The GMD & the CCP
In the two months following Emperor Hirohito’s
surrender declaration, Dakota transport planes of the U.S. Tenth Air
Force airlifted over 110,000 of Chiang’s best American-trained troops
to key cities. Japanese commanders were told not to surrender to the
Communists, and in many cases they continued to clash with Communist
forces until Guomindang officials arrived. ... As [the Guomindang] took back city after city from the
Japanese, and seemed to have the goal of reconstructing a united China
once more within their grasp, their carelessness, their inefficiency,
and often their corruption whittled steadily away at their base of
popular support. Many Chinese were outraged when puppet troops and
politicians who had collaborated openly with the Japanese during the
war were allowed to remain in their positions, just to prevent the
Communists from expanding their territory. ... The Guomindang also mismanaged the
difficult problem of stabilizing the currencies of China. ... By not
acting decisively or promptly, the Guomindang allowed a chaotic
situation to emerge in which exchanges varied wildly among
cities. ... Food prices also began to rise uncontrollably, and no central
authority had the power to hold them at a reasonable level. (SMC,
433-5)
In August 1945, Ambassador Hurley personally escorted Mao
Zedong from Yan’an to Chongqing for negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek. ... Mao and
Chiang announced that they agreed on the need for political democracy, a unified
military force, and equal legal status for all political parties. A National Assembly or People’s
Congress should be convened promptly, to mark the end of the period of
political tutelage that Sun Yat-sen had said would precede the
transition to democracy. ... It was harder to reach a satisfactory
compromise over local militias and the Communist-controlled border-area
governments. The Communists, who had already captured Kalgan, the main
railway junction of the far north, were content to state that they
would pull their troops out of southern China. Chiang, on the other
hand, was determined to reassert his control over the entire country,
and in November he launched a fierce attack on the Communists, sending
many of his best troops north through the Shanhaiguan pass into
Manchuria. (SMC, 435)
[T]hirty-eight
delegates assembled in Nanjing for a “political consultative
conference” on January 11 [1946]. ... In ten days of discussion that
were widely reported in the press and that led to an upsurge of hope
for the future, the delegates seemed to reach agreement on all the most
important points concerning constitutional government, unified military
command, and a national assembly. ... Unfortunately, these good
intentions came to nothing — indeed perhaps had always been
unrealistic. Military clashes between Communists and Nationalists
continued in many parts of China, and the Central Executive Committee
of the Guomindang made crucial changes in the conference agreements.
The committee limited the veto power of the Communists and the
Democratic League in the projected State Council, reaffirmed
presidential powers for Chiang Kai-shek rather than the genuine cabinet
system called for in the new constitution, and reversed its stand on
allowing more provincial autonomy. When the Communists and the
Democratic League refused to cooperate further unless these changes
were rescinded, the Guomindang went ahead without these groups and in
late 1946 convened a national assembly and drafted a constitution, both
without genuine democratic participation. The situation was
reminiscent of Yuan Shikai’s manipulation of the constitution and the assemblies in 1914 and 1915. (SMC,
436-7)
Who was to blame for the breakdown of these attempts to form a unity government?
The Struggle in the North
 In
the year following the Japanese surrender the Communists intensified
their land-reform program in the areas where they were strong. ... The
Communists had moved on from the cautious united-front policies of rent
reduction ... and were working to abolish tenancy and return the land to
the peasants who tilled it. ... Violence was an integral part of this
process, as old scores were settled with village thugs and personal
enemies as well as with landlords. ... Accounts of village reform show
how a whole community could be roused through mass meetings to attack
its wealthier members, to kill the most hated, and then to redistribute
all the confiscated property. ... The head of a recently formed Peasant
Association in a Shanxi village described the interrogation in January
1946 of a local landlord, Sheng Jinghe, against whom over a hundred
charges of brutal treatment of villagers and tenants had been
registered with local CCP cadres:
When the final struggle began Jinghe was faced not only with
those hundred accusations but with many many more. Old women who had
never spoken in public before stood up to accuse him. Even Li Mao’s
wife — a woman so pitiable she hardly dared look anyone in the
face — shook her fist before his nose and cried out, “Once I went to
glean wheat on your land. But you cursed me and drove me away. Why did
you curse and beat me? And why did you seize the wheat I had gleaned?”
Altogether over 180 opinions were raised. Jinghe had no answer to any
of them. He stood there with his head bowed. We asked him whether the
accusations were false or true. He said they were all true. When the
committee of our Association met to figure up what he owed, it came to
400 bags of milled grain, not coarse millet.
That evening all the people went to Jinghe’s
courtyard to help take over his property. It was very cold that night
so we built bonfires and the flames shot up toward the stars. It was
very beautiful.
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Dissatisfied
with the amount of grain that they found, the villagers beat Sheng
Jinghe repeatedly and heated an iron bar in the fire to torture him
with. Terrified, he at last confessed where his money was buried. (SMC,
439-41)
Was
land-reform necessary for the restoration of peace and stability in
China?
Were the peasants justified to "struggle" against such
landlords?
Japanese investments in Manchuria in summer 1945 were
estimated at 11 billion yen, and when the Soviet troops pulled out of
Manchuria in 1946 much of this was seized by the Guomindang. ... As in
Shanghai and elsewhere, the arriving Guomindang officials were ruthless
and wasteful in their takeover of industrial plants. Private
profiteering was common, along with the renting out — for private
gain — of public properties.
Local susceptibilities were irritated
further by Chiang’s decision to ship the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang
off to detention in the safer fastness of Taiwan, instead of releasing
him from his decade of house arrest as many of his former troops had
hoped. One newspaper correspondent commented from Mukden in late 1946,
“As for the common people, they feel on the one hand that all under
heaven belongs to the southerners and on the other that life today is
not as good as it was in Manchukuo times.”
The Communists, still too weak to hold southern Manchurian cities
against the numerically powerful and well-armed Guomindang forces, made
their main urban base in Harbin ... [an] industrial and commercial city
of around 800,000 people. ... The personnel to direct the expanding
revolution were trained by veteran cadres in special institutes in the
city, and all modern means of communication — newspapers, films,
magazines, radio — spread the message of communism to the citizens. To
ease the task of governing such a huge urban population, the CCP
leaders divided the city into 6 districts, which were subdivided in
turn into fifty-eight street governments, each with a population of around,
14,000 people. To cope with the large floating population in the
city — laborers, hawkers, porters, droshky drivers — registration
campaigns were conducted, bandits and destructive elements rounded
up ... and 17,000 citizens organized into “night watchmen self-defense
teams.” When these organizations still could not control crime, each
lane and alley was charged with forming its own patrols; as with the
old baojia
national security
system, any witness not reporting a crime would be treated as if he or
she were the perpetrator of that crime. Travel was controlled by a
rigidly supervised passport system. (SMC, 443-4)
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General Marshall
The Mediator’s View,
1947
| [I]n June 1946, George Marshall managed
to get the two sides to proclaim a cease-fire, this time in Manchuria,
and to push for reopening the war-damaged railway lines vital for
China’s economic health. (The CCP had cut some of the lines that were
still intact after the war, because the Nationalists were using them
for anti-Communist troop movements.) Even as the cease-fire was
theoretically in effect, Nationalist troops were massing for a second
assault on Manchuria, which commenced in July. The Communists, in the
meantime, refused to give up their base areas in north China,
reorganized their forces as the People’s Liberation Army, and shifted
the focus of land reform from rent reduction and redistribution to
outright confiscation and violent punishment of class enemies. (SMC,
437-8) |
The greatest obstacle to peace [in China]
has been the complete, almost overwhelming suspicion with which the Chinese
Communist Party and the Guomindang regard each
other.
On the one hand, the leaders of the
Government are strongly opposed to a communistic form of government. On the
other, the Communists frankly state that they are Marxists and intend to work
toward establishing a communistic form of government in China, though first
advancing through the medium of a democratic form of government of the American
or British type. ...
| I think the most important
factors involved in the recent breakdown of negotiations are these: On the side
of the National government, which is in effect the Guomindang, there is a
dominant group of reactionaries who have been opposed, in my opinion, to almost
every effort I have made to influence the formation of a genuine coalition
government. ... They were quite frank in publicly stating their belief that
cooperation by the Chinese Communist Party in the government was inconceivable
and that only a policy of force could definitely settle the issue. ... |
| On the side
of the Chinese Communist Party … it has appeared to me that there is a definite
liberal group among the Communist ideology in the immediate future. The
dyed-in-the-wool Communists do not hesitate at the most drastic measures to gain
their end … without any immediate regard for the suffering of the people involved.
They completely distrust the leaders of the Guomindang and appear convinced that
every Government proposal is designed to crush the Chinese Communist Party. I
must say that the quite evidently inspired mob actions of last February and
March … gave the Communists good excuse for such suspicions. ... |
The reactionaries in the Government have
evidently counted on substantial American support regardless of their
actions. The Communists by their unwillingness to compromise in the
national interest are evidently counting on an economic collapse to
bring about the fall of the Government, accelerated by extensive
guerrilla action against the long lines of rail communications — regardless of the cost of suffering to the Chinese people. The salvation of the situation, as I see it, would be the assumption of
leadership by the liberals in the Government and in the minority
parties. ... In fact, the National Assembly has adopted a democratic
constitution which in all major respects is in accordance with the
principles laid down by the all-party Political Consultative Conference
of last January. It is unfortunate that the Communists did not see fit
to participate in the Assembly since the constitution that has been
adopted seems to include every major point that they wanted. (DC,
347-50)
Does General Marshall provide an objective summary?
Who do you blame for the failure to form a democratic government:
the Nationalists, the Communists, or both?
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The Collapse of the Nationalist Economy
On the surface the most urgent aspect of the
crisis facing the Guomindang was the steady loss of territory in the
north to the Communists, and the attendant erosion of the morale of the
Nationalist armies. But equally important was the growth of inflation
in China, which wrecked all attempts of Chiang Kai-shek and his
advisers at reinstituting viable central control. ... The common
Guomindang response to money shortages was to print more bank notes,
which merely contributed to the inflationary spiral. Taking September
1945 as the base line, the table [on page 446] shows that wholesale
prices in Shanghai had increased fivefold by February 1946, elevenfold
by May, and thirtyfold by February 1947. ... In July 1948 Chiang Kai-shek
met with T. V. Soong and his other senior advisers to discuss a bold
plan to stem the chaotic financial slide. The decision was made to
switch to a new currency, abandoning the old fabi yuan and inaugurating a gold yuan, at a conversion rate of 3 million fabi
yuan to 1 new yuan. Several Guomindang advisers warned that the new
currency probably could not hold firm unless the government drastically
reduced its deficit spending, much of it the result of the huge
military expenses to which Chiang was still committed. ...
To
inspire confidence in the new notes, the government
undertook not to print more than 2 billion of them. Wage and price
increases were forbidden, along with strikes and demonstrations. And
any gold and silver bullion, along with any foreign currency, held
privately by Chinese citizens were to be turned in to the banks in
exchange for the new currency, thus boosting the government’s reserves
of specie and foreign exchange. Sales taxes on commodities were sharply
increased in order to raise more revenue. ... But despite ... the
strenuous attempts
at enforcement, the gold-yuan plan failed. ... When [the government]
imposed heavy new taxes on sales of certain consumer goods such as
tobacco, shopkeepers simply closed their doors until they won
permission to raise their prices by the same amount as the new taxes.
News also spread rapidly that the note-printing program was
accelerating, and promised soon to exceed the ceiling of 2 billion gold
yuan pledged by the government. By October 1948, with shops emptied of
goods, restaurants closing, and medical supplies unobtainable, the
failure of the reforms was clear. ... The vaunted gold yuan began to
follow in the steps of the old fabi currency. The Chinese republic had become, for all practical purposes, a barter economy. (SMC, 445-51) |
It
was in this context of a final loss of
confidence in the economy and the political policies of the Guomindang
that the Communists forged their conclusive military victory. ...
[They] now controlled much of the north China countryside. Peasant
guerrillas constantly disrupted Chiang’s supply lines, making relief of
his beleaguered forces slow and dangerous. By May 1948 the situation of
Chiang’s armies was becoming hopeless. Both Mukden and Changchun were
surrounded by Communist troops and could be supplied only by
Nationalist air-force planes. There were 200,000 well-trained
Nationalist troops in Mukden supported by artillery and tanks, but
their slow strangulation was assured if the airfields fell. Yet Chiang
Kai-shek consistently refused the proposals of the American military
advisers still with him that he pull those troops back south of the
Great Wall to invigorate his defenses in north China.; he had invested
too much of his waning prestige in the Manchurian campaign to back down
now.
... A
series of tactically brilliant campaigns conducted by Lin Biao in
Manchuria during September and October led to the fall of Mukden
and Changchun, and the destruction, surrender, or desertion of 400,000
of Chiang’s finest troops. Only 20,000 Nationalist troops escaped, evacuated by sea from south Manchuria. ... Zhu De,
commander in chief of all the Communist armies, decided to commit
600,000 troops to the seizure of the railway junction of Xuzhou,
opposing an equal number of Nationalist troops, who also had complete
air superiority. In a sixty-five-day battle toward the end of 1948, the
Communists showed a new mastery of massed artillery power and emerged
victorious by completely outmaneuvering Chiang’s generals. The
Nationalist commanders were plagued by the contradictory and
impractical orders personally issued by Chiang Kai-shek, and by the
massive desertion of their troops. In this complex and protracted
campaign, the extraordinary Communist effort at mobilizing upward of 2
million peasants in four provinces to provide logistical support was
directed by Deng Xiaoping, once the youngest of the work-study students in France, now a veteran party organizer of forty-five.
 In a third campaign,
overlapping with these two, Lin Biao invested and captured Tianjin for
the Communists in January 1949. Turning back west with the bulk of his
forces and holding an overwhelming tactical advantage, he persuaded the
Nationalist general commanding Peking to surrender. Communist troops
entered the old imperial capital on January 31. North China was
irrevocably lost to Chiang Kai-shek, who had resigned as president ten
days earlier. (SMC,
451-5)
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The conquest of so many large cities in north China confronted the CCP
with new administrative and economic problems ... [but the CCP used their
Harbin experience] to avoid the most serious administrative and
financial mistakes that had been committed by the Guomindang in their
return to east China in late 1945. The CCP insisted that the People’s
Liberation Army maintain strict discipline in the cities it occupied,
that ordinary Chinese businesses not be disrupted, and that urban
property not be redistributed to benefit the poor. Factories were
patrolled and machinery guarded to prevent looting. A new “people’s
currency” — the renminbi
— was
introduced, with only a short term allowed in which to exchange gold
yuan notes for the new ones. Thereafter trading in gold, silver, and
foreign currency was to be explicitly forbidden.
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The island of Taiwan, which had prospered
economically as a colony under Japanese rule since 1895, was reclaimed
by the Nationalist government late in 1945. In reasserting central
government power, Guomindang behaved in a “carpetbagging”
style similar to that followed in Shanghai and Manchuria. Often
inefficient or corrupt, they failed to build up public support and
managed to erode many of the more satisfactory aspects of Japanese
economic development. ...
When Taiwanese anger broke out into
antigovernment riots in February 1947, Nationalist troops fired into
the crowd, killing many demonstrators. Over the following weeks, in a
series of ruthless actions that recall Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai
tactics of 1927, Chen Yi attempted to break the spirit of the Taiwanese
by ordering the arrest and execution of thousands of Taiwan’s
prominent intellectuals and citizen leaders.
With the Taiwanese opposition broken, Chiang
recalled Chen Yi [the chief administrator of Taiwan province] and
replaced him with more moderate administrators, who slowly built up the
island as a viable base for future mass Chinese occupation. In the
months before the fall of Peking, furthermore, thousands of crates of
Qing-dynasty archives were shipped to Taiwan along with the finest
pieces of art from the former imperial-palace collections, in a clever
propagandistic move to make the Nationalists seem like the preservers
of the Chinese national heritage. A force of 300,000 troops loyal to
Chiang was based on the island by early 1949, backed by twenty-six
gunboats and some planes. The scene was set for Chiang’s retreat to
Taiwan, should he choose the option. (SMC, 456)
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PLA Proclamation
April 25, 1949
The Guomindang reactionaries have rejected the
terms for peace and persist in their stand of waging a criminal war against the
nation and the people. The people all over the country hope that the People’s
Liberation Army will speedily wipe out the Guomindang reactionaries. ... We hereby
proclaim the following eight-point covenant by which we, together with the whole
people shall abide.
1. Protect the lives and property of all the
people ... irrespective of class, belief or occupation. ... Counter-revolutionaries who
seize the opportunity to create disturbances, loot or sabotage shall be severely
dealt with.
2. Protect the industrial, commercial,
agricultural and livestock enterprises of the national bourgeoisie. All
privately owned factories, shops, banks, warehouses, vessels, wharves, farms,
livestock frames and other enterprises will without exception be protected
against any encroachment. ...
3. Confiscate
bureaucrat-capital. All factories, shops, banks, and warehouses, all vessels,
wharves and railways, all postal, telegraph, electric light, telephone and water
supply services, and all farms, livestock farms and other enterprises operated
by the reactionary Guomindang government and the big bureaucrats shall be taken
over by the People’s Government. In such enterprises the private shares held by
national capitalists ... shall be recognized, after their ownership is
verified. ...
4. Protect all public and private
schools, hospitals, cultural and educational institutions, athletic fields and
other public welfare establishments. ...
5. Except for
the incorrigible war criminals and counter-revolutionaries who have committed
the most heinous crimes, the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s
Government will not hold captive, arrest or subject to indignity any officials, whether high or low, in the Guomindang’s central, provincial, municipal and
county governments ... so long as they do not offer armed resistance or plot
sabotage.
... Punishment shall be meted out to those who seize the opportunity to
engage in sabotage, theft or embezzlement, or abscond with public
funds, assets or records, or refuse to give an accounting.
6. In order to ensure peace and security
in both cities and rural areas and to maintain public order, all stragglers and
disbanded soldiers are required to report and surrender to the People’s
Liberation Army or the People’s Government in their localities. No action will
be taken against those who voluntarily do so and hand over their
arms. ...
7. The feudal system of landownership in the
rural areas is irrational and should be abolished. To abolish it, however,
preparations must be made and the necessary steps taken. Generally speaking, the
reduction of rent and interest should come first and land distribution later;
only after the People’s Liberation Army has arrived at a place and worked there
for a considerable time will it be possible to speak of solving the land problem
in earnest. ...
8. Protect the lives and property of
foreign nationals. It is hoped that all foreign nations will follow their usual
pursuits and observe order. All foreign nationals must abide by the orders and
decrees of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Government ... and must not
engage in espionage, act against the cause of China’s national independence and
the people’s liberation, or harbour Chinese war criminals,
counter-revolutionaries or other law breakers. Otherwise, they shall be dealt
with according to law by the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s
Government.
The People’s Liberation Army
is highly disciplined; it is fair in buying and selling and is not allowed to
take even a needle or a piece of thread from the people. It is hoped that the
people throughout the country will live and work in peace and will not give
credence to rumors or raise false alarms. This proclamation is hereby issued in
all sincerity and earnestness.
Mao Zedong
Chairman of the
Chinese People’s
Revolutionary Military Commission | Zhu
De
Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese
People’s
Liberation Army (DC, 362-4) |
|
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Mao Zedong announcing the founding of the
People’s Republic of China
October 1, 1949
|
The Communists, still too weak to hold southern Manchurian cities
against the numerically powerful and well-armed Guomindang forces, made
their main urban base in Harbin ... [an] industrial and commercial city
of around 800,000 people. ... The personnel to direct the expanding
revolution were trained by veteran cadres in special institutes in the
city, and all modern means of communication — newspapers, films,
magazines, radio — spread the message of communism to the citizens. To
ease the task of governing such a huge urban population, the CCP
leaders divided the city into 6 districts, which were subdivided in
turn into fifty-eight street governments, each with a population of around,
14,000 people. To cope with the large floating population in the
city — laborers, hawkers, porters, droshky drivers — registration
campaigns were conducted, bandits and destructive elements rounded
up ... and 17,000 citizens organized into “night watchmen self-defense
teams.” When these organizations still could not control crime, each
lane and alley was charged with forming its own patrols; as with the
old baojia
national security
system, any witness not reporting a crime would be treated as if he or
she were the perpetrator of that crime. Travel was controlled by a
rigidly supervised passport system. (SMC, 443-4)
