Fighting on all Fronts (49 page)

In places like France, Italy and Greece Allied governments harnessed mass resistance movements during the Second World War, even if their motivation was cynical self-interest. Although the former were fighting for imperialist hegemony and the latter for freedom and democracy, each side shared a common enemy in the Axis. It was only at the end of the war that these partnerships of convenience finally fell apart. The KMT did not get that far.

The Nationalist leadership may have been unwilling to mobilise wartime resistance and by 1944 tens of millions were subject to Japan’s rule. Its most notorious atrocity was the “rape of Nanjing” in 1937 during which 200,000 men were killed and some 20,000 women were raped.
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Rape was a policy systematically used by the invader.
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In Communist-controlled areas Japanese general Okamura Yasuki introduced a policy called the “three alls”—“kill all, burn all, loot all”.
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Tokyo also promoted large-scale colonial settlement policies and enforced labour conscription.
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By 1945 tens of millions of Chinese soldiers and civilians were dead compared to 400,000 Japanese troops.

This was the context in which the CCP was able to rise from near annihilation to undisputed ruler of all mainland China in 1949 by espousing the people’s war. Mao Tse-tung, the CCP leader, explained:

two lines have co-existed in China for a long time: the Kuomintang government’s line of oppressing the Chinese people and carrying on a passive resistance, and the Chinese people’s line of becoming awakened and united to wage a people’s war.
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The CCP’s path to that war was convoluted and shaped by its relationship with Russia and its social position within Chinese society.

In the mid-1920s the needs of Russia’s rising state capitalist ruling class were displacing the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Having suffered defeat by Japan in 1904, Moscow’s priority was that
Japanese forces be drawn away southwards.
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This meant strengthening links with Nationalist China. The CCP and its working class supporters were ordered to submerge themselves into the KMT. This contributed directly to the massacre of workers by Chiang’s forces in Shanghai in April 1927. Afterwards Comintern policy was reversed and the CCP was encouraged to achieve “the immediate establishment of soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers”.
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So in September Mao led the “Autumn Harvest” uprising in Hunan province, in south-central China. Its failure saw CCP membership there plummet from 20,000 to 5,000.
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A few months later he wrote how in many areas the CCP “is entirely a peasant party”.
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Together the rightward policy of liquidating the CCP into the KMT and its ultra-left opposite seriously damaged the link between the CCP and the Chinese working class. In 1926 two thirds of Communists had been workers. By September 1930 the figure was 1.6 percent.
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Having lost their urban base and faced with Chiang’s extermination campaigns, the Communists channelled their efforts into a rural civil war. The intention was that the Red Army would create “red bases” free from Nationalist control and these would be sustained by a local peasantry grateful for the land reforms delivered. But the KMT could draw on much larger resources and outnumbered the Red Army by ten to one.
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After the successive Nationalist offensives the CCP’s bases had been reduced to just 2.5 percent of the Chinese population.
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Survival, for the time being at least, depended on the desperate retreat to Yenan, an area described by the Communist military commander Chu Teh as “the most backward economically in the whole country”.
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It was precisely its remoteness from centres of economic life (and opportunities for exploitation) that meant the Nationalists lacked a local presence and so were too weak to deliver the death blow.

It is important to note that, notwithstanding professions of loyalty to Russia, the CCP did not always slavishly follow Soviet demands. This became apparent in the mid-1930s when the Comintern abandoned its ultra-left position and adopted the “popular front” tactic, which meant renewed collaboration with the KMT. If the CCP had uncritically accepted that it would have meant subordination to Chiang (and his passivity towards Tokyo) at a time when the CCP’s very survival depended on fighting him.

Therefore Mao’s version of the united front was made dependent on signs of real national resistance coming from the KMT. A frustrated Comintern official assigned to the CCP wrote:

In 1935 the CCP was pursuing two independent and contradictory lines. One of them, favouring continued civil war, was directed by Mao Tse-tung and approved by the Central Committee and Politburo members in the Red Army. The other…strove for a national united front against Japan…
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Such relative independence from imperialism (in this case Russian) was an important factor in making the Chinese people’s war possible.

The CCP’s removal from the cities and direct physical confrontation with the state changed it from being a conventional political organisation. While retaining the ideological features of a party, it acquired the characteristics of a military formation. This inevitably affected the people’s war. This term says little about internal dynamics. “People” are a heterogeneous group, yet warfare, even of the populist kind, requires a level of definite, organised leadership. Whether decisions are shaped and controlled from below or determined by those acting “on behalf of” the people is an important consideration. In the case of China, it was very much the latter. There were social and organisational reasons for this.

Workers have the greatest potential for collaborative, democratic, action because production brings them together in comparatively large units. Individual family production is the norm for peasants. Agriculture is geographically dispersed, reinforcing obstacles to sustained collective control and representative decision-making. Mao hinted at this in 1928 when he complained that: “Once the land has been divided up, they have all gone to till it”.
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Although often called a peasant revolutionary, Mao was therefore dismissive of the ability of the peasantry to run affairs, stating that: “given the various kinds of deep-rooted feudal relationships in the countryside…this will definitely require that the Communist Party and the Soviet Government” play the leading role.
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With working class presence now minimal and peasants the main source of recruitment, it is clear the rank and file could hardly control the people’s war, despite providing the vast bulk of the foot soldiers and it being in their interests.

What of the CCP leadership? Unaccountable to either the working class or the peasants, it consisted of professional revolutionaries and soldiers whom both Johnson and Selden, historians with very different views, call an “elite group”.
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In practice many were drawn from the Chinese intelligentsia and Mao himself used the term “déclassé” to describe them.
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The character of this section has been described as follows: “as the only non-specialised section of society, the intelligentsia is
the obvious source of a ‘professional revolutionary elite’ which appears to represent the interests of the ‘nation’ as against conflicting sectional and class interests”.
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If the social composition of the CCP circumscribed its internal regime, the CCP’s Stalinism also left little room for rival organisations. Potential alternatives such as the various Sacrifice Leagues and Anti-Japanese Associations emerged in the 1930s but were caught between the repression of Chiang’s regime and intolerance of the Communists. They were either crushed by the former or absorbed by the latter.
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As a consequence the history of people’s war in China came to be dominated by the CCP.

In an influential book Chalmers Johnson points out that the CCP made little headway in the early 1930s because policies like eliminating the landlords and total land redistribution “failed to obtain mass support”. But after the Marco Polo Bridge incident:

war presented the peasantry with a challenge to its security of such immediacy that the peasants could not ignore it. Pre-war pressures on the peasantry—such as economic exploitation, Communist ideology, warlord wars, and natural calamities—had never been sufficiently widespread or sufficiently intense to give rise to a peasant-based mass movement. But after July 7, 1937, the peasants spontaneously created resistance organisations in many areas of China; and they felt a heightened sensitivity to proposals for defensive organisation throughout the entire occupied area. People’s war had “a new kind of political appeal—namely, the defence of the fatherland”.
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Selden, who is more sympathetic to Maoism, argues that while Johnson:

focuses correctly on relationship between the Communists and peasants as the critical factor in people’s war, in attempting to define that bond exclusively in terms of nationalism, however, it ignores central features of the wartime resistance movement… [Patriotic] appeals were effective in securing active peasant support only when linked to a program focused on rural problems… In the resistance war a peasant revolution was transformed into a national revolution, and a people’s war was directed simultaneously against Japanese imperialism and the root problems of rural society.
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The blend of social radicalism and resistance to imperialism that would make a people’s war was summed up by the banner that greeted Edgar Snow on his arrival in Communist territory during 1936:

Down with the landlords who eat our flesh!

Down with the militarists who drink our blood!

Down with the traitors who sell China to Japan!

Welcome to the United Front with all anti-Japanese armies!

Long live the Chinese Revolution!

Long live the Chinese Red Army!
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The balance between the two factors was not constant, however. For example the CCP modified its initial policy of total land redistribution during the 1930s. There were several reasons for this. One was pressure from the Comintern for compromise with the KMT. Another was that for the slogan of a united front to be credible confiscation of the land of rich or middling peasants was difficult to sustain. Therefore, by the Second World War Mao had altered policy overall:

We see to it that, on the one hand, rent and interest are reduced so that the peasants may have food to eat, and on the other hand, rent and interest at the reduced rate is paid to the landlords…we on the one hand help the workers so that they may get employment and food, and on the other pursue a policy of developing industries so that the capitalists may reap some profit. In all this our aim is to unite the people throughout the country…
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A reduction of land rents by 25 percent was a retreat from land redistribution but was still very different from the situation in Nationalist areas. The same was true of taxation. In one Communist district the share of income taken during 1943 was as follows: poor peasants 0.3 percent; middle 26.4 percent, rich 42.2 percent, landlords 222.3 percent.
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In another, peasants found to have repaid in interest more than twice their original loan had the debt cancelled and land given away as security returned.
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Surveys of CCP members showed how attractive such policies were. In one typical sample, of 16 CCP members questioned: “Most of them stated that they joined the party in order to oppose the old rulers of the village. Three or four said that they joined in the hope that the party would help reduce their tax burden… One said that the War of Resistance against Japan motivated him to join”.
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Other progressive Communist policies in the base areas included a ban on arranged marriages, and
the buying or selling of women. Marriage and divorce were by consent and free.
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For many a CCP-led people’s war behind enemy lines meant practical liberation from the occupier. By 1945:

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 country councils… 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 recognising sex equality and adult suffrage. They regulated rents, collected taxes, controlled trade and issued currency, operated industries, maintained experimental farms [and] a grain-rationing system.
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If such radical social content explains civilian support for the people’s war, it also shows why the Red Army survived “against vastly superior military combinations [despite] lacking any industrial base, big cannon, gas, airplanes, money, and the modern techniques”.
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In the late 1930s Snow interviewed a soldier who explained:

Here we are all equals; in the White Army the soldier masses are oppressed. Here we fight for ourselves and the masses. The White [Nationalist] Army fights for the gentry and the landlords. Officers and men live the same in the Red Army. In the White Army the soldiers are treated like slaves.
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Snow himself observed that: “From the highest commander down to the rank and file these men ate and dressed alike…there was even an equal sharing of the delicacies available…”
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This lack of hierarchy translated into battle conditions with officers fighting alongside their men and suffering their fate.
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He found that “the Reds had no highly paid and squeezing officials and generals, who in other Chinese armies absorbed most of the military funds”.
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It was frequently the case that neither Red commanders nor ordinary soldiers received conventional salaries. Instead they and their families were given land to farm.
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This reflected the poverty of the Red bases but had the political advantage of reducing demands on the local population.
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To the extent that the Red Army did make local demands, the better-off were expected to contribute the greater amount in taxation.
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