61 Years of Red China: A Brief History of the Rise of Communism in China and its Devastating Consequences (Part Two)

" From the very beginning of the war, Chiang dedicated his Nationalist forces to a tenacious resistance against Japanese advances. At Shanghai, the Japanese and Nationalist forces met in the first major engagement of the war. While no Communist forces fought for Shanghai, over 600,000 Nationalist troops would be committed, including the bulk of the junior officers and the KMT’s best divisions."

by Eric Bailey

Associate Editor of Sri Lanka Guardian writes from Austin-Texas

(September 21, Texas, Sri Lanka Guardian) Despite winning – or surviving would perhaps be more accurate – dozens of battles against the KMT Nationalists under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, the Chinese Communists were facing catastrophic defeat in the Chinese Civil War by the mid 1930s. Like the Confederate defense of Richmond and Petersburg in the American Civil War 70 years earlier, the CPC had no effective means of countering the KMT’s strategy of encirclement and were slowly losing the war of attrition in Southern China.

One of many Communist groups during the Long March. Of the 100,000 that started in Mao's group, only these 30,000 would survive. Other groups would suffer even higher casualties.

By 1936, the Chinese Soviets in Southern China had all collapsed and the famous Long March retreat, which was actually a series of retreats as several different Communist forces were defeated, had relocated the surviving communist troops to North Western China. In some groups as few as 10% of those fighters who started the Long March actually survived long enough to reach their destination. Despite these stunning losses, the CPC was just over a decade away from taking control of all of Mainland China. This miraculous turnaround was not because of any particular brilliance on the part of the CPC leadership or a major shift in public opinion among the general population, but was due to the total transformation of the conflict that came from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Second Sino-Japanese War would be the largest war of the 20th Century in Asia and would eventually be incorporated into the Pacific Theater of World War Two. While both warring Chinese factions, it could be argued, took actions that were not necessarily in the best interests of the Chinese people, the new threat of an all-out Japanese invasion of China forced both sides to define what was ultimately more important: the defense of the nation against a foreign threat or the survival and supremacy of their political faction.

Chiang Kai-Shek being held in Xi'an

There is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the events just prior to the Japanese Invasion. Both the Communists and Nationalists have pushed propaganda that demonizes and seeks to place the blame for China’s vulnerable status on the other. Working through both sides’ propaganda can be confusing, but a prudent place to start is with the basic facts. The facts are that Japan and China had fought minor border skirmishes for years, but by 1936, both the KMT and the CPC were increasingly worried that a major conflict was on the horizon. On December 12, 1936 Chiang Kai-Shek was abducted by two warlord generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, who had been convinced by the CPC to try and force Chiang to join forces with the Communists against Japanese aggression. This abduction would become known as the Xi’an Incident.

Communist recollections of the 13 day event focus on the attempts made by the two warlords to convince Chiang to voluntarily join forces with the CPC and point out that Chiang was absolutely opposed to the idea, suggesting that he was more interested in fighting Communism than Japanese aggression. On the opposite side of the coin, the KMT perspective points out that Communist leaders, such as Mao and Zhu De, wanted Chiang executed immediately and were never really interested in the idea of an alliance as proposed by the warlords. The KMT also stresses that those in the CPC who opposed killing Chiang (believing that decapitating the leadership of the main political and military force in China would immensely strengthen the Japanese position and encourage an invasion) were marginalized by execution advocates over the course of the Incident. It wasn’t until Stalin himself used his influence with the CPC to demand Chiang’s release that the Generalissimo’s life was saved. It is abundantly clear that both Stalin and Mao saw the advantageous position Japan would be in if Chiang were killed, but it was only after Stalin used his clout as the sole supplier of arms and equipment to the CPC that Mao finally agreed to negotiate with the KMT. It is an ironic fact, then, that the most ardent anti-communist in Chinese History owed his life to Joseph Stalin. These events strongly suggest that the CPC leadership that came to power after the Long March, more so than any other faction in China, were willing to put the entire nation in jeopardy for the sake of defeating their domestic rival.

By the end of 1936, the CPC and KMT agreed to form an alliance, known as the Second United Front, against the Japanese, putting their civil war on hold. It is still unknown, though, why the warlords agreed to a risky abduction of Chiang in the first place. As the CPC membership of Zhang is actually an unknown factor (he was a well known Communist, but his status as a warlord ensured he never received any official recognition by the CPC), it is impossible to really say if the Xi’an Incident was an honest attempt by Zhang and Yang to protect China from a foreign threat or if this can be considered a CPC plot to save the movement from an imminent defeat. Whatever the case may be, the CPC clearly gained the most from the Incident. Chiang honored his commitments after being released and put The KMT’s operations against the Communists on hold. Mao was then able to secure his grip on power and rebuild his military forces. Mao’s submission to Stalin’s orders also helped ensure continued support from Russia, even during the war with Germany. As the United Front would prove to be anything but united, the real lasting legacy of the Xi’an Incident would prove to be the salvation of the CPC.

Chinese reinforcements run towards the Marco Polo Bridge where the first shots of the war can be heard for miles.

The new Chinese alliance did not have to wait long for Japan to make her move. The night of July 7, 1937 saw the start of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, a minor skirmish not unlike the many other “incidents” of the 1930s between Japan and China. Here, however, minor skirmishing gradually escalated and efforts to politically defuse the situation failed, resulting in a general Japanese invasion of Northern China. Coupled with the killing of a Japanese officer in Shanghai on August 9th, the war soon spread to Central China.

From the very beginning of the war, Chiang dedicated his Nationalist forces to a tenacious resistance against Japanese advances. At Shanghai, the Japanese and Nationalist forces met in the first major engagement of the war. While no Communist forces fought for Shanghai, over 600,000 Nationalist troops would be committed, including the bulk of the junior officers and the KMT’s best divisions. While the Nationalists at the start of the war had nearly two million soldiers on paper, the vast majority were poorly trained, poorly equipped, and had almost no armor or air power. Only around 300,000 Nationalist troops had any significant training, including roughly 80,000 elite, German trained, troops. However, even these troops had almost no tank power, minimal air support, and very few larger artillery pieces, while Japan was fully equipped for a large-scale conflict with hundreds of planes, tanks, and naval vessels committed to Shanghai alone. While the statistics of the Shanghai battle suggested that Chiang outnumbered the 300,000 Japanese aggressors by a factor of two to one, fewer than 100,000 Nationalist troops were truly ready for combat, even by the lowered standards with which China was forced to cope. Japan was easily in the superior position and this type of situation – where superior numbers of Chinese troops battled fewer, but better armed and trained Japanese troops – would remain typical for the rest of the war, resulting in incredibly high Nationalist casualties.

Nationalist troops defending a river bank during the Battle of Wuhan

Without a competitive supply of advanced weapons, Chiang realized that only foreign intervention could really stop the Japanese advance. China simply did not have the industrial capacity to compete with the Japanese war machine. To prove China’s willingness to fight to the rest of the world, as well as to buy time for the relocation of industrial equipment further inland, Chiang committed his best troops and officers to the defense of Shanghai for three brutal months. Even though only 10% of Shanghai’s industrial equipment was evacuated successfully, it would later form the base of China’s wartime industrial capabilities. Chiang’s primary goal of enlisting foreign support, however, appeared to be much less successful. KMT generals often complained that this political goal was supplanting military strategy as Chiang ordered units to fight on, even when their positions had become untenable, so that the symbol of Shanghai’s resistance would continue to shine. While Chiang’s tenacious resistance would pay dividends with the United States and Britain once the war merged into World War Two, for now the strategy appeared to be a failure and had cost the KMT dearly. Chiang lost over 10,000 Whampoa Academy junior officers, or roughly 40% of China’s entire officer Corps. The better trained and equipped Chinese troops available at the start of the war also suffered some 200,000 casualties. Losses were so heavy that the Nationalist forces were no longer in any position to effectively resist the Japanese drive on Nanking, resulting in the loss of the Republic’s capital by the end of January, 1938. The KMT would never fully recover from the losses of so many of their best officers and men.

As the war progressed, the Chinese resistance took two different approaches. Chiang and the Nationalist armies fought large battles in desperate campaigns to defend major cities, either to permanently hold them, or to buy time for the evacuation of people and supplies. As the Japanese advanced, Chinese militias and partisan cells also formed in the countryside to hamper Japanese efforts, creating both a conventional and guerilla war in China. While both Japan and China would have their share of victories and defeats over the next eight years, post-war China would be much more interested in the debate of who contributed most to China’s defense, the Communists or Nationalists, rather than the question of how Japan was ultimately defeated. Perhaps “debate” is in inaccurate term to use on this subject, as there has not been any serious academic controversy to solve. Rather, the question has been bombarded by propaganda and isolated by censorship for decades, making reasonable debate unusually difficult. As with the Xi’an Incident, when faced with a sea of propaganda it is best to return to the known basic facts.

Nationalist troops defending a machinegun nest during the Battle of Shanghai

The facts are that the war in China saw 22 major battles involving over 100,000 troops on each side and that Communist forces were completely absent from most of these. Those few battles that Communist troops did participate in were still primarily fought by Nationalist troops, by wide margins. The largest Communist led effort of the war, the Hundred Regiments Offensive, had significantly fewer casualties than major battles such as Shanghai or Wuhan, and was actually a three and a half month guerilla campaign that primarily targeted Chinese troops fighting with the Japanese and collaborating Chinese civilians, not a large scale battle against the main Japanese Army. Fewer than half of the “Japanese” casualties during this engagement were actually Japanese forces. The Communist leadership was also critical of the campaign because fighting openly revealed troop strengths to the KMT. A Communist leader, Zhou Enlai, even admitted in a secret report to Stalin in 1940, about halfway through the war, that Communist forces had only suffered 3% of the total Chinese military casualties since the war began.

It is the contention of the KMT that by providing the bulk of regular forces in the war, fighting all of the major battles with little or no Communist support, and absorbing the majority of Chinese military casualties, the Nationalists clearly deserve the bulk of the credit for the defense of China and that the Communists were much more interested in consolidating power and allowing their internal rival to exhaust itself against the Japanese. Conversely, the CPC argues that the KMT’s direct opposition was ineffective, while the Communist guerilla actions immobilized and demoralized Japanese forces and were an overall greater success during the war. Unfortunately, the CPC’s claims go much further than this reasonable subject for debate. The CPC also asserts that their partisans killed over 1.7 million Japanese soldiers – nearly the total number of Japanese fatalities suffered on all fronts of the Second World War. This is universally rejected by all credible sources. They further argue that after all the various partisans are considered, there were actually more Communists fighting than Nationalists, thus marginalizing the KMT’s contributions further. Aside from the fact that it is impossible for anyone, including the CPC to know how many partisans there were during the war, precisely because of their unorganized nature, the CPC also intentionally misleads people into believing that all, or even most, partisans were Communists by default. If anything, the opposite appears to be true. Most partisans were, by their nature, locally raised and were formed specifically to resist the arrival of Japanese troops. More often than not these were simply non-political members of occupied communities that rose up in response to the atrocities they witnessed Japanese soldiers committing. Many were actually veterans that had previously served local warlords. With these propaganda claims now eliminated, the CPC’s role in the war takes on a very different appearance.

In fact, there is ample evidence to show that the lack of Communist inspiration in partisan groups was a thorn in the side of the CPC and that thorn would eventually result in the collapse of the Second United Front. The guerilla war was supposedly the Communists’ to wage and they viewed other resistance groups as competitors. Just as the LTTE targeted and destroyed other Tamil groups in the Sri Lankan Civil War, so too did the Communists in China hunt down resistance groups that did not pledge themselves to Communism ahead of the nation, calling them collaborators to justify the attacks. In one instance in 1939, Communist forces attacked a brigade size militia force in Hebei Province and destroyed it completely because they were not Communists. This greatly reduced the guerrilla threat to Japanese forces in the area. Nationalist units soon began launching retaliatory attacks on Communist units and the two sides gradually returned to a status of low intensity war, much to the delight of the Japanese.

KMT soldiers pin down CPC fighters during the New Fourth Army Incident.

It cannot be denied that Chiang never wanted to form an alliance with the Communists to begin with, but once the alliance had been formed, he honored it and dedicated the entirety of his forces to defeating the Japanese. Communist forces under Mao and Zhu De, however, actively fought other Chinese resistance forces and spent more time killing rival Chinese than they spent fighting the Japanese Army. While the Nationalists initially only retaliated with minor, tit-for-tat skirmishes, Chiang would eventually conclude that the CPC’s actions could not be ignored. KMT forces began blockading CPC controlled zones to limit Communist recruitment, which deepened hostile attitudes and resulted in a further escalation of violence. In 1941, following a series of harassing raids against Nationalist forces by the CPC’s New Fourth Army, the two factions began to fight in larger engagements, to the initial success of the Communist force. In response, the Nationalists launched a major assault on the Communists, largely destroying the New Fourth Army and killing over 7,000 men. After this action, the Second United Front came to an end, though major fighting between the Communists and Nationalists would not resume until after the Japanese surrender.

On the eve of the Japanese invasion, the question posed to each side was whether the defense of China or the supremacy of their faction was more important. Would the KMT and the CPC really put aside their rivalry to save their nation, or would they risk China’s destruction to satisfy their own political ambitions? From the very first day of fighting the KMT proved its commitment to defeating Japan and suffered devastating casualties over the next eight years. Conversely, the CPC dedicated only 30% of its forces to resisting the Japanese, while the great majority of Communist manpower was dedicated towards gaining influence and eliminating competition in Free China. Only two engagements of any significance were led by the CPC during the entire war and both were opposed by the senior CPC leadership. On the whole, it seems quite plausible that the CPC did more to help the Japanese invaders than to hinder them. Mao and his Communist followers proved beyond any doubt that they were willing to risk the total destruction of the country in the name of their own political ambition, while the KMT was willing to take the opposite risk. Despite Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945, the Nationalists were so badly weakened from eight years of fighting without any truly significant Communist support, that the CPC found themselves enjoying most of the advantages the KMT had held only eight years before. While full-scale civil war would drag on until 1949, Chiang and his exhausted army would be unable to effectively counter the forces that Mao had been building up for so many years. Just like the CPC in the Encirclement Campaigns of the previous decade, the KMT found itself unable to replace its losses and eventually was forced to retreat – this time to Taiwan. The consequences of the Japanese unwittingly passing power into the hands of Mao’s Communists would be catastrophic, both for the Chinese people, and for nearly all her neighbors, creating a worse scourge in Asia than even the Imperial Japanese conquests.

( Eric Bailey can be reached at eb@srilankaguardian.org and his blog americandecembrist.wordpress.com )