Revolution and Civil War, episode 16

Kidnapped at Xi'an

By 1936 Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal who lost Manchuria, commands the troops Chiang Kai-shek has sent to finish the Communists in the northwest, and he and his men would rather fight Japan. The episode follows Zhang and Chiang from the student marches of December 1935 and Moscow's call for a united front, through the American journalist Edgar Snow's months with Mao Zedong in the Communist base, to the dawn of 12 December 1936, when Zhang's troops seize Chiang at a hot spring outside Xi'an, and the two weeks of bargaining, with Mao wanting a trial and Stalin wanting Chiang alive, that end with Chiang freed and Zhang under arrest for more than fifty years. It leans entirely on scholars, with a little Chinese public voice from the students.

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Transcript

Last time, the Red Army walked out of its ruined state in Jiangxi and kept walking, a year and more than six thousand miles, until in October 1935 Mao Zedong stood in the hills of northern Shaanxi and announced that the Long March was over. Of the eighty-six thousand who had set out, about eight thousand were left. On the way, Mao had beaten the men who sidelined him, and Zhou Enlai, the party's most cautious survivor, had come over to his side. And Chiang Kai-shek still meant to finish them. This time, he will get his chance. And the men he sends to do it will turn their guns on him instead. This is the story of how the leader of China was kidnapped, and of the young warlord who did it. But it begins far from China, in Moscow, a few months before the march ended, with a change of mind. In Europe the dictators were on the move. Mussolini, dreaming of a new Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia, and Hitler tore up the limits the Treaty of Versailles had placed on German arms. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin watched with alarm. The Soviet Union had been weakened by purges and mass starvation, and it was in no shape to fight Germany in the west or Japan in the east. So in the summer of 1935, Stalin sharply changed course. Communists around the world were told to stop trying to overthrow the ruling classes, and to make common front with them instead: against fascism in the West, and against Japan in the East. On the first of August 1935, the Soviet Union and the Comintern declared a worldwide front against fascism. The Comintern was the organization in Moscow that directed Communist parties around the world, the Chinese party included. Stalin was not giving up on world revolution. He was simply gathering as many allies as he could. The decisions were taken at a great congress of the Comintern in Moscow, and on the first of August, at that congress, a Chinese Communist spoke for his party. His name was Wang Ming. He was one of the young men the Moscow office of the International had pushed to the top of the Chinese party, and since 1931 he had headed its delegation in Moscow. He was the party's man in Moscow, and he had not been on the Long March. Speaking in the name of the Chinese Soviet Republic and the party's Central Committee, Wang Ming published a declaration calling on his countrymen to stop fighting one another and unite against Japan. All his countrymen, that is, but a few. Chiang Kai-shek and his cabinet were left out. That would not last. Moscow's line was that the Chinese Communists would have to give up opposing Chiang altogether, and back him. For the Communists, it was galling to embrace the man who had turned on them without warning a decade earlier. And Chiang understood what it meant for him. A war with Japan was now likely, and if it came he would need Soviet help. His hope of finally crushing the Communists might be slipping away. Mao, meanwhile, knew none of this. He had no radio link with Moscow, and he was working out his own line on his own. He was already speaking more and more as a patriot. Only by giving voice to anger against Japan, he saw, could the Communists win wide support, and for now it suited him to tone down the talk of class war. At the end of 1935 he softened the party's program. The fields of rich peasants were no longer to be seized, businessmen would be encouraged, and it became easier to join the party. Moscow, for its part, was already warming to him. It knew about Zunyi from a delegate who had reached Moscow, and it approved. By September 1935, the International had begun to build a true cult of Mao's personality. Stalin himself was slower to warm. When the Communists reappeared in the northwest, he seems at first to have written them off as peasant bandits. In the spring of 1936 they sent an expedition east across Shanxi to take on the Japanese. It failed, but to many Chinese it seemed to prove that the Communists had to be taken seriously. More and more Chinese, in neither party, were calling for the two to make common cause against Japan. The two lines, Moscow's and Mao's, were heading the same way. They would not stay in step for long.

Now to Chiang Kai-shek, and to the north. Through 1935, Japan pushed deeper into north China. Its plan was to turn whole provinces into so-called autonomous zones, small puppet regimes under Chinese generals of Japan's choosing. In November, eastern Hebei was placed under a body calling itself the Anti-Communist Self-Government Council. Chiang let it happen. He did not recognize these new regimes, but he accepted them, and in effect China north of the Huai River, Beijing included, was slipping under Japanese control. Beijing was no longer the capital. The government sat in Nanjing, and the old capital was now above all a city of universities. On the ninth of December 1935, thousands of students took to the streets of Beijing. It was freezing. The police turned fire hoses on them, beat them, and arrested a number of the marchers. It was the start of what became the December Ninth movement. Within a couple of weeks, students were marching in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan and other cities. A wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations rolled across the country. The students appealed to every citizen, even the police, in the name of patriotism. But from the start, their anger was aimed at their own government as much as at Japan. And Chiang's people fought back for the streets. In some cities, Blue Shirt activists took control of the demonstrations and turned them into rallies of loyalty to the Nationalist leadership. The Blue Shirts were a secret society of officers sworn to Chiang. But Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai saw real confrontations. Four years earlier, when Japan took Manchuria, the student protests had failed to change Nanjing's policy. This time was different. The December Ninth movement fed a growing national impatience with appeasing Japan. Even in Chiang's own army, men were grumbling about his policy toward Japan. And something else was born in those protests. The students and their teachers opened a new political space between the Nationalists and the Communists, a democratic, anti-Japanese centre for people who trusted neither party. It was never broad or comfortable. In the war years to come it would be called the Third Force. Chiang's answer did not change. In January 1936 he defended his foreign policy to students and teachers. He was not afraid of Japan, he told them, but China was not yet strong enough to go to war with it. It was an answer that gave the Chinese people little satisfaction. It was not an empty one. His army's new weapons were scheduled to arrive over the next three or four years, and they could have made a critical difference in a war with Japan. And no help was coming from outside. The Western democracies did not yet see China's fate as tied to their own, and offered no hope of real support. In Tokyo, meanwhile, a band of young officers tried to seize the government in February 1936. They murdered the finance minister, and the prime minister escaped only because they killed his brother-in-law by mistake. The coup failed, but its cause had friends in high places, and the new government in Tokyo set out to show a strong hand in China. Japan's generals were thinking beyond China. "Japan is destined sooner or later to clash with the Soviet Union," the chief of staff of its army in Manchuria told the foreign minister, "and the attitude of China at that time will gravely influence operations." Its demands on China now included joint defence against Communism. Chiang realized that he could no longer appease Japan. The war would have to come soon. War, he said, "cannot be avoided." He was building for it. A new German adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen, reckoned that China needed two more years to reach his goal of sixty well trained, modern divisions. German coastal guns, submarines and warships were not due until 1938, and the German air force was training China's pilots. By 1939, if all went to plan, they would be flying Messerschmitts and Stukas. And at home, Chiang's government was stronger than any central government China had known since the Taiping rising. That spring he had quickly put down yet another revolt by the generals of Guangxi and Guangdong. The Taiping rising was the vast civil war that tore through southern and central China in the eighteen fifties and early sixties. He was talking to Moscow too. Through an envoy, he held talks with the Soviet ambassador on joint efforts to help China resist Japan. Then Stalin signed a mutual defence treaty with the Mongolian People's Republic, a Soviet puppet whose independence China had never recognized, and Chiang put the talks on hold. Stalin answered in his own way. He had Pravda publish a letter from Chiang's son to his mother, which once again denounced his father as the enemy of the whole people. But first, he still meant to finish the Communists. And for that, he was counting on one man. His name was Zhang Xueliang, and everyone called him the Young Marshal. In 1936 he was just thirty-five, and it was his youth that gave him the name. His father, Zhang Zuolin, had been the old marshal, the warlord who ruled Manchuria. In 1928 Japanese agents killed his father. In 1931 Japan's army in Manchuria, after staging the Mukden Incident, took everything the Young Marshal had inherited and drove him out. He was good-looking, with dark hair and a bristling moustache. He adored nightclubs, danced beautifully, courted women elegantly, and was worth some fifty million dollars. He had flirted with fascism. He hoped Mussolini might help him, and he had an affair with Mussolini's daughter. In Europe he met Hitler and Goering, and got nothing from them. He came away still believing that only an iron dictatorship like Mussolini's could rescue China. He even asked the Soviet foreign minister to arrange a trip to Moscow. Stalin, not wanting trouble with Japan, turned him down. By January 1934 he was home again, cured of opium and knowing that no help would come from abroad. Now he commanded the Northeast Army, about two hundred thousand men, with its headquarters at Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province. His soldiers were Manchurians, far from home, and their commander had a special score to settle with Japan. Chiang had given them a different job: to attack the Communists in the hills to the north. They did not do it well. When Chiang ordered the Young Marshal and his ally, the Shaanxi general Yang Hucheng, to attack, it went badly, with thousands of men reported killed and missing. Zhang and his troops really wanted only one thing, to go home to Manchuria. And that made him open to the Communists. Mao had seen it. In late November 1935 he sent a proposal for a truce and joint action against Japan to an officer in one of the Nationalist armies in Shaanxi. It was a gesture aimed at the Young Marshal. Zhou Enlai sent word through a captured officer that he wanted to talk. In February 1936 Zhang met Communist envoys in secret in Xi'an, and in April he sat down with Zhou Enlai himself. They met in an abandoned Catholic church in the town of Yan'an. Zhou lavished praise on him. And the Young Marshal told the polished, learned Zhou that he was one of the people he most admired in all of modern Chinese history. The talks ended with Zhang agreeing to stop fighting the Communists, and even to help supply them with weapons. The Young Marshal did not need much persuading. In fact he took the lead. Chiang's appeasement of Japan, he insisted, had destroyed his right to lead the nation, and there could be no uniting with him. He proposed a new government for the northwest to fight Japan, made up of the Communist armies and other patriotic forces, with a rallying cry: unite with Zhang, oppose Chiang, resist Japan. He suggested that he himself should head it. Zhou quickly agreed. It was not only patriotism. Ambition drove him as well. He even told the Communists that he wanted to join their party. Mao by now had been told that Moscow wanted a united front with Chiang, not against him. He went along with the Young Marshal's plan anyway, thinking his hunger for heroism could be put to use and that Moscow would come round in time. He did not tell the Comintern for four months. Inside the Northeast Army, Zhou's propaganda teams were busy, and the Young Marshal even let the Communists set up a leftist society for resistance against Japan among his officers.

There was another visitor that summer, and he came from much further away. In June 1936 a Nationalist division, on Chiang's orders, attacked the Communists' capital at Wayaobao and drove Mao and the leadership more than ninety miles west to Bao'an. Bao'an was a tiny, half-abandoned town of four hundred people, with almost all its houses in ruins. On the thirteenth of July 1936, two days after Mao himself set up camp there, an American journalist arrived. His name was Edgar Snow. Snow was thirty-one, already well known, writing for some of the biggest papers and magazines in America. He was deeply sympathetic to the Chinese Communists, though he was no Marxist, and he had a name for being independent minded. That reputation was exactly why the party's leaders wanted him. They meant to use him to improve their image. Snow had his own reasons. He was an ambitious journalist with a nose for the big story, and this was a sensational scoop. Each man meant to use the other. Mao agreed to a series of interviews. In the first, on the fifteenth of July, he left Snow in no doubt about the party's line. "The fundamental issue before the Chinese people today is the struggle against Japanese imperialism." Then, over long nights, Mao told Snow the story of his life, and Snow wrote it down in his notebook by candlelight in the cave where they met. He began with his childhood on a farm in Hunan, and his father, a hard, thrifty man who had worked his way up to become what Mao called a rich peasant. He was born in 1893, and he was working in the fields by the age of six. His father beat his sons when they dared to contradict him. "I'll kill you," he once shouted at Mao, calling him a mongrel who respected no rules. His father gave his children no money and the meanest food, Mao said. "To me he gave neither eggs nor meat." And laughing, he described the family in the language of politics. "One was my father, the Ruling Power. The Opposition was made up of myself, my mother, my brother, and sometimes even the laborer." His mother, he said, favoured a policy of indirect attack, and disapproved of open rebellion against the Ruling Power. It was not the Chinese way. Mao chose open rebellion, quarrelling with his father even in front of others. Of his father, he told Snow: "I learned to hate him." At eighteen, in 1911, Mao ran away to join the revolutionary army against the Qing dynasty. He went on to take part in founding the Communist Party, and worked as a propagandist for Sun Yat-sen's government in Guangzhou. What did Snow make of him? He found him plain-speaking and plain-living, with the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, a lively sense of humour and a love of rustic laughter. Some people, Snow wrote, might have thought him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined a curious naivety with incisive wit and worldly sophistication. But Snow noticed something more. "Something about him," he thought, "suggested a power of ruthless decision when he deemed it necessary." And what Mao wanted was nothing less than a complete overturning of heaven and earth, a social revolution as well as a political one. "I never saw him angry," Snow wrote, "but I heard from others that on occasions he had been roused to an intense and withering fury." Snow came away seeing Mao as a wise philosopher king, easygoing and self-confident. "He certainly believed in his own star and destiny to rule," he remembered. He was less a critical reporter in that cave than Mao's secretary, taking down a monologue. He spent four months with the Communists. The book he wrote from those notes, published a year later, created a sensation among liberals and leftists in the West, and gave them a romantic revolutionary to set against an ever more authoritarian Chiang. The party had chosen its journalist well.

Mao had reason to feel hopeful that summer. The Red Army had grown to twenty-five thousand men, and the courtship of the Young Marshal was going so well that the leaders thought of secretly letting him into the party. And at the end of June, the radio link with Moscow was restored. In his very first telegram, Mao asked Stalin to raise his aid to two million Mexican dollars a month, and to send airplanes, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns. He also reported, for the first time, his secret agreement with the Young Marshal: a Northwestern Government of National Defense, with Zhang Xueliang as its chairman and commander of an anti-Japanese army. The Young Marshal's army depended on two million yuan a month from Nanjing, Mao explained, and that would stop the moment he broke with Chiang. So could Moscow send three million a month, to pay the Red Army and the Manchurians alike? He promised an offensive within two months, aimed at the liquidation of Chiang Kai-shek's forces in the northwest. Stalin was appalled. If Chiang were seriously threatened by a Communist-led coalition of warlords, he would suspect that the Soviet Union was secretly behind it. And that sense of betrayal would open all sorts of doors for Japan, including a common front with some of the conservative, strongly anti-Communist men in Chiang's party. Stalin had another reason to worry. Since 1934 his secret police and military intelligence had been sending him reports of a likely Japanese attack on the Soviet Union. In mid-August he sent a curt message, and it rejected Mao's approach completely. "We think it is incorrect to place Chiang Kai-shek on the same level as the Japanese aggressors," he wrote. Japan was the main enemy, and everything had to be subordinated to the struggle against it. He told Mao to offer Chiang and his party talks at once, on ending the fighting and on a common struggle against Japan. And about the Young Marshal, Stalin was blunt. Zhang Xueliang "must not be viewed as a reliable ally," he declared. Even outright betrayal was possible. Zhang wanted to join the party. Stalin forbade it. The whole idea of a front of Communists and warlords against Chiang sank out of sight. Mao did not argue. He raised no objection to Stalin, and ten days later he dutifully sent a letter to the Nationalists' Central Executive Committee proposing an end to the civil war and the start of negotiations. He dropped the party's slogans against Chiang, and his letter even congratulated Chiang on his progressiveness. He told his own comrades that the core of the party's policy was now to work with Chiang to resist Japan. And Mao got his aid. Stalin sent two million rubles, and in the months that followed half a million American dollars and more than a thousand tons of fuel and military supplies. Chiang read Mao's new admiration for what he thought it was: the bandit leader was cornered, and had nowhere left to go. The Soviet envoy in China reported that Chiang would agree to an alliance with the Communists only on the eve of war with Japan, and only together with a pact with the Soviet Union. Chiang had a hard sum to do. Was it worth crushing the Communists if it shut the door on the only possible source of arms for the war with Japan, especially when Mao, facing defeat, could simply escape into Russia or Mongolia? For now, he prepared a sixth campaign. He knew the Young Marshal was talking to the Communists, and he warned him again and again that they could not be trusted. It did no good. Talks between the two parties went on through the summer and autumn, in secret, with Zhou Enlai leading for the Communists. In public, Chiang declared that the Communists were nearly beaten and that he had no need to deal with them. Yet Mao went on talking in secret with the Young Marshal about a coalition against Chiang, and let him believe that everything was on track. On the tenth of October 1936, China's national day, Chiang spoke to a huge crowd in Nanjing. The last Communists, he declared, were penned in a few scattered regions and could be wiped out without much difficulty. "At present, communism is no longer a real menace to China." Then he stood and saluted as his troops marched past in goose step, followed by row after row of powerful German weapons. On the thirty-first of October he turned fifty. He was at Luoyang, his headquarters for the final campaign against Mao, and his wife flew in with two large cakes. In the morning, twenty thousand people gathered at the Luoyang Military Academy to pay their respects, a twenty-one-gun salute roared, and the crowd bowed three times in unison. After the party, Chiang met the Young Marshal in private. Zhang had written to him calling for a united front against Japan, and Chiang was angry. In his stern lecturing manner, he warned that anyone who talked of resisting Japan before finishing off the Communists was "an enemy of the state." Later, Chiang wondered why he had used such strong words. By Zhang's own later account, it was that meeting that hardened his resolve. Back in Xi'an he told General Yang about it, and Yang reached for an old proverb: "One should have the emperor in one's hand and then order the nobles about in his name." In early November, the Young Marshal told Mao's secret liaison officer in Xi'an that he meant to stage a coup. When the message reached Mao, he replied, by one later account, simply: "a masterpiece." On the twenty-fourth of November Zhang sent word that the situation in Shaanxi was tense and asked to report in person. Chiang wrote in his diary that Zhang did not have the strength of will "to endure the last five minutes" of the civil war. The last five minutes. That was how close Chiang thought he was to finishing the Communists. In early December the Young Marshal came and told him that the troops in Shaanxi were close to mutiny. The two men quarreled for more than an hour. If the Nationalists stopped the civil war now to fight Japan, Chiang warned, they would end up losing the leadership of the nation to the Communists. Zhang urged him to come to Xi'an and talk to the officers and men face to face. And Chiang agreed. H. H. Kung warned him that the trip was too dangerous. That only made him more determined to go. He had walked into his enemies' country before, and always come back with a name for fearlessness. Kung was Chiang's finance minister, and married to his wife's eldest sister. Here is the twist. While Chiang flew to Xi'an, Zhou Enlai was secretly in Nanjing with Chiang's negotiators, and they had nearly reached a deal. The Communists agreed to drop the name of the Red Army, to put their forces under the government's military council, and to stop seizing landlords' land. Their army, under a new name, could number thirty thousand men. The two sides drafted a joint proclamation of a united front, waiting only for Chiang's and Mao's approval. By early December they had agreed in principle, by word of mouth, though nothing was yet in writing. And nobody told the Young Marshal. If Chiang had told him, it might have stopped his plans. Chiang was a secretive man who expected obedience without explanation. He would likely say nothing until the deal was signed and a military pact with Moscow was settled, and he would not want to sap what little will his troops in Shaanxi had to fight.

On the fourth of December 1936, Chiang flew from his headquarters at Luoyang to Xi'an. He lodged outside the city at the hot springs of Huaqingchi, in the ancient residence of the Tang emperor Xuanzong, whose beautiful and ambitious concubine, Yang Guifei, had loved to bathe in its waters. The Tang dynasty ruled China from the seventh century to the tenth, from a capital on the site of modern Xi'an. Chiang settled into a gloomy one-storey pavilion in a corner of the park. There he met the Young Marshal and General Yang. Zhang argued for uniting with the Communists against Japan. Chiang argued that destroying the Communists was the key to resisting Japan. They reached a dead end. To the senior officers of the Northeast and Shaanxi armies, he said what he had said to Zhang: only the last five minutes remained of the long campaign against the bandits. On Wednesday the ninth of December, a light snow began to fall on Xi'an. It was the first anniversary of the December Ninth movement, and more than ten thousand students in Xi'an marched to demand an end to the civil war and a united front against Japan. Some of them set out along the road to the town of Lintong, near Chiang's lodgings, to confront him. Police met them and opened fire, and two students were wounded. By a twist of fate, the two wounded students were the children of an officer of the Northeast Army. The Young Marshal rushed to the scene and told the students he would speak for them to the commander in chief. When he reached Chiang and told him what had happened, Chiang was furious. "Which side of earth are you from?" Chiang asked him. According to the Young Marshal, Chiang said he did not fear the students, and shouted: "Let them come and I can use a machine gun to kill them." If he said it, it shook Zhang, who was already under the strain of what he was planning. He went into the bathroom to compose himself. Two days later, at ten o'clock on the night of Friday the eleventh of December, Zhang Xueliang ordered the top officers of the Northeast Army to arrest Chiang Kai-shek. At five in the morning on the twelfth of December, a detachment of two hundred men attacked Chiang's lodgings. They were led by the commander of the Young Marshal's personal guard, a twenty-eight-year-old captain named Sun Mingjiu. Inside, Chiang heard the shots. An officer burst in to report that soldiers in fur caps, the headgear of the Manchurian army, were attacking. Chiang jumped out of his bedroom window in his nightclothes and ran up the bare hill behind. He scrambled over a high wall, fell, hurt his back, and hid in a narrow crevice in the snow-covered hills. He was found two hours later, barefoot, in a robe thrown over his nightshirt, shivering terribly and at first unable to speak. In his haste, he had left his false teeth behind. The captain addressed him by the book, as military regulations required. At last, with some difficulty, Chiang spoke: "If you are my comrades, shoot me now and finish it all." "We will not shoot!" Sun replied. "We only ask you to lead our country against Japan. Then we shall be the first to cheer our generalissimo." Chiang had been generalissimo, commander of all China's armed forces, since 1928. Chiang asked for a horse to ride down the mountain. "There is no horse here," said Sun, "but I will carry you down the mountain on my back." And he knelt. Taking his time, the generalissimo climbed onto the captain's broad back. At the car, the argument went on. Sun told him that the past was the past, and that from now on China needed a new policy. "I am the leader of the Chinese people," Chiang burst out. "I represent the nation. I think that my policy is right, not wrong." The captain was not cowed. Resisting Japan was the demand of the whole nation, he said. "How can you claim to represent them when you do not carry out their demands?" "I am a revolutionary," Chiang said, and that ended it. He was always ready to sacrifice himself, and even as a prisoner, "my spirit will never submit to another's."

They brought him into Xi'an and held him in a government office, guarded by General Yang's men. After a while, the Young Marshal came into the room, stood at attention, and addressed him as commander in chief. "Do you still call me Commander?" Chiang demanded. If Zhang still saw him as his superior he should send him back to Luoyang; if not, he was a rebel, and had better shoot him. "Your bad temper is always the cause of trouble," Zhang replied. He apologized for the inconvenience, and then made his demand again: stop the war on the Communists, and lead the whole nation in resisting Japan. The governor of Shaanxi, who had ordered the student march broken up, was arrested too, with more than ten of Chiang's entourage. Zhang and Yang telegraphed Nanjing. They had tried with tears in their eyes to explain themselves to the generalissimo, they said, and been repeatedly scolded. They set out eight demands, among them a government of national salvation, an immediate end to the civil war, and the release of political prisoners. On the twelfth of December, China woke to extraordinary news: Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped. Nanjing was left without a head. The party's leaders met in emergency session that same day and resolved to crush the mutiny by force. They put H. H. Kung in charge of the government, and the war minister, He Yingqin, a man devoted to Chiang body and soul, in command of the troops. He Yingqin began preparing an expedition against Xi'an. He threatened to attack the city to rescue the generalissimo, and Nationalist planes were already bombing towns in Shaanxi. Central Army troops began to move toward Xi'an, and planes bombed the railway that climbed through the mountains to the city. He Yingqin also wired Wang Jingwei, Chiang's old rival, who was in Europe, to come home at once. Kung went on the radio to say there could be no dealings with armed rebellion, and no truce with the Communist bandits. Across most of China, people's sympathy was with Chiang. The way most saw it, two ambitious warlords were crushing the nation's hopes and about to start another bloody civil war. Soldiers and citizens wept, it was reported, and people who could not read pestered those who could for the latest news. For two weeks, the Chinese public followed every move. Among the warlords, opinion split. Some called for Chiang's release. Others, like the Guangxi generals Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, quietly sided with the Young Marshal. One person in Nanjing was determined that there would be no attack. She was Chiang's wife, Soong Mei-ling. She vetoed a full assault on Xi'an, fearing her husband would be killed in the fighting. And she wondered whether that was exactly what He Yingqin had in mind, as a way to seize power himself. She bitterly complained of what she called the military mind. Setting out on her own to find a quick, calm and bloodless settlement, she even suggested that the men in Xi'an might have a reasonable grievance. She sent her husband's Australian adviser, W. H. Donald, flying to Xi'an, and announced that she would follow. On the fifteenth, Donald telephoned from Luoyang. Chiang was not being mistreated, and he had agreed to move to more comfortable rooms under the Young Marshal's guard rather than Yang's. And the Young Marshal, Donald said, had admitted in private that he had acted wrongly, though with honourable motives. A journalist sympathetic to the Communists was in Xi'an, and felt a civil war about to break out as government planes roared low over the city's roofs. "The sound of their engines cannot have been very reassuring to the Young Marshal's prisoner." The Young Marshal had made a terrible mistake. Far from being hailed as a new leader for the nation, he was seen by the government and by the wider public as a traitor. On the seventeenth of December, Zhou Enlai arrived in Xi'an and opened talks with Zhang and General Yang. Chiang refused to meet them or discuss their proposals. He told the Young Marshal, "You must not fall into the trap set by the Communists. Repent before it is too late." In Xi'an, General Yang, who said he did not want to become a beheaded general, was afraid to free Chiang without firm guarantees.

Let us go back to the morning of the twelfth, and to the caves of Bao'an. Early that morning, Mao's secretary was woken by the radio officer on duty. A message had come in from the Young Marshal and General Yang, marked extremely urgent. It was brief, written in plain language, and it turned on two characters: soldiers, and admonish. It meant that the Young Marshal had decided to use force to bring Chiang to his senses. The secretary took it to Mao, who had not yet gone to bed. Mao read it and exclaimed with joy: "How about that! Time for bed. Tomorrow there will be good news!" By the time Mao woke, the whole town was in an uproar. The field telephone in his cave rang without stopping. Otto Braun, the German adviser who had once run the Red Army's war in Jiangxi and now lived beside the leaders' compound, remembered that the news spread with lightning speed. "It produced a genuine rapture, for Chiang Kai-shek was the most hated man" in the party and the Red Army. One by one, the leaders hurried into Mao's cave to hear the message read out, and the cave echoed with excited laughter and gleeful voices. Zhu De, the Red Army's commander, and others wanted Chiang and his generals killed at once. Mao, laughing like mad, felt the same. Zhang Guotao was there too, the rival who had split from Mao on the march and had come back to Shaanxi to make his peace. Mao had welcomed him back magnanimously and made him the Red Army's general political commissar. As Zhang Guotao wrote, "At that time, we discussed our future, not our past." With Zhang's troops, and another Red Army that had joined them on the way, Mao now had a force of about thirty thousand. At an open air meeting of every party member, soldier and official in Bao'an, Mao spoke first. The time had come, the speakers said, to settle accounts with Chiang as a traitor and bring him before a people's court. A huge meeting adopted a resolution demanding a mass trial of Chiang as a traitor, and there was wild rejoicing in the town. At a Politburo meeting on the morning of the thirteenth, a very excited Mao called the arrest a revolutionary, anti-Japanese, progressive event. Almost unanimously, the Politburo resolved that Chiang should be tried and sentenced to death. Then Mao reported it all to Moscow.

In Moscow, the news arrived that same day, the thirteenth, and it astonished the men who ran the Comintern. The head of the International was a Bulgarian Communist, Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov was in seventh heaven. He wrote in his diary of an optimistic, favourable view of Zhang Xueliang. The next day he met his closest aides. Only then did he call Stalin. What he heard astonished him. Stalin, laconic as ever, told him to advise the Chinese Communists to come out against civil strife and "to insist on a peaceful resolution of the conflict". No one had expected that. Stalin wanted the Communists to set Chiang free. How else could the crisis end peacefully? Then, at midnight, Stalin phoned Dimitrov again, and he made no effort to hide his irritation. "Who is this Wang Ming of yours? A provocateur? He wanted to file a telegram to have Chiang Kai-shek killed." Dimitrov, flabbergasted, said he had heard nothing of the kind. "I'll find you that telegram," said Stalin, and slammed down the phone. He never did look for it. Most likely there was no such telegram, and someone had told Stalin wrong. Or perhaps he wanted to frighten Dimitrov, who he knew was ready to see Chiang executed. Soon afterwards Molotov phoned on Stalin's behalf. Dimitrov was to come to Stalin's office the next afternoon, with one colleague and nobody else. What was said there is not known. Why did Stalin care so much about Chiang Kai-shek? In November 1936, a month before Xi'an, Nazi Germany and Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed squarely at the Soviet Union. Suddenly Stalin faced his worst nightmare: Japan and Germany attacking him at the same time. Arresting and killing Chiang would split China even deeper, and make Stalin's position harder still. For Stalin, turning Chiang into an ally was a matter of life and death. And Moscow had another worry. Wang Jingwei, Chiang's great rival in the Nationalist party, had just flown to Berlin to see Hitler and talk about China joining the anti-Communist camp. The Soviet party paper even claimed that Wang Jingwei and the Young Marshal had hatched the plot in Xi'an for Japan's militarists. On the fifteenth, Dimitrov passed Stalin's orders to his officials. On the sixteenth the directive went out to the Chinese party, urging it to stand "decisively for a peaceful resolution of the conflict." In Nanjing, Chiang's own people sent a message straight to the International, warning that without Chiang, China would have no leader to fight Japan, and that would not benefit the Soviet Union. Moscow's telegram reached Bao'an late, on the seventeenth or eighteenth, and part of it did not come through. Mao could not read the full text until the twentieth. It hardly mattered. By then he knew Moscow's position from the Soviet press, and he had read the Young Marshal's appeal to the nation, which made clear that Zhang did not want Chiang dead. He only wanted to force him to fight Japan. By the nineteenth, Mao had seen that the crisis had to be settled. At the Politburo that day, he could not control himself. The Japanese, he suddenly put in, said the Soviet Union had arranged the arrest, "while the Soviet Union says it was contrived by the Japanese." The Politburo voted for a peaceful way out. Edgar Snow later heard from someone who was there that when the order came from Moscow to release Chiang, Mao flew into a rage. "Mao swore and stamped his feet." The most humiliating thing was that Moscow's order came just when Mao himself had understood the need for a peaceful end. But from the outside, it looked as if Stalin had forced his hand. So Mao, not wanting to lose face before his comrades, took his time. He formally approved Moscow's directive, and went slow on any deal with Chiang.

In Xi'an, the deal was being made anyway. Chiang's brother-in-law, T. V. Soong, was against an attack. If the army moved in, he would warn Chiang, Zhang's and Yang's troops would fall back into the Communist areas, and civil war could break out everywhere. On the morning of the twentieth, the Young Marshal met Soong at the airport and took him to see Chiang. When Soong came in alone, Chiang looked up in surprise and burst into tears. Ten years of fighting the warlords and the Communists had seemed only five minutes from success. Now if he agreed to a united front, it would look as if he had been forced into it. The economy had turned around, and so had his popularity. In two more years, he believed, his army would have been ready to face Japan. Now two warlords, one in his eyes petulant and ineffectual and the other corrupt and ignorant, had spoiled everything. Soong gave him a letter from his wife. If her brother did not come back within three days, she wrote, "I will come to Shaanxi to live and die with you." Chiang wept again. When he had recovered, he told Soong he would agree to nothing under duress. The Young Marshal could take his army to Inner Mongolia, and Yang could reorganize the Shaanxi government; the only other way out was for the Central Army to attack. Back in Nanjing, Soong Mei-ling was still holding off He Yingqin, who finally agreed to put off bombing for three more days. On the twenty-second, she came. At the airport she shook hands with the Young Marshal and General Yang, and asked Zhang not to let his men search her luggage, because she disliked having her things messed up. The embarrassed Zhang replied, "Oh Madame, I would never do that." Chiang looked pale and ill, and tears came into his eyes as he scolded her for coming. That morning, he said, he had read a passage in the Bible about a woman protecting a man. He told her he was ready to die for his country. To save the country, she told him, he had to live. Behind her came Dai Li, Chiang's intelligence chief, who fell to his knees, clutched Chiang's legs and wept, blaming himself for failing to protect his leader. By now the Young Marshal was desperate. He told her he knew he had made a grave mistake, and that he was ready to free Chiang at once, but that Yang and his men were not. And she gave him her word: if her husband was returned safely to Nanjing, Zhang would not be punished. Chiang had decided it was pointless to talk to the two generals. The man he had to deal with was Zhou Enlai, who had once served under him at the Whampoa military academy. That evening he sent Zhou four requests through T. V. Soong: abolish the Soviet government, abolish the name Red Army, end class struggle, and obey the generalissimo as commander in chief. Zhou answered that the Communists had accepted all of that before, and had not changed their position one iota because of what had happened at Xi'an. Later, among family, Chiang offered more by word of mouth: he would halt the government troops advancing on Xi'an, and support all the armies once the war with Japan began. But most of the two generals' officers wanted something concrete before Chiang left, and Chiang would rather die than concede anything while a prisoner. The Young Marshal and Yang had a violent quarrel over it. The Young Marshal and T. V. Soong even talked about making a dash for the airport with Chiang and his wife, and decided it was too dangerous. Early on Christmas morning, Donald came into Chiang's room and hung two of his golf stockings on the mantelpiece, a typewriter under one for Madame and a travelling rug under the other for the generalissimo. Chiang, still in his bedclothes, laughed for the first time since the whole affair began. At eight o'clock Zhou Enlai came in, and saluted. It was the Red Army's first sign of obedience to its new commander. Zhou asked for Chiang's personal word that he would stop attacking the Communists and let them join the fight against Japan. Speaking in Zhejiang dialect, Zhou told him the Communists had avoided fighting for a year to save the nation's strength, and had made no capital out of Xi'an. Chiang answered that if the Communists would obey him as their leader, he would treat them as his own troops. Zhou added that Chiang's son would soon come home to China, a patriotic young man who surely wanted his father to resist the invaders. As they left, the Soongs asked Zhou how to reach him in Shanghai. Through your sister, he said. Soong Ching-ling, their own sister, had recently sent Mao fifty thousand American dollars. That afternoon, the Young Marshal appeared with a porter carrying his suitcase. He wanted to fly back with them to Nanjing, to show the country his intentions had been honourable. Chiang told Zhang and Yang that he bore no personal grudges, and by one account pardoned them. They drove over the snowy road to the airport and left in the Young Marshal's own Boeing, with Chiang in the copilot's seat. Chiang Kai-shek was released on Christmas Day, and all of China rejoiced. In Nanjing, thousands of cheering people lined the road from the airport, and strings of firecrackers popped like machine guns. He had left for Xi'an a popular leader. He came back a national hero. The American ambassador reported a month later that the outcome at Xi'an had set off a spontaneous outburst of nationalism across the country. Chiang's moment of greatest danger had turned into his greatest triumph. If Chiang gave anyone credit for his release, it was Zhou Enlai. Years later he would write that at Xi'an the Communists had repented and were sincere. Two months afterwards, in his diary, he compared his ordeal at Xi'an with the trials and humiliations of Jesus. Did he promise anything at Xi'an? He forever denied that he agreed to terms. But it seems he had given his word, by mouth, to ease up on the Communists. When Zhou reported back, Mao was aghast that Chiang had given nothing but his word. Zhou thought he would probably keep it. It was, Zhou said, "the vainglory of a self-appointed hero." And the Young Marshal? He had been terribly naive. As soon as they landed, Chiang handed him over to a military tribunal, which sentenced him to ten years in prison. Soong Mei-ling interceded, and Chiang pardoned him, placing him under what was called supervision. It meant house arrest, without end. He passed the years playing mahjong, studying history and collecting Chinese art. His first prison was a house in the mountains above Chiang's home village. Soong Mei-ling kept his valuable art collection safe for him, and sent him letters, special foods and small gifts. When Chiang fled the mainland in 1949, he took the Young Marshal with him to Taiwan, and kept him under guard long after his own death. Zhang Xueliang was not free until 1990, at the age of eighty-nine, more than half a century after Xi'an. General Yang was sent abroad on a tour, and on his return in 1938 Chiang had him arrested. Was Xi'an the turning point? Here the sources disagree. On one view it has long been the hinge of the decade: before Xi'an, grudging acceptance of Japan's advances; after it, national unity against invasion. On the other, the kidnapping changed nothing that mattered. The deal was nearly done before Chiang ever flew to Xi'an, and it was his own choices afterwards, not the kidnapping, that shaped what came next. What is not in doubt is what Chiang did next. He did not go back on the idea of a new united front. The threat from Japan was simply too great to risk another civil war. Back in Nanjing, his decisions were measured. Almost without violence he took control of the two mutinous armies in Shaanxi, replaced the Northeast Army's division commanders, and moved its fur-capped brigades far away to Jiangsu and Anhui. Even Edgar Snow, Mao's friend, would call him a "master of compromise." Soon after his return, Chiang called Chen Lifu into his bedroom. How had Zhou Enlai behaved at Xi'an, Chen asked. "Very good," said Chiang. Then Chen suggested using the troops gathered near Shaanxi to finish off the Communists after all. Chiang bowed his head and did not answer. He had given his word. The civil war stopped. Each side's armies would stop fighting the other and get ready for a foreign invader. Next time: on a summer evening, shots ring out near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. And this time, Chiang Kai-shek decides that China will not give up one more inch.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 1-2, 15-17, 268-269, 269-270, 277-278, 279-281, 281-282, 287-289, 289-290, 290-291, 294-296, 296-297, 297-299, 299-300, 300-301, 301-302
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 98-100, 108-109, 114-115, 116-118, 118-119, 119-121, 122-124, 124-126, 126-127, 127-129, 130-132, 132-133, 133-135, 135-136, 136-142
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), p. 26-27
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 254-255, 268-270, 270-272, 299-301, 301-302
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)