IV—
The Initial Expansion in North China

This chapter will describe the initial expansion of the Communist forces and their bases in the rural areas of north China. I attribute the spectacular expansion of Communist power during the first stage of the war to three factors. First and foremost was the fact that the Communist forces were virtually all alone as an organized force in the rural areas for the first two years of the war. This also explains in part the second factor: the Communist forces were able to carry out a revolutionary land program, which accomplished basically the same results as in the civil war days but by different means. A third factor which aided Communist expansion was what Philip Kuhn calls the "militarization" of China's countryside or the mobilizational potential of the peasantry within the traditional social and political structure.^[1]

Troop Movements and Base Construction

The Kuomintang government's hold on north China was never firm. Its strategy after the Lukouchiao Incident was to draw the Japanese forces deep into central China, its own stronghold, for a stiff resistance. It left the defense of north China to the collateral warlord forces, which easily crumbled. Hardly a hsien magistrate could be found remaining in his post behind the advancing Japanese forces. The CCP seemed to have anticipated just such a state of affairs. Since as early as the spring of 1936, when the Communist forces raided Shansi Province, the CCP had been working toward initiating a local war with the Japanese forces. The raid failed because the central government

[1] Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies .

came to the aid of Yen Hsi-shan. In 1937, the Japanese forces removed that obstacle. Single-mindedly the invading horde pursued the retreating Kuomintang forces into the interior. Liu Shao-ch'i noted with glee in early 1938 that the plains of Hopei and Shantung Provinces were empty.^[2] The Japanese forces occupied only major towns and the transportation link between them at this stage.

The CCP's activities and the deployment of its forces before and during the invasion indicated that it was ready to move into the vacuum and begin constructing "anti-Japanese bases." The CCP intended to take Shansi Province as its permanent home base. Good ground work had been done through the local united front since 1936. From Shansi, the Communist forces began to move eastward across the Peiping-Hankow railway into Hopei in the spring of 1938.^[3] The shortage of troops and cadres prevented the CCP from moving further east into Shantung in force until the spring of 1939,^[4] though local guerrillas were already organized there. There was very extensive and spontaneous mobilization of the peasants for self-defense in the wake of the invasion. But such mobilization had limited parochial goals which were often inimical to the CCP's purposes. Communist mobilization proceeded entirely from "above to below." For this reason the relative freedom enjoyed by Communist organizers injected from the outside was important.

The CCP's Northern Bureau drew on a huge pool of educated and patriotic youths who had taken part in various phases of popular front type organizations that sprang up after the August First Declaration of 1935. The first big demonstration of the anti-Japanese feeling among the students was the December Ninth Movement. During this campaign the mobilized youths were led by Liu Shao-ch'i down into the countryside to conduct agitation and propaganda among the peasants.^[5] After this, the tense international situation in north China spurred the organizing activities of various National Salvation Associations on college campuses. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the focus of activities was public demand for resolute resistance and cessation of the civil war. Some students went through short para-military

[2] "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü kung-tso ti ching-yen" [Experiences of work in north China war zone], Kung-fei huo-kuo , III, 300.

[3] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 26.

[4] Yang Shang-k'un, "Hua-pei tang chien-she-chung ti chi-ke wen-t'i" [Several problems in the process of building the Party in north China], Yang Ch'ing, et al., Kan-pu pi-tu chung-yao wen-hsüan [Selected important documents required of all cadres] (no date, no publisher listed) (BI), p. 335.

[5] I-erh-chiu yü ch'ing-nien [The December Ninth and the youth] (Hua-chung hsin-hua shu-tien, 1948), p. 19.

training and fraternized with the troops of Sung Che-yüan's forces.^[6] During the Lukouchiao Incident a small band of students, under Liu Shao-ch'i's direction, took part in more direct actions to sustain the momentum of hostility.^[7] When the full scale war was on, they descended on the rural areas in considerable numbers to help organize "anti-Japanese governments." They were usually given the appellation of "refugee students from Peiping and Tientsin" (P'ing-Tsin liu-wan hsüeh-sheng ) and cropped up in widely scattered areas of north China.^[8]

The activities of the Sacrifice League (or the League for National Salvation through Sacrifice, Hsi-sheng chiu-kuo t'ung-meng-hui ) were the best example of the role played by mobilized urban youths. The Sacrifice League was also an example of the "united front from below" tactics of Mao directed at warlord groups prior to the war.

In many ways Yen Hsi-shan's predicament from 1935 onward prefigured Chiang Kai-shek's. Both were subjected to three identical pressures: the Japanese, the Communists, and each other. Yen's position was particularly vulnerable because he was surrounded by all three sources of pressure without having a rear. Shansi Province bordered on Suiyüan and Chahar Provinces, the object of the Kuantung Army's manipulation, and was itself one of the five northern provinces included in Japan's scheme of autonomy. After 1935, the main forces of the Red Army arrived one after another to build up the Shensi–Kansu Soviet across the Yellow River to the west. Communist military pressure on Yen's domain erupted in the raid in 1936. Yen's rear was occupied by Chiang Kai-shek, intent on "centralizing" the country under his rule. When Yen asked for Nanking's help against the threat posed by the Communists and then the Japanese, the central government's action revealed its ulterior motive. During the Shansi raid, Yen's request for aid was met belatedly by the dispatch of the central forces, which let it be known upon arrival that "we did not come to fight the Reds."^[9] During the Suiyüan Incident, Chiang Kai-shek appeared in

[6] Teradaira, Nihon no higeki , pp. 40–41.

[7] See above, p. 55.

[8] Liu Shao-ch'i put it this way later: "The revolutionary enthusiasm of the student masses as aroused by the 'December 9' Movement . . . had no way of widespread development until the 'July 7 Incident' in 1937. . . . It was then that the revolutionary students in the cities were able to unite with the broad masses of workers and peasants as well as the armed forces of workers and peasants. . . . Many of those who took part in the 'December 9' Movement now became military commanders on battlefields behind the enemy, political personnel, local administrators and directors of economic and cultural work . . . . " Collected Works of Liu Shao-ch'i (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1969), I, 456.

[9] Donald G. Gillin, Warlord Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province, 1911–1949 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 288; Chugoku^[*] kyosanto^[*] 1936-nen shi , p. 511.

person in Taiyuan but refrained from using his forces in the fighting against Prince Te's forces. It was widely rumored that he was using the occasion to assert his control over north China.^[10]

The vulnerability of Yen's position induced him to opt for the united front sooner than did Chiang Kai-shek, and presumably he in turn hastened Chiang's move toward the united front. Later, when the Communists became his major threat, he would turn to the Japanese. The examples of Yen Hsi-shan and Chang Hsüeh-liang point up the basic structural weakness of the Chinese polity and lend support to Mao's thesis that the central government could be stampeded into the united front by means of a regional united front.

Yen Hsi-shan was evidently compelled to go to great lengths to compete with and outbid the Communists in a time of peasant unrest and student agitation. Within the framework of opposition to communism, rather surprising programs of economic and social reforms were undertaken. Even before the Communist raid into Shansi, Yen proposed to nationalize and redistribute cultivated land in Shansi to absorb the landless.^[11] Most of the measures he put on the statute book, however, he was powerless to enforce. He also created the Justice Force (or Force for the Promotion of Justice, Chu-chang kung-tao t'uan ), an anti-Communist mass organization staffed by his followers.^[12] Its purpose was to curb the abuse of the poor by the rich and powerful.

The progressive character of his reforms, however, provided a convenient cover for the Communists to exploit in the name of the united front. Liu Shao-ch'i mockingly described Communist pressure on Yen this way:

At first supreme commander Yen was afraid of the Communist party. While in Taiyuan we proposed setting up a college to train young cadres, but he would not agree. Later when we set up a training group and gathered all the youths, he quickly set up the so-called "People's Revolutionary College" in Linfen. Then concerning the abolition of heavy and miscellaneous taxes, supreme commander Yen would not agree to the proposals we made in the past. Later when we began to win the support of the vast masses, then supreme commander Yen promulgated the statute. . . .^[13]

If there was a demand among Yen's liberal followers for resistance along with the Communists, he met them more than halfway. Po I-po states that he, as a Communist, was invited openly to come to Shansi to assume the leadership of the new Sacrifice League, a col-

[10] Gillin, p. 233.

[11] Ibid. , 201–207.

[12] Ibid. , pp. 220, 229; Van Slyke, pp. 131–139, passim .

[13] Liu Shao-ch'i, "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü . . . ," p. 297.

Map 4
Confused Battlefront in North China

lateral organization of the Justice Force created to accommodate younger men of talent on the basis of the united front.^[14] The League came into existence in September, 1936. Yen apparently set great store by the new organization and appointed his close confidants, Liang Hua-chih and Liang Tun-hou, to leadership positions.^[15] By early 1937, a total membership of 600,000 was reported in the League.^[16]

The organization of the League was shoddy and chaotic because it had a rather diverse membership as a united front organization. Around Wut'ai, Yen Hsi-shan's home, strong local elites related to Yen may have controlled the League. The radicals there took over the Mobilization Committee, another local mass organization formally created by Yen Hsi-shan.^[17] The rather uneven distribution of the League members in Shansi Province was also related to the internal politics of the CCP. Nieh Jung-chen and the unit of the 115th Division that opened up the forerunner of the Chin-Ch'a-Chi (Shansi-Chahar–Hopei) Border Region northeast of Wut'ai did not draw on a large number of civilian cadres for mass work.^[18] The Sacrifice League's presence was most conspicuous in the southeastern corner of Shansi, which was the home of the 129th Division and P'eng Te-huai. P'eng was very concerned about the united front with Yen Hsi-shan, his immediate superior.^[19] It seems that the Sacrifice League provided a cushion between them.

At what point, and for what motive, Yen Hsi-shan turned over the local administration of his province to the leaders of the League is obscure. According to one source, it was not until the northeastern half of the province fell to the Japanese forces that he appointed the League members to administrative posts in the occupied areas.^[20] This paralleled Chiang Kai-shek's practice toward the Communists. Sung Shao-wen was given the post of hsien magistrate in Wut'ai.^[21] Then

[14] Gillin, p. 232.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Van Slyke, p. 134.

[17] Lin Piao, et al., Chin-pei yu-chi chan-cheng chi-shih , pp. 79–80, 105–106. According to this account, the Mobilization Committee was authorized only in areas occupied by the Japanese forces.

[18] K'ang-Jih yu-chi-tui ti tsu-chih yü chan-shu [Organization and tactics of anti-Japanese guerrillas] (K'ang-Jih chan-cheng yen-chiu-hui), p. 41. One other area where hostility toward the Sacrifice League is often expressed by the Communist cadres is northwestern Shansi, commanded by Ho Lung. See Lo Kui-po, "K'ang-chan liang-chou-nien ti Chin hsi-pei yü wo-chün" [Northwestern Shansi and our army on the second anniversary of resistance], Chün-cheng tsa-chih (hereinafter cited as Military Affairs Journal ) (Chün-cheng tsa-chih-she, the Eighth Route Army), September, 1938, pp. 58, 60.

[19] The Case of Peng Teh-huai , p. 191. The Chin-Chi-Yü District had many cadres who supported the Wang Ming line on united front questions. Their local slogan was "everything through Shansi." Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 199.

[20] Pacification War , No. 1, p. 211.

[21] Ibid. , p. 86. He was to head the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region government.

Yen interceded with Nanking to secure recognition of the Communist base in this area as a border region.^[22] Precisely what was authorized is not known. But it is certain that neither Yen nor Chiang authorized what was later called the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region, which went beyond the Second War Zone in Shansi.^[23] In addition, the third district special commissioner's office in the southeast (Po I-po), the fifth district in the southwest (Jung Wu-sheng), and the sixth district in the northwest (Chang Wen-ang) were given to the Communist members of the League.^[24] In these places Communist bases were built up on the basis of the pre-existing government structure or through "united front from above."^[25]

Outside of Shansi, Communist bases had to be constructed from the ground up. Just before the Lukouchiao Incident, the CCP dispatched small groups of Party cadres as organizers to many areas of north China. The Conference of Party Delegates in May of 1937 seems to have been the occasion for putting Communist organizations on war footing in north China. For instance, some thirty cadres—"professional revolutionaries"—began building the forerunner of the Chin-Chi-Yü District Party Committee by reviving old underground contacts.^[26] A similar work began in Shantung. "Far in advance of the war of resistance," it was reported,

responsible Communist party members who returned to Shantung from a meeting in Yenan planned how to develop guerrilla warfare when the Japanese bandits attacked. Before there was any invasion of Shantung by the enemy, each local Party organization in all of Shantung entered the stage of detailed implementation. . . .^[27]

By early November, six divisions and one brigade of Japanese forces remained in north China. At this point, the Party Center issued its directive stating that the stage of regular warfare by the Kuomintang forces was ended.^[28] This was an order to the Communist units to concentrate their efforts on base construction. All four quadrants of

[22] Gillin, p. 275.

[23] The Eighth Route Army was authorized to operate in northern Shansi. Soviet Russia in China , p. 83. In 1937, the areas along the Peiping–Hankow railway were designated as the First War Zone. Pacification War , No. 1, p. 52. They did not belong to Yen Hsi-shan's command.

[24] Van Slyke, p. 136.

[25] Growth of one revolutionary base , pp. 48–49.

[26] Ibid. , p. 198. See also Ibid. , pp. 18–20, 198–206, for a most detailed account of Party expansion in the early stage of the war.

[27] K'ang-Jih chan-cheng shih-ch'i chieh-fang-ch'ü kai-kuang [General conditions of the liberated areas during the anti-Japanese war] (hereinafter cited as Liberated Areas ) (Peking: Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1953), p. 81.

[28] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 16.

Shansi Province, divided by the Tat'ung–P'uchow railway running north and south and the Chengting–Taiyuan railway running east and west, were taken up. After the Battle of P'inghsingkuan in the north-east, the 115th Division left a unit of 2,000 men around Wut'ai under Nieh Jung-chen's command to build the forerunner of the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region. Below the Wut'ai area on the southern side of the Chengting–Taiyuan railroad and Niangtzukuan was the home of the 129th Division led by Liu Po-ch'eng. What was later to become the Chin-Chi-Yü (Shansi–Hopei–Honan) District of Chin-Chi-Lu-Yü (Shansi–Hopei–Shantung–Honan) Border Region started from a tiny circle around Hoshun, Yüshe, and Liao hsien . In the northwest corner between the Yellow River and the Tat'ung–P'uchow railway the 120th Division led by Ho Long dug in on both sides of the Great Wall around Ningwu, Shuo, and Shench'ih hsien .^[29]

The main force of the 115th Division, led by Lin Piao, followed the Japanese forces moving into the southwestern corner of the province. Apparently it was ordered to build a base in Chungt'iao mountain, which runs north and south on the west side of the T'aihang mountain.^[30] Lin Piao's unit had once taken this area in the spring of 1936. Some of its troops were natives of the area recruited on that occasion. There is no evidence, however, that the division succeeded in building a base here. Shortly afterward, the division was redeployed to Shantung. P'eng Te-huai was later accused of ordering some Communist units withdrawn from the Linfen area for fear of offending Yen Hsi-shan.^[31] It is my inference that he was removing Lin Piao's unit from the area for the sake of better relations in the united front.

In contrast, Nieh Jung-chen's vigorous efforts in building the Chin-Ch'a-Chi base so closely conformed to Mao's line that his base was upheld as the "model anti-Japanese base" in 1939.^[32] The speed of expansion of this base was phenomenal. Until about March, 1938, it relied almost wholly on the original contingent of military personnel to conduct its mass and political work. A desperate shortage of cadres was reported, though this was not peculiar to this area. "From all sides," we are told, "came the cry, 'we need cadres.' " Old security personnel, clerks, stable hands, and cooks were all assigned to the task of being a guerrilla leader or a cadre "whether or not they wanted it."^[33] The first winter was cold and miserable. But with the setting up

[29] Johnson, Peasant Nationalism , pp. 104–106.

[30] Mao Tse-tung-chi , V, 325.

[31] The Case of Peng Teh-huai , p. 191.

[32] See Mao's prefatory remark to K'ang-Jih mo-fan ken-chü-ti Chin-Chi-Ch'a pien-ch'ü [The model anti-Japanese base Shansi–Hopei–Chahar Border Region] (Chün-cheng tsa-chih-she, 1939), pp. 1–2. This was written on March 2, 1939.

[33] Ibid. , p. 6.

of the infrastructure and mass organizations, the system of requisitioning grain from the countryside began to work. Already in February most of the guerrilla units began training and regrouping for "regularization."^[34] In March, the army withdrew from the job of running mass work and played only a supplementary role in it.^[35] What started as a guerrilla district was gradually growing into a base. In January, the Border Region Temporary Administrative Commission came into being. In March, hsien representatives of various national salvation associations—mass organizations—met.^[36]

This base expanded eastward into central Hopei by establishing a liaison with the remnants of the Kuomintang forces under Lü Cheng-ts'ao. The union of Lü and the Eighth Route Army was in fact the tail end of the long process of the CCP's united front from below with Chang Hsüeh-liang, which earlier resulted in the disintegration of his forces and his revolt against Chiang Kai-shek at Sian. Lü began his military career as a youth by joining Chang Tso-lin's Northeastern Army and moved upward rapidly to become an officer. After the Mukden Incident he was assigned to work under General Wan Fu-lin. By the time the CCP started to infiltrate the Northeastern Army, then being used for anti-Communist campaign, Lü was a regimental commander. It is said that Chang Hsüeh-szu, Hsüeh-liang's younger brother, had persuaded Lü to join the CCP secretly by the time the war began.^[37] During the defense of Paoting in October, 1937, his regiment separated from Wan Fu-lin who connived with the Japanese to flee. The military hardware of Lü's regular unit impressed the poorly-equipped Communist forces. Nieh Jung-chen contacted him and succeeded in recruiting the whole unit into the Eighth Route Army. Lü also served concurrently as the head of the Central Hopei Administrative Office. It is quite possible that the Communists had some difficulty in dealing with the troops of the Northeastern Army under Lü's command.^[38] In early 1939, Ho Lung descended on central Hopei with the main force of the 120th Division and secured

[34] Jo Fei, "Hua-pei yu-chi-tui yü min-chung yu-chi chan-cheng fa-chan ti ching-yen" [Guerrillas in north China and experiences of developing popular guerrilla war], Cheng-chih kung-tso lun-ts'ung [Collection of essays on political work] (Chün-cheng tsa-chih-sha, 1940), p. 118.

[35] Shu T'ung, "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü k'ang-chan san-nien-lai cheng-chih kungtso kai-kuang" [Overview of political work in the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region in the three years of war], Ibid. , p. 215.

[36] K'ang-Jih mo-fan ken-chü-ti Chin-Chi-Ch'a , p. 18.

[37] Huang Chen-hsia, ed., Chung-Kung chün-jen-chih [Mao's Generals ] (Hong Kong: Research Institute of Contemporary History, 1968), pp. 97–98.

[38] Kusano Fumio, Shina henku no kenkyu^[*] [A study of China's border regions] (Tokyo: Kokuminsha, 1944), pp. 15–17.

the area as a source of grain for Nieh Jung-chen's mountain base.

In the spring of 1938, Sung Shih-lun and Teng Hua led a unit of the 120th Division, called the Yenpei Detachment into eastern Hopei. This area constituted the link between Manchuria and north China. The Detachment settled in Fanshan hsien in Yenshan mountain range. It was made up of six hundred soldiers of southern extraction from the former Red 29th Army, and they appeared to have abused the peasants. The natives organized themselves into an association called Liu-shan-hui and refused to supply the Detachment with grain. The conflict erupted into a peasant insurrection, in the course of which the peasant association was destroyed.^[39] It is not known whether the Japanese were behind this insurrection. In that summer, the Japanese forces in turn launched a campaign against the Communist unit and routed it. Later Sung Shih-lun was reprimanded by the Party for his failure and for his abuse of the peasant masses.^[40] In the following winter, Hsiao K'e, the vice commander of the 120th Division, led a unit into the same area to resume Sung's mission. By the summer of 1941, he had established a guerrilla base called the Chi-Je-Liao (Hopei–Jehol–Liaoning) Military District, subordinated to the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region. The unit maintained a lean existence.

It became the task of the 129th Division, operating in the Shangtang area just below the Chengting–Taiyuan railway in Shansi Province, to expand eastward into the southern Hopei where it borders on Shantung. Southern Hopei provided the lateral link between the durable bases in the mountains of Shansi and Shantung. In the spring of 1938, a small reconnaissance patrol of cavalry descended on the plain and was met by a band of guerrillas organized by refugee students from Peiping and Tientsin.^[41] The guerrilla group was led by Yang Hsiu-feng, formerly a professor of history at the National Normal College in Peiping and the Director of the Education Department in the Hopei Provincial Government. Some time during the political upheaval preceding the war, he had been recruited by Liu Shao-ch'i to work with the CCP. For a brief while after the war, he worked in the Paoting headquarters of the Kuomintang forces in mobilizing the

[39] Ibid. , pp. 22–23.

[40] Kuan-yü Sung Shih-lun t'ung-chih ti chüeh-ting [The decision concerning comrade Sung Shih-lun], cited in Pao-shu, ed., Chien-wei chung-yao ts'an-k'ao tzu-liao hui-pien [Collection of important reference data about traitors and puppets] (no date, no publisher listed) (BI), p. 35.

[41] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 25.

youths.^[42] He took with him some units of the Hopei People's Army, a Kuomintang regional force. Between March and May, his and several other guerrilla units were joined by the regular units. Hsü Hsiang-ch'ien and Sung Jen-ch'iung brought with them parts of the 129th and the 115th Divisions. Yang Hsiu-feng moved into Nankung with Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the political commissar of the 129th Division, to build a base government for the Southern Hopei Military District.^[43] By September, they were competing with the Kuomintang's Hopei governor Lu Chung-lin who was dispatched to Nankung to reclaim the lost area.

In the spring of 1938, as Hsüchow and K'aifeng on the Lunghai railway fell, the CCP seems to have anticipated that the North China Area Army and what was then called the Central China Expeditionary Forces, moving up Yangtze River, would link up with each other across Honan Province. Wu Chih-p'u and P'eng Hsüeh-fen organized the Sixth Detachment of the New Fourth Army, in what was then called the Yü-Wan-Su (Honan–Anhwei–Kiangsu) Border Region, with the help of students from K'aifeng.^[44] The anticipated link-up of the Japanese forces of north and central China did not take place, and the area was designated the Fifth War Zone by the Kuomintang. The designation of the Yü-Wan-Su Border Region was later withdrawn by the CCP.^[45]

One should not be misled by the CCP's maps of its border regions into thinking that they indicate the boundaries of Communist areas in the early stage of the war. These maps show the state of affairs at the end of the war; they conceal the difficulties encountered in some areas by the Communist forces early in the war. In contrast to the initial success in most of Shansi Province, the CCP encountered serious problems in Shantung and on the border of southern Shansi, northern Honan, and western Shantung. For some reason there is very little data concerning the Communist forces in Shantung. What little that are available today show that the Eighth Route Army did not make much headway there until the war was nearly over. In the early part of the war, serious opposition to the Communists came from the natives, not the Japanese forces.

The border area of southern Shansi, western Shantung, and northern Honan was called Hsiao Chi-Lu-Yü (Small Hopei–Shantung–Honan) District to distinguish it from the latter-day Chi-Lu-Yü (Hopei–

[42] Who's Who in Communist China (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1970), II, 748.

[43] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 26.

[44] Central China Bureau First Plenum , pp. 40–41.

[45] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 7.

Map 5
The Chin-Ch'a-Chi (Shansi–Chahar–Hopei) Border Region, circa 1944

Shantung–Honan) or the Ta Chi-Lu-Yü (Large Hopei–Shantung–Honan) District, which encompassed the Southern Hopei District and the Hsiao Chi-Lu-Yü District.^[46] P'eng Te-huai went on an inspection tour of north China to solve "local confusion" at the behest of Chiang Kai-shek in the spring of 1938. He conceded that the conditions in northern Honan were most unsatisfactory. "There are no genuine mass movements there yet," he said, "and the feudal Hui-men organization is still very widespread."^[47] Northern Honan along the Lunghai railway was the stronghold of the China Youth Party, a rival of both the Kuomintang and the CCP. In 1938, the Japanese Army sought to prevail on Wu P'ei-fu to lead a puppet government, but he refused. Native cooperation with the Japanese in the Hsüchow–K'aifeng area was the by-product of that plot. The China Youth Party had a membership of 20,000 at the end of 1940, and its own military forces actively assisted in the defense of the Lunghai and the Tientsin–Pukow railways.^[48]

The Ta Chi-Lu-Yü District included western Shantung west of the Tientsin–Pukow railway. Here was one of three clusters of Communist guerrilla activities in Shantung. In this marshy area in the Old Yellow River basin, the father and son team of Fan Chu-hsien and Fan Shu-shen activated traditional rural self-defense when the warlord governor of Shantung, Han Fu-ch'ü, fled from the Japanese forces. Fan Chu-hsien was the Kuomintang's Sixth Area Special Commissioner. It is reported that he was assisted by 1,600 students.^[49] In the twelve hsien in the Sixth District around Liaoch'eng, he organized 30,000 peasants into ten groups (t'uan ). Early in the war he seemed to have been on good terms with Shen Hung-lieh, Han Fu-ch'ü's successor. Shen paid for and equipped the peasants. The guerrillas grew to a force of 50,000 in thirty units.^[50] In November, 1938, however, the Kuomintang's Shantung Provincial Government organized the landlords and the Hui-men into a "big insurrection." Many

[46] Ibid. , pp. 29, 50.

[47] "Chien-ch'ih hua-pei k'ang-chan yü kung-ku t'uan-chi," [Uphold the resistance in north China and strengthen the unity], Ch'ün-chung , No. 8–9, May 25, 1938, p. 241.

[48] Pacification War , No. 1, pp. 69, 417–419, 486.

[49] Johnson, Peasant Nationalism , p. 111.

[50] Fan Chu-hsien fu-tzu hsün kuo-nan [Sacrifice of Fan Chu-hsien father and son for national crisis] (The Political Department, the Kweilin Headquarters), pp. 9, 14. This, a Kuomintang propaganda pamphlet, gives us to believe that Fan Chu-hsien was killed by the Japanese. Actually, the Japanese forces were not capable of tracking down and assassinating a popular leader like him.

thousands of peasants put down Fan Chu-hsien's guerrillas and killed Fan Chu-hsien himself.^[51]

After this, western Shantung had only one cluster of guerrilla activities. The Hsien Party Committee of T'aian, a short distance south of Tsinan, organized guerrilla bands in Mt. T'ai (T'aishan). The force grew to one thousand by May, 1938, and called itself a unit of the Shantung Column. It was also assisted by students. The activities of this band were indistinguishable from ordinary peasant insurrection. It seemed to have made its living by attacking landlords.^[52] Mt. T'ai was in the large square bounded on the north by the Tsintao–Tsinan railway, on the west by the Tientsin–Pukow railway, on the south by the Lunghai railway, and by the Yellow Sea on the east. In the center was Mengshan, which provided the base of operation for the Kuomintang forces until 1943. After the fall of Tsinan and Tsingtao, regional forces led by the new governor Shen Hung-lieh moved into the area. The foundation of his power was 260 local self-defense groups, including militia (min-t'uan ) and Hui-men.^[53]

Toward the end of 1938, the Kuomintang government was alarmed by the expansion of the Chinese Communist bases in unauthorized areas in north China, and it began sending its officials and armed forces behind the Japanese lines. Yü Hsüeh-chung was appointed commander of the Shantung–Kiangsu War Zone. He and Shen Hung-lieh cooperated with Lu Chung-lin, the governor of Hopei, against the Communists. By April of 1939, the Kuomintang forces were beefed up by the 51st and 57th Armies which had infiltrated into western Shantung.^[54] The CCP, too, overcame its initial shortage of cadres as the bases in Shansi and Hopei were built up. Ch'en Kuan, who assumed the command of the 115th Division when Lin Piao was wounded in 1938, moved the 343rd Brigade from southeastern Shansi. At the same time Hsü Hsiang-ch'ien, the vice commander of the 129th Division, led a part of the Division into western Shantung.^[55] The life of the Communist regulars of the Shantung Column seems to have been rather difficult. According to Hsü Hsiang-ch'ien, in late 1940, "the development of the anti-Japanese forces is uneven" in Shantung. He continued, " . . . strictly speaking up until today Shantung is still not a consolidated base." He mentioned the T'aishan area in western Shantung and Fenglai, Huanghsien, Kaiyang, and Yehhsien in

[51] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 305.

[52] Liberated Areas , pp. 81–82; Ho Kan-chih, p. 333.

[53] Liberated Areas , p. 83.

[54] Pacification War , No. 1, p. 160.

[55] Huang Chen-hsia, Mao's Generals , p. 281.

Chiaotung as the only two areas where the Communist forces were in control.^[56]

The guerrilla movement in Chiaotung was evidently an outgrowth of the tradition of coastal self-defense as well as piracy. Shantung's coast had been ravaged by Japanese pirates in Ming and early Ch'ing times, and fishermen and peasants of these areas had a tradition of para-military organization. In many places defensive fortifications against old pirates still remain. The peninsula also had its own pirates. By September, 1938, the so-called Fifth Detachment of the Eighth Route Army's Shantung Column had come into being, and included a water-borne force.^[57]

Not very much is known about the conditions in northwestern Shansi, the forerunner of the Chin-Sui (Shansi–Suiyüan) Border Region. The movement of the Communist forces here was confined to the narrow strip between the Peiping–Suiyüan railway in the north and the Lishih–Fenyang highway to the south. Yen Hsi-shan kept his own forces below the Lishih–Fenyang highway, in the southwestern corner of the province. There were twenty-seven hsien in the northwestern corner, but the Communist control of the area appeared to be tenuous. Northwestern Shansi was very mountainous and underpopulated. Its value was in the fact that it was the corridor connecting Shen-Kan-Ning with Chin-Ch'a-Chi and other north China bases. But this route was nearly severed later when Japanese pacification intensified. Peasant mobilization in the area was frustrated, and collaboration by the landlords with the Japanese forces was conspicuous.^[58] This may have been related to Yen Hsi-shan's hostility toward the Communists and to the collaboration of the Mongols in the north. Ho Lung, who commanded the Communist base here, spent all of 1939 in central Hopei with the main unit of the 120th Division. During that time one brigade and one regiment of regular troops stayed behind. No local government came into existence until 1941. One notable development in this base was the growth of the Shansi New Army, a regional force that was wrested from Yen Hsi-shan's command by the Sacrifice League. Hsü Fan-t'ing played a major role in the New Army.^[59]

[56] Chieh-fang , No. 119, p. 26.

[57] Hsüeh-chan pa-nien ti Chiaotung tzu-ti-ping [Son-and-brother-soldiers of Chiaotung in eight years of bloody war] (Chiaotung hsin-hua shu-tien, 1945), p. 3.

[58] Lo Kui-po, "K'ang-chan liang-chou-nien ti Chin hsi-pei . . . ," p. 56; Ho Lung, "Chin hsi-pei chih chin-hsi" [Northwestern Shansi today and yesterday], Military Affairs Journal , April, 1939, pp. 5–9.

[59] About Hsü Fan-ti'ing and the origin of the Shansi New Army, see Johnson, Peasant Nationalism , pp. 105–106; Van Slyke, pp. 135–138.

The foregoing survey of the Communist bases in the early stage of the war shows that their development was highly uneven. The gross and imprecise nature of available data does not permit accurate assessment. But it is safe to conclude that a spectacular growth of Communist power was correlated, on the one hand, with the disintegration of the old regime in the wake of the Japanese blitz and, on the other, with the careful groundwork that preceded the war. The CCP enjoyed both of these conditions in Shansi. The strength of the opposition in most of Shantung Province seemed to have something to do with local organization of the landlords and its linkage with regional Kuomintang leadership. It is interesting to recall that the Japanese forces stopped at the door to Shantung and negotiated for nearly three months with Han Fu-ch'ü for a peaceful surrender before moving in. This was very unlike the manner in which Hopei was taken. This fact might have given the local elites a chance to prepare for possible anarchy. Clearly there were some conditions peculiar to Shantung. Unfortunately, we do not know what accounts for the success of Communist mobilization in the Chiaotung area and the failure elsewhere. The case of the Liaoch'eng area, where the peasants were mobilized by one set of government officials and countermobilized by another, suggests the importance of leadership at this stage.

Spontaneous Mobilization within the Tradition

It is well known that in developing the rural strategy of revolution with the sanction of the Sixth Congress, the Chu–Mao Group put together some axioms to be followed in selecting the sites for the revolutionary bases. The soviets were to be built in areas difficult of access; they should fall between the spheres of influence of various warlords, and between the jurisdiction of several provincial authorities. In addition, areas where pre-existing social organizations were well entrenched and hostile to the revolution had to be avoided. These organizations included armed landlords, lineage organizations, secret societies, bandits, and the like. In November, 1928, Mao reported from Chingkanshan that "wherever the Red Army goes, it finds the masses cold and reserved; only after propaganda and agitation do they slowly rouse themselves . . . We have an acute sense of loneliness and are every moment longing for the end of such a lonely life."^[60] Subsequently, this base was abandoned. Mao wrote to the Party Center of the advisability of building the soviet in southern Kiangsi

[60] SW , I, 99.

Map 6
The Chin-Chi-Lu-Yü (Shansi–Hopei–Shantung–Honan) Border Region, circa 1944

with the remark that "the economy in Kiangsi is chiefly feudalistic; the power of merchant capital is relatively weak, and the armed forces of the landlords are weaker than in any other southern province."^[61] Even a single landlord, non-aligned with regional power, could pose a problem for the Red Army on occasion. I quote from Mao:

Some of our comrades put their faith only in political influence fancying that problems can be solved merely by influence. This is blind faith. In 1936, we were in Paoan [in northwestern Shensi]. Forty to fifty li away, there was a fortified village held by a landlord despot. The Central Committee of the Party was then in Paoan and our political influence could be considered very great indeed, but the counter-revolutionaries in this village obstinately refused to surrender. We swept to the south, we swept to the north, all in vain. Not until our broom swept right into the village did the landlord cry out, "Ow I give up!" . . . .^[62]

It took three months for the Red Army to take the walled village by a combination of political and military means.

These are some illustrations of what Philip Kuhn calls the "militarization" of China's rural life. This condition dates from the nineteenth century. Villages organized in para-military formations primarily for self-defense were related at once to the rise of the Taipings and—paradoxically—to their demise. It is also recognized that the peasant mass movement led by the CCP was an adaptation of the infrastructure provided by this tradition. One element of the CCP's power in the rural areas stemmed from its ability to reshuffle and reintegrate this institution into its own revolutionary infrastructure. The tradition of self-defense itself was politically neutral because it derived from the fiercely parochial attachment of the peasants to their villages. The uneven progress of the CCP's base construction in areas from which the Kuomintang's central forces were absent seems to be accounted for by this fact. Where the CCP failed to pre-empt the spontaneous mobilization of the peasants, it encountered serious difficulty, as will be shown in Chapter VIII. The tradition of rural self-defense was not a ready-made source of power for the Communists; it had to be transformed without emasculating it. Thus, a clear distinction must be drawn between what came "from the masses" and what the Party did "to the masses."^[63]

[61] Ibid. , p. 127.

[62] Ibid. , V, 19–20.

[63] My task in explaining the CCP's power in the rural areas must reckon with the following three facts: (1) "peasant revolution" as such failed in Kiangsi; (2) rather radical "social revolution" involving redistribution of land was never abandoned by Mao; and (3) the united front as a shield to protect the revolution in itsinfancy was necessary. I question the thesis that, either because of chronic poverty or destruction caused by the war, the peasants rose up spontaneously or automatically in support of the Communist partisans. I agree with Samuel P. Huntington: "Americans typically tend to think of power in zero-sum terms: a gain in power for one person or group must be matched by a loss of power by other people or groups. The communist approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the 'collective' or expansible aspect of power. . . . The problem is not to seize power but to make power . . . . " Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 144.

The readers' attention is called to map 4 made by the North China Area Army to show the dispositions of all forces as of October, 1938. What strikes the eye is the utter confusion of the battle line in north China, in spite of the fact that the map abbreviates the more complicated local situation. Except for northern Hopei, southern Chahar, northern Shansi, and the areas between Tsinan and Hsüchow along the Tientsin–Pukow railway, the Japanese forces, in their own judgment, controlled only the rail network. In the parlance of guerrilla warfare, the Japanese forces controlled only the "points" and the "lines" but not the "plane." In the spring of 1939, following the occupation of Hankow, the Japanese forces dispersed themselves into the countryside, thus adding further to the complicated pattern. Mao describes this state of affairs as ch'üan-ya hsiang-ts'o (literally "dog's teeth gnashed together" or "jigsaw pattern").

The unique character of the war was the extreme complexity of the relationship that obtained among various forces operating on the battlefield, something which will never be repeated elsewhere. These forces can be grouped into four categories: the Japanese forces and those that were affiliated with them; the Kuomintang forces and those that were affiliated with them; the Communist forces and their affiliated guerrilla units; and those forces that were primarily neutral. With the exception of the Japanese forces proper, all forces in north China varied among themselves as to degree of combat worthiness and shades of loyalty or political ideology. The war was not a simple resistance against foreign invaders. It is the sociological foundation of this jigsaw pattern in which we are interested.

About one year after the war had begun, Liu Shao-ch'i wrote a report on the conditions of guerrilla warfare in north China. In spite of its peculiarly detached style, intended for an external audience, he was definitely describing in part the process of the expansion of forces under his control on the battlefield marked by the jigsaw pattern.^[64]

[64] "Chien-ch'ih hua-pei k'ang-chan-chung ti wu-chuang pu-tui" [Firmly uphold the armed forces in the resistance in north China], Chieh-fang , No. 43–44, pp. 49–53.

In the wake of the Japanese invasion, the countryside of north China seethed with armed organizations of predominantly native character. In Shantung, it is reported that "in the spring of 1938, groups of t'u-hao ["local tyrants"] and yu-min ["drifters"] in the area . . . established guerrilla forces everywhere, cleverly finding excuses and appointing themselves 'commanders'."^[65] To the invaders, all of these armed organizations looked like "local bandits," and in some sense they were. Many of the bandits, Japanese observers noted, were "ideologicalized" (shisoka^[*] ). Liu Shao-ch'i called them "get–rich–against–the–Japanese bandits" (k'ang-Jih fa-ts'ai t'u-fei ).^[66] They were apparently setting up road blocks to collect transit tax in the name of the resistance to Japan.

An interesting example of the "ideologicalized" bandit is reported from northern Fukien. A Communist unit 3,000 men strong, left behind by Fang Chih-min, was eking out a bleak existence in the vicinity of the stronghold of the Big Sword Society. The bandits numbered 10,000 and were led by a chieftain named Lin Hsi-min. After some unsuccessful skirmishes with the bandits, the northern Fukien Special Committee opted for a peaceful co-existence. An agent was sent to Lin Hsi-min to negotiate a truce, which was successfully concluded. The chieftain, who was fond of wearing the yellow robe of a Buddhist monk and cherished the hope of becoming an emperor of China some day, was given some "ideological education." Eventually he agreed to carry a new inscription, alongside the old one, on his banner: "Resist Japan and Save the Nation." The bandits and the Communists cooperated with each other in raiding the landlords in the area.^[67] In north China, too, many bandit groups were raising the banner of "resistance to Japan." But "their main purpose is not resistance but looting to get rich and become powerful."^[68] Being apolitical in nature, they could just as easily be bribed to become traitors. The trouble at this time, from the standpoint of the CCP, was that the regional Chinese authorities were commissioning them indiscriminately to local security duties by giving them grandiose titles.^[69]

The CCP's policy toward bandits was flexible: it entered into tactical cooperation with them; then the bandits were "won over," destroyed, or "disintegrated" (wa-chieh ); and the soldiers and arms were reintegrated into the Communist forces. This was, so to speak, a combination of united front from above and below. The choice de-

[65] Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao , VII, 163.

[66] "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü kung-tso ti ching-yen," p. 302.

[67] Hung-ch'i p'iao-p'iao , XI, 117.

[68] Liu Shao-ch'i, "Chien-ch'ih hua-pei . . . ," p. 50.

[69] Ibid.

pended on the relative power of the Communist and the bandit forces. "If local bandits active in the enemy occupied area are adequate for the task of wrecking the enemy's order, and if the anti-Japanese forces are relatively weak there," said Liu Shao-ch'i, "then we should persuade and unite with the bandits."^[70] At this point in the war, the CCP was somewhat hesitant to attack the local forces formally in the chain of the Chinese command. The CCP negotiated with the higher authorities to withdraw the commission from the bandits. In any case, bandits were not tolerated in areas where the Communist forces were building a base. Merciless execution awaited the most recalcitrant leaders. "In the anti-Japanese bases where order and government have already been established and where the army and guerrilla forces are relatively more powerful, local bandits should not be allowed to harass and wreck the rear."^[71] Caution was exercised in attacking a bandit unit so as not to push them into the hands of the Japanese. Some bandits were better armed than the Communist regulars. Then the Eighth Route Army, too, had to enter into some sort of boundary agreement to keep out of the bandits' stronghold.

A second major formation of local self-defense had a more mass character. It was made up of secret societies such as the Red Spears, T'ienmenhui, and the like. In central Hopei alone, there were more than seventy varieties.^[72] Liu Shao-ch'i did not explain how the distinction was to be drawn between the secret societies and the bandits. Again, under certain circumstances, they were indistinguishable. But the CCP did try to distinguish between them and to accord different treatment to each. The Party's attitude toward secret societies was marked by a degree of tenderness. This was presumably due to the inseparable tie between these heterodox organizations and peasant revolts against the imperial regime in the past. Secret societies had always been the primary source of strength and comfort for the poorer masses against oppression of the orthodox hierarchy. Though they were a historical product of "feudalism" destined to pass away, they were also a fallen ally of the Chinese Communist movement, as it were, deserving therapeutic treatment. Besides such ideological affinities to secret societies, the CCP had practical motives for mobilizing them on its side. In July, 1936, for instance, the Soviet Government proposed united front with the Kolaohui against Japanese imperialism. It extolled the Kolaohui's opposition to the Manchus and the role it played in the 1911 Revolution. It condemned the

[70] Ibid. , p. 51.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Shu T'ung, "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü k'ang-chan san-nien-lai . . . ," p. 219.

Kuomintang's discriminatory treatment of Kolaohui members as "inferior human beings" and "thieves." The Kolaohui was promised the legal right to exist under the Soviet Government.^[73] Liu Chih-tan, who founded the Shensi–Kansu Soviet, was a leader of the Kolaohui.

Secret societies always existed in north China, according to Liu Shao-ch'i; but since the Japanese invasion, increased incidence of disturbances by straggling Chinese troops and bandits forced them to multiply. He spoke of them in conjunction with the Lienchuanghui, a landlord organization:

They are armed organizations preserved deep among the people. They grew spontaneously without having any legal basis in the state or the government, but they have a very long history. Their chief purpose is to oppose harsh and miscellaneous taxes and the disturbances by armies and local bandits. They are simple armed self-defense organizations. If the Japanese forces, straggling soldiers, and local bandits do not harass them in their own areas, they do not actively rise up against the Japanese, strike the local bandits, or fight guerrilla war. The majority of their leadership is gentry but they are especially suited to meet the backward, narrow, and selfish interests of the peasants. Therefore they are capable of creating very strong unity. Superstition is one method of unifying the peasants (though the Lienchuanghui has no superstition and is relatively better). In dealing with any problem, they start from their own interest. Whoever harasses and plunders them, they oppose and dissolve—regardless of whether you are the Japanese Army, puppet army, anti-Japanese army and government, local bandits, or whatever. They are politically neutral.^[74]

The secret societies and Lienchuanghui together constituted the direct successors to the popular defense mechanism which came into existence in the early nineteenth century. The presence of Lienchuanghui was reported in every village in central Hopi whereas secret societies were more numerous in Shantung.

In ordinary times, these organizations do not maintain formal military formations, according to Liu Shao-ch'i; but once an emergency rises and a battle is necessary, they can amass "a very great number." Their major strength is in local self-defense. If their leaders attempted to use the organizations in areas outside the narrow interest of the peasants, the organizations disintegrated easily. Liu warned the Communist forces in north China to be alert in the vicinity of these organizations, to maintain good discipline, and not to interfere with their religious beliefs or to insult the leaders.^[75] Liu revealed in pass-

[73] Ssu-wei-ai chung-yang cheng-fu tui Kolaohui hsüan-yen [Declaration of the Soviet Central Government towards Kolaohui], Mao Tse-tung-chi , V, 59–61.

[74] "Chien-ch'ih hua-pei . . . ," p. 51.

[75] Ibid.

ing that among some secret societies it was believed that Chu Te, the commander of the Eighth Route Army, was the descendant of Chu Hung-wu, a Ming emperor.^[76]

Of the organizations managed and led by the landlords, Lienchuanghui is best known and most frequently mentioned in the Communist sources.^[77] The Lienchuanghui is a more modern form of village self-defense found on the plain of north China, particularly in Hopei Province. It dates back to the beginning of the Republican era in origin, and it has been relied upon in times of disorder ever since. It is organized by village leadership made up of the landlords with the support of peasants. Agriculture was considerably commercialized in Hopei until the depression of the early 1930s frustrated further commercialization. The landholding pattern was more egalitarian here, with a larger number of more or less equal-sized holdings; this contrasted with Shansi Province, where a wide gulf separated the destitute many from the few who were rich. Rural self-defense in Hopei, therefore, relied not on the personal power and the fortified private estate of a single family but on cooperative efforts of the many. The natural village (ts'un ) was the unit, each providing a ta-tui (usually translated into "battalion"). Sometimes as many as several hundred villages joined in the formation in times of emergency. Weapons, in the possession of the landlords, were dug up from under the ground and passed out. The formation dissolved and the guns were buried again when each crisis had passed. In 1937, they came into life after the fall of Paoting and Shihchiachuang. There was one in every village in central Hopei.^[78]

There were two basic methods used in procuring recruits for village self-defense. Recruits could be hired from among semi-professional mercenaries or unemployed and landless peasants. The Lienchuanghui in Hopei were so large in size and numerous as to lead one to believe that they were constituted mostly of volunteers. In either case, the recruits were mouths to be fed, which were not productive. In the Communist vocabulary, a functionary—be he a soldier or an administrator—who works full time on the job is referred to as t'o-li sheng-ch'an or "divorced from production." Full time work was the precondition for professionalization. It also presupposed a degree of collective wealth of the organization and a collective political power for redistributing it in the form of taxation

[76] Ibid. , p. 52.

[77] Li Meng-ling, "Chi-chung cheng-ch'ü Lienchuanghui ti ching-yen chiao-hsün" [Experiences and lessons of winning over the Lienchuanghui in central Hopei], Military Affairs Journal , September, 1938, pp. 87–89.

[78] Ibid. , p. 87.

Map 7
The Shantung District, circa 1944

and pay. Regional security units such as pao-an-tui , represented a standing force of higher professionalization. The Lienchuanghui were relying on both types of recruitment. Most peasants left their work temporarily during an emergency to join the formation in response to some signal. Those who could not or would not volunteer were paying the expense according to the size of the cultivated land they owned (an-mou t'ang-p'ai ). A good number were too poor to afford the luxury of taking the time off from work unless they were paid for it. They were getting from three to five yuan a month or simply fed during shorter emergencies. The Lienchuanghui also hired former militia, police, and straightforward mercenaries. Altogether in central Hopei, 20,000 men were organized, not counting those who were "puppetized" (wei-hua ). The groups ranged in size from 200 men in Tinghsien on the Peiping–Hankow railway to 7,000 men at Hochien.

A Communist cadre wrote a report showing how to "win over" the Lienchuanghui and absorb it into the base infrastructure. According to him, the Lienchuanghui was politically neutral; for those who controlled it, it served the purpose of "protecting life and property" and of "raising capital for rising to official rank." The coming of the war did not affect the Lienchuanghui's primary concern, to wit, "not resistance against Japan, not surrender to Japan, but defense against local bandits and protection of the village." Villages organized by it would not let any force station itself nearby, would refuse to provide grain for the anti-Japanese troops, and would oppose "rational burden," a form of taxation administered by the Communist forces.^[79] Such an orientation of the Lienchuanghui posed a problem for the Communists.

But it was the instinct for self-preservation and political neutrality of the Lienchuanghui which enabled the Communist forces to win it over to the cause of "resistance" for the time being. In fact, the landlords were not opposed to the resistance as such. Many of them in this commercialized agricultural area fully understood the war situation. Implications of this over-all strategic factor were important even at this grass-roots level. The leaders could be persuaded. The amorphous outlook of the countryside was the result of another factor. Officials above the hsien level in the Kuomintang regime fled when the Japanese forces rolled through the area on their way south. In Shansi Province, desertion of official posts was caused in part by the fear of the Communist forces which were known to be operating behind the Japanese forces. Had these officials been present, they

[79] Ibid.

could have enlisted Lienchuanghui groups with relative ease. The success of Fan Chu-hsien in western Shantung stemmed from the mobilization of similar local organizations. In the absence of such a superstructure, the predominantly local orientation of the Lienchuanghui prevented it from uniting across the entire central Hopei. The Communist forces, the only organized force in the area, moreover, posed as an arm of the central government with perfect legality.

The isolation and parochialism of the Lienchuanghui rendered it an easy target for the application of the united front work-method by the Communist forces. There were many contradictions, it was reported, in and between Lienchuanghui groups. There were feuds of a personal nature between villages, tension between the leaders and the followers about the pay, among the leaders concerning the assessment of expenditures, etc. The Communist forces used whatever means was expedient to divide them. Political control and discipline of the Eighth Route Army was infinitely superior to the leadership of isolated villages. For instance, a Communist unit was fired upon by a Lienchuanghui group without provocation. It sustained some casualties but did not return fire. Eventually, a liaison was established with the village. There were windfalls for the Communists as well. "All that is necessary is for them and the Japanese to open fire," it was reported, "then they cannot but automatically depend on us; when they turn to us asking for title, we may first give them rather big ones, then gradually strengthen their cadres, leadership, and political work to change their two-faced attitude."^[80] As the ranks of a Lienchuanghui organization were divided, stubborn opposition to the Eighth Route Army was isolated. The rebellious were marked out for treatment as traitors. The remainder of its members were reintegrated into the lower rungs of the base infrastructure.

Local self-defense was the cause for, as well as the reaction against, warlordism at the regional level. Beneath the shiny hardware of warlord armies was a continuum of armed organizations that reached down to the root in the villages. However they were articulated at the very top, these local self-defense organizations were indistinguishable at the very bottom: the recruits were by and large interchangeable among the Lienchuanghui, secret societies, local bandits, puppet troops, Kuomintang and Communist units, or between orthodox and heterodox formations. In the first two years of the war, the CCP and the Eighth Route Army went about their way collecting these archaic formations that were already in existence and slowly converted them.

[80] Ibid. , p. 89.

In addition to the three local groups discussed above, the Communists recruited small Kuomintang units that had lost contact with their command during the retreat. These cases possibly belong to the category of mutiny. The Northeastern Army under Lü Cheng-ts'ao's command seems to have subsisted by plundering the countryside before it was legitimized by co-optation into the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region. A warlord force of rather dubious quality, the unit had to go through extensive retraining and regrouping under Communist supervision.

In the Wut'ai areas, the regular army went directly down to the village to organize guerrilla forces. It is quite possible that the strength of Yen Hsi-shan's influence in the traditional self-defense groups there made them undesirable for the CCP's purposes. In Shansi Province, new hsien magistrates appointed by the Communists tried to convert police and min-t'uan and the like.^[81] This was reported to be relatively difficult. In northwest Shansi, the anti-Japanese mass organizations of workers along the Tat'ung–P'uchow railway were converted into the Shansi New Army. Po I-po, Jung Wu-sheng and others were using the student leadership of the Sacrifice League to organize the Dare–to–Die Columns. Everywhere straggling Kuomintang soldiers were added on to the existing formations, though they were said to be "inadequate to harass the enemy and excessive in harassing the people."^[82] The local CCP organizations multiplying in Hopei and Shantung were organizing rather elementary guerrillas in their respective areas. In 1938, Liu Shao-ch'i estimated that there were 300,000 guerrillas in north China. A good portion of these were gradually coming under the influence and leadership of the CCP. He stated that "it is by no means a difficult thing to collect men and arms to build guerrilla units . . . but . . . it is more difficult to turn them into well disciplined and operational units."^[83]

The Communist efforts in building a base, whether through the existing framework of the Kuomintang government or from scratch, started with a cluster of a few hsien that corresponded to the chuan-ch'ü (special district) administered by chuan-yüan kung-shu (special district commissioner's office). When a sizable Communist unit moved into an area for base construction, it carried with it a sort of shadow government. Regiments, independent battalions, an equivalent unit

[81] K'ang-Jih yu-chi-tui ti tsu-chih yü chan-shu , p. 41. It is interesting to note that the Japanese army found the uniformed puppet forces without local connections less reliable than the irregular forces at hsien level or below, such as pao-an-tui .

[82] Ibid. , p. 42.

[83] "Chien-ch'ih hua-pei . . . ," p. 52.

or above—all had a political department with a mass work section under it.^[84] A unit engaged in base construction was apparently accompanied by civilian cadres of considerable competence to staff important administrative offices at chuan-ch'ü, hsien , and ch'ü levels.^[85] As a rule Kuomintang officials of hsien level or above had fled; incumbent officials of hsiang (administrative village) level or below stayed on since they had roots in their villages. They were usually allowed to stay on for a few years until a complete mobilization of the masses penetrated to the bottom of the base society. An official at any level who refused to cooperate with the Communists was gotten rid of quickly. The anticorruption measure in the Kuomintang's Program for Resistance and Reconstruction was relied on for justification.^[86] In Shansi there was a similar measure promulgated by Yen Hsi-shan. Those who looked for official wrongdoing had no difficulty; some officials were assassinated.^[87] But in most cases, such a measure seemed to have been unnecessary at this stage.

Posing as agents of the Kuomintang government, Communist troops and civilian cadres (e.g., the Sacrifice League or the Mobilization Committee) would enter a village. A mass meeting, including the incumbent village officials, was called, and a Communist cadre from the ch'ü level would make a speech. I offer an account of one such meeting held somewhere in the Wut'ai area in late 1937.

This evening we were to organize the Mobilization Committee in this village, and we invited the army to play skits. Peasants gathered shoulder to shoulder in front of the stage in the village, and women and children, too, were sitting in high places. . . . The chairman was a gentry. He explained in a shrill throaty voice that the Mobilization Committees have already been formed everywhere in Shanshi and that the head office exists in Taiyuan. . . . "Right now we will ask the ch'ü representative comrade XX to come forward and give us a talk." Everyone's attention was drawn to a young officer with an erect posture. . . .

"Tonight we have gathered to see the play, and I should not waste too much of your time. . . . Suppose we were to keep silent right now, can't we still hear the guns? (audience: 'Yah') The enemy has killed several thousand peasants around Lingch'iu. . . . Have you heard about that? (audience: 'Yah') The enemy's swords are about to fall on our heads. The Japanese bandits are getting ready to destroy our nation, destroy our homes. They want your lives.

[84] Chungkuo kuo-min ke-ming-chün ti-shih-pa chi-t'uan-chün cheng-chih kung-tso t'iao-lieh [Political work regulations of the 18th Group Army of the National Revolutionary Army], Military Affairs Journal , April, 1939, p. 131.

[85] For instance, see below, p. 139.

[86] Liu Shao-ch'i, "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü kung-tso ti ching-yen," p. 297.

[87] Ibid. , p. 314.

"Tonight we have gathered to organize ourselves and to drive the Japanese bandits out. First of all we must demand that harsh taxes should never ever be collected again. The destitutes cannot fight the Japanese and pay taxes at the same time. We must carry out governor Yen's principle, 'those who have money should contribute money, those who have labor should contribute labor'. . . . The chairman here, for instance. He is rich. He wants to be a model. If those who have money don't want to contribute money, we must force them with everyone's pressure . . . . "^[88]

Under some such circumstances, a village branch of the Mobilization Committee was set up—again in keeping with Yen Hsi-shan's Wartime Mobilization Statute. Village officials sat ex officio on the Committee, but it was created de novo and existed outside of the government organization. Members of mass organizations being established concurrently were in all likelihood given a determining voice. These organizations, all having the title of "national salvation," were class organizations, in contrast to the formally united front character of the village government. The Communist power had just begun to reach the village level at this point, but it had a long way to go.

The tradition of mobilization for rural self-defense was still alive in 1937. It was spontaneous but very parochial in outlook. Hence, the peasants mobilized within the traditional structure could just as easily support the Eighth Route Army as oppose it, depending on leadership. The traditional leadership was neutralized in Shansi because of the united front. In Hopei, it was non-existent. Only the CCP provided the superstructure to integrate the village with hsien and special district levels. Because the mobilization under Communist leadership "developed from above to below and from outside, not from below nor from inside,"^[89] it is important to examine the catalyst of that mobilization, the land program.

The CCP's Land Program:
1937–1941

It is generally assumed that the CCP's land program had gone through a major change from the Kiangsi period to the resistance period. The origin of this notion is of course the CCP itself and its pledge of February and September, 1937, that confiscation of the landlords' property would be discontinued for the sake of the united front. But William Hinton's study of the social relationship in the rural bases leads one to doubt whether a thoroughgoing peasant mobilization

[88] Lin Piao, et al., Chin-pei yu-chi chan-cheng chi-shih , pp. 29–30.

[89] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 204.

was really compatible with a continued presence of the landlord class under any circumstances.^[90] To eliminate this confusion, I will examine in this section the land program of the CCP in the early stage of the war. The modified land program which was in effect after 1941 will be treated in Chapter VII. It will be shown that integration of the peasants into the infrastructure of the bases presupposed a land revolution.

To gain a proper perspective on this question, let us first take a look at the sequence of land revolution which became the standard procedure in the Kiangsi period. A succinct statement of its outline is found in a report written by Mao Tse-tung in 1933.^[91] In it he described the stages of land revolution in the Central Soviet, of which he was the chairman. At the outset he affirmed irrevocably:

All past experience has proved that only through the correct solution of the land problem and only through the fanning to the highest degree the flames of class struggle in the rural districts under the resolute class slogan can the broad peasant masses be mobilized, under the leadership of the proletariat, to take part in the revolutionary war, participate in the various aspects of Soviet reconstruction, and build up a strong revolutionary base. . . .^[92]

The statement is so unqualified as to cast doubt on the possibility the advanced struggle area." In the newly developed area,

After smashing the Kuomintang's main force and removing overt military threat to an area, the land revolution proceeded in three stages: the stage of land confiscation and land redistribution; the stage of land investigation; and the stage of land reconstruction. As the area advanced through these stages, it was called respectively the "newly developed area"; the "comparatively retarded area"; and the "advanced struggle area." In the newly developed area,

the unfolding of the land struggle is still in the stage of land confiscation and redistribution. Here the central problems are: the overthrow of the regime of the landlord class by armed forces, the establishment of a revolutionary provisional regime (a revolutionary committee); the build-up of local armed forces of the workers and peasants; the formation of revolutionary mass organizations; the confiscation of the land and other property of the landlord class, and the redistribution of the land of the rich peasants to the hired farm hands, poor peasants, and middle peasants.^[93]

[90] Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

[91] "The Land Investigation Drive Is the Central Task of Great Magnitude in Base Areas," in Hsiao Tso-liang, ed., The Land Revolution in China, 1930–1934 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 202–205.

[92] Ibid. , p. 202.

[93] Ibid. , pp. 202–203.

In the third stage,

solid Soviet regimes have been established, local armed forces and revolutionary mass organizations have been widely set up, the feudal and semi-feudal forces of landlords and rich peasants have been completely crushed, land has been thoroughly redistributed, and the land struggle of the peasant masses has entered upon the stage for the reform of land and the development of its productivity.^[94]

The specific purpose which occasioned this report was Mao's call to carry out a thorough drive for land investigation, the most important program for the second stage in the "retarded struggle area." By this time, counter-revolutionaries who openly resisted the Communist political power had been destroyed. The locus of counter-revolutionary forces had shifted from the overt military sphere to the more amorphous sociological sphere. The old ruling elites who survived the first stage "have taken off their counter-revolutionary masks and put on revolutionary masks." They continued to exert feudalistic influence on the poorer masses by all sorts of subterfuge. The method of dealing with the class enemy in this stage was land investigation (ch'a-t'ien ). It was a drive to discover the so-called "black field" (hei-t'ien ), land which was not recorded in the land register because of under-reporting. Those found concealing a "black field" were designated counter-revolutionaries in disguise and punished accordingly. Moreover, the whole land investigation drive was to be conducted a second, a third, or even a fourth time in some areas, each time netting new counter-revolutionaries. This pattern of continued revolutionary vigilance is confirmed by William Hinton from his observation of the post-war land revolution as well. Did the Chinese Communists really dispense with these programs during the war or not? If they did, what made it possible?

The major source of confusion about the land program of the war period is the extreme secrecy in which it has been surrounded until today. All of my search has failed to turn up any major directive or resolution for the initial period of the war. I must begin with an analysis of CCP documents prior to the war. The starting point is the position taken by the Wayaopao Resolution of December, 1935. It advocated that "the Communist Party and the soviet must make sure to satisfy the peasants' demand for land." In this way the CCP was to "join together the land revolution with the national revolution."^[95] The Resolution accepted Wang Ming's proposal made in Moscow that the soviet government relax its treatment of the rich peasants, and

[94] Ibid. , p. 203.

[95] Mao Tse-tung-chi , V, 34.

commercial and industrial enterprises belonging to the national bourgeoisie.^[96] Confiscation of the rich peasants' property ceased. But the policy of confiscating the property of the landlords and traitors in the "Japanese-occupied areas and their surroundings" remained intact.^[97]

By September, 1936, the CCP had decided to accept the bourgeoisie in the united front. But the landlords were never admitted into the united front. The CCP's telegram of February, 1937, promised simply that the policy of confiscation would be discontinued. Also in February, a propaganda document was issued by the Party to allay the fears of the members who took the united front proposal as a surrender to the Kuomintang. It assured them that the land which had already been confiscated in the past would not revert to the former owners.^[98] In March, confiscation ceased in the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region.^[99] Then on May 12, the rights of citizenship were formally restored to the landlords in those few hsien in Shen-Kan-Ning where they had not yet been liquidated.^[100] As late as May, however, some Party branches in the outlying areas were carrying out confiscation.^[101] At the May conference of Soviet Area Party Delegates in Yenan, Mao was criticized for his insistence on "anti-feudal" struggle. The debate seems to have touched on some important policy question in implementing united front strategy. It is my inference that either at this conference or perhaps earlier in the spring, the CCP formulated its policy on the land question and secretly disseminated it to Party and army units in the field.^[102]

It is quite possible that the CCP's pledge to cease confiscation was offered before it arrived at an internal consensus as to what alternative policy should be adopted toward the landlord class. In July, 1937, Mao offered an "Eight Point Program" and contrasted it with a policy which he condemned as "compromise and concessions." One item demanded, "Abolish exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous levies, reduce land rent, restrict usury, increase the workers' pay . . . . " The other proclaimed: "Financial policy should be based on the principle that those with money should contribute money and that the property

[96] Ibid. , pp. 30–31.

[97] Ibid. , p. 34.

[98] Warren Kuo, "The CCP Pledge of Allegiance to the Kuomintang," Issues and Studies , August, 1968, p. 49.

[99] Lin Po-ch'ü's report of January, 1939, Shen-Kan-Ning pien-ch'ü ts'an-i-hui wen-hsien hui-chi , p. 14.

[100] Electoral Laws of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region, Ibid. , p. 53.

[101] Min-hsi-nan chün-cheng wei-yüan-hui [Southwestern Fukien military affairs committee], Wei t'ing-chih nei-chan i-chih k'ang-Jih kei k'e-pu-tui k'e-chi tang ti hsin [The letter to all armed units and the Party at all levels concerning cessation of internal war and resistance against Japan] (BI).

[102] See above, pp. 40, 90.

Map 8
The Chin-Sui (Shansi–Suiyüan) Border Region, circa 1944

of the Japanese imperialists and Chinese traitors should be confiscated . . . . "^[103] The stormy meeting of the Politburo in Loch'uan in late August passed a "Ten Point Program." It repeated the same points as the Eight Point Program. Neither of them demanded a "unified progressive tax" which was stated as the Party's goal in Wayaopao.^[104] The term was not to be mentioned again until Mao made his report to the Sixth Plenum^[105] and the first Administrative Program of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region was proclaimed in April, 1939.^[106] The stated position of the CCP in August, 1937, therefore, was: (1) reduction in rent and interest; (2) new taxation system which reduced the rate of exaction at least on some peasants; (3) increase in pay for farm laborers; (4) continued expropriation of those who were labeled "traitors"; and (5) cessation of confiscating the property of the landlords qua landlord.

It is said that "if the relationship between the army and the civilians is handled poorly it originates mostly in the supply of food."^[107] In a country where the population was in a tight balance with the ecology, imposition of an extra number of people to be fed and clothed on the existing population of a given area often meant the difference between survival and starvation. As a part of united front concessions, the Kuomintang government paid a monthly sum of 500,000 yuan for the authorized strength of the Communist forces.^[108] This was hardly enough. At any rate, the Communist forces as well as their base infrastructure were rapidly expanding beyond the authorized limit. The provision for the troops and civilian personnel "divorced from production" had to be met directly by local revenue. In this, the Chinese Communists were no different from any other regional power in China's modern history. When a Communist unit occupied a new area, whose local government had not been preserved by civilian cadres through united front arrangement, it often met a rather hostile reaction. During the first winter of 1937, Nieh Jung-chen's unit northeast of Wut'ai lived a wretched life. Traitors had not yet been suppressed. During this phase, the Communist forces were carrying out an outright military occupation. The provision for the troops could not wait. Yet, the mechanism for revenue collection could not function until a local anti-Japanese government was built from the ground up. The Communist forces resorted to confiscation of the property of the

[103] Selected Works , II, 18.

[104] Mao Tse-tung-chi , V, 29.

[105] Ibid. , VI, 216.

[106] Shen-Kan-Ning pien-ch'ü ts'an-i-hui wen-hsien hui-chi , p. 40.

[107] Ma Han-ping, Wang Chen nan-chen-chi [The chronicle of Wang Chen's southern expedition] (Hong Kong: Chungkuo ch'u-pan-she, 1947), p. 13.

[108] Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 139–140.

rich. The Sixth Detachment of the New Fourth Army in Huaipei area reported, for instance, that

several thousand troops and several thousand work personnel had to be fed and clothed. In everything we needed revenue, and yet nothing had started at the time. Our finance was in difficulty, and we could count on but a small tax revenue. Therefore, we had to resort to two emergency measures. One was striking the traitors, the other was to get donations from the rich households. Even that was inadequate. . . .^[109]

Confiscating the property of the rich and sharing the loot with the poor had been the standard practice of the Red Army when it moved through a strange territory or in an early phase of settlement before the revenue collection mechanism was built up.^[110] It seems that the Eighth Route Army had to resort to the same method in the very early phase of base construction. In addition, so-called "loans" were secured: hsi-k'uan if it was in cash and hsi-liang if it was in grain. Such loans were usually treated as an advance on tax. An I.O.U. was issued, which then became a note of credit against subsequent tax payment.

Lack of adequate data and monographic studies compels me to grope in the dark concerning the tax system in the early phase. There was considerable variation in the practice from one place to another. In Shen-Kan-Ning the government relied exclusively on confiscation and expropriation to meet its expenditure until 1937. Then the system of "national salvation public grain" (chiu-kuo kung-liang ) was instituted.^[111] This was definitely a progressive taxation, though it is not known whether it was a single tax and hence displaced all the other taxes. The Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region relied on land tax (t'ien-fu ), custom duties, and internal loans at the outset. At least some part of this border region was still collecting land tax along with "national salvation public grain" in 1940.^[112] It is my inference that "national salvation public grain" was an interim measure which was used before the slightly more routinized "rational burden" system was instituted. It seems that they were both quite arbitrary.

[109] Liu Jui-lung's report to the second Huaipei District political council (October, 1942), in Huaipei k'ang-Jih min-chu chien-she [Anti-Japanese democracy building in Huaipei] (Huaipei Su-Wan pien-ch'ü hsing-cheng kung-shu, 1942), p. 23.

[110] In 1948, Mao stated: " . . . hasty dispersal of social wealth is to the disadvantage of the army. Premature distribution of land would prematurely place the entire burden of military requirements on the peasants instead of on the landlords and rich peasants . . . . " Selected Works , IV, 251. While the statement was made in the civil war period, the logistic needs of the army remained constant.

[111] "Wo ti hui-i," Ming Pao , No. 59, November, 1970, p. 88.

[112] "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü ti hsing-shih" [The situation in the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region], Chieh-fang , No. 115, p. 14.

Again Chin-Ch'a-Chi was in the lead in switching from old land tax to the new system. The new tax system was called "rational burden" (ho-li fu-tan ) and was a progressive taxation. This was clearly intended to have a socially leveling impact. Hence, if the differential tax burden was passed from the rich to the poor in the form of higher rent and interest, the tax would lose its effectiveness. The commencement of "rational burden" or any other system that favored the poor was, therefore, accompanied by measures to reduce rent and interest (chien-tsu, chien-hsi ). By February, 1938, the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region promulgated the first regulation on rent and interest reduction.^[113] By March, it was already moving into the second stage of the "rational burden" system.^[114] How the Communist unit there overcame the opposition so quickly is not known.

The most widely used form of rent and interest reduction in north China in the early period was called "quarter down in rent, 10 percent interest" (erh-wu chien-tsu, shih-fen chien-hsi ). It meant reduction of all existing land rent by 25 percent and freezing it until further change. This was an interim measure before a border region government had enough time, power, and cadres to conduct land investigation to make an accurate land register. Interest rate on all loans, including new ones to be contracted under the new regulation, was to be no more than 10 percent per annum.^[115]

Rent and interest reduction alone presupposed a social change of great magnitude. They could not have been carried out without thorough mobilization of the masses and the backing of the Communist forces. Since I will deal with the rent and interest reduction campaign in Chapter VII, only one statistic will be noted here. The Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region carried out a campaign to return the land held as collateral by money-lenders to the borrowers by recomputing the interest at the newly enforced rate. In four special districts (or military sub-districts), all in Hopei Province, 69,400 mou (1 mou = 0.15 acre) of land was returned by June, 1940.^[116] Naturally such a campaign had the effect of drying up the private source of credit, but the Party was interested in the political goal of winning mass support at

[113] Liang-nien-lai pien-ch'ü ta-shih-chi [The chronicle of important events in the border region in the two years] (The Secretariat, the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region Administrative Commission, 1939), p. 4.

[114] Ibid. , p. 7.

[115] These rates are my own inference from the post-1941 practices. See p. 249 below. Rates varied tremendously depending on the local military balance of power between the Communists and their enemies.

[116] Kung-fei fan-tung wen-chien hui-pien [Collection of documents on the reaction of the Communist bandits]: Land policy (Ministry of National Defense, Republic of China) (BI), p. 179.

this stage. It goes without saying that both rent and interest reduction and "rational burden" were enforceable only in areas where Communist control was thorough.

The "rational burden" was in effect until 1941, when it was superseded by the "unified progressive tax" in some places.^[117] They both embodied the principle that "those with money should contribute money," which was another name for progressive tax. But rational burden was infinitely easier to handle from an administrative point of view, a vital requisite for application in wartime in or near the battlefield. The label and principle of rational burden originated with Yen Hsi-shan, though the CCP applied it in many places in north China. The rational burden was a single progressive tax reckoned once a year. The first phase was called the "hsien class rational burden," which was superseded soon by the "village class rational burden." The hsien class rational burden seemed to have been a slight routinization of confiscation of the property of the landlords and the rich. It was handled directly by the hsien class governments through their ch'ü level offices, both of which were in the hands of reliable Communist cadres. The number of households that could be dealt with by the hsien government must have been limited. In the Shangtang area of the T'aihang mountain (the Third Special District, Po I-po), where the 129th Division settled, the transition to the village class rational burden did not come until the fall of 1938.^[118]

In this system the hsien government classified every village into one of eleven classes representing the total asset in each. Quality of land, old land tax assessments, houses, and other properties were all taken into account in a rough fashion in classifying a village. Each village was then assigned to a class with corresponding points. First class village rated 2 points, second class 1.9 points, down to the eleventh class with 1 point. Each point and a fraction thereof stood for a village's share of tax within the total budget of the hsien .^[119] That is, the hsien government would distribute its levy according to the number of points represented by the villages in its jurisdiction. The actual worth of a point became known only when the total annual budget of the hsien government was closed. This was therefore similar to the work point system that was in use during the stage of agricultural cooperation in the 1950s.

[117] For details of the rational burden system, I have relied on valuable data collected by the Japanese forces which occupied the Shangtang area in the heart of the T'aihang District. Sugiyama Corps and the Huangch'eng Intelligence Center, Sansei-sho^[*] Wajun-ken chiho^[*] Kyosanto^[*] chiku jokyo^[*] chosa^[*] hokoku-sho^[*] [Investigation report of the conditions in the Communist district in the Hoshun hsien area of Shansi Province] (hereinafter Hoshun Investigation Report ): Vols. I and II.

[118] Hoshun Investigation Report , II, 5.

[119] Ibid. , p. 34.

The village office, with the cooperation of the village Mobilization Committee, was then charged with the task of distributing the burden among the households in its jurisdiction. The hsien government no longer interfered in tax assessment at the village level, with certain exceptions. The object of taxation seems to have been a peculiar category that reckoned property and income on a single scale. For tax purposes a household was classified in terms of (1) interest and dividend; (2) property, liquid as well as non-liquid; and (3) salaries, wages and other compensation for service.

The method used in assessing tax liability for ordinary peasant household was as follows. A village (hsin-pien-ts'un ) was divided into groups of yen —a yen being a collective security system made up of thirty households. The richest and the poorest households in any given yen were classified as the first and the twentieth class respectively. Using them as a rough standard, the remainder were fitted into the intervening classes. The twenty classes were not always filled in any one yen , as several households tended to cluster into the same class. Each class was then given corresponding points. In Hoshun hsien assignment of points to each class was left to the discretion of each village, so long as the series was discreet. In one example suggested, the first class was assigned 35 points; the second class 28 points; the third class 20 points; the fourth class 18.5 points, and so on down to the twentieth class with 1 point.^[120] Collectively, therefore, a village had the power to decide who belonged to which class, and then to decide how many points should be assigned to each class.

Excluded from this classification were the rich (fu-hao ) and the destitute. When the wealth of the rich was determined by the villagers, the information was forwarded to the hsien government, which then decided special tax rates. A clear guideline for defining the rich cannot be found in the document I have. Judging from actual examples enumerated in Shangtang's case, the rich were landlords and rentier class. Generally they owned forty mou or more of land; a few owned less land but possessed other sources of income. Those who were judged to be indigent were exempted from tax and became eligible for relief administered by the village government.

According to an official propaganda leaflet collected by the Japanese in the Shangtang area:

The rules in the previous regulations of rational burden [i.e., Yen Hsishan's statute] required that distribution of burden be determined only after a thorough investigation of property and income.

This regulation does not require investigation of property but relies only

[120] Ibid. , p. 24.

on an estimate. This is entirely due to the fact that the war of resistance makes urgent demands on revenue. This cannot be met if we are to rely on the previous regulation which was very time consuming [in administration].^[121]

It is my inference that under the leadership of the Sacrifice League, the Mobilization Committee, or some mass organization, the peasants were conducting a sort of collective and mutual tax assessment session. Everyone was subject to this collective judgment.

It is extremely convenient to let the village office handle [the rich]. This is because all the people in a village know well the amount of property and income of the rich. Therefore the village office cannot be deceived even though the hsien government may be fooled. . . . Even if the rich tries to conceal his income, public opinion, criticism, and guidance by the whole village will make him feel insecure not to share the burden. Those in the village who, because of some special relationship with the rich or because of their interest, try to defend the rich . . . will also be attacked by the whole village.^[122]

This method of collective assessment foreshadowed the method of "democratic assessment" used in the 1950s to distribute work points to the members of an agricultural cooperative.

The hsien government of Hoshun collected its revenue in grain, cash, and other goods. Grain was presumably priced at some fixed cash value. Of the taxed goods, the most frequently collected, according to the captured file of official communications, were the hand-sewn shoes made of cotton cloth priced at fifty cents a pair; cotton cloth; and cotton suits. The Japanese investigator estimated that a household in the Shangtang area turned in three-and-a-half pairs of shoes annually to the government. Tax was not collected all at once or at fixed intervals. Grain was stored away locally and dispersed. As need arose, it was collected by the government in small installments. An advance notice would come from the hsien government, routed through the ch'ü office, such as:

Order: The Fourth Ch'ü Office; Series 99.

Mr. Chang Fu-ch'ang, Village Chief:

For the daily actions of officers and soldiers at the front, supply of shoes is in urgent demand. You are hereby ordered to mobilize 380 pairs of shoes in your village and to deliver them. You will receive 50 cents a pair for cost of manufacturing. Your assistant chief is requested to mobilize 80 pairs forthwith and to deliver them to this office by the fifteenth of the month. You will be punished severely for violation, insincerity, or failure to deliver in time. . . .

Each shoe must bear the name and address of its maker.^[123]

[121] Ibid. , p. 25.

[122] Ibid. , p. 26.

[123] Ibid. , p. 40.

Or if a Communist army unit passed through a village, the village had to feed the unit in exchange for grain tickets (liang-p'iao ). The tickets then became a note of credit to be offset against the village's share of tax. Again, during emergencies forced loans from the rich were permitted. It was estimated that Hoshun hsien collected 23,000 piculs (1 picul = 133.3 pounds) of food grain and 300,000 yuan in cash or its equivalent in one year.^[124]

It seems fair to say that under the rational burden system the distribution of a village's share of tax was carried out by a majoritarian method. The poor were given a choice of taxing the rich to reduce their own share. With assurances from the Communist cadres that this accorded with the principle that "those with money should contribute money," they opted for this method. In the T'aihang District, the raising of a fist at a mass meeting determined tax liability.^[125] Only such an arbitrary method would have enabled the CCP to endear itself to the masses while assuring a source of revenue for itself. A thin line separated tax collection from expropriation, as witness the following report from the Chin Ch'a-Chi Border Region:

At night the soldiers gathered in the storage rooms of the village chief and the rich families to reckon and collect money, grain, oil and flour, potatoes, and administrative expenses. According to "rational burden" the village chief ought to pay most. Besides there were five big families, but they refused responsibility. In the stable in the courtyard the self-defense troops started a quarrel. "The chief's is the richest family." "No, he should give fifteen tan of potato." In the end the chief whispered consent, and he watched [the sacks of] grain and potatoes carried away from his storage cellar one after another.^[126]

Apart from regular tax, the rich households were subjected to periodic pressure to provide "contributions," "loans," and the like. In the Shangtang area, the rich were also subjected to a small amount of "confiscation" from time to time, though the nature of infractions were not reported.^[127] What was the amount of levy on the base area's population? A sample from the Japanese data is presented in Tables 1 through 5. The families A through D in Table 1 were the four leading landlording households in Hoshun hsien . It is apparent that they were destined to be liquidated rapidly. In a small hamlet called Sanch'i, also in Hoshun, there were altogether 167 families. Of this, the first twenty-one were rich enough to be classified as "hsien rational burden rich households." While the government's levy on these house-

[124] Ibid. , p. 70.

[125] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 149.

[126] Lin Piao, et al., Chin-pei yu-chi chan-cheng chi-shih , p. 23.

[127] Hoshun Investigation Report , II, 138–150.

holds was heavy, the bulk of the village's families, Nos. 22–117, were paying relatively little in tax. The families No. 118 through No. 167 were tax-exempt or were receiving relief.

Mao states that "In the first stage, from 1937 to 1939, we took very little from them [the people]; during this stage they were able to build up considerable strength. In the second stage, from 1940 to 1942, the burden on the people was increased . . . . "^[128] In Ch'ang-chih in the T'aihang District, average tax on "the people" decreased as follows: 1937, BR$ (border region yuan ) 3.34; 1938, BR$0.85; 1939, BR$0.857. In Yangch'eng: 1937, BR$1.732; 1938, BR$1.182; 1939, BR$0.629.^[129] On the whole, tax decreased in this area by four-fifths of the pre-war level for the masses. Isabel and David Crook report from another village in the T'aihang District that, as soon as a Communist-sponsored government was established in late 1939, "national salvation public grain" was collected from the richest 30 percent of the village population. Shortly thereafter, the rational burden went into effect. The tax burden continued to be borne by 30 percent of the population. "For 70 percent of the villagers to be free from taxation was a state of affairs never dreamt of before," the Crooks report.^[130]

We can now reconstruct the political aspect of the very early stage of the Communist base construction. As soon as a Communist unit entered an area and overcame overt military opposition, it reduced rent and interest and practically abolished taxes for the majority of the peasants in the area. The expenditures for maintaining the Com-

[128] Selected Works , III, 114.

[129] Growth of one revolutionary base , pp. 148–149.

[130] Isabel and David Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1959), pp. 46–47.

Table 2 Government Levy in Hoshun, Shansi, 1939: Hsien Rational Burden Rich Households in the Village of Sanch'i1   1Hoshun Investigation Report , II, 39–50. 2 Includes tax, "confiscation," and "donation." 3 Includes tax, "confiscation," and "donation." * underwear ** hemp (chin )

munist forces and the civilian cadres were borne mostly by a minority who were rich. The poorer majority supported the new regime and incurred the resentment of the landlords and the rich peasants, who made all sorts of threats in private. The poor were then committed to the defense of the new regime. For roughly two years, this state of affairs persisted. To pay for increased tax out of reduced income, the rich sold their property. The sort of social and political changes entailed by this confiscatory tax policy by 1940 will be discussed in Chapter VII.

The tax and rent reduction program of the CCP was revolutionary. It amounted to confiscation by installment. Its fully revolutionary character cannot be appreciated until some inquiry is made into the treatment of the so-called traitors. If the development of a Communist base in the resistance period paralleled that in the Kiangsi period, should the traitors be considered the equivalent of counter-revolutionaries? Data concerning the suppression of hostile elements in the Communist bases and their environs are very difficult to obtain.

The Party was obviously reluctant to reveal such data. In addition, the suppressed elements did not have organized, political existence; and they left no record of their fate. Among the CCP's enemies hidden in the rural areas were bandits and traitors. Both were usually liquidated physically. In the early stage of base construction, the "anti-traitor work" (ch'u-chien kung-tso ), which included the suppression of bandits, was primarily the responsibility of the Communist forces. At this stage it was part of a military security of the unit in question. Thereafter as the boundary of a base expanded, new areas were subjected to the same program while authority in the older central district passed gradually into the hands of civilian government. The process of handling traitors gradually became routinized until, in the final stage of development, it merged with ordinary legal process.

Bandits were numerous after the outbreak of the war. In Shen-Kan-Ning, where banditry was not a serious problem, more than forty bands were eliminated by early 1939, including 800 bandits killed and wounded and 400 captured.^[131] On the periphery of the border region, suppression of bandits was not yet complete, it was reported. The reference seemed to be to Suite and Lungtung Sub-districts which were not subjected to the civil war type of land revolution before the united front came into existence. In one year period ending in November, 1942, 846 bandits were liquidated in Yenfu District in Kiangsu.^[132] According to Liu Jui-lung, the head of the Huaipei District government, bandit suppression by October, 1942, was as follows: Ssunan, fourteen bands; Hungtze, six bands; Ssuyang, seven bands; Hsüfengchia, five bands; Huaipao, nine bands; Ssuwulingfeng, six bands; Ssuhsiu, ten bands; P'eichüt'ung, two bands; Hsiut'ung, sixteen bands—for a total of seventy-five bands. The size of only twenty-eight bands was reported. Some were 20 or 30 strong, while the largest ones had from 200 to 400 men. Average size of the twenty-eight bands reported was 90.^[133] Multiplied by 75, the putative total bandit population was 675 for the Huaipei District. As will be shown in Chapter VIII, this area was exceptionally infested.

Statistics concerning traitors are more difficult to find. According to

[131] Shen-Kan-Ning pien-ch'ü ts'an-i-hui wen-hsien hui-chi , p. 11.

[132] Jao Shu-shih, Hua-chung ch'u-chien pao-wei kung-tso ti chi-pen tsung-chi chi chin-hou ti jen-wu [The basic conclusion and the future task of anti-traitor and security work in central China] (report to the Central China Anti-Traitor Conference, November, 1942), Chen-li , No. 1, March, 1943, p. 25.

[133] Huaipei k'ang-Jih min-chu chien-she , appendix. I am assuming that the so-called "bandits" were in fact bandits, though in the case of central China in particular the distinction between bandits and armed landlords seems to have been tenuous.

Yang Hsiu-feng who was running the government of the South Hopei Military District, 279 were eliminated in one year ending September, 1939. These included 51 in Weihsien, 45 in P'inghsiang, 31 in Feihsiang, 30 in Tsaoch'iang, and 20 in Chülu.^[134] Again, the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region was the model of anti-traitor work. It was an object of envy among the units of the New Fourth Army in central China, where political conditions were infinitely more complex because of the persistence of the Kuomintang's influence. In the Wut'ai area, there were a number of Buddhist temples with a total of 1,000 priests who were reported to have acted as traitors.^[135] We do not know their fate. In October of 1940, Shu T'ung, who headed the political department of the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region, stated that in the three years since the founding of the government, 1,402 traitors had been eliminated.^[136] As a Communist base developed with increasing mass support, anti-traitor work became part of mass mobilization and created a tense vigilante atmosphere. In Shen-Kan-Ning there were 700 traitor-weeding committees, one in every hsiang; 9,000 traitor-weeding small groups; and 100,000 members in them by January, 1939.^[137] As the Japanese forces never seriously threatened this border region, the anti-traitor work there had class character.

I can only infer the identity of these traitors. There is no doubt that a substantial number of them were genuine traitors. But a large number seemed to have come from among the landlords and the rich peasants who were subjected to confiscatory taxation. Po I-po deplored in mid-1939 that "in the past we drove the landlords, the rich men, and gentry to become traitors by exploiting them."^[138] But if so, why were there not insurrections by the landlords against the Communist forces? The reported figures of traitor liquidation—if they can be trusted and if they are representative—were not staggering ones. Assuming that a standard-sized hsien in Hopei had 250 villages, liquidation of fifty traitors in one year amounted to one for every five villages. Assassination and liquidation increased in number after mid–1940, as will be shown below, but even then the CCP was defi-

[134] Pacification War , No. 1, p. 209.

[135] Lin Piao, et al., Chin-pei yu-chi chan-cheng chi-shih , p. 62.

[136] Chieh-fang , No. 120, p. 24.

[137] Shen-Kan-Ning pien-ch'ü ts'an-i-hui wen-hsien hui-chi , p. 11.

[138] "Ts'ui-hui ti-wei cheng-ch'üan ti chi-pen cheng-ts'e [The basic policy for destroying the enemy and puppet political power], Wo-men tsen-yang tsai ti-hou chien-li k'ang-Jih cheng-ch'üan [How we have built the anti-Japanese political power behind the enemy] (Huang-ho ch'u-pan-she, 1939), p. 14. See also Liu Shao-ch'i, in "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü kung-tso ti ching-yen," pp. 304, 314, in which he talks about executions.

nitely more restrained than during the Kiangsi period. It seemed that somehow the Chinese Communists managed to carry out the land revolution while holding the class tension just short of the breaking point. This paralleled the CCP's relationship with the Kuomintang at the national level.

Several factors may be adduced to account for the CCP's success in this respect. First, the CCP's approach left the door open for the rich to survive by submitting to gradual fleecing. Its measures were radical only in the central base areas but were indistinguishable from the policies of the competing forces, Japanese and Kuomintang, on the periphery. The CCP leaders pointed out often that it was imprudent to pressure the landlords on the periphery of a base as they would bring the Japanese forces in.^[139] Second, the landlords as a class were more literate and educated; they understood the national predicament better than ordinary peasants. In the Shangtang area of Shansi, the most radical villages were those in which educated sons of native landlords had returned home and cooperated with the CCP.^[140] P'eng Te-huai pointed out that the educated sons of the landlords were somewhat detached from the material interests of their parents.^[141] One hsien magistrate in Shansi held a banquet for the local notables and peasants' representatives; he revealed Yen Hsi-shan's order on rent reduction and managed to persuade the landlords to sign a pledge of cooperation which he posted in the area.^[142] Last, though not the least in importance, was the military supremacy of the Communist forces in the rural areas in the first two years of the war. This supremacy enabled the Communist party to impose its definition of the situation on the rural population.

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" indeed in China's countryside. But the over-all strategic milieu in which the CCP's gun was exercised added to its efficacy. The war silenced the competing guns, and the landlord class as a whole was more amenable to accepting the CCP's exactions because of the national emergency.

[139] This is mentioned repeatedly in many documents. See, for instance, Kung-fei huo-kuo , III, 410.

[140] Hoshun Investigation Report , II, 39.

[141] Kuan-yü hua-pei ken-chü-ti kung-tso ti pao-kao [Report on north China base work] (Report to the cadres above the battalion and hsien class in the T'aihang District, December 18, 1942), Kung-fei huo-kuo , III, 385, Liu Shao-ch'i quotes some landlords in Shansi who said, "Japan is now invading us. Pay whatever rent and debt that you can, and it's all right," in "Hua-pei chan-ch'ü kung-tso ti ching-yen," p. 314.

[142] Ibid.

The Structure of a Communist Base

The extent of the changes in Chinese society since the time of the Taiping Rebellion is indicated by the fact that a large number of heirs of the gentry class that had once defended the Confucian order fled the native places and official posts to the cities, while another part, consisting of younger literati, descended on the rural areas in opposition to the status quo. Thus, the surviving tradition of rural self-defense among the peasantry was welded to a superstructure which was at once old and new. In the early stage of mobilization, the organizational sinew that gradually extended itself among the amorphous rural masses was hardly recognizable as revolutionary bases.

Initial Communist expansion consisted mostly of wholesale absorption of armed peasants that antedated the coming of the Communist organizers. It was a long and painful process to transform them into the regular Communist army and the supporting infrastructure. Roughly two years, from 1938 to 1940, were spent in the task.^[143] Nieh Jung-chen, who had started with an initial contingent of 2,000 regulars in October, 1937, had formed four detachments by December. By March, 1939, reorganization of sundry irregular forces had started. Incorrigible leaders of the native self-defense organizations were executed as traitors or bandits. But the remainder were more or less kept intact for the time being and assigned to the task of "defending the homes and villages." As government and mass organizations reached down to the hsien and ch'ü levels, ordinary peasants with decent occupations were inducted into hsien or ch'ü class guerrilla units. These were the forerunners of the Communist regional forces. Besides keeping vigilance over the rich, they went from village to village collecting hoarded weapons, including occasional machine guns.

Discipline in a newly founded unit was miserable. The greatest obstacle to regularization was desertion. Once new recruits were assigned to missions which took them away from home, they deserted in large numbers.^[144] Watchful eyes had to be kept on them from the moment they left their village with escort. Large-scale "return to the post campaigns" (kui-tui yün-tung ) were conducted by mass organizations in the villages to send back deserters.

The designation of detachment (chih-tui ) was used very flexibly. A detachment could consist of as many as 10,000 or even 20,000 men.^[145] When a special district, made up initially of a few hsien , had acquired

[143] Shu T'ung, "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü k'ang-chan san-nien-lai . . . ," p. 218.

[144] Jo Fei, "Hua-pei yu-chi-tui . . . ," p. 120.

[145] K'ang-Jih yu-chi-tui ti tsu-chih yü chan-shu , p. 51.

a force of full-time guerrillas supporting a detachment of regulars, a military sub-district was formed. A force level of 600 to 1,000 guerrillas was suggested for this purpose.^[146] Large-scale programs for training native peasant cadres got under way relatively early in Chin-Ch'a-Chi. A three-month course produced 1,500 graduates, who became company and battalion leaders.^[147] The Anti-Japanese Military College had established its second branch under Nieh Jung-chen's command also. It began to train more qualified military leaders. As reliable cadres displaced the co-opted incumbents everywhere, the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region's framework was articulated.

Below the Central Committee in Yenan, there were several regional bureaus.^[148] In north China, there were originally four sub-bureaus (fen-chü ) under the Northern Bureau, viz., the Shantung, the Chin-Ch'a-Chi, the Chin-Sui, and the T'aihang Sub-bureaus. All but one had jurisdiction over a border region. The Communist bases in Shantung and central China never received border region status; they were called military districts or simply districts. The Northern Bureau had moved from Tientsin to Taiyuan with the war front, then settled in southeastern Shansi with the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army. In September, 1943, the Plains (P'ingyüan) Sub-bureau was created with jurisdiction over the South Hopei and the Chi-Lu-Yü Military Districts.^[149]

A typical border region consisted of two or three military districts on a mountain and a fertile plain contiguous to it, thus insuring its self-sufficiency in both military and economic terms. The Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region was made up of three military districts (chün-ch'ü ) or administrative director's offices (hsing-cheng chu-jen kung-shu ), in Peiyüeh, Central Hopei, and Chi-Je-Liao. The Chin-Chi-Lu-Yü Border Region was made up of two large sub-divisions—the Chin-Chi-Yü District west of the Peiping–Hankow railway and the Chi-Lu-Yü Disstrict on the plain to the east of it. The former was made up of the T'aihang and the T'aiyüeh Military Districts, while the latter consisted of the South Hopei and the so-called Small Chi-Lu-Yü Military Districts. Most of the military districts on the plain were listed as

[146] Jo Fei, "Hua-pei yu-chi-tui . . . ," p. 113.

[147] Nieh Jung-chen, "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü ti hsing-shih" [Conditions in the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region], Tsen-yang ho ti-jen tou-cheng yü tsen-yang chien-li ti-hou k'ang-Jih ken-chü-ti [How to fight the enemy and how to build an anti-Japanese base behind the enemy] (1940), p. 71.

[148] K'uo-ta ti Chung-Kung chung-yang ti-liu-tz'u ch'üan-hui kuan-yü k'e-chi tang-pu kung-tso kui-tze yü chi-lü ti chüeh-ting [Decision of the Sixth Plenary Session of the CCP concerning the regulation and discipline of the Party at each level], Kung-fei fan-tung wen-chien hui-pien: Party work , pp. 133–135.

[149] Growth of one revolutionary base , p. 321.

second-class military districts—a rough index of their consolidation and defensibility. Strange as it may seem, the T'aihang District was also a second-class military district. Apparently, it was not very secure because of the presence of the Kuomintang's central army in southern Shansi.

The Sixth Plenum's decision on party organization stipulated that any one unit must not supervise more than eight sub-units immediately below it. Nieh Jung-chen and Lü Cheng-ts'ao each commanded five military sub-districts, the first through the fifth in the mountain and the sixth through the tenth on the plain. The government office at the military sub-district level was called special administrative commissioner's office (hsing-cheng tu-ch'a chuan-yüan kung-shu ); its jurisdiction was the special district (chuang-ch'ü ). Again, the controlling voice was that of the military because a military sub-district accommodated one detachment or brigade, the operational unit of the regular army. Huang Yung-sheng and Yang Ch'eng-wu were military sub-district commanders under Nieh Jung-chen. Each sub-district controlled an average of five or six hsien , at the height of their growth in 1941. Some time in late 1939 or early 1940, all of the regular units in military sub-districts graduated from detachment status to regiment or brigade status.

Below the military sub-district were the hsien and ch'ü level offices of government. Key posts in Party and government hierarchies down to the ch'ü level were staffed by outside cadres. Young students and intellectuals were a majority in the government offices. In Shen-Kan-Ning, more than 70 percent of government personnel at the special district level or above were intellectuals who came from the outside after the war had begun.^[150] These cadres began to co-opt and train native cadres at the ch'ü and hsiang levels, while the army co-opted the natives as company or battalion class cadres. Ch'ü rather than hsien was the last rung of centrally-staffed offices. Ch'ü Party committee (ch'ü-wei ) was therefore said to be the link between the Center and locality. When Japanese pacification intensified, Communist cadres of ch'ü level and above would cease making their rounds in the villages.

Until 1941 or 1942, military organization of a Communist base had three tiers. A brigade or a detachment of the regular army at the sub-district level was at the top. Each government office at the sub-

[150] Shen-Kan-Ning pien-ch'ü chien-cheng shih-shih yao-kang [Outline for implementing the simplified government in the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region] (December, 1942), in Cheng-cheng wen-t'i [Problems of reorganizing the government] (The Northwestern Bureau, 1943), p. 27.

district, the hsien , and the ch'ü level organized guerrilla units or regional forces (ti-fang-chün ) of various degrees of irregularity. These units received designations such as independent battalion, independent regiment, cadre unit, battalion, and the like. They were "divorced from production" and could be commanded by the regular army in supporting roles, though they were formally controlled by civilian personnel. They also constituted the reservoir from which the regular army recruited its troops. It was compulsory for all males between the ages of 15 and 55 to belong to the self-defense corps (tzu-wei-tui ) at the hsiang and ts'un levels. As the land revolution proceeded at the village level, the army's complexion began to change. Nieh Jungchen demanded that his forces establish "blood relationship" with the natives. By 1939 he was able to say of his troops that they were "son-and-brother-soldiers" (tzu-ti-ping ) of the T'aihang mountain.^[151]

After the spring of 1939, the Japanese forces began to conduct pacification campaign to consolidate the occupied area in north China. Most of the hsien towns reverted to Japanese control, though the countryside was still wide open. Consequently, there arose a need to redraw the boundaries of local governments. Hsien and ch'ü level offices were relocated outside of hsien seats or other large towns. They were mobile and ready to disappear at a moment's notice. Sung Shaowen, who headed the government of the Peiyüeh District, said, "Big highways and riverbeds must be made the boundary between one ch'ü and another in order to prevent the enemy from using [them] . . . to cut off the connection between ch'ü and ts'un ."^[152] At this stage, the Communist base governments were consciously orienting themselves away from market towns, blockading them as though they were Japanese "colonies."

Writing in early 1939, Sung Shao-wen was very agitated about the inadequacy of the village level governments (hsiang-ts'un cheng-ch'üan ). While nobody challenged the power of the Communist government, the village officials were still by and large old incumbents. The link between the ch'ü level government and the village was the weakest. Sung entertained three alternative proposals as remedies. One was to increase the number of ch'ü branch offices. But this, he felt, would have the effect of emasculating the ch'ü office. Besides, there were not enough cadres to staff the branch offices. A second idea

[151] Nieh Jung-chen, "Chin-Ch'a-Chi pien-ch'ü ti hsing-shih," p. 72.

[152] "K'ang-Jih yu-chi chan-cheng-chung kai-ke ch'ü-ts'un cheng-ch'üan chi-kou wen-t'i ti shang-ch'üeh" [Discussion on the chü and ts'un class government mechanism during the anti-Japanese guerrilla war], Wo-men tsen-yang tsai ti-hou chien-li k'ang-Jih cheng-ch'üan , p. 43.

was to set up the so-called "newly organized villages" (hsin-pien-ts'un ), a practice adopted in Foup'ing, Wut'ai, and Laiyüan hsien , which amounted to redrawing the boundaries of hsiang . Every hsien would be divided into anywhere from thirty to eighty "newly organized villages," depending on its size. Every ch'ü office would have seven to fifteen such villages in its jurisdiction. Sung concluded that this alternative was no different in substance from the first one. Hence, he finally recommended a third alternative: increase the number of the regular ch'ü offices by one time as many, and staff them with newly-recruited poor peasant cadres. In this system, every ch'ü office would control all natural villages within a thirty-li radius. Village officials were not to be paid, as the scope of their work was smaller. Sung conceded the difficulty of carrying on business with village officials who could not read a single character, but he felt the problem could be overcome.^[153]

Tight vertical integration of Communist base governments is striking; it contrasted with the disjunction between local, regional, and national governments on the Kuomintang's side. The CCP had posted competent outside cadres immediately above the villages to oversee them. This accounts in part for the cohesion of the peasant masses with the CCP. There is one important qualifier here, however. During the Rectification Campaign, Mao criticized what he chose to call "warlordism" among his military followers. The reference was to the instances of insubordination by P'eng Te-huai, Ho Lung, Liu Poch'eng, Hsiang Ying, and possibly Hsü Hsiang-ch'ien toward the Center. They were accused of developing factionalism in their strong-holds on "mountain tops" and defying Party discipline. It so happens that all of them had exercised control over a border region or its equivalent. The interaction between the peculiar conditions of a military base and its commander would produce a variety of orientations, as will be shown below. Thus, cohesion within an operational base appears to have been strong enough to give rise to occasional challenge to Party cohesion. In contrasting the Kuomintang and the CCP, therefore, the most salient distinction was not that one suffered from "warlordism" and the other did not, but rather that one failed to turn this native trait to good account while the other managed to do so. While assimilating themselves into the rural areas, the Chinese Communists had to be on constant guard against the peril of being swamped by the ocean of peasants. One facet of the problem was put this way by a Communist cadre: "A main force unit . . . should up-

[153] Ibid. , pp. 39–49.

hold to a certain degree the local character of a given area, but at the same time it must overcome its inherent localism such as not wishing to depart from a place where it was founded."^[154]

[154] Kao Feng, "Lun tui-yü ti-fang wu-chuang ti ling-tao wen-t'i" [On the problem of leadership over local arms], Chien-ch'ih , January, 1942, in Kung-fei huo-kuo , III, 215.