by Philip Short
The same year that van de Ven's book appeared, Jonathan Fenby published Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (The Free Press, 2003), the first full-length biography of Chiang for almost thirty years and arguably the first ever to attempt a balanced judgement of his rule before 1949. While more critical than van de Ven, whose main focus was on military affairs, Fenby, too, rejected the wholly negative appraisal common to most earlier writers. Chiang, he wrote was ‘a reactionary authoritarian who set no great store by the lives of his compatriots, … a bad administrator … [who] tolerated corruption and amorality … [and] whose short-term battles with the Americans ended up by losing him the one ally who mattered.’ None the less, he had succeeded in unifying China, ‘even if that unity became the platform for his greatest adversary’; in the 1930s he had laid the foundations for modern industry, finance and communications; and he had managed to hold together a fragile coalition against the Japanese which, without him, might have sundered altogether.20
In 2009, the balance shifted still further with the publication of Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard University Press). Taylor offered a carefully nuanced appreciation of Chiang's rule. His leadership after the Japanese defeat was ‘a disaster’ and on occasion he sanctioned ‘extreme actions that amounted to staggering moral blindness or turpitude’. On the other hand he was ‘a modernising neo-Confucian’ whose goal was to make China ‘a harmonious, stable and prosperous society’. Few scholars today dispute that. As Fenby put it, the stigma of the nationalists’ defeat masked the regime's genuine successes. Taylor's conclusions, however, went further. Whether consciously or not, he wrote, Chiang ‘set the stage for Taiwan's development of a vigorous democracy’; in the final analysis, ‘it is [his] vision of modern China, not Mao's, that guides the People's Republic in the 21st century’.21 The reader will search in vain for passages in his book which support such assertions. None the less, Taylor's interpretation of Chiang as a would-be democrat has taken hold. A 2014 article by Robert Kaplan in the American journal, Foreign Policy, insisted: ‘Mao Won the Battle, Chiang Kai-shek Won the War’.22
Ironically, support for the Generalissimo's rehabilitation has come from mainland China and opposition to it from Taiwan. With reunification in mind, Beijing today spins Chiang as an essentially honourable figure misled by bad advisers, ‘a nationalist and a patriot,’ in the words of one Chinese historian, ‘[who] never wavered in his determination to resist the Japanese.’23 The Chinese Party, which for decades viewed the 1949 revolution as a complete rupture with the past, now emphasises continuity. Mao's regime is depicted as having built on the reforms of the nationalists who in turn built on the reforms of the late Qing.24 In Taiwan, by contrast, where the wounds left by Chiang's repressive rule are still fresh and reunification is unpopular, his memory is played down.
The new narrative depicting Chiang Kai-shek as a progressive figure whose defeat was undeserved has been embraced not only by writers like Jung Chang and Jon Halliday but by several mainstream professional historians. Ramon Myers of the Hoover Institution has argued that had Marshall and Truman put America's full weight behind Chiang Kai-shek, instead of imposing a ceasefire in Manchuria in June 1946, the nationalists would have wiped out Lin Biao's forces and gone on to win the whole of China. Arthur Waldron concurs. Yet contemporary intelligence assessments and much of the historical evidence which has emerged since suggest otherwise. In the words of Harold Tanner, a leading scholar of the period: ‘Even if the United States had been willing to do so, extending unlimited military aid to an army that was pursuing a fundamentally flawed strategy and a government that was proving incapable of winning the political struggle is not likely to have changed failure into success’.25 As it was, Truman's policy had the merit of keeping Americans out of a foreign civil war of a kind which subsequent events (in countries such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan) have shown they are not especially good at winning.
The wheel has gone full circle. Sixty years on, the ‘Who lost China?’ debate is back. Senator McCarthy must be smiling in his grave.
Frank Dikötter, whose writings on Mao and the Chinese revolution have likewise had great influence in the past decade, espouses both theses of the revisionist paradigm: Chiang was a decent leader, unfairly maligned; Mao and the tyranny he installed were fundamentally rotten.
From the outset Dikötter nails his colours to the mast. The first of his books (in historical sequence) is entitled China before Mao: The Age of Openness; the second, The Tragedy of Liberation; and the third, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. The last in the series, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976, appeared in 2016. Dikötter's theme is that China under Chiang Kai-shek enjoyed ‘a golden age of engagement with the world’;26 that Chiang's defeat by Mao's forces was the result of American betrayal, massive Soviet aid to the communists and only to a marginal degree the venality of his regime; and that the communist system which followed consisted solely of ‘calculated terror and systematic violence’. The first decade of Mao's rule, he writes, was ‘one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the twentieth century, sending to an early grave at least 5 million citizens and bringing misery to countless more’. The second decade, with the Great Leap Forward famine and the onset of the Cultural Revolution, was exponentially worse, culminating in a blood bath when Mao, ‘an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life’, as Dikötter puts it, plunged China into an inferno.
Dikötter avoids the pitfalls into which the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story plunge, but shares their ideas. The Tragedy of Liberation opens with a graphic account of the five-month long siege of Changchun by Lin Biao's forces in 1948, in which, Dikötter estimates, 160,000 civilians died. It was one of ghastliest incidents of the civil war, vividly described by Zhang Zhenglong, a PLA lieutenant-colonel, in Xuebai xiehong [White Snow, Red Blood] (Jiefangjun chubanshe, Beijing, 1989), one of a number of books questioning the official history of the conflict which were published in China during a brief period of openness in the late 1980s. As the siege unfolded, Lin Biao refused to allow the starving population to leave the city in order to put pressure on the besieged nationalists’ grain supplies; Chiang Kai-shek refused to allow the garrison to surrender and abandoned it to its fate. Civil wars are the most abominable of conflicts for, almost by definition, they erase the distinction between civilians and soldiers. The suffering of Changchun was instrumental in persuading Beijing and other cities to surrender without resistance. Did the lives saved there justify the horrors that befell its martyred population? Similar questions are often asked about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden and of Tokyo during the Second World War, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did they help bring the war to an earlier conclusion? Or were they unnecessary? There is no agreement. Likewise who was most responsible for the death toll in Changchun? The nationalist generals who starved the civilian population to death in order to feed their own troops? Chiang, who forbade surrender? Or the communists, who refused to allow the civilians to escape? One might think that all sides bore a measure of responsibility.
Dikötter does not address such issues, nor does he provide context. Warfare had been raging in China since the 1920s. In the 1930s Chiang Kai-shek had caused the deaths of more than half a million civilians – three times the number killed at Changchun – and condemned millions more to starvation by deliberately breaching the dykes on the Yellow River. During the war with Japan, as many as 20 million Chinese civilians may have died, either from Japanese carpet bombing or from the ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’ policy aimed at depriving communist guerrillas of support in the countryside.27 The atrocity of Changchun was not simply, or even principally, an example of Mao's ruthlessness and indifference to human life. It was one horror among many in a chain of bloodshed which had begun a century before with the Opium Wars – waged by the Western powers to force open a marketplace which un
til then had closed its doors to foreign trade – or, if one wishes to take a longer view, with the civil and dynastic wars and rebellions which have punctuated all of Chinese history.
Dikötter's work is valuable primarily for his use of formerly closed provincial archives.28 These contain fascinating accounts of how local officials reacted to central directives, and also, in many cases, copies of the original directives themselves – documents which, in the Central Archives in Beijing, are still under seal. However, the extracts he quotes are usually very brief and parts of The Tragedy of Liberation and Mao's Great Famine require extremely careful reading, often to the point of parsing each sentence, in order to be sure of the sense. Most of the documents describe excesses by local officials which the Party subsequently investigated and condemned, but this is not always made clear. In The Tragedy of Liberation, for instance, he quotes a report by Deng Xiaoping on land reform in western Anhui, where the local leadership killed an ever lengthening list of landlords and their relatives whom the peasants had denounced. Only in the last sentence does it emerge – between the lines – that Deng was denouncing, not approving, the indiscriminate killing.29
There are also puzzling lapses. Describing the quotas Mao laid down during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in the early 1950s, Dikötter quotes Mao as saying that ‘once a death rate of two per thousand had been achieved, people should be sentenced to life imprisonment’. The Chinese historian, Yang Kuisong, cites the same document as saying: ‘One per thousand can be surpassed but not by too much. In general, two per thousand should not be adopted as a new target. Many of these criminals can be sentenced to lifetime imprisonment [emphasis added].’30
It may be argued that these are quibbles; factual errors occur in the best of books.31 However, Dikötter's errors are strangely consistent. They all serve to strengthen his case against Mao and his fellow leaders.32
Mao's Great Famine ranks second only to Chang and Halliday's work in shaping popular perceptions of Mao and his regime. It describes in unflinching detail the horrors of mass starvation, the cruelty of the local officials who terrorised the peasants, the iron controls imposed to contain news of the catastrophe, and the disarray of a leadership which, from Mao, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai down, was utterly unprepared to deal with, when not actually in denial of, the suffering it had unleashed. Dikötter's portrait of the institutionalised ghastliness of those years is exemplary. As in his earlier books, citations are generally very brief, though that has since been partly remedied by the publication of The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962 (Yale University Press, 2012), by his principal collaborator, Zhou Xun, which provides lengthy extracts of a number of the documents he refers to.
The main problem of Mao's Great Famine is that it offers no credible explanation of why Mao and his colleagues acted as they did. Why did they believe that mass mobilisation would usher in an age of plenty? For believe it they did: Mao was convinced that so much grain would be produced that everyone would eat their fill and the country would still have a huge surplus.33 When the first reports of famine emerged, why were they not taken seriously? Why did Zhou Enlai, even after its extent became clear, do nothing to alleviate it?
To dismiss the Chinese leaders’ policies as ‘ravings … [and] visionary whims’ does not take us very far.34 Dikötter argues that they ‘glorified violence’, showed ‘a callous disregard for human life’ and adopted a logic of war, ‘regardless of the casualty figures’.35 Some of that is undoubtedly true. But the one specific example that he offers points to a rather different picture. Li Xiannian, the hard-bitten Politburo veteran whose troops had been decimated by Moslem cavalrymen at the end of the Long March, broke down and wept when taken to a district in Henan where more than a million people had died of hunger. ‘The defeat of the Western Route Army was so cruel yet I did not shed a tear,’ he cried, ‘but after seeing such horror in Guangshan even I am unable to control myself.’36
Dikötter rejects what he calls ‘the widespread view that these deaths were the unintended consequence of half-baked and poorly executed economic programmes’.37 Yet most of the archival documents he cites show precisely that.38 ‘In effect, the countryside was quarantined, as if peopled by lepers’, he writes. ‘Information was distorted all the way up to the Chairman.’39 Contemporary sources confirm both those statements. When word did get out, investigation teams were sent in by the Party centre, and eventually – although much too late – the policy was changed.
Mao's Great Famine places the blame for the tragedy squarely on a communist regime of which ‘terror and violence were the foundations’.40 But the horrors which it records, and the tortures inflicted by officials, may all be found in nineteenth-century accounts by Western missionaries, in Chinese treatises on punishment under the Empire, and in reports on the republican period. Theodore White wrote of the Henan famine of 1941–3, in which an estimated three million peasants died – roughly the same figure as perished in that province during the Great Leap Forward – that when he visited the area, local Guomindang officials offered him a banquet of ‘chicken, beef, water chestnut and three cakes with sugar frosting’. But travelling through the countryside,
The peasants as we saw them were dying. They were dying in the roads, in the mountains, by the railroad stations, in their mud huts, in the fields. And as they died, the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … No excuses were allowed; peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax collector's office.41
When a Chongqing newspaper published news of the Henan famine, the only response Chiang Kai-shek's government could think of was to close it down for three days. By the time the Japanese launched the Ichigō offensive two years later, the people of Henan had come to hate Chiang Kai-shek's regime so fiercely that they attacked the Guomindang army – which was supposed to be defending them against the foreign invader – stealing the soldiers’ weapons and grain and killing their officers. Such experiences help to explain why hundreds of millions of Chinese welcomed what Dikötter calls the ‘Tragedy of Liberation’. Compared with what had gone before, communist rule did not seem so bad. The Chinese writer, Liu Zhenyun, whose novel about the wartime famine in Henan was made into a film starring Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins, recalled asking his grandmother, who had been among the survivors, what she remembered of that time. The old lady brushed the question aside. ‘What's so special about that year?’ she asked. ‘People died of starvation all the time.’42 So much for the ‘golden age’ when Chiang Kai-shek ruled China before the communists took power.
The cadres who meted out barbaric punishments during the Great Leap Forward invented very little. Like necrophagy and cannibalism and the selling of women and children, such practices had always existed. That they continued in the 1950s and 1960s was an appalling indictment of Mao's regime, but it is sheer foolishness to pretend that the communists created them.*
Dikötter's Mao was a ruthless despot pretending to be a ‘benign leader concerned about the welfare of his subjects’ while ‘China descended into hell’.43 The smoking gun, in his account, is a comment made by the Chairman at a meeting of top leaders in Shanghai on March 25, 1959. Mao, he writes, having been assured that grain production had ‘increased hugely’ over the previous year, urged his colleagues to procure a third of this bountiful harvest, not 25 per cent as had been the case previously.44 He then went on to say: ‘When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’ Dikötter takes the phrase literally to mean that Mao was ready to let half the population of China starve to death to ensure that the Great Leap could be carried through to the end.45
Even without a complete transcript of what was said, there are good reasons to doubt that. If all the leaders were convinced there would be a bumper harvest, why would Mao or anyone else anticipate widespread famine? Secondly, the partial text published by Zhou
Xun shows that Mao's comment was made not in a speech about farming, as Dikötter implies, but as a brief interjection during a discussion about industry.46 She quotes him as saying that industrial investment should be targeted and precise because ‘to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward’, before going on to draw a parallel with letting ‘half of the people die’ so that others might survive in a time of famine. Mao's mind often worked laterally. The logical explanation for what otherwise would be a complete non sequitur is that he was reaching out for a metaphor from the earlier discussion about the grain harvest to make the point that some industrial projects would have to be starved of funds so that others could proceed. We now know that was indeed his meaning. The full Chinese text, which has since become available, shows that Mao prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘If we want to fulfil the plan, then we need greatly to reduce the number of projects. We need to be resolute in further cutting the 1,078 major projects down to 500’.47 Curiously that sentence is omitted from both Dikötter's and Zhou Xun's accounts. On closer examination, Dikötter's claim that Mao ordered a massive increase in grain procurement also turns out to be unfounded.48 Every other recorded statement Mao made that winter and early spring focussed on the importance of easing the pressure on the peasants and avoiding unnecessary suffering. The previous November he had warned in strikingly similar terms that ‘half of China's population unquestionably would die’ if mass mobilisation were not reined in. He had ended his remarks on that occasion with the words: ‘Make it a principle to have no deaths’.49
