China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  In his first few years in Yan’an, Mao had time to play cards, smoke, drink and eat, as well as to seek out the company of a pretty Shanghai actress, Lily Wu, who had travelled there to join the Communists. Mao’s tryst with Lily Wu earned him a beating from his wife, who in a fit of rage hit him ‘with a long handled flashlight … until she was out of breath’.29 He Zizhen left Mao, who married, not Lily Wu but another Shanghai actress who had come to Yan’an, Lan Ping, better known to history as Jiang Qing.

  Mao’s calm, confident, boisterous exterior hid a man grappling with the fundamental issue of how to transform the Red Army’s ragtag units, a divided Communist Party and its poor rural base in Yan’an into a serious revolutionary force. That meant first of all establishing that he was not just a guerrilla commander. At Zunyi, one of Mao’s critics had charged ‘your methods of warfare are not particularly clever; they are based on just two books, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms [a Robin Hood-type novel] and Sunzi’s The Art of War.’ Mao admitted later that at the time of the Zunyi Conference he had not actually even read the latter.30

  Mao read up on his Marxism–Leninism and with the aid of a Marxist– Leninist brains trust produced a series of theoretical essays, including ‘On Practice’, ‘On Contradiction’ and ‘On the New Stage’, making major statements on philosophical, social, economic and cultural issues.31 These articles insisted that revolution in China must follow its own path, rather than mimic the course of revolution in the Soviet Union. The Chinese Communists therefore had to develop their own revolutionary practice, one in which, according to Mao, the countryside and the military had a uniquely important place. If the revolutionaries in Europe had succeeded by seizing political power in a capital, then in a China that was overwhelming rural and where political and military power was dispersed rather than controlled by a centralised state bureaucracy, that was not possible. In articles such as these, Mao set out his strategy for revolution in China, in the process suggesting that he not only understood Marxism–Leninism but could enrich it. He was determined never to be patronised again by those with greater knowledge of Marxism–Leninism, as had happened in the past.

  Mao Zedong’s most important military work was On Protracted War, a long pamphlet published on 1 July 1938. Although influenced by the Soviet army’s Field Training Manual, Sunzi’s The Art of War and Erich Ludendorff’s Der Totale Krieg, Mao engaged most fully with Clausewitz’s On War. He repeatedly quoted Clausewitz’s famous aphorism ‘war is the continuation of politics’.32 Mao wrote On Protracted War while Clausewitz was being translated into Chinese on his orders, chapter by chapter, with Mao discussing completed chapters with a select group in weekly seminars which often lasted deep into the night.33 On Protracted War reflected On War in its dialectical style of reasoning, its emphasis on the importance of rational calculation by commanders, and the significance of the will of the people. Like Clausewitz, Mao stressed that ‘war is bloodshed’, meaning that it was merciless, that there was nothing pretty about it, and that the only role for the enemy on the battlefield was his destruction. For a man who declared that a reign of terror was necessary, that revolution is not a dinner party and that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, Clausewitz confirmed much of what Mao had long thought.34

  On Protracted War was written and published after China’s defeat at the Battle of Xuzhou. Part of its purpose was to counter the defeatist atmosphere that had descended on the country and to reassure Mao’s readers that victory would be China’s, even if it would be slow in coming.35 Following Clausewitz’s description of a defensive strategy, Mao suggested that the War of Resistance would go through three phases, beginning with a retreat (which had not yet ended), followed by a long period of stalemate and then a counter-offensive in which China would prevail. Mao then reassured his audience that the future was theirs even if much hardship would have to be endured.

  On Protracted War was not just a propaganda piece aimed at boosting morale, but also an attempt by Mao to demonstrate his credentials as a military theorist, who had learned from but had also added to Clausewitz. In Clause-witz, guerrilla war was ancillary, a tactic of last resort. For Mao, ‘protracted guerrilla war … knocks on the gate of strategy’, and so had become ‘quite new in the entire history of war’.36 Guerrilla war could have strategic significance in China’s war with Japan because China was a large and populous country, only a small part of which the Japanese could occupy. That opened up Japan’s rear as the place to develop base areas from which to mobilise the population and conduct guerrilla warfare. Mao never thought that the use of guerrilla war alone would secure revolutionary victory. ‘The outcome of the war depends mainly on regular warfare, especially in its mobile form, and guerrilla warfare cannot shoulder the main responsibility for deciding the outcome.’37 The Communists went on to the offensive in the Civil War only after they had trained up a large army which was well armed and able to sustain large-scale battles.

  Building base areas was critical to Mao’s plans. He said little about base building in On Protracted War, which circulated publicly, because he did not want to alienate the Nationalists by revealing that he wanted to gain territory. However, he did discuss base areas extensively in a draft essay he abandoned before composing On Protracted War. Base areas in the enemy’s rear were ‘essential because of the protracted nature and ruthlessness of the war’; 38 they were also what distinguished national liberation war from ‘peasant wars of the “roving rebel” type’.39 In base areas, the Communists could ‘arouse the masses for struggle against Japan’.40 ‘We must arm the people, i.e. organise self-defence forces and guerrilla units; we must organise the workers, peasants, youth, women, children, merchants and professional people.’41 Mao found plenty in Clausewitz to confirm his belief in the importance of popular support in war.42

  The general pattern in base building was for Communist forces and officials to move into an area, presenting themselves as legitimate military and civilian authority, and make contact with local administrators, military groups, secret societies and religious groups.43 Influence was slowly built up through persuasion, infiltration and education. The next step was to build up a three-tiered military structure, an administrative hierarchy and mass organisations. Once an area was sufficiently secure, Communist cadres would promote rent- and interest-reduction campaigns and press for the cancellation of surcharges and extra levies, steps defensible as implementing Sun Yatsen’s ‘land to the tiller’ programme.44 Campaigns against collaborators and abusive landlords would follow. Mao insisted that base areas, usually but not always constructed in poor hilly regions, should not be overburdened. ‘In every base area, the total number of those not actively engaged in production (including those serving in party, government, army, popular organizations, and schools) should constitute no more than 3% of the population.’45 During the War of Resistance the Communists largely stuck to that formula, but not later during the Civil War when they readied themselves to wage large set-piece battles.

  The Communists developed a set of economic, social and political policies, which the historian Mark Selden has baptised the Yan’an Way as a means of attracting popular support. Direct elections for local assemblies up to county level and mass organisations of all kinds drew base area populations into politics far more widely and deeply than ever before, thus giving them an unprecedented, and hence for them electrifying, role in public life. Campaigns were organised to promote literacy, enhance hygiene, improve the lives of women, strengthen public health and fight what was depicted as superstition. Base area life was full of meetings at which both leaders and led discussed national and local affairs. Selden was wrong to believe that the Yan’an Way alone made the base areas viable. Opium cultivation was the foundation of Communist finance.46 Moscow’s emissary, Peter Vladimirov, quoted one high-ranking Communist as having stated laconically that ‘with the money we earn from opium exports to the Nationalists, we buy their arms, which we will use to overthrow them’.47 But the Yan’an Way was im
portant in suggesting that the Communists would be radically different to the Nationalists in garnering popular support.

  Mao and Clausewitz are rarely put together. But it is not so strange that, in his search for a successful military strategy, Mao should turn to the most widely celebrated military thinker of modern times. In On War, Mao found many ideas that confirmed his own thinking, including about the brutal nature of war, the importance of popular support and the key role of commanders. Clausewitz recognised that not all wars are about crushing the enemy and that victories might be relative and lead to compromise, but in his discussions of absolute war, he stressed that a crushing victory on the battlefield was necessary to impose one’s will on the enemy. Mao would pursue just such a victory in the last years of the Civil War. Mao was likely thinking about this, too, when he sent young cadres for military training in the Soviet Union during the War of Resistance.

  The Japanese Rescue Chinese Communism

  Yan’an became the cradle of Chinese communism, but, as Mao admitted, the Japanese invasion provided the conditions that allowed the Communists to break out from their confines, spread out across north China and lay the foundations for their eventual triumph. However, if Japan’s invasion offered salvation, initially at least, after the December 1936 Xi’an Incident which led to Chiang Kaishek calling off his campaign of annihilation, and then provided the opportunities for the Communists to grow, it was also full of danger. The Japanese, the Wang Jingwei government and the Nationalists all had their reasons to strike against the Communists either separately or jointly, with the Communists’ own actions during the War of Resistance having the potential to make that more or less likely. A carefully calibrated policy was required, which could also be adjusted in the face of developments.

  In the negotiations about a new united front that followed the Xi’an Incident, the Communists clung to three basic conditions, the most important of which was a single independent headquarters for all their military forces. They feared that if their forces were divided, the Nationalists would deploy them in different regions and then feed them one by one into the jaws of the advancing Japanese armies. The two other demands were autonomy in Yan’an and the continued existence of the Communist Party.48 Chiang Kaishek’s hope was a single command for all military forces in China and a single governmental system in which regions had a considerable amount of autonomy as long as they acknowledged the ultimate authority of the central Nationalist government.

  The post-Xi’an negotiations dragged on without resolution until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and even the Battle of Shanghai. They were fully concluded only on 22 September 1937, when the new united front was formally announced.49 The agreement provided that the Communist forces in Yan’an were renamed the Eighth Route Army of the National Army, while the units that had remained in central China became known as the New Fourth Army. Yan’an became a Special Administrative Region. The Communists issued a public statement declaring that ‘the Three People’s Principles of Mr Sun Yatsen are what is required for China today; we will struggle for their full realization. We will stop all violent policies aimed at overthrowing the Nationalist administration as well as all movements to spread communism, while we also annul policies for the violent confiscation of land.’50 But they had retained full independence of command and they remained in full control of Yan’an. With Chiang Kaishek needing Communist collaboration in order to claim that China fought as a united country, he had blinked first.

  Nationalist and Communist commanders were all smiles and politeness when together they defended Shanxi province against the Japanese invaders. Having taken Beijing, units of Japan’s 5th Division marched west, reaching the province in the middle of September 1937. Eighth Route Army headquarters ordered three Communist divisions into Shanxi from bordering Yan’an. The three divisions were: 115th Division led by General Lin Biao, who moved into central Shanxi; 120th Division under General He Long, who took up positions at the Yanmen Pass north of the provincial capital of Taiyuan; and 129th Division under General Liu Bocheng, which deployed to the east of Taiyuan. The three cooperated with General Yan Xishan’s Shanxi Army, as well as National Army units commanded by General Wei Lihuang. General Yan Xishan vouched to Chiang Kaishek that his new Communist collaborators were ‘honest in their support for you and they are truly enthusiastic about resisting the enemy’.51 A Communist commander was heard to say that ‘wherever the Eighth Route Army goes, that’s where the central government goes and where the KMT goes’.52

  All this friendliness led to a victory in late September when, in collaboration with the Shanxi Army, two regiments of General Lin Biao’s 115th Division ambushed a supply column of the 5th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army in a narrow defile at Pingxingguan Pass. While Communist propaganda celebrated the event as a giant Communist success, as it continues to do today, General Lin Biao reported that a lack of reliable communications equipment had made coordination impossible between his own forces, the Shanxi Army units and Nationalist forces, with the consequence that units did not arrive on time, if at all. His battle report made clear that the Communist forces were not ready for this kind of warfare:

  We never encountered such a strong foe in the Northern Expedition and the Soviet Period. Their infantry are able to deploy themselves with individual initiative in combat situations. Although wounded, they refuse to give up their arms … Our army’s military skill and training still leave a great deal to be desired. In the past half year, our troops have had a chance to rest and regroup, and their discipline, morale, and regularization have progressed greatly; but in combat training we still have a long way to go.53

  To persist in fighting in this way risked wasting all the Communists’ forces in no time.

  Mao Zedong had insisted from the beginning of the United Front that Communist forces should only fight guerrilla warfare in mountainous areas on the flanks or to the rear of the Japanese.54 Only after the middle of November, when the Battle of Shanxi was over, was he able to convince his colleagues that the Eighth Route Army was not ready for positional warfare. Having prevailed, Mao was then able to force through a new policy, built around his view of the importance of building base areas behind enemy lines. He issued an instruction in the name of the Party insisting that ‘primary importance should be given to creating base areas and mobilising the masses, and we must disperse our forces, rather than laying emphasis on concentrating them for combat’.55 He ordered General Lin Biao’s 115th Division into the mountainous regions in northern Shanxi, while General He Long’s 120th Division moved to northwest Shanxi and General Liu Bocheng’s 129th Division marched to the Taihang mountains in the south-east of the province. Each set about building a new base area. It was not just the Japanese invasion but this policy of building base areas that allowed the Communists to grow so rapidly during the War of Resistance.

  By February 1938, it became clear that the next battle would be for Xuzhou, the railway junction that lay between the north China and central China fronts. Mao saw his opportunity, telling his front-line commanders: ‘the enemy … must suffer from a severe lack of forces in the whole of Hebei, Shandong, and northern Jiangsu.’56 The Communists should move into these areas, he insisted. Building bases behind Japanese lines was also necessary because the Japanese were in control of most of Shanxi province. Their next step might be an invasion of Shaanxi, which could lead to the occupation of Xi’an and an offensive against Yan’an.57 Having bases elsewhere provided for the possibility that Yan’an might fall and would allow the CCP leadership to move elsewhere.

  Mao Zedong ordered 115th Division, commanded by General Nie Rongzhen, who had replaced the wounded General Lin Biao, to north Hebei province with the instruction to advance east into Shandong province and south into the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu.58 In January 1938, General Nie Rongzhen inaugurated the Shanxi–Chahar–Hebei Border Region.59 Communist forces in the Taihang mountains were ordered to expand into the provinces of Hebei and Henan.60 Some units marched
to Shandong province, where they set about building a further base area in a mountainous region on the province’s south coast.61

  Base building worked. From 1937 to 1940, Party membership grew from 40,000 to 800,000, while the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies expanded to 500,000 troops.62 The Japanese invasion proved a godsend for the Chinese Communists. Without it they would not have expanded so quickly or so widely. This was of course not just the work of Mao Zedong, but also of many Party officials, activists, commanders, soldiers and Party members, all determined to exploit the opportunities the war with Japan provided.

  War within War

  Rapid Communist expansion inevitably provoked Nationalist suspicions about the Communist commitment to fighting Japan. Such suspicions were strengthened by a public warning issued by a founding member of the Party, Zhang Guotao, in May 1938. Zhang had been in charge of his own base area before the Long March and had been the chair of a central committee rival to Mao’s. He had made it to Yan’an, but without his forces, and was first humiliated by Mao and then purged from his leadership positions. He published his warning letter having fled Yan’an for Wuhan. In it he said that the ‘real objectives’ of the Communists ‘are to preserve effective forces and maintain the special status of the border governments and some guerrilla zones to boost the development of its own forces’ and that ‘the CCP is insincere about unity in the War of Resistance’.63 In April 1940, a New Fourth Army defector claimed that Mao had stated at a farewell rally when his unit had set out from Yan’an in September 1937 that ‘the War of Resistance is a great opportunity for us to develop. Our policy is to focus 70% on expansion, 20% on dealing with the KMT, and 10% on resisting Japan.’64 That report was seized upon then, as it still is now, by those who argue that the Communists were never serious about resisting Japan and that their aim was to let the Nationalists do all the fighting.65