Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (11 page)

Even if the Chinese were not unified, they had to be militarily prepared. Seen in this context, the continued battles against the CCP and the various regional militarists seem more logical: from Chiang’s point of view, opposition to unification, whatever the reason, contributed to China’s continuing weakness in the face of an external threat. To criticize Chiang for attacking the CCP in the face of a threat from Japan, as many have done, assumes that had he stopped fighting, his opponents would have too. This seems unlikely: only a decade earlier, Mao had declared that neither the left nor right wings of the Nationalists were true friends of the CCP, even though he had been allied with both at the time.
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Chiang truly understood that the assaults from Japan were a real threat to the stability of his regime. From the early 1930s onward, the Nationalists made concrete plans based on the idea that there would eventually be a war with Japan. Governments around the world were making similar calculations. Germany and Japan had both brought themselves out of the Depression by massively increasing their military spending. Along with Italy, they became corporatist states: key parts of the economy came under state control, but unlike in the USSR, private firms still maintained a role. The primary goal of the fascist powers was military conquest. Chiang’s government did not share that goal, nor would it have had the resources to pursue it. But Chiang realized that mobilizing for war would provide an opportunity to develop China’s infrastructure and technology, perhaps leading it out of its desperate poverty.

Discreetly, the Nanjing government began to ramp up the war effort. A key move was the establishment of the National Defense Planning Council on November 29, 1932, which undertook thorough and detailed surveys to measure just what China’s capacity was in terms of coal mining, railway infrastructure, crop cultivation, electricity production, and metals. The Council also investigated the impact of education and the importance of currency reform. A crucial conclusion was that China’s geography made it vulnerable in the event of a major war, because the vast majority of the country’s infrastructure was on the east coast, the area most likely to be invaded. Plans were drawn up for the state to ensure sufficient supplies of iron, coal, and chemicals should war break out. There needed to be more production in the interior of China: iron and steel in Hunan, copper and iron in Sichuan, and coal mines in south and southwest China.
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The seeds of the planned economy that would mark Mao’s China were sown by Chiang’s government, stimulated by the Japanese threat.

Chiang also knew that China’s security depended on the strength of its army. Despite his own military victories, he was aware that the National Revolutionary Army was a patchwork of troops, some of high quality, others barely trained and only marginally loyal to the central government. In 1934 Chiang brought in a new adviser, the German Hans von Seeckt, a senior officer during the First World War who had been instrumental in retraining the Reichswehr (German Army) during the years of the Weimar Republic, instituting one of the most rigorous military training regimes in the world. From 1935 von Seeckt was succeeded by Alexander von Falkenhausen, who had also been an officer during the Weimar Republic. Both men were supporters of a professional army that would be controlled by the bureaucracy, rather than a political force in its own right. Neither man was a Nazi sympathizer, although they both agreed to serve under Hitler’s regime. Overall, the aim of the reforms was to provide a relatively small, well-trained Chinese Central Army that would be supplied through a mandated period of national service (as in Japan). By the mid-1930s some 80,000 men had experienced German-style training.
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Chiang’s policy of avoiding public confrontation with Japan while quietly preparing for conflict was only partially successful. He stayed clear of war, but was forced into humiliating surrenders of territory. Following the full occupation of Manchuria in February 1932, and Manchukuo’s subsequent “declaration of independence” from China, in February 1933 the Japanese invaded and occupied the province of Rehe (Jehol). Zhang Xueliang’s troops in the province showed little inclination to fight, and the province fell quickly. Chiang’s government decided it must seek a compromise with Japan, and on May 31 the two countries signed the Tanggu Truce. The terms of the treaty were designed to save face on both sides, but they marked a de facto recognition of Manchukuo. Under the terms of the truce, there would be a demilitarized zone between the Great Wall and an area north of Beiping and Tianjin. The Japanese were allowed to maintain observation rights in the area, and Chinese troops were forbidden from engaging in “provocations.” It was clearly an embarrassment for China, but in the short term it was a very useful agreement for Chiang, as it provided a temporary breathing space in which he could focus on other priorities, notably his campaigns against the Communists.
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The years 1933–35 would see a significant lessening of tension in Sino-Japanese relations. Indeed, if the Japanese had stayed content with their already powerful control over north China in 1933, and not sought to advance further into the mainland, the war that would eventually consume much of the continent of Asia might have been averted.

Beginning in 1933, Chiang was faced with an exquisitely difficult task: simultaneously to rearm China against Japan, avoid provoking the Japanese into further military aggression, and placate growing anti-Japanese public feeling. The need to maintain these contradictory aims meant that public figures who advocated resistance to Japan could find themselves in trouble not only with the Japanese but also with their own government. A prominent example was the journalist Du Zhongyuan. In 1935 Du’s journal published an article entitled “Loose Talk about Emperors,” which made disparaging comments about the ruler of Japan, saying that he was an “antique” who “actually does not have the real power, though everything is done in his name.”
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Du had not actually written the article himself, but he was put on trial for authorizing its publication, and was sentenced to fourteen months in prison.

Wang Jingwei proved a particular challenge to Chiang in this regard. After their wary reconciliation in 1932, Wang supported Chiang’s policy of strengthening China’s defenses, but also advocated a policy of close relations with Japan. Wang was still an ardent nationalist, and wanted to see a vital, independent China, yet he shared Chiang’s belief that the armed forces were too weak to mount a war of resistance, and agreed that China must play for time. In 1934 he wrote that “as a matter of plain fact, the Government is prepared to admit it is weak and powerless” in international affairs. For the moment he dismissed talk of fighting back against Japan, but in terms that made it clear he regarded Japan’s demands as unacceptable:

the present Government refuse to be carried away by popular clamour for war against Japan. High-sounding words are anathema. Pride kills victory; modesty averts defeat . . . Japan’s apparent object is to reduce China to the status of a Japanese colony, but to this ignominy the National Government . . . will never consent.
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Wang, like most Chinese nationalists, regarded all foreign imperialism as enemy action. He did not see any intrinsically greater merit in allying with Britain or the US—both of which also maintained significant colonial power on Chinese territory—than with Japan, a country that at least had cultural connections with China. Wang was in the unhappy position of advocating close ties with Japan (which was government policy, after all), but being associated in the public mind with a uniquely pro-Japanese stand. And he was detested for it.

On November 1, 1935, members of the Chinese government gathered for a group photograph. Suddenly, one of the photographers revealed a Browning machine gun hidden under his camera, and fired three times at Wang Jingwei. Wang barely survived the attack. It left him with wounds that affected him for the rest of his life, embittering him further against Chiang (who was supposed to have attended the event where Wang was shot, but had canceled at the last minute). Wang maintained that Chiang had ordered the attempted assassination, but this was probably unjustified. Being perceived as pro-Japanese had become dangerous by the mid-1930s; another minister in the same faction, Tang Youren, was shot and killed on December 25, 1935. In fact, Wang’s death would not have served Chiang’s purposes: the impression among the public that Wang was biased toward Japan was very useful to distract attention from the fact that Chiang did not himself hold a significantly different viewpoint on how to deal with Tokyo. Wang’s injuries led him to withdraw from government and he soon left the country for a tour of Europe. As policy hardened in Tokyo, the “pro-Japan” faction had been marginalized in the government.

Although the threat from Japan preoccupied minds in Nanjing, it was less immediately visible in the hill country of remote Jiangxi province, where the remnants of the CCP had fled after Chiang’s purge in 1927. While Chiang had been consolidating power, the Communists had been plunged into a bitter series of recriminations about why the United Front had failed so dismally. The changes that they made in the decade that followed, while Chiang was in power in Nanjing, would equip them with ideas of military and economic self-sufficiency that would shape their efforts in the war with Japan a decade later.

Among the younger Communists who had made their way to Jiangxi was Mao Zedong, not yet in charge of the party, but rising rapidly. Mao quickly took a leading role in debates about why the party had been so comprehensively outmaneuvered by the Nationalists. One of the main reasons was that they had had no military of their own. On Soviet advice, Communist troops had been subsumed within the National Revolutionary Army, but when the confrontation came, the NRA remained loyal to the Nationalists. Therefore, one of the earliest acts of the Communists in Jiangxi was to establish the Red Army. Zhu De, a former warlord commander who had also spent time training in Germany, took the lead in training the fledgling force.

While in Jiangxi, Mao took the opportunity to try out radical social policies, including the redistribution of land from richer peasants to poorer ones. “A landlord is a person who owns land. . . . and lives entirely by exploitation,” Mao declared baldly. “Warlords, bureaucrats, local bullies, and bad gentry . . . are particularly ferocious elements among the landlords.”
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The party’s leaders were cautious at first, since they realized that gaining the support of local elites was necessary for mobilizing the wider population. But several factors began to weaken the Communists. Factional fighting within the party became savage, particularly as clashes emerged between Mao and his colleague Xiang Ying, and Wang Ming’s “Returned Bolsheviks,” younger Chinese ideologues who had been sent to Moscow for training under Stalin. Land-reform policy became much more violent, and alienated many of the middle-level peasants who were condemned as rich even though they sometimes had only marginally more than those defined as “poor.” As the CCP began to turn in on itself, events outside Jiangxi started to plague the party too. The Tanggu Truce of 1933 had created a breathing space in Sino-Japanese relations that allowed Chiang more time and space to direct his armies against the CCP. His initial Suppression Campaigns, as they were uncompromisingly termed, had been failures, but by 1934 the army reforms were beginning to have an effect. The Communists in Jiangxi found themselves under siege. It was time to leave.
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In June 1934 the Red Army began a trek to the northwest that has become known as the Long March. The party’s position in Jiangxi had become untenable, and thousands of men and a smaller number of women made the winding journey westward through central China. In January 1935 the Politburo gathered in the small town of Zunyi, in Guizhou province. The meeting turned into a showdown between the party’s leadership (including their Soviet advisers) and rivals, including Mao, who had been kept away from the top levels of power up to that point. Mao attacked the leaders for using misguided military strategy and allowing the Nationalists into the Communists’ base area; they should have followed Mao’s advice on tactics. Otto Braun, the chief Soviet adviser, said little, but he “turned white when Mao began to attack him. At no point did he lose physical control, but he smoked cigarette after cigarette . . . He looked more and more depressed and gloomy.”
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When the meeting ended, it was clear that Mao’s devastating indictment of the existing leadership had turned him into one of the preeminent personalities in the party. He now had the momentum that would propel him to the very top.

In October 1935 the weary Long Marchers finally reached the dusty yellow earth of Shaanxi province, where a Communist base had been founded in the small city of Yan’an. Of the more than 80,000 who started out, only around 7,000 reached their destination: the others had died, or had to abandon the trek in the face of hostile armies and immensely difficult terrain including marshes, mountains, and swamps. But the end of the Long March was a crucial staging post for Mao’s rise to paramount power. Up to that point, Mao had been an important member of the party (he had been at its first congress in Shanghai in 1921), but not the leader. The very fact that the party had been forced onto the Long March suggested that his rivals’ strategies had failed, and his criticisms of the CCP’s dominant ideological line, including the attention to urban over rural revolution, had real substance. Although Mao still had rivals, the march to Yan’an was an important stage in Mao’s ascent.

The Long March was to become a glorious foundation myth of the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, it was a desperate retreat. Even after it was over, it still seemed likely that the ever more effective tactics of the Nationalists would have a good chance of finally crushing the Communists. But within months a series of secret dealings and double-crosses would change the political reality completely.