ONE OF MANY errors made by Western observers in China was to assume that Communists in Moscow must be sympathetic to Communists in Yan’an, and vice versa. In the winter of 1944–45, when Chinese Nationalist troops were everywhere retreating before the Japanese, the British Joint Intelligence Committee speculated: “If Chinese unable put up even show789 of determined resistance in defence of such important towns, considerable danger gov might not survive. With breakdown of centralised govt and dispersal Chinese troops, other than those trained and led by Americans, organised Chinese opposition would come only from Communists…who might get more support than in past from Russians who might see some advantage in maintaining some Chinese Government in opposition to Japanese.”
In reality, however, Stalin had long before reached brutally pragmatic conclusions about China. He believed that Chiang was the only man capable of ruling the country; that Mao was too weak to overthrow him; and that Soviet interests therefore demanded a working relationship with the Nationalists. For years before the war, Chiang received cash and military aid from Moscow. Mao’s people in Yan’an were far more isolated politically than Western visitors knew. Though Stalin had funded China’s Communists back in the 1920s, not until the war ended did the Soviet leader lift a finger to assist their cause against Chiang. Conversely, in the dark days of 1941–42, when Stalin’s emissaries in Yan’an urged Mao to exert all possible military pressure on the Japanese, to diminish the risk that they would join Hitler’s onslaught on Russia, the Chinese leader ignored their imprecations.
Yet the Soviets needed information from China, and above all from Manchuria, where Russian and Japanese forces confronted each other across their shared border, and had fought a brief war in 1939. Despite their supposed neutrality towards Japan, the Russians welcomed into the far east of the Soviet Union several thousand Chinese Communist guerrillas who sought refuge from hunger and Japanese harassment. In remote forest areas, under the auspices of Moscow’s Far East Intelligence Group, training camps and bases were established. Chinese guerrillas were sent back into their own country to spy and make trouble, in the same fashion as the British SOE and American OSS promoted resistance elsewhere in the world.
The activities of these groups form a remarkable story, largely unknown in the West. Chiang Kai-shek lost much face among Manchurians when he declined to commit Nationalist forces to resist the 1931 Japanese takeover. The local guerrilla bands which formed thereafter were Communist in name, however little ideology they possessed. Stalin’s Chinese recruits were drawn from unimaginably wretched backgrounds. Li Dongguan was the child of a peasant in Heilongjiang Province, who started poor and grew relentlessly poorer. The child tended cattle for the local landlord, and quickly became radicalised by the Japanese occupation. One day when a group of boys were making a fishtrap by the river, two Japanese soldiers came by with a dog. One of the children was foolish enough to throw a stone at it. The Japanese unslung their rifles and shot dead not only the stone thrower, but three other children. “I was so shocked. After that, I cared only about fighting the Japanese.”
Not long after, a Communist guerrilla group stayed in his village for a few days. He befriended its bugler, a boy about his own age. They played together, as children do, and Li—nicknamed “Tiezi” by his family—helped tend the guerrillas’ horses. He told the bugler that he wanted to join the band. “You’ll have to talk to Liu, the commissar,” said the young warrior. Liu was dismissive: “Look at you—thirteen years old. Life as a guerrilla is no picnic. One day you’re crossing mountains in the snow, the next there’s nothing to eat. You’d never keep up. Anyway, your family need you at home.” “My mother’s dead and I needn’t tell anybody else,” said the boy. Liu shrugged, patted him on the head and said: “We can talk about this again in a couple of years.”
Next day, however, when the guerrilla column marched out, behind them in the snow trudged Li. He said nothing to his family, carried only a little rice and a few trifles in a bag. That night, when the guerrillas camped, Li slipped in among them, and slept beside his friend the bugler. It was two days before Liu, the commissar, noticed him. Then he burst out furiously: “What the hell are you doing here? We’re going into action tomorrow. Look at your hands—you’ve got frostbite already. The cold will kill you in a week. Go home where you belong!” But Li did not go home. Through the days that followed, he shadowed his young friend the bugler, helping with camp chores, fetching water, peeling vegetables, feeding the horses. After a month of this, Liu shrugged and said: “OK, you’re earning your keep. You can stay with us.” Li’s family assumed that he was dead. It was fifteen years before his few surviving relations saw him again.
In the times that followed, besides the usual privations of guerrilla life, Li took part in several skirmishes with the occupiers. Once, when his band saw two Japanese vehicles pass by on a road, they knew that they were likely to come back the same way, and laid an ambush. Sure enough, late in the afternoon the trucks reappeared. The guerrillas poured fire into them. When the action was over, they found that they had killed twenty Japanese. Only one made good his escape. There was a bonus: one truck had been carrying a garrison payroll. The guerrillas found themselves laden with cash as well as the weapons of the dead. In China, it was hard to distinguish between banditry and politically motivated resistance, and few tried to do so. Such little battles were rare. The guerrillas’ lives were characterised by monotony, privation, and long marches to escape Japanese punitive columns. A combination of all three eventually drove Li’s group across the northern border, into Russia.
Li Min’s father was head of the anti-Japanese group in his village in Heilongjiang Province. During her brief period of schooling, her teacher proselytised enthusiastically about the virtues of the October Revolution in Russia. He taught them Lenin’s song: “With Lenin’s birth, a star rose in the sky, beloved of all workers, feared by every capitalist.” Min’s education ceased, along with the life of her village, after a punitive raid by Japanese troops in 1936. She found herself a young nomad in the forests with a guerrilla band. Her father and brother joined other groups—with which both were killed before she could see them again. In the early years of the Japanese occupation, such groups survived without too much difficulty, receiving help from sympathetic peasants. At its peak, Min’s band was seven hundred strong. However, as the Japanese tightened their grip, the plight of their opponents grew harsher. Peasants were rounded up into “protected villages,” which they needed passes to leave. Others were deported for slave labour. Large numbers of Japanese immigrants arrived, taking over confiscated Chinese land. Japanese military sweeps of guerrilla areas became progressively more vigorous and ruthless.
It was a fantastically primitive existence, which only the youngest and hardiest could endure. Most of Min’s group were aged between seventeen and twenty—“a man of thirty, like our commander, seemed to us incredibly old.” They planted their own maize and rice in remote stretches of wilderness, hunted deer, wild boar and bears not only for food but for skins in which to clothe themselves. Like most of the wartime French maquis, their chief concern was not with fighting the enemy—for which they possessed scant means—but with survival. They snared rabbits for food and skins with which to sew caps and cloaks. They lived in huts dug deep into the earth, so that only the roofs showed above ground level. They huddled around their fires to fight the winter cold. But fires meant smoke, and smoke brought strafing Japanese aircraft, which killed scores of their people. Of those who survived, many more perished of hunger. Finally, in 1941, they embarked on a twenty-day march which led them across the border into Russia.
Jiang De grew up with Communist guerrillas in Manchuria. Every autumn they came to his village seeking grain and recruits. His uncle, whom Jiang much admired, joined them. Jiang became a small-time spy, collecting fragments of information about Japanese movements, assisted by the fact that he had another uncle working in a local police station. “Nobody took any notice of what a kid like me was doing.” One day in July 1943, six guerrillas were in Jiang’s house when two Japanese police appeared without warning at the front door. The guerrillas bolted through the back. There was a brief scuffle, in which one policeman was killed while the other fled. A few hours later, three trucks laden with Japanese soldiers and Chinese militia drove up to the village and rapidly deployed around it. They rounded up all fifteen members of the family except Jiang, who escaped into fields with the guerrillas. In captivity, the family paid dearly for their rashness in lingering at home after the policeman’s killing. All were tortured in varying degrees, with forced infusions of chilli water, electric shocks and beatings. Jiang’s father died under the experience.
After the Japanese had departed with their prisoners, the young man and the guerrillas raided the farm of a local landlord. They seized ten horses and all the grain the beasts could carry, then set off towards the forests. After marching all night, at dawn they realised that they were being pursued. For four hours they lay in hiding with their animals, listening to Japanese voices as troops searched the area. One of the horses began to whinny. They cut its throat. At last it seemed safe to move on. Early next morning, they reached the camp of the seventy-strong guerrilla band, with whom Jiang now threw in his lot. Winter came on. “It was a very difficult time,” he said. They were soon desperate for food. They ate some of the horses, and the remainder soon perished of hunger. Eventually, a decision was taken: some men would hold out in the forest until spring. The rest, however, would make for the Russian border. After three weeks’ hard marching, and a crossing of the frozen Amur River, they reached Soviet border posts. Jiang delivered a letter which the guerrilla commander had given him, asking that he should be trained and sent back into China.
Zhou Shuling was an illiterate fourteen-year-old when one day in 1934 her Manchurian hamlet was visited by Japanese troops who murdered her grandfather by stuffing chilli plants down his throat until he choked. Her brother, aunt and two uncles were killed by simpler methods. She ran away to join a local Communist guerrilla group of the North-East Anti-Japanese Union: “I refused to become a Japanese slave.” There were eleven guerrilla groups in northern Manchuria at this time, some of them no more than bandits. She served with the 3rd Regiment, initially employed as a spy to scout Japanese positions and report where it might be possible to steal weapons or food. On one of these expeditions she met a Japanese patrol. A soldier casually lashed out with his bayonet, gashing her face. Another Japanese intervened, saying: “Oh, leave her alone. She’s harmless.” He said to Shuling: “Run for it, while you’ve got the chance.” After that encounter, fearful of rejoining her group when the Japanese were on the move and she had no papers, she took refuge for a week with a woman whom she persuaded to give her shelter in return for helping to look after her four children. Then Shuling threw herself on the mercy of a women’s religious group. After a week with them, she was able to escape back to her band.
It was a hard life, moving constantly to escape roving Japanese columns, living in caves and woods, once surviving a week without food. In 1938, when she was sixteen, she was told that she was to marry the commander of another group, an old man of twenty-nine named Li Mingshu. “What did I think of him?” She shrugged. “It didn’t matter whether I liked or disliked him. That was the way things were done.” She lived for several months in the wilderness with Li’s 32nd Battalion, until Japanese pressure became irresistible. After the Communist groups in their area had been desperately mauled, and with the loss of hundreds of men, the survivors slipped over the border into Russia, where most of them remained until 1945.
The Russians treated their Chinese guests as well as their own threadbare means allowed: “They respected us, because we had been fighting for the same thing as them,” said Li Min. They were issued Russian uniforms, armed and intensively trained for intelligence missions and guerrilla war. Min underwent courses in radio work and parachuting. Clothes to wear, roofs over their heads and a bare minimum of food to eat might seem little enough, but were more than they had known in the forests of north-east China. Min supervised the guerrillas’ little library, and acted as assistant to their group’s resident intellectual, Chen Lei. He produced a string of pamphlets and reports, and conducted briefings for the group on the state of the war, based on newspaper reading and radio listening. In 1943, Min married Chen Lei. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-five. “It was not an arranged marriage—we simply loved each other. There was somebody else who liked me a lot, but Lei was the one I really cared about.”
Marriage in such circumstances was a strange business. There was only the simplest of ceremonies before a few friends, with no spare food or alcohol with which to celebrate. In winter months, the couple were allowed to cohabit in a hut they found for themselves in a derelict Soviet army camp. In summer, however, party rules decreed that men and women should occupy separate quarters, whether married or not. The Chinese were strictly quarantined from all Soviet citizens except their own instructors. They were forbidden to visit the nearest town, Yasta, some forty miles from the guerrilla camps. Yet the union of Lei and Min, unlike so many wartime marriages, lasted through sixty-three years that followed. “I never regret my experience in Russia. I was very lucky. In some ways, it was a good time.”
After months of training by Soviet instructors, Li Dongguan joined one of the reconnaissance groups which operated inside China from Russian bases. Over the next seven years he carried out seventy cross-border missions, scouting on foot up to thirty miles inside Japanese-controlled territory, liaising with local guerrillas and reporting on Japanese deployments. In winter the guerrillas usually stayed in their Soviet camps. Though there were occasional ski patrols, deep snow made movement difficult. In summer they worked in four-man teams. Dongguan’s favoured companion was a young Korean named Li Yunlong, “a peasant like me, who had shared the same sort of life.” They were dropped by jeep on the Russian side of the border, then travelled for three to five days in Japanese territory, clad usually in peasant clothing, occasionally in Japanese uniform, reporting back by radio. They slept mostly in the huts of sympathetic peasants. Unlike most Russian soldiers, they never carried vodka in their rations: “We saved our drinking for when we got back.” Only once did they clash head-on with a Japanese patrol, which cost Dongguan a bullet in the shoulder. Fortunately, they had only just crossed the river border. Within hours his companions were able to get him back into Russia.
The young Chinese liked the Russians: “We were all fellow Communists.” Once he had mastered the language, he became friendly with Russian officers who used to say: “You like it here. Why not take out citizenship and marry a nice Russian girl?” Dongguan was irked by this: “I am not a Russian—I’m Chinese.” “Don’t be so small-minded and nationalistic,” they taunted him. “I’m not nationalistic!” the young Chinese said angrily. “I’m internationalistic.” “Come on,” insisted the Russians. “You’d have a much better life here than in China—even when we’ve dealt with the Japanese there’ll be a civil war to come.” Dongguan brushed them aside. He met a young Chinese Communist doctor named Zhang Yujie and married her three months later. He enjoyed his life in the Russian camps. Their remoteness held no terrors for a Chinese peasant, and he loved the opportunities to hunt and fish: “There was plenty of game in the forests. We lived pretty well.” By 1945 he was twenty-eight years old, one of the most experienced of the guerrillas.
Jiang De joined a course of thirty students, most of them under twenty, who were taught the arts of reconnaissance and wireless operation—which, in the case of Jiang and several others, included some basic literacy skills. “I enjoyed it—I learned so many things I didn’t know.” Their material needs were served by Russian batmen and cooks, a privilege the teenager had never known. They liked their Russian “headmaster.” Jiang said: “I changed a lot—for a start, I learned to read and write. I became a different person.”
“The Russians were kind to us,” said Zhou Shuling. “I saw how very hard life was in Russia—worse than in China—but they shared what they had. Sometimes, a Russian might only have one potato to eat. But he would share that potato.” She herself was trained as a nurse, and during those years of exile bore her husband four children in their tiny room in the bleakness of the Russian north-east. Her husband’s career became much more exotic. He was trained as a parachutist, and carried out several intelligence missions in Manchuria. He told her nothing of his abrupt comings and goings. Once, she was amazed to see a Japanese soldier walking up the path to her home. Then she recognised her husband in the hated uniform.
More than a few of the Chinese agents whom the Soviets sent back into Manchuria were captured by the Japanese, who were as confused as the Allies by the tangle of Communist loyalties between Mao and Stalin. In December 1944, Japanese intelligence in Manchuria reported to Tokyo that they had caught two Chinese Communist agents in Dalian, who had been in contact with the local Soviet consul. These men confessed under interrogation to membership of a thirty-strong network of agents in Manchuria, in wireless contact with the Communists in Yan’an. Their group, the prisoners asserted, “at present were mostly inactive790 awaiting a revolt in Manchuria or a Soviet-Japanese war.” It is today impossible to guess whether the captured agents were in reality reporting to Yan’an or to the Soviets.
In addition to the reconnaissance groups791, the Russians formed guerrilla refugees into a regular unit, the 88th Independent Brigade. Four of its battalions were Chinese. The fifth was Korean, commanded by Kim Il Sung, who later became ruler of North Korea. Their ranks were stiffened by some Soviet officers of Chinese and Korean origins. In the canteen at their base forty miles from Khabarovsk, they celebrated the German surrender with Russians who offered toasts to victory and to Stalin. The Chinese immediately called for another toast: victory over Japan. The Red Army men enthusiastically joined in. From that day on, the former guerrillas anticipated Soviet entry into the eastern war. When at last it came, the Chinese were bitterly disappointed when the Russians deployed only a handful of the Chinese trainees, committing the others to internal security duties in Manchuria and Korea. Stalin’s Chinese clients were deemed a political asset more than a military one.
JOHN PATON DAVIES and his kind forever afterwards believed that, in the winter of 1944–45, the United States lost a historic opportunity to achieve an understanding with China’s future, in the person of Mao, which it sacrificed by clinging to the past, in the person of Chiang. This was naïve. There is no more reason to suppose that Mao would have honoured promises to American capitalists, made under the duress of war, than did Chiang. Both were playing a game with the Americans, Chiang with greater apparent success, Mao with much shrewder understanding of his own people. Edgar Snow, the U.S. journalist who knew Mao for many years and who became one of his most effective Western propagandists, recorded a conversation with him in the 1930s: “Both of us felt792 a growing conviction that the Communist-Nationalist war in China would in the long term prove more important than the Japanese war…Mao correctly predicted the Japanese attack on Western colonies in Asia, Russian intervention in a general war to defeat the Japanese—and end colonialism in Asia. He told me to expect the Japanese to win all the great battles, seize the main cities and communications, and in the process destroy the KMT’s best forces…at the end of a war which he thought might last ten years, the ‘forces of the Chinese revolution’ would…emerge as the leading power in East Asia.”
This seems both a plausible illustration of Mao Zedong’s shrewdness and a convincing view of his agenda. In 1945, the U.S. remained implacably unwilling to send military aid to Yan’an. For this, much abuse has been heaped upon Hurley and his kind by liberal contemporaries and historians. Yet the Americans were surely right. It would have availed the Allied war effort nothing to ship arms to the Communists. These would have been used against the Japanese only in showcase operations to impress foreign spectators. By now, the minds of U.S. policy-makers as well as Chinese principals had become fixed upon shaping post-war realities, rather than promoting Japan’s defeat on the Asian mainland.
In January 1945, Wedemeyer chaired a meeting with the British at which he asserted emphatically: “Under no circumstances is any material help793 to be given or negotiations entered into with any provincial authorities or military leaders who are not, repetition not, directly controlled by and owe allegiance to central authorities.” A British hand pencilled on the War Office copy of this minute: “Yennan?” Wedemeyer urged everyone present to “come clean” about any “undeclared operations.” The British in Chongqing agreed with their American colleagues about very little, but they endorsed Hurley and Wedemeyer’s view that it was pointless to arm Mao’s people. The British military attaché signalled to London on 27 December 1944: “Seeing that the Communists have not been equipped794 with modern weapons nor organised and trained to operate with them, I consider that they would be of negligible value for at least a year, even if given all the facilities enjoyed by the central gov forces since 1928. They have never carried out regular ops against the Japs, but have contented themselves with occupying territory from which the Kuomintang tps have withdrawn.”
In March 1945 Hurley abandoned his attempt to forge a coalition between Mao and Chiang, and became implacably hostile to Yan’an. The ambassador conducted a dramatic purge of all those whom he deemed Communist sympathisers, including Service and Ludden. He had become convinced that the United States must support Chiang, and Chiang alone. A British visitor met Hurley in 1945. He afterwards asserted that the U.S. ambassador “despised the Chinese [and] asked795 whether I did not agree that they were hopeless people who must have a strong man on top to keep them in order.” As so often when others waver, one man passionately committed to a course of action—Hurley—got his way. America withheld support from Mao, whose guerrillas remained largely passive until August 1945.
John Paton Davies admitted later that he had been mistaken to suppose that Mao Zedong was amenable to democracy. However, the American diplomat was impenitent in his judgement about the virtues of what he and his colleagues saw, liked and admired about Mao’s camp in 1944–45: “Yan’an provided the great mass796 of the population, which had been without hope, with an affirmative, personal way out of the swamps of despair. The way out was through rustic nationalism, based on organized rustic resistance to the Japanese invaders, and a novel feeling of having some say in the shaping of one’s individual destiny.”
It was unquestionably true that Mao’s people in Yan’an were building a base of popular support—however deluded were the Chinese people about Mao’s ability to improve their lives—quite lacking for Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Christopher Thorne has written perceptively about the enthusiasm of generations of American foreign policy-makers for identifying a nation’s “great man,” and fixing upon him—sometimes to the point of obsession—as friend or foe. Americans, Thorne argues, are far less comfortable assessing movements and ideologies than categorising individuals. American policy in China represented a spectacular example of this proclivity. Chiang had become unequivocally the chosen “great man” of the United States. Though Washington grew deeply disillusioned about the Nationalists’ will or ability to assist the Allied cause against the Japanese, and acknowledged the chronic corruption and incompetence of Chiang’s government, they stuck with him.
Even if the U.S. had decided to ship military aid to the Communists in 1945, the logistical difficulties were so great that the Japanese would not have been much inconvenienced. No more than the Nationalists were the Communists capable of inflicting defeat upon a regular Japanese army. American support for the Communists might have spared the Chinese people from their later civil war, by hastening the fall of Chiang: it was plain to all but the most blind and bigoted foreigners in China in 1945 that if its people were granted political choice, Chiang must fall. But aid to Mao could not have altered the course of the Second World War in Asia.
Exposure of the delusion that the U.S. could determine the future of China cost Americans only money, but was paid for in blood by the Chinese people. By the spring of 1945, Wedemeyer in Chongqing was making hasty plans for American troop landings at Chinese ports and in Beijing, to pre-empt their seizure by the Communists when hostilities ended. The U.S. general was grudgingly obliged to recognise how formidable Communist forces and organisation had become. By summer, Mao’s people in Yan’an displayed a notable smugness. The mere fact of their survival against all expectations until the Japanese stood on the brink of defeat enabled them to stand poised to launch the only struggle which mattered to them: for the body and soul of China.