In 1928, while the CCP withdrew to remote parts of Hubei, Hunan and Fujian to lick its wounds and regroup as best it could, Chiang Kai-shek went on to secure the northern provinces. The success of this second phase of the Northern Expedition was due, even more than the first, to concessions and alliances with existing warlords. In Shandong, Nationalist troops met their fiercest resistance not from Chinese opponents but from Japanese forces based there to protect Tokyo’s concessions. To the now standard level of carnage was added a new venom as wanton atrocities were inflicted on civilians in the name of race.
Beijing, its latest warlord-master Zhang Zuolin having been blown up by a bomb in Mukden (Shengyang), was too vulnerable to Tokyo’s zealots in nearby Manchuria and Shandong to serve as the Nationalist capital. Instead it was downgraded, as it had been by the Ming Hongwu emperor, from ‘Beijing’ (‘Northern Capital’) to ‘Beiping’ (‘Northern Pacified [city]’). Nanjing was once again preferred as the national capital, and it was effectively consecrated as such when Chiang Kai-shek had the remains of Dr Sun Yat-sen ceremonially reinterred there in a spectacular tomb. Again like the Hongwu emperor, whose own tomb was hard by on Mount Zijin, Sun was portrayed as the Guomindang’s inspiration and his writings were accorded something of the authority of the Hongwu emperor’s ‘ancestral instructions’. In performing this pious act, Chiang sought to portray himself as Sun’s protégé and delegated successor, an arrangement given quasi-dynastic substance by Chiang’s new bride being the sister of Sun’s widow. Legitimacy still lay with the past, not the people.
Since priority was being given to eradicating the CCP, extending Nationalist control into the warlord-ruled countryside and milking Shanghai for funds, ‘there was little need for Chiang to worry about the trappings of democracy’.21 A strongly centralist and bureaucratic form of administration was adopted by China’s first Nationalist government, and an austere Confucianist ideology developed to underpin it. Known as the ‘New Life’ movement – supposedly a Chinese take on the American ‘New Deal’ – this stressed discipline, decorum and loyalty rather than righteousness or reverence for scholarship. When in the 1930s Chiang conceived an admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, it acquired fascist under-tones. The now Generalissimo became the centre of a personal cult and launched his own morality police, the ‘Blueshirts’.
Though Chiang’s China was but a fraction of the Qing empire, and though within it warlords were still rife and fighting was continuous, the Nationalist revolution of 1926–28 attained a wider acceptance than had the republican revolution of 1911–12. This was nicely demonstrated when the British returned, or ‘rendited’, the 775 square kilometres (300 square miles) of mainland Chinese territory that comprised their Shandong concession at Weihaiwei. Technically Weihaiwei could have been returned in 1905 when, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, the Russians withdrew from Dalian. But the Japanese then took over Dalian and so the British stayed on as a counterweight to the Japanese presence. The matter came up again in 1915, at which point Reginald Johnston, Weihaiwei’s district magistrate, was invited to summarise the reasons for its retention. He replied that he was ‘aware of none’. Britain and Japan were allies at the time; the naval base served no strategic purpose, and the seafront was more noted for bathing machines than battleships, being a popular summer resort with foreign families. By 1920 the British had accepted Johnston’s logic and were resolved to hand the place back. But a new problem arose: to whom to hand it. In Beijing warlords were coming and going too quickly, while the Guomindang were at the time far away in the south.
The difficulty was still unresolved when in 1926 Reginald Johnston returned to Weihaiwei as its commissioner. In the interim, he had occupied what he called ‘the peculiar and rather interesting position’ of tutor to Henry Pu-yi. The ‘Last Emperor’ had been allowed to stay on in the Imperial Palace after his 1912 deposition, and so Johnston, living with his young charge, probably enjoyed a closer acquaintance with palace life than any other foreigner during the 250 years of Qing rule. Since then, Pu-yi had been extracted from the palace for his own safety and was now living as a private citizen under Japanese protection in Tianjin. There could be no question of handing Weihaiwei to him; but when in 1929 the British recognised Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, the problem was at last solved. With a legitimate and reasonably stable government in place, ‘the first British surrender of crown territory since the American War of Independence’ took place in October 1930. The ceremonial procedure adopted for the occasion – handshakes, flag-lowering, salutes, bagpipes, sombre seaward departure, ecstatic landward celebrations – would be repeated in outposts of Britain’s empire at the rate of about one every two years over the next half-century. And a process, begun on the China coast, would culminate there. For in June 1997, when the ninety-nine-year lease of Hong Kong’s ‘New Territories’ expired and the whole colony was ‘rendited’, Britain’s empire was finally laid to rest. China regained the first of its alienated territories; and bar two (Macao, handed over in 1999, and Taiwan, still ‘unrendited’) it was the last.22
As well as reclaiming Weihaiwei, the Nationalist government opened the question of renegotiating the ‘unequal’ treaties of the nineteenth century, especially in respect of extraterritoriality and the treaty ports. Three Yangzi ports were duly handed back, including Hankou, where the bomb had gone off in 1911, while a system of power-sharing was introduced on Shanghai’s municipal council. Negotiations with the foreign powers were still ongoing when in 1932 this brief window of opportunity was slammed shut. The Japanese had in the previous year contrived a pretext for occupying Shenyang (Mukden), the largest city in Manchuria, and then overrunning the rest of Manchuria. A year later in Shanghai, in response to anti-Japanese protests over this Manchurian grab and the killing of several Japanese nationals, the Japanese navy landed troops. Negotiations with the foreign powers were suspended as a fierce little war raged through the Chinese districts of the great city. By the time a truce was arranged in 1933, 14,000 had died.
These distractions, while affording a stay of execution to the treaty ports, proved the salvation of the communists in that they gave them time to regroup. Since its betrayal by the Guomindang in 1928, the CCP had gone back to the countryside. In several scattered enclaves, the party slowly reformed, usually following an accommodation with local warlords, and then began establishing autonomous local soviets, still with Comintern guidance and support. Troops were recruited and trained; and the leadership was viciously contested. Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai had been made scapegoats for the failure of the united front with the Guomindang, despite their reservations about it in the first place. Other figures now contended for high party office. They included: Zhou Enlai, a dedicated ideologue who had studied in Paris, then headed the political department of the Guangdong military academy, and now coordinated party activities; Lin Biao, one of the Guangdong Academy’s cadets who had distinguished himself as a brilliant commander during the first phase of the Northern Expedition; and Mao Zedong, a tall, slightly effete-looking maverick with little military experience, an unreliable record, a ruthless reputation and an unshakeable conviction that he alone understood the requirements of the situation.
But attempts to extend the party’s enclaves fared indifferently. By 1933 all of them were on the defensive as Chiang Kai-shek, relieved by the truce with the Japanese, intensified his blockades and sent wave after wave of Guomindang forces against them. The largest ‘Red’ enclave was located in the hills of Jiangxi near the provincial border with Hunan. When, in 1934, this Jiangxi soviet was faced with imminent extinction, the decision was taken to evacuate it. About 28,000, including the wounded and nearly all the women, were left behind to the none-too-tender mercies of the Nationalists; equal status did not include equal opportunity of survival. The rest, about 80,000, of whom perhaps half were combat troops, broke out of the blockade under cover of darkness, heading west, on 16 October 1934. This was the start of the ‘Ten-thousand Li [about 5,000 kilometres, 3,000 miles] March’, otherwise the Long March.
‘The most enduring myth in modern Chinese history, and one of the biggest myths of the twentieth century’, the Long March has since been controversially exposed as just that, a myth.23 According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao was very nearly left behind; he repeatedly led the marchers astray; and like the rest of the leadership, he seldom actually marched, being carried most of the way in a sedan chair. Moreover the whole thing, far from being a saga of heroism and survival, was allegedly a charade masterminded by, of all people, Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang’s son was at the time in Russia and supposedly being detained there as surety for his father’s collaboration. Were Chiang’s forces to annihilate the marchers, it would be as good as a death sentence for one on whom his father doted. Additionally Chiang could not afford to antagonise Moscow at a time when Tokyo posed the direr threat. And finally, while his Nationalist forces did indeed pursue the marchers through Guizhou and Sichuan, this supposedly served a different agenda, namely to wrest those territories from their warlords so that they would be available as a refuge for Chiang and his government in the event of a Japanese invasion.
The Comintern wanted the Jiangxi ‘Reds’ to relocate in the north-west, where they could supply and control them. Chiang’s task, therefore, was to shepherd them there. Instead of decimating the communists, he was to deliver them. With air power and artillery, he could easily have annihilated them; but the planes buzzed without bombing, and the troops and guns were meant to overawe the local warlords. The battles of the march were invention, its year-long duration was due to quite unnecessary diversions, and the hardships encountered were the result of Mao’s miscalculations and his power-thirsty manoeuvrings.
Much of which may be true – the details were always suspect – and none of which detracts from the central importance of the march. Removing from southern Jiangxi to northern Shaanxi, while saving the CCP from possible extinction and proving a strategic masterstroke, lent the party national credibility and set an example of improbable, even heaven-blest, survival. The sacrifices could not be gainsaid. Of the 80,000 who had marched out of Jiangxi, just 4,000 are said to have reached the new headquarters at Yan’an. Desertions accounted for some of these losses, perhaps most; deaths more often resulted from exhaustion and sickness than enemy fire; and since the Long Marchers were reshuffled with another ‘Red’ army en route, the exact number of survivors remains unclear. But disaster or triumph, the march came to be seen as bathed in glory, much like Gallipoli or Dunkirk, and was treated as a suitable subject for inspirational propaganda. Fairbank compared it to ‘Moses leading his Chosen People through the Red Sea’; redemption through flight is something of an apostolic cliché.24 In China, from the Han founder Liu Bang’s repeated withdrawals before the fiery Xiang Yu to the long northward march of the Taipings, precedents aplenty demonstrated the genius of tactical relocation. And while to the average Chinese the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism may have seemed excessively abstract and alien, the march gave them a human dimension and a national relevance.
The march also gave birth to the Mao legend. A tendency to present mid-twentieth-century history in personal terms is not unique to China. In a world dominated by wartime leaders and national heroes – Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Gandhi, de Gaulle – China’s redemption would readily lend itself to a Mao-centred narrative. Post-war reunification, mass indoctrination, implementation of the brand of communism labelled ‘Maoism’ and the cult of the Great Leader’s personality – all ensured that Mao’s story over the next four decades eclipsed China’s. But it was not as simple as that. Without, for instance, the devastation caused by Japan’s invasion and the Second World War, Mao and the CCP might have been a historical irrelevance.
In 1936, within a year of the party setting up its new soviet among the dusty canyons just south of the Great Wall in northern Shaanxi, another heaven-sent opportunity presented itself. Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek was taken prisoner. While on a visit to Xi’an to meet Zhang Xueliang, playboy son of the warlord Zhang Zuolin and inheritor of his army, Chiang’s bodyguard had been massacred and he himself held as a hostage. Zhang Xueliang’s plan was the laudable one of acting as a go-between in bringing the Nationalists, communists and warlords together in united opposition to renewed Japanese incursions. In effect Chiang was to be forced into declaring a new united front and an end to anti-CCP hostilities on pain of being handed over to the CCP. Tortuous negotiations ensued in which the decisive move was made by the Comintern in Russia. For instead of encouraging the CCP to grab Chiang Kai-shek while it had the chance, it ordered the party to cooperate with the Nationalists, secure Chiang’s release and even serve under his command in a united front against the Japanese. Zhou Enlai dutifully relayed this position and Chiang was freed. Not for several years would a united front result; the Nationalists were still too suspicious of the communists. But Nationalist offensives against the Shaanxi soviet were scaled down, Mao and the CCP gained the breathing space to embark on rural mobilisation, and all parties braced themselves for the Japanese onslaught.
Long anticipated, the fatal encounter took place at the so-called ‘Marco Polo bridge’, about 15 kilometres (9 miles) west of Beijing, on the night of 7 July 1937. In defence of their railway and industrial concessions, Japanese troops and Japanese-controlled Chinese forces were by now stationed all over Hebei and Shandong. The affair at the bridge, initially a misunderstanding over training manoeuvres, escalated rapidly because Tokyo was taking a more belligerent line and Chiang Kai-shek was under enormous pressure to stand firm. When the Japanese and their warlord allies swept all before them round Tianjin and Beijing, the same pressure saw Chiang risk opening a second front with a view to drawing off the enemy.
Chiang’s new front was Shanghai, where Japanese troops were few and a Japanese naval fleet looked an inviting target. That it was also China’s most populous city, its biggest port and richest financial centre seems not to have troubled the Generalissimo. Ordered to attack the Japanese fleet, in mid-August Chiang’s Nationalist air force swept low over the city to drop their bombs. They failed to hit a single ship but sent three bombs into the heart of the international concession. One scored a direct hit on the Palace Hotel, a prestigious development on the corniche-like Bund, another just missed the nearby Cathay Hotel and landed in the crowds outside, and a third hit the Great World, an enormous pleasure-drome on Nanjing Road, the main shopping street. There alone 1,000 were killed, nearly all Chinese, and 1,000 more horribly mutilated. It was 13 August, a Friday.
Inauspiciously begun, the Nationalists’ Shanghai front soon retracted to become a Yangzi front. Shanghai itself held out for a couple of months, during which the Japanese brought in aircraft carriers, heavy armour and several divisions of marines and infantry. ‘As many as 250,000 Chinese troops were killed or wounded – almost 60% of Chiang’s finest forces – while the Japanese took 40,000 or more casualties.’25 The city never really recovered. Foreigners fled, business confidence collapsed, and it was in fact the Japanese who terminated the status of its international concession. The Nationalists then began their own Long March, retreating upriver to the capital, Nanjing, which fell in December (1937), to a new capital at Wuhan, which fell in mid-1938, and finally to Chongqing above the gorges in Sichuan, which, though heavily bombed, would serve as the last capital of what remained of Chiang’s Nationalist China until 1945.
It was a similar story farther north, despite valiant resistance and the flooding – intentional for once – of the Yellow River. Meant as a way of slowing the enemy’s advance, the blowing up of the dikes redirected the river for the umpteenth time and inundated an unrecorded number of Chinese civilians. By late 1938 the Japanese had reached Kaifeng. Meanwhile in the south Guangzhou had fallen and Hong Kong was effectively isolated. Worse by far, though, was the madness that had overtaken the Japanese when they entered Nanjing. That city, as fair as any with its graceful Ming palaces and massive walls beneath the wooded slopes of Mount Zijin, had known massacres before. Nothing, though, could compare with the butchery, rapes and other atrocities perpetrated over a seven-week reign of terror in the winter of 1937/38. As Japanese troops took their revenge on the capital, at least 50,000 Chinese – and possibly half a million – most of them civilians, were gratuitously slaughtered in one of the worst war crimes on record.
By 1939, when the Sino-Japanese war was subsumed within the Second World War, all the coastal provinces were under Tokyo’s control, while its quisling regimes extended deep inland. China was fragmented; but zhongguo, in any meaningful sense, was subjugated. The Nationalists were penned up in Sichuan, desperately short of revenue and dependent for munitions and supplies on the newly built but only fitfully open Burma Road through semi-autonomous Yunnan. The communists were equally marginalised and equally cash-strapped in Shaanxi. There they cultivated self-sufficiency, harboured designs on Gansu and Ningxia, and accumulated manpower while experimentally re-allocating land and classifying and organising its cultivators. Meanwhile the fighting continued and the human tragedies multiplied. Despite massive Allied support for the Nationalists, especially after Pearl Harbor (December 1941) and American entry into the Pacific War, despite the eventual formation of a half-hearted Guomindang-CCP united front, and despite a major Japanese offensive in Hunan and Guizhou in 1944, the military situation remained basically unchanged until Japan surrendered following the August 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
China’s contribution to victory had been in tying down vast numbers of Japanese aircraft, military vehicles and above all troops. In 1945 about two million, half of them in Manchuria, awaited surrender and repatriation. Both the Nationalists, with their promise of a ‘Free China’ now backed by the USA, and the communists, with their ambitions for a People’s Republic backed by the Russians, swooped to secure the surrendered munitions and to claim the abandoned infrastructure, the mines, the factories and the teeming territories. In this race, Manchuria, now a heavily indus-trialised region thanks to Japanese investment and less devastated by the late war than the rest of China, constituted the greatest prize. It had been invaded by the Russians in the dying months of the war, which handed the advantage to the communists. When Nationalist and communist armies both converged on it, the Nationalists, while much the stronger, found their progress slowed by the Russians. The communists, joined by local partisans and some Koreans, were allowed to help themselves to the stockpiled Japanese weaponry and establish themselves in the far north. It was thus in Harbin, the first city run by the CCP, that Lin Biao reorganised his forces as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and in late 1946 began to push south.
By then American attempts to get the two sides to accept a ceasefire
and some form of power-sharing under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership had collapsed. ‘The greatest obstacle to peace has been the complete, almost overwhelming suspicion with which the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang regard each other,’ began General George Marshall’s report on the failure of his mediating mission. ‘They each sought only to take counsel of their fears.’26 The fears proved real enough when in early 1947 the fighting flared into open war and each side assumed its true colours. The communists no longer disguised their revolutionary intent. Lands were confiscated and redistributed, landowners held to account, informants encouraged, and mass indoctrination campaigns organised. The Nationalists, on the other hand, betrayed their old preference for corporate croneyism, indifference to popular sentiment and economic incompetence. A collapse in morale as a result of rampant inflation (500 per cent a month in 1948), famines, rural unrest and student protests undermined the Nationalist regime more fatally than the communist victories. By 1948 the PLA had inflicted a series of disastrous defeats on the Nationalists in Manchuria, leading to mass desertions. All over northern China the CCP’s peasant guerrillas were simultaneously making the countryside a no-go area. More victories and desertions meant that by the end of 1948 most of China north of the Yangzi was in communist hands.
Jonathan Spence likens Chiang Kai-shek’s plight to that of the Ming pretenders after the Manchus had overrun the north in 1644–45. Chiang himself might have been more reassured by those earlier dynasties, stretching back through the Song and the Eastern Jin to the Wu of the Three Kingdoms period, which had made a greater success of their southern sojourn. He certainly considered standing firm south of the Yangzi, while he investigated the alternative possibility of again withdrawing to Sichuan and Yunnan. But in the end he opted for the greater safety of Taiwan, which had been restored to the republic after the defeat of Japan. Art treasures and texts from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, the nearest thing to regalia that he could lay his hands on, were removed there in 1948; and in early 1949, as the PLA overran the south in a series of lightning advances, Chiang himself fled across the Taiwan Strait with about a million of his troops. Other Nationalists were driven into Thailand, Laos and Burma. Many emigrated overseas.
As president of his rump ‘Republic of China’, Chiang ruled on in Taiwan until his death in 1975. In good dynastic tradition he was then succeeded by his son until Taiwan adopted a parliamentary form of government in the late 1980s. Mao, who would die in 1976, outlasted Chiang by just a year. But his ‘People’s Republic of China’, officially proclaimed from Tiananmen, the Heavenly Gate, in Beijing in October 1949, proved markedly more resistant to parliamentary representation.