The war with Japan and the second united front

From Marco Polo Bridge to Nanjing

Having seized Manchuria in 1931, Japan encroached on north China by forcing “autonomy” on it through 1935, and on the night of 7 July 1937 escalated a minor clash at Marco Polo Bridge outside Beiping into full war. In his Lushan statement of 17 July Chiang declared “the last critical juncture”, and in August he threw his German-trained divisions into Shanghai, holding for three months at a cost of more than 200,000 men. Source 1 · Source 2

The capital Nanjing fell on 13 December and for weeks Japanese troops massacred prisoners and civilians; estimates of the dead range from China’s official 300,000 to Western scholarly figures of tens of thousands up to 200,000. The Nationalist government moved via Wuhan to Chongqing in Sichuan in October 1938; Japan held the coast, the railways and the big cities, but in the vast countryside it controlled only “points and lines”. Source 3 · Source 4

The terms of the front: the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies

The negotiations that followed the Xi’an Incident were hurriedly concluded when war broke out. In August 1937 the 46,000 Red Army troops in northern Shaanxi became three divisions of the Eighth Route Army (Zhu De, Peng Dehuai) of the National Revolutionary Army, the southern guerrillas became the New Fourth Army (Ye Ting, Xiang Ying), and the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region became a “special region” under the national government. On 22 September the Communists declared they would fight for the Three Principles of the People, and Chiang endorsed the declaration. Source 5 · Source 6

The two parties entered the front with different calculations. For Chiang it was a device to bind the Communists inside the national army; for Mao, an opportunity to move behind enemy lines under the principle of “independence and initiative”. Lin Biao’s ambush of a Japanese supply column at Pingxingguan in September 1937 was loudly publicised, but Mao ordered the army to avoid large regular battles and concentrate on guerrilla war and base-building. Wang Ming, returning from Moscow at the end of 1937, urged “everything through the united front” and cooperation with the Kuomintang, and this difference of line soon became an inner-party struggle. Source 7 · Source 8

Chongqing’s war: attrition and inflation

After Wuhan fell in October 1938 the front stalemated. The Nationalist army won at Taierzhuang in 1938 but was worn down by the loss of its best troops, of its tax base in north and east China, and by the bombing of Chongqing. The government financed the war by printing money and prices rose more than two thousandfold between 1937 and 1945; conscription and requisition bred peasant resentment and official corruption spread. Source 9 · Source 4

With the Pacific War in December 1941 China became one of the Allies, and American aid and General Stilwell arrived, but Chiang’s conflict with Stilwell ended in the general’s recall in 1944. Japan’s Ichi-Go offensive that year routed the Nationalist armies from Henan to Guangxi and exposed the government’s weakness. The same year the US Army’s Dixie Mission took up residence at Yan’an and sent favourable reports on Communist discipline and morale, and Washington tried to broker a coalition of the two parties. Source 10 · Source 11

Bases behind enemy lines

The Eighth Route Army built bases in the north China countryside Japan had swept through — Jin-Cha-Ji (Nie Rongzhen), Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu (Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping), Shandong. Base governments did not confiscate landlord land but reduced rents and interest, and ran united-front administrations under the “three-thirds system” dividing office among Communists, leftists and centrists. This moderate policy was the laboratory of New Democracy, drawing in landlords and middle peasants in the name of resistance. Source 12 · Source 13

From August to December 1940 the Hundred Regiments Offensive under Peng Dehuai struck railways and mines across north China with more than a hundred regiments and inflicted heavy losses on Japan. But it exposed the Eighth Route Army’s strength, and Japan retaliated with the “kill all, burn all, loot all” mopping-up campaigns; in 1941–1942 the population and troops of the bases fell sharply. Mao later criticised the offensive as a mistaken resort to large-scale regular warfare, and it became one of the charges against Peng in 1959. Source 14 · Source 15

The New Fourth Army incident: the end of the front in substance

As the New Fourth Army expanded on the lower Yangtze, the Kuomintang ordered it north of the river in October 1940. In January 1941 its headquarters column of nine thousand, on the move, was surrounded by 80,000 Nationalist troops at Jing County in southern Anhui; most were killed or captured, the commander Ye Ting was arrested and his deputy Xiang Ying killed. Chiang cancelled the army’s designation for “mutiny”. Source 16 · Source 17)

The Communists rebuilt the New Fourth Army with Chen Yi as acting commander and gained the upper hand in the propaganda war. Thereafter the two parties blockaded each other while keeping the name of “cooperation”: the Kuomintang ringed the Shaan-Gan-Ning region with 400,000 troops and Yan’an survived through the “self-reliance” production drive. After the Soviet–Japanese neutrality pact of April 1941 Soviet support for Yan’an was slight, and the party grew on its own resources. Source 16 · Source 5

Yan’an: rectification and Mao Zedong Thought

In February 1942 Mao opened the rectification movement with “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” and “Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing”. The targets were the “dogmatism” of Wang Ming and the returned students and the “subjectivism” of intellectuals; the methods were study of assigned texts, self-criticism and screening. When Wang Shiwei’s “Wild Lilies” criticised the graded privileges at Yan’an he was branded a Trotskyist, and in May the “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” laid down that art must serve workers, peasants and soldiers. Source 18 · Source 19

In 1943 Kang Sheng’s “rescue campaign” branded thousands of young people from the Nationalist areas as agents and forced confessions; Mao admitted the excesses the next year. The “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party” of April 1945 rewrote party history as the vindication of Mao’s line, and the Seventh Congress of April–June, through Liu Shaoqi’s report, wrote “Mao Zedong Thought” into the constitution as the party’s guiding ideology. Mao became chairman, and the leadership formed at Yan’an — Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Ren Bishi — ruled for the next thirty years. Source 20 · Source 21

The balance sheet of 1945

Japan surrendered in August 1945 after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombs. By then the Communists had 1.2 million members, 910,000 regular troops with two million militia, and nineteen liberated areas of about a hundred million people; against the 40,000 troops of 1937, the war had made them a national party. The Kuomintang still held the government, the cities and American recognition, but its army was exhausted and its finances broken. Source 4 · Source 22

The interpretation of the war remains disputed. The Communists say they were the “mainstay” of resistance; the Kuomintang and many historians reply that Nationalist armies fought most of the large battles. What is certain is that China lost between fourteen and twenty million people, and that the war exhausted the Nationalist state while giving the Communists a school of peasant mobilisation. This asymmetry was the starting condition of the civil war of 1946. Source 4 · Source 23