Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (15 page)

On July 26 the Japanese struck. Beiping came under attack, as did Tianjin, about one hundred kilometers away:

Tremendous fires were started as incendiary bombs struck the principal Chinese buildings [in Tianjin], including Nankai University, the Central Station and the headquarters of the Peace Preservation Corps between the East Station and the International Bridge. The flames were visible for miles . . . As [Japanese bombers] performed their mission, a terror-stricken mass of Chinese fled from the Chinese City to the security of the concession.
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The cities fell swiftly, Beiping on July 28 and Tianjin on the 30th. Chiang was shaken. “The dwarf bandits took Beiping and Tianjin with great ease,” he wrote in the monthly reflection section of his diary. “This was not what I expected. But if they gained it with such ease today, then how do we know they won’t lose it again with ease on another day? . . . When it comes to diplomacy with the dwarfs, you have to be firm.”
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Chiang did not deploy his own Central Army, instead leaving the fate of the north in the hands of the generals who had dominated the region, including Yan Xishan and Song Zheyuan. Chiang did put one of his personal allies into the army: General Tang Enbo, who, like Chiang, had been trained in Japan. Yet Chiang also hampered Tang; he refused to allow first-rate troops to serve under him, saving them for the coming war in Shanghai and the Yangtze valley. As the best troops were very limited in number, this was perhaps understandable, but it put Tang in an almost impossible situation. The Japanese Kwantung Army deployed more than 90,000 of its troops, vastly outnumbering the Chinese, and were supplemented by more than 60,000 other troops, including those of the Mongolian Prince De (Demchugdongrub). With inferior forces, Tang fought hard at Nankou in Hebei province, losing 26,000 men, but he was unable to defend the city even with Yan Xishan’s support. The fighting in north China went on into August, although it soon became clear that the region was lost.

Chiang did have another option, albeit a very risky one: he could now enlist his former enemies, the Communists. On July 13 he received those visitors whose arrival would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier: top-level Communist officials including Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, and Lin Boqu. They had been tasked with negotiating a more concrete agreement between the Nationalist and Communist armies, and had come to meet senior Nationalists including Shao Lizi, Zhang Zhonghui, and Chiang himself. The Lugouqiao fighting now made this task all the more urgent. Immediately after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Mao Zedong and several senior colleagues had issued a statement urging Chiang to stand firm and fight, and pledging their support:

The Japanese bandits have attacked Marco Polo Bridge as a step in carrying out their established plan of taking North China by military force. Our grief and indignation upon hearing this news are beyond description! . . . We respectfully implore you to issue strict orders to the Twenty-ninth Army to put up resistance with all its courage and might, and to carry out a general nationwide mobilization . . . The officers and men of the Red Army sincerely wish to give their all in the service of their country under your leadership, Mr. Chairman, to fight against the enemy.
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Yet both sides were cautious. Chiang did not want yet more troops who would not obey his commands, and the Communists, still wary after a decade of persecution by Chiang’s forces, were unwilling to lose any control over the Red Army, which had been formed under conditions of great difficulty as the party fled from its Nationalist enemies. The Communists wanted cooperation, whereas Chiang’s preferred term was “assimilation.” Chiang wrote on July 27: “We mustn’t let [the Red Army] be too independent.”
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Mao, in turn, had let his negotiators at Guling know that they must not cede too much: “We have decided to adopt the policy of holding no more talks with Chiang if he refuses to compromise.”
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Finally, the urgency of the moment forced an agreement. Chiang compromised, allowing the Communists to set up their own military headquarters. Mao then confirmed that reorganization would be completed before August 15, and specified that the CCP would provide three divisions of 45,000 men, along with 10,000 local troops who would defend various key points in the north, including the front in the northwestern province of Suiyuan.
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On August 2 Chiang legalized the Red Army.

Of all the concessions that Chiang made to the Communists, the most important was permission to establish their own armed forces. Following their legalization, the Communist troops based in the northwest were renamed the Eighth Route Army. Under their commanders, including Lin Biao and He Long, the army would stand at the heart of the Communists’ ability to maintain autonomous control of armed force. There were also a smaller number of troops in the south. In the summer of 1938, they would be designated the New Fourth Army. However, they were a guerrilla force initially so few in number that they struggled to reach their authorized troop level of 12,000 men, although within two years they would number 30,000.
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By now, Chiang had returned to Nanjing and called a meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, the forum in which the decision to go to war would be discussed. To symbolize that the new politics of cooperation against the Japanese was real, three major CCP leaders took the precarious flight to Nanjing to attend the meeting: Zhou Enlai, Red Army marshal Zhu De, and General Ye Jianying.
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Mao instructed them to cooperate, but also to act with caution. He felt that in north China, the area of greatest CCP presence, the first line of defense should run through cities such as Zhangjiakou in Hebei and Qingdao, the seaport in Shandong. Cities such as Datong and Baoding would be the next priority. Mao also authorized the type of combat that would characterize the CCP’s contribution to the war over the next seven years: “The Red Army and the other appropriate armed forces . . . may engage in guerrilla warfare.” But Mao also sounded a wary note as he sent his comrades on their way into the camp of their former enemy, now reluctant ally: “You may come up with other ideas as opportunity offers, but not too many, and firmly grasp the essentials.”
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Chiang then turned his mind to leveraging his new alliance with the CCP. His target was the Soviet Union. For years Chiang had been trying to bring the USSR into an alliance against Japan, even while he was attacking the CCP. (He assumed, rightly, that Stalin would regard Chiang’s anti-Japanese stance as more important than his anti-Communist one.) Now, Chiang saw the agreement with the Chinese Communists as an opportunity to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviets and hinder Japan’s “dream” of further aggression in China; “otherwise not only will they control north China, but the whole country will become a second Manchukuo.” Chiang was not starry-eyed about a pact with the Soviets. “Although there are dangers in allying with the Soviets,” he reflected, if he did so, then “we would lose north China [to the Japanese] but not lose our national dignity, and they wouldn’t be able to occupy it all. I’m choosing between two evils.”
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Mao and the CCP also had to make a painful choice. They deferred dreams of revolution and entered an alliance with an old enemy. Mao’s public statements at this time reflect the unease that he and his comrades felt at the sudden outbreak of conflict. “The authorities of north China from the very start resorted to the tortuous pursuit of compromise, without making sufficient preparations militarily,” Mao declared at a rally on August 1, 1937. The “authorities” had also failed to harness popular anger against the Japanese. “The result of this behavior was that they lost Beiping and Tianjin!”
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Clearly he was pointing a finger at figures such as Song Zheyuan, but he was also criticizing the Nationalists. He would not attack them openly on the eve of war, but he was doing his best to position the CCP as the “truly” patriotic party, and by implication associating Chiang with appeasement, weakness, and poor judgment.

The foreign community in China was not immune to the Nationalists’ plight. They feared a war because of the disruption it would bring to their lives and businesses, but they could also see why Chiang had been forced to act. An editorial in the
North-China Daily News
made the point with biting sarcasm:

It is impossible to withhold sympathy from the Japanese people. They have become so accustomed to the absence of any limit to the freedom with which their military . . . have been allowed to lay down the law and take action . . . that even the mild propositions now established by General Chiang Kai-shek must seem to them to constitute an astonishing defiance . . .

One thing is certain: if words mean anything, the Generalissimo has not stretched the sense of Chinese public opinion by a single letter . . . The sympathy of world opinion is with China. It recognizes that the choice of resistance by arms is not hers; it is being forced upon her by pressure which no nation could permit to proceed further unchecked without forfeiting whatever claim it might have to individual freedom.
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A later editorial also cast doubt on Japanese justifications. Konoye’s explanation to the Diet (Parliament) that the Japanese expedition to China was to secure “cooperation in contributing to the development of Oriental culture” was met with hollow laughter by the Western press in Shanghai. The “blindness” of the Chinese government in refusing to cooperate with “the spread of Oriental Culture will, no doubt, be regarded in Tokyo as another example of Chinese ‘insincerity.’”
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Such sentiments might have persuaded Chiang that if he were to act, the foreign community would rally behind him against Japan, and that the move to war was a wise one.

On August 7 the Chinese government held a confidential Joint National Defense Meeting in Nanjing at the premises of the Lizhishe (the Society for Vigorous Practice of the Three Principles of Sun Yat-sen). The location was symbolic, reminding everyone present of the hard-won Chinese republic and its history, and what was at stake if the country were defeated by Japan. The participants represented the recent, tumultuous history of the Nationalist Party. All the major figures in Chinese Nationalist politics attended, including Wang Jingwei, former finance minister (and another of Chiang’s brothers-in-law) T. V. Soong, and military strongman Yan Xishan, leader of Shanxi province.

The war minister, He Yingqin, gave a dry but necessary summary of the maneuvers made at Lugouqiao. The main event, however, was the address by Chiang Kai-shek, who was now uncompromising in his strong advocacy of war. Chiang made it clear that this was a struggle for the fate of the entire Chinese people. “If we can win this war,” he declared to his elite audience, “then we can revive the country, and turn danger into security . . . but if China loses a war with Japan, then I fear it may take decades, or even centuries, to revive it.” Objectively, he pointed out, the Japanese military was stronger than the Chinese; but the Japanese economy had real problems. “In spirit, the United States and Britain would help us,” he added, “but as the Italian case shows, they’re not reliable.” (Chiang was referring to the failure of the Western democracies to prevent Fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.)

Chiang then raised the question on everyone’s mind:

Many say that if we can resolve the problem in Hebei and Chahar [the two provinces of north China where the troops were being deployed], then China will be safe for fifty years . . . Some say that if we have a clear border around Manchukuo and Hebei-Chahar, then the Japanese won’t invade further. This idea of a border is all right, and I dare say that if we did draw it up along the Great Wall then the Japanese wouldn’t invade.
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But those who were trying to solve the problem with these makeshift ideas were missing the point, Chiang warned. The leaders should understand that they could not trust Japan, and that what Tokyo wanted was “to destroy China’s international position in order to achieve its ambition of doing whatever it wants.” Chiang reserved particular criticism for the “scholars” who advocated further appeasement: while he did not name them, it seems inevitable that he was thinking of Hu Shi and Jiang Menglin, both distinguished and prominent liberal intellectuals outside the government who had counseled Chiang to “bear the pain while seeking peace.” Through late July into early August, Hu argued that Chiang should recognize the client state of Manchukuo. By doing this, he would win a further breathing space, and allow elements in Japan that were less enthusiastic about war, such as the interests of big business, to tip the scales away from conflict. It would also allow more time for Chiang to develop the Central Army and make it indestructible. A concession now, thought Hu, might guarantee fifty years of peace.
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“I tell these scholars,” Chiang warned, “that in a revolutionary war, the invaders will lose. The Japanese can see only materiel and troops; they can’t see the spiritual aspect.” Throughout the length of the war, Chiang would see the war as a spiritual, sacred trust, a continuation of the 1911 revolution symbolized by Sun Yat-sen. That trust inspired him to declare repeatedly that the war could be the making of a new China. It was also why, despite continued temptations in the darkest days of the war, he would refuse to surrender to Japan.