Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (33 page)

The war also transformed the career of Mao Zedong. Mao had not been the only possible leader for the party when the war broke out, but his position had been greatly strengthened by the Long March; later accounts would play down the role of other Communist leaders whose feats of bravery on the March equaled or exceeded Mao’s. The Zunyi Conference, held in Guizhou province in January 1935, was also a major turning point for Mao’s fortunes, as it endorsed his tactics of mobile warfare and moved the party away from the conventional warfare strategies supported by the Comintern. Yet by the outbreak of war in 1937, there were still other contenders for leadership of the CCP, most notably the Moscow-trained Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) and rival Long March veteran Zhang Guotao.
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But Mao’s decisions were not made just in the context of other figures and ideas within the party itself. Despite the turn toward self-sufficiency, the CCP did not exist in a vacuum. Communist ideology had to change to fit the real, unpredictable, and very fast-moving events of the war itself.

Mao knew that the United Front with the Nationalists was an outstanding opportunity for the CCP to extend its power, but also one fraught with great danger. In particular, the Red Army would be placed under the overall command of Chiang Kai-shek. However, the CCP had no intention of allowing a repetition of 1927, when it had been left without armed forces of its own and vulnerable to Chiang’s purges. The Communist armies numbered some 30,000 men at the start of the war, and during August and September they were reorganized as the Eighth Route Army, made up of three divisions which quickly expanded to around 80,000 troops. Not long afterward, the Communists were authorized to establish a second force of up to 12,000 men known as the New Fourth Army, which would operate in central China.
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At least a third of the Communist forces would not fight the Japanese directly, but be retained at the base areas (by implication, to defend them against the Nationalists).

Mao observed that Chiang was genuine in his resistance to Japan. On August 13, 1937, the very day on which fighting broke out between China and Japan in Shanghai, Mao spoke to the sympathetic American journalist Nym Wales (the pseudonym of Helen Foster Snow) and acknowledged that the National Government had agreed to immediate war, with Communist troops as part of the national army.
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On September 6 the ShaanGanNing (SGN) Border Region government was officially declared. Its name derived from the first syllables of the three provinces where it was located (Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia), with its headquarters at Yan’an. This was the key base area where Mao would spend the war and create a new vision of society, what a classic later analysis would call “the Yenan [Yan’an] Way.”
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In the first years of the war, Mao’s writings show a politician and thinker in the process of change. Mao took advantage of his relative isolation in Yan’an by reading extensively in Marxist literature. He had always been a voracious reader, but not being on the run allowed him space for the first time, perhaps since the heady days of the May Fourth Movement, to immerse himself in the ideology that he had embraced as a young man. Unlike Wang Ming and his followers, who had been able to learn at the hands of Stalin in Moscow, or the various urban sophisticates in the party, such as Zhou Enlai, Mao came from a rural background and was an autodidact. His intellect was not in doubt, but his training and theoretical suppleness were. By making it clear that he was in control of the ideological apparatus that shaped the party, he was strengthening his bid for leadership.

Mao’s writings on the war in its first year show a thinker whose range of reference took him well beyond the caves of Shaanxi province.
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Shanghai fell in November 1937, as did Taiyuan. Mao saw the fall of these cities as a sign that the positional warfare of the large Nationalist armies was over, and that guerrilla warfare would be the dominant strategic method, at least until the war became internationalized. As with Chiang’s plans, this was a leap of faith, for there was no indication in autumn 1937 that the war was likely to become global. Nor was Mao correct in arguing that conventional pitched battle was no longer effective; Xue Yue’s defense of Changsha in 1939, for instance, would preserve a key strategic city for Nationalist China for at least a few more years. Even had it been possible to wage the kind of mobile warfare Mao favored, it would have been politically very difficult for the Nationalists, with the world’s eyes upon them, to abandon a conventional armed defense while continuing to call for international assistance. As the secondary partner of the Nationalists, Mao had the freedom to indulge in more radical strategic thinking, but it was Chongqing, not Yan’an, that had to lobby London and Washington for aid.

The powerful status of Yan’an as a beacon of radical resistance attracted large numbers of migrants, some 100,000 between 1937 and 1940.
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These numbers were dwarfed by the millions who fled to Chongqing, but the types of people who came to Yan’an were disproportionately well educated: perhaps some 50,000 were middle-class, educated types such as students, journalists, and teachers. Many of them came in search of a new future for China, feeling that the Nationalists were already hopelessly compromised by the brutality of their government’s behavior before 1937. For many, however, the reality of Yan’an did not measure up to the dream. The small city was in an economically deprived and backward area that made Chongqing look like a sophisticated metropolis. The surrounding areas of Shaanxi province were desperately poor—one reason the Communist message had resonated there—and still almost entirely agricultural. The total population of the region that the party ruled from Yan’an was only 1.4 million. The region was prone to natural disasters (earthquakes and drought) along with human-made ones (banditry and famine).
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The harsh yellow loess soil had formed into cliffs into which cave houses were carved.

For those who wanted to make revolution, life was a strain, with scarce food and basic accommodation. The Yan’an College of Marxism-Leninism was a typical party educational institution: students lived in a hillside cave. There were desks and lamps so that they could study in the evenings, but no chairs. Duan Suquan recalled many years later: “Student life was very ordered. We studied, went to class, discussed things, then ate and slept. There was strict order, and a whistle was used as a signal [for instructions].”
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Yet despite the stress on order, it was hard to organize a dynamic political movement. Chen Xuezhao, founder of the Yan’an hospital, wrote in
Liberation Daily:

When we hold a meeting, even if there are lots of people there, the waiting time is almost as long as the actual meeting time. For a meeting that lasts two hours, you wait two hours . . . so if I’m waiting to hear two hours of reports, and I’ve already been waiting an hour and a half, I’m exhausted and can’t concentrate.
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In Chongqing the refugees from eastern China had found themselves at odds with the Sichuan locals. In Yan’an, too, the newcomers seeking a systematic Communist revolution came up against the centuries-old habits of the local farming population. One young worker activist, Yang Changchun, recalled that in the spring of 1938 he had taken part in a tree-planting exercise, and suggested arranging the trees to keep them neat. The official he spoke to, a veteran of the Long March, disagreed, saying that one shoved a tree into the ground and that was all there was to it. A shouting match broke out. Yang yelled that the man was “just an old peasant,” only to receive the reply that “you people who’ve come from the Nationalist areas are disgusting—you look like foreigners!”
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Skilled industrial workers were at a premium in Yan’an and consequently could earn higher wages and a better standard of living (by some calculations, twice what they had before the outbreak of war), causing further resentment.
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In Yan’an men always outnumbered women. In 1938 there were some thirty men to every woman; even by 1944 there were still eight men to each woman.
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For many women, this was a chance to escape stereotyped roles; “revolutionary costumes” with “Lenin-style” open collars became de rigueur at the Women’s University, for instance. The activist Chang Zhaogou recalled in a memoir nearly half a century later that the romanticized image of Yan’an was misplaced:

There were no women there with permed hair, and there were no lovers hand in hand. Few women comrades had a pretension toward femininity. Their fashions were almost the same as the men’s. In general, Yan’an was really not a sexy town.
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Women in Yan’an were also subject to profound social pressures. The lack of contraception led to many unexpected pregnancies, but the primitive medical conditions meant that childbirth could be a dangerous and traumatic experience. Nor were there sufficient facilities for childcare. If women wished to continue their revolutionary careers, then they had to consider the wrenching possibility of handing over their newborns to local peasant families to bring up.
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Hygiene was very poor: a local joke held that lice were “revolutionary insects” because everyone who was committed enough to stay in Yan’an would become infested by the insects eventually.
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Nor was the town immune from Japanese attack. On November 20, 1938, some seven Japanese aircraft launched bombs on the old city. One observer, Wang Guangrong, recalled “seventy or eighty dead or wounded, flesh flying, terrible to see.” The bombers came again the next day, hitting Mao’s own house, and killing thirty soldiers. But people learned fast. At New Year and Chinese New Year, Yan’an was raided again, but this time preparations were better and there were few injuries. The town’s old Ming dynasty tower was fitted out with antiaircraft guns, and the bell was tolled as an air-raid warning.
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The Japanese did not target Yan’an in the way that they did Chongqing. In total, there were some seventeen air raids between 1938 and late 1941; the death toll was 214, a significant loss, but a much smaller number than the 5,000 or more killed in just the Chongqing raids of May 3 and 4, 1939.
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The enemy was fiercely anti-Communist, but the prize target was Chiang Kai-shek; it was his resistance that symbolized the fact that not all of China was willing to succumb to Japanese dominance. The Nationalist regime was under constant bombardment and in the public eye not only of the Chinese media but the international community. This fact, along with the remote location of Yan’an and the smaller influx of refugees relative to Chongqing, allowed the Communists to develop their project free from outside observation or interference. Yan’an remained something of a mystery: no embassies were located there, and no journalists had bureaus in town. Foreigners were not unknown, but most of the invited guests from outside, such as the radical journalists Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, were Communist sympathizers who gave a generally positive account of Yan’an in their reports.

Being out of the international spotlight allowed Mao a much greater opportunity to create a new social order. In addition to being poor, the land was distributed unequally, with one estimate suggesting that 12 percent of the population owned some 46 percent of the land. In the SGN region, policies were designed to equalize the burdens on all living in the area, but were adapted according to local circumstances. In areas where a relatively small number of landlords owned a high proportion of the land, rent reductions became an important tool; in other areas where land was more evenly distributed, but poverty was widespread, the reduction of tax burdens was more important. The Communists did not attempt to control the whole of the base area’s economy from Yan’an, but rather supervised the significant private economy, which included large private landholdings. Politics was also pluralized, with elected local assemblies, although the party continued to dominate them in practice.
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In 1940 the Communists adopted another system of representation that would stress United Front policies: the “three-thirds” system
(san san zhi)
. This decreed that local assemblies (but not the party or the army) should be elected from three groupings: one-third CCP members, one-third leftist elements not in the party, and one-third middle elements neither from the left nor the right.
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Other leaders varied in the strength of their threat to Mao. In the spring of 1938, Zhang Guotao had realized that his hopes of dominance in the party were becoming ever weaker, and he defected to the Nationalists. Wang Ming was a more substantial challenger, particularly since his pedigree included prestigious training in Moscow. He advocated policy that was anathema to Mao, suggesting that the CCP might cooperate more strongly with the Nationalists, possibly even through a combined government. Since the Soviets were giving significant assistance to the Nationalists, this might also have been an opportunity for the Communists to share in some of the finance and materiel then flowing to Chiang Kai-shek. Wang Ming also clung strongly to the idea that a Communist revolution in China would take place in the cities, not the countryside.
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Yet events conspired against him. The loss of Wuhan meant that his hopes of organizing an urban base for Communist power were no longer realistic. Instead, it was the rural areas where the CCP would make inroads, and Mao’s vision prevailed over Wang Ming’s. By the end of 1938 the Moscow-trained pretender was no longer a real threat. Mao was not the only noteworthy Communist leader, nor was his base area the only place where the CCP developed its ideas and strength during the war. But Mao’s charisma, along with the geographical advantages of Yan’an, meant that the stories of the Communist resistance elsewhere in China were rather overshadowed.