by Jung Chang
While Marshall was still in Yenan, Mao summoned the GRU liaison, Dr. Orlov, and briefed him on the talks.
MARSHALL WAS to perform a monumental service to Mao. When Mao had his back to the wall in what could be called his Dunkirk in late spring 1946, Marshall put heavy — and decisive — pressure on Chiang to stop pursuing the Communists into northern Manchuria, saying that the US would not help him if he pushed further, and threatening to stop ferrying Nationalist troops to Manchuria. On 31 May, Marshall wrote to Chiang, invoking his personal honor:
Under the circumstances of the continued advance of the Government troops in Manchuria, I must … repeat that … a point is being reached where the integrity of my position is open to serious question. Therefore I request you again to immediately issue an order terminating advances, attacks or pursuits by Government troops …
Chiang gave in and agreed to a fifteen-day ceasefire. This came at the very moment when Mao had become resigned to abandoning the last big Red-held city in Manchuria, Harbin, and dispersing his army into guerrilla units. In fact, he had issued the order on 3 June but on the 5th, when he learned about the ceasefire, he dashed off a new order: “Hang on … especially keep Harbin.” The tide had turned.
Marshall’s diktat was probably the single most important decision affecting the outcome of the civil war. The Reds who experienced that period, from Lin Biao to army veterans, concurred in private that this truce was a fatal mistake on Chiang’s part. Had he pressed on, then at the very least he might have prevented the Reds establishing a large and secure base on the Soviet border, with rail links with Russia, over which huge amounts of heavy artillery were brought in. Furthermore, having agreed to a truce of two weeks, Chiang then found Marshall proposing that it be extended to nearly four months and cover the whole of Manchuria — and that the Communists be allowed to keep northern Manchuria. For Chiang to press on would have meant a head-on collision with Marshall, who, Chiang noted, “was in an exceptionally violent fury” in this period.
The Generalissimo found pressure bearing down on him not only from Marshall, but from President Truman himself. In mid-July, two prominent anti-Nationalist intellectuals were gunned down in the Nationalist area. That month, a public opinion poll in the US showed that only 13 percent favored aiding Chiang, while 50 percent wanted to “Stay Out.” On 10 August, Truman wrote to Chiang using very tough language, citing the two assassinations and saying that the American people “view with violent repugnance” events in China. Truman threatened that he might have to “redefine” America’s position if there was no progress “toward a peaceful settlement.”
Under these circumstances, Chiang held his fire in Manchuria (although he pursued Mao’s forces elsewhere, with some success). One of Chiang’s closest colleagues, Chen Li-fu, disagreed with his restraint. “Be like Franco of Spain,” he told Chiang; “if you want to fight communism, fight it to the end.” A “stop-go” approach would not work, he told Chiang: “No good to fire and cease fire, cease fire and fire …” But Chiang needed American aid, which came to some US$3 billion for the whole civil war (almost $1.6 billion in outright grants, and about $850 million in de facto gifts of arms), and bowed to American pressure.
Mao thus gained a secure base in northern Manchuria some 1,000 km by 500 km, an area far bigger than Germany, with long land borders and railway links with Russia and its satellites. To his top brass, Mao compared this base to a comfortable armchair, with Russia as a solid back to lean on, and North Korea and Outer Mongolia on each side on which to rest his arms.
WITH FOUR MONTHS’ RESPITE, the Reds had the time to integrate the nearly 200,000-strong Manchukuo puppet army and the other new recruits, and to retrain and recondition the old troops. Any soldier the Communists could not control was “cleansed” (qing-xi), which often meant killed. Classified figures reveal that for the Red Army in this theater, the total for those “cleansed,” together with those who “escaped,” came to a staggering 150,000 in three years, almost as many as the total killed in action, assumed captured and invalided out (172,400).
Motivating the troops to fight Chiang was a key part of the reconditioning. This was mainly done through rallies at which soldiers were pushed to “speak bitterness.” Most had been poor peasants, and had histories of hunger and injustice. Bitter memories were stirred up, bringing out personal traumas. The crowds became febrile. A report to Mao said that one soldier had burst out at a rally with such a storm of grief and anger that “he passed out. And when he came to, he never recovered sanity and is now an idiot.” When the rallies reached their emotional climax, the Party would tell the inflamed crowds that they were now fighting to “take revenge on Chiang Kai-shek,” whose regime was the source of all their woes. The soldiers thus found personal motivation to fight. People who went through the process testify to its effectiveness, even though they find this hard to believe when they reflect in a calmer state of mind.
Many, however, declined to be psyched up, and some made skeptical remarks. They quickly found themselves condemned as members of “the exploiting classes,” and joined the ranks of those destined for “cleansing.”
The military training was as intensive as the political reorientation. Here, the Russians were indispensable. When the first Chinese Red units arrived in Manchuria, the Russians had taken some of them for bandits. They did not look like regular troops, and could not handle modern weapons. During the truce, the Russians opened at least sixteen major military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Many Chinese officers went to Russia for training, and others to the Russian enclaves of Port Arthur and Dalian. These two ports that Stalin had acquired at Yalta now also served as sanctuaries for Mao’s shattered units and cadres in southern Manchuria; here they were given refuge, trained and rearmed.
Moscow’s arming of Mao accelerated. The Russians transferred some 900 Japanese aircraft, 700 tanks, more than 3,700 artillery pieces, mortars and grenade-launchers, nearly 12,000 machine-guns, plus the sizeable Sungari River flotilla, as well as numerous armored cars and anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of thousands of rifles. More than 2,000 wagonloads of arms and war matériel came by rail from North Korea, which had housed major Japanese arsenals, and more captured Japanese weapons arrived from Outer Mongolia. Russian-made arms were also shipped in, plus captured German weapons with the markings chiseled out, which the Reds then pretended were captured American arms.
In addition, the Russians secretly transferred tens of thousands of Japanese POWs to the CCP. These troops played a major role in turning the ragtag Communist army into a formidable battle machine, and were crucial in training Red forces to use the Japanese arms on which they chiefly depended, as well as for servicing and repairing these weapons. It was Japanese, too, who founded the CCP air force, with Japanese pilots serving as flight instructors. Thousands of well-trained Japanese medical staff brought the Red wounded a new level of professional and much-welcomed treatment. Some Japanese troops even took part in combat operations.
Another vital factor was Soviet-occupied North Korea. From there the Russians supplied not only arms but also a Japanese-and Russian-trained contingent of 200,000 hardened Korean regulars. In addition, with its 800-km border with Manchuria, North Korea became what the CCP called “our clandestine rear” and bolthole. In June 1946, when they were on the run, the Chinese Reds moved troops, wounded and matériel there. As the Nationalists took much of central Manchuria, splitting the Red forces in two, the Communists were able to use North Korea as a link between their forces in north and south Manchuria, and between Manchuria and the east coast of China, particularly the vital province of Shandong. To supervise this vast transportation complex, the CCP set up offices in Pyongyang and four Korean ports.
By no means the least of the Russians’ contributions was to get the railway system running. Once the northern Manchuria base was consolidated, in late 1946, a team of Russian experts restored the extensive railway network in Mao’s territory and had it li
nked with Russia by spring 1947. In June 1948, when Mao’s army was preparing for its final push to take all Manchuria, Stalin sent his former railways minister, Ivan Kovalev, to oversee the work. Altogether, the Russians supervised the repair of more than 10,000 km of track and 120 major bridges. This railway system was critical in allowing the Communists to move vast numbers of troops, and heavy artillery, at speed, to attack the main cities that autumn.
The gigantic assistance from Russia, North Korea and Mongolia was carried out in the greatest secrecy — and is still little known today. The Reds went to great lengths to conceal it. Mao told Lin Biao to delete mention of the fact that their base “was supported by Korea, the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia” even from a secret inner-Party document. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.”
This Russian help, however, came at a grievous price for those living under Mao’s rule. Mao did not want to be beholden to Stalin for this aid, and he wanted to feel free to ask for more. Twice, in August and October 1946, he offered to pay for it with food, an offer Russia’s trade representative in Harbin at first declined. So in November Mao sent one of his most dependable acolytes, Liu Ya-lou, to Moscow to insist. A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year.
The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. In the Yenan region, according to Mao’s logistics manager, over 10,000 peasants died of starvation in 1947. Mao knew the situation very well, as he was traveling in the region that year, and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient. In the neighboring Red base in Shanxi, his guard chief told him after a visit home that people were starving, and that his own family was lucky to be alive — and this was soon after harvest time. In Manchuria itself, civilian deaths from starvation were in the hundreds of thousands in 1948, and even Communist troops were often half-starved.
Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.” Here was a foretaste of the future Great Famine, which was likewise Mao’s creation: again the result of his decision to export food to Russia.
AT THE TIME of the Marshall-dictated ceasefire, in June 1946, Chiang was militarily still far superior to Mao. The Nationalist army stood at 4.3 million, easily outnumbering Mao’s 1.27 million. For a while, the Generalissimo seemed to prevail. While he left the Reds in peace in Manchuria, he drove them out of most of their strongholds in China proper, including the only important city they still held, Zhangjiakou, in October. Farther south, the Reds were swept virtually completely out of the Yangtze area. In all theaters, Mao repeated his failed Manchuria approach, and urged his generals to seize big cities at any cost. His plan for eastern China on 22 June, for instance, called for closing in on Nanjing, where Chiang had just reinstalled his capital. Though Mao called this a “no-risk” undertaking, it had to be abandoned, like his other plans.
In spite of these substantial losses, Mao remained totally confident — because he had the north Manchuria base. When Chiang did begin to attack it, in October 1946, after the ceasefire had given the Reds more than four months to consolidate, he was unable to break their defenses. In that winter of 1946–47, the coldest in many people’s memory, the Nationalists found themselves fighting hard see-saw battles with the transformed Communist forces under Lin Biao, whose military talent came into its own in these harsh months. Mao summed up Lin’s style appreciatively as “merciless and devious.” One method of Lin’s was to make use of the cold weather. In temperatures as low as –40 °C, when passing water could cause frostbite on the penis, his troops lay in ambush in ice and snow for days on end. Red veterans estimated their own dead and crippled from frostbite at up to 100,000. The Nationalists suffered much less because they had better clothes — and less ruthless commanders.
By spring 1947, the Reds’ north Manchuria base had become unshakable. Marshall had left China in January, marking the end of US mediation efforts. The US later gave considerable aid to Chiang, but it made no difference. The goal the Communists had been secretly seeking for more than two decades, “linking up with the Soviet Union,” had been accomplished — with help from Washington, however unwitting. Mao’s victory nationwide was only a matter of time.
The Moscow — Mao double act deceived many into suggesting for decades that Mao could have been won over by the US, and that the US had lost the chance to detach Mao from the Soviet camp. In fact, in secret, Mao always told his Party that the friendliness towards America “is only a tactic of expedience in our struggle against Chiang.”
Washington’s savvy ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, had been concerned about Marshall’s appointment precisely because he felt Marshall was not sufficiently aware of the “Russian danger.”
Lin was also told: “say we struggle for political, economic and military democracy … Do not put forward the slogan of class struggle.”
29. MOLES, BETRAYALS AND POOR LEADERSHIP DOOM CHIANG (1945–49 AGE 51–55)
BY EARLY 1947, when the Nationalists had failed to crack Mao’s vast base on the borders with Russia, Chiang knew he was in trouble. Many in the country knew, too. He badly needed a victory to boost morale. He came up with the idea of taking Yenan, Mao’s capital. Its capture would have “the greatest significance,” he wrote in his diary on 1 March. On that day, he gave this vital task to a man who enjoyed his unconditional trust. General Hu Tsung-nan was the guardian of his younger (and adopted) son, Weigo, and had stood proxy for Chiang at Weigo’s wedding.
Our investigations have convinced us that General Hu was a Red “sleeper.” He started his career at the Nationalists’ Whampoa Military Academy in 1924, which Moscow founded, bankrolled and staffed, at a time when Sun Yat-sen was trying to use Russian sponsorship to conquer China. Chiang Kai-shek was the head of the Academy, and Chou En-lai the director of its pivotal Political Department. Many secret Communist agents were planted there, and went on to become officers in the Nationalist military.
At Whampoa, Hu Tsung-nan was strongly suspected of being a secret Communist, but he had well-placed friends who vouched for him. He then struck up a friendship with Chiang’s intelligence chief, Tai Li, who match-made his marriage. The two became so close that Tai ordered his subordinates in Hu’s units to send copies of all their intelligence reports to Hu as well as to himself, the result of which was that none of them dared report any suspicions about Hu.
In 1947, Chiang assigned him to take Yenan. On the day he received the assignment, the message appeared on Mao’s desk. Mao ordered the city to be evacuated, and the local population was herded out into the hills by armed militia. The bulk of the Red administration went to the Red base east of the Yellow River.
On 18–19 March, Hu took Yenan, which the Nationalists trumpeted as a great victory. But all they acquired was a ghost town. On Mao’s orders, the evacuees and the locals had buried not only their food, but all their household goods, down to cooking utensils.
Mao himself had left only hours before, in an ostentatiously leisurely, even nonchalant manner, pausing awhile to gaze at the pagoda which was the symbol of Yenan, while his driver revved the engine of his American jeep (donated by the departing US mission) as a reminder that the Nationalists were nearby. Mao staged this performance to build confidence in people around him. A short time before, Mao’s top brass had been awe-struck when he sent most of the troops in Yenan away, keeping only 20,000 men with him for the whole of the region — less than one-tenth of the force Hu had at his disposal, which totaled some 250,000.
Mao set off north, riding with Chou En-lai, now his chief of staff, and Mme Mao. On the way, he and Chou chatted and laughed, as if, in the wor
ds of a bodyguard, “this was an outing.”
About 30 km northeast of Yenan, at a place called Qinghuabian, Mao asked the driver to slow down in a deep valley where the loess slopes had been scoured by rain and floods into deep canyons. His bodyguards were puzzled to see him pointing and nodding thoughtfully with Chou. It was only a week later that the explanation dawned on them, when Hu’s 31st Brigade HQ and 2,900 troops walked into an ambush at this exact spot on 25 March.
The brigade had been given the order to follow this road by Hu only the day before. But Mao’s men had started taking up positions days earlier — and Mao had committed his entire force of 20,000 to this one operation. Before the first shots were fired, the brigade spotted the ambushers, and radioed the information to Hu. General Hu told his force to press on, threatening court martial if they did not, and the 2,900 men were wiped out. Meanwhile, Hu had dispatched the bulk of his army in another direction, due west, making it impossible for it to come to the rescue of the trapped brigade.
Three weeks later, on 14 April, Mao scored another victory in exactly the same fashion at a place called Yangmahe, when one of Hu’s units marched straight into an ambush. Five thousand men were killed, wounded or captured. Just as before, Hu had moved his main force away, so the doomed brigade was cut off from it by impassable ravines.
