China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  To complete the encirclement of Jinzhou, General Lin Biao had to take the town of Yixian, located along the railway line from Jinzhou to Shenyang. Yixian was surrounded by thick strong walls and counted an elite division armed with US equipment among its defenders. When Yixian had still not been captured after three weeks, Mao pressed Lin Biao to make haste: ‘our forces moved out on the ninth, twenty days ago, and you have not yet begun to attack Yixian.’75 But General Lin Biao stuck to his ‘four fasts and one slow’ principle. He worked methodically, initially severing Yixian’s railway connection with Shenyang and encircling the city. He then ordered a pause to allow his commanders to complete their preparations while General Zhu Rui’s artillery bombarded the town. On 1 October, after the artillery had blasted a hole in the town wall, Lin’s forces advanced on a narrow front through this breech, and then spread out. Four hours later the city was in Communist hands.76 This was a stunning success, marred only by the death of General Zhu Rui, who stepped on a land mine.77

  Chiang Kaishek tried to turn the tables on Lin Biao. His plan for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat was to use Jinzhou to tie down General Lin Biao’s forces and then smash them by sending relief forces from north China and Shenyang. Chiang Kaishek’s American advisor, General David Barr, wrote later that ‘the plans made and the orders given were sound and, had they been obeyed, the results would probably have been favorable’.78 On being informed of the plan, General Lin Biao took fright, remarking that ‘we prepared a feast for one table, but now we have two tables of guests – what are we to do?’79 He was so concerned that he even proposed to Mao to abort the battle. Mao Zedong, too, was worried, but he ordered General Lin to attack immediately, before the Nationalists could complete their deployments, which Mao believed would take three weeks.80

  We will never know whether Chiang Kaishek’s plan could have worked. Opposition by his most senior military leaders in north China and Manchuria meant that it was not given a chance. General Wei Lihuang, commander-in-chief at Shenyang, believed that his best option was to sit tight in Shenyang rather than send his forces out into the Manchurian countryside where they would be exposed to Communist attacks. General Fu Zuoyi in north China, already engaged by the Communists, also doubted the wisdom of diluting his force strength there. Only after Chiang Kaishek shuttled back and forth between Shenyang and Beijing for nine days was he able to convince them, a fact that underscored the fragility of his authority by this time. While the relief force from north China arrived just before the commencement of the Battle of Jinzhou, the force from Shenyang never came close. Valuable time was lost in dithering and bickering.

  Before beginning the assault on Jinzhou on 14 October, Lin Biao’s 250,000 Communist forces dug many kilometres of trenches, some to within earshot of Nationalist front lines. They shut down the water supply to the city, closed all roads leading in and out of it and cut its telephone lines. The attack began with an artillery barrage delivered by 900 cannons. A planned second barrage was called off when Communist tank units began their advance prematurely due to a communications mix-up. It did not matter. Through a breech in the city wall, their infantry poured into the city. By nightfall all meaningful resistance had ended and the city was in Communist hands.81 They could not believe their good luck. Jinzhou was chock-full of supplies destined for Shenyang and Changchun. Besides vast piles of grain, they took possession of arms and ammunition for 60,000 troops, ‘a large amount of industrial equipment’, 1,000 bolts of cotton cloths, 200,000 kilos of cotton yarn and 400 trucks.82

  The Siege of Changchun ended a few days later, on 20 October, when commander-in-chief Zheng Dongguo ordered his headquarter’s units to lay down their arms after a symbolic last stand at the city’s Central Bank building. From the middle of September, desertion, either individually or by small units of troops, had become common. On 13 October, the whole 60th Army defected, its commanders having been in discussion with the Communists about such a move for weeks.83 It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the defection happened the day before General Lin Biao ordered the attack on Jinzhou. Following the fall of Jinzhou, holding out in Changchun became pointless. The Communists treated the surrendered Nationalist commanders well, as an inducement to Nationalist commanders elsewhere to follow suit. The siege also showed that the Communists were prepared to inflict terrible pain on cities that defied them. After Changchun, no city would be defended to the death.

  Following the fall of Jinzhou, General Wei Lihuang favoured recalling to Shenyang the relief force that he had sent south. Its commander, General Liao Yaoxiang, had consistently favoured withdrawal of all forces from Manchuria. He continued to argue that the attempt should be made, not through Jinzhou, of course, but through Yingkou, which was in Communist hands but where their troop numbers were low. On 19 October, a compromise was worked out in Shenyang whereby General Liao Yaoxiang’s forces would attack General Lin Biao’s northerly positions. If these attacks were victorious, the relief force would continue on to Jinzhou; if not, it would head for Yingkou. General Lin Biao first drew Shengyang’s relief force south by pulling back his advance units; he then encircled and annihilated it methodically and thoroughly.84

  With only some 100,000 troops left to defend it, Shenyang was doomed. General Lin Biao’s units raced to the city, reaching it on 29 October, and prepared his assault. The lesson of Changchun was fresh in the minds of the defenders. The one division that refused to surrender was crushed on 2 November.85 The New York Times reported that day: ‘the Communists entered this thriving industrial center this morning, started disarming scattered government troops, and were in full control by 3 p.m.’86

  The Communists had pulled off one of the greatest military feats in Chinese, or even world history. They had outmanoeuvred and out-thought a huge Nationalist force. They had first drawn the Nationalists out over much of Manchuria and then isolated their armies there. They had identified where precisely the critical point was in the Nationalist deployment and, having rapidly transferred a vast number of troops, had attacked it with overwhelming force. Lionel Lamb, whose acting position as Britain’s ambassador to China had now been converted into a permanent one, visited Beijing and Tianjin after the fall of Jinzhou. He concluded that ‘the morale among the civilian population no less than in Central Government armies is at an extremely low ebb … the military, economic, and political collapse of the Central Government is a foregone conclusion.’87

  He was right. Hot on the heels of the Liaoshen disaster came the Huai-Hai Campaign, which lasted from 6 November 1948 until 10 January the following year. This caused the Nationalists even greater losses. By this time, the Nationalists were no longer capable of fighting as a cohesive force or following a cohesive strategy. The enormous resilience that had sustained them during the War of Resistance was dissolving in a sea of economic, political and social problems.

  During the Civil War, the Nationalists relied on the printing press to finance their military effort, as they had during the War of Resistance, with hyper-inflation the result. Twice they attempted to bring the inflationary spiral under control. In February 1947, price caps were imposed on essential commodities such as rice, cotton and fuel, and wages were frozen. The reforms failed because they were only enforced in the Shanghai–Nanjing area, but also because the price cap disincentivised rural producers and prompted, for instance, grain merchants to hoard their stocks. A black market grew up as the food supply situation inevitably worsened, resulting in rice riots. The second anti-inflationary attempt by the Nationalists, in August 1948, involved forcing the public to sell gold, silver and foreign currencies to the government in return for a new paper currency, the Gold Yuan. Prices and wages were again frozen, but once again the reform had to be abandoned after only a few weeks. The introduction of the Gold Yuan became seen as the daylight robbery of urban China of US$ 170 million-worth of gold, silver and hard currency.88

  One consequence of the Nationalists’ fiscal policy and the subsequent deterioration of livin
g standards in the cities was industrial unrest. Before the War of Resistance, strikes were not uncommon in Shanghai, China’s industrial centre, but they were counted in the hundreds. In 1946, 1,716 strikes took place in Shanghai. That figure rose to 2,538 the following year.89 The freezing of salaries, the collapse of the rice market and the advent of hyperinflation hit teachers, college professors, writers, journalists, government employees and students. The value of their salaries and stipends had already been reduced to a fraction of what they had been in 1937; afterwards the situation worsened further. Most people’s salaries were insufficient to pay for even their families’ basic needs. Unsurprisingly, an anti-war movement took hold, which the Nationalists attributed to Communist agents and which led, as we have seen, to harsh suppression measures which only made the Nationalists more unpopular.90

  The Liaoshen and Huai-Hai defeats also caused the Nationalists to disintegrate politically. The re-election of Harry S. Truman to the US presidency in November 1948, which came as a surprise to many people, including in the USA, scotched any hope that a new administration might change course and resume US aid to the Nationalists. In December, pressure on Chiang Kaishek to resign reached a crescendo. In his 1949 New Year’s message, he attempted to take the moral high ground by declaring that he was prepared to restart discussions with the Communists, laying down as his conditions that the constitution would remain in effect, that the government would not be changed, and that the Communists would agree to reject violent means to pursue their goals. This attempt to shift the blame for the Civil War on to the Communists failed. They declared that their conditions for the resumptions of negotiations were ‘(1) The punishment of war criminals; (2) The abolition of the bogus constitution; … (4) The reorganization of all reactionary military forces on the basis of democratic principles; (5) The confiscation of bureaucratic capital [assets held by the government and its officials]; and (6) reform of the land system.’91

  On 8 January, Chiang Kaishek gave in and communicated his decision to resign to Li Zongren, the head of the Guangxi Clique, who formally took over on 21 January, but only as acting president – an arrangement that guaranteed instability as Chiang could resume the presidency at any moment. In addition, Sun Ke, Sun Yatsen’s son and China’s premier at the time, moved the Executive Branch to Canton. Li Zongren may now be acting president, but he had no government.

  Li Zongren declared an end to martial law, released political prisoners, allowed journals and newspapers that had been closed to publish again and reined in the secret police. He also initiated negotiations with the Communists. He declared that he was willing to accept a number of the demands the Communists had made earlier, including the confiscation of bureaucratic capital and the abolition of the constitution, which he suggested should be replaced after negotiations involving both parties. He proposed that both Nationalist and Communist forces would maintain their current positions and begin voluntary troop reductions. The Communist response was to demand the punishment of war criminals, the incorporation of Nationalist forces into the Communist order of command, the cancellation of all treaties and international agreements made by the Nationalists, the replacement of Nationalist government organisations with democratically elected ones, and the nationalisation of all banks, mines, industrial factories, shipping lines and companies. Essentially, they insisted that the Nationalists surrender and that their leadership sign its own death warrant. They set 20 April as the last date for acceptance of their demands.92

  Unsurprisingly, that day came and went, after which the Communists crossed the Yangzi river in force, thus shattering any hope the Nationalists might have had of hanging on to south China. Acting President Li Zongren fled to his home province of Guangxi. A delegation from Canton convinced him to resume his acting presidency in Canton, but the diary of Chen Kewen, who worked closely with Li Zongren during this time, makes clear that Li was thoroughly demoralised and could see no way to restore Nationalist fortunes. In the middle of October 1949, when the Communist forces reached Canton, the Nationalists moved their capital to Chongqing, hoping that Sichuan province might save them again. Not this time. In the middle of November, they had to relinquish Chongqing, and shortly afterwards, on 8 December, they moved their government to Taipei.

  Individual commanders such as General Bai Chongxi and Hu Zongnan still continued to fight, but they were unable to stem the Communist advance. Forces other than those of Lin Biao were involved in rounding them up, including the East China Field Army of Generals Su Yu and Chen Yi, the Central Plains Army of General Liu Bocheng and Political Commissar Deng Xiaoping, General Nie Rongzhen’s army in the Shanxi–Hebei–Chahar Border Region, and the forces of General He Long in Shanxi and Suiyuan provinces.93 But General Lin Biao’s army was the best armed and trained and did most of the work. They marched all the way south, defeating Nationalist forces in the provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Guangdong, including at Canton. The Lin Biao juggernaut only came to a halt after it rolled through Hainan, the large island off the south China coast in the South China Sea. It could go no further.

  In On War, Clausewitz wrote that ‘a swift and vigorous assumption of the offensive – the flashing sword of vengeance – is the most brilliant point in the defensive.’ The Nationalists’ Winter Offensive of 1939–40 had been an attempt to achieve that feat, but it proved a damp squid. Had the War of Resistance lasted longer, General Albert Wedemeyer’s plan to train up and equip a thirty-plus division army might have been completed. The Nationalists might well then have been able to wage a powerful offensive against Japanese positions in China. But that was not to be, with the result that the Communists succeeded where the Nationalists had failed. They wielded the flashing sword of ven geance, crushingly and decisively.

  — FOURTEEN —

  EXHAUSTION

  There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

  Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Fifth century bc)

  As so often in China’s history, events along its borders would have a major impact on the outcome of the Civil War. Chiang Kaishek did not surrender, he just moved to Taiwan, together with the country’s gold and between 1 and 2 million soldiers, officials and citizens, hoping to launch a comeback from this difficult-to-invade island. General Hu Zongnan had retreated with his troops to still-independent Tibet. In Gansu province in north-west China, Muslim forces allied with the Nationalists to resist the Communists. Several thousand Nationalist soldiers withdrew to Burma and Thailand; they, too, did not accept that the Civil War was over. Xinjiang, China’s far west province with a large Muslim population, was far from secure, not just because of Muslim resistance to Communist rule but also because of Soviet penetration. To the south of China, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had begun fighting the French in Vietnam. In Korea, the 38th parallel divided two governments each claiming to rule the whole country. Events in any of these border regions could have triggered a chain reaction leading to a different outcome for China. But it was in Korea that the final act took place, an act that ended with the Communists firmly taking control of mainland China and the Nationalists ensconced on Taiwan.

  As we have seen, at the end of the war against Japan, Soviet and US forces entered Korea and made the 38th parallel the line demarcating their zones of occupation. Instead of granting the country immediate independence, the Allies decided at a conference in Moscow in December 1945 to place Korea under joint Soviet and US trusteeship for a period of five years.1 An attempt in 1946 to establish a single government failed because of Korean opposition and because of the distrust between the USA and the USSR. The Soviets instituted a government in North Korea, with their man in Korea, the 38-year-old Kim Il-sung, as president. Seventy-one-year-old Syngman Rhee, the USA’s counterpart to Kim, was put in charge of the US-sponsored South Korean government.

  Initially Stalin rebuffed Kim Il-sung every time he mooted his desire to launch an offensive to unify Korea by force, but at a meeting held in April 1950, he gave his approval.2 Three d
evelopments led to Stalin’s change of heart. The USA had announced that it regarded neither Korea nor Taiwan as critical to its security, making a US intervention unlikely. The completion of its troop withdrawal programme by July 1949 provided concrete evidence that the USA was serious.3 Secondly, the USA was turning Japan into an anti-Communist bastion in the western Pacific. That stoked the Soviets’ fears about the security of their eastern frontier zone. Finally, South Korea seemed ripe for invasion. In 1946, the Soviet Union had imposed order efficiently in North Korea; by contrast, the US administration in the south was beset by problems ranging from food shortages, strikes and corruption to a serious uprising, the suppression of which came at a cost of 30,000 dead.4 Syngman Rhee’s government lacked a strong popular base because many of its officials came from an elite which had close connections with the Japanese. Finally, the Chinese Civil War was over. Thus, in the spring of 1950, a conjuncture of developments came together to suggest that an invasion of South Korea stood every chance of success.

  When Stalin gave his blessing to Kim Il-sung, he told him that the Soviet Union would not become directly involved in the offensive and that Kim must secure Mao Zedong’s concurrence.5 Before Kim arrived in Beijing for his discussions with Mao Zedong, Stalin informed the latter that, while he personally approved of ‘the proposal of the Koreans to move toward reunification’, the final decision rested with ‘the Chinese and Korean comrades together, and in case of disagreement by the Chinese comrades, the decisions should be postponed’.6 In Beijing, Kim did not ask for any assistance other than the transfer back to Korea of three Korean divisions which had fought with General Lin Biao during the Liaoshen Campaign. Also, Mao Zedong judged that ‘the Americans would not become engaged in a Third World War for such a small territory’.7 With the invasion of South Korea promising the definitive removal of US influence from the Korean peninsula, and the ousting of a hostile South Korean government with links to Chiang Kaishek on Taiwan, and little being asked of the Chinese in the way of support, Mao Zedong readily gave his approval.