The Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung fought a brutal three-way war with the Japanese and the Kuomintang from 1937 to 1945. Driven to the hills of Shensi Province by Chiang Kai-shek before the war, and cynically abandoned by Stalin, they fought alone until Allied victory in the Pacific changed Stalin's attitude and brought renewed Russian support. They would then seize control of all of China except Formosa and usher in a reign of terror (the Great Cultural Revolution) that is among the worst the world has ever seen.
Following the First World War, the new Soviet government in Russia
saw an opportunity to instigate a Communist movement in China, and the
Chinese Communist Party
was founded in July 1921 under the tutelage of Russian advisors. These
same Russian advisors pressured the Communists into joining with the
Kuomintang, which soon after the death of founder Sun Yat-sen on 12
March 1925 came
under the control of Chiang Kai-shek.
However, the Communists distrusted Chiang who had begun making
alliances with landlord organizations in south China. When Chiang began
his first expedition against the warlords in July
1926, the Communists took advantage of his absence to organize in the
countryside and win over the support of a number of Kuomintang division and regiment commanders. However, Chiang struck
first, on 12 April 1927, and drove the Communists underground.
Chiang began a campaign to exterminate the Communists, and by
October 1934 he had the strongest of the Communist forces, that of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, bottled up in the mountains of southern Kiangsi. Mao
and Che's 100,000 guerrillas
constituted perhaps 90% of the Communist guerrillas in China at the
time. In
desperation, the Communists broke through the encirclement and began
the Long March through southern and western China, during which Mao
cemented his position as the leader of the Chinese Communists. Mao
eventually led his force to Shansi province in northwest China and
established his headquarters at Yanan. Meanwhile Chiang's efforts to
rid himself of the Communists were brought to and end by the threat of
Japanese expansion into north China.
Following the Sian Incident of
December 1936, in which Chiang was
kidnapped by Chang Hsüeh-liang and forced to agree to a United Front
with the Communists against the Japanese, the People's Liberation Army
was nominally incorporated into the national army, with its main
formation (8
Route Army) designated as 18 Army Group. The Communist
government was also nominally absorbed into the national government and
designated the Shensi-Kansu-Ningshia Border Region, with Lin Po-ch'u as
chairman. After some dispute, the Kuomintang recognized Communist rule
in 18 counties (hsien) in July
1940. By then the Communists were claiming up to 28 counties. The area
was about 35,500 square miles (92,000 square kilometers) with a
population of about 1,420,000. The Communists and the Kuomintang also
become somewhat reconciliatory in their propaganda towards each other, but
with the exception of some local cooperation between Communist and
Kuomintang guerrillas behind
Japanese lines, there was little genuine cooperation between the groups.
The actual contribution of the Chinese Communists to Allied victory remains difficult to assess. This is partly because of their isolation during the war years, and partly because neither they, the Kuomintang, nor the Japanese had much interest in keeping an accurate account. Reports of the skill and success of Communist guerrillas against the Japanese may have been exaggerated to excuse their subsequent success against the Kuomintang. However, the preponderance of evidence is that the Communist contribution to fighting the Japanese was small. It seems likely that Mao never had any intention of engaging in serious fighting against the Japanese. Only 30% of Communist manpower was assigned to guerrilla operations against the Japanese, while the other 70% were engaged in building up the Communist base areas for the inevitable postwar showdown with the Kuomintang. Thus Mao's policy was to wait for the Japanese to clear an area of Kuomintang forces, then move into the vacuum behind the front line. He commented that "The more land Japan took, the better." The Communists appear to have fought just two significant actions in eight years of Japanese incursion. These were an ambush of a column of 5 Division at Pingxingguan, and the Hundred Regiments Offensive in August 1940. Both were carried out against Mao's wishes.
Chinese historians are also coming to acknowledge that the Yan'an regime engaged in substantial opium trafficking, including with the Japanese. Yang Jinghua has declared that "Mao and the Communists engaged in the opium trade. How else could they pay their troops? Nothing else that would grow in Yan'an was marketable. In such a situation, you do what you must" (Hastings 2007.) Japan's China Affairs Board is alleged to have negotiated with the Communists for supplies of opium, although the evidence is fragmentary.
Japanese sources seem agreed that the Communists were never considered a serious threat and the preponderance of Japanese strength was deployed against the Kuomintang. By 1944, only 30% of Japanese forces were deployed against the Communists. Rather than fight the Japanese, most Communist forces struggled simply to feed themselves. Nevertheless, by the time of the surrender, the People's Liberation Army numbered over a million men, and the Communists governed a population of 100 million in an area of 370,000 square miles (950,000 square kilometers). Party membership had grown to 2.7 million. The Communists had also won considerable foreign sympathy. All these elements were essential to the ultimate Communist victory in the civil war of 1945-1949.
Communist propaganda was effective in creating the illusion that the
Communists were effectively fighting the Japanese and at concealing
true
conditions in the Communist-controlled areas. As a result, some 100,000
young Chinese had joined the Communists by 1940, and another 86,000
came between 1941 and 1944. About half of these were students and other
intellectuals. Few were strongly committed to Marxism, but were
disillusioned by the military reverses suffered by the Kuomintang and
believed the Communists had a better chance of expelling foreign
invaders.
The Hundred
Regiments Offensive. The Hundred Regiments Offensive began on 20
August 1940. It was masterminded by Chu Teh but led by P,eng Te-huai. 8 Route Army began
the battle with 400,000 troops (about half guerrillas and half regular
troops) drawn primarily from 120 and 129 Divisions
and organized
into 116 regiments. The battle
lasted three and a half months, ending on 5 December. The attacks
focused on the Shihchiachuang-Taiyuan, Peiping-Hankow,
and Tatung-Fenglingtu rail lines and caught the
Japanese off-guard, inflicted heavy casualties.
The Japanese recovered by late September as the Communists tried to
reduce Japanese strongholds
in the Taihang mountains. This shift from hit-and-run to positional
tactics was an unwise strategy for a guerrilla force. The Hundred
Regiments offensive managed to
greatly annoy the Japanese, who responded with a massive
counteroffensive from 6 October to 5 December that killed 90,000
Communist
troops. Total Japanese deaths were 20,645 plus another 5,155
puppet troops dead. Material damage was fairly significant, with 600
miles of railroad destroyed and the Chingching coal mine near Taiyuan shut down for six
months.
The Japanese counteroffensive was accompanied by
the unleashing of the "security-strengthening movement" or Three Alls
on northern China: "Kill all, loot
all, burn all." During 1941-1942 the Communist strength in north
China was reduced from 500,000 to 300,000 men and considerable
territory was lost. This led the Communists to adopt the cheng-feng or "rectification"
movement, which peaked in 1943 and whose excesses foreshadowed the
later Cultural Revolution. Many of the intellectuals who had come to
the Communists from other areas of China found themselves brutally
interrogated during the "cadre investigations" of 1943. The tax on
peasants went from 1.2% of their
grain to 16.5%. Communist tactics thereafter were described
as "sparrow warfare:"
Sparrow warfare is a popular method of fighting created by the Communist-led anti-Japanese guerrilla units and militia behind the enemy lines. It was called sparrow warfare because, first, it was used diffusely, like the flight of sparrows in the sky; and because, second, it was used flexibly by guerrillas or militiamen, operating in threes or fives, appearing and disappearing unexpectedly and wounding, killing, depleting and wearing out the enemy forces.
The Japanese continued to regard the
Kuomintang as the more dangerous enemy at least as late as autumn 1942.
The New 4 Army Incident. The
New 4 Army was organized by Hsiang Ying, who had become disaffected
with Mao in 1931 and was left behind by the Long March. Hsiang's forces
precipitated a clash with Kuomintang forces at Huang-ch'iao in early
October 1940, annihilated two Kuomintang divisions, Chiang ordered the New 4
Army to move north of the Yellow River by the end of November. The
Communists announced their intention to comply, but when elements of
New 4 Army began moving south rather than north (the Communist
leadership claiming this was a detour in the interests of safety) the
Kuomintang waylaid the movement with seven divisions at Maolin. Five
thousand Communists were taken prisoner and another four thousand
killed. Curiously, the attack appears to have been ordered by the local
commander, Ku Chu-tung, rather
than Chiang.
Chiang ordered New 4 Army dissolved on 17 January 1941. The order was ignored by the Communists, who responded with a propaganda campaign to discredit Chiang for fomenting internal strife when the country should be united against the Japanese foe. Chiang responded with his own claims that New 4 Army was mutinous and its disbandment strictly a matter of military discipline rather than politics.
References
Hastings
(2007)
Hsiung and Levine
(1992)
Sih (1977)
Trotsky.org
(accessed 2009-9-12)
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