On the night of July 7, 1937 while some Japanese troops
were engaged in maneuvers at the Marco Polo Bridge
about ten miles west of Beiping (Beijing), some Chinese
fired shells where they were assembled.
A Japanese officer thought a missing soldier
had been captured, and he ordered Wanping searched.
When permission was not granted, he ordered the city
bombarded and occupied on July 8.
The next day Chinese troops near that railway junction
attacked the Japanese without success.
After several days of arguments and negotiations by the
local commanders and the governments, the
Japanese War Ministry mobilized five divisions in Japan,
and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) sent four divisions
to Baoding in southern Hebei.
Japanese troops from Manzhouguo (Manchuria)
invaded northern China.
The Chinese general Song Zheyuan signed an agreement
to withdraw his troops from Wanping on July 19.
Six days later fighting broke out around the Marco Polo Bridge,
and Japanese troops seized the bridge.
On July 27 Prince Konoe Fumimaro proclaimed
his determination to solve the conflict.
To save its historic relics and art, the Chinese evacuated
Beiping on July 28, and two days later
Japanese forces also occupied Tianjin.
That day Jiang declared that he would lead the masses
in a national struggle to the end, and one week later
he and his top advisers decided to wage all-out war.
On August 11 Jiang Jieshi sent 80,000 men from his
German-trained divisions into Shanghai,
and two days later fighting began on both sides.
On August 14 China’s air force bombed
Japanese warships anchored at Shanghai.
The planes’ bombs missed their targets
and killed hundreds of civilians in Shanghai.
Japan had 12,000 troops there, and they were
reinforced from the Yangzi River.
Japan sent fifteen more divisions to north and central China.
Jiang had ordered factory equipment removed from Shanghai
on August 10, and 15,000 tons from 146 factories
were moved during the fighting by 2,500 workers.
The Chinese forces tried to overcome the Japanese
in Shanghai in late August, but they were on the
defensive in September and October, losing 250,000 soldiers
compared to 40,000 Japanese casualties.
In November the French priest Jacquinot de Bessage
provided a neutral area in Shanghai for some
450,000 Chinese refugees whose homes
had been destroyed by the Japanese.
In the northwest Yan Xishan’s Shanxi army defended
Niangziguan, but the Shanxi capital Taiyuan fell on November 9.
Communists led by Lin Biao won a strategic victory at
Pingxingguan in late September, killing about 500 Japanese;
they gained a hundred trucks but only a hundred rifles
and no prisoners because the remaining Japanese
destroyed their equipment and committed suicide.
The Japanese broke through the Chinese lines with an
amphibious landing at Hangzhou Bay south of Shanghai, and
on November 11 the Chinese began to retreat toward Nanjing.
Tokyo sent German diplomats to mediate a settlement.
Jiang believed world opinion was on his side;
but the League of Nations took no action,
and his signing a non-aggression pact
with the Soviet Union had no effect.
Meanwhile in the north Japanese forces had taken over
Baoding in September, Shijiazhuang in October,
and Taiyuan in November.
Japan also occupied the Shandong peninsula, taking Qingdao
in August and Jinan in December.
Governor Han Fuju abandoned Shandong,
and Jiang had him executed.
Jiang Jieshi ordered the former warlord Tang Shengzhi
to hold Nanjing no matter what.
Japanese planes dropped leaflets on the city promising to
treat civilians well while Chinese soldiers were killing
and robbing people to get civilian clothing and escape.
After Jiang refused to agree to a cease-fire,
the Japanese began bombing on December 10.
About half the population of 600,000 or more
had left Nanjing before the Japanese army arrived.
The Presbyterian missionary W. Plumer Mills had learned
of Bessage’s neutral zone, and the Americans and Europeans
organized a safety zone that included Nanjing University,
Ginling Women’s Arts and Science College,
the American embassy, and Chinese government buildings.
The German businessman John Rabe,
leader of the Nazi party in Nanjing, established the
International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone
on November 22, and three days later he cabled Adolf Hitler
to ask him to intercede with the Japanese government
to respect the neutral zone for the noncombatants.
After the telegrams the Japanese
confined their bombing to military targets.
More than one hundred thousand people
crowded into the Safety Zone.
Having no plan for withdrawal, Tang suddenly
abandoned the city on December 12.
Japanese troops entered Nanjing the next day,
and for the next seven weeks they killed at least 30,000 Chinese
soldiers and slaughtered most of the civilians
not in the safety zone while burning much of the city.
Somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 women were raped
or taken away as slaves for military brothels.
After the war the International Military Tribunal of the Far East
that tried the war criminals estimated that more than
200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were massacred
by Japanese soldiers in and around Nanjing.
The Japanese government tried to keep these atrocities
secret from the public at home.
Some of the men in the Safety Zone were ex-soldiers,
and the Japanese dragged them from the zone and executed them.
The Japanese made a second treaty proposal on December 22
with harsher demands that Jiang also rejected.
Jiang and Yan Xishan approved the Communist base
in the Jin-Cha-Ji border region on January 22, 1938,
but that was the first and last Communist base
behind enemy lines that the Nationalists recognized.
The Chinese forces fled southwest and up the Yangzi River
to Wuhan while the Japanese advanced
and attacked the railway junction at Xuzhou.
In April 1938 General Li Zongren led a tough defense
that killed 30,000 Japanese troops before retreating
and giving up the city of Xuzhou on May 19.
The Japanese marched toward Kaifeng while Jiang ordered
his engineers to destroy the dikes of the Yellow River in June,
causing a huge flood that delayed the Japanese
for three months and destroyed more than 4,000 villages,
making more than two million people homeless.
The Yellow River had been flowing into the Yellow Sea
north of the Shandong peninsula since the 1850s,
but this changed its course back to the south through Jiangsu.
From Kaifeng the Japanese followed the railway south
and began attacking the tri-city area of Wuhan
in the late summer of 1938.
Jiang had his headquarters there but moved the capital
to Chongqing in Sichuan.
After Japan made an alliance with Nazi Germany,
Stalin sent Russian pilots to help China
from the Lanzhou base in Gansu.
The Chinese lost more than a hundred planes
and suffered 200,000 casualties defending Wuhan,
which was devastated.
The Japanese entered the city on October 25,
four days after their navy and marines
had taken Guangzhou (Canton).
Jiang retreated with a scorched-earth policy,
and Changsha was burned in November.
Nearly five hundred private factories
were moved to western China.
The Government gave private industrialists incentives
that included guaranteed profits for at least five years,
low-interest loans, and free factory sites.
The Japanese bombed universities in the major cities
or looted them and converted them for their own uses
as barracks, brothels, hospitals, and stables.
Only six colleges and vocational schools remained
in Japanese territory; 52 fled to the interior,
and 25 moved to foreign concessions or Hong Kong.
The refugees from the east were given most
of the government and skilled jobs
as the natives in the west suffered discrimination.
Japan had gained China’s wealthy eastern cities
and its most fertile farmland, and they exploited the
puppet states of Manzhouguo (Manchuria) and the
Inner Mongolian Federation (Chahar and Suiyuan)
for their military and industrial resources.
Japanese forces set up local governments south of the
Great Wall under the Provisional Government
of the Republic of China
(Hebei, Chahar, Suiyuan, Henan, and Shandong).
Zhang Xueliang’s financial adviser Wang Kemin
was made chairman of the executive committee
in Beijing on December 14, and the North China
Development Company took over various industries
that had been managed by Japanese corporations
and iron and coal mines, steel factories, and harbors.
The Japanese formed the North China Transportation,
Telephone, and Telegraph Companies,
and a new Federal Reserve Bank tried to
undermine the Chinese paper money.
Japanese troops searched the foreign concession areas
for terrorists and reduced foreign trade from
US $31 million per month to US $18 million while retaining
the revenues of the foreign customs in Japanese banks.
After Nanjing fell, Japan organized a fourth puppet
government in central China over Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui,
making the pro-Japanese Liang Hongzhi president
of the executive bureau in Nanjing on March 28, 1938.
The Central China company had less than a third
of the capital of its northern counterpart
and tried to repair the damaged railways.
After collaborators were assassinated in Shanghai’s
International Settlement, Japanese troops occupied the area.
The puppet governments were mostly supported by
businesses and landowners, and the urban unemployed
out of poverty joined their puppet armies.
Many Japanese civilians came to China to make money,
220,000 from the Kobe port in 1939.
Yan Xishan still ruled most of Shanxi.
Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai,
and Tibet were also independent.
Jiang’s Guomindang governed a large area in the south
(except around Guangzhou), and the Chinese
Communist
Party (CCP) controlled a northern area around Shaanxi.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled into these two areas
to join the united front against the Japanese.
Workers transported machinery and spare parts to factories.
Students from Beijing and Tianjin brought their books to the
Consolidated University at Kunming in Yunnan.
Many stayed in Shanghai but continued to publish and teach.
Zhou Zuoren, brother of Zhou Shuren (Lu Xun),
had been saved by the Japanese in 1927,
and he became a dean at Beijing University
and then the director of the Bureau of Education
of the Provisional Government.
In April 1938 a Guomindang provisional national congress
met at Wuhan and confirmed Jiang Jieshi as director-general;
he was the supreme leader over the
party, the government, and the military.
On April 16 in an Easter radio broadcast he explained that
he believed in Jesus because he was the leader of a
national revolution, a social revolution,
and a religious revolution.
During the war the government was run by Jiang as chairman
of the Military Affairs Committee.
A Three People’s Principles Youth Corps was create
to train young men for war and reconstruction.
A People’s Political Council was formed,
but it was only advisory.
The Outline of Resistance and Reconstruction set the goals
to establish local governments, ally with countries
opposed to the imperialists, train people for the military with
political indoctrination, adopt a planned economy
or national defense, move factories and colleges to “free China,”
and encourage scientific education.
This plan was approved by the National Social Party
and the Youth Party.
The Communist Party accepted it but had their own program.
The People’s Political Council met in July and included
80 Guomindang members, 70 independents,
and 50 Communists and others.
After 1939 it did not have much influence.
After pursuing the Communists on the long march,
the Guomindang had tried to break the power of warlords
in Sichuan and reformed the provincial government
by simplifying taxes, building roads,
and suppressing opium cultivation.
A drought there in 1936 caused a famine
that killed thousands in early 1937.
Sichuan cities had food riots, and banditry increased.
On December 8 Jiang flew from Wuhan to Guilin and made
Chongqing his new capital in Sichuan.
He confirmed Long Yun in Kunming as the governor of Yunnan.
The Japanese took control of the shipping on the Yangzi River
and pressured the French to stop the arms shipments north
on the railway from Hanoi.
Cut off from the outside world, Jiang ordered the Burma Road
built from Kunming to Mandalay using conscript labor.
The road opened on December 2, 1938.
Jiang began the war with an army of 1,700,000 men
who were poorly trained and supplied.
About 300,000 had been trained by Germans,
but only 80,000 of them
were fully equipped with German weapons.
In September 1937 the Communists in Yan’an agreed
to follow Sun Yat-sen’s three principles of
nationalism, democracy, and socialism;
give up the rebellion, forming soviets, and confiscating land;
renounce the Shaanxi Soviet’s autonomy;
and put their renamed Eighth Route Army
nominally under Nationalist command.
Actually the commanders Zhu De and Peng Dehuai were
under Yan Xishan of Shanxi.
They were following the current Comintern policy of
forming alliances to fight fascism.
The party line was that they could not fight a civil war
and the Japanese at the same time;
national independence would have to come first.
However, Mao insisted that the Communist party leadership
must remain independent.
No more than one-third of government officials were
to be CCP members, but Mao suggested a second third
could be “left progressives.”
On November 29, 1937 a plane brought Wang Ming
to Yan’an as Stalin’s representative to get the Communist
to cooperate with Jiang in the united front.
Mao published “A Key to Solving the Present Situation”
in December.
Communists still in central China formed the
New Fourth Army with 10,000 troops in December
under the command of Ye Ting and Xiang Ying.
Local areas had their own regular armed forces
and militias of men and women who also had jobs.
They also gained support from traditional secret societies
such as the Elder Brothers’ Society and the Red Spears.
The popularity of the united national front enabled
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to increase
its membership from 40,000 in 1937 to 200,000 in 1938
and to 800,000 by 1940.
The Red Army had a similar expansion, increasing from
about 45,000 in 1937 to more than 180,000 in 1938
and 500,000 by 1940.
Instead of expropriating land, the CCP reduced rent and
graded taxes to discourage rich landlords
and help poor peasants.
They fulfilled Sun Yat-sen’s pledge to lower rent
by 25% from 50% of the harvest to 37.5%
while the Guomindang ignored this policy.
They organized the Resist Japan University in Yan’an,
and its graduates started cadre schools in the base areas.
The Marxist-Leninist Wang Ming was put in charge
of the United Front Work Department in Wuhan in 1938,
but his Wuhan Defense Committee and CCP newspaper
were shut down in August.
The CCP published Liberation in Yan’an,
and in the summer of 1941 it became the Daily Liberation.
Their New China Daily appeared in Nationalist areas,
but it was censored.
In May 1938 Mao wrote “Problems of Strategy in
Guerrilla War Against Japan” and “On Protracted War.”
After the plenum in late 1938 Liu Shaoqi became
the highest CCP authority in central China,
and the New Fourth Army began expanding
north of the Yangzi River.
Liu developed flexible policies for winning over
the people while harassing the Japanese.
In August 1937 the Soviet Union had offered China
a loan of US $50 million for 1937, US $50 million for 1938,
and US $150 million for 1939 at only 3% interest.
They would also send pilots and planes if China would agree
not to attack the USSR in a non-aggression pact.
Russia sent 1,000 planes, 2,000 pilots,
and 500 military advisors by the end of the 1939.
Very little of the Soviet aid went to the Communists
through Xinjiang and Gansu.
The aid to Chongqing ended in April 1941
when the USSR signed a neutrality pact with Japan.
The United States sent US $50 million for currency stabilization
and US $120 million for non-military uses.
Britain provided US $78.5 million and France US $15 million.
The United States also continued its silver purchases,
and these gave China US $252 million in cash.
The Americans did not stop selling Japan oil, scrap iron,
automobile parts, metals, cotton, and wood pulp
until their commercial treaty ended in July 1939.
The Guomindang sent military officers to Germany
for instruction up to 1941.
Jiang Jieshi’s German and Italian military advisors
had left China in 1938, and Japanese bombers
had destroyed China’s airplane factories.
In 1939 the Japanese advanced south and took over the
Guangxi capital Nanning and the Jiangxi capital Nanchang,
and they occupied the island of Hainan.
Chongqing had little defense against Japanese air attacks,
and regular Japanese bombing began in May 1939,
killing 4,400 in the first two days.
In the next three years the Japanese bombed Chongqing 268 times.
The Chinese dug underground shelters,
and partisans behind Japanese lines
provided early warnings by radio.
A US flyer named Claire Lee Chennault urged Jiang
to purchase modern planes from the United States.
In 1940 Jiang sent Chennault to Washington with T. V. Soong.
They and China’s ambassador Hu Shi persuaded
President Franklin Roosevelt to ship China one hundred P-40 fighters.
American volunteers flew for the famous Flying Tigers
and were given $500 for each plane they shot down.
Wang Jingwei had failed to convince the governor of Yunnan
to secede from the Nationalists,
and on December 18, 1938 he flew from Chongqing to Hanoi
to try to develop a peace plan.
Four days later Japan’s Prince Konoe announced
a new Chinese regime that would cooperate with Japan
and fight the Communists.
When Wang urged Jiang to accept,
Jiang had him expelled from the Guomindang.
Wang signed eight agreements with Japan,
and he urged the Chinese to be friendly with Japan
as Sun Yat-sen had been
In March 1940 Wang Jingwei accepted a position
in Japan’s government over central China in Nanjing.
When Wang died in 1944, he was replaced by Chen Gongbo.
Dai Li increased his Guomindang secret agents to about
50,000 by the end of the war,
and he was supported by 600,000 Blue Shirts.
His secret service competed with the old secret society
of Elder Brothers (Gelaohui) for the drug traffic.
Dai Li maintained a radio link to Zhou Fuhai,
who was the head of the puppet government in Nanjing.
When the war ended, Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fuhai
were arrested and executed as traitors.
Those who did not like Jiang’s policies formed the
Federation of Democratic Parties in March 1941
as a coalition of the China Youth Party,
the National Socialist Party, the Third Party
and the National Salvation Association.
In 1942 the Nationalist government reorganized the
People’s Political Council, and these critics were excluded.
The Guomindang gained a majority,
and the Communists stopped attending.
Japanese forces seized the Yangzi River port at Yichang
in June 1940 to block rice shipments
to central China and build an air base.
That month France stopped the rail service from Hanoi to Yunnan,
and three months later the Japanese occupied Tonkin.
China was cut off from the outside world in July
as British prime minister Winston Churchill yielded
to Japanese pressure to close the Burma Road
o all military supplies for three months;
but at the end of that period he ordered it opened again.
In northern China the Japanese claimed that
70,000 Nationalist troops defected in a year and a half.
In March 1939 the Communists formed the border region
government called Shaan-Gan-Ning for Shaanxi, Gansu,
and Ningxia, and later they established the
Jin-Cha-Ji government for Shanxi, Chahar, and Hebei.
Shaan-Gan-Ning remained the only base
that was not in territory controlled by the Japanese.
The other bases did not receive Nationalist subsidies
and had to be self-sufficient.
The Guomindang Central Committee
restricted the CCP in early 1939.
Military clashes began in the summer, and Jiang sent troops to
blockade the Communists in the northwest
from Xinjiang and Soviet Central Asia.
By then the CCP had established about fifteen bases
in the enemy territory of the Japanese.
Liu Shaoqi gave a series of lectures on
“How To Be a Good Communist”
in July at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Yan’an.
Like Mao, he taught that they must cultivate themselves
and steel themselves in their practice.
They should become unselfish and intelligent Communists
and practice mutual love.
They should search for the truth from concrete facts
and work for the good of the whole,
putting the party’s interests above personal problems.
A good Communist will be the first to suffer hardship
and the last to enjoy oneself, will face difficulties
with the greatest sense of responsibility,
with moral courage will resist corruption by money or honors,
will resist vacillation despite poverty,
and will refuse to yield to threats of force.
A comrade does not fear criticism from others
and courageously criticizes others with sincerity.
The New Fourth Army consolidated
its position in the Lower Yangzi region.
In November and December more than 30,000 troops
went over from Yan Xishan’s armies to the Communists.
Mao Zedong enunciated the policy of resisting
when it was justified or expedient
but restraint from going too far.
He gave a series of courses at the Yan’an Military Academy
on guerrilla strategies that included daily attrition, harassment,
sudden dispersal, and concentration of forces.
Mao started The Communist newspaper in October 1939.
His book On New Democracy was published in January 1940
and described four classes that included peasants, intellectuals,
and even a few “national capitalists” as well as workers.
The Communists organized elections by village, canton, district,
and region, and everyone over eighteen could vote.
One-third were to be Communists, one-third leftists,
and one-third liberal democrats.
In the 1941 elections in the Yan’an zone
the 10,926 representatives included 2,801 Communists.
Anyone could participate in economic and military decisions.
Villages had self-defense militias.
The Communists allowed decentralization in liberated areas.
Political cadres were expected to spend
some of their time in farming or crafts.
Mao himself grew tomatoes and tobacco.
Most belonged to large organizations such as the
Workers Organization, the Youth Association
for National Salvation, and the Association of Women.
The women defended each other from arranged marriages
and dominating mothers-in-law.
Only 8% of the elected leaders were women.
Foreign visitors to Yan’an were impressed
by the frugality and brotherhood.
The liberated zones were blockaded by the Japanese
and the Guomindang troops
and had to learn to produce what they needed.
The area cultivated in the Shaan-Gan-Ning zone
increased from 9 million mou in 1936
to 12.5 million mou in 1942.
Cotton production went from 7,370 bales in 1938
to 104,302 in 1943.
Schools were established, but in 1940 only 1,341 schools
had 43,265 students for the two million people
in the Shaan-Gan-Ning base area.
Guomindang and CCP representatives began negotiating
in June 1940 over operating zones.
The Communists launched a series of offensives
against the Japanese in 1940 from August to December.
On August 20 about 40,000 men of the Eighth Route Army
attacked the major railways and roads in northern China.
The Jingxing coal mines were also severely damaged
and stopped production for almost a year.
In October the Communists defeated a larger force
led by Han Deqin in north Jiangsu.
In this campaign they killed or wounded 20,000 Japanese troops
and 18,000 collaborating Chinese soldiers.
Japanese counter-attacks had orders to “kill all, burn all, destroy all,”
and they wiped out entire villages.
Thousands of Chinese prisoners were taken to Manzhouguo to work.
The CCP’s Eighth Army lost 100,000 men from casualties and desertion.
The population under CCP control fell from 44 million to 25 million.
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) did not want the CCP’s
New Fourth Army in Jiangsu, and he ordered them
to move north of the Yangzi River by the end of December.
Mao ordered Xiang Ying to evacuate on December 25,
but he and Ye Ting did not start moving until January 4, 1941.
Three days later they were ambushed in the mountains
by 40,000 Nationalist forces.
In six days of fighting 4,000 Communist troops were killed
along with 5,000 civilians.
Some of those arrested were also shot
while others were taken to prison camps.
Xiang escaped but was killed later by bodyguards
over gold reserves they had taken.
On January 17 Jiang ordered the New Fourth Army disbanded,
and its commander was arrested.
The CCP appointed a new commander and reorganized
the New Fourth Army in six areas north of the Yangzi;
a few months later they also sent guerrilla fighters
south of the river where they had been before.
Jiang reacted by imposing an economic blockade
on the Shaanxi government, stopping salt shipments,
and ending subsidies for the New Fourth Army.
CCP members refused to attend the People’s Political Council.
Chinese troops blockaded the Communists in the northwest,
and 50,000 Japanese troops attacked them
south of Shanxi in May 1941.
The Chinese were routed and retreated across the Yellow River.
In July the central Nationalist government took over
the collection of land taxes from the provinces
and assessed them in rice, wheat, barley, or cotton;
but tax revenues were only 11% of war-time expenditures.
As inflation increased the salaries of officials and soldiers
lost most of their value, increasing peculation.
The Communists also suffered from the disrupted economy
and high inflation which began accelerating in 1940.
The CCP had to impose taxes but still exempted the
poorest fifth of the peasants.
Grain taxes in 1941 were twenty times
what they had been in 1938.
In July 1941 Liu Shaoqi gave a series of lectures
“On Inner-Party Struggle.”
He said that comrades should consider inner-party struggle
a great responsibility and remember the adage that
one must correct oneself before one can correct others.
A sincere and educational attitude
helps one achieve unity in ideology.
Criticisms should not be excessive or abusive name-calling.
They must first make clear the facts, the points at issue,
and the cause of the errors, then they can discover
who causes the errors and who is responsible.
If they do not agree,
anyone may appeal the case to a higher authority.
After discussion an issue may be decided by a majority.
The minority can maintain their opinion
but must accept the decision.
Criticisms should be presented to the appropriate party
organization and not be talked about casually among the masses.
The interests of some should be subordinated to those of the whole,
and immediate interests should be subordinated to long-term goals.
Everyone must submit to reason.
After the Japanese tried to cripple the American navy
with its surprise attacks on December 7, 1941,
the United States declared war on Japan and made China
one of the big four allies along with Britain and the Soviet Union.
The US had granted China only $26 million in lend-lease
supplies in 1941, and the closed Burma Road
made delivering lend-lease in 1942 difficult.
T. V. Soong gained a loan of $500 million.
The US lend-lease credits to China were $49 million in 1943
and $53 million in 1944,
but they jumped to $1,107 million in 1945.
Excessive borrowing and paper money
let Chinese inflation go out of control.
In 1937 the US dollar was equal to three Chinese dollars,
but this ratio increased to 6.5 in 1938, 16 in 1939,
98 in 1943, 680 in 1944, and 3,250 in 1945.
Yet during the war China maintained
an exchange rate of twenty to one.
This created an enormous subsidy
in the last year of lend-lease.
The great families accumulated rich reserves of
American dollars in the United States,
and H. H. Kung became the richest man in China.
President Roosevelt appointed General Joseph Stilwell
as liaison to Jiang Jieshi and American commander
in the China-Burma-India theater.
The Flying Tigers were incorporated into the Fourteenth Air Force,
and Chennault was made a general.
The United States had 1,255 troops in China by the end of 1942.
This increased gradually to 32,956 in January 1945
and to 60,369 by August.
Nationalist troops defeated a massive Japanese attack in Hunan.
Japan had forty percent of their forces in China.
The Nationalist army increased to more than 3,500,000 men,
but they did less and less fighting as indicated by their figures
for the dead which decreased from 340,000 in 1940
to 145,000 in 1941 to 88,000 in 1942, and 43,000 in 1943.
Provincial armies complained that Jiang kept the best
lend-lease equipment and supplies for his own forces.
Poor harvests and a drought led to a terrible famine in 1942
in Henan; more than two million people died
while three million left the province.
About 50,000 peasants rebelled in 1943
and took over southern Gansu.
Japanese forces severed the Burma Road
at Lashio in April 1942, and Jiang lost many
of his reserve troops in the Burma campaign.
Chongqing became as isolated as Yan’an
except for air travel over the Himalayas from India.
Stilwell developed training programs for the Chinese army.
From 1941 to 1943 the Japanese built thousands
of blockhouses, trenches, stonewalls, and surveillance
posts to protect their occupied towns.
Japanese soldiers were sent out to “clean up” the liberated
areas by killing people and burning houses.
In May 1942 more than 50,000 people
in central Hebei were killed or arrested.
The Communists responded with guerrilla attacks,
but their forces declined to about 300,000 men.
In 1942 fifteen Nationalist generals defected
to the Japanese with about a half million men.
Jiang let deserters go so that the
Japanese
would have to feed them.
The number of generals defecting jumped to 42 in 1943,
and hundreds of thousands of troops went over
and protected the Japanese from Communist guerrillas.
In 1943 the Japanese attacked
the “rice-bowl” in western Hubei;
the Chinese lost more than 70,000 men
while Japanese casualties were less than 4,000.
In 1942 Xinjiang’s Governor Sheng Shicai broke with
Moscow and expelled the Soviet military advisors and civilians
while massacring Chinese Communists, including Mao Zemin,
brother of the famous Mao Zedong.
Sheng sought support from the Guomindang,
and in 1943 their troops replaced the departing Soviets.
In August 1944 Sheng reinstated martial law and had
Guomindang officials arrested.
The Guomindang had Sheng flown to Chongqing.
Wu Zhongxin was made chairman of the Xinjiang government,
but the Kazakhs in the north led a revolt,
and the Eastern Turkestan Republic was proclaimed
in November 1944 under Ahmadjan Qasimi with
Ali Khan Türe as the nominal president in Uzbek.
They captured Guomindang garrisons
in the Ili Valley in January 1945.
In 1942 the Nationalist government monopolized
the distribution of salt, sugar, tobacco, and matches.
Newspapers were censored, and prominent
professors were suspended or arrested for criticizing
the bureaucratic capitalism of the Guomindang tutelage.
Minister of Education Chen Lifu applied his anti-Communist
policies to control the curriculum and textbooks.
Notable exceptions were at Southwest Associated University
in Kunming, Yunnan, where Long Yun governed,
and at Guilin in Guangxi.
The 1942 National Mobilization Act suppressed opposition
and helped regulate labor.
In March 1943 Jiang Jieshi published his
authoritarian views in China’s Destiny.
The book was edited by Tao Xisheng who went over
to the Japanese for a while with Wang Jingwei;
but it was not translated into English so as not to ruin
Jiang’s liberal reputation promoted abroad.
T. V. Soong and Madame Jiang Jieshi went on
public relations tours of the United States.
The Communists took more control over local governments
and sent cadres into rural areas
to purchase grain and advance credit.
They criticized and punished landlords,
loan sharks, and corrupt officials.
On February 1, 1942 at an assembly in Yan’an of one thousand
party cadres Mao launched his Rectification Campaign
that criticized “subjectivism, sectarianism, and party formalism.”
Mao spoke on art, literature, and the role of intellectuals in May.
Self-examination was demanded, and some were
transferred from powerful positions to menial jobs.
Instead of punishing people, the idea was
to get them to change themselves.
Ding Ling had written stories criticizing the insensitivity
of the cadres toward women, and she was sent
to work in the countryside.
Zhao Shuli published stories and plays
about peasants in plain language.
Kang Sheng, who had arrived from Moscow
with Wang Ming in 1937, became loyal to Mao and went after
the dissidents in another purge that arrested hundreds,
including Wang Shiwei, and expelled 40,000 party members.
Mao in December published “Economic and Financial Problems”
in which he suggested pragmatic rural reforms.
Zhou Enlai complained about Kang’s charges,
and Ren Bishi sent Mao a secret report.
Mao became chairman of the Politburo in March 1943.
Liu Shaoqi began to develop the cult of Mao’s leadership in July,
and Mao’s portrait was painted on many public buildings.
Liu attacked the Fourth Plenum and compelled those
who had been associated with Wang Ming to criticize themselves,
including Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai.
Mao admitted in December that they should not kill party
members and that most should not be arrested.
They realized that most of those accused were innocent,
and they were rehabilitated.
In 1944 Mao became chairman of the entire Communist Party
in China with Liu Shaoqi as number two and Zhou Enlai as third.
Commander-in-Chief Zhu De ranked fourth and Ren Bishi fifth.
After a century of imposing the extraterritoriality system on China,
the Allies ended the “unequal treaties” in January 1943,
though this did not affect Americans until the war ended.
In March the Japanese took their foreign enemies from Beijing
and put them in an internment camp at Weixian.
Americans and Europeans in Shanghai were interned
in central China, and 16,000 refugee Jews were forced
to sell their property and were guarded in a ghetto.
In 1943 the Communists demanded legal status and
military expansion, and talks with the Nationalists broke down.
By the end of the year their chief negotiator,
Zhou Enlai, had left Chongqing.
New talks began at Xi’an on May 4, 1944,
but the Communists demanded more army divisions.
Jiang sent more troops to blockade the Communist
areas in the northwest.
When Patrick Hurley visited Yan’an in November,
he reported back to Roosevelt that they were
striving for democratic principles.
The Union of Comrades for Unity and National Reconstruction
started in 1939 and became the
League of Democratic Groups in 1941.
On September 6, 1943 General Stilwell urged Jiang to lift
the blockade on the Communist areas
that was using 400,000 of his troops.
During General Patrick Hurley’s visit Stilwell went against
his advice and on September 19 gave Jiang a message
from Roosevelt requesting that he give Stilwell unrestricted
command or accept responsibility for the
deteriorating military situation.
Jiang reacted by asking for Stilwell to be recalled.
Stilwell agreed to stop using Communist forces.
Hurley reported that Stilwell’s attitude was the problem
between Roosevelt and Jiang,
but he was not recalled until October 19, 1944.
The Americans persuaded the Soviet foreign minister
Vyacheslav Molotov to let China sign the Moscow Declaration
on November 1, 1943 in which the Four Powers promised
to prosecute the war unceasingly to victory
without making any separate treaties with their enemies.
Jiang Jieshi met with Churchill and Roosevelt at Cairo
in December, and they agreed that Manchuria and Taiwan
should be controlled by China after the war.
General Stilwell and the British led retrained Chinese troops
against the Japanese in northern Burma and constructed
a new road from Ledo to the Burma Road.
Roosevelt supported the strategy of air force bombing,
and Chennault supervised tens of thousands of Chinese laborers
to expand the airfields east of Chongqing.
In June 1944 American B-29 bombers began attacking
Japanese targets in Bangkok, in Manzhouguo
and on the islands of Kyushu, Sumatra, and Taiwan.
In the spring of 1944 Japan’s Ichigo offensive defeated
400,000 men in Henan under Guomindang general Tang Enbo
in a few weeks with only 50,000 troops.
Tang was especially hated for letting his troops pillage
while tens of thousands of Henanians were starving.
The Japanese moved south and took Changsha on June 18.
They entered Guangxi and by November had seized the
airfields in Guizhou and Liuzhou.
Chinese peasants in Guangdong had suffered so much
from famine and enforced tax collections that they attacked
the retreating Chinese troops.
During this offensive the Nationalist Chinese forces suffered
nearly a half million casualties, not counting civilians,
and they lost a quarter of their factories.
Opposition groups formed the China Democratic League
in September, but these intellectuals lacked a popular base.
Americans were horrified by the misery that resulted
from the labor conscripted by the Guomindang armies.
Jiang’s ordering random executions of recruiting officers
had not stopped the abuses.
About three quarters of a million Chinese men who had been
drafted in 1943 either deserted or died while traveling to
their units under miserable conditions.
About fourteen million Chinese men were drafted between 1937
and 1945, but more than eight million deserted or died
from causes other than battle.
The draft was supposed to be by lottery,
but often peasants were pressed into service, roped together,
and marched hundreds of miles to their units
with little food and no medical care.
The number of recruits who died in this way during the war
has been estimated at more than a million.
General Wedemeyer found that lack of food made most
of the Chinese soldiers ineffective.
The entire Chinese army had only 2,000 qualified doctors,
and most seriously wounded soldiers died.
Students were exempt from conscription,
and university enrollment increased from
42,000 in 1936 to 79,000 in 1944.
However, military education for officers deteriorated as the
percentage of academy graduates among the officers
declined from eighty in 1937 to twenty in 1945.
In June 1944 US Vice President Henry Wallace visited
Chongqing and urged American visits to Yan’an.
Jiang reluctantly agreed to a
United States Observer Group in Yan’an.
The next month Col. David Barrett led a group of seventeen
military observers and two from the foreign service
called the Dixie Mission to get information
and help downed American pilots.
US President Roosevelt wanted Stilwell to be commander of all
Chinese forces; but Jiang objected,
and Stilwell was replaced by
General Albert Wedemeyer in October.
Roosevelt’s special envoy Patrick Hurley went to Yan’an
in November and signed a five-point draft agreement with
Mao Zedong calling for a coalition government,
CCP representation on the United National Military Council,
legal status for the CCP, civil rights, and unified armed forces.
Jiang Jieshi rejected this and countered with acceptance of
Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles and the Communists
turning their troops over to the Nationalist government
in exchange for legal status, a place on the
National Military Council, and some civil rights.
The next month Wedemeyer proposed an alliance
with the Communists, but this was rejected by Jiang.
Two other plans to assist the Communists in fighting the Japanese
were also blocked by Jiang.
CCP negotiator Zhou Enlai left Chongqing
for Yan’an on December 9.
Hurley became ambassador to China, and both he and
Wedemeyer were anti-Communist and prohibited collaborating
with any Chinese political parties.
When Col. Barrett tried to revive the agreement,
Mao sent him a message complaining that the Americans were
trying to get them to sacrifice their freedom.
He asserted that, unlike Jiang,
they needed no nation to prop them up.
Mao’s 200-page report On Financial and Economic Problems
of the Border Region explained how self-reliance
enabled civil servants and soldiers to produce their own food,
reducing public expenditures.
He noted that Nationalist finances were on the verge of collapse.
The Communists’ counter-offensive expanded in 1944 and 1945
The peasants organized self-defense forces and militias.
Mao began urging his comrades to work in the big cities.
In 1944 the Communist general staff claimed they captured
5,000 small forts, killed or wounded 260,000, and captured
60,000 while 30,000 puppet soldiers came over to their side.
The Eighth Army took over some cities several times,
mostly for propaganda purposes.
By the end of the war the Communists claimed
950,000 square kilometers in 19 liberated zones.
Their regular armies had 910,000 troops, the militias 2,300,000,
and the village self-defense units 10,000,000.
In the fall Mao persuaded some American colonels that
they would serve under an American general
if they received military aid;
but when the anti-Communist Hurley heard of these negotiations,
he ended them and demanded an investigation.
A conspiracy against Jiang Jieshi fell apart in January 1945
when Long Yun of Yunnan was bought off with America
lend-lease supplies for three of his divisions.
Hurley persuaded Zhou Enlai to return to Chongqing
on January 20, 1945, but he did not stay long.
In February at the Yalta conference President Roosevelt and
Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war
against Japan within three months after Germany’s defeat;
they would support Jiang as China’s leader
and recognize Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria.
However, the agreement also safeguarded
Soviet interests in Manchuria.
Stalin promised that Russia would not help
the CCP fight the Nationalists.
Jiang sent T. V. Soong to Moscow to confer with Stalin,
who promised to support Jiang as China’s leader,
not aid his enemies, begin evacuating Soviet troops from
Manchuria three weeks after Japan’s surrender and
complete the withdrawal in three months.
In exchange China granted the USSR ownership of
Manchurian railways, recognition of Outer Mongolia’s
independence, and the right to station military forces
in Port Arthur, Dairen, and adjacent areas.
The Communists began attacking landlords again and
rated the peasants into classes to help equalize their opportunities.
They organized five-person mutual-guarantee (baojia) groups
in order to prevent individuals from committing crimes.
Thieves, bandits, prostitutes, and opium smugglers were excluded.
Mao Zedong wrote “On Coalition Government” in April
and
convened the seventh CCP national congress, the first since 1928.
They met from April to June 1945 at Yan’an with 50 delegates
and 208 deputies representing 1,211,128 members.
The CCP now controlled territory with 95 million people.
Mao’s ideas were integrated into a new party constitution.
After hearing Mao’s report they decided to avoid a civil war
and form a coalition central government,
unify the military command, guarantee the freedom of democratic
parties, abolish authoritarian measures, control bureaucratic
monopolies, and reduce farm rents.
Liu Shaoqi proposed ways of reorganizing CCP statutes.
The top position of chairman of the Central Committee
was created, and Mao was elected.
The theories of Mao had become the
main guide of the Chinese Communist Party.
Mao welcomed the United Nations conference
and sent CCP delegates to San Francisco.
He asked the Allied governments not to impair their friendship
and warned that any foreign government that opposed the
Chinese people’s democratic cause by helping the Chinese
reactionaries would be making a gross mistake.
In July he warned that ambassador Hurley was creating a
civil war crisis in China and was antagonizing the Chinese people.
Mao outlined their policy after the victory over Japan in August
and also wrote “Now Jiang Jieshi is Provoking Civil War.”
The Guomindang congress also met in April 1945 at Chongqing
for the first time in seven years and heard much severe criticism.
Churchill considered China a very weak ally, and he,
Roosevelt, and Stalin had not informed Jiang
of the decisions they made at Yalta in February.
The Soviet Union was to lease the naval base at Lushun,
participate in the international city at Dalian,
and have the controlling interest in the railways in Manchuria.
In early August the Chinese forces recaptured Guilin,
and on August 8 Soviet forces led by
Marshal Rodion Malinovsky entered Manzhouguo.
Two days later the Russians entered Outer Mongolia,
and Stalin warned T. V. Soong that Manchuria
might fall to the Communists.
So Jiang’s Foreign Minister Wang Shijie and Molotov
signed the treaty of alliance on August 14.
After thirty years the joint ownership of the Manchurian railways
would revert to China as would the free port of Dairen.
Mao recognized the atom bomb as a weapon of mass slaughter;
but he believed that wars were decided
by the people, not by new weapons.
After eight years of war, Japan had spent
35% of their war expenditures on the China campaign
and had 396,040 Japanese killed.
China piled up a war debt of Ch $1,464 billion.
Japanese germ warfare experiments and attacks,
directed by Major Ishii Shiro in Manchuria and in other places,
may have caused as many as 200,000 Chinese to die of
bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and other diseases.
The Communist forces claimed they fought 92,000 battles
and inflicted one million casualties.
Most of their 150,000 prisoners were Chinese puppets
because most of the Japanese soldiers fought to the death.
They captured 320,000 rifles, 9,000 machine guns,
and 600 artillery guns.
The total number of Chinese people killed in the Japanese war
has been estimated at 19,605,000 with
3,800,000 of them being military deaths.
After atom bombs destroyed the cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the Japanese agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945,
the same day the USSR signed a treaty of alliance
with the Nationalist government.
Four days earlier Commander-in-chief Zhu De had ordered
Communists to force Japanese officers to surrender,
and the Communists worked to maintain law and order.
Zhu asked the Japanese commander Okamura Yasuji
to surrender to the Communists.
When the war ended, the Japanese had 1,250,000 troops
in China plus 900,000 in Manchuria along with
1,750,000 Japanese civilians.
The Nationalist armies had 2,700,000 men.
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and US General Wedemeyer
agreed that American forces should occupy
Shanghai, Dagu, Guangzhou, and Qingdao.
About 53,000 US Marines landed,
and some were sent to Beijing and Tianjin.
The Americans airlifted more than 110,000 of Jiang’s soldiers
from Chongqing to north and east China.
The Allied commander Douglas MacArthur sent General Order
Number 1 to Tokyo that required Japanese commanders
in China to surrender to the Nationalists
while those in Manchuria surrendered to the Soviets.
On August 15 Jiang ordered General Okamura to keep
all military supplies and maintain order until further notice.
One week later he was told to allow the passage of only
Nationalist troops in occupied territory.
On August 23 the Nationalist commander He Yingchin ordered
Okamura to defend Japanese positions against Communist troops,
and by the end of September more than a hundred such clashes
had occurred.
Generally the Nationalists took over most of the cities in east,
central, and south China while the Communists controlled much
of the countryside and took over 59 cities mostly in the north.
Yan Xishan used Japanese troops in Shanxi in his fight
against Communists to hang onto Taiyuan.
Russian troops in Manchuria deposed Manzhouguo emperor Puyi
and accepted the Japanese surrender.
On August 19 Chinese Communist armies met up with the Russians,
who left them large amounts of weapons and ammunition.
As reparations for their losses to the Germans,
the Russians took away gold worth US $3 million,
machinery and equipment estimated it would cost
$2 billion to replace, and food.
They even took generating plants and pumps from the large mines,
leaving them flooded.
Starting on August 11, Lin Biao had used forced marches
to occupy Manchuria with 100,000 soldiers before many
Nationalists could arrive.
About 150,000 former guerrillas were reorganized into the
People’s Self-Defense Army,
and they included many fugitive Koreans.
By October 10 they had taken over 97 towns
and 315,000 square miles with 18,700,000 people.
The Nationalists took over industrial plants from the Japanese
and allowed private profiteering.
Jiang alienated Manchurians by appointing Chinese officials
to govern the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin,
and Liaoning in nine districts.
Jiang also transferred the detained Zhang Xueliang to Taiwan
even though many wanted him released.
The Guomindang allowed many puppet officials
and troops to remain in authority.
They issued anti-collaborator regulations in September
that made exceptions, though some were punished.
Factories and warehouses were closed,
but those claiming authority often robbed them.
In Hunan 3,438 motor vehicles were robbed
of their parts that were sold to dealers.
Puppet currencies as well as the yuan and the US$ were
exchanged at wildly different rates from city to city,
enabling speculators to make money buying and
selling them from one place to another.
In south and central China the exchange rate
of the Japanese-supported currency was 200 to 1.
Yet the Japanese government had previously made people
exchange two yuans for one unit of the puppet currency,
resulting in a total loss of 400 to 1.
The corruption and incompetence of many
Nationalist officials alienated millions of people.
In October the Soviet authorities refused to let Nationalist
troops from American ships enter the port of Dairen,
and two other ports that Malinovsky suggested
also turned them away.
Soviet commanders also blocked the air transport of Nationalist
troops into Manchuria until January 1946.
The Soviet forces in November 1945 had agreed to withdraw
within three months; but the Guomindang extended their deadline,
and the Soviet troops did not complete
their withdrawal from Manchuria until May.
Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai flew with Patrick Hurley from
Yan’an to Chongqing on August 28, 1945,
and talks continued until October 10.
Jiang Jieshi and Mao both promised to avoid a civil war.
Mao wanted to appear reasonable, and he agreed to reduce
CCP forces by 90% to 20 divisions and to withdraw
from eight liberated zones in the south.
He and Jiang generally agreed on political democracy,
a unified military, and legal status for all political parties
with “freedom of person, religion, speech,
publication and assembly.”
Local governments were to be elected.
The Communists were willing to evacuate the south,
but Jiang in November sent his best troops to Manchuria
in an attempt to control all of China.
On November 14 Nationalist troops supported by the US
attacked the Communists at Shanhaiguan
at the strategic end of the Great Wall.
Washington announced that it would support the Nationalist
government as long as it negotiated with the Communists and
did not use American arms in a civil war.
Ambassador Hurley protested this change of policy
and resigned on November 27, accusing State Department
officials of siding with the Chinese Communists.
President Harry Truman sent the respected
George Marshall to China in December.
The Communists went back to confiscating land
and punishing class enemies.
In 1946 the Communists explained their policy at a large
conference of the Chinese Agricultural Association in Shanghai.
They were abolishing tenancy and redistributing
land to its cultivators.
Mass meetings aroused communities to attack the wealthy
and redistribute confiscated property.
Communists infiltrated unions,
and thousands of workers went on strike.
The Shanghai Power Company yielded in February 1946.
Unemployment in Shanghai was 8% in late 1946,
but it was 20% in Guangzhou and 30% in Nanjing.
Both sides supported the effort by the United Nations Relief
and Rehabilitation Administration engineers to redirect the
Yellow River back to its northward path to the sea
which was completed in 1947.
The US promised Jiang $600 million
in military equipment at low prices.
Jiang wanted the Communists to put their armies under a
unified command immediately; but the Communists would
not agree to do so until after a constitution
government was established.
Marshall got both sides to agree to a truce on January 10, 1946
that was to be supervised by a committee with himself as
chairman along with Zhou Enlai and the Guomindang
general Zhang Jun; decisions had to be unanimous.
The next day a political consultative conference met in Nanjing
with 38 delegates that included eight from the Guomindang,
seven from the CCP, nine from the Democratic League,
and five from a new Youth party.
They agreed on a state council having forty members with half
nominated by the Guomindang and half by the other parties,
but resolutions required a two-thirds vote.
Provincial governments were to have their own constitutions,
and their governors were to be elected by the people.
On February 25 they agreed that within a year the Guomindang
would reduce their forces to 90 divisions and the CCP to 18;
then six months later they would be reduced to 50 and 10 divisions.
That day President Truman announced that the United States
Military Mission in China would be staffed by 1,000 officers
and men under General Wedemeyer.
Communist forces would be included in American training
programs and would receive American equipment
before they were integrated into the National army.
Marshall returned to the United States on March 11
and arranged for a loan of $500 million
from the Export-Import Bank.
Some of the Guomindang showed their opposition to the
agreements by breaking up a meeting celebrating the
Consultative Conference in Chongqing, by having police raid the
Democratic League, by refusing to release political prisoners,
and by destroying Communist newspaper offices.
When the Soviets departed in March, the Guomindang occupied
Mukden; but the Communists moved into Sipingkai and
defended it for a month in the first major battle of the civil war.
Lin Baio’s Communist forces captured Changchun on April 18
and the city of Harbin ten days later.
The Soviet army completed its
withdrawal from Manchuria in May.
The Chen clique objected to the concessions to the Communists,
and the Guomindang Central Executive Committee in March
demanded that the veto power of the Communists and the
Democratic League on the State Council be limited,
that Jiang have presidential powers instead of a cabinet system,
and that provincial autonomy be reduced.
The Communists and Democratic League refused to accept
these changes, but the Guomindang convened a national assembly
and drafted a constitution on their own.
Military clashes were going on, and the fighting escalated in April
when CCP forces defeated a Nationalist army
and took over Changchun.
That month the Guomindang government returned to Nanjing.
The Communists demanded a more favorable ratio of forces
in Manchuria, and Jiang ordered an attack
which regained Changchun in May.
On June 4 he announced national mobilization,
and he ordered conscription, tax on grain,
and more political surveillance.
Marshall got a 15-day cease-fire proclaimed on June 6
for Manchuria, and the US Congress voted to give the
Nationalist government long-term credit.
The Communists accused the Americans of playing a
double role of pretending to be an impartial mediator
while aiding the Nationalists,
and they demanded that American troops be withdrawn.
In June 1946 nearly two million Nationalist soldiers attacked
the Communist bases in north and central China,
and they began a major campaign in Manchuria in July.
On July 4 the Guomindang unilaterally announced that
the National Assembly would convene on November 12.
The CCP and Democratic League responded that
they would boycott the Assembly they considered illegal.
Mao Zedong called for war in self-defense,
and the Communists renamed their forces the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Leftists and liberals, such as the poet Wen Yiduo,
were being assassinated.
Marshall warned Jiang that economic collapse
could lead to a Communist victory.
That summer the Guomindang also sent 150,000
well-armed troops into Jiangsu province,
and they took over 29 counties from the Communists.
They captured 49 counties in the
Hebei-Shandong-Henan border region.
Many who had sided with the Communists had to pay ransoms,
or they were put in jail or executed.
Leftists complained that the United States was aiding
the
Nationalists, and protest demonstrations were escalating to riots.
Communists occasionally attacked the US military,
and forty US marines were ambushed in Anping in July 1946.
Generally in 1946 the Communist forces retreated to maintain
their forces while using guerrilla tactics
to attack when they had an advantage.
On July 20 Mao issued “Smash Jiang Jieshi’s Offensive
by a War of Self-Defense.”
The US put an embargo on shipping arms and ammunition
to China in late July, but in August they sold the Nationalists
$900 million worth of war surplus equipment for $175 million.
The Nationalists moved against the Communists in the lower
Yangzi Valley, and they seized Chengde.
On August 10 President Truman wrote to Jiang warning him
that American faith in Chinese democracy had been shaken.
A few weeks later Jiang replied by complaining of
Communist cease-fire violations.
The US partially lifted the arms embargo in October
and ended it completely in May 1947.
On October 1, 1946 Marshall warned Jiang to stop the war
or he would leave China.
Nationalist forces captured Kalgan on October 10.
That day Jiang made a major speech and called upon the CCP
“to abandon its plot to achieve regional domination
and disintegration of the country by military force.”
The CCP replied that the new “National Assembly”
had split the nation and was a fraud.
Jiang did not stop the campaign until November 8,
when he gave the other parties
a few days to consider the situation.
Eleven days later Zhou Enlai withdrew
from the talks and returned to Yan’an.
In early December the Communists announced that
they would not accept any more American mediation
nor would they resume negotiations unless the
National Assembly was dissolved, and the Nationalists
withdrew to their positions during the January truce.
The new National Assembly met on November 15,
and the 1,744 delegates adopted a constitution on December 25.
The inflation problem accelerated
as more bank notes were printed.
The Shanghai price index rose from 100
in September 1945 to 3,090 in February 1947.
In January 1947 George Marshall criticized both sides
and left China, and the last American
mediation groups were disbanded.
In the second half of 1946 the Nationalist forces had captured
165 towns and 174,000 square kilometers from the Communists.
Guomindang troops even took over Yan’an in March 1947.
Mao and other CCP leaders retreated, pursued
by 400,000 Nationalist troops.
Mao said that a people’s war is not won by taking or losing
a city but by solving the agrarian problem.
The PLA avoided fighting unless they were sure of winning.
Then they struck swiftly with concentrated forces at weak points.
The Communists had knocked out fifty of the
218 Nationalist brigades in the campaign by February.
Most of the Guomindang troops
who surrendered joined the Communist army.
Manchuria had 45 million people and more food reserves.
In November 1946 Lin Biao’s army crossed the frozen
Sungari to attack the Nationalist army’s winter quarters.
The Communists made Harbin their urban base,
and they tried to control crime by using the
baojia mutual-security system.
They took strict measures to control a bubonic plague epidemic
that broke out after the Japanese released flea-infested rats
they had been using in germ-warfare experiments.
After an incubation period 30,000 people
died of the disease in 1947.
The CCP kept taxes low on grain, fuel, vegetable oil
but high on luxuries such as tobacco and cosmetics.
Businesses were taxed, and contributions were solicited
by publicity campaigns that raised
200 million yuan in Harbin in 1947.
Lin Biao led 400,000 PLA troops against the Nationalists
in early 1947 and destroyed railway lines.
As the Nationalist troops fled,
they left behind large amounts of arms and equipment.
On December 1, 1945 in Kunming four young anti-war protesters
had been killed, and a year later the alleged rape of a
Beijing University student by a US Marine led to
anti-American demonstrations that grew out of the
anti-war and anti-hunger movements.
In May 1947 the Nationalists outlawed strikes, demonstrations,
and even petitions signed by more than ten people.
During the student demonstrations in May and June
about 13,000 were arrested.
Torture was used to try to get information,
and those believed to be Communist agents were executed.
Shanghai had 1,716 labor strikes in 1946 and 2,538 in 1947.
In February 1947 the Nationalist government imposed wage
and price limits; but the drop in production increased demand,
and prices had nearly doubled by April.
Rice riots spread to more than a dozen cities,
and the policy was abandoned in May.
In July the Central Bank of China offered food and fuel
at artificially low prices to help government employees,
but overall prices still increased.
In November the Nationalists elected a new National Assembly,
which convened on March 29, 1948.
On April 19 they elected Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) president
and Li Zongren vice president.
The United States extended another $400 million to the
Guomindang in April, making a total of more than
$3 billion in aid since 1945.
The Government began issuing ration cards in the spring of 1948,
but the Shanghai cost-of-living index set at
107 in June 1947 multiplied to 5,863 by July 1948.
By the middle of 1947 the Communist army had 1,950,000 troops.
The Guomindang had 3,730,000, but many were assigned to
garrison duty in reconquered areas.
In the second half of the year a Communist offensive won victories
in Henan and northern Hebei.
Lin Biao’s army inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Nationalist army
in Manchuria and bottled them up between
Mukden, Changchun, and Jinzhou.
Mao would not let military recruitment interfere
with the requirements of farm labor.
Liu Shaoqi organized a national land conference in September,
and the next month the Communists
began implementing the Agrarian Reform Law.
This allowed the confiscation of land and property from landowners
without indemnity, and in a few months a hundred million peasants
had been given land in the Communist zones.
Mao intervened in December to correct some of the excesses
that made no provision for middle peasants.
In October 1947 Mao Zedong issued the Manifesto of the
Chinese Communist Party that called for
1) uniting workers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, businessmen,
and all the oppressed in a national united front
to overthrow the dictatorial Jiang;
2) arresting and punishing the war criminals;
3) instituting a people’s democracy guaranteeing civil rights;
4) removing corrupt officials;
5) confiscating property of the four big families of the
Jiang, Soong, Kung, and Chen;
6) abolishing the feudal system by returning land to the tillers;
7) recognizing the rights of minority nationalities; and
8) repudiating Jiang’s foreign policy
and making new treaties of trade and friendship.
Also in October the Americans gave the Nationalists
$27.7 million in economic aid and set up
an Army Advisory Group for Jiang.
By the end of the year Mao announced that they had killed
or wounded 640,000 Nationalist troops and that
more than a million had surrendered.
Mao reinforced the democratic movement in the army
in January 1948 by restoring the soldiers’
committees at the company level.
He criticized Liu again in February and wrote
“Correct the Left Errors in Land Reform Propaganda.”
Peasant guerrillas disrupted Jiang’s supply lines
to his troops who became desperate in 1948.
Jiang disregarded American advice and refused
to withdraw his troops from the north.
In April the Communists took over Luoyang after much fighting.
Peng Dehuai had recaptured Yan’an in March,
and his forces invaded Sichuan in the spring
but were blocked by heavy fighting.
In 1948 Mao announced that Communist forces would shift
from guerrilla tactics to conventional fighting.
The Nationalists had 250,000 troops guarding Kaifeng
and the railway junction at Zhangzhou, and they were attacked
by 200,000 Communist veterans who captured Kaifeng
for a while in June; but reinforcements
and air attacks drove them back.
The Nationalists had suffered 90,000 casualties.
Thousands of students had become wandering beggars,
and in July their march to the residence of Beijing’s
Municipal Council president was blocked by armored cars
that fired at them with machine guns,
killing fourteen and wounding more than a hundred.
More students were aroused, and in September they gathered
in large demonstrations in Beijing, Nanjing, and Wuhan.
Jiang met with T. V. Soong in July 1948, and they decided
to issue a new currency called the gold yuan
which would equal three million fabi yuan.
Economists doubted this would work because the
1948 government deficit was 66% of total expenditures.
The wealthy four families and the landowners
were not paying any taxes, and ten percent of the budget
was coming from hard-cash reserves
accumulated during the war with Japan.
The United States refused to extend a loan to stabilize
the currency, though $400 million in aid
arrived in the second half of 1948.
On June 25 Republican presidential candidate
Thomas Dewey announced that if elected he would
send massive financial and military aid to China,
but Truman defeated him in a close election in November.
Using emergency powers, Jiang announced
the new measures on August 19.
The Government prohibited wage and price
increases, strikes, and demonstrations.
All gold and silver bullion and foreign currencies had to be
exchanged for the new money,
but the foreign bank accounts of the wealthy were exempted.
Jiang appointed his son Jiang Jingguo,
who had governed Jiangxi, to administer the reforms.
Loudspeaker trucks reminded people
in the streets of the new laws.
Some arrests were publicized, but the wealthy smugglers
who supported the government were not arrested.
Farmers stopped selling their produce for low prices
in Shanghai, and the city soon experienced shortages.
Shopkeepers refused to sell goods that had high taxes
until the Government let them raise their prices.
The Government printed more than the
two billion gold yuan they had promised.
Prices only held until October when the Shanghai wholesale
price index was 118; but it went to 1,365 in November
and reached 40,825 in February 1949.
After four years of inflation averaging 30% per month,
Nationalist China had become a barter economy.
In May 1948 the Communist Central Committee called for
a new Political Consultative Conference.
By June the Communists had three million troops
and 168 million inhabitants.
They captured Jinan in the summer, and in the fall
Lin Biao’s army defeated 400,000 of Jiang’s best troops,
taking Mukden and Changchun as only
20,000 troops escaped by sea.
Chen Yi’s Communist army conquered Shandong,
taking Jinan on September 26.
Zhu De used 550,000 troops to capture the Xuzhou
railway junction from 400,000 Nationalist forces,
who defected in October.
In November 100,000 Nationalist troops were destroyed,
and Xuzhou fell on December 15.
Jiang’s confusing orders to his generals had resulted
in their being outmaneuvered.
Meanwhile Deng Xiaoping had organized two million
peasants in four provinces to provide logistic support.
Mao claimed that in the previous two years the
CCP had recruited into the PLA
1,600,000 peasants who had obtained land.
In January 1949 Lin Biao’s 800,000 troops captured Tianjin
and then Beiping as the Guomindang general Fu Zuoyi had
his plans stolen by a Communist spy and then surrendered
with 200,000 troops that joined the PLA.
In four months the Nationalists had lost 1,500,000 troops.
On January 14 Mao announced the following
eight conditions needed for peace negotiations:
1. Punish the war criminals.
2. Abolish the bogus constitution.
3. Abolish the bogus “constituted authority.”
4. Reorganize all reactionary troops on democratic principles.
5. Confiscate bureaucrat-capital.
6. Reform the land system.
7. Abrogate treasonable treaties.
8. Convene a political consultative conference without the
participation of reactionary elements, and form a democratic
coalition government to take over all the powers of the
reactionary Nanjing Guomindang government
and of its subordinate governments at all levels.1
Jiang resigned as president on January 21
and was replaced by Vice President Li Zongren,
but Jiang still led the Guomindang party.
Zhou Enlai negotiated with Li until March.
On January 31 the Communists marched into Beiping.
On March 5 Mao announced that the PLA in the south
would first occupy the cities and then the villages.
They were ordered to maintain strict discipline
and not disrupt businesses nor distribute property to
the poor nor allow strikes during the transitional period.
Mediation rules allowed “reasonable exploitation.”
Factories and machinery were guarded to prevent looting,
and a new “people’s currency” was introduced,
allowing only a short time to exchange gold yuan notes.
CCP officials sent Guomindang officers and soldiers home
or, after politically educating them, enrolled them
in the People’s Liberation Army.
Those in the cities were urged to save with
“commodity savings deposit units”
that were designed to be safe from inflation
by adjusting to price changes in food and fuel.
Jiang Jieshi had appointed a different Chen Yi to govern Taiwan,
and his harsh policies provoked riots in February 1947.
Nationalist troops shot demonstrators, and Chen had
about ten thousand arrested and executed.
Then Jiang replaced him with moderate administrators.
Before Beiping surrendered, Qing-dynasty archives
and art treasures were transferred to Taiwan.
By early 1949 Jiang had 300,000 loyal troops based on Taiwan
with 26 gunboats and the planes of the Nationalist air force and
US $300 million in gold, silver, and foreign exchange reserves.
In the west the Nationalist general Zhang Zhizhong went to
Xinjiang with a delegation of prominent Uighurs in the fall
of 1945 and persuaded the Soviets to accept a cease-fire
and a peace treaty in June 1946.
Zhang was chairman with Qasimi as vice chairman.
Masud Sabri became the first non-Chinese governor
of Xinjiang in May 1947, but he was under the Guomindang.
Conflicts lasted about a year between the Kazakh nomads
and the troops from the Mongolian People’s Republic
who were supported by Soviet planes.
Burhan Shahidi, Sheng’s former consul in Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan, replaced Masud Sabri in December 1948.
On September 24, 1949 the Guomindang forces
in Xinjiang surrendered to the PLA,
and Burhan went over to the Communists.
Mao Zedong triumphantly entered Beijing with the PLA
soldiers on March 25, 1949, and the Communists
formed a provisional government for north China.
Li Zongren hoped to hold China south of the Yangzi River
and tried to negotiate with Mao, who adhered to his
eight-point surrender program.
In April the British moved the Amethyst frigate
up the Yangzi to Nanjing to assist their embassy,
but the Communists attacked, killing 17.
Other British ships were sent but were driven back.
The Communist army crossed the Yangzi on April 21.
Li Zongren refused an ultimatum, and Nanjing fell
without a fight on April 23, followed in May by
Hangzhou, Shanghai, Nanchang, and Wuhan.
Yan Xishan in Shanxi tried to hold on to his power
by using thousands of Japanese troops; but as Communists
broke into Taiyuan in April he set fire to the jail
holding Communist prisoners and committed suicide.
Peng Dehuai’s army moved west and took Xi’an,
defeated a Muslim general from Gansu, and then
entered Lanzhou in August before moving into Xinjiang.
Lin Biao’s forces captured Changsha in August
as the Communists took over the provinces
of Hunan, Hubei, and Fujian.
Jiang established his headquarters on Taiwan in July.
In the fall he moved his government from Chongqing
to Chengdu and finally to Taiwan on December 8.
About two million Guomindang supporters
also took refuge on Taiwan.
Li Zongren fled to Hong Kong and then
to exile in the United States.
Guangzhou fell on October 13.
In November the Communists occupied Guizhou and Sichuan.
Xiamen was defended as the remaining Nationalists embarked
for Taiwan, but it fell on December 9.
About five million lives had been lost in this civil war,
plus about three million from the 1927-37 civil war.
On September 21, 1949 Mao Zedong convened the
new Political Consultative Conference with 662 delegates
at Beijing that was dominated by the CCP
but included fourteen small parties.
They elected a central government with Mao as chairman
and Zhu De as vice-chairman.
A red flag with a large yellow star and four smaller stars
represented the Communist Party and the four economic
classes of the workers, peasants, petite bourgeoisie,
and the national capitalists.
This became China’s flag,
and they adopted the Gregorian calendar.
The name of Beiping was changed back to Beijing,
which became the capital again.
In his opening address Mao promised that their national
defense would be consolidated so that no imperialist
would be allowed to invade their territory again.
In a ceremony in the square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace
on October 1, 1949 Mao proclaimed the
founding of the People’s Republic of China.
The Soviet Union recognized the government the next day,
followed by the other Communist countries
and a few other nations.
Mao took a train to Moscow to confer with Stalin in December.
The PLA suffered 9,000 casualties and was not able to take
Jinmen Island (Quemoy) off the coast of Fujian,
and the Nationalists still occupied most of southwest China.
The Chinese Communist Party had 4,500,000 members
and governed a population of about 500,000,000,
nearly one quarter of the world’s population.
Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893 into a peasant
family that had become prosperous by farming and selling grain.
When he was eight, he went to school
and began studying the Chinese classics.
Five years later he had to leave school to work on the farm,
but he left home to go to a primary school
and then to a secondary school in Changsha.
He fought as a soldier in the revolution of 1911,
and he always emphasized the martial spirit
and the importance of will.
His studies included Western subjects,
and he admired Napoleon and George Washington.
He spent several years studying ethics in Changsha
with the neo-Kantian philosopher Yang Changji.
In 1915 Yang wrote an article
praising the rights women enjoyed in the West
that allowed them to freely choose their husbands.
In a letter on August 23, 1917 Mao recognized
the importance of ethics, writing,
Truly to establish the will is not easy; one must first
study philosophy and ethics, in order to establish a
standard for one’s own words and actions,
and set this up as a goal for the future.2
Mao helped form a New People’s Study Society,
and he graduated from Normal School in 1918.
He began reading New Youth from its inception in 1915,
and as a student and assistant librarian under Li Dazhao at
Beijing University he was strongly influenced
by the May Fourth Movement in 1919.
When a woman committed suicide because
she would not accept an arranged marriage in 1919,
Mao suggested they should struggle
to change society and “die fighting.”
He believed that only Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen,
and Yuan Shikai had the ideas to govern all of China,
but the recent historical figure
he most admired was Zeng Guofan.
He lamented that China was still under the
influence of old thinking and bad morals.
He studied Confucianism and wanted the superior people
not only to help the common people but also to educate
and transform them into a greater harmony.
He appreciated the union of opposites such as yin and yang,
life and death, matter and spirit, and he believed
that morality is the result of an interaction
between desire and conscience.
In the summer of 1919 Mao published a series of articles
called “The Great Union of the Popular Masses”
in his Xiang River Review.
He compared Marx’s struggle against the aristocrats and
capitalists to Kropotkin’s voluntary work and mutual aid.
The May Fourth Movement had convinced Mao that
China’s renewal would come from the young,
especially students, who would overturn the old order.
In another article he urged politicians to get their brains
washed by working in factories or by
cultivating fields with the common people.
He saw the value of getting inside a movement to build it
while staying outside it to promote it.
He worked for the independence of Hunan and realized that
any effective movement must come from the people.
On October 7, 1920 Mao was one of the authors
who proposed a constitutional convention.
He was influenced by Hu Shi and proposed a Self-Study
University in Changsha, where
they would “live a communist life.”
Mao was impressed by the Bolshevik revolution
and called Russia the most civilized nation in the world.
Seeing the unhappiness caused by arranged marriages,
he wanted to replace capitalist marriage contracts
with love matches or free love.
He expanded beyond local issues and made
transforming China and the world his goal for society.
Mao discussed Marxist books with Chen Duxiu and was
especially impressed by the Communist Manifesto.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed
in the summer of 1921, Mao was a founding member.
After two years of working to organize the labor movement
in Hunan, in 1923 Mao became a member
of the CCP’s Central Committee.
He also served on the Guomindang’s Executive Bureau
in Guangzhou and Shanghai.
Then from 1925 to 1927 he worked on
organizing the peasant movement.
He wanted a revolution so that democracy and national
independence would triumph over the warlords.
He realized that merchants were suffering from the
current system and could be important allies.
In the fall of 1925 he went back to Guangzhou
and ran the Guomindang Propaganda Department.
In his report to the Second Congress in January 1926
he argued that they were concentrating too much
on the cities and ignoring the peasants.
From May to October 1926 Mao lectured
at the Peasant Movement Training Institute.
In 1927 Mao published his radical report
on the Hunan peasant movement.
He suggested that the domination by the imperialists and
warlords could only be overthrown by mobilizing the peasants
to destroy the basis of their rule.
Landlords, bad gentry, and village bullies had been using
their political power to crush the peasants for centuries.
He became one of the first to propose that the Communists
break with the Guomindang by raising
their red flag in the countryside.
He suggested redistributing the land of
all the landlords and peasant proprietors.
He believed that a military approach was needed,
and at the Central Committee emergency conference
on August 7 he made the often quoted statement,
“We must be aware that political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun.”3
He recommended devoting sixty percent of
their party’s efforts to the military aspect.
The soldiers must depend on the people
like the fish in the ocean for mass support.
For three years Mao Zedong and Zhu De used
guerrilla methods of fighting in the countryside.
Mao began living with He Zizhen in 1928
before his second wife was executed
by the Guomindang in 1930.
He Zizhen bore him six children,
but all but one died or were raised by others.
After she left Mao in 1937,
he married the famous actress Jiang Qing.
In 1930 Mao criticized the strategy of attacking cities
ordered by Li Lisan, and he wanted to mobilize the peasants.
They founded the Jiangxi Soviet Republic with a Red Army
that increased to 200,000 from a population of several million
and fought against Jiang’s Nationalist attacks.
A purge eliminated thousands of dissidents
from the Communist party.
In January 1933 Mao declared that he would be willing
to make agreements with armed forces who would
stop attacking soviet regions, grant democratic rights,
and cooperate with them in arming
the masses against the Japanese.
In 1934 Mao wrote Guerrilla War, and at Zunyi during the
Long March he became chairman of the Central Committee.
Mao had time to study Marxism during his years at Yan’an.
In December 1936 he gave a series of lectures on
“Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.”
He predicted, “War, this monster of mutual slaughter among men,
will be finally eliminated by the progress of human society,
and in the not too distant future too.”4
Mao believed in opposing counter-revolutionary wars
with revolutionary wars, but then he wrote,
When human society advances to the point
where classes and states are eliminated,
there will be no more wars,
counter-revolutionary or revolutionary, unjust or just;
that will be the era of perpetual peace for mankind.
Our study of the laws of revolutionary war
springs from the desire to eliminate all wars;
herein lies the distinction between us Communists
and all the exploiting classes.5
In August 1937 Mao gave the lectures
“On Contradiction” and “On Practice.”
Mao’s philosophy of contradictions applies Chinese
yin-yang theory to dialectical and historical materialism.
Contradictions that cause conflict lead to antagonism
that must be resolved by struggle.
According to Lenin, even socialism has contradictions,
but they do not cause antagonism.
Mao believed in balancing practice and theory in a middle path
that avoids the extremes of being too dogmatic or too empirical.
This philosophy provided him with tools
for criticizing anyone who disagreed with him.
Human knowledge is verified only in the social process
by achieving anticipated results.
To be successful one’s thoughts must correspond
to the laws of the objective world.
When one fails, one may correct one’s ideas.
Knowledge of the world’s laws should be applied to the
practice of production, scientific experimentation,
and the revolutionary class struggle.
In “On Practice” Mao wrote,
Knowledge is a matter of science,
and no dishonesty or conceit
whatsoever is permissible.
What is required is definitely the reverse—
honesty and modesty.
If you want knowledge, you must take part
in the practice of changing reality.6
Rational knowledge depends on perceptual knowledge,
which needs to be developed into the concepts
and theories of rational knowledge.
Knowledge begins with practice, and the theoretical
knowledge developed by practice must return
to practice in a continuing cycle.
The truth is developed through practice
and verified by practice.
Mao wrote “Combat Liberalism” in September.
He warned against the liberalism that does not argue
based on principle but lets things slide for the sake of friendship,
that criticizes in private without making suggestions
to the organization, that disobeys orders for personal reasons,
that vents personal grievances or seeks revenge,
that tolerates counter-revolutionary opinions
without disputing them, that is not indignant about actions
that harm the masses, that works half-heartedly,
and that does not correct one’s mistakes.
Mao believed that liberalism harms revolutionary
organizations by disrupting unity, undermining solidarity,
inducing inactivity, and creating dissension.
These deprive the organization of discipline,
prevent policies from being carried out,
and alienate the party from the masses.
Liberalism comes from the selfishness
that puts oneself before the revolution.
Mao wrote “On Protracted War” in May 1938.
He believed that all the wars in history have been political,
“that politics is war without bloodshed
while war is politics with bloodshed.”7
He believed wars could be just or unjust and wrote,
“As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which
both sides fought for imperialist interests;
therefore the Communists of the
whole world firmly opposed that war.”8
In November 1938 in “Problems of War and Strategy”
Mao advocated the abolition of war, but he believed that
war could only be abolished through war.
He noted that some principles such as appointing people
based on merit are perpetual.
About study he wrote,
Complacency is the enemy of study.
We cannot really learn anything
until we rid ourselves of complacency.
Our attitude towards ourselves
should be “to be insatiable in learning”
and towards others “to be tireless in teaching.”9
He found a Confucian mean between the rightism
of not going far enough and the leftism of going too far.
He observed in history that peasant revolts had lacked
leadership and had been exploited by the landlords
and nobility to change dynasties
without changing the feudal system.
After an intensive study of Marxism, Mao started formulating
his philosophy as the “sinification of Marxism.”
Like Lenin he saw the need for revolution
against imperialism as well as against capitalism.
Mao believed that Sun Yat-sen’s revolution had failed
for forty years because in an era of imperialism
the bourgeoisie could not lead a genuine revolution.
He wrote that China is a vast semi-colonial country
with a semi-feudal economy and that its
revolution required armed struggle.
Mao’s weapons were the armed struggle,
the united front, and party-building.
He promoted grass-roots democracy on a large scale,
but he also wanted a strong state.
Mao wrote The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese
Communist Party in December 1939 for party members.
He reviewed China’s long feudal history and its economic
exploitation and political oppression
of the peasants by the landlords.
Many peasant revolts and wars occurred,
but they had not had the leadership of the proletariat
that the Communist party was now offering.
The penetration of foreign capitalism in the 19th century
began China’s transformation, but the capitalists
worked in collusion with the feudal system.
The struggle arising from the contradictions
led to revolutionary movements.
Japan’s armed invasion of China
collaborated with the reactionaries.
Also suffering from imperialism, the bourgeoisie joined the
revolutionary struggle and the war against the Japanese.
However, the reactionary leadership of the Guomindang
formed an alliance with the landlord class and turned
against their former friends, the Communists,
betraying the revolution in 1927.
Mao argued that because these enemies were very powerful,
the Chinese revolution would take a long time
and would require the use of armed forces.
The reactionaries controlled the cities,
but the villages could be made into consolidated base areas
by improving their military, political,
economic, and cultural capabilities.
The Communist party was fighting a protracted revolutionary
struggle by using peasant guerrilla warfare.
At the same time propaganda work
was preparing the cities for revolution.
Mao published On New Democracy in January 1940.
He explained that the Chinese revolution
would have two stages—first democracy and then socialism.
Mao argued that the transformation brought about by the
World War and the Russian revolution created a
new historical era in which a “new democracy” emerged.
He wrote that in China the new democracy would be
under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes
and would be headed by the proletariat.
After that revolution was successful,
then they would establish a socialist society.
He recommended that China develop people’s congresses
on the national, provincial, county, district, and
township levels with universal suffrage that
would elect a government to represent them.
Mao called this “democratic centralism.”
In the new democratic economy the big banks, industries,
and commercial enterprises that were too large
for private management would be owned by the republic
so that private capital would not dominate the people.
The republic would confiscate the land of the landlords
and distribute it to the landless peasants
in order to fulfill Sun Yat-sen’s call for “land to the tillers.”
The new democracy contained socialist elements,
and full socialism would be implemented later.
Mao advised absorbing what is good from foreign cultures
and China’s own traditions while rejecting what is bad.
The new democratic culture should be scientific
and oppose imperialism, feudalism, and superstition
in a united and progressive front.
The Rectification Campaign of 1942 used pressure
for self-criticism to bring people in the party
into line with Mao’s ideas.
On February 1 he gave the speech
“Rectify the Party’s Style of Work.”
The three problems he defined were subjectivism in study,
sectarianism in party relations, and stereotyped writing.
The two extremes of subjectivism
are dogmatism and empiricism.
Dogmatism is too dominated by theory without correction
by practice, and empiricism is too concerned with
concrete situations without being guided by theory.
Sectarian tendencies in the party’s internal relations
exclude comrades and hinder unity and solidarity.
Sectarian tendencies in external relations exclude other
people and hinder the party from uniting all the people.
Those who assert their independence
put their own interests before the whole.
They must learn from past mistakes
and maintain a scientific attitude.
Mao gave a speech in May 1942 at Yan’an
during a forum on literature and art.
He said their problems are those of working for the masses
and learning how to work for them.
Revolutionary literature and art should create characters
based on life so as to help the masses push history forward.
For example, people who are suffering from hunger, cold,
and oppression may be contrasted
with those who are exploiting them.
To be successful the art must be both popular and elevating.
They should unite serving the masses
with gaining their approval.
Mao observed that reactionary political content shows that
the exploiting classes are declining, but he recommended
combining revolutionary political content
with the best possible artistic form.
Mao Zedong wrote On Coalition Government in April 1945
for the Seventh National Congress
of the Chinese Communist Party.
He surveyed the current situation and warned of the danger
of civil war because of the reactionary policy
of the Guomindang dictatorship of Jiang.
They were trying to negotiate a coalition government
with democratic reforms, but the Guomindang
were rejecting their proposals.
Mao described their general program which he called
New Democracy that was in accord
with the principles of Sun Yat-sen.
The Communists did not conceal their views,
and he put forth a long list of specific goals that included
mobilizing forces to defeat Japan; punishing the pro-Japanese,
reactionaries, and traitors; revoking reactionary laws
to allow freedom of speech, press, assembly, association,
religion, and full civil rights;
recognizing democratic parties and releasing political prisoners;
providing for disabled soldiers, their families, war refugees,
and victims of natural disasters;
abolishing exorbitant taxes and establishing a progressive tax;
rural reforms such as reducing rent and interest
and helping peasants organize; checking inflation;
relieving the unemployed and letting workers organize;
paying teachers and guaranteeing academic freedom;
giving minorities rights; and many more.
The one-party dictatorship of the Guomindang
must be abolished and replaced
by a coalition government with nation-wide support.
On June 30, 1949, the 28th anniversary of the Chinese
Communist Party, Mao published his policies in
“On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.”
The working class would lead the masses in a united front
while China allied with the Soviet Union
and the world proletariat.
China would establish relations with any nation
respecting China’s international equality and territorial integrity.
China would develop its potential by using socialized
agriculture and industry as a state enterprise.
Civil rights would be guaranteed to all except to
“political reactionaries,” who would be
given land to work and be re-educated.
Equal rights for women would end their lives of bondage.
Rural reforms included rent reduction and land redistribution.
The Common Program and Organic Law called for
universal education to meet the goals.
By eliminating the errors of the reactionaries
they would be able to advance toward a socialist
and communist society that
has no classes but a universal fraternity.
Notes
1. “Statement on the Present Situation” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
Volume 4, p. 318.
2. Quoted in “Mao Tse-tung’s thought to 1949” by Stuart Schram in
The Cambridge History of China, Volume 13, p. 793.
3. Ibid., p. 822.
4. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume 1, p. 182.
5. Ibid., p. 183.
6. Ibid., p. 300.
7. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume 2, p. 153.
8. Ibid., p. 150.
9. Ibid., p. 210.
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