Restless Empire (39 page)

By 1941 Mao’s forces were fighting something close to a civil war against the GMD. The worst battles were in Anhui province, where Chiang was determined to stop CCP expansion and force the party to submit to his authority. But government victories were not solid enough to deter the Communists and took much-needed GMD forces away from the battles with the Japanese. Throughout the rest of the war, Mao stuck rhetorically to the Comintern’s policies, calling for a continued united front and for a new coalition government, while concentrating on expanding CCP positions. Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern head, told Mao in December 1943 that he considered the CCP policy “to wind down the struggle against China’s foreign occupiers, along with the evident departure from a united national front policy” to be “politically mistaken,” but Mao stuck with his policy of emphasizing the internal over the external and it brought great returns.
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While the united front policy toward the GMD was neglected, Mao put in place another form of united front within the areas controlled by the CCP. Instead of executing landlords and businessmen, dividing up land and confiscating savings, as had been done before, the Communists now proclaimed what they themselves called a moderate policy of rent reduction, collaborative farming, price caps, and credit schemes. In the name of national resistance, the CCP had a policy for everyone: peasants (who got a guarantee against starvation), landlords (who got money and stable prices), company owners (who got predictable taxes and property guarantees), and workers (who got a minimum wage). Instead of Marx and Lenin, the party began talking about a “reasonable tax burden.” In the western Shandong borderlands, salt-producing locals had made use of the wartime receding of the state to avoid much-resented
taxes and thereby achieve prosperity. In that region, the CCP became very popular with its promise of protecting local welfare and tax reduction. In other parts of the country, the party recruited members and soldiers, promising to maintain the stability that the CCP had brought to the area and to punish collaborators.
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The war, in other words, provided a near perfect foil for the Communists to spread their influence.

While they built up the party, Mao and his followers carried out ruthless inner-party campaigns to destroy their old Communist rivals. And they worked to gain the undivided and unquestioning loyalty of those who had joined the party since 1937. These campaigns, known as
zheng feng
or rectification, criticized, arrested, and even executed those who would not accept the party’s new tactics and the recentering of party literature and programs on Mao and his understanding of the CCP’s historical mission. Instead of the internationalist Marxism that the party was born of, Mao and his supporters brought in writings that underlined the party’s role as the redeemer of the Chinese people after a hundred years of denigration and weakness. Instead of Communist materialism, the CCP began preaching to anyone who cared to listen that they could achieve liberation by the force of will. China, Mao told his inner-party audience, was not weak and poor. It was strong, because the CCP brought it the revolutionary spirit that would set it free.

W
HILE THE
CCP
UNITED
, the GMD seemed to fragment. Many leaders questioned Chiang’s authority. Wang Jingwei was one such. He had been one of Sun Yat-sen’s closest associates and a key founder of Chinese nationalism. Jailed by the Qing authorities in 1910, he became a hero on his release after the 1911 revolution, and later served several times as prime minister during the republic. A left-winger within the Guomindang—much in the spirit of Sun himself—Wang stood for cooperation with the CCP and fervent anti-imperialism, even after Chiang Kai-shek had attacked the Communists in 1927. As a result, Wang became Chiang’s main rival within the party, and the personal
relationship between the two leaders went from bad to worse. In 1937, Wang at first joined the government in its flight to Sichuan, but upset many of his colleagues by insisting that Western imperialist powers were greater threats to China in the long run than Japan, which, after all, was a fellow Asian nation. By 1939, Wang was in Hanoi, where, after Chiang’s agents had tried to kill him, he fully threw in his lot with the Japanese. In March 1940 he became head of what he called a reorganized Guomindang regime at Nanjing. In November, Wang signed a peace treay with Japan which recognized Manzhouguo and gave the Japanese special rights over the territory it claimed to control. In reality, Wang’s regime was entirely dependent on Tokyo’s support for the five years it existed.

But for all his reputation as a traitor, Wang Jingwei was no simple stooge of the Japanese. His political journey in the 1930s had taken him from a vague socialism to a position that emphasized Asian racial values and cooperation against the dominant Western powers. Wang believed that China was wasting its strength fighting Japan. Instead it should join in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere that Tokyo was about to create and build its power in Japan’s image. In January 1943 Wang’s regime declared war on the Allies, and it remained a quarrel some ally of the Japanese empire until its capitulation in August 1945. But although the collaborationists managed to recruit soldiers to fight alongside the Japanese, there were never any doubts about who were calling the shots. Wang’s legitimacy, even within his own regime, was entirely built on his ability to get the Japanese to do less harm in China than they otherwise would have done. The “reorganized” Guomindang were generally seen as traitors, but as traitors who could serve a useful purpose for some.

For most Chinese during the war years, the goal was survival, pure and simple. They needed an outcome for themselves and their families, and to avoid being harmed by the armies they encountered. In urban China, mostly occupied by Japan, this often meant finding some modus
vivendi with the occupiers. Most tried to avoid Wang Jingwei’s regime, not just because it was considered traitorous but also because it was considered inefficient. If one needed to deal with the new regime, many thought, better deal directly with the Japanese. Of course, all-out collaboration was as difficult in Japanese-occupied China as it was in German-occupied Europe. A central part of the occupiers’ ideology was their own national or ethnic superiority, and even those who wanted to take over Japanese ideals could not become Japanese. In parts of China, especially those that had suffered the most during the social and political turbulence in the early part of the century, the desire to work with the newly arrived power was great. This was especially true among the elites, who saw the Japanese as a protection against unruly peasants and workers. But even those who tried to find an ideological position that allowed collaboration were often put off by Japanese brutality and fiats. As in German-occupied eastern Europe—Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine—to collaborate was not always easy or safe.

In the cities, the occupiers immediately tried to find ways of getting industrial production going again after the fighting ended. At first, the Japanese confiscated Chinese enterprises at will, running them through army units or Japanese business conglomerates, the
zaibatsu
. But output still dropped 50 percent from prewar levels, and Tokyo’s dreams of using China’s industrial capacity to make their armies in China self-sufficient and to help supply Japanese forces elsewhere turned out to be a chimera.
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Overall output was down, probably as a result of supply difficulties and Chinese workers being less than enthusiastic. But Japanese production in China had also fallen from prewar levels. Before the war, half of all textile mills in Shanghai were Japanese-owned but many had been destroyed in the fighting. The
zaibatsu
were reluctant to invest in China; many found that they could not make a profit. As with all occupiers, the fall-back position was a mix of the carrot and the stick. Chinese owners were allowed to get their factories back if they would collaborate with the war effort. Many did. But in strategic areas
of production—a term that widened and widened as the war went on—the Japanese army instituted direct control through corporatist companies that produced directly for the war. Neither approach was successful. The imperial army had confiscated most ships and trains for the war effort, so the market had little chance to work. And price setting did not stimulate production. All the way up to 1945, Japan faced the classic occupation dilemma: The occupiers wanted to increase production. Their collaborators wanted managers that were politically beholden to them. And the workers resented unskilled and collaborationist managers as well as the occupation itself. It was not a scenario for success.

In the countryside there were not many more options available than in the cities. Local elites often chose to collaborate, but their return for doing so was minimal. They resented the Wang Jingwei regime and got little from it. They sought stability, but the Japanese either could not or would not provide it. The situation in one county is illustrative. Neihuang in northern Henan province had suffered from various civil wars prior to the 1930s. But in the years before the Japanese attack, the GMD had gradually asserted control against bandits, Communists, and secret societies. When the Japanese approached in 1937, local GMD leaders fled south. Prisoners broke out of jail and public storage facilities were raided. Bandit groups begin to operate openly. On the very day in March 1938 that the imperial army prepared to take control of the county, two squads of bandits clashed near the Japanese advance. The invaders, believing they were coming under attack from a nearby village, arrested all the men they could find, stripped them naked, and put them in a house, which they torched with kerosene. Anyone trying to escape was shot. Eighty villagers died. Throughout the war, civilians in the county were preyed on by criminals, occupiers, and wannabe authorities. The GMD could offer no protection. No wonder that villagers in the region were eager to accept security from the CCP when it started to operate in the county in 1944.
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T
HE
J
APANESE ARMY MADE
little progress in 1942–1943. Many observers expected the China front to be relatively uneventful for the remainder of the war. But the Japanese High Command did not plan for status quo. It knew that if Japan should have any chance of winning the war, it would have to knock the GMD out of the fighting first. In 1944 it started the largest offensive yet on the Asian mainland, intending to break Chinese resistance and establish direct land links between north China and Southeast Asia. The Japanese planners almost succeeded. By early 1945 the GMD regime was in dire straits and may not have survived the war in spite of the Allied victories in the Pacific and Southeast Asia if it had not been for Japan’s sudden capitulation.

As so often happened during the war, Japanese planners could not agree on what was the most important objective of what they called Operation Ichigo (Number One). Some emphasized supply lines, others destroying the GMD. As the offensive developed, they came much closer to the second objective than the first. The GMD regime in Chongqing was suffering from an acute economic and social crisis in 1944 that made determined resistance difficult. The government’s attempts at collecting new taxes had mostly failed, leaving much ill will among the population. Supplies of all kinds were running out, and famine had begun in parts of GMD-held territory. Under such circumstances it is only natural that resistance against further conscription increased. Half of all desertions and anticonscription revolts happened in the last year of the war. The GMD’s proudest achievement, the alliance with the United States, meant little to most people. Why, many were asking, did the United States not do more to help China? If Washington could send substantial forces of its own to guard Brazil against an Axis invasion, why could it not send a single regular soldier to fight in China? And the GMD’s response to its funding crisis, to print more money, led to runaway inflation that impoverished almost everyone, including its own supporters. The combination of all these ills forced active support for the government to its lowest point in the war just when it needed it most.

Operation Ichigo began in April 1944. In less than a month it had driven the GMD’s forces out of Henan province. It had also conquered the capital of Hunan, Changsha, where the Chinese had been resisting since 1939. The Japanese forces then drove south into Guangxi province, capturing Guilin in November and began moving toward the GMD’s stronghold in Sichuan from the south and east. Ichigo’s successes were in part due to poor planning by Chiang’s US advisers. But it also exposed how the GMD’s economic and political weakness was eroding its ability to resist. Even though the Japanese began running out of steam in the spring of 1945, when they had to redeploy their forces to the near Pacific, the GMD’s counteroffensives were largely ineffective. Chiang was still seen as a hero by most Chinese, but his party’s capacity to govern had taken a serious drubbing in the latter stage of the war.

Unlike the GMD, the CCP could make use of the war to expand. When Ichigo drove the GMD out of key parts of central China, the Communists could begin to build their own political institutions behind the overextended Japanese lines. They could also, where needed, attack the decimated government forces, as they did in the Shandong-Jiangsu border area. To their surprise, the CCP could also begin their first contacts with the Americans. Fed up with Chiang’s cautious strategy, Washington attempted to mobilize other power holders, including the Communists, against Japan. Mao had been told by the Soviets that Stalin expected the Soviet-American alliance to continue after the war had ended, and the CCP chairman interpreted the US overtures as part of this new international framework. CCP contacts with the Americans would help push Chiang and other anti-Communists toward compromise in postwar China. CCP hopes were high when President Roosevelt’s representative to China, the vain and utterly naïve Oklahoma lawyer Patrick Hurley, during a high-spirited visit with the Communists, put his name to a demand for a coalition government in China that Mao himself had written. Hurley also promised US supplies for the CCP, in preparation, Mao thought, for American landings on the coast.
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