by Jung Chang
On 4 May came a third pushover, when the Communists took Hu’s main forward depot, Panlong. Once again, Hu had sent his main force away on a wild goose chase, leaving the depot lightly defended. Both the defenders and the main force had reported Red units “lying in hiding” near the depot, but Hu said they were crying wolf. When the main force reached its target, it found an empty city.
The depot at Panlong handed the Reds vast stores of food, clothing, ammunition and medical supplies, while the Nationalists were left starving. Some were reduced to taking shoes from rotting Communist corpses. “No matter how we washed them,” one recalled, “we still couldn’t get rid of the horrible stench.” Many fell ill, but they had been cleaned out of medicine.
After these three victories within two months of the Nationalists taking Yenan, the Communists broadcast the news that Mao had remained in the Yenan region. The import was clear: even though he was not actually in the capital, the CCP supremo was able to survive and operate in the area, and was very much in control of events.
Mao remained within some 150 km of Hu’s HQ in Yenan city for a whole year, traveling with an entourage of 800 people, which eventually grew to 1,400, including a cavalry company. A sizable radio corps operated twenty-four hours a day, keeping contact with Red armies and bases all over China and with Russia.
Mao moved about from place to place for the first time since he had come to rule this region a decade before. A litter was kept at the ready, but Mao preferred walking and riding, unlike his custom on the Long March, and became very fit. His chef carried his favorite foods like chili and sausages. Mao almost never ate with the locals or in restaurants, for fear of poor hygiene, or poison. He slept so well that he even dispensed with sleeping pills, and was in marked high spirits. He did quite a bit of sightseeing, and posed for a newsreel crew who came from Manchuria to film him. Mme Mao acquired a stills camera, and took a lot of photographs, embarking on a hobby at which she later became quite accomplished. The Russian doctors came over frequently from the Red base east of the Yellow River to give Mao check-ups and report on his condition to Stalin.
During this year, most of the Yenan region remained under Communist control, and Hu’s vast army was sent into one large ambush after another, always following the same pattern: isolated units surrounded and overwhelmed by concentrated Communist forces while Hu’s main forces chased their own tails elsewhere. Hu’s superbly trained artillery battalion fell wholesale to the Reds, and came to form a significant part of Mao’s artillery. Yet another spectacular ambush buried one of Hu’s crack units when he ordered it back to Yenan, claiming that the city was under threat. It was trapped in a narrow mountain valley and shelled to smithereens. While Hu’s army was thus destroyed on a massive scale, Mao came across as a military genius who could pull spectacular victories out of a hat.
MAO HAD ONE CLOSE SHAVE. It came in June 1947, when he had lingered nearly two months in a village called Wangjiawan, staying with a peasant’s family, the first time he lived in intimate proximity to the locals. Here he took walks and went riding for pleasure. When the weather got hotter, he decided he wanted a shady place to read outdoors, so his bodyguards felled some trees to make pillars, weaving the twigs and leaves into a bower, where Mao read every day, studying English for relaxation.
On 8 June, one of Hu’s commanders, Liou Kan, suddenly appeared nearby with a large force. He had been tipped off about Mao’s presence by a local who had managed to escape from the Red area. Mao erupted with unprecedented rage, bellowing at Chou En-lai, and a heated discussion ensued about which way to run. The nearest safe haven was a Red base east of the Yellow River, where boats and cars were on constant standby at the crossing. But it was too far away, so Mao decided to go west, towards the Gobi Desert — after taking the precaution of rounding up a large group of villagers, who were forcibly evacuated in the opposite direction as decoys.
Mao made off through thunderstorms, carried on the backs of bodyguards along mountain paths too slippery for horses. Radio silence was imposed to minimize the chances of detection — except for one radio, which worked non-stop, almost certainly to contact Hu to call his troops off.
Which is exactly what happened. On 11 June, Liou Kan was so close on Mao’s heels that the Reds could hear his troops and see their torches. Mao’s guards said they felt their hair seemed to “stand on end.” As they were getting ready to defend him to the death, Mao emerged from a cave all smiles, predicting that the enemy would pass them by. At that instant, right in front of the guards’ astonished eyes, the Nationalist troops rushed by, and left them totally unmolested. Hu had ordered Liou Kan to drop everything and race on to his original destination, Baoan, Mao’s old capital.
This incident may well have triggered an urgent request to Stalin to get Mao out to Russia. A cable from Stalin on 15 June was clearly in reply to such a request. Stalin offered to send a plane to pick up Mao.
By then, Mao was safe. The day before Stalin’s telegram, Mao had wired a cheerful message to his colleagues in the Red base east of the Yellow River: “On 9–11 this month, Liou Kan’s 4 brigades held a parade where we were … Apart from a little loss to the population, no losses. Now the Liou [Kan] army is running to and fro between Yenan and Baoan.” Mao did not take up Stalin’s offer to evacuate him this time. All the same, he ordered an airstrip built at once just east of the Yellow River, in case.
Liou Kan soon met his death. In February 1948 he was ordered to reinforce the town of Yichuan, between Yenan and the Yellow River. There were three possible routes, and the one picked for him, by General Hu, ran through a narrow wooded valley. Scouts found a heavy concentration of Communist troops, clearly indicating an ambush. Liou Kan radioed Hu for permission to attack the ambushers and then change course. Hu flatly refused.
One of Liou Kan’s division commanders, Wang Ying-tsun, later wrote: “After this order, which completely ignored the real situation and our interests, officers and soldiers lost heart … everyone marched in silence, with their heads bowed …” They walked straight into the encirclement and were virtually annihilated. Half a dozen generals were killed, and Liou Kan committed suicide. The division commander managed to escape, and later saw General Hu. According to him, the general “hypocritically expressed his regret, and said why did you press on when you did not have enough troops? I thought: it was your order, and my men were pounded and killed …” The division commander testified: “After Liou Kan’s 29th Army was wiped out, it went without saying that Hu Tsung-nan’s troops had no morale to speak of. Moreover, the state of mind of the whole Chiang area was tremendously shaken …” This defeat sealed the Nationalists’ fate in the Yenan theater, and negated Chiang’s whole aim in capturing Yenan, which had been to boost morale and confidence in the country at large.
Chiang knew that Hu wrecked everything he touched. In his diary of 2 March 1948, the Generalissimo wrote: “This catastrophe cost over one third of the main force [under Hu],” and that Hu was “following the same fatal road again and again.” And yet, when Hu disingenuously offered his resignation, Chiang turned it down, with only a lamentation: “The loss of our troops at Yichuan is not only the biggest setback in the Nationalist Army’s campaign against the bandits, but also an entirely senseless sacrifice. Good generals killed, a whole army wiped out. Grief and anguish are consuming me …” A half-hearted investigation blamed the debacle on the dead Liou Kan. The Nationalist system followed its tradition of closing ranks, especially once others saw that Hu was so secure in Chiang’s favor.
The fact that the Generalissimo allowed Hu to get away with a whole year of incredible defeats, all clearly following the same pattern, says a lot about his leadership and judgment. He trusted people he liked, and would back them come what may, often sentimentally. He was also stubborn, and would stick by his own mistakes. Chiang even allowed Hu to siphon off troops from other vital theaters. The chief US military adviser, Major General David Barr, observed that Hu “prevailed on” Chiang “to reinforce h
is Xian garrison to an extent which was later to prove disastrous to the Nationalists in east central China”; key losses there were “a direct result of this shift of troops to the west,” where, Barr noted, they were either useless or destroyed.
When Mao finally left the Yenan region and headed east over the Yellow River to the Red base on 23 March 1948, he did so publicly, with organized crowds of peasants seeing him off at the river crossing. And he shook hands with local cadres before he boarded the boat. This unusual openness was to demonstrate that he was not running away furtively. And the general point that the Reds were riding high was reinforced a month later when Hu abandoned Yenan altogether. Over the past year he had lost 100,000 troops. Recovering Yenan was potentially a propaganda windfall for the Reds, but Mao adopted an extremely low-key position. His assistant, Shi Zhe, expected him to make the most of the occasion: “so I waited by his side … But nothing happened.” Mao did not want to attract more attention to Hu in case he was sacked.
Hu went on to cause even more spectacular catastrophes for Chiang, ultimately losing many hundreds of thousands of troops. When Chiang got to Taiwan, Hu went too. There he was immediately impeached, on the charge that he had “brought about the greatest damage to our army and country” of all the Nationalists. But the impeachment failed, thanks to Chiang’s protection. Chiang even put Hu in charge of operations to infiltrate the Mainland: they all came to grief. Hu died in Taiwan in 1962. Chiang may have come to doubt his judgment in his later years. His chief of guards (and subsequently prime minister of Taiwan), Hau Po-tsun, told us that Chiang showed an aversion to the mention of the Whampoa Academy, which is generally assumed to have been his base. Many moles had hailed from there.
MOLES CONTINUED to play a key role in the defeats Chiang suffered in the three military campaigns in 1948–49 that clinched the civil war. The first was in Manchuria, where Chiang picked as his supreme commander a general called Wei Li-huang. In this case, Chiang had not only been told that Wei was a Communist agent, but actually suspected this to be true. Even so, he put Wei in charge of all the 550,000 best troops in this critical theater in January 1948.
Wei had asked to join the CCP in 1938. Mao passed the news to Moscow in 1940, telling the Russians that the CCP had instructed Wei to stay undercover with the Nationalists. It seems that Wei decided on his betrayal out of a mighty grudge against Chiang for not promoting him as high as he felt he deserved. Wei had told cronies then: “I am going for the Communists … Yenan is nice to me … Let’s work with the Communists to bring him [Chiang] down.”
Chiang had been told about Wei’s secret liaisons by a Communist defector at the time, and so he passed Wei over again for a top army post after 1945, even though Wei had fought well in Burma against the Japanese, and earned the title “Hundred Victories Wei.” Wei became even more disgruntled, and went into self-imposed exile abroad.
The reason Wei was brought back in 1948 and given such a crucial job was that Chiang was frantically trying to woo the Americans, who thought highly of Wei’s performance in Burma and regarded him as an important “liberal.” The then US vice-consul in Shenyang, William Stokes, told us that Chiang appointed Wei “in a futile attempt to gain more American equipment and funding, because Wei was recognised by the Americans as a proven military leader.”
The moment Wei received the call from Chiang, he let the Russian embassy in Paris know, and thenceforth coordinated his every move with the CCP. First of all, he pulled his troops back into a few big cities, thus allowing the Communists to take control of 90 percent of Manchuria without a fight and then to surround these cities.
Mao wanted Wei to make sure that all the Nationalist troops under him stayed in Manchuria so that they could be wiped out there. Wei therefore ignored repeated orders from Chiang to move his troops to Jinzhou, the southernmost railway junction in Manchuria, preparatory to withdrawing from Manchuria completely (a move the chief US adviser, Major General Barr, had also recommended). Instead of sacking Wei, Chiang went on arguing with him for months — until the Communists took Jinzhou, on 15 October, trapping most of the hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops in Manchuria. Mao’s troops then swiftly isolated Wei’s forces in the remaining Nationalist-held cities, and attacked them one by one. With the fall of Shenyang on 2 November, the whole of Manchuria was in Mao’s hands.
For his performance in Manchuria, Chiang put Wei under house arrest, and there were calls for him to be court-martialed. But the Generalissimo, who rarely executed, or even imprisoned, any of his top commanders or opponents, let Wei go, and he sailed off unmolested to Hong Kong. A year later, two days after the proclamation of Communist China, Wei cabled Mao, wagging his tail: “wise guidance … magnificent triumph … great leader … rejoice and cheer and whole-hearted support … Am leaping up ten thousand feet like a bird …” But he cynically declined to go and live under Mao, and tried to contact the CIA in 1951 to back him to lead a third force. He finally moved to the Mainland in 1955.
Mao spoke to his nephew about Wei in withering terms: “Wei Li-huang didn’t return until he went bankrupt doing business in Hong Kong. A man like Wei Li-huang is contemptible …” And Mao made sure his contempt was demonstrated. Wei’s old Communist contacts were told to turn down his invitations to dinner, and the snubbing lasted until Wei’s death in Peking in 1960. His critical help for Mao is still hushed up, as Mao’s military genius would look a lot less brilliant if it were known that the enemy’s top commander had offered up much of his force — and many of Chiang’s best troops — on a platter.
DURING THE WHOLE of the Manchuria campaign, Mao never went there. He was at his new HQ at Xibaipo, 240 km southwest of Peking. After Manchuria fell in early November 1948, he ordered the army there under Lin Biao to come south. This army now stood at upwards of 1.3 million strong, and its new mission was to tackle the 600,000-man Nationalist army in northern China led by Fu Tso-yi, a celebrated general who had fought China’s first winning battle against Japanese puppets in 1936. The encounter between Lin and Fu, known as the Peking — Tianjin Campaign, was the second of the three key campaigns that decided the civil war.
Unlike Wei, General Fu was not a secret Communist. But he was surrounded by people who were, not least his own daughter, who was assigned by the Party to stay with her father in this period and report his every move. Chiang had some idea about this situation, but took no action to remedy it.
By November, even before Lin was on his way south from Manchuria, Fu had made up his mind to surrender, without telling Chiang. He had lost faith in Chiang’s regime, and decided to try to save the area under him from pointless devastation — not least Peking itself, the nation’s cultural capital, where his HQ was located. He did not do this out of any illusions about Communist rule, which, he said publicly at the time, would bring “cruelty … terror and tyranny,” and the decision to surrender caused him great anguish. He began to fall to pieces, and was seen slapping his own face, and contemplating suicide.
Chiang knew what was happening to Fu. On 12 December he wrote in his diary that Fu was “deeply depressed … and seems to be going insane.” But he still refused to sack him, and when Fu offered to resign, Chiang turned him down with a maudlin “10,000 Nos.”
Mao kept close tabs on Fu’s mental condition through Fu’s daughter, and he decided he could extract more from the situation than just a surrender. He could establish himself in the public eye as a military genius who had beaten Fu, the renowned war hero. So, when Fu sued for surrender, Mao strung Fu’s envoys along for two months, not accepting the surrender but not saying “No” either, while all the time keeping up attacks on Fu’s army. By now Fu was quite unfit to command. One officer recalled how during one key battle, when asked for instructions, “Fu dithered and faltered and then said listlessly: ‘Play it by ear.’ At that moment, I thought, we are finished …” Predictably, Mao’s army took city after city, including Tianjin, the third largest in China, which fell on 15 January 1949. Only when he had created
an image of himself as a military giant-killer did Mao accept Fu’s standing offer to surrender Peking. Mao was thus able to say that Fu had opted for peace only after being thoroughly defeated on the battlefield — by Mao himself. The truth is that the whole campaign, which cost tens of thousands of lives, did not have to be fought at all. A broken Fu collaborated with Mao until his death on the Mainland in 1974.
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the sham Peking — Tianjin Campaign, a third huge, and more genuine, campaign was being fought in the heartland of China to the north of Chiang’s capital, Nanjing. Known as the Huai — Hai Campaign, this involved well over one million men, and lasted from November 1948 to January 1949. The chief commander on the Nationalist side here was not a Communist agent, or a mental wreck. But just below him there were strategically placed Red sleepers, including two generals who had been secret Party members for ten and twenty years respectively, who opened up the gateway to this battleground within forty-eight hours of the campaign starting.
The major saboteurs were two other men in Chiang’s own HQ called Liu Fei and Kuo Ju-kui, who were intimately involved in drawing up the battle plans for the campaign. They placed the Nationalists on the defensive in every move by deliberately making wrong deployments and recommendations, while passing the plans to the Communists.
Chiang was particularly dependent on Kuo, to whom he spoke on the phone almost every day, and whose ruinous advice he heeded. Kuo actually fell under suspicion at this time from field commanders, and was even denounced as a spy by no less a person than Chiang’s adopted son, Weigo. But the Generalissimo did nothing until it was too late, and even then he merely transferred Kuo to Sichuan — on the recommendation of the other key mole, Liu Fei. In Sichuan, Kuo would later surrender an entire army.
By mid-January 1949, Mao had wrapped up all three major campaigns triumphantly. The country north of the Yangtze, where 80 percent of Chiang’s troops had been stationed, was Mao’s. He now wanted moles to be posted to unconquered areas south of the river, to wait for his army to arrive and then surrender at the opportune moment. Nationalist bigwigs jumped ship in droves. On 7 January Mao informed Stalin that “many prominent” Chiang men, including former defense minister Pai, were seeking deals: “Pai Chung-hsi asked our people — whatever orders come from the CCP, I would fulfill them immediately …” (Pai in fact did not go with Mao.) Mao told supplicants to stay with Chiang, and in some cases even to put up resistance and wait for the right moment. Though the Yangtze was a formidable barrier, and Chiang had a sizable navy, these old and new betrayals made sure that the road was open to the capital, Nanjing, and the financial center, Shanghai — and to the rest of China. On 9–10 January, Mao confidently informed Stalin that his government “can be created in summer,” or “earlier.”
