Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (7 page)

At first, there were high hopes for the republic. But from the earliest days, it was clear that power lay not with the political parties and Parliament, but with the militarists. Yuan Shikai swiftly used his military strength to force Sun Yat-sen’s resignation and install himself as president, with the complicity of foreign powers that favored a military man in charge rather than the less predictable Sun. Wang Jingwei was released from prison just after the revolution broke out, and Yuan offered him the premiership of the new republic. Wang declined; rather in the manner of a traditional Confucian scholar, he chose to withdraw from political life rather than be corrupted by a flawed system. Others carried the mantle. General elections were set for late 1912, and Sun ran at the head of his newly formed Nationalist Party (Guomindang or Kuomintang). He handily gained the largest grouping in Parliament, with 269 out of 596 seats. But China’s experiment in electoral democracy, while real, was very short lived. On March 20, 1913, an assassin walked up to Song Jiaoren, the Nationalists’ brilliant young nominee for prime minister, and shot him. Song died of his wounds soon afterward. Everyone assumed the assassin had been sent by Yuan Shikai. Yuan quickly dissolved Parliament and banned the Nationalist Party. Sun fled to Japan, deeply disillusioned.

China’s new republic was plunged into turmoil. Europe became caught up in its own crisis just a year later, as the Great War broke out. This gave Japan, now unquestionably the strongest power in the region, the opportunity to bolster its own position in China while the Europeans were distracted. In January 1915 the government of Prime Minister Okuma Shigenobu presented Yuan Shikai with a set of territorial and political demands that would give Japan immense advantages in everything from trading rights to the placement of Japanese “advisers” within the Chinese government. Yuan’s position was still weak, and in May thirteen of the original demands were formalized by treaty. Yuan remained president until 1916, when he died of uremia. For the next decade, China was split among warring militarist factions. Although the international community recognized whichever government was installed in Beijing at any given moment, many felt that China was a geographical expression rather than a country.

The early republican era was not all bleak. Despite the chaos, it led to one of the finest flowerings of culture in China’s modern history. In 1915 progressives launched a “New Culture” movement that aimed to liberate China from the constraints of outdated thinking. The movement gathered pace after Yuan’s death, sparked by the 1919 signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the Allied campaign against Germany in the First World War. Under the treaty, Germany had to give up its territories on Chinese soil, along with all its other colonies around the world. The Chinese assumed that the territories would be restored to the young republic, as a reward for the efforts of the nearly 100,000 Chinese workers who had been sent to the Western Front in Europe to assist the British and French. But the territories were awarded instead to Japan. The Western Allies turned out to have made simultaneous secret agreements with both China and Japan in order to bring them both in on the Allied side. Once again, Japan’s actions on the international stage were wreaking havoc with China’s internal politics.

The reaction to this news in Beijing was swift and angry. One student at a public meeting threatened to kill himself with a knife in protest. His fellow students quickly mobilized, and on May 4, 1919, three thousand students from the capital’s finest colleges marched through the Legation quarter of the city and set fire to the house of a government minister whom they condemned as a “traitor to the nation”—an apologist for Japanese interests. The students sparked a wider movement that vowed to use “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” to revive a society suffering from “warlordism within, and imperialism from outside.” The demonstration was over in a few hours, but the aftershocks helped to transform Chinese society and culture for decades to come. The New Culture movement became intertwined with the “May Fourth Movement”(commemorating the demonstration). Patriotic Chinese demanded technological development and political reform that could rescue China from its seemingly eternal weakness.
²⁸

In 1921, amid this upheaval, a fledgling group—the Chinese Communist Party—held its first congress. Socialism was one of the many Western ideas that had flowed into China late in the Qing dynasty, and radical exponents of the doctrine were further inspired by the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917: Li Dazhao, head librarian of Peking University, declared: “The victory of Bolshevism . . . is the victory of the spirit of common awakening in the heart of each individual among mankind of the twentieth century.”
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Chen Duxiu, the university’s dean of humanities, was at the meeting (as was one of Li Dazhao’s library assistants, a young man named Mao Zedong). The assembled figures all felt that China’s social problems, not least the burning question of foreign imperialism on Chinese soil, needed a radical solution. Yet even these optimists could not deny the size of the crisis that faced the country. The revolution seemed to have failed. How could China save itself?

Chapter 2

A New Revolution

T
HE REACTION OF CHIANG
and Wang to the crisis of the republic was typical of the many young men and women of their age. They had all been supporters of the 1911 revolution, and to see their bright hopes for the country disappear into a sea of warlordism was wrenching. Wang Jingwei took the most radical step in response. He and his wife Chen Bijun traveled to France (soon to be a political training ground for figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Pol Pot) and remained there for five years as the republic went from bad to worse. Chiang and Mao both remained in China, but the continuing grip of the warlords seemed to allow little scope for their dreams of a new politics and society.

Wang’s action was an extreme version of a wider feeling among the politically conscious in China that the country was suffering from imperialism and warlordism. The Nationalist Party seemed to be dead and buried. Sun Yat-sen, in exile again from his beloved China, spent the next few years in Japan, that ironic place of refuge for an anti-imperialist revolutionary. But the aftermath of Yuan Shikai’s demise in 1916 made it safer for Sun to return to his homeland. By 1921, with the assistance of a sympathetic warlord, Chen Jiongming, Sun was based in Guangzhou (Canton), where he set up a revolutionary government. The Nationalists were in power, even if only in one region of China. Wang returned from his self-imposed exile in France and stood by Sun’s side as they sought to recapture the revolution.

Yet Sun was now fifty-eight and in poor health. Who among his followers would take over from him? In the early 1920s, if one had to choose a young man likely to lead a revolution in China, the most logical choice might well have been Wang Jingwei. Wang was effectively second in command to Sun, and had helped shape a program of vigorous social reform. He was a political star, with his near-martyrdom to burnish his reputation. Yet despite the talent that Sun and Wang brought to the Nationalist Party, their prospects seemed limited unless they could find some powerful supporter who would arm them. Sun Yat-sen had had no success in persuading the European powers to back him. He had more hopes of Japan, declaring in a speech at Kobe in 1924 that since Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, the peoples of Asia had cherished the hope “of shaking off the yoke of European oppression.”
¹
However, Sun’s idea of pan-Asianism, the philosophy of Asian unity, meant something rather different in governmental circles in Tokyo: not cooperation, but domination by Asia’s major power.

Then, in 1923, Sun made a decision that would help shape the path of Chinese history. For years, he had been seeking foreign support for his dream of launching a revolutionary army that would unify China, with him as its president. The Western powers had all turned him down flat. But there was another hand to play in the early 1920s. By 1921 the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had been secured after a bloody and vicious civil war. Leon Trotsky, the fiery foreign minister of the new regime, was eager to find opportunities to use the Comintern, the agency responsible for spreading revolution abroad. In 1923 Sun held talks with Adolf Joffe, the representative of the Comintern, for a formal alliance between the Nationalists and the Soviets. In the Soviet view, China was too backward for a socialist revolution. Instead, a “national bourgeois” party, the Nationalists, should carry out the first revolution. Sun agreed, content to ally with Russia, believing that alone among Western nations she had shown “benevolence and justice.”
²
To show his commitment, he sent a delegation of Nationalist representatives to Russia, Chiang Kai-shek among them. Being tapped by Sun raised the young officer’s prestige greatly within the party, and was a sign that he was a rising star. Chiang met many prominent Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, but was not overly impressed, calling them “conceited and autocratic.”
³
Chiang’s sour memories of Moscow and the political system he saw forming there would come to shape his views when he returned home.

The new alliance changed the fate of the Chinese Communist Party. During the first couple of years of the party’s history, it was a tiny and marginal political grouping (as well as being officially illegal). It made grand claims about fomenting a revolution among urban workers, Bolshevik-style, but in reality it had little prospect of doing so. Cooperation between Sun and the Soviets gave the CCP a crucial opportunity to expand. On Soviet advice, many Communists also joined the Nationalists, forming the United Front, making the two parties hard to distinguish during this period. The alliance made sense ideologically for Sun as well. His political philosophy, which he termed the “Three People’s Principles,” consisted of democracy, nationalism, and the idea of “people’s livelihood,” a vague social welfarism that was sometimes rendered as “socialism” in English. He was not a Communist, but he and the Soviets had enough in common to make the alliance useful for both sides. Sun’s prestige was also enough to calm the more conservative elements in the Nationalist Party who were wary of the Bolsheviks.

Revolutionary politics were forged on a small island in Guangzhou (Canton) Harbor. The nerve center was the Whampoa (Huangpu) military academy, where the Soviets tutored China’s revolutionaries. For both the Nationalists and Communists, the experience of working with the Soviets between 1923 and 1927 on the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) was crucial. Wang Jingwei worked in the political education department of the academy, and alongside him was a rising star of the CCP, Zhou Enlai (later to become China’s premier under Mao). On the military side, Chiang Kai-shek rose rapidly in the officer corps as his organizational skills became better known and better valued, along with his comrade from his Japan days, He Yingqin. Also at the Academy were Hu Zongnan and Xue Yue, both of whom would provide crucial military service to Chiang during the war years.
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The alliance was of particular interest to the young Communist Mao Zedong, as it meant a much larger party base which he could use to plan radical revolution. Mao’s influence as a political activist was growing. In October 1925 he replaced Wang Jingwei as the Nationalist Party director of propaganda, providing a chance for him to hone his techniques of rhetoric and mass mobilization which would prove so vital in the decades to come.
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Mao Zedong was born in 1893, in a large village named Shaoshan in Hunan province, deep in the interior of China. Chiang seemed stolid and hard to read to many of his contemporaries; in contrast, Mao appeared mercurial, outgoing, and exuberant. Chiang had little small talk, whereas Mao loved to talk for hours with friends and visitors. Mao was always seeking a bigger stage for himself, and had little but contempt for the old ways of thought and behavior that he felt were holding China back. In one of his angriest articles as a young man he attacked the tradition of arranged marriage: “Chinese parents,” he wrote, “all indirectly rape their sons and daughters.”
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Also characteristic of the young Mao was a personal exercise plan (“While squatting, the heels should more or less touch the buttocks. Three times.”
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), part of his youthful intention to exercise both body and mind as a building block for the establishment of a revitalized nation, an idea that would be echoed some six decades later when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 with a public swim in the Yangtze. Throughout his life, Mao was shaped by early violent disagreements with his father, a conservative, well-off peasant farmer; their clashes eventually drove Mao to leave home and to take up political journalism. Mao was also shaped by romantic ideas of heroism drawn from the traditional Chinese classics, including tales of adventure such as
Outlaws of the Marsh
and
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
. He was always driven by the idea of a strong China, but unlike Chiang, he demanded a complete overturning of “heaven and earth”: nothing less than a complete social as well as political revolution would serve his purposes.

The American writer Edgar Snow met Mao in 1936, when he had just achieved national prominence. Snow was deeply impressed: “He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter . . . He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might even have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naîveté with incisive wit and worldly sophistication.” Snow also noticed that there was more to Mao. “Something about him,” he thought, “suggested a power of ruthless decision when he deemed it necessary.”
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Clearly Mao and Chiang had more in common than either would admit. Like Chiang and Wang, Mao wanted to embrace the possibilities of the new, more open world of thought and experience. In 1911, when he was eighteen years old, Mao had joined a group of revolutionary soldiers in his home province. This was his earliest taste of the warfare that would define his life for another seven decades.