Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (36 page)

This was the deal that Mei Siping brought to Wang’s house on November 26. Now, less than a month later, Zhou sat in Kunming, sleepless and terrified, waiting for news. Who had arrived in the city on December 18?

The answer came: “It’s Wang Jingwei.” “I was very happy,” wrote a relieved Zhou. After the dithering and hesitations, Wang had at least taken the first step. But the plotters were balanced on a knife edge: there was still a great deal that could go wrong. Once they took the next step and defected by crossing the border into Indochina, there would be no going back.

On December 19 Zhou heard that they would be able to hire an aircraft to take them to Hanoi. As ever, the plotters were nervous, trying to decide whether to travel by air or road. “In twenty minutes, we changed our minds seven or eight times . . . but finally decided to take the plane.” They made their way to the airport. “At 3:15 p.m., we flew.” As he left Chinese soil behind, Zhou’s thoughts were not on political matters. “I missed my mother very much,” he wrote. “I fear it’ll be hard ever to see her again. I wept for her.”
³¹

To the ends of their lives, Zhou and the man he served, Wang Jingwei, saw themselves as the truest patriots. Faced with the prospect of the physical destruction of China by the Japanese assault, or else the establishment of a Communist China under Soviet control, Wang’s group considered the negotiation of a just peace as the only realistic solution to the crisis of war. They were fueled by a genuine ideological enthusiasm that made them keener on a pan-Asianist future than on an alliance with Britain or America, powers whose imperialist behavior in China hardly made them preferable to the Japanese.

Wang was not, however, “pro-Japanese” in the sense of being a fervent collaborator who admired the Japanese way of life and denigrated his own. This would have been a strange position for someone whose early life had been so dedicated to the nationalist revolutionary cause. Wang could understand some Japanese, but he did not speak it or read it; “I had to translate for him when he was foreign minister,” recalled Gao Zongwu. Gao also suggested that another colonial power might have had more influence on Wang. Before the fall of Wuhan, he had talked to Henri Cosme, the French ambassador. Cosme had advised the Nationalists to negotiate with Japan; after all, he pointed out, China was even weaker than France after it had lost the war with Prussia in 1870. Then, the French had wanted revenge, but it had neither the diplomatic nor military influence to achieve it.
³²
Cosme’s point was clear. It had taken more than four decades, but eventually, in 1918, France had vanquished the old enemy. Similarly, China might have to wait to defeat Japan; in the meantime, the Chinese should be realistic about their chances. In fact, Cosme’s words would have more significance for himself than he knew at the time; after the Fall of France in June 1940, he was appointed as the Vichy regime’s ambassador to Tokyo.

Wang Jingwei spent the flight to Hanoi in a state of intense anxiety. “He looked very worried that Chiang Kaishek might have found out his plans,” Gao recalled, “and might send a plane to stop him and force him to land in Chongqing.” Wang even issued emergency instructions to his traveling companions. “We’re heading south,” he said, “and the sun is on our right. If you start to see any shadows [i.e., if you sense the aircraft turning back], jump in the cockpit and force the pilot to go in the right direction.”
³³
But the precaution was not necessary. Wang’s party landed safely in Hanoi at 5:30 p.m. on December 19.

The next day they moved to a small seaside resort some 100 kilometers distant, giving the defectors a little more time and space to breathe. Now that they had made the move, Zhou’s mood changed. “Facing the big sea,” he said, “I suddenly felt elated.” He went on: “The ocean is wide and the sky is empty. When we were in Chongqing just fifteen days ago, we couldn’t have imagined this.” The group had fresh seafood for lunch and began to discuss everything that a new government would need: a military, a diplomatic service, and, of course, funds. Zhou, Chen Chunpu, and Tao Xisheng marked their arrival in a less than statesmanlike way. That evening they drank strong Chinese liquor and visited a Vietnamese brothel. Even that visit failed to comfort a maudlin Zhou: “An older prostitute sang us poems about the moon, birds, and lonely wives. I felt homesick for my native land.”
³⁴

The last few days of the year were spent in a mixture of plotting and traveling. Indochina was only a way station to the next destination, Hong Kong. On the journey Zhou declared that of all the defectors, Chiang Kai-shek would be angriest at him. After all, Wang had never been Chiang’s friend, but Zhou had been close to Chiang, and his defection would be regarded as a more personal betrayal. Zhou drafted a letter to Chiang (and to his secretary Chen Bulei) explaining the reasons for his action. “I know they won’t forgive me,” Zhou wrote in his diary, “but I have to do it.” Meanwhile, Wang was writing the public statement he would give to explain his decision to defect. In discussions, Zhou was at pains to stress two particular points. First, Japan would have to abandon its “traditional” thoughts of invading and humiliating China, and second, Japan would acknowledge that the War of Resistance (which Wang had, after all, voted for in committee) had been to guarantee the “independence and survival of the nation,” and that if this were achieved peacefully (that is, through negotiation with Japan), then China would have “achieved the goals of the War.” Wang was keen to make sure that any agreement would portray him as the patriotic victor in a righteous war.
³⁵

Some informal signals emerged from Chongqing, where officials were trying to keep the political temperature down after Wang’s momentous decision. Chiang encouraged Guo Taiqi (Quo Tai-chi), the Chinese ambassador to Britain, to send a message to Wang asking him to come to Europe; Guo would even abandon his post and dedicate himself to looking after Wang. Zhou, in turn, wrote to Chen Bulei, arguing the move was not “anti-Chiang Kai-shek, but about advocating peace.” He asked Chen to persuade Chiang not to attack Wang in the press, nor to have him assassinated. In the very first days after the defection, Chiang did order the press to be discreet about Wang’s departure, claiming that the latter had gone to Hanoi for “medical treatment” and saying that if Wang had views that he wished to have heard, he should return to Chongqing to discuss them.
³⁶
On December 21, Long Yun confirmed to Chiang that Wang’s meeting in Hanoi was with the Japanese. Chiang was perplexed:

I was told Mr Wang has secretly flown to Kunming. I don’t understand how, at this moment when our country is faced with unprecedented danger, he disregarded all these considerations, and made this excuse of being unwilling to collaborate with the Communists, and left without letting anyone know. I felt extremely sorrowful. I just hope he will come to his senses and turn back.
³⁷

But all this was to little avail. On December 22 Konoye gave a hastily arranged press conference in Tokyo and announced a vague commitment to join China in friendship, economic cooperation, and anti-communism.
³⁸
Chiang issued a public rebuttal, declaring that the “new order” that the Japanese proposed was “a term for . . . the enslavement of China as the means whereby Japan may dominate the Pacific and proceed to dismember other states of the world.”
³⁹
On December 31 a Hong Kong newspaper published a telegram from Wang Jingwei, confirming the rumors that had been swirling for days: Wang said that Konoye’s statement created new terms to discuss peace. Any settlement would require that the Communists would have to abandon their separate organization, but also that Japan would have to make a specific commitment to withdraw its army from Chinese territory.
⁴⁰

“Every newspaper is attacking Wang,” Zhou noted. “Considering the present situation, this is to be expected.”
⁴¹
The defectors had made a huge sacrifice, risking accusations of treachery to come over and negotiate with the enemy. Now surely, they felt, they would be given the reward they deserved: the legitimate government of an independent China.

All that would be to come. On the last day of 1938 Zhou recorded that “Xisheng and I sat around on New Year’s Eve doing nothing. That’s how we spent the last part of the year.” As it turned out, Wang, Zhou, and the Low-Key Club would be sitting around, doing nothing, for a very long time indeed.

Chapter 12

The Road to Pearl Harbor

T
HE EASTERN PROVINCE OF
Anhui is usually cold and can become very wet at the height of winter. The weather was just one of the problems besetting Xiang Ying, commander of the section of the Communist New Fourth Army stationed in the province in December 1940. Just a few weeks before, Chiang Kai-shek had sent out orders that the Communist forces in Anhui must retreat north of the Yangtze River, out of the zone of Nationalist control patrolled by General Gu Zhutong. He made it clear to Gu that if the Communists did not move, then he should force them to do so.

Xiang Ying assumed that the evacuation would take place in cooperation with the Nationalist troops. But instead a telegram arrived with disappointing news from party headquarters in Yan’an, where Mao and the overall Red Army commander Zhu De were located:

You should not have any further false hopes about the Nationalists. Do not rely on them to help you with anything . . . If you end up being attacked by the Nationalists on one side and the Japanese on the other side, it will be extremely dangerous for you.
¹

Only a week later Xiang Ying would find out just how dangerous his position was. For in the two years from 1939 to 1941 the conflict had become not only a war of resistance against Japan and its Chinese collaborators, but also a duel between the Nationalists and the Communists. Alliances shifted against the backdrop of an international situation that also pitted former friends against each other, and created strange partnerships that nobody could have foreseen.

In the first two years of the war, the National Government had managed to survive against the odds. Its own efforts to cope with inadequate armies, refugee flight, and aerial bombing had contributed significantly to that survival, but the Nationalists had also benefited from fortunate circumstances. The Communists had generally stuck by the terms of the United Front and cooperated with the Nationalists—at the very least, by not confronting the government outright. The Soviets had continued to support Chongqing, and the European powers, while still neutral, provided sympathy and some tacit support for Chiang’s regime, allowing it to stay supplied even in its southwestern exile. Japan had not succeeded in bringing on board collaborators who would pose a threat to the Chinese or be taken seriously by the outside world. Even the weather had been helpful: harvests in Free China in the first summers of the war had been remarkably abundant, easing somewhat the government’s inability to import food as normal. By the end of 1940, every one of these factors would change, and in every case to the disadvantage of the Nationalists.

In September 1939 the Japanese Imperial Army, its operations now unified under the China Expeditionary Command, had sent 100,000 troops to take the central Chinese city of Changsha, which had already suffered grievously after the retreat from Wuhan in October 1938, when Chiang had ordered that Changsha be burned. If the Japanese could capture the city, then they would hold Hunan, one of the great breadbasket provinces of central China. From there, the way to Sichuan in the west would lie open, and they could hope to defeat Chiang’s regime in Chongqing once and for all. But the Japanese assault on Changsha failed. The Cantonese general Xue Yue defended the city brilliantly, using a combination of formal field warfare along with guerrilla tactics to lure the Japanese into ambushes and prevent them from resupplying themselves. Changsha remained in Chinese hands.
²

The Nationalist military now seized the initiative with a series of offensives across the whole country, bringing together eighty divisions of troops. In a series of coordinated attacks, the army was to strike out and recapture huge swathes of territory, from Yan Xishan’s former area of control in Shanxi province in north-central China to Guangxi in the southwest.

But almost nothing went according to plan. Chiang’s supposed ally, the militarist Yan Xishan, carved out his own deal with the Japanese for control of parts of Shanxi and withdrew from the campaign. And in the south, the Japanese surprised Chiang by launching an invasion of the southwestern province of Guangxi, capturing the capital city of Nanning on November 23, 1939, and cutting off the route to the sea. Instead of being able to deploy troops aggressively to retake captured territory, the Nationalists found themselves on the defensive once more. Two months of fierce fighting finally repelled the Japanese advance, but the momentum for the Nationalists’ Winter Offensive had been utterly lost. Things worsened in the spring of 1940. In May the city of Yichang in Hubei province fell to a new Japanese advance. Yichang had been the transit point from Sichuan to the other parts of the country, and its loss meant that Chiang’s regime was even more isolated. Chongqing now also became vulnerable to a new weapon, Japan’s Mitsubishi Zero fighter aircraft, one of the most advanced in the world. In the summer of 1940 the Zero managed to knock out all of the aircraft that protected Chongqing from the sky, leaving the city even more vulnerable to air raids.
³
As had happened so often before, an initially successful Nationalist assault had turned into a disaster.