by Philip Short
The communists, leaders and soldiers alike, received the news rapturously. At a mass rally that evening, Mao, Zhu De and Zhou Enlai demanded that he be brought before the masses and put on trial. ‘[It was] an occasion to stand up and cheer,’ Zhang Guotao wrote later. ‘It seemed that all of our problems could be resolved at the drop of a hat.’113
At a Politburo meeting on Sunday morning, Zhang Guotao and others in the leadership called for the overthrow of the nationalist government and for the captive Generalissimo to be executed. Not only had he instigated an atrocious civil war and collaborated treasonably with Japan in a shameful policy of appeasement, they said, but only days earlier he had rejected communist offers of an accommodation, preferring continued ‘bandit suppression’ to national resistance. Mao was more prudent, or perhaps more devious. Chiang, he declared, had shown himself to be objectively pro-Japanese. His arrest had ‘revolutionary significance’ and the Party should support it. However, the communists should not take the lead in opposing him. The proper course was to bring Chiang before ‘the judgement of the people’ so that his crimes might be publicly exposed – a formulation which Zhang Guotao would later claim was designed to encourage the Young Marshal to dispose of ‘the prime culprit’, as Mao called Chiang, while keeping the Party's hands clean.114 At the same time, strenuous efforts should be made to gain backing from the left-wing and centrist factions of the Nanjing government for a national anti-Japanese united front, while guarding against moves by right-wing GMD leaders to put down the Xian mutiny by force.
The Party's position was conveyed to Zhang Xueliang in a series of telegrams that weekend, in which Mao and Zhou Enlai stressed the Red Army's solidarity with the Young Marshal's actions and their determination to make the north-west the main base for a future anti-Japanese war.115
Almost at once, however, the CCP's scheme began to unravel.
Zhang had made clear from the start that his aim was not to punish Chiang Kai-shek, but, as he put it in a ‘Telegram to the Nation’, addressed to the Nanjing government on the morning of the coup, to make him ‘remedy past mistakes’.
Ever since the loss of the north-eastern provinces, five years ago, our national sovereignty has been steadily weakened and our territory has dwindled day by day. We suffered national humiliation [again] and again … There is not a single citizen who does not feel sick at heart because of this … Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, surrounded by a group of unworthy advisers, has forfeited the support of the masses of our people. He is deeply guilty for the harm his policies have done the country. We, Zhang Xueliang, and the others undersigned, advised him with tears to take another way. But we were repeatedly rejected and rebuked. Not long ago the students in Xian were demonstrating [for the] National Salvation movement, and General Chiang set the police to killing these patriotic children. How could anyone with a human conscience bear to do this? … Therefore we have tendered our last advice to Marshal Chiang, while guaranteeing his safety, in order to stimulate his awakening.116
This implied that once the Generalissimo had accepted the mutineers’ demands, which echoed those the communists had been making – namely that the government should be enlarged to include representatives of all patriotic parties; the civil war should end; political freedoms should be restored; and future policy should be based on ‘national salvation’ (i.e. resistance against Japan) – he should continue as China's leader.
In Nanjing, meanwhile, his detention had triggered a fierce struggle between his supporters, led by his redoubtable wife, Soong May-ling, who urged a peaceful resolution, and a loose alliance of right-wing and pro-Japanese leaders, headed by the War Minister, He Yingqin, who wanted bombing raids against Xian and a full-scale punitive expedition, not necessarily to rescue Chiang but rather, if he succumbed during the conflict, to put a more reliably pro-Japanese leader in his place. Soong May-ling narrowly prevailed, but it was clear that if peace efforts stalled a military offensive would follow.
Thus, by the time Zhou Enlai reached Xian four days later, on Thursday, December 17, after a wearisome journey on horseback from Bao'an, followed by a lengthy wait at Yan'an while Zhang sent a plane to fetch him, the situation had already changed. The balance of forces in Nanjing was turning out to be less favourable than the CCP leaders had hoped. The idea of putting Chiang on trial, as Mao had urged earlier, was beginning to look much less attractive.117
At this point Stalin intervened – in such a casual, chauvinistic manner, so contemptuous of Chinese communist interests, that Mao was left speechless with rage.118
Far from being a ‘revolutionary event’, the Soviet leader held, Zhang's mutiny was ‘another Japanese plot … [whose] purpose is to obstruct the unification of China and sabotage the rising anti-Japanese movement.’ This, on the face of it, was asinine. Mao dismissed it at a Politburo meeting the following day as being no less absurd than Japan's claim that Chiang's arrest was a Soviet plot, and in subsequent statements he insisted that the Xian Incident had been extremely positive and had ‘caused the Guomindang to put an end to ten years of erroneous policies … [It] marks the transition between two eras and the beginning of a new stage.’ However, Stalin had his reasons. As Comintern's Secretary-General, Georgi Dimitrov, explained in a telegram shortly afterwards, Zhang's action was ‘objectively detrimental’ to anti-Japanese solidarity because it torpedoed Stalin's hopes of an anti-Japanese front being formed in China under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. In November, unknown to Mao, the Russians had made a fresh attempt to enrol the nationalist government as an ally, to counter the anti-Comintern Pact that had just been established by Japan and Germany, and secret talks were under way in Moscow on a Sino-Soviet security treaty. Chiang's arrest put all that in doubt. To Stalin, nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the overriding national interests of the world's leading socialist power. That the Chinese Party might see things differently was not his concern.119
Friction between Moscow and the CCP leadership was hardly new. But in the Party's early years, the question of blame had been obscured. Who could say for certain if Moscow had been at fault, or if successive Chinese leaders had misinterpreted Moscow's line?
Stalin's ukase of December 1936 was different. For the first time since Mao had become the leading figure in the Politburo, Moscow had issued a direct order, telling him what to do. It was all the more galling because he had already accepted by December 16 that, given Zhang Xueliang's stance and developments in Nanjing, there was no choice but to seek a peaceful outcome.120 The previous July, in an interview with Edgar Snow, he had bridled at the suggestion that Red China might become merely an extension of the Soviet Union. The Comintern did not ‘dictate’ to member parties, he said, and China was not ruled by Russia: ‘We are certainly not fighting for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow!’121 Now, barely five months later, that was exactly what had happened. The lesson – that Soviet ‘internationalism’ was a one-way street and China would have to get used to it – would not be forgotten.
By then, however, events had developed a momentum of their own. The Generalissimo himself had come round to the idea of mediation.122 Soong May-ling arrived on the 22nd and, with her brother, T. V. Soong, held talks with Zhang and Zhou Enlai. As suddenly as it had begun, it was all over. On Christmas Day, Chiang flew back to Nanjing. The Young Marshal, to show loyalty, went with him.123 Although the principle of his release had been agreed, Zhou was not forewarned, and when Mao learned of it he had mixed feelings. ‘There are advantages to releasing Chiang,’ he noted, ‘but whether [they] have been realised is a matter that remains to be confirmed’.124
What had happened behind the closed doors of the Generalissimo's captivity? Both more and less than met the eye.
In his public statements afterwards, Chiang maintained he had steadfastly refused to enter into political negotiations and had signed nothing. Technically this was true. Zhou Enlai told Mao that the negotiations had been with the Soongs, and that only after agreement
had been reached on Zhang Xueliang's main demands had the Generalissimo agreed to meet him and given him a verbal undertaking that he would abide by what had been decided.125 Mao's judgement was that Chiang remained ‘ambiguous and evasive’, and that there was no way of knowing whether he would honour an accord which he now denied ever making, and which, even if he had, was obtained under duress.126
The first signs were uniformly bad. The Young Marshal, the sacrificial lamb whose bold gesture had made the agreement possible, was court martialled, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, amnestied, and then placed under house arrest (from which he would not be freed until his ninetieth birthday, more than fifty years later, on Taiwan). Far from pulling back, as Chiang had promised, the nationalists sent up reinforcements. In Nanjing, pressure resumed for a punitive expedition. Zhang's troops began building defensive fortifications, and in January 1937, Mao told the Red Army it must ‘firmly prepare for war’.127 Once again, the Comintern intervened. After condemning ‘the erroneous nature of your Party's previous orientation, which [aimed at] eliminating Chiang Kai-shek and overthrowing the Nanjing government’, Moscow demanded that Mao ‘openly proclaim and resolutely carry out’ a policy of enhanced cooperation with the Guomindang.128 Mao appears to have ignored these messages but they cannot have pleased him.
Two months later, the crisis had passed. Chiang and Zhou Enlai resumed contact, at first indirectly, then face-to-face.129 Mao knew as well as Stalin that if the whole Chinese nation were to be mobilised against Japan, it would have to be at least nominally under Chiang's leadership, although he differed over the extent of the concessions the communists should make in order to bring that about. But the hoped-for united front proved as elusive as before. All through the spring and early summer, the two sides argued over issues ranging from the number of divisions the Red Army should have to the kind of badge they should wear on their caps.130
Later, communists and nationalists alike would claim that the Xian incident was a turning-point, a pivotal moment which changed the course of Chinese history. Mao was closer to the truth when he told the Politburo, shortly after Chiang's release, that if a truce with the nationalists came about, it would not be because the Generalissimo had given his word but ‘because the situation would leave him no choice’. The events at Xian were a vital catalyst. But they were not the deciding factor.131 That came on July 7, when Japanese troops occupied a key railway junction by the Marco Polo Bridge at Lugouqiao, five miles south-west of Beijing. The Pacific War had begun.
Even then the Generalissimo hesitated. Mao, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and other commanders ‘respectfully implored’ him to decree nationwide mobilisation and authorise communist forces to move towards the front. But a week after the Japanese attack, he was still unwilling to do so.132 In a telegram to the CCP Military Commission, Mao urged caution:
Don't let Chiang get the feeling he's being pushed into a corner. [Our] duty now is to encourage him to take the final step of setting up the united front – and there may still be problems over this. We have reached the moment of truth, which will decide whether our country will live or die. This is the crucial time when Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang must change their policy totally. Everything we do must accord with this general line.133
The day after Mao signed that telegram, July 15, 1937, Zhou Enlai went to Lushan, the hill resort where the Generalissimo was staying near Nanchang, for their third meeting that year. He handed over a draft declaration, reiterating earlier communist undertakings and pledging the Party's support for the democratic revolution launched by the GMD's founder, Sun Yat-sen. In return, he said, the CCP had only two substantive demands: war against Japan; and ‘democracy’, a code-word for the legalisation of communist activities.134
Still Chiang dragged his feet.
On July 28, Mao issued an ultimatum: The Red Army, with Zhu De as Commander-in-Chief and Peng Dehuai as his deputy, would begin moving towards the front on August 20, whether the Guomindang agreed or not.135
Next day, Japanese troops occupied Beijing, followed on the 30th by Tianjin. Ten more days passed. Then, on August 13, they attacked Shanghai, directly threatening Chiang's own power base. The choice could be put off no longer. ‘Go and tell Zhou Enlai’, he instructed one of his aides, ‘[the communists] should send their troops at once. They need not wait any more.’ Soon afterwards it was announced that the Red Army had been redesignated the Eighth Route Army of the (GMD) National Revolutionary Army.136
Finally, on September 23, the Guomindang published the declaration which Zhou had submitted two months before, and the Generalissimo himself announced that, in the national interest, the united front was being revived.137
Chiang's reluctance to cut a deal was understandable. For ten years, he had succeeded in keeping the communists in the wilderness, on the margins of Chinese political life. Now they were back on centre stage, a legal party with a national constituency, a national platform, and a recognised national role. For Mao, the highroad to power was open. As he told a bemused Kakuei Tanaka, Japan's Prime Minister several decades later, it had been opened by the Japanese.
I For a discussion of the claims of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that the battle never occurred, see the afterword of this book, Mao: Western Judgements.
II In October 1934, to escape nationalist encirclement, Ren Bishi abandoned the base area he had set up in eastern Hunan and marched west to join He Long in the Hubei–Hunan–Sichuan–Guizhou border region. The following year they began their own Long March, which led them further into the Tibetan borderlands than Mao's route, allowing them to reach Shaanxi with far fewer casualties than the First Army. Of the three forces which eventually reached the north-west, He's forces took the longest route. Zhang Guotao's Fourth Army, which was already in northern Sichuan in 1935, took the shortest.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Yan'an Interlude: The Philosopher is King
Shortly after Chiang Kai-shek's release from Xian, the Red Army moved its headquarters from the impoverished cave-village of Bao'an to more accommodating, and slightly more sophisticated, surroundings, sixty miles further east.1
The old walled town of Yan'an which Zhou Enlai had visited secretly the previous year for his first, clandestine meeting with the Young Marshal, stands on the bend of a shallow rock-strewn river, below an ancient white pagoda, built on a promontory as a talisman against the autumn floods.2 Since Song times, it had been an important local trading centre, where camel caravans came from Mongolia with ponies, wool and furs. Woodcutters brought muleloads of sawn timber and whole tree-trunks on high-wheeled oxcarts. Salt was smuggled in from the cities to the south. Beside the Bell Tower, a herbalist sold powdered lion's teeth, dried snakes and other homely remedies. During fairs and market days, the dusty streets were clogged with a shouting, brawling throng of humanity, clad in blue homespun with white kerchiefs round their heads, which fascinated the young soldiers fresh from the parched, bare hill country to the west – and provided a welcome change, too, for the Party leaders and their wives, who on high days and holidays would stroll through the town, savouring the noise and colour.
Mao and He Zizhen, who had still not recovered from the shrapnel wounds she had suffered during the Long March, moved into a wealthy merchant's house in the western part of the walled city, on the lower slopes of Fenghuangshan, Phoenix Mountain. Zhang Wentian, as acting Party leader, occupied the central courtyard, which included a large stone-flagged reception hall where Politburo meetings were held. Zhu De and Peng Dehuai had quarters in another smaller courtyard nearby, where the Office of the Military Commission was housed. For them all, it was a big step up from Bao'an. Mao had a sitting room, where he received visitors, as well as a spacious study, with latticed paper windows, and a large, round wooden bath. Yet creature comforts had their limits. The only heating in the bleak northern winter was from a charcoal brazier and the fire under the kang; water had to be brought from the well; and Mao's papers, the very stuff of his political existence, were file
d away in makeshift cabinets fashioned out of Standard Oil drums.3
Over the next decade Yan'an's pagoda, its tiered landscape, its massive crenellated walls and twelfth-century gate, became a symbol of hope, a beacon for progressive-minded young Chinese and Western sympathisers alike. Yet, as one sober-minded traveller, who visited the CCP leaders there in the summer of 1937, noted prosaically, it was in reality, then as now, a ‘rather ordinary Chinese town in a Shaanxi backwater’.4 The aura of romance it exuded, ‘of gallant youth, courage and high thinking’, came from the extraordinary collection of people who gathered there.5
Michael Lindsay, an aristocratic Englishman whose father was the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, spent part of the war in Yan'an training Red Army radio operators. He would remember it as ‘the heroic age of Chinese communism’. The journalist, Gunther Stein, extolled ‘the steady fighting enthusiasm of a primitive pioneer community … They seem to feel, whether we believe it or not, that the future is theirs.’ Thomas Bisson, an American academic, found an egalitarian commitment, ‘a special quality of life’.6 Only the occasional sceptic sensed a darker side – the uniformity of thought; the regimentation; the young bodyguards, armed with Mausers, who hovered, unnoticed, around the top leaders like so many invisible shadows.7
