Red Star over China (60 page)

The defense perimeter held by Japanese troops in China in 1944 was already stabilized before the end of 1939. When the enemy originally moved into the conquered provinces most of the old officials of the Kuomintang Government, as well as its troops, withdrew to the West and South. Behind them the administrative bureaucracy collapsed. In the cities it was replaced by Japanese and their Chinese puppets, but a kind of political vacuum existed in the hinterland towns and villages, the interstices between enemy garrisons. Into that temporary vacuum moved the former Red Army of China—with arms, with teachers, and with faith in the people's strength.

This movement began with the Generalissimo's acquiescence. It was made possible first of all, as we have seen, by Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang's earlier “detention” of the Generalissimo at Sian, in order to persuade him to stop fighting the Reds and unite with them against Japan. After the Japanese invaded North China, an agreement was reached which ended a decade of civil war. This provided that the Red Army should be incorporated into the national forces, that the soviets should be abolished
in favor of a government in which all classes would be represented, and that the Communists would abandon the slogans of class warfare and cease confiscating and redistributing the land. The northern Red forces dropped the Red flag and the Red star and accepted the designation “Eighth Route Army.” Southeast of Shanghai other Red remnants under Generals Yeh T'ing and Han Ying were regrouped in 1938 as the “New Fourth Army.”
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Both the Kuomintang and the Kungch'antang now claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Both supported him in the early days of the revolution. Even after 1937, however, there was no agreement over the practical application of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of “nationalism, livelihood and democracy.” The Communists still regarded Sun as a social revolutionary and demanded a radical interpretation of his principles. Briefly, they wanted a “thoroughgoing democratic revolution,” with equalization of land ownership, universal suffrage, and constitutional government establishing the people's power, by which they meant the Communist Party and, ultimately, a “proletarian dictatorship.” Since the Kuomintang still drew its chief internal support from the landlord class, it was naturally opposed to radical land reform. In general it wanted to keep economic and political relationships intact and to superimpose its dictatorship on the old Chinese semifeudal structure. If it acknowledged the legality of other parties and their conflicting interpretations, especially if it conceded adult suffrage, that structure would almost certainly be overthrown.

While questions of class power and of the ultimate form of the state and society remained in momentary abeyance, the Communists and Nationalists at least agreed upon the principle of “nationalism” when Japan invaded the country. The Reds then took their military orders from the Generalissimo. In 1937 he sent them into the battle line in North China, where many Kuomintang leaders confidently expected them to be swallowed up in the Japanese drive. They did not disintegrate in that way, however, as some of the northern warlord armies did. They met the attack and were defeated in the cities, but instead of retreating or surrendering they withdrew to the villages and hills and continued fighting.

Infiltrating all the northern provinces with experienced partisan leaders and political organizers, they soon enlisted valuable reinforcements from a thickening stream of refugees fleeing from the cities: students, workers, and various professional men and women, including some intellectuals belonging to the non-Communist liberal political parties, long
suppressed by both the Chinese and Japanese regimes. Cut off from the rear, whole divisions of defeated Chinese troops came under Red leadership. In North China the
min-t'uan
lost its central direction and cohesion when Nationalist regulars were driven out by Japan. Their landlord-gentry paymasters fled, or stayed to make deals with the Japanese, and the militia had to become puppet troops for the Japanese, or flee to Chiang Kai-shek's territory, or join the Communist-led partisans.
Japan served the Communists by destroying or demoralizing the whole rural police-power system with which the old rural landlord-gentry alliance with the urban property owners had been maintained.
At the outset it was the disintegration of that police system, rather than victories over the Japanese, that made possible the rapid expansion of the Eighth Route Army. Their rifle power, however, steadily increased. By 1939 their strongholds had become so formidable that the Japanese were compelled to launch a full-dress offensive against them. They went on doing so semiannually from then on.

The first partisan regime entirely inside occupied territory was set up in the mountains of northeastern Shansi, east of the Yellow River, and included areas as far north as Jehol, or Inner Mongolia. Another regime, with its capital in southeast Shansi, directed operations in recovered territory which stretched for over 300 miles across southern Hopei and Shantung eastward to the Yellow Sea. There was a third border region centering in northern Kiangsu, north of Shanghai, which was controlled by the New Fourth Army, with nearly 100,000 troops. A fourth regional government was established in the mountainous country north of the Yangtze River above Hankow, where the borders of Anhui and Hupeh enclose the southern extremity of Honan.

Political and military methods used to organize the people borrowed heavily from the pattern developed in the old soviet districts of north Shensi. After the Soviet Government was abolished in 1937, a “Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Area Government” took its place and the town of Yenan, the so-called “mother of the Chinese partisans,” became its capital. I revisited Yenan in 1939, after the new government was established. It remained until 1944 the last trip made there by any foreign newspaper correspondent, for soon afterwards the region was cut off by the Kuomintang's military blockade.

On the other side of the Yellow River, behind Japanese lines, the organization of the social, political, and economic life was naturally more difficult than in Yenan, but in general the goals, if not always the degree of success achieved, were comparable. Although newspaper correspondents in Free China were not able to investigate the Shansi and Hopei areas, the various foreigners who escaped from the Japanese in Peking and made
their way southward across the guerrilla territory gave fairly complete pictures of the system which prevailed. Among these observers was Professor William Band, of the famous American missionary institution, Yenching University, whom I knew when I lectured there in 1934–35. Another was Professor Michael Lindsay, also of Yenching, whose report of conditions there was published in
Amerasia
magazine in 1944.
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The most comprehensive account of the partisan areas to reach the outside world for some time, it was released for publication by the author's father, A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

According to Professor Lindsay, the partisan governments were elected from candidates nominated directly by the people and their organizations. The Chinese partisans aimed to establish a united front of all groups and hence the Communist Party limited its own members to one-third of the total of any elected body. This peculiar policy was vigorously enforced, according to Lindsay. The purpose was to give representation in the government to both landowners (except absentee landlords) and merchants, but above all to develop political leaders among the poor peasants and workers. It was “education in democracy by practicing democracy,” according to the partisan leaders.

In the mass organizations there were no limitations on Communist leadership, however; and these organizations were the guerrillas' sinew and life. They included separate unions or associations for farmers, workers, youth, children, and women, and membership in each ran into the millions. Most important of all such organizations were the self-defense corps, the militia, and the Young Vanguards. These were crude but basic military organizations which locally supported the Eighteenth Group Army's main forces.

G. Martel Hall, former manager of the National City Bank in Peking; who was the last American to escape from the Japanese across the partisan areas, told me that there was simply no other way he could explain the success of the partisan leaders with the peasants, “except through their own incorruptibility and honesty, their energetic patriotism, their devotion to practical democracy, their faith in the common people, and the continuous effort they made to arouse them to action and responsibility.”

Mutual hatred of the Japanese provided the atmosphere in which these zealots exploited the people's patriotism, but side by side with political reforms went economic and social changes. In the case of women the enforcement of laws like monogamy, freedom of marriage at the age of consent, free education, and suffrage at the age of eighteen won a surprising response. Professor Lindsay said there were over 3,000,000
members of the women's organizations in the partisan areas. Many women had been elected to village and town councils and large numbers of young girls carried serious political and military responsibilities.

The primary school system operated widely in all the “permanent” guerrilla bases and education was free and compulsory in theory if, because of poverty, seldom attainable in fact. Yet in a few places as high as 80 per cent of the younger children of school age were literate. The basic reform was a drastic reduction in land rent. Land of absentee landlords was tilled in common; the aim was to cultivate all cultivable land. Taxes were collected mainly in grain, and were kept at about 10 per cent of those demanded by the Japanese. Consumer, marketing and industrial cooperatives were widespread. Lindsay stated that there were over 4,000 cooperatives in Shansi and 5,000 in central Hopei alone.

Unimaginable hardships accompanied partisan organization at every step.
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While it is true the Japanese failed to destroy the partisan forces, or to stop their increase, they carried out literally thousands of large- and small-scale punitive expeditions against them. They looted and burned thousands of villages, raped the womenfolk and slaughtered countless civilians, in a terror aimed to wipe out all thought of resistance. The guerrillas always found ways to overcome the demoralizing effects of these tactics, but not without sacrifices as bitter as any endured in Russia. It was true that the Japanese were still unable to control any village much beyond the range of their garrisons along North China's railways and roads, but it was also true that their fortified points had greatly increased and could now be seized only at a heavy cost.

So much for background. How did all this affect American plans to defeat Japan through China?

“After all, you saved the Kuomintang,” a Chinese intellectual in Chungking said to me when I returned to China (1942'43) as a war correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post.
“It is your baby now and you cannot avoid responsibility for its actions.”

He meant simply that American money, arms, and economic aid were given to the Kuomintang authorities, without any conditions concerning policies pursued inside China. American government representatives had several times made it clear to Chungking that we would disapprove of a renewal of civil strife during the joint war against Japan, but Americans had not gone beyond that nor sought to have the blockade lifted against the partisan areas.

Chungking established its blockade against the Eighteenth Group
Army when Kuomintang party leaders became increasingly alarmed by the Communists' success in recovering control of areas behind the Japanese lines. The Generalissimo described their activity as “illegal occupation of the national territory.” The Kuomintang's War Areas Political and Party Affairs Commission took the position that all the guerrilla administrations were “illegal” and should be abolished to await the re-establishment of the Kuomintang system.

In 1940 some Kuomintang troops engaged the rear echelon of the New Fourth Army while it was moving from its base south of the Yangtze River, near Shanghai, to an area entirely behind the Japanese lines to which it was assigned by the Generalissimo. It was apparently a surprise attack and the partisans were reportedly outnumbered eight to one. The little detachment of about 4,000 was not a combat unit and it was easily encircled and destroyed. General Yeh T'ing, the commander of the New Fourth Army (who was himself not a Communist), was wounded and taken prisoner, and General Han Ying, the field commander, was killed together with many of his staff, some doctors and nurses of the medical battalions, a number of convalescent wounded soldiers, some cadets, men and women students, and some industrial cooperative workers attached to the army.

The incident failed to liquidate the New Fourth Army, whose main forces were already north of the Yangtze River, engaging Japanese troops there, but it was the effective end of Nationalist-Communist collaboration in the field and the beginning of an open struggle for leadership in the joint war against Japan. The Generalissimo ruled that the incident was caused by the New Fourth's “insubordination” and thenceforth withdrew all aid not only from that army but also from the Eighth Route.

For some months previous to the tragedy no part of the Eighteenth Group Army had been paid. From this time on they not only received no pay or ammunition but were blockaded by a ring of strong government forces from access to supplies in Free China, which they might have purchased or received as gifts from the people. Ironically enough, the Kuomintang troops enforcing this blockade were largely supplied by Soviet Russia. There were two group armies (the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth) engaged exclusively in the blockading enterprise. American officers in 1942 suggested that they were needed in the campaign to recover Burma, but Chungking considered their “policing role” in the Northwest of greater importance and there they remained.