by Jung Chang
In the aftermath of the N4A Incident, Moscow organized an immense publicity campaign against Chiang in the West. Communist propaganda claimed that up to 10,000 were massacred. In fact, the total casualty figure was around 2,000. Three thousand had managed to escape back to their own side by turning around and taking the North Route across the Yangtze, the one designated by Chiang. They were unmolested along the way.
Chiang had not set a trap, but he presented his case poorly. His government unwisely announced the disbanding of the N4A, leaving the impression that the Nationalists had intentionally wiped it out. Chiang was also hampered by the fact that he had not protested publicly about the many earlier and much larger clashes in which his troops had been the victims, and had even suppressed news of them, on the grounds that civil strife was bad for domestic morale — and for international aid (which all the foreign powers had made conditional on there being no civil conflict). This silence on the Generalissimo’s part had suited the Communists very well. As Red C-in-C Zhu De put it: “They [Nationalists] keep quiet, and we keep quiet, too. They are defeated and keep quiet; we win, so why should we publicise it?” As a result of all these factors, many in the West only knew about the N4A Incident, and saw it as a treacherous large-scale attack by the Nationalists on innocent Reds.
The Communist propaganda machine was effective. In Chongqing, Mao’s disinformation symphony was conducted by Chou En-lai, who alone knew Mao’s murderous role in the killing of their own men and women in the N4A. This accomplice of Mao’s was extremely successful in spreading the lie, thanks to his charm. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who met him at this time, told us she would have followed Chou to the ends of the world had he beckoned. But the summing up by her husband, Ernest Hemingway, catches Chou’s main attribute: “he does a fine job of selling the Communist standpoint on anything that comes up.”
In America, on 22 January the New York Herald-Tribune carried a report highly favorable to the Reds’ version of events by Edgar Snow, which opened with the words: “The first reliable account of the recent clashes …” Yet Snow’s account was based entirely on a CCP intelligence man in Hong Kong.
While the Communists’ version traveled all over the world, other observations were sidetracked by friends that Moscow and the CCP had in America. Hemingway, who was in China just after the N4A Incident, made some sharp observations about the Reds: “… as good Communists they will attempt to expand their sphere of influence … no matter what territorial limits they may accept on paper.” Thanks to the Reds’ “excellent publicity,” he wrote, “America has an exaggerated idea of the part they have played in the war against Japan. Their part has been very considerable but that of the Central Government troops has been a hundred times greater.”
“Communists,” Hemingway noted, “in my experience in Spain, always try to give the impression that they are the only ones who really fight.”
Given Hemingway’s name, his assessment might have made a considerable impact on public opinion, but it did not see the light of day until 1965. He was dissuaded from publishing his views in 1941 by a Roosevelt aide called Lauchlin Currie, who told him “our policy was to discourage civil war.”
Currie, chief White House economic adviser, visited China right after the N4A Incident. US intercepts of Soviet intelligence traffic (Venona) name Currie as helping the Russians, and some consider that he was a Soviet agent. A judicious recent study of Roosevelt and intelligence describes Currie as “a manipulable sympathizer,” concluding that he was not a spy, but a “friend” of the Russians in the White House. On this trip to China, he certainly did the Reds sterling service. In Chongqing, he told Chiang that he had brought a verbal message from Roosevelt (as well as a written one). Currie opened the verbal message with this sentence: “It appears at ten thousand miles away that the Chinese Communists are what in our country we would call socialists. We like their attitude towards the peasants, towards women and towards Japan.”
In his report to Roosevelt, Currie mainly spoke ill of Chiang, and painted an extremely rosy picture of the Reds. He claimed that “the Communists have been the only party which has been able to attract mass support,” suggesting that this was the reason they had expanded. Currie gave Roosevelt the Communists’ version of the N4A crisis.
International pressure on Chiang was so strong that on 29 January he told his ambassador in Moscow to ask the Kremlin to intervene to help resolve the crisis with the Reds, effectively asking the Russians to dictate terms. Three days later, a jubilant Mao told his army chiefs: “No matter how hard Chiang Kai-shek tries to rebel, he can try this and that, but in the end will only get himself toppled.” Mao was using the word “rebel” as if Chiang were the outlaw and he himself already on the throne. Chiang acceded to Russian demands to let Mao’s men hang on to their territorial gains and stay in the heartland of China near Nanjing and Shanghai.
Mao had been quick to see how helpful Western journalists like Snow could be to his cause, but slow to appreciate how useful the British and American governments could be in tying Chiang’s hands. His hostility to both states had been extreme. On 25 October 1940 he had told his top brass how he hoped Britain could be occupied by the Nazis, and the Japanese would continue to occupy China: “the most difficult, most dangerous and darkest scenario,” he said, was Chiang “joining the AngloUS bloc”:
We must envisage this: that the Japanese are unable to take Singapore … which will be taken by the US navy; London does not fall … Japan surrenders to America; Japanese army leaves China; America finances and arms the pro-Anglo-American Chinese … It can’t be darker than this.
This scenario was to Mao worse than Japanese occupation. But all of a sudden there was a spectacular change in his attitude. On 6 November he wrote to Chou En-lai: “I have this morning just read the important intelligence in your cable of the 3rd. So Chiang joining the AngloUS bloc is only to our advantage … Let us oppose this no more … We must forge more links with Britain and America …”
Chou En-lai had clearly enlightened Mao about how useful the West could be to him. From now on, Chou devoted more energy to cultivating Westerners, particularly Americans. And his charm offensive intensified after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and America’s presence in China greatly increased.
ON 13 APRIL 1941 Russia signed a Neutrality Pact with Japan, which freed large numbers of Japanese troops to attack Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. But it did not include a carve-up of China between Russia and Japan. Mao did not get his Poland scenario.
We know that Mao suppressed this cable because he told Chou En-lai, his liaison with Chiang, on 13 January, nine days and many deaths later: “I have sent you the cable of the 4th from … Xiang to Chiang. Its wording is inappropriate, so if you haven’t passed it on, please don’t.” The fact that Mao felt he still had time to withdraw the cable indicates he had only just recently sent it to Chou.
Chou told the Russians that radio links between N4A HQ and Yenan had been broken from the afternoon of the 13th—different from the dates Mao gave: 6th-9th. Clearly, Mao’s dates would have been bound to arouse suspicion in the Russians.
Another thing Currie did which was to Mao’s great advantage was to thwart Chiang’s attempt to establish a sympathetic channel to Roosevelt. Chiang requested Currie to ask Roosevelt to send him a political adviser who had access to the president. Chiang named his own choice, William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, whom Chiang knew personally, and knew to be anti-Communist. Currie rejected Chiang’s request outright, off his own bat, and there is no sign he even told Roosevelt that Chiang wanted Bullitt. When Currie got back to America, he recommended an academic, Owen Lattimore, who had not even met Roosevelt, much less had the sort of access to the President that Chiang had specified. The upshot was that Currie had a tight grip on communications between Chiang and Roosevelt.
23. BUILDING A POWER BASE THROUGH TERROR (1941–45 AGE 47–51)
ON 22 JUNE 1941 Ger
many invaded the Soviet Union. This event radically altered Mao’s calculus. Soviet Russia was his sponsor and his hope; a seriously weakened — or diverted — Russia was unlikely to offer much help. Mao could not sleep for days.
To start with, there was absolutely no chance now that Russia would step in and bail him out if fighting with Chiang’s troops turned perilous. Mao immediately halted attacks. “Stop any assaults on all Nationalist units,” he ordered his armies.
Self-preservation dominated his relationship with newly weakened Russia. As a result of the German invasion, Moscow wanted the CCP to commit to engage militarily with Japanese troops if Japan should attack the Soviet Union. Stalin’s nightmare was a giant pincer assault by Japan from the east coordinated with Hitler’s attack from the west. How many Japanese troops could the CCP “divert” if that happened? Moscow asked Mao. To encourage Mao to act, Dimitrov cabled on 7 July that he was sending US$1 million in installments. Two days later, the Comintern told the CCP to draw up “concrete steps.”
Most of Mao’s colleagues thought they should take some action if Tokyo invaded the Soviet Union. The normally circumspect Liu Shao-chi wrote to Mao that if Japan attacked Russia, the CCP must launch offensives to tie up Japanese forces. Mao, however, was determined not to risk troops under any circumstances. On 18 July he told Liu that if Japan attacked Russia (which Mao had said on 2 July was “extremely likely”): “It is not a good idea … to undertake large-scale action … our armies are weak. Action will inevitably do irreparable damage.” His approach was to let the Russians do the fighting: “Everything depends on victory by the Soviet Union.”
Mao spelled this out to Peng De-huai, the acting commander of the 8th Route Army. Any coordination with the Russians was to be purely “strategic [i.e., in name only] and long-term — not in battles.” To his troops Mao repeatedly cautioned: “Do not excessively upset the [Japanese] enemy.”
To Moscow, Mao protested that his forces were too weak to be counted on: “our human and material resources [are diminishing], regions of operation [are contracting], ammunition is running out — and the situation is becoming more difficult by the day.” If his army acted, Mao argued, “there is a possibility that we will be defeated and will not be able to defend our partisan bases for long … Such an action will not be good for either of us …” He told Moscow not to expect much: “if Japan attacks the Soviet Union, our abilities in terms of coordinating military operations will not be great.”
Mao virtually admitted that his army had not been fighting the Japanese and would not start now. Only recently he had been telling Moscow he had a huge army, with 329,899 men in the 8RA alone; now he was saying his troops could hardly fire a shot.
Stalin personally cabled Mao several times asking him to keep the Japanese occupied, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow in late 1941 and just before the battle of Stalingrad, in July 1942—in vain. Mao’s refusal to help infuriated Moscow, and he further riled his patrons by advising them to retreat to the Urals and fight a guerrilla war. Some Russians claim that Mao’s behavior was also motivated by lack of confidence in the Soviet Union, and even (according to General Chuikov) by the desire to exploit Hitler’s attack to supplant Russia. Word got around that Mao said: “Stalin cannot beat Hitler” and “24-year-old socialism cannot compete with eight-year-old fascism.”
Years later, Molotov was asked: “We knew [what Mao was doing to us] and we still helped Mao?” To which Molotov mumbled: “Right. Yes, yes. I know that is hard for you to understand. But you must not look at things in such a stark way.” “We looked like fools, but, in my opinion, we were not fools.”
Indeed, even though they were at odds, Stalin and Mao understood each other perfectly. Their relationship was based on brutal self-interest and mutual use, and they shared the same long-term goals. However much Mao’s actions displeased the Kremlin, Stalin never for one moment ceased doing business with him.
WITH NO FIGHTING against either the Japanese or the Nationalists, and with Russia in trouble and in no position to intervene, Mao seized the opportunity to go to work on his Party and mold it into an unquestioning machine in preparation for the forthcoming all-out civil war against Chiang Kai-shek.
By late 1941, Party membership had grown to some 700,000. Over 90 percent of these were people who had joined up since the start of the war against Japan, and many were young enthusiasts who had come to the Communist bases from Nationalist areas. These young volunteers were vital to Mao because they were relatively well educated, and he needed competent administrators to staff his future regime. Most of the Long Marchers and rural recruits from within the Communist bases were illiterate peasants. It was the young volunteers who were Mao’s target.
These volunteers had almost all joined up in the late 1930s as the mood among the younger middle class swung significantly to the left. This was a time when Red Russia was China’s main — and virtually only — ally and supplier of arms against Japan. Goodwill towards Russia rubbed off on the CCP. Many thought the Chinese Communists were truly dedicated to fighting Japan.
There was also widespread disenchantment with the Nationalists, who were seen as incapable of eradicating China’s widespread poverty and injustice. The CCP’s atrocities before the Long March were either unknown or forgotten, or dismissed as Nationalist propaganda. Some also believed the Party when it proclaimed that it had changed, and abandoned its old policies. And for awhile the Communists’ behavior seemed to confirm that this change was real. Many foreigners, and even some missionaries, accepted Red claims. The mole Shao Li-tzu, the Nationalists’ media overlord during the crucial period 1937–38, did much to erase the Party’s bloody past and project a benign image of the Reds. So too did Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. Mao assiduously peddled the line that the Communists had been slandered. The CCP “has always been pretty,” he told a group of new arrivals in Yenan; “it is just that it was painted badly …”
A large number of the young volunteers congregated in Yenan, Mao’s capital. By the time Mao started his drive to condition them, some 40,000 had come there. Most were people in their late teens and early twenties who had joined the Party in the Nationalist areas, and then been sent on to Yenan.
They were tremendously excited when they first reached what had been portrayed as a revolutionary Mecca. One young volunteer described his feelings when he arrived: “At last we saw the heights of Yenan city. We were so excited we wept. We cheered from our truck … We started to sing the ‘Internationale,’ and Russia’s Motherland March.”
The new arrivals, he wrote, “really envied the stinking and dirty worn-out padded uniforms [of the veterans]. They found everything fresh, exciting and mysterious.”
The newcomers were mostly enrolled in various “schools” and “institutes” to be trained — and indoctrinated. But most very soon became disillusioned. The biggest letdown was that equality, the core of their idealism, was not only completely absent, but manifestly rejected by the regime. Inequality and privilege were ubiquitous. Every organization had three different levels of kitchen. The lowliest got roughly half the amount of meat and cooking oil allotted to middle-rankers, while the elite got much more. The very top leaders received special nutritious foods.
Likewise with clothes. The locally produced cotton was rough and uncomfortable, so softer cotton was imported for senior cadres. Mao, outwardly, dressed the same as the rest, but his underwear was made of fine material, as a servant who washed and mended for the Maos told us. The maid did not qualify for any underwear or socks at all, and kept getting colds as a result. Items like tobacco, candles and writing paper were similarly allocated by rank.
Children of the topmost leaders were sent to Russia, or had nannies of their own. Wives of senior cadres could expect to give birth in a hospital, and then have a personal nurse for a while. Officials on the next rungs down could send their children to an elite nursery. The relatively small number of ordinary Communists who were married either tended not to have child
ren, or had to struggle if they did.
Spartan conditions and poor food led to many illnesses, but only high officials had access to scarce medicines, which were imported specially from Nationalist areas. Mao had a personal doctor from America, George Hatem, as well as Russian doctors. When he needed something — or somebody (like a physiotherapist) — he asked Moscow, or Chou En-lai in Chongqing. Senior cadres were given special hospital treatment, and no one could get into a hospital without authorization from their work unit. Food was graded in hospitals, too.
At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War there was a Red Cross team in Yenan, which had been sent by the Nationalists. It treated local residents as well as average Communists. But the regime set about driving it away. Rumors were put about that its medicines were poisonous, and that it had been “sent by the Nationalists to murder our comrades! And to poison our drinking water, to spread germs!” Most of the team soon left. The rest were forcibly kept behind, mainly to minister to the Red elite.
The ultimate symbol of privilege in Yenan was highly visible — the only car, in fact an ambulance, which was a present from Chinese laundry workers in New York for carrying war wounded. But it never transported one injured soldier. Mao “privatised” it. It transported his guests as well, including Edgar Snow in 1939. Snow was blasé about it: “So this was Mao’s extravagance that had shocked my missionary friend,” he wrote, asserting that it was one of “a number of these laundrymen’s gifts [which] had accumulated in Yenan, where sometimes they were used to carry civilian air-raid victims to near-by hospitals.” In fact, it was the only car, and never carried any civilian wounded — and was known, appropriately, as “Chairman Mao’s car.” Even people near the top thought Mme Sun Yat-sen had given the car to Mao “for his personal use.”
