Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (38 page)

Zhou had a somewhat inflated view of his contributions to the prospective new government in Nanjing. On January 26 he wrote in his diary that he, not Wang, had chosen the key ministers: “Ten minutes with my pen will produce the National Government,” he joked.
¹⁵
But it was not just ministries that Zhou organized; he also took charge of muscle. Wang’s great deficiency as a power broker was his lack of military support. It had been his downfall during the Northern Expedition, and a decade later it was now hampering his chances of being taken seriously by Japan. This lack also placed him and his followers in grave personal danger from assassination squads organized by Chiang’s security chief, Dai Li. Zhou had little choice but to turn to two of Dai Li’s former employees, thugs named Ding Mocun and Li Shiqun, who ran an enforcement squad from a mansion at 76 Jessfield Road in the part of Shanghai known as the “Badlands.”
¹⁶
With this dubious backing, Wang’s regime lost much of its already limited prestige before it had even formally been constituted.

As winter turned to spring, Zhou was torn between aspiration and venality. He still harbored hopes of reconciliation with the government in Chongqing, optimistically sending a message to Chiang Kai-shek via an American intermediary to say that even the establishment of a new government at Nanjing should not stop discussions between Japan and the Nationalists. Late in March he found himself close to quarreling with Wang Jingwei and his wife Chen Bijun over financial subsidies for their native province of Guangdong. Behind the squabbling lurked the fear that the Japanese, who were clearly hedging their bets, might seek to halt the new administration in its tracks.

But despite the obstacles, Wang finally got his new government in Nanjing. On March 30, 1940, Wang Jingwei’s
huandu
—the “return to the capital”—officially came into being. The regime’s newspaper, the
Zhonghua ribao
(China Daily)
, was filled with fulsome praise for the government of “Chairman Wang,” positioned not as a new regime but rather as a restoration of the true Nationalist Party to its rightful capital at Nanjing. The cartoons that filled the middle pages were pure propaganda: pictures of Wang as a superhuman giant radiating light toward a group of children representing the Chinese people.
¹⁷

Zhou Fohai recalled the ceremony in his diary with his usual touch of egomania. “My idea has come to reality,” he declared. “This is the happiest thing that has happened in my life.” He went on: “The National Government has returned to the capital, the national flag is fluttering in the city, and the whole thing was started up by me. After this, the movement will take
me
as its center . . . my whole life has not been in vain.”
¹⁸
Zhou spoiled the moment by going on to drink too much after the ceremony and giving himself a stomachache. Wang Jingwei was in a less celebratory mood. One witness to the ceremony declared that he “stood there as if in a daze . . . tears copiously flowing down his face.”
¹⁹
The motive behind his defection, his vision of an equal collaboration with the Japanese, now looked very hollow.

In February 1940, Frank Lockhart, counselor at the US Embassy, filed a report to Washington on behalf of Ambassador Nelson Johnson, summarizing the war situation in the year just gone by:

There were no indications that Chinese determination to continue resistance had lessened, despite the uncertainties in the international situation, friction in the “United Front,” and the severe strain of war on the national economy. General Chiang Kai-shek retained the confidence of the nation and his influence was effective in settling the difficulties which arose between various factions in the government . . . One important factor in maintaining and increasing Chinese determination to resist was the ruthless Japanese bombing of civilian populations, the most murderous instance of which occurred in Chungking in May.
²⁰

Had he known of this positive assessment, Chiang Kai-shek would have valued it. China’s situation was precarious by the spring of 1940. In March high-level Japanese negotiators tried to secure an agreement with Chiang in Chongqing, while Wang Jingwei was attempting to formalize his own Nationalist government in Nanjing. This strategy, known in Chinese as the Tong Operation, and in Japanese as Operation Kiri, led to talks in Hong Kong between March 7 and 10, 1940. The Nationalists were in a perilous military position: the United States remained neutral, and Europe was in turmoil. In fact, during that spring, as the fall of France looked imminent, the British government similarly put out very discreet feelers to test the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany. For China, there was no possibility of Western assistance. The Japanese saw it as a propitious moment to persuade Chiang to concede.
²¹
Now, at a time of great danger for his government, Chiang opened the door to negotiations just a crack.

As a result, the Japanese continued to stall on recognition of the new government of Wang Jingwei. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1940, Japan remained ambivalent about the defector. Senior Japanese figures such as Count Arima Yoriyasu of the Privy Council declared that Wang’s behavior proved his dishonesty, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yôsuke declared his continuing interest in an agreement with Chongqing.
²²
Zhou Fohai summed up the frustration of the defectors, who felt that they had made a supreme patriotic sacrifice: “Chongqing sees us as collaborators, we see ourselves as heroes. We think only peace can save the country—that’s why we think of ourselves as heroes. If we end up classed as heroes, then China and Japan will be at peace. If we end up classed as collaborators, then China and Japan will never be at peace.”
²³

Senior Japanese military figures met with a Chinese intelligence agent posing as the younger brother of Chiang’s brother-in-law T. V. Soong. The talks foundered on issues of principle: Japan wanted to station troops in north China and gain formal recognition of Manchukuo, which Chiang absolutely refused. Japan responded by turning up the temperature. In June the Imperial Army captured the major city of Yichang in Hubei province. With Chongqing under continued pressure, talks resumed from June 4 to 6, in Macau.
²⁴
In these talks the Japanese pressed for recognition of Manchukuo, and the placement of Japanese troops in north China, while the Chinese side continued to play for time, arguing that Tokyo’s final position was still not clear.

The Japanese also exploited the weakness of China’s potential European allies. Chiang’s government desperately needed supplies sent along the railway from the Indochinese port of Haiphong to Kunming in Yunnan province, nearly one thousand kilometers to the northwest. In January 1940, as Paris prepared itself for a German invasion, Japanese diplomats had sent messages to their French counterparts demanding that the colony’s railway be shut down. The Japanese repeatedly bombed the railway, and when the French ambassador in Tokyo protested, Matsuoka Yôsuke, the foreign minister, replied that “the Japanese Government intended to continue bombarding the French railroad from Indochina until the French should stop sending supplies to Chiang Kai-shek.”
²⁵
France fell in June 1940, and like most of its colonies, Indochina came under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. As this new government was supposed to be neutral, it continued to allow supplies to be sent to Free China via the railway. Throughout the summer of 1940, the Japanese put the Vichy colonial authorities under pressure to close the railway, but the French refused to do so, although they agreed in August that a limited number of Japanese troops (no more than 6,000) could be stationed within Indochina. But the Japanese were not in the mood to compromise. On September 22 Japanese troops under Lieutenant General Nakamura Akihito invaded Indochina. The fighting ended within a few days when Indochina capitulated, but Japanese troops remained in the colony until the end of the war, severing the Nationalist government from the vital railway line.

In July 1940, while the Battle of Britain raged over the skies of the south of England, the Japanese government demanded that London close the Burma Road, linking the British colony to the border with China. This would cut off supplies of war materiel that were being shipped to Rangoon and then transported onward via the Burma Road into Nationalist China. Churchill’s government had seen France fall in June and feared that Britain was in danger of imminent invasion. Unable to contemplate opening up a new front for conflict in Asia, they closed the road. In less than a year, all of Free China’s supply routes from the south coast, from Indochina, and from Burma had been cut off (although the latter did reopen in October 1940). Better strategy by the Nationalists might have helped keep the sea routes open for a while longer. But the land routes were lost because of the policies of the British government and Vichy France, over which Chiang Kai-shek had no control. The Nationalists were clearly vulnerable.

Chiang continued to show determination mixed with guile. Having agreed to talk to the Japanese in August 1940, he suddenly canceled the meeting on the pretext that the Japanese had not revoked their
aite ni sezu
, the declaration of refusal to deal with the National Government. The Nationalists had achieved an important overall goal by casting doubt on Japan’s commitment to the Wang regime in Nanjing.
²⁶
To the Chinese, it seemed obvious that the Japanese wished to use anti-communism as an excuse to station Japanese troops in China on a long-term basis. Chiang’s strategy of hinting at talks with Japan without ever holding any official meetings offered two main benefits. It made Japan hold on until well into 1940 before finally allowing Wang Jingwei to set up a government in Nanjing, and it sent the Western powers the message that if they did not grant further assistance to Chongqing, Chiang would be forced to seek some sort of agreement with the enemy. On November 30, Wang Jingwei’s government was officially recognized by Tokyo. On the same day the US government announced a loan arrangement of US$100 million to Free China, as well as the dispatch of fifty military aircraft.
²⁷

Chiang’s actions did not suggest a genuine willingness to negotiate with the Japanese for a harsh peace settlement. He made it very clear that he would continue to resist Japan, even in the darkest days of 1940, when China, like Britain, came closest to collapse. He gave the impression of dancing close to the edge of cooperation with Japan, but never took steps that would send him directly over the precipice. The threat of a Japanese takeover of China frightened the Allied powers, and Chiang knew he desperately needed to draw them in. For not only were his armies and regime on the brink of disaster, with little prospect of external assistance. A new threat now emerged from within his own alliance.

Beginning in early 1939, the Nationalists started to take measures to restrict the growth of the CCP. The year marked the beginning of the terror raids on Chongqing that would do so much to undermine the National Government’s position, and as the bombs fell, Chiang and his colleagues became alarmed by the growing strength of their rivals to the northeast, based in Yan’an. Chiang ordered new political and economic measures against Mao’s heartland. In particular, he sought to regain control of parts of Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong that the CCP had come to think of as its own areas of control. The Nationalists imposed a blockade of some 400,000 troops around the SGN base to the south and the west. The campaign aimed to box the Communists in, rather than to invade their territory, but it was a clear sign that relations between the two sides were beginning to break down.

However, the conflict remained a strange, shadowy one. Neither side could afford to let its own public, let alone the international community, think that the United Front had failed. When clashes broke out between Nationalist and Communist troops at the borders of the SGN region, the CCP claimed that the fighting had initiated solely at the local level and did not reflect any wider abandonment of the United Front. Chiang could hardly disagree openly.

Yet Mao also wanted to hint at the risk that the Nationalists ran by seeking to suppress the Communists. In a July 1939 speech on long-term cooperation between the two parties, Mao made a pointed comment about past Nationalist attempts to restrict the growth of the CCP, speaking out to the “diehard elements” in the Nationalist Party who sought to crush the Communists:

You insisted on “suppressing” us, but what is most curious is that the more we were “suppressed” the more numerous we became. Our party used to be only as big as a little finger, but thanks to the “Encirclement and Suppression” campaigns it grew enormously and became as big as a thumb . . . The entire Red Army was forged by fighting you, and all the Red Army’s guns were given by you, so I invite my friends to consider it: To fight or not to fight? We, too, have thought about it; let’s everyone make peace!
²⁸

The two sides felt ambivalent toward each other even as relations soured. Chiang had always been wary of Mao, but he had a rather more positive view of Zhou Enlai, and the respect was mutual. In August 1939 Zhou wrote a report for the Politburo of the CCP in which he argued that both parties needed to rein in their more extreme and backward-looking members. Shortly afterward, when Zhou fractured his arm, Chiang sent his personal plane to Yan’an to fly Zhou and his wife to Xinjiang, for transport on to Moscow for treatment.
²⁹