downs of Mao’s career, to organize his guerilla army. Mao and Zhu became so closely identified that many in the outside world referred to them as Mao-Zhu and may have believed them to be one person. They had no choice but to rely upon guerilla warfare. They were vastly outnumbered by the Guomindang army, and also did not possess the massive weapons available to these adversaries. Their strategy of guerilla warfare ­centered upon avoidance of full-fledged battles, in which they could not match the Guomindang’s advantages in manpower and armaments. Ambushes and skirmishes would be much more effective because they could determine the terrain and the numbers of combatants. Such a policy could be successful only if they had the local populace’s support. They needed not only grain and other supplies but also information and intelligence from the peasants. The local inhabitants would act as their protectors.

Mao, Zhu, and their troops certainly needed such protection because Chiang Kai-shek was determined to crush them. Guomindang forces initiated “bandit extermination” campaigns. The first two campaigns led to standoffs, with neither side emerging as a clear-cut victor. Communist survival in the face of such overwhelming force prompted Chiang to seek outside assistance in suppressing them. He turned to German military advisers who suggested a serious blockade, the use of air power, and the construction of new roads to facilitate Chiang’s army’s movements. Based upon these recommendations, the fifth bandit extermination campaign finally surrounded the communists in Jiangxi. Recognizing that they were in mortal danger, the communist leaders decided that they would have to gamble by trying to break out of this stranglehold.

In October of 1934, the communists set forth on the so-called Long March, a touchstone and almost mythical event in their history. It gave them a romantic aura, although the actual grinding drive across treacherous rivers, lofty mountains, and often barren terrain was perilous and led to great loss of life. Encounters with enemy troops, ambushes by local inhabitants, and wintry weather added to their woes. After a year of such extraordinary movement, the various communist contingents reached a safe sanctuary in the remote region of Yan’an in Shaanxi province. Many soldiers perished en route, and the Guomindang captured and executed a few leaders. Yet several commanders who were to play critical roles in twentieth-century China took part in the Long March, an approximately six-thousand-mile journey, and made it to safety. Mao himself managed to survive, although illness compelled soldiers to carry him for part of the way. Zhou Enlai, who had studied in France and was perhaps the most sophisticated of the communist leaders, was overall commander for a time, and Zhu De was the best-trained military commander of the older generation. Lin Biao (1907–1971) and Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), two young commanders who later would appear to have been tapped as Mao’s successors, led two detachments.

Their success in this demanding expedition temporarily forged unity among the leaders. Such unity did not endure, as rival factions would repeatedly arise throughout Chinese communist history. All, however, hoped that their new base in northwest China – closer to the USSR, their principal ally – might translate into Soviet assistance. The USSR could not have helped when their base had been in Jiangxi and they had been surrounded by Guomindang troops. Migration to a less populated region, which was geographically isolated from the rest of China and relatively free of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, offered not only a respite but also the possibility of supplies from the USSR.

This rosy prospect did not coincide with USSR policy. By 1928, Joseph Stalin, having defeated Leon Trotsky and facing no serious opposition to his rule, had initiated radical collectivization in the rural areas and nationalization of enterprises in the cities. His foreign policies mirrored his hard-line domestic policies. He perceived the Western capitalist countries as enemies who sought the overthrow of the communist system in the USSR. At first, he did not distinguish between the Western democracies and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. From 1928 to 1935, he remained opposed to collaboration with Britain, France, and the USA, the leading Western democracies, to contain the Nazis and Fascists. Similarly, in east Asia, areas adjacent to the USSR’s Siberian territories, he did not seek to create an alliance in opposition to imperial Japan’s expansionist aims. In 1935, after two years of Adolph Hitler’s rampage against leftists and communists in Germany, he began to differentiate between the threats posed by the Nazis and the competition with the Western States and sought a rapprochement with the European democracies. In east Asia, he perceived Japan to be a dangerous force and decided to emphasize a united-front policy against its territorial objectives in China and Southeast Asia. He called upon the Chinese communists to join with all Chinese, including Chiang ­Kai-shek’s Guomindang, in a nationalist campaign against the Japanese.

The communist leaders’ initial response to Stalin is not recorded, but they quickly adhered to a united-front policy. Having reached Yan’an after the Long March, Mao Zedong had praised what he believed to have been a miraculous achievement and condemned Chiang Kai-shek and his forces for their relentless attacks on the Red Army (the military forces organized by the communists, also called the People’s Liberation Army) and for their exploitation of the Chinese people. It must have required a dramatic reversal of his views and values to accept Stalin’s message. Nonetheless, he swallowed his pride, and by early 1936 he had begun to advocate for a united front. Some of his opponents agreed with his position. Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001), the son of Zhang Zuolin (the old warlord of Manchuria, who had been assassinated by the Japanese), had been Chiang’s staunch ally in trying to suppress the Chinese communists. Naturally, he despised the Japanese, which made him receptive to a nationalistic effort to resist China’s increasingly powerful neighbor. He even met secretly with Zhou Enlai to discuss an anti-Japanese coalition. Others among Chiang’s followers and allies wanted to join in a patriotic movement to protect China from further Japanese incursions, but Chiang wished to focus on the communists. On December 9, 1935, students in Beijing organized a demonstration to protest Japanese aggression. The authorities dispersed the demonstrators, but other protests persisted. However, Chiang Kai-shek was determined to pursue his “bandit extermination” campaign against the ­communists rather than opposing Japanese incursions. Despite continued Japanese encroachment, even in north China and not simply in peripheral areas with large non-Chinese populations, Chiang remained focused on crushing the communist guerillas. Chiang’s unwillingness to confront the Japanese infuriated more and more Chinese.

These tensions and hostilities erupted in December of 1936. Chiang convened a meeting of his top military commanders and allies in Xian to plan a campaign to “extirpate” the communists. Zhang Xueliang, one of the ­parti­cipants, had become so frustrated with Chiang that he decided to act. He kidnapped Chiang and demanded that his captive conclude his conflict with the communists and instead collaborate with them to save the country. Ironically, the communists were, in part, responsible for Chiang’s release. Stalin had sent them a message asserting that Chiang, not Zhang, had the national reputation and support that could galvanize the bourgeoisie and other segments of the population in an anti-Japanese coalition. He urged them to line up behind Chiang. The communists responded by dispatching Zhou Enlai to Xian to facilitate a compromise between Zhang and Chiang. After oral assurances from Chiang, Zhang agreed to Zhou’s plan to release Chiang. The Guomindang leader returned to his capital in Nanjing, and Zhang, to demonstrate his loyalty, accompanied Chiang. Zhang was detained and remained under house arrest for about five decades in China and then Taiwan, when the Guomindang was compelled to leave the mainland. During those years, he became an ardent Christian, built up a collection of Chinese art, and stayed clear of politics. Meanwhile, Chiang restated his opposition to a united front with the Chinese communists. Stalin had erred, not for the first time, in his perceptions of Chinese politics and society.

The lack of collaboration subverted China’s response to Japan, which had grand ambitions in Asia. Seeking to take its place as a world power, Japan felt humiliated by what it perceived to be Western insults. After the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895, the Western countries had compelled Japan to abandon some of the territorial concessions it had obtained via the Treaty of Shimonoseki. At the conclusion of the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by US President Theodore Roosevelt, had limited the gains Japan thought it deserved. In the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement negotiated with Roosevelt, it had acquiesced to limitations on Japanese immigration to the USA, although Japanese who were already residents would be granted US citizenship and Japanese students could obtain visas to study in the USA. In 1924, the US Congress enacted further restrictions on east Asian immigration, an even greater humiliation. During this time, Japan’s only Western ally was Britain, with which it had signed an agreement as early as 1902. Yet at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, Britain joined the USA in applying a ratio of 5:5:3 to the tonnage of warships of each country, and Japan was accorded the lowest number. The Western powers reasoned that they had to station their vessels in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, among other places, and had to defend more territories than Japan did in the Pacific. The Japanese accepted this interpretation because it seemed to offer them a privileged position in the Pacific and, from their standpoint, a sphere of influence. They also compromised and refrained from demanding economic and territorial privileges in the old German concessions they had occupied during the First World War.

Yet all these incidents rankled Japan, which resented the way it had been forced to relinquish territorial and commercial gains and had not, in its view, been accorded proper respect. The rise of increasingly nationalist leaders in the late 1920s made the Japanese more assertive, and economic problems, exacerbated by the worldwide depression, added to their discontent. They started to make more forceful claims by creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a vaguely described organization that was designed to bolster Japan’s status in the region. Pointing to the US position in the Americas, Japan wanted to play the same role in east Asia. Yet the government did not want to act precipitously and thus to risk creating an incident in China. It sought to restrain the firebrands in the parts of the Japanese army based in Manchuria, but its officers provoked an incident in September of 1931, defeated Chinese troops, and occupied Manchuria. They quickly sought legitimacy by placing Puyi, the last Qing-dynasty emperor, at the head of and eventually as the emperor of the new country of Manchuria. They ignored the relatively feeble League of Nations response rejecting recognition of the new state, and Manchuria was effectively detached from Chinese control.