Until the fall of Wuhan, Chiang Kaishek had ignored warnings like these. In January 1939, though, he wrote in his diary that ‘perhaps they think their time has come. Alas. The greatest danger is not the Japanese, but most of all Communist expansion everywhere.’66 By this time, the Communist Eighth Route Army had already grown to 160,000 troops.67 The KMT Central Executive Committee decided in the same month to adopt a set of measures to contain the Communists. It ordered that any organisation not registered with the KMT or the national government would be treated as a criminal entity. Several associations were placed under supervision, including the Youth National Salvation Association and the Wartime Rural Work Promotion Association.68 Offices and businesses suspected of being Communist fronts were closed down.69 The Nationalists also dispatched their own guerrilla forces into the provinces of Shandong and Hebei to counter Communist expansion. Some counties ended up with three different magistrates: a Nationalist, a Communist and a Japanese one.70 By the end of 1939, the Nationalists had deployed 400,000 troops to blockade Yan’an in an attempt to prevent the movement of Communist officials and soldiers in and out of their main base area and to undermine its economy.71
These measures were unable to prevent further Communist growth.72 Moreover, the Japanese targeted mopping-up operations against the Nationalists. In Shandong, these ‘caused the destruction of Nationalist administration below the provincial level’.73 Once the Japanese withdrew, Mao ordered the Commun ists in Shandong to grab local government control, grow the armed forces to 250,000 troops, expand into the provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui and recruit another 150,000 troops there.74 The Communists in Shandong grew strong enough to introduce a system of progressive taxes, which they collected in grain.75 Later they even issued their own currency.
North China became a powder keg. Not just the Nationalists and the Communists, but also the Japanese, the Wang Jingwei government and the Guangxi Clique, whose leader, General Li Zongren, was commander-in-chief of the Fifth War Zone, had interests to protect there. As one advisor to Chiang Kaishek put it in early 1940, ‘the Japanese, the traitor Wang Jingwei, and the Communists are all our enemies. The Japanese and Wang Jingwei are absolute enemies. The Communists are dispersed between their units and ours. They are even more difficult to deal with.’76 He feared that Communist expansion in this complex situation would lead to armed clashes from which only the Japanese and Wang Jingwei would benefit.
The Nationalists decided that the best option was to assign Nationalist and Communist forces their own areas of operation, rather than try to fight alongside each another. Nationalist negotiators proposed that the Communists confined their operations to the area north of the old bed of the Yellow river, while their own would stay south of it. Given that at the start of the War of Resistance the Communists had been assigned a campaign area of a mere twenty or so counties, this was a significant Nationalist concession. The Communists initially demanded that they should be allocated all five provinces of north China – Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu – but in the end they accepted the proposal. Detailed preparations were made for a staged withdrawal of the entire New Fourth Army, first to northern Jiangsu and then to the area north of the Yellow river.
This attempt to separate Communist and Nationalist forces led directly to the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941, the most violent clash between the two during the War of Resistance, in which 10,000 Communist troops were killed, including, as said, political commissar Xiang Ying. The incident took place when the Japanese were conducting mopping-up operations in central China in preparation for the inauguration of the Wang Jingwei government. Discussions taking place between the Japanese and the Nationalists triggered Communist fears that Chiang Kaishek was preparing to cut a deal with the Japanese and Wang Jingwei. If all the Communist forces were concentrated in one place, they would offer an easy target for Nationalist and Japanese attacks, coordinated or not. Adding to the febrile atmosphere were internal Communist and Nationalist divisions. On the Communist side, Mao Zedong and Xiang Ying were deeply suspicious of each other. On the Nationalist side, General Li Pinxian of the Guangxi Army, General Yu Xuezhong of the Shandong Army and General Han Deqin of the central Nationalist forces did not see eye to eye either.
The first conflict occurred at Huangqiao in Jiangsu province in October 1940. In the spring of that year, Mao Zedong had ordered Communist forces in Shandong and Jiangsu to put pressure on the position of General Han Deqin, who had masterminded the expansion of Nationalist guerrilla operations in Jiangsu province. If the Communists feared Nationalist collusion with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei government, the Nationalists were concerned that the Communists were preparing to establish a new base area in the region. The danger for the Nationalists was that the Communists could then operate in a continuous zone from north China to the Yangzi delta. General Han Deqin stood firm at Huangqiao, but he lost thousands of troops.77
Preferring to preserve the united front, both sides downplayed the incident. But the Nationalists became determined to force the New Fourth Army to move northwards. PRC historian Yang Kuisong, who has had unique access to Communist archives, has shown that the two sides were in daily contact as the Nationalists cleared two corridors through their ranks for the New Fourth Army. They placed supplies, including ammunition, at various stages to be picked up by New Fourth Army units as they made their way north. The New Fourth Army did begin to move, but it all went wrong when one of its divisions moved in an unexpected direction, surprising Chongqing, Yan’an and Nationalist front-line commanders, all of whom were in telegraphic contact. In the fighting that followed, a whole Communist division of 10,000 troops was destroyed in a battle that lasted three days.78 Its commander, Ye Ting, was arrested, while political commissar Xiang Ying was killed.
From his examination of the telegraphic traffic, Yang Kuisong concludes that Chiang Kaishek did not issue the order to shoot and that Yan’an too had no influence over what was happening on the ground. The failure of communication equipment was no doubt an important factor and there may well have been the desire on both sides to avoid serious clashes, but a deep mutual suspicion resulting from a decade of civil war meant that something like the New Fourth Army Incident was bound to happen sooner or later. The Communists used the incident to unleash a propaganda storm against the Nationalists which undermined their domestic as well as their international reputation. The united front survived because neither side was willing to risk the consequences of a complete rupture, but relations never recovered. The Nationalists stopped their subsidies to Yan’an and the Communists refused to attend meetings of the Political Consultative Conference.
Disciplining the Party
Rapid expansion in the early years of the War of Resistance caused problems for the Chinese Communist Party, as it had in Jiangxi. Mao Zedong noted in a telegram to General Peng Dehuai that 90 per cent of its 800,000 members had joined after the War of Resistance had started.79 Most of these were urban youths, leading Mao to call for ‘a struggle between proletarian and petit-bourgeois ideologies’ in order to baptise the new arrivals into communism and acquaint them with rural conditions.80 But the campaign was also designed to root out ‘agents provocateur and internal treachery’.81 Mao, though, did not want a repeat of the 1930 orgy of killing in the Jiangxi Soviet. He designed the Rectification Campaign, as it came to be called, as a controlled exercise containing specific stages. Mao was learning from experience how to use violence as an instrument of power. He did not use violence for violence’s sake. He applied it in a considered and calculated way, in the same way that he used his charisma and his ability to inspire to drive the revolution in the direction he believed was the correct one.
The Rectification Campaign began on 1 February 1942, when Mao addressed a gathering of 1,000 cadres in Yan’an. He stressed Party control of the movement and insisted that ‘no one must be killed and only a few arrested’.82 The campaign targeted what Mao called three diseases – subjectivism, sectarianism and
Party formalism – to be cured by the collective study of twenty-two documents, five of which were written by Mao himself. Subjectivism was the reliance on one’s subjective understanding resulting from the failure to apply the general truths of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions. Sectarianism referred to protecting one’s own faction and ignoring orders from a higher authority. Party formalism was the habit of Party officials to produce writings full of empty clichés and generalisations, compared by Mao to ‘the lazy old woman’s long, foul-smelling foot bindings which should be thrown into the privy at once’.83
Rectification began at the top of the Party and over the next two years moved down its hierarchy,84 with participants required to keep diaries and produce self-criticisms, said by Mao to be ‘a great weapon in the thought struggle’.85 In their diaries and self-criticisms, Party members reflected on when, where, how and with whom they had fallen into error, not just in their behaviour but also in their thinking. This was shock therapy: ‘the first step is … to give the patient a good jolt: yell at him “you are sick”’, as Mao put it.86 Because self-criticisms were preserved in the personnel files of each Party member, for the rest of their lives each had to live with the idea that the Party could punish them for something to which they had already confessed – an excellent way to ensure subordination to the will of the Party.
Already by 8 June over 17,000 people were enrolled in the campaign. One man had assumed that, because he had not studied, did not have any close friends or relatives and did not write, he could not possibly be suffering from any of the three diseases of subjectivism, sectarianism and formalism. Study, though, convinced him that he was in fact suffering from all three.87 Another was pulled up for forgetting the importance of politics in deciding who to marry. He had joked that in looking for a spouse his conditions were that ‘first, it must be a human being, second, it must be alive, and third, female’, adding that he would prefer his wife to stay at home.88 He was criticised, not for misogyny, but for forgetting his politics. Beginning with the rectification of such individual attitudes, the small groups in which the texts were studied moved on to reflect on the work styles of their work units. Like the Nationalists, the Communists regarded revolution not just as a force for change in social and political relations, but also of the self. Self-criticism was meant to transform the individual.
The study of documents and collective self-criticism were designed to forge an individual link with a transcendental revolutionary truth, including a correct understanding of the history of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1941, Mao Zedong ordered the compilation of two volumes of Party reso lutions, reports, minutes and key articles by its leaders from the Party’s founding until 1941.89 The collections were meant to illustrate two things. Firstly, only the Chinese Communist Party could be the agency of China’s redemption, a cause for which it had battled warlords, imperialists and the Nationalists, who had begun as true revolutionaries under Sun Yatsen but had abandoned the revolution after they had come to power and now served the interests of imperialists, large landlords, capitalists and warlords. The second was a depiction of the history of the CCP as the overcoming of two deviations, one that was leftist and had cost the Party dearly by calling for uprisings when they were impossible, and the other that was rightist and which had shied away from revolution. Because he had been able to apply the universal truths of Marxism–Leninism to the specific conditions confronted by revolution in China, the suggestion was that Mao had been able to formulate the correct line, as it was called, the right revolutionary strategy to deliver the country from its troubles and bring about the New China.
Mao was determined to use the Rectification Campaign to stamp his authority on the Party. He compelled competitors to submit self-criticisms and acknowledge in public their acceptance of the correctness of his views. Party leaders who had worked and studied in the Soviet Union came in for special attention. Most did not put up much of a fight, but an exception was Wang Ming, who had stayed in Moscow from 1931 as head of China’s delegation to the Communist International and had been sent back to China to enforce a more fulsome Communist commitment to the united front. In March 1940, Wang Ming republished ‘Fighting for the Further Bolshevisation of the Chinese Communist Party’, which he had written in the early 1930s, as a defence of his views. Wang Ming held out until 1944, suffering a good deal for his pains, including being refused medical treatment when he was seriously ill.90 But in 1944 he produced a letter stating that he agreed with a Party resolution on the history of the CCP which affirmed the Maoist interpretation of its past.91 Mao was triumphant a year later when Mao Zedong Thought was enshrined in the Party constitution.
Mao used the campaign to drive home the cost of criticism against him. Wang Shiwei, educated at Peking University and working for Liberation Daily in Yan’an, published a series of satirical pieces criticising aspects of Yan’an life under the title Wild Lilies. In the introduction he describes a young woman, Li Fen, a fellow Peking University student who was executed after having been arrested in Hunan province in 1928. Before her execution, she had put on three levels of clothing and sown them together to protect herself from rape. ‘For the nation’s sake, we really do not want to go over old scores from the class struggle. We really are truly impartial and magnanimous, so much so that we are using all of our strength to recruit representatives to walk with us on the same road towards the light. But, in the process of recruitment, old China’s dirt and filth contaminate us, spreading germs and infecting us with disease.’92 This was a notso-veiled criticism of Mao Zedong and his cavorting with Shanghai actresses. Wang was condemned as a Trotskyist, placed under arrest and executed in 1947.
In 1943 the Rectification Campaign span out of control, despite Mao’s origin al intentions. This was as a consequence of developments that have not yet been made fully clear. In August, the Central Committee issued a directive stating that in Yan’an the Nationalists ‘have a huge network of spies’ and that the Japanese had ‘many Chinese working as spies’. Party officials were therefore ordered to ‘eliminate counter-revolutionaries hidden in the Party’.93 Kang Sheng, the Party’s security chief, took charge of the campaign. Determined to root out ‘counter-revolutionary ideological poison’, he justified his purge as saving the Chinese-ness of his victims:
Why does the Communist Party make so much effort to rescue you? Simply because it wants you to be Chinese, and not be cheated into serving the enemy. Those of you who have lost your way, be conscious, take a firm decision, repent to the party, and cast off the special agent’s garb … and put on Chinese clothes …94
As had happened in Jiangxi province in the early 1930s, torture was used to secure confessions and many people were executed after Kang Sheng claimed that in Yan’an alone there were 1,400 spies.95 Mao apologised three times after he reined in the campaign, at one time stating ‘during cadre investigation, the whole of Yan’an has made mistakes. Who is responsible? Me, because I issued the orders.’96
None of this would have made much sense unless Mao Zedong articulated a new vision for China’s future. He addressed the question ‘Whither China?’ in 1940 in ‘On New Democracy’.97 In this famous tract he traced the history of China’s revolution back to the Opium War, arguing that China had become a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country in which the bourgeoisie was too small to lead the revolution, as had been demonstrated by the failure of the 1911 Revolution to give rise to a stable republic and by the abandonment of revolution by the Nationalists. As Marxist doctrine demanded, Mao argued that China would have to pass through a democratic and a socialist revolution, but because of the weakness of its bourgeoisie, the Communists would have to shoulder the leadership in both phases and they would need to establish a democracy ‘of a special type – new democracy’ ruled by a government that represented the peasants, the workers, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.
In this way, Mao could suggest that only a few – compradors working for foreigners, large landlords
– would have anything to fear from the Communists. The state, Mao declared, would only take over ‘large banks, industries, and businesses’.98 He insisted that, under the CCP, the state would look after ‘over 90% of the toiling masses of workers and peasants throughout the nation’,99 providing them with education, protecting them from imperialism and enhancing their prosperity. Mao stressed that the CCP would support business and protect China’s industry against foreign competition. To counter accusations that the CCP would make China subservient to Moscow, he stressed the importance of nationalism. The CCP would restore ‘the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation’.100
In Yan’an, Mao Zedong did more than branch out from the military sphere into the civilian realm. He wrote on a broad range of cultural, economic and social issues, setting out a different vision for the New China, as he had done in ‘On New Democracy’, and highlighting the differences between the Communists and the Nationalists. Mao was turning into a cosmocrat. Not only was he a competent executive, a charismatic guerrilla leader, a shrewd strategist and an innovator of Marxism–Leninism; now he was a sage and saviour, who understood the past, had deduced its direction, had seen the future and had discerned the path towards it. Had Mao remained just a military leader, he would never have been able to dominate the CCP. That would be true, too, if he had merely been a political leader expert in Marxism–Leninism. In the Chinese tradition, political achievement is more highly esteemed than military glory, although the highest praise goes to those who excel both militarily and politically. Mao claimed unique expertise in both realms.
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