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In 1929, two years after Chiang Kai-shek's crackdown against China's Communists, his government moved against the Soviet Union owning the Chinese Eastern Railroad - a railway across Manchuria and an ownership from tsarist times. On May 27, the Chinese arrested everyone at the Soviet consulate at Harbin, a city on the rail line in Manchuria. In July, Chiang Kai-shek and Zhang Xueliang agreed to seize the rail line, and, from August to October, border clashes occurred between Soviet and Chinese troops. In November, Soviet Forces, supported by air, drove the Chinese into a rout and occupied the Manchurian city of Hailar, near the Soviet border. The Chinese then settled with the Soviet Union, agreeing to the restoration of Soviet control over the railroad and Soviet employees returning to their duties on the rail line, China agreeing also to the release of all Soviet citizens that had been arrested and to the resumption of normal trade between China and the Soviet Union. And Chiang Kai-shek summed up the matter by describing Soviet Russia as having continued tsarist Russia's aggressive policy toward China.
Communists remained underground in China's cities, hunted by Chiang's police, who believed it was better to kill an innocent person than to miss killing a Communist. Quietly, Communists were organizing in factories, where people, many of them children, were working under turn-of-the-century conditions. Many of the overworked found hope in the messages of Communist organizers, and they saw the Communists as friends and kept silent.
Communists were still gathered in a number of remote areas in central China, where they joined poor peasants in revolt and promoted taking land from landlords and giving it to those who did the actual farming. Chiang Kai-shek saw himself at war with the Communists, and on December 29, 1930, his regime sent its military against those Communists in southern Jiangxi Province - where Mao Zedong was located. In the first couple of days, the 100,000-man Guomindang force penetrated deep into Communist territory and found no resistance and no Communist troops. The Communist force in the area was inferior in numbers and equipment, but they took advantage of familiar terrain and were more mobile. When the Guomindang's army lines were stretched thin, the Communists ambushed them at points of their choosing. In a little more than one week the Guomindang force retreated from the area, having lost something like 9,000 men and quantities of supplies.
On April 1, 1931, Chiang sent another offensive into Jiangxi, a force of 200,000 men, and this second campaign ended in June with more heavy losses in men and arms for Chiang. A third campaign was attempted into Jiangxi, and it came to a standstill in September 1931, when Japan began expanding in Manchuria. Most Guomindang divisions in southern Jiangxi were withdrawn, leaving government troops guarding a few outposts on the fringes of the Communist held territory.
With the failure to prevent the Kwantung army's expansion, Chiang resorted to diplomacy with Japan. China's students camped outside government buildings in Chiang's capital, Nanjing, and they continued their passionate call for war against Japan. But Chiang believed it was better that he allow himself to be vilified by some Chinese than to take China into an all-out war with Japan, and his government cracked down and banned all student demonstrations. Then, again, Chiang turned his attention to the Communists.
The Communists in Jiangxi were melded with peasants there in what Mao Zedong described as fish in the sea tactics - the fish being the Communists, the sea being the peasants. The Communists had found that peasants would not commit themselves to change if they felt that matters were hopeless, and the peasants believed that matters were hopeless if their revolution could not defend itself militarily. The Communists had organized a Red Army that gave revolutionary peasants confidence. And with the Guomindang government distracted, the Communists in southern Jiangxi had expanded, and in November 1931 they declared their area in Jiangxi a Soviet republic.
The Communist Party line, originating in Moscow, was that in China's soviet territories a resolute class struggle should be waged against rich peasants - China's kulaks. But in Jiangxi, Mao Zedong was deviating from the Party line. For the sake of maintaining the economy in his area he and others had initiated a policy of allowing the more wealthy peasants to produce and to sell their grain to merchants in areas under Guomindang control. Mao believed that an attempt at self-sufficiency would have meant disaster, and because Mao ignored the Party line, he came under attack within the Party, which labeled him as a deviationist.
In May 1932, a couple of months after the short war against the Japanese around Shanghai had ended, Chiang began the first phase of his fourth "Communist suppression" expedition. This began first against the biggest of the Communist forces: near the northern border of Hunan Province. Within three months, most of the Communists in this area were routed, many escaping into more mountainous areas, some fleeing north and some west. Then Chiang moved again against Mao's forces in Jiangxi Province. Rather than rushing into Communist held territory as before, Chiang's plan was for encircling the region and advancing slowly inward, stopping after each short advance to build secure defensive positions, with trenches and block-houses. The block-houses were impregnable because the Communist forces had no artillery. And each step inward by Chiang's forces was to be made after the area had been militarily secured - a campaign designed to take months.
Chiang's plans against Mao's forces were disrupted again by the Japanese, as it appeared to Chiang that Japan was about to invade Jehol. The war he did not want with Japan seemed closer as he concluded that Japan's aim was to bring the whole of China under its domination. The Japanese - so vocal in their opposition to Communism in Japan - was harming Chiang's efforts. Chiang's troops in Jiangxi began to withdraw to north China, and the Communists in Jiangxi mounted an offensive and succeeded in annihilating two of Chiang's divisions.
It was on January 3, 1933 that Japan began its push into Jehol Province. They Japanese moved through the mountainous province in two to three months. They occupied the three major passes in the Great Wall just north of Beijing. Then they called a truce. China's military had failed again. There was no question of Japan having a superior military machine. And in late May, Chiang chose to settle what he could with the Japanese. Chinese civilians were passionate in their desire to resist the Japanese intrusions. People organized and demonstrated, to no avail. Chiang wanted more time rather than war. Chiang established an agreement with the Japanese: China's far north, including the capital province, was to be demilitarized, and Chinese police in the north were to maintain order among civilians.
Having settled with the Japanese, Chiang planned a campaign against the Communists in Jiangxi Province, which began in May 1934. It was another encircling action. Slowly it tightened around the Communist positions. The Communists in Jiangxi had come under the leadership of a Comintern agent, Otto Braun, who had convinced the Communists that the glorious age of guerrilla warfare was over and that it was time to fight regular battles. Mao disagreed and removed himself from military planning meetings, making himself a common soldier. The Communists also tried using block-houses, but their tactics failed, Chiang's forces having airplanes as well as artillery. Communist-held territory shrank, and the turn to zealous class warfare by the Communists further diminished enthusiasm among those who had supported them.
In October the Communists were forced to flee from Jiangxi. Those who remained in Jiangxi were pursued and many rounded up, tortured and sent to a concentration camp. Others began what was to become known as the Long March. They numbered around 87,000, including 50 women, the families of Red Army men and entire peasant households. With them they hauled small printing presses, duplicating machines, sewing machines and other home-industry tools. They stopped in towns and made their own clothing and shoes.
For almost year the marchers zigzagged across eighteen mountains, deserts, rivers and swamplands, from the south of China, westward and then north, chased by Chiang's forces and by warlord armies. Some froze to death. Some starved. Mao's third wife, He Zizhen, was wounded in a dive bombing attack, with shrapnel in her body and a piece in her head that was too dangerous to remove. She had to ride in a cart or strapped to a mule.
After trekking 6,000 miles the marchers had dwindled to about 7,000, less than one-tenth their original size. They arrived at an arid and agriculturally unproductive location in the far north, at Yenan, about 300 miles west of Beijing, a more impoverished area than Jiangxi, and more sparsely populated. It was a propitious location - closer to the Russians and the Japanese. There a few Communists had already established themselves, and more were trickling in, running from Guomindang forces. Another long march, in November 1935, was just beginning from central China, by a Red army titled the Second Front Army. And with this army, other Red army units were to arrive at Yenan the following year.
At Yenan, Mao had time to relax and think. He stayed in his room for days, meditating. Like some others in or emerging from pain and suffering he dreamed. He dreamed of remaking the whole of China and setting the world on the course of new organization. He worked through his Marxist ideology - what he believed to be scientific socialism - and he emerged convinced of the validity of class struggle and Lenin's hypothesis that imperialism was the end part of dying capitalism. The transition from capitalism to socialism was, he believed, inevitable - aside from the struggle and violence needed to bring it about. His knowledge of the world outside of China came mostly from Communist publications, from which he had learned that moderate socialists - the Social Democrats - were opportunists, that in seeking gains for themselves they had forsaken the building of real socialism and that they would always betray real revolutionaries. And he believed that Western democracies were imperialist and in essence bourgeois dictatorships.
By the time that Mao and his Long March colleagues had settled in Yenan, Stalin and his Politburo were well into their new foreign policy, seeking good relations and coalition politics with those powers that might stand against Hitler. In September 1934 the Soviet Union had joined the League of Nations. In May 1935 - two months after Hitler announced Germany's rearmament - the Soviet Union signed an alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In July and August, 1935, the Comintern announced that an "anti-imperialist front" should be launched worldwide - an alliance with all those it had recently been calling social fascists and capitalist tools. The Chinese delegation to Moscow, led by Wang Ming, accepted the new directives. And the Communist forces in and around Yenan adopted the title "The Chinese Anti-Japanese Red Army."
The Soviet Union in 1935 feared Japan's expansion toward their borders. Moscow had an alliance with the Chinese warlord in Sinkiang, China's most western land, a desert region just east of the Soviet Union's Kazakhstan. The warlord in Sinkiang, Sheng Shicai, had invited the Soviet Union to intervene against forces in the area that he was fighting - forces believed to be supported by the Japanese. In exchange for Soviet help, Sheng Shicai promised the Soviet Union peaceful relations and a market for Soviet manufactured goods. Germany, Japan and Britain objected to Siankiang's new Soviet orientation, but Sheng remained undeterred.
The Soviet Union's fear of Japanese expansion included Japan's threats to the Soviet Union's client state, the People's Republic of Mongolia. Japan was attempting to win an agreement from Mongolia to accept Japanese military observers in their country and to allow Japan to station a military telegraph station there. When Mongolia rejected these requests, the Japanese press in Manchoukuo, expressing the views of Japanese expansionists, began calling Mongolia a "dangerous country" and writing that Manchoukuo intended to regulate all issues and settle all disputes by force of arms as it saw fit.
Worried about the Soviet Union's activities, in late 1935, the Guomindang government conveyed to the Japanese proposals for improving relations. The Japanese responded with three "principles" on which improvement would need to be based: China would have to give up maneuvering Western countries against Japan, it would have to recognize Manchoukuo and recognize Japanese interests in northern China, and it would need to take joint action with Japan against "the anti-Japanese Communist movement" in China. Chinese nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment was boiling, and Chiang and his Guomindang did not wish to go so far as to recognize Manchoukuo. No further agreement between China and Japan was made.
The Japanese pushed on with their attempt to dominate China, and they were pushing China back into the arms of the Soviet Union. In 1936, the Japanese announced their intention to open a consulate at the capital of Sichuan province:Chengtu. When the Japanese arrived at Chengtu, Chinese there rioted, and two Japanese were killed by a mob. On September 3, 1936, a Japanese owner of a drugstore in Guangdong province was murdered. And there were other incidents, including scuffles between Japanese and Chinese soldiers near Beijing. Fearing the Japanese, Chiang tried to discourage such incidents, while the Japanese were growing more irritated.
Japan's hardline was as successful as Germany's diplomacy before World War I. It placed too much confidence in military prowess and too little on hearts and minds. Japan presented China with seven demands, which were made public: that China allow Japan to combine its forces with Chinese troops in a campaign against the Communists, that China allow the placement of Japanese advisers in all offices of China's government, that China grant autonomy for China's five northern provinces, and that China reduce tariffs on Japanese products to their 1928 levels. Chiang's forces fighting alongside Japanese soldiers against Chinese would not have looked good in the eyes of the Chinese. But, no matter - it was not to be. And with the Chinese, the demands that the Japanese were making were no more popular than their Twenty-one Demands back in 1915.
Chiang's government continued talking with the Japanese, while students and others were in renewed passion and again calling for war. Chiang had been suppressing demonstrations for resistance against the Japanese. And again Chiang did not wish to surrender to the passions of the masses for war. He wished to hold off war as long as possible. He had only recently emerged from his struggle for unity, by convincing warlord armies to place themselves under a Guomindang command. Recently, China had been making economic gains, and Chiang had been trying to build China as an economically viable nation. In 1936 China had 115,000 kilometers of motor highways, up from 1,000 kilometers in 1925. It had 13,000 kilometers of rail lines, up from 8,000 in 1927. Elementary and secondary education was growing rapidly. Credit societies were being established, including an Agricultural Credit Administration, designed to improve conditions in rural areas. Chiang believed that China had to be stronger before taking on Japan. And he was trying to strengthen China - which took time.
Pursuing Moscow's strategy of a united front against imperialism, the Communists around Yennan, in May 1936, announced a cease-fire against Guomindang forces, stating that battles between the two would delight only the Japanese imperialists. Mao wrote a letter to his "brothers" in the Guomindang requesting that they unite against the Japanese.
Chiang and the Guomindang had other ideas. They still wanted to annihilate the Communists. In December, 1936, Chiang was preparing another assault against the Communists, while the Guomindang was negotiating with the Soviet Union. There, Stalin was not making the survival of China's Communists an issue. What was important to Stalin was the Soviet Union's security, not the fate of China's Communists.
It was mass opinion in China that would deter Chiang from another offensive against the Communists. The passion among the Chinese against the Japanese had become too much for Chiang's plans. Soldiers in Guomindang armies shared in the passion against the Japanese, and some of them did not wish to see Chiang divert the nation's military against their fellow Chinese. Among them was Zhang Xueliang, the deputy commander-in-chief of the Guomindang armies. While Chiang was visiting his troops in Sian, the capital of Shaanxi province, Zhang and a force under his command kidnapped Chiang and demanded that Chiang direct his energies in fighting the Japanese. Military units in the area wished to try Chiang as a traitor, and a few politicians in the Guomindang were inspired by the prospect of Chiang's death in their hope that they would rise in his place.
Chiang gave in, perhaps trying to save his life. He promised the Communist representative that had gathered around him, Zhou Enlai, that his war against the Communists was over. According to Mme Chiang Kai-shek, who had come north to be with her husband, it was Zhou Enlai and other Communists who persuaded the Guomindang military not to execute Chiang. For the Communists it was an example of the benefits of policy that put aside passion. (Zhou Enlai considered Chiang the murderer of his wife and sister.) It is said, however, that it was Stalin who ordered that Chiang be spared. Moscow was afraid of elements in the Guomindang who were more likely than Chiang to ally China with Japan and the other anti-Comintern nations: Germany and Italy. Instead, Moscow wanted someone with Chiang's prestige to lead China against Japan.
Chiang returned to Nanjing, while Japan charged that the Soviet Union was behind his having been kidnapped. The Soviet newspaper Pravda, on the other hand, charged that the kidnapping was a Japanese sponsored affair. Chiang denied that he had made any promises as a condition for his release, but this was apparently for the benefit of the public and the Japanese. Chiang kept the promise he had made with Zhou Enlai. The drive against the Communists was called off. Zhang Xueliang, the man who released Chiang, was arrested and was to serve twenty-four years in prison - two years for each of the twelve days that he held Chiang prisoner. Zhang's Manchurian armies were dispersed, leaving the Communists without a rival Chinese army nearby and relatively free to develop their power.
Recommended Books
Mao, a Life, by Philip Short, 2000.
China: a New History, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, 1998.
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