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Written by: A. Lorenzo Lucino Jr.


Nationalist Difficulties

Militarist Japan’s attempt to conquer China began by seizing Manchuria in 1931 and became a full-fledged invasion from 1937 to 1945. Japanese historians saw Japan following the footsteps of the Manchu conquerors of 1644, while Tokyo’s modernizers saw Japan shepherding the Chinese people into the modern world. But times had changed. Japan’s aggression only strengthened China’s new nationalism.

While the GMD and the CCP were both party dictatorships in form, they were very different political creatures in fact. The GMD had two incarnations, first in the associates of Sun Yatsen in 1911 revolution, second in the followers of Jiang Jieshi in the Nanjing government after 1927. The GMD’s forced removal in 1938 from Nanjing to Wuhan and then beyond the Yangtze gorges to Chongqing cut it off from its roots. Its revenues from the Maritime Customs and the opium trade to Shanghai were knocked out. China’s nascent Sino-liberal educational system suffered a grievous destruction of plant and facilities. Missionary colleges kept at work under the Japanese occupation but in purely Chinese Universities many students and faculties migrated in 1937-1938 up the Yangtze or to the southwest. The Southwest Associated University at Kunming was set up by Qinghua University and Beijing University from Beijing and Nankai University from Tianjin.

With admirable fortitude but little foresight, the nationalist’s regime met its problem by short-term expedients and gave it little strength for the future. The Chongqing government got control of the land tax in grain as the wherewithal to feed its administration. Its industrial developers had arsenals at work to support the war. The Japanese bombing of Chongqing stimulated the spirit of resistance, but meanwhile the spirit of the united front deteriorated. Radical intellectuals in Chongqing began to drift northward to Communist Yan’an, except for those who were already “outside cadres” of the CCP assigned to work as ostensible liberals in the GMD area. The Nationalist government during World War 2 displayed all its earlier weaknesses. Local warlord power-holders in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guangxi made Chongqing’s extension of local control very difficult. The governor of Yunnan, where Kunming had become the airbase doorway to Free China, was able to keep Jiang Jieshi’s secret police and troops largely out of his province until the end of the war in 1945. Famine led to hoarding supplies for profit and an immense growth of corruption. The unfortunate result was that the government received little more in the way of resources while the petty officials and landlords found out how to profit in the inflation. By the war’s end, peasant rebellion was incipient in several provinces of Free China.


Mao’s Sinification of Marxism

To control and direct the widespread organization of the CCP movement over the broad stretches of North China required dedicated and disciplined party members, experienced cadres in the villages, and attempt at self sufficiency in each base and the use of radio telegraphy to transmit messages. The principle of centralized control over a decentralized situation was exhibited in the government organization. The Central Committee of the party had its departments at Yan’an dealing with military affairs, organization, united front work, enemy occupied areas, labor, women and the like, a total of twelve categories. The secret to Mao’s success at Yan’an was his flexibility at combining short term and long-term goals. In the short term he espoused in 1940 the New Democracy as a united front doctrine that would embrace all the Chinese people who would subscribe to CCP leadership.
Meantime, the real sinews of power grew up in the CCP mobilization of the peasantry in North China. The Japanese were excellent targets to mobilize against. Invading China along the rail lines, they tried to seal off the areas in between, but their rail-line blockhouses could not control trade and contact across the lines. In general their invasion cultivated the ground for CCP mobilization.

The war of resistance against the Japanese Empire provided the sanction for a CCP mobilization of the Chinese masses in the countryside; and this, once achieved, gave a new power to the CCP based not on the cities but on the villages. CCP expansion and base building across North China and even in the Yangtze region reached a new high point in 1940. The Japanese had been extending their control by setting up blockhouses every one to three miles along the rail lines. They then sent columns out from these strong points to invade the villages. One of the major offenses by the Chinese against the Japanese aggressors was the Hundred Regiments Offensive that began in August 1940, which resulted in Japanese rail lines being repeatedly cut off.

Mao Zedong Thought

In time the Chinese historical consciousness would undermine the verisimilitude of Marxism in China. But for Mao’s purposes it could be asserted that the “imperialist” exploiters backed the domination of the landlord class from abroad, while the rise of a Chinese merchant class centered in towns produced a capitalist “national bourgeoisie”. Only an establishment of central state authority to complete the tasks of the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” might cure its “comprador” wing sold out to the imperialist exploiters, and the situation. Sinification was still a two front enterprise because the CCP had to maintain its credentials as part of international Marxism-Leninism by using orthodox European lingo. Thus, earl on the GMD at Guangzhou could not be defined as representing simply a bourgeois class trying to carry through its phase of bourgeois democratic revolution. No, the GMD government, instead of representing the bourgeois capitalist class had been a multi-class government or “block of four classes,” in which the proletariat could participate.

Mao began with the Marxist assumption of a bourgeois democratic revolution as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism, which could be followed by another revolution as the transition from capitalism to socialism. Chinese Marxists could only conclude that the May Fourth Movement had ushered the bourgeois democratic revolution.
The Rectification Campaign of 1942-1944

Mao pushed not only to consolidate his position but to unify the party and to ensure discipline. The rectification campaign of 1942-1944 was limited to party members, who had increased in number and lacked the cohesion of the Long March generation. The targets of the campaign were “subjectivism, sectarianism, and party formalism.”
The methods whereby Mao’s thought reform movement was carried out at Yan’an in 1942-1944 would become very familiar in CCP history from the o. The individual whose thoughts were to be reformed was first investigated and persuaded to describe himself and his life experience to the point where the group could begin to criticize him. In study group criticism the individual was at once isolated and subjected to the rebukes or admonishments of everyone else.

In 1943, Mao put forward his doctrine of the “mass line.” Like many of Mao’s intellectual formulations, this was double-ended and ambiguous so that it could be applied in either of two ways. While it asserted the need of consulting the masses and having a mass participation of some sort in the government, it also reaffirmed the necessity for central control and leadership. Thus some contradiction made you an enemy of the people and some did not, depending on how you were perceived. All in all, it was a very flexible structure of ideas, as though Marx and Engels had been seduced by Yin and Yang. Once Mao had control over it, he was truly in a position of leadership. Unity resulted because those who held out against Mao were vilified, penalized, jailed, or even executed.

American Support of Coalition Government

In 1943, the Soviets successfully defended Stalingrad, the western allies won North Africa, the US Navy began to get the upper hand in the Pacific and the American forces had invaded the Solomon Islands on their way to Tokyo. The Japanese had to relax their pressure on the North China Liberated areas and border region.  In these circumstances, the CCP expansion was resumed in the period 1943-1945, but its policy was prudent and avoided haste and superficiality. By the time the American Army military observer group, or so called Dixie Mission, reached Yan’an in mid 1944, the CCP was on an upswing again and preparing for the postwar showdown with the GMD.

Unfortunately, by the time the US got an observer mission into Yan’an in 1944, it was too late to use the Washington-Chongqing alliance to prepare the way for a Nationalist victory in the obviously upcoming civil war. Nevertheless, the Americans tried. The Americans could not get the nationalists trained, fed and armed to fight off the Japanese effectively. The American idea of using a Free China as a base for the struggle against Japan absorbed the American’s attention but at the same time distracted them from the Chinese Revolution.  With the end of the united front in 1941, American observers could see the split widening between the GMD and the CCP party dictatorships.

   After Japan’s surrender in August1945, Jiang and Mao under Hurley’s auspices met in Chongqing and in October agreed upon an ideal set of principles that would gladden any liberal in the world. The GMD and CCP regimes would cooperate in a representative assembly, scrambling their armies and meanwhile guaranteeing all civil liberties and good things dear to men and women everywhere.  This would not last. Communist forces moved across North China to compel the Japanese to surrender to them. The Nationalists reacted by ordering the Japanese to fight off the communists and recover from them any territories they had gained. The United States sent its troops to north china to aid the nationalists.

Chapter 17: The Civil War And The Nationalists on Taiwan

   When peace broke out in August 1945, the Nationalist armed forces were at least twice the size of the CCP’s and moreover had the advantage of American equipment and supplies plus the assistance of the US Navy in transporting troops and the US Marines in the Tianjin-Beijing area. The Nationalists held all of the major cities of China, while the communists held the countryside. Jiang continued the out of date use of the war by taking the cities and in doing so overextended his forces. In addition to mishandling the economy, the nationalists mishandled its citizens and had corrupt officials as well as corrupt soldiers. In these ways, the GMD lost public support and seemed to be the instigator of the civil war even more than the communists. It was evident that the nationalists government had become so militarized that it could only think of a military solution to the civil war without the regard for its functions as a government to serve the public.

Nationalist Attack and Communist Counter Attack

   Ironically, the Nationalist forces pursued a war rather similar to what the Japanese had inflicted upon China in their day. By the end of the first year of the three year struggle, the Nationalists held all major cities and rail lines, and their forces were far more superior in firepower. However, the CCP armies had merely withdrawn, refusing to stand and fight and so avoiding casualties. Thus in the classic guerilla strategy, they helped the nationalists become overextended. They fought only when they could bring overpowering force to bear on some small GMD unit. When the CCP began to counterattack in mid 1947, its forcers were soon able not only to dominate Shandong, but also to recover the base area between the Yellow River and the Yangtze stretching between the Beijing-Hankou Railway on the west and Beijing-Nanjing on the east. The nationalists lost and were evacuated to Formosa, later called Taiwan, while the Communists took over of the mainland, Greater Chinese Empire.


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