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11. Chiang Attacks Warlords and Reds

Chiang Kai-shek recognized the warlords were keeping him from dominating the bulk of China and, though professing friendship at a big conference in January, 1929, set out to destroy them.1

Chiang selected his first target in March, 1929. It was the Guangxi clique, headed by Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi and Li Jishen. Together they controlled much of central and southern China and commanded 230,000 troops, not many fewer than Chiang, though less well-trained and led. Morever, the Guangxi clique counted on the alliance of Feng Yuxiang, the northwest China warlord who commanded 220,000 men and was Chiang's most dangerous rival. But the "Christian general" Feng was an expert at treachery. Chiang offered him a bribe of two-million Chinese dollars and promised to give him control of Shandong province as soon as the Japanese removed their troops. Feng accepted and abandoned the Guangxi clique and its empire quickly collapsed.

A month later, Chiang turned on Feng. He backed out of his pledge and Feng, who had made a career of deceit, was livid that Chiang would deceive him. Feng faced Chiang's army defiantly, only to see 100,000 of his best troops defect after Chiang paid their commanders huge bribes. Chiang turned against the remainder of Feng's army in Henan and drove Feng out of the province by November, 1929.

* * * * * * * * * *

While the battle against Feng was reaching its height, Chiang Kai-shek undertook a bizarre excursion into Red-baiting by charging that the Soviet Union was promoting Communism in Manchuria. He arrested numerous Soviet citizens and took over the Chinese Eastern railway, operated by Russia and China since an agreement in 1924. Chiang apparently believed, since Russia was an outcast, the imperialists would approve. But they were suspicious Chiang might turn on their concessions in China and secretly supported Russia. The Soviet Union invaded northern Manchuria in November, 1929, and quickly penetrated 150 miles into Manchuria, forcing Chiang to back down and restore joint operation of the railway.2

The U.S. meanwhile got on better with Japan. With the forced resignation of Tanaka Giichi as Japanese prime minister, the main opposition leader, Hamaguchi Osachi, formed a cabinet and brought back as foreign minister Shidehara Kijuro, who had led Japan's conciliatory policy with China during the earlier years of the decade. The Hamaguchi ministry pursued a nonaggressive foreign policy, despite opposition from militarists. Hamaguchi agreed, against strong naval opposition, to retain the 5:5:3 capital-ship naval ratio with Britain and the United States when the 1922 Washington conference treaty came up for renewal in 1930. The conferees agreed to extend their treaty through 1936 and, during the period, not to build replacement capital ships, to apply an approximate 5:5:3 ratio to cruisers and destroyers and to limit all three navies to 53,500 metric tons of submarines.3

The conferees gathered in London in January, 1930, less than three months after the New York stock market collapsed. The great economic depression of the 1930s was brought on by the disorder in world capital markets caused by the stock exchange crash, overextended credit by many banks and an abrupt raising of high national tariff walls by major trading nations which sharply reduced international trade. The crisis hit Japan especially hard because its economy was heavily dependent upon trade. The economic disaster intensified the conflict between the peaceful forces represented by Hamaguchi and the aggressive forces represented by the military and ultranationalists. Rapid closures of many foreign markets by higher tariffs and other restrictions called into question the policy of Foreign Minister Shidehara, who held that Japan's interests could best be served by peaceful trade.4

* * * * * * * * * *

While the world was moving into the immense conflicts and disorders of the great depression, the Communist movement inside China was undergoing profound change. The failure of the "autumn-harvest" uprisings in 1927 disproved the Communist leadership's idea that untrained peasants could seize the countryside and then overwhelm the cities. The disastrous failure of the Guangzhou commune in December, 1927, demonstrated that an urban insurrection alone had no chance.

Meanwhile, the Communist movement had largely shrunk to small soviets based in remote rural areas, such as around Ruijin on the Jiangxi-Fujian border where Mao Zedong and Zhu De had moved their surviving soldiers in July, 1928.5 Other soviets sprang up on the Anhui-Hubei-Henan border in the Dabie mountains, along the western Hunan-Hubei border in the region around Hefeng, on the Hunan-Jiangxi border in the vicinity of Tonggu and in a few other locations.

There still remained an urban stream inside the Communist party composed of intellectuals and the "real work" members represented by labor union leaders. This urban influence helped to keep an internationalist tone to the movement that otherwise might have turned into another traditional Chinese peasant rebellion. Because of the blows the party had received in 1927, the Comintern reconstructed the Chinese party and came almost to rule it as a branch. The initial reordering occurred at a party congress outside of Moscow in 1928, followed by the guidance of Pavel Mif, the Comintern agent later sent to China.6 Mif's principal Chinese agent was Li Lisan.

Mao Zedong, however, had developed a plan to win the revolution at odds with the doctrinaire Marxist approach. Mao turned the axiom of the working-class leadership of the revolution upside down.7 The peasant problem, he wrote, was central to the revolution. The greatest enemy was the "feudal-patriarchal class" (the landlords) that extended into every village and exploited the peasants. The warlords were merely chieftains of the landlord class. Mao wrote: "If the peasants do not arise and fight in the villages to overthrow the privileges of the feudal-patriarchal landlord class, the power of the warlords and of imperialism can never be hurled down root and branch."

Now one of the basic axioms of Marxism, going back to Karl Marx himself, was that the peasantry, however important as a revolutionary force, could not play a separate political role and that working-class or urban industrial proletariat leadership was essential. Mao wove into this Marxist doctrine the conviction that the peasants had to revolt as well. And the depressing experience of leading ill-trained peasants in the 1927 autumn-harvest revolts convinced Mao the revolution required a dedicated, disciplined, trained and adequately armed military force. Mao later developed the metaphor that soldiers of the Red army were "fishes" who swam in an "ocean" of mass sympathy and support.

In late 1929, however, the Comintern possessed no vision of a vast revolution welling up from the countryside. The Comintern and Li Lisan felt victory could be attained only by combining the forces of the rural soviets with the city industrial proletariat. In December, 1929, the Comintern and Li Lisan, encouraged by the conflicts between Chiang Kai-shek and the warlords, believed a "tide" of revolution was rising and advanced plans for immediate and widespread revolts. Li Lisan acknowledged that guerrilla warfare in the country was a legitimate part of the effort but he insisted that conventional outbreaks by workers in the cities were more decisive. Li pushed the policy of "the cities leading the villages" and ridiculed "the talk of encircling the cities with the villages." This became known as the "Li Lisan line" and he began to lay plans for a great offensive against a number of cities in the summer of 1930.8

The stage was set for a major conflict between Mao Zedong's concept of how to win the revolution and Li Lisan's. Mao recognized how few troops the Communist movement possessed and he wanted to preserve them, using them as guerrillas to attack vulnerable or exposed targets, then to retreat back to the safe base areas when faced with a superior enemy. Li Lisan saw a different problem. The urban-oriented Comintern had directed Li to revive the shattered labor movement in the cities and Li had to develop a strategy to include the workers. This required him to capture some cities, at almost any cost.9

* * * * * * * * * *

Li Lisan and other Communists had reason to be optimistic, because most of the remaining warlords and Chiang Kai-shek were on the verge of war in 1930. The major warlords allied themselves with Wang Jingwei, who had returned from exile in Europe. Only the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Xueliang, remained uncommitted with his massive army of more than 200,000 men.10

Chiang did not wait for his enemies to combine. In July he struck a northern coalition of Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan and this time he didn't employ the "silver bullets" of bribes. He used real bullets and shells and threw his armies into massive, bloody assaults against the coalition troops. It was war as never before practiced by the warlords, battles to the death in which villages and cities were destroyed by fire and shelling. In four months both sides lost a quarter of a million men in killed and wounded. Since the soldiers received little or no medical care, most of the wounded also died.

The rebel government soon fled from Beiping to Yan's Shanxi provincial capital of Taiyuan. To keep Zhang Xueling quiescent, Chiang bribed him with ten-million Chinese dollars (about a third the value in American dollars) and a promise to administer all of China north of the Yellow river. Thus Chiang gained little from his victory. North China still remained outside his control.

* * * * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist party politburo had ordered the poorly equipped Red forces in central China to attack the cities of Changsha, Nanchang, Jiujiang and a few others before massing against Wuhan on the Yangzi river. Li Lisan dismissed any thought of relying on the Red army alone for victory. The key, he felt, lay in revolts of workers. According to Li's vision, the workers would start strikes and armed insurrections while the army marched on the cities. Yet the concept was foolhardy. In the huge city of Wuhan, for example, the party had only two hundred members and there were only a hundred and fifty in Red unions. The situation was worse elsewhere. The mass base for a successful urban revolution was simply not present.11

Mao didn't want to disperse the few Red army troops to take distant cities. He wanted to expand the rural soviets in a methodical movement outward, capturing counties, then whole provinces.

Li Lisan and the party central overruled Mao and he reluctantly moved against Nanchang in late July, 1930, with the Red commander, Zhu De, while Peng Dehuai attacked Changsha. Kuomintang forces repulsed both attacks and the expected rising of the workers in the cities did not occur. Risings in the other cities Li Lisan had marked out for capture amounted to little and the feeble attacks against them by Red army troops failed. However, the combined forces of Mao, Zhu and Peng Dehuai now concentrated against Changsha and on July 28 they captured the city. The poorly armed Red soldiers found it easier to seize Changsha than to hold it. Heavily armed Kuomintang forces converged on the city, now the only point in revolt, and forced the Reds to withdraw after only ten days.12 After the Red forces retreated, KMT troops arrested members of Mao Zedong's family and executed his wife, Yang Kaihui, as they had earlier killed a younger cousin, Mao Zejian, who lived in the Mao family home.13

The great surge to capture Chinese cities had failed miserably. Li Lisan and the Comintern policy were thoroughly discredited. But the Comintern was uninterested in shouldering the blame. It directed Zhou Enlai, Qu Qiubai and Pavel Mif to investigate and hopefully to lay the responsibility on Li. The inquisitors, however, found Li guilty of only minor errors. The Comintern took the matter into its own hands and summoned Li and Qu Qiubai to Moscow. There Li maintained Moscow didn't know the conditions existing in China and was in no position to advise the Chinese Communists. This was, of course, true, but an impolitic thing to say. The Comintern predictably found Li guilty of "extreme localism." The Comintern kept him in Moscow for reeducation.14

The leadership of the CCP now fell into the hands of the so-called "28 Bolsheviks." The Comintern, through Pavel Mif, pushed these "returned students" forward. They were all young with no revolutionary experience and had studied 1926-30 at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. There they had been indoctrinated with orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology. To the Comintern their great virtue was that they could be relied upon to follow the Kremlin's line, whichever way it might turn. The two leaders of the 28 Bolsheviks were Chen Shaoyu who went by the pseudonym Wang Ming, and Qin Bangxian whose cover name was Bo Gu. Both were only 24 years old and came, not from the worker or peasant classes, but from the Chinese gentry.15

At this time Mao Zedong fought his first major internal battle against opponents within his own party. He won but the harshness he exhibited aroused criticism. The cause was a conflict over control within the rural soviets between remaining followers of Li Lisan and Mao. Mao probably saw in Li's downfall the opportunity to consolidate his control over operations in Jiangxi. He claimed to have discovered in October, 1930, evidence of counterrevolutionaries and "determined followers of Li Lisan" in the Red army and proceeded to arrest 4,400 persons. On December 8, 1930, a political commissar led several hundred followers at Tonggu into a rebellion against Mao's authority and killed several dozen Maoist soldiers. The rebels freed a number of leaders Mao had jailed and fled west across the Gan river. Mao pursued them, rounded up the survivors and reportedly executed a large number. Estimates ranged from 800 to 4,400. The party central finally approved Mao's actions but concluded Mao had overreacted. But Mao demonstrated he could be merciless in routing out opponents to his authority.16

Chiang Kai-shek followed up the defeat of the Red soldiers in Changsha with the first of his "extermination campaigns" or "bandit-suppression" drives to end the Communist threat once and for all. Chiang sent twelve warlord divisions totaling about 100,000 men against the Reds. Mao Zedong and Zhu De could assemble only about 40,000 Communist soldiers and these were far less well-armed.17

The campaign was fought in southern Jiangxi largely east of the Gan Jiang and west of the central soviet in the Wuyi mountains on the Jiangxi-Fujian border. Much of the action revolved around the towns of Fudian and Tonggu, some 20 miles southeast of Ji'an on the Gan river and 40 miles northwest of Ningdu.

In these engagements Mao Zedong demonstrated his mastery of guerrilla warfare and the principles of the famous Chinese military strategist, Sun Zi, who lived sometime around the fifth century B.C. Mao's policy was to move rapidly and secretly, mostly at night, to attack only when he could achieve local superiority and then swiftly to disperse. Mao used peasants and others to spy out the Nationalists' intentions and he practiced deception whenever possible. Thus, Mao would fight only when he could assemble overwhelming strength against only a fraction of the enemy's strength.18

In the first extermination campaign, beginning in December, 1930, the Nationalists encircled the Red areas and penetrated into it by five routes.19 Mao and Zhu De lured the Nationalists deep into territory of the soviet or into friendly areas and there encircled and attacked isolated KMT units one by one with superior Red forces. Thus, at numerous local points they reversed the general strategic advantage enjoyed by the Nationalists. The campaign petered out in early January, 1931, in a defeat for the Nationalists.

Although the Chinese Communists were alive but weak, Chiang Kai-shek also was suffering reverses. The remaining warlords decided to unite to prevent Chiang from destroying them. The precipitating event was Chiang's arbitrary arrest of the left-wing KMT leader, Hu Hanmin. In February, 1931, Chiang announced he was going to issue a provisional constitution guaranteeing the lives and property of the people. Hu Hanmin opposed it for fear Chiang would use a proclaimed constitution to perpetuate himself in power. Chiang arrested Hu because, he said, "it is the only way that his glorious past may be preserved intact."20

The Guangxi clique and a mixed group of Chiang's rivals, including the leftist Wang Jingwei, Western Hills right-wingers and Sun Yat-sen's son, Sun Ke,21 established a rival Nationalist government in Guangzhou in June, 1931. The power, however, rested with the warlords, especially Chen Jitang, who had taken over as the Guangdong warlord.

While Chiang was trying to counter this political threat within the Kuomintang, he launched another, but bigger, attack against the Reds. He placed General He Yingqin in command of the second "bandit-suppression" campaign and doubled the number of warlord troops to 200,000. Available Red forces meanwhile had declined to 30,000. However, He Yingqin repeated the same tactics of the first campaign, moving ponderously into the Red areas by seven routes. Mao repeated the tactics of the first campaign.22 By the end of May, 1931, the Communist forces had won again and had captured 20,000 KMT rifles.

Chiang Kai-shek finally realized he was dealing with a tough and wily enemy. For the third extermination campaign, begun July 1, 1931, Chiang set up his own headquarters in Ji'an, brought in 100,000 of his own best government troops and assigned 200,000 warlord troops to support roles. Chiang had every reason to believe his troops would make short work of the ill-equipped Red peasant forces. Ever since November, 1927, shortly after the KMT's association with the Soviet Union collapsed, Chiang had employed a group of German army advisors, who, by 1931, had greatly improved the training of Chiang's soldiers and given Chiang confidence his government forces could rapidly eradicate Communism.23 The German officers, however, were experts in stand-up fights between European field armies. The semiguerrilla warfare Mao Zedong was perfecting called for different tactics and training. Although the German skill produced a better soldier than the usual warlord product, the orthodox German tactics and strategy gave the Red army many opportunties to strike back with inferior forces.

Chiang's plan was orthodox in the extreme: he decided to "drive straight in," taking the soviet areas by storm. He moved eight separate columns in fast marches of over twenty miles a day into the heart of the soviet territory. Chiang hoped to squeeze the Reds into a corner and force them to stand and fight. In such a "set-piece" battle Chiang's superior artillery, machine guns and aircraft would destroy the ill-equipped Communists. The Reds, however, had no intention of fighting Chiang's kind of war. The Red forces, still about 30,000 men, were exhausted after the second campaign and were resting in the Wuyi mountains when the attack commenced. To get in position, Mao and Zhu ordered the army to move by forced marches to an assembly point at Xingguo, about thirty-five miles northwest of Ruijin.

Mao's original plan was to march northwest to Wan'an on the Gan river, drive north down the east bank to Fudian and then sweep eastward across the Nationalists' rear, striking at isolated units. But when the Red army reached Fudian, KMT units detected them and Chiang Kai-shek rushed two divisions to the scene. To avoid being trapped, the Red army fell back south of Wan'an.

Mao and Zhu decided to move northeast through cover of night, slip through a thirteen-mile gap between two groups of KMT forces and drive to Huangpi, about thirty-five miles east of Wan'an. This again would put the Reds into the rear of the Nationalist forces. But it was dangerous, because it would give the separated Kuomintang troops an opportunity to concentrate against them. The Communists got clean through the KMT forces without being detected and, on each of two successive days, sent a KMT division reeling backward.

The Red army now moved to Huangpi and there struck a KMT division moving southward. The Reds again defeated the Nationalists but Chiang ordered all KMT forces to close on Huangpi at furious speed to seek a battle of annihilation. Mao's and Zhu De's peasant spy network gave them word of the movement and they realized their entire army lay in peril. The KMT forces, though bruised, remained overwhelmingly superior. Mao's dictum never to stand up against a stronger foe required the Reds to retreat at all speed. They found a seven-mile gap in high mountains between KMT forces west of them and slipped through it to reassemble near Xingguo. There they collapsed in exhaustion. It took several days for the KMT forces to discover that the quarry had fled. Weary, hungry and demoralized, the Kuomintang forces moved out of the soviet areas to reorganize in late September, 1931.

The reason for Chiang Kai-shek's retreat was not the Red army but far more disturbing news of developments in Manchuria. And what was happening there changed the history of China and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the few remaining Communists in the cities and the Chinese Communist party headquarters in Shanghai had been under intense pressure by KMT police. In the spring KMT police seized the CCP secret-service chief in Hankow (Wuhan) and forced him to divulge names. This led to the capture and execution of the party's nominal secretary-general, Xiang Zhongfa, on June 24, 1931. These and other pressures convinced the CCP party headquarters, with a number of its 28 Bolsheviks, to move in late summer or early fall 1931 to the relative security of the Jiangxi central soviet in the Wuyi mountains. Wang Ming, one the 28 Bolsheviks, however, returned to Moscow to serve as a leading Cominern expert on colonial matters. The arrival of the CCP central leadership, including Zhou Enlai, brought into focus the conflict between Mao and the politburo over the proper strategy to achieve the revolution.24

At a party conference the "returned students" and Zhou Enlai condemned Mao for failure to adopt a strong "class and mass line," for his guerrilla tactics and for allowing rich peasants to keep land. The conference called for adoption of regular warfare in place of guerrilla tactics, expansion of the Red army and use of proletarian leaders. The CCP leadership, therefore, exhibited a doctrinaire devotion to orthodox Marxist-Leninist thinking, however inappropriate for Chinese conditions and attacked Mao Zedong for his very success.

At the first all-China soviet congress which opened November 7, 1931, at Ruijin, the CCP leadership intended to reduce Mao's position substantially. However, Maoists dominated among the delegates and, when they proclaimed the Chinese Soviet republic, they outmaneuvered the 28 Bolsheviks and elected Mao president and chairman of the republic's central executive committee. The 28 Bolsheviks, however, kept their iron control of the party apparatus and politburo.

The doctrinaire Communists now running the CCP wanted to follow the strategy the Russian Communists had employed in defeating the White forces after the Russian revolution. The Soviets had practiced conventional open warfare using large armies in stand-up fights with White forces. However, the Soviet forces were generally superior to the White armies and had behind them the strength of Russian industry and population.

Since Red forces and potential strength in China were inherently weaker than those the KMT could bring to bear, Mao Zedong held to a strategy of luring enemies into barren evacuated areas and ambushing them.25 Mao had many battles to fight before the revolution could succeed. And his toughest was against his own Communist party.

Chapter 12: Japan Begins the March to Disaster >>

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