IX—
Conclusion
After Pearl Harbor, Yenan had relatively little to fear about the stability of the united front. The Kuomintang evidently decided to shift the major share of war efforts to the Allied powers. Since unification was inseparable from resistance, this had the effect of depriving Chungking of its initiative against the Communists as well. There were, however, two possible turns in the war which remained Yenan's concern after Pearl Harbor. One was the possibility of a war between Japan and the Soviet Union. The likelihood of such a conflict was relatively remote as both countries were engaged with major enemies, Japan with the United States and the Soviet Union with Germany. Nevertheless, the possibility existed and increased after the German defeat in Stalingrad in early 1943. Up through 1941, every border war between Japan and the Soviet Union had the effect of encouraging the Kuomintang to simply maintain the stalemate. After 1941, however, Japan's priority was no longer in China. In the event of a war with the Soviet Union, it would have been in a three-front war. If China turned to the offensive, Japan would have been compelled to withdraw its forces toward Manchuria or abandon China altogether. That would have exposed the Communist bases to the Kuomintang. Speaking in December, 1942, Liu Shao-sh'i expressed the hope that the Soviet Union would delay a decisive operation against Japan to make possible a protracted war in China, or that it would advance into China in pursuit of the Japanese forces there.[1]
[1] Central China Bureau First Plenum , pp. 34–35. See also Japanese intelligence to this effect, in Intelligence Division, Embassy of Japan, Jukei[*] seiken no gaiko[*] [Diplomacy of the Chungking government] (Nanking, 1943) (Toyobunko[*] ), p. 23. The CCP's public stance after Pearl Harbor was to defer the priority of world war to Europe, and to welcome the rapprochement between Japan and the Soviet Union.See Chieh-fang jih-pao , December 16, 1941, p. 1. In this sense it was opposed to Chungking's demand on Washington for "Asia before Europe."
The other threat to the Chinese Communists was posed by the United States, which was single-mindedly pursuing the goal of destroying Japan as speedily as possible. It sought to marshal whatever force could be enlisted for this purpose and opposed a split in China's resistance. When the so-called "third anti-Communist high tide" began with the tightening of blockade around Shen-Kan-Ning in March of 1943, the United States exerted pressure on Chungking to avert a civil war.[2] Insofar as American assistance to China had the effect of maintaining the protracted stalemate, it was welcome from the CCP's standpoint.[3] But in order to prosecute the war against Japan, the United States had been equipping and training the Kuomintang forces in India and Yünan.[*] In 1943, the debate in Washington concerning the strategy of counter-offensive against Japan was taking final shape.
At the Quebec Conference (August), Chungking again made a strong representation for the adoption of its long-standing demand, "Asia before Europe," by the United States.[4] The Kuomintang wanted a landing of American forces in China to drive back the Japanese forces. Its intention was to re-establish itself in north and central China against the Communists with the help of U.S. forces. The proposed American landing, therefore, posed a grave threat to the CCP.
After the "third anti-Communist high tide" was overcome with American help, and the Kuomintang had suffered considerable damage to its prestige, the CCP's public stance visibly stiffened. Restraints on its pronouncements were removed; it began to attack the Kuomintang openly, first with an editorial in the Liberation Daily of October 5 written by Mao.[5] Internally this editorial was understood as a signal to get ready for a general armed insurrection.[6] The CCP began a pro-
[*] To this date some friends of the CCP complain that both Moscow and Washington "neglected" to aid the Communists. This charge is based on ignorance of the role played by the united front. Suppose the United States or the Soviet Union had chosen to disregard the Kuomintang's blockade to send in large scale aid to the Communist bases. The result would have been to force Chungking to reconsider the wisdom of remaining in the war. The optimal external aid from the CCP's standpoint would have been one which aided Chungking just enough to keep it in the war but not large enough to build it up in its own right.
[2] Selected Works , III, 139.
[3] See comments by Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung in Amerasia Papers , pp. 703, 790.
[4] Selected Works , III, 138.
[5] Mao Tse-tung-chi , IX, 59–74.
[6] Teng Tzu-hui, Cheng-feng lun-hsün-tui shih-shih t'ao-lun tsung-chi pao-kao [Report of the sum-up of current affairs discussion in the Rectification rotation–indoctrination unit], Part II, Fuhsiao , February, 1944, p. 14. Teng Tzu-hui's words were: "[if] an internal war and capitulation occurs, our policy in the great rearwill change from the clandestine method of the past to armed insurrection, guerrilla warfare, mutiny and uprisings of troops in order to overthrow the rule of the capitulationists. The editorial in the Chieh-fang jih-pao of October 5 concerning fulfilling our pledge should be understood to mean such a policy . . . ." The pledge he referred to was the CCP's united front pledge of September, 1937 which, according to Mao in the editorial above, was already fulfilled. Mao Tse-tung-chi , IX, 70.
gram to indoctrinate its members with the slogan, "Without the Communist party, there is no China" (Mei-yu Kung-ch'an-tang, mei-yu Chungkuo ). This theme was designed to refute Chiang Kai-shek's book China's Destiny , published in March. The indoctrination program stressed that the Communist party was the "orthodox" heir of Sun Yat-sen and that it was to decide "China's Destiny."[7] There were some in the army who doubted the wisdom of actively seeking a collision with the Kuomintang. They said, "The reason why the reactionary faction wants to capitulate is that our Party has grown strong and threatens it. It is because class contradiction exceeds the international contradiction."[8] There were also skeptics who doubted that the CCP was ready to take on the three million troops with which the Kuomintang had armed itself by this time. "Some people say that if a civil war breaks out we will again leave our bases to go on a long march."[9] The Party assured them that the CCP would hold on to most of its bases this time.[10]
The CCP's efforts were stepped up as the U. S. Army Observer Section arrived in Yenan in the spring of 1944. One can discern three goals that were pursued by the Communist leaders in their extensive conversations with the Americans. They stressed that the CCP was interested primarily in speedy defeat of Japan and hence shared an identical goal with the United States.[11] They sought to undermine Washington's confidence in the Kuomintang by describing it as a dictatorship interested only in suppressing internal opposition but not in the resistance.[12] Lastly, they sought to influence the choice of sites for American landing in China, and the relationship of U. S. and Chinese forces. In connection with the last point, the Communist leaders repeatedly asked that all Chinese forces, Kuomintang as well as Communist, be subordinated directly to American command and that the two Chinese forces be assigned to "separate sectors" for operation against the Japanese forces.[13] This would have enabled the Communist forces to acquire American arms and supplies directly, while
[7] Teng Tzu-hui, Cheng-feng lun-hsün-tui . . . , Part I, Fuhsiao , January, 1944, pp. 41–42.
[8] Ibid. , Part II, p. 26.
[9] Ibid. , p. 14.
[10] Ibid.
[11] See Chou En-lai in Amerasia Papers , p. 703.
[12] See Mao in Ibid. , p. 789.
[13] Ibid. , pp. 707, 795, 902, 903.
using the United States forces to segregate themselves from the Kuomintang forces. John S. Service of the U. S. Army Observer Section came away with an impression that the Communist leaders were more interested in joint action against the Japanese than the officials in Chungking.[14]
This reflected not the attitudes of the two parties toward a joint action against Japan as such but their confidence in using it to their respective advantages. "If the Americans do not land in China, it will be most unfortunate for China," Mao told Service, and added, "The Kuomintang will continue as the government—without being able to be the government."[15]
In reality, Yenan had very little choice when American landing in China became imminent. It could not oppose the proposal. The only way out was to take the initiative in offering its cooperation in order to exert its influence on the manner of execution. In the fall of 1943, the Communist regular forces numbered 400,000 at most.[16] This was less than half of the force level which Mao regarded as necessary for the final challenge against the Kuomintang. But in other ways, the war was going very well from the CCP's standpoint. The front was completely stalemated and the Kuomintang forces were deteriorating rapidly, while the Japanese forces in north China were withdrawing to the model peace zones. But the prospect of Allied operation on the mainland, I surmise, forced the Communists to step up their schedule of revolution by using the American intervention as a leverage to displace the Kuomintang.
On May 4, 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States decided to carry out landing operations in the Philippines, Taiwan, and on the China coast.[17] Some time in 1944, the CCP's Center had issued a directive to its forces stating in part that "China's counter-offensive must rely on us as the main [force] coordinated with the Allied counter-offensive."[18] The Communist forces everywhere were ordered to expand rapidly. The New Fourth Army, for instance, was setting the goal of expansion by three to five times.[19]
The United States then reversed its decision concerning landing in
[14] Ibid. , p. 798.
[15] Ibid. , p. 794. Emphasis original.
[16] Teng Tzu-hui mentioned the figure of "less than 500,000" in Cheng-feng lun-hsün-tui . . . , Part I, p. 38. Lin Tsu-han made public the figure of 475,000 Communist troops in September, 1944. Amerasia Papers , p. 1049.
[17] Stilwell and the American Experience in China , pp. 446–447.
[18] Teng Tzu-hui, "Kuan-yü chin-nien k'uo-ta ti-fang-chün chi-ke chi-pen wen-t'i" [Concerning several basic problems in expanding the regional forces this year], Fuhsiao, November , 1944, pp. 2–3.
[19] Ibid. , p. 2.
China. It decided to proceed with island-hopping toward Japan.[*] Most surprisingly, it reversed its basic position vis-à-vis the Kuomintang and the CCP shortly afterward. The CCP's plan to claim the Mandate of Heaven was delayed by several years. This belongs to another chapter in the history of the Communist movement in China. It must be noted, however, that by the fall of 1943 the highest Communist leadership was willing to challenge the Kuomintang—with some external help. Mao Tse-tung seems to have tried to "Seize the hour." It is my judgment that, with or without United States intervention, the fate of the Kuomintang was seriously compromised by this time. Foreign intervention could still accelerate or delay the revolution born in China's countryside, but it was no longer capable of thwarting that revolution completely. The power of the Communist military machine had grown to the point where it could disregard the forces generated in the cities of China and of the world. The second united front which neutralized the cities toward the revolution in the rural areas could be dispensed with.
In the spring of 1945, the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee was convened in Yenan. The Resolution on Some Questions in the History of Our Party , passed on this occasion, formalized Mao's victory over Wang Ming by rewriting the Party's history. The Resolution on History stated that the Party's line laid down at the Sixth Congress in 1928 was "basically correct."[20] Formally, the Resolution chose not to deal with the period of the war against Japan on the ground that it was not yet over.[21] But the war was all but over, and the Resolution in fact made many references to the topics of internal dispute during the second united front period, such as the one concerning guerrilla vs . mobile warfare.[22] By this means, the Resolution clearly suggests that the Party's line of the Sixth Congress was valid for the resistance period as well. The line of the Sixth Congress had guided the CCP through the civil war period. It had stressed the rural area work, the Red Army, the soviets, and severe land revolution; it had made no provisions for a "united front from above." The Resolution and the Maoist version of history which accompanied it had the effect of creating an impression that Mao's rural strategy was chiefly instru-
[*] The Japanese forces waited nervously for the strategic counter-offensive promised by Mao, but it never came. The war ended in stalemate.
[20] SW , IV, 176. While The Resolution on History and the Seventh Congress stood for Mao's victory, I am not certain how complete a victory it was. Evidently Mao needed Liu Shao-ch'i's support to muster a majority against Wang Ming.
[21] Ibid. , p. 189.
[22] Ibid. , p. 204. The resolution makes a specific reference to guerrilla warfare during the "Anti-Japanese War" here.
mental in leading the Communist revolution to its success in 1945. It is to this fact that we owe the distortion in our view of the Chinese revolution.
In this book I have tried to correct this distortion by bringing to light the role played by the cities in China's revolution, and the manner in which Communist power was created in the rural areas under the protective umbrella of the cities. Let us take a final look at the way in which that power was constituted by the time Japan surrendered. In August, 1945, Mao described it with obvious pride:
Are there places which are sure to fall into the hands of the people? Yes, there are. They are the vast rural areas and the numerous towns in the provinces of Hopei, Chahar and Jehol, most of Shansi, Shantung and the northern part of Kiangsu, with villages linked together and with about a hundred towns in one area, seventy to eighty in another, forty to fifty in a third—altogether three, four, five or six such areas, big and small. What sort of towns? Medium and small towns. We are sure of them, we have the strength to pick these fruits of victory. In the history of the Chinese revolution this will be the first time that we have got such a bunch of fruit. Historically, it was only . . . in the latter half of 1931 that we had altogether as many as twenty-one county towns in the Central Base Area in Kiangsi Province. . . .[23]
This was what Mao had been trying to build since the Kiangsi days. Now it was in his hands. The area mentioned by Mao contained 95 million in population and supported a regular army of 910,000 and 2.2 million militia.[24] The tiger was out of the cage. It could no longer be contained.
For Mao the revolution in China meant a steady increase of such bases:
From now on, the area taken by our army will daily expand, and the Kuomintang's sources of troops and food supplies will daily contract; we estimate that by next spring, after another full year's fighting, our army and the Kuomintang army will be roughly equal in numbers. Our policy is to go ahead steadily and strike sure blows, not to seek quick results; all we are trying to do is to wipe out, on the average, about 8 brigades of the Kuomintang regular army each month, or about 100 brigades a year. . . . It should be possible to wipe out the entire Kuomintang army in about five years. . . .[25]
The revolution was strictly a matter of depriving the enemy of his source of grain and recruits by steady attrition. It was above all a mechanical matter of wiping out the enemy forces by small install-
[23] Selected Works , IV, 17–18.
[24] As of April, 1945. Ibid. , III, 202.
[25] Ibid. , IV, 225. See also Ibid. , p. 261.
ments. Hence, Mao predicted with audacity that it would take five years from March, 1946, to topple the Kuomintang. He placed no reliance on snowballing or the "prairie fire" effect of political disintegration in the cities. He showed little awareness that at some point the cities would read in the Communists' success a new "Mandate of Heaven" and suddenly change their allegiance.[26]
I have shown that Mao envisioned Communist power on such a basis in Kiangsi. He was confident that this power could be made to grow indefinitely. The trouble for the Communists was that the peasant revolution provoked reaction primarily in the cities. The cities of modernizing China turned out to be more powerful than the countryside. The defeat of peasant revolution in Kiangsi showed that it had to co-exist with the dominant power for a long time (Wang Ming) or it could grow only by neutralizing the cities against itself. The war with Japan was the providential opportunity that made the latter course possible. Whether the Kuomintang was forced into the war by the Chinese Communists is an important question, but it cannot be settled until the Kuomintang's records are open to us. In any event, it was the urban middle class and intellectuals that demanded resistance on the basis of internal unity. Mao opposed it at first and for very good reasons: mobilization of the peasants on which the Communists depended could not be anything but revolutionary.
Without redistribution of land in some form and the attendant reshuffling of the entire social fabric in the rural areas, Communist power could not be built. The precious two years between 1937 and 1939, when the Japanese forces left the countryside of north China virtually empty, gave the Communists a head start. Thereafter the strategic stalemate between Japan and the Kuomintang enabled their continued existence and expansion. The resistance qua resistance was not simply a "peasant war" fought by "encircling the cities from the countryside." It was at best a joint effort of the cities and the countryside. The CCP had eventually acquired enough military power of its own to make it risky for the Kuomintang to enter into a separate peace with Japan. In my judgment that point was reached some time between Pearl Harbor and 1943. After that, the CCP was in fact forcing the Kuomintang to stay in the resistance.
Chinese Communists' revolutionary strategy was an uneasy juxtapo-
[26] An interesting debate took place between H. G. Creel and Ho Ping-ti as to whether the founding of a new dynasty in China depended primarily on military prowess and army of the founder or on the Mandate of Heaven bestowed by the literati. See Ho Ping-ti and Tang Tsou, eds., China in Crisis , Vol. I, Bk. 1, pp. 59–92. The import of my finding would be that they are both correct. The CCP drew on military power based on territory, grain, and peasants and on the support of the modern literati.
sition of two distinct lines, urban and rural. Neither alone was sufficient to account for the CCP's ultimate victory. The differences between Mao and Wang Ming were reflections of the CCP's own predicament in 1935. There was no way of getting out of that predicament except to combine resistance and revolution into a unique blend called jen-min chieh-fang chan-cheng or "war of people's liberation." The "people" stands for both the Chinese nation and the "oppressed" part of the nation.
As late as July, 1940, one may recall, the CCP had acknowledged that "the rise and fall of the Chinese nation is the responsibility of the Koumintang."[27] For six years until 1943, the modern sector of China bore the major burden of the resistance. What sustained this effort was the spontaneous outburst of modern nationalism. With enormous force, it propelled China forward into an enterprise whose destiny was unforeseen. On the Communist side, credit must be given the strategic genius of its leadership. But for the collective genius of this leadership, the CCP would not have been able to harness urban nationalism to its purpose. Next in importance was the combat worthiness of the seasoned Communist forces. We must agree with Mao that "Without a people's army, the people have nothing." The reverse was not true tactically speaking. When the going became difficult in one area, the army could move elsewhere and create a new source of popular support.[*] What made the revolutionary potential of the peasants strategically relevant was the tremendous expanse of China's countryside.
There is little evidence to support the view that chronic poverty among the peasantry—usually traced back to the population increase in early modern times—had predisposed and "preconditioned" them to rise up in response to some "precipitating" event. Poverty produced the explosive result only when it interacted with the CCP's land program. But then this was no longer a question of poverty per se. "The social question" (Hannah Arendt[28] ) had to be politicized into the question of "class exploitation" before mass mobilization could occur, and therefore the CCP's land program remained basically unchanged from the Kiangsi to the Yenan period. Thus, chronic rural poverty was indeed a factor in the Communist revolution, but it played a passive role. The most massive poverty and deprivation, on the other hand, was inflicted on the peasants of north China as a consequence of the war and revolution rather than as their precondition.
[*] The metaphor of "fish" and "water" for guerrilla and peasants, incidentally, was authored by Chou En-lai, not Mao Tse-tung. Mao would have said, "fish can swim without water" at least for a while as happened on the Long March.
[27] Mao Tse-tung-chi , VII, 259.
[28] On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), Chapter I.
More directly relevant to Communist expansion was the peculiar social and political organization of modern China's vast hinterland. This category denotes a complex of phenomena and can be stated in many ways. At bottom was the parochial outlook of the peasants and the fierceness with which they defended their existence. Mobilization into para-military formations was almost a natural reflex by tradition, almost a way of life. While the villages were articulated with regional and national political leadership on the "orthodox" side as during the Taiping Rebellion, it was possible to mobilize the peasants for the defense of status quo. It is quite evident that the successors of the gentry leaders who put down that rebellion had gone through a profound transformation by the 1930s. Social and political ties that bound the countryside to the cities were tenuous during the interm between the disintegration of the old order and the establishment of the new. Warlordism was a concomitant of this disorder and reflected the parochial character of the infrastructure on which it rested. The Communist peasant movement also drew its strength from this foundation. As one subsystem among several regional powers, it relied on internecine warfare as the major precondition of its existence. Regionalism found a new lease on life in the anti-Japanese national salvation movement which originated in the constituencies of the Kuomintang and some regional powers. This tended to widen the "semi-feudal" fissure in the Chinese polity while magnifying the pressure on the government for war. Communist power survived and resumed its growth beyond the critical threshold because of the unique alliance and interaction between the cities and the countryside.
The chronic and ubiquitous propensity of China's peasants to take local power into their hands in modern times, rather than their poverty, should be regarded as an element of necessity in the revolution. But this was not sufficient for the victory of the revolution. The peasants had to be acted upon under particular international and domestic circumstances. These circumstances were political in nature. The most important condition, the war itself, was a discretionary and contingent event. In the sense that the revolution in China could not succeed without the war, one can conclude that the revolution itself was a contingent event.[29]
[29] See Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1966), chap. I, for a theoretical statement of this point.