Revolution and Civil War, episode 20

Three Capitals

In December 1938 Wang Jingwei, Sun Yat-sen's oldest disciple and the second man in the Nationalist party, flies out of Chiang Kai-shek's China to Hanoi to make peace with Japan, and in 1940 he returns to Nanjing at the head of a government under Japanese protection. The episode follows Wang, sure the war is lost and that he is Sun's true heir, and Chiang in Chongqing under bombing that kills thousands, while in the north the Communists' Hundred Regiments offensive brings down Japan's campaign to kill all, burn all and destroy all, and Chiang's order to the Communist New Fourth Army ends in its destruction, until Pearl Harbor brings America into the war; it gives real time to whether Wang was a traitor or a man trying to save what he could. It leans entirely on scholars, with a Chongqing newspaperman's day of the bombing.

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Transcript

In the last days of 1938, Chiang Kai-shek told China's newspapers to be discreet about a sudden departure. Wang Jingwei, he said, had gone to Hanoi for medical treatment. Wang Jingwei was Chiang's official deputy. He was not in Hanoi for his health. Last time, Chiang lost Wuhan, burned Changsha and settled his government far up the Yangtze at Chongqing, to fight a long war from the interior. And in Chongqing, in the long evenings after Wuhan fell, an official named Zhou Fohai, who had worked close to Chiang himself, had been talking over the war with Wang, and his doubts about it had been growing. Zhou is worth a moment, because we will see a great deal of him. He was the well-educated son of a well-off family, and he had begun his political life in the Communist party before he left it for the Nationalists. He drank a good deal, had love affairs, and went to the cinema as often as twice a week. And he kept a diary, which is how we know what he was thinking at almost every turn of what came next. This episode is about three capitals: Chiang's Chongqing, under the bombs; Wang's Nanjing, under Japanese protection; and Mao Zedong's Yan'an, in the north, whose armies fought Japan and then fought their own allies. It is also about whether Wang Jingwei was a traitor, or something more complicated. First, who was he? Wang Jingwei had joined Sun Yat-sen's revolution early and became one of Sun's closest allies. As a young man he had risked his life trying to assassinate Manchu nobles, and nobody could have doubted that he was a patriot. He had led the left wing of the Nationalist party, and he had been firmly anti-Communist since at least 1928. And he had never forgiven Chiang. During the Northern Expedition, more than a decade before, Chiang had manoeuvred him out of power. Since then Wang had held high office under Chiang, but very little real power. In the first days of the war with Japan he had been loyal. But from 1938 on he kept urging peace on the party, pointing out that Sun Yat-sen himself had been a friend of Japan. After Wuhan fell, he pressed Chiang directly to give up both the war with Japan and the alliance with the Communists. Chiang refused, again and again. Wang was not pro-Japanese in the sense of admiring Japan and despising his own country. He could understand a little Japanese, but could neither speak nor read it, and when he had been foreign minister an aide had to translate for him. One foreign voice that may have weighed with him was the French ambassador's. Before Wuhan fell, the ambassador had advised the Nationalists to negotiate. China, he pointed out, was even weaker than France had been after it lost its war with Prussia in 1870. France had waited more than four decades for its revenge, and had it in 1918. China, he suggested, might also have to wait, and be realistic in the meantime. That same ambassador would later go to Tokyo as the ambassador of Vichy France. So Wang listened to Japan. At the beginning of November the Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, had hinted on the radio that a Nationalist party with different leaders might find Tokyo friendlier. Wang sent one of his circle, Mei Siping, to Shanghai to find out what that meant. The ground had been laid already. Earlier that year Gao Zongwu, the head of the Asia bureau of the Foreign Ministry, had gone to Japan without permission and been treated royally by his hosts. Both Wang and Chiang had condemned the trip. But somewhere in those talks, the Japanese had stopped trying to win over Chiang, and started thinking about winning over his deputy. Between the twelfth and twentieth of November, in a hastily done up mansion in the Hongkou district of Shanghai, Mei sat down with Japanese army officers and argued out the terms of a peace. Manchukuo was the state Japan had carved out of Manchuria in 1932, with the last Qing emperor as its figurehead. Japan wanted China to recognize Manchukuo. The Chinese side was reluctant, knowing it would look like giving up Chinese sovereignty. The two sides agreed that Japan and China could jointly exploit Chinese territory, and that Japan would give up the special legal rights its people held in China, though not its concessions. The Chinese side's biggest demand, the one the whole risky plan rested on, was that Japan end its military occupation. They could not get that at once. But the draft did promise an end to the occupation within two years after the "restoration of peace and order." And the whole plan assumed two things. Wang Jingwei would defect to head a new government, and that government would start life not in occupied China but in the free southwest, in Yunnan and Sichuan, where the plotters hoped provincial generals with their own armies would come over to them. On the twenty-sixth of November 1938, Mei brought the deal to a secret meeting at Wang's house in Chongqing. Zhou Fohai was there. Had Chiang known, Mei would have been arrested on the spot. Japan's demand was simple: Wang should defect and set up a rival government to Chiang's. It was an enormous thing to ask. Wang had a long revolutionary past, and there was no doubt that Chiang and the Communists would call defection treason. Wang could not make up his mind. After the meeting he looked miserable. Zhou Fohai was furious. At home, he wrote in his diary, they talked over Wang's character. He had no fixed ideas, and it was easy to change his mind. "That's why he's failed these last ten years." But this time, Zhou thought, "although he will go back and forth, he will eventually carry out the plan." Wang had a strong wife, Chen Bijun, a revolutionary in her own right, fiercely brave and fiercely loyal. Where Wang hesitated, she did not, and she may have helped tip the balance. She was becoming convinced that Chiang was trying to have her husband killed. Gao Zongwu, a Foreign Ministry official who was close to the Wangs, remembered her influence as very strong. Those who offended her, he said, never got to see Wang Jingwei again. Within a few days Wang seemed to be won over. Now the plotters had to get out of Chongqing without being noticed by the agents of Chiang's security chief, Dai Li. The plan was for Wang to go to Chengdu, and for Zhou to go ahead to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, ruled by a general named Long Yun, who ran his province very much his own way and was known to welcome men who found Chongqing too stifling. Chiang was away from the capital, and every day the plotters feared he would come back and find them out. "I've heard that Chiang will be coming back before the 10th," Zhou wrote on the first of December. "I have an inexplicable feeling, like a schoolboy who hears that the teacher is coming." And Wang began to waver again. He phoned his followers constantly, furious one day about a statement from a Japanese client government in the north, upset the next about newspapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai that were attacking him. Zhou began to fear that they had pinned their hopes on a man they could not depend on. On the fifth of December, Zhou flew to Kunming. As far as the officials who saw him off were concerned, it was a routine business trip. "Farewell, Chongqing!" he wrote. "The survival or destruction of the country, and my own success or failure, all depend on the success of this trip!" Then the news came that Wang had cancelled. Chiang was back in town, and Wang was afraid to move. Zhou could not sleep. "I worried worse than ever before in my life," he wrote. Kunming made him homesick. He heard people speaking with a Chongqing accent and missed the city. He thought about a lover long dead. "I miss my dead friend," he wrote. "Even writing the words 'dead friend' is very painful." But he decided he could not go back. If he returned now, he might never get out again. "If heaven does not let China die," he wrote, "then Mr. Wang will be able to leave Chongqing." On the seventeenth he heard that Wang had cancelled his tickets to Hanoi. Zhou now reckoned it eighty percent likely that he would simply go back to Chongqing, as if nothing had happened, and twenty percent that he would go on to Hong Kong. On the eighteenth Zhou went out into the streets of Kunming and found bands playing and police on guard. Some great leader had arrived. If it was Chiang, the plot was finished. If it was Wang, it was under way. The answer came: it was Wang Jingwei. "I was very happy," Zhou wrote.

On the nineteenth of December the plotters learned they could hire a plane to take them to Hanoi, in French Indochina, across the border from Yunnan. Even now, they could not decide. In twenty minutes, Zhou wrote, they changed their minds "seven or eight times" before they "finally decided to take the plane." "At 3:15 p.m., we flew." As he left Chinese soil behind, Zhou was not thinking about politics. "I missed my mother very much," he wrote. "I fear it'll be hard ever to see her again. I wept for her." Wang spent the flight in a state of intense anxiety, afraid that Chiang had found out and would send a plane to force them down at Chongqing. He even gave his companions emergency instructions. They were heading south, he told them, and the sun was on their right. If they ever saw the shadows shift, if the plane seemed to be turning back, they were to jump into the cockpit and make the pilot fly on. They never needed to. Wang's party landed safely in Hanoi at half past five that afternoon. The next day they moved to a small resort on the sea, about a hundred kilometres away, and Zhou's mood swung right round. "Facing the big sea," he wrote, "I suddenly felt elated." They ate fresh seafood for lunch and began to talk about everything a new government would need: an army, diplomats and, of course, money. That evening Zhou and two companions drank strong liquor and visited a brothel, which did not cheer him up. He wrote, "An older prostitute sang us poems about the moon, birds, and lonely wives. I felt homesick for my native land." On the road, Zhou said that of all of them, Chiang would be angriest with him. Wang had never been Chiang's friend, but Zhou had been close to him, and his going would feel like a personal betrayal. He drafted a letter to Chiang to explain himself. "I know they won't forgive me," he wrote in his diary, "but I have to do it." Wang, meanwhile, was writing the public statement that would explain why he had gone. He wanted any peace to show him as the patriotic victor of a righteous war, with Japan giving up its old habit of invading and humiliating China. And Chiang, at first, kept the temperature down. He even had China's ambassador in London invite Wang to come to Europe, offering to leave his own post to look after him. Back in Chongqing, Chiang was baffled. When he learned that Wang had met the Japanese in Hanoi, he wrote that he could not understand how, at a moment of such danger, Wang could simply leave without a word to anyone. He wrote, "I felt extremely sorrowful. I just hope he will come to his senses and turn back." On the twenty-second of December, the Japanese prime minister gave a hastily called press conference in Tokyo with a vague promise of friendship, economic cooperation and a common front against communism. Chiang answered in public that Japan's so-called new order was a name for the enslavement of China. And on the last day of the year a Hong Kong newspaper printed a telegram from Wang. Japan's statement, he said, opened the way to talk about peace. Every newspaper attacked him. On the first of January 1939 Wang was stripped of his posts and thrown out of the Nationalist party, though no order was yet given for his arrest. On New Year's Eve, Zhou recorded that he and a friend had sat around doing nothing, and that was how they had spent the end of the year. As it turned out, Wang and his followers would be sitting around doing nothing for a very long time. Chiang tried first to coax him away to a quiet life in Europe. When that failed, he sent agents to kill him. They bungled it, and killed Wang's nephew by mistake.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had found a way to reach Chongqing. The city had seemed safe, sitting high on its cliffs above the meeting of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers, fifteen hundred kilometres up the Yangtze. For most of the autumn and winter it was wrapped in fog, which kept enemy planes away, and with so little electric power there were few lights at night to guide them. But spring brought warmer weather and an end to the mist, and then the city was a clear target. There were a few trial raids in the winter of 1938. The real attacks began in the spring of 1939. Between 1939 and 1941 Chongqing was bombed 268 times. The city was in no state to take it. It had swollen with refugees living in shacks of bamboo, boards and mud, without power or, often, clean water. A city of about four hundred and seventy-four thousand people in 1937 had grown past seven hundred thousand by 1941, and it would pass a million by the end of the war. It was not even the capital of its own province. Drinking water was often scarce, and people sometimes walked miles to a spring. Homes off the electric grid had no light at night but saucers of oil with wicks in them, with a wick or two added when the children did their homework. And, as with so much in wartime China, the talk of shared suffering hid the truth of class. Better connected people had better shelters. Government officials were given special access to reserved shelters, with passes to bring their families. For those who could afford true luxury, there were top of the range shelters at some two thousand yuan a year. Everyone else crowded into basic tunnels cut into the rock of the cliffs. Life in the city came to be shaped around the sirens. "Your everyday plans were decided by the weather," one man remembered. "If you needed to travel a long way, then you'd choose a cloudy day." People carried emergency packs of food, water and medicine, and brought chairs and stools to the shelters so they would not have to stand for hours. In the summer heat the tunnels were stifling. When the bombs fell, people felt a very strange wind rushing in ahead of them, strong enough to throw a careless person against the wall. Then came the noise. "Like the sky and the earth being smashed," one local said, "like thunder on your head." If a Japanese plane was shot down, the silence in the shelters broke into cheering and clapping. Sometimes people stayed underground for days, at the mercy of vendors who braved the raids to sell them overpriced necessities. Some who came out after five or six days could hardly bear the sunlight. Shopkeepers began opening at four in the afternoon, to dodge the raids. The American correspondent Theodore H. White called it "a sort of wartime normal." The government began to adapt too. When the all-clear came after midnight, workers' hours were cut the next day, and shops selling necessities were ordered to stay open, with subsidies to help them. The city's air defences stayed weak, because China simply did not have the planes or the guns. Soong Mei-ling had recruited a retired American air officer, Claire Lee Chennault, to train China's tiny air force, and he brought in American volunteer pilots who became famous as the Flying Tigers. They lifted the city's spirits, though they never actually fought over its skies. Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, spent many hours with their staff in the big dugout behind their house. After one raid she wrote to an American friend about what the bombs had done. Rich and poor alike had been reduced to "pieces of burnt flesh which are extracted from the smoldering piles with tongs." And she wanted Americans to know something. This death and destruction, she wrote, came to China with the help of American gasoline and oil, and materials for bombs. Chiang told foreign newsmen that China's strategy was now to pile up small victories and trade land for time. He reached back into China's ancient history for an example, and said, "Chu Han lost 72 battles but won the last one."

The third of May 1939 was a sweltering day in Chongqing, under a clear sky. At noon, Zhang Xiluo, a reporter for a Chongqing newspaper, was sitting down to lunch. Down at the docks porters were hauling boxes on and off the river boats, and the markets were busier than at any time in the city's history. Then he heard a sound whose meaning he knew well. "At about noon, we heard a short alarm signal," he remembered. He left his lunch unfinished. He got ready to hide in the air raid shelter at the newspaper's office in Jintang Street. Half an hour later a more urgent siren began to howl, in short, continuous bursts, and the last people in the office grabbed their things and ran down into the shelter. Zhang was lucky. His shelter was one of the best in the city, built by the government, with electric light, communications and supplies of food and water. Even the privileged had no guarantees. The British consulate had painted a huge Union Jack on its roof to warn the bombers off, and still a Japanese attack on a nearby water plant had hit it. Many poorer families had nothing like it. One man later wrote that when the siren sounded, his whole family, more than ten people, just hid under the table. At a quarter to one, dots appeared in the sky. There were thirty-six of them. From inside the shelter Zhang heard the engines, then the pitifully few Chinese fighters going up to meet them, then the bombs, and then the boom of the anti-aircraft guns. The raid went on for a full hour. The all-clear sounded at 2:35. Zhang went out to see. All across the city, from the docks to the houses, buildings had been gutted. The destruction was so complete that what seemed strangest to him was what had survived. At one crossroads a cluster of banks stood untouched among endless rubble. Hours later, as darkness fell, the city was still full of moaning and cries for help. "It was truly unbearable to hear," he said. He talked to the wounded and the families of the dead, and then rushed back to the office to write the story for that night's paper. Another man remembered his father talking to a group of young factory workers when the bombs fell. Before his eyes, the workers were "turned into bloody, fast-flying bits of flesh." The next day, the fourth of May, Zhang was in a park when he came across a woman weeping. She and her family had not been able to reach a shelter. Her husband had been killed outright, and her two children wounded. "Why didn't the Japanese devils kill all of us?" she cried. "How are we going to live now?" In one of the big shelters, in the dark, people had panicked and stampeded, and many who tripped and fell were simply trampled to death. That afternoon the sirens went again. At seventeen minutes past five, twenty-seven Japanese aircraft appeared, and the bombing started all over again. "It was like being in a tiny boat, constantly shaking," one survivor remembered. Then he looked out of his window and saw that "the whole sky was lit up by flames, and the surrounding buildings were collapsing one by one." When the all-clear sounded, just after seven, Zhang's office was still standing. Every building around it had been destroyed. On the third of May 673 deaths were recorded, and on the fourth 3,318. Thousands of houses were destroyed. On the evening of the fourth, Chiang wrote in his diary, "This is the most terrible thing I've seen in my life. I can't bear to look at it." The night before, he had written more flatly that more than forty enemy planes had bombed the area around his military headquarters, and that a lot of people had been killed and wounded. Now he could not keep the feeling out. He went on, "God lives—why does he not swiftly bring some disaster to our enemy?" The novelist Lao She, watching the red glow of the fires from a suburb outside the city, noticed the date. The fourth of May was the anniversary of the great student protest of 1919, a date with deep meaning for his whole generation of writers. "We must seize with our whole hearts the new life of our great China!" he wrote. After those raids the city hired professional body carriers, and paid them half a kilogram of rice for each body they carried. At the height of the raids more than a hundred boats at a time were carrying the dead out of the city. The boatmen would take whole bodies. After a while, they began dumping parts of bodies overboard or burying them by the river, because the fluid from the corpses could stand a foot deep in the bottom of the boats, and the men worked in sandals. A man who grew up in Chongqing said decades later, "The whole of my life, I have remembered the sound of the air-raid sirens howling in my ears". The next year even the city's few defenders in the air were gone. In the summer of 1940 Japan's new Zero fighter knocked out every plane that protected Chongqing. After that the bombers came unopposed, sometimes a hundred and fifty in a single day, and rained down explosives for two or three hours at a time. There was no proper fire brigade, and the fires simply burned themselves out. Yet the city kept going. Buses ran on alcohol made from potatoes and urine, and a shop blown up one day was rebuilt the next with planks of salvaged wood. In June 1941 came yet another horror. After some five hours of bombing, people were coming out of a large, dark tunnel shelter, whose lights and fans had never been connected, when a rumour spread that the Japanese were coming back with poison gas, and the wardens forced them back inside. In the crush, hundreds died in the dark. The official count was 461. A police report of the time put it at 1,527. The rescuers remembered the faces of the dead, people locked in each other's arms, their clothes torn to strips. One survivor remembered a hand grabbing at him from a pile of bodies and a voice moaning, "Sir, please help me". The hand held his shorts so tightly that they came off. He jumped out of them and fled the tunnel. The bombs over those years killed close to twelve thousand people in Chongqing, most of them civilians. In time the toll fell, because the government dug underground shelters, and Chinese behind the Japanese lines radioed a warning whenever the bombers took off. An American embassy report summed up 1939 for Washington. One of the things hardening China's will to resist, it said, was the ruthless Japanese bombing of civilians, and the most murderous case of all had been Chongqing that May.

Wang Jingwei, meanwhile, was finding out what Japan's promises were worth. The Japanese officers who had talked to his men in Shanghai turned out not to speak for Tokyo. They were a small group, genuinely sympathetic to China. The prime minister, Prince Konoe, had already made it clear that the promise to withdraw Japan's troops within two years was off the table. And in January he resigned. In June 1939 Wang went to Tokyo, and the trip was a disaster. Five senior Japanese ministers met without him and decided that his government would be only one piece in a patchwork of Japanese client regimes across China. His dream of reuniting the country under his rule was dead before he arrived. Wang's fortunes rose a little only after Japan's defeat at Nomonhan that summer, when Tokyo began to see that Chiang might not be beaten as easily as it had hoped. He won exactly one argument. Japan wanted his government to fly the old flag of the early republic, five coloured stripes, the flag already flown by a puppet government in the north that Wang despised. Wang refused. His government would fly the Nationalist flag that Sun Yat-sen had chosen, a white twelve-pointed star on blue, over a red field, because he saw his regime as the true Nationalist government, now that Chiang had betrayed the cause by joining hands with the Communists. Japan objected that if Wang's troops and Chiang's ever met, nobody would be able to tell them apart. In the end the Japanese gave way, on condition that a yellow pennant be added, reading peace, reconstruction, anticommunism. Through November and December 1939, Zhou Fohai and Wang's other advisers sat with Japanese officers over the real terms. Japanese troops and advisers were to be stationed all over China. Japan would take new concessions in coal and mining, its navy would control Hainan island, north China would be kept separate, and Shanghai would have a special status. The terms were almost entirely one-sided. The signing, on the thirtieth of December 1939, was a gloomy affair. One of Wang's men had seen enough. Gao Zongwu, the official who had made the first unauthorized visit to talk to the Japanese, was asked to help translate the treaty, and Wang insisted the work be done at his house. Gao slipped the translation into his pocket, telephoned Wang to say he had taken it by mistake, and before giving it back took it home and photographed it. On New Year's Day 1940 Gao and Zhou had a long talk and swore to work hard and to forgive each other, though Zhou did not understand why Gao was asking for forgiveness. Three days later Gao had vanished, with a colleague. The Shanghai gang boss Du Yuesheng had spirited them away, and they turned up on Chiang's side. "Now I understand what he meant on New Year's Day," Zhou wrote. From Hong Kong the two defectors revealed just how crushing Japan's demands were, and called on Wang to "restrain the horse from falling over the precipice." Wang went on. Zhou, never short of confidence, wrote in his diary that he, not Wang, had picked the new ministers. "Ten minutes with my pen will produce the National Government," he joked. Japan's refusal to treat the new government as a real government infuriated him. If it had no significance, he asked a Japanese official, "then what is the point of organizing it?" But Wang had no army, and his people were in mortal danger from the assassins of Chiang's security chief, Dai Li. So Zhou turned to two gangsters who had once worked for Dai Li themselves. They ran an enforcement squad from a mansion at 76 Jessfield Road, in the part of Shanghai known as the Badlands. Like Zhou, both had started out as Communists. A Japanese lieutenant colonel shivered at one man's "cold manner and snake-like eyes," but was cheered by the other's "bright and cheerful manner." Number 76 became a name that filled Shanghai with fear. Political hostages were kept in its basement, and whenever Dai Li's men killed one of Wang's supporters, a supporter of Chiang was shot in return. With backing like that, Wang's regime lost most of what little standing it had before it even began. On the thirtieth of March 1940 Wang's government officially came into being in Nanjing. He called it the return to the capital: not a new regime, but the true Nationalist government restored to its rightful home. His newspaper's cartoons showed Wang as a superhuman giant, radiating light over a group of children who stood for the Chinese people. Zhou Fohai was overjoyed. In his diary he wrote, "This is the happiest thing that has happened in my life." Then he drank too much and gave himself a stomachache. Wang was in a different mood. A witness at the ceremony said he "stood there as if in a daze", with tears pouring down his face. It was the largest and most prestigious of all the puppet governments Japan set up in China. And even then Japan held back. It kept Wang waiting while it tried to make a deal with the real prize, Chiang, and did not formally recognize Wang's government until the thirtieth of November 1940. Some in Tokyo made no secret of their doubts about Wang. Count Arima, of the Privy Council, declared that his behaviour proved he was dishonest, and Japan's foreign minister kept saying he wanted a deal with Chongqing instead. In March 1940, in Hong Kong, senior Japanese officers had sat down with a man posing as the younger brother of Chiang's brother-in-law, T. V. Soong. He was in fact a Chinese intelligence agent. The talks broke down on the same old issues. Japan wanted troops in north China and recognition of Manchukuo, and Chiang absolutely refused. Did Chiang ever really consider a deal? Earlier he had sent his wife to Hong Kong, under the pretext of dental treatment, to meet two Japanese moderates. His condition was the same as always: China's territory and sovereignty restored in full. He danced close to the edge, but he never went over it. And the dance had its uses. It kept Japan from fully backing Wang, and it warned the West that if it did not help Chongqing, Chiang might be forced into a deal. On that same day, the United States announced a hundred million dollars in credit for Chiang's China. Zhou Fohai tried to keep his own line open to Chongqing too, sending a message to Chiang through an American go-between. And the new rulers squabbled. That March Zhou nearly came to a quarrel with Wang and his wife over money for their home province of Guangdong. The regime poured out an endless stream of propaganda for peace, Asian brotherhood and anticommunism, all in the name of Sun Yat-sen. It seems to have had little effect. So what was Wang Jingwei? Zhou Fohai put the question himself. "Chongqing sees us as collaborators," he wrote, "we see ourselves as heroes." Only peace, they believed, could save the country. Here the sources disagree. One view points to opportunism: Wang thought of himself, not Chiang, as Sun Yat-sen's true heir, and saw at last a chance to outshine his rival. The other takes his reasons seriously. Wang and his circle saw a just peace as the only realistic answer to a war that would destroy China, either at Japan's hands or by delivering it to a Communist government under Soviet control. In that view, he was the one more loyal to Sun's principle of national unity before war, and it was Chiang who had betrayed the people, abandoning them to the Japanese while he saved his corrupt cronies. His widow said as much at her trial after the war. "It was after the government and its troops took to their heels that we common people came forward and took charge." But some things are not in doubt. Wang badly misread the world. He was sure Japan would win, and between Russia and Japan, he preferred Japan. And whatever he meant to save, his government had almost no freedom. The Japanese army had the final say in all its decisions and took what it wanted from Chinese farms and factories. Japan never managed to turn the rich economy of central China to its war. Most of Shanghai's businessmen did not flee inland; they kept their factories running under the Japanese. But few of them threw themselves into collaboration, and most Chinese gave no more than they were forced to. Collaboration came in degrees. A businessman might have no real choice but to sell shoes to the Japanese army; another might volunteer to spy on his neighbours. And there was a great deal of quiet resistance: deliberately shoddy work, slacking whenever possible, stealing. In 1942 Wang admitted it himself. It was undeniable, he said, that "the regime in the peace areas is not yet free," and that the people there were "suffering unbearably" under Japan's controls.

In the north, meanwhile, the alliance between Chiang and the Communists was going sour. From early in 1939 Chiang began to hem the Communists in. He threw a blockade of some four hundred thousand troops around their base region in the northwest, and in early 1940 he cut off the money his government had been paying them. Mao Zedong was in no mood to be hemmed in. In April 1940 he wrote to one of his commanders that the party's expansion was "not to be bound by the Kuomintang's restrictions." His armies were to grow and set up new bases freely, wherever they could. He had a warning for those in the Nationalist party who wanted to crush the Communists. The more they had been suppressed in the past, he said in July 1939, the more of them there were: a party once as big as a little finger had grown, thanks to Chiang's campaigns against it, to the size of a thumb. The secret count of the war's dead told its own story. In January 1940 Zhou Enlai, Mao's representative in Chongqing, reported to Stalin that more than a million Chinese soldiers had been killed or wounded. Only thirty thousand of them came from the Eighth Route Army, and a thousand from the New Fourth. The blockade hit the Communist base hard, just as the harvests failed. In the base region, what had cost five hundred yuan in 1940 cost two thousand two hundred in 1941. The Nationalists suffered too. In Chongqing food prices rose nearly fourteen times over in 1940 and 1941. Mao's answer was self-sufficiency. Production campaigns over the next few years brought far more land under the plough, and raised cotton, livestock, cloth, salt and coal. In other words, by the Communists' own reckoning, they had taken about three percent of the losses. Chiang's own armies had not stood idle. In the winter of 1939 he ordered a general offensive across eight war zones, and four hundred and fifty thousand Chinese troops mounted nine hundred and sixty attacks. It failed. Some commanders attacked only half-heartedly, and the gap between the two sides in weapons was worse than ever. Still, Chiang and Zhou Enlai respected each other. When Zhou broke his arm in 1939, Chiang sent his personal plane to Yan'an to fly him and his wife on their way to Moscow for treatment. By the summer of 1940 the two Communist armies dominated much of north and central China, and they had grown so strong that, for the first time, Mao broke his own rule of fighting the Japanese only in small guerrilla actions that would not provoke revenge. In August the Eighth Route Army, under the command of Peng Dehuai, launched the only major conventional offensive any Communist army fought in the whole war. They called it the Hundred Regiments. It began with about forty thousand men in twenty-two regiments, and by the end a hundred and four regiments had joined in. They attacked everything the Japanese needed to hold north China: railways, roads, bridges and coal mines in Shanxi and Hebei. They tore up hundreds of miles of track and blew up bridges. It took the Japanese by surprise, because the Communists had fought so few formal campaigns. And under Peng, the Communists did real damage. The fighting went on until October. Then the bill came in. By the end of September the Eighth Route Army had lost about twenty-two thousand killed and wounded. Japanese losses were put at three or four thousand. Japan poured in reinforcements and, with brutal search and destroy operations, took back everything it had lost. The Communists said ever after that they had borne the main weight of the war. But their one great campaign against Japan was at least as unsuccessful as the Nationalists' many offensives. Mao never launched another major offensive against the Japanese. And what came next, in the countryside of the north, was one of the worst things done in the whole war.

After the Communist offensive, Japan began to sweep whole districts known to shelter guerrillas. The policy had a name: kill all, burn all, destroy all. It meant killing every Chinese person, children included, and every animal found in country where guerrillas were or had been, burning every building, and destroying all the crops, dikes, wells and canals. Villages were razed, crops seized or destroyed and peasants slaughtered. The Japanese did not raid and leave. They came back again and again, to make sure no resistance could grow up again. Over the next three years the two hundred and fifty thousand Communist troops in the north were hit by a hundred and fifty thousand Japanese soldiers, helped by a hundred thousand Chinese troops fighting for Japan. Across the north the Japanese built networks of fortified blockhouses and trenches, and fortified roads that carved the Communist base areas into pieces. Villages could be made responsible together for the roads and railways near them. If there was sabotage, the whole village might pay. Villagers who cooperated were promised that their crops would not be taken, their men would not be dragged off to labour gangs, and they would not all simply be killed. The Communists' own sources admitted that the population of their base areas fell from about forty-four million people to twenty-five million. Their main army lost a hundred thousand men to casualties and desertion. Guerrilla activity dropped away. Where the guerrillas had to leave, the peasant associations they had built seldom survived, morale collapsed, and hostility to the Communists grew. Across most of the north, the Communists' first goal was no longer resistance. It was survival. But they did survive. Around thousands of villages, the resistance had dug underground tunnels and hiding places, which made the later sweeps less effective than they might have been. The Communists bent rather than broke. Secret cells lay low until it was safe. Puppet county leaders approved by Japan were either assassinated or, more often, quietly drawn into the Communist network, until Japanese officers no longer knew which Chinese to trust. And after a nearby victory, organizers would arrive in the villages to rebuild. As one of them put it, "after a victory in battle the masses fall all over themselves to send us flour, steamed bread, meat, and vegetables". And Mao's own base region, in the northwest around Yan'an, was the exception. It was relatively safe from both the Japanese and the Nationalists, and its importance only grew.

The last blow to the alliance came from Chiang's own side. The trouble was the New Fourth Army, the other Communist army, which had pushed into country along the Yangtze that the Nationalists had held. Its senior commander, Xiang Ying, had his own area of control and was outspoken in party arguments. In the summer of 1940 Chiang's military council proposed that all Communist troops gather north of the old course of the Yellow River, the course it had run before the dikes were broken in 1938. Zhou Enlai may have backed the plan. Mao rejected it. He wanted his armies to operate south of the Yellow River, and south of the Yangtze too. On the ninth of December 1940 Chiang gave his orders. All New Fourth Army troops were to be north of the Yangtze by the thirty-first of December, and all Communist troops north of the Yellow River by the end of January. In a confidential message to the Nationalist general in the area, Gu Zhutong, Chiang said that if the deadline was broken, "then you must take care of this matter; no more tolerance." Mao sent Xiang Ying mixed signals: one moment move north, the next take a roundabout route that suggested no hurry at all. Mao also tried to alarm Moscow. He warned Stalin that Chiang was planning a separate peace with Japan and meant to drive the Communist armies into the old valley of the Yellow River and destroy them there, and he proposed to strike first. The Comintern's head, Georgi Dimitrov, cabled back that the plan "caused us great doubts," and that the party must not start a fight with the government. But if Chiang attacked, he added, they must strike back with all their might. On Christmas Day, while Chiang and Zhou Enlai were having dinner together, Mao issued a secret directive that said nothing about moving north. Instead it declared, "We must expand the 8th Route Army and the New 4th Army in every way possible." On the fourth of January 1941, the New Fourth Army began to move. It went south, not north. The Communists said they were circling round to avoid the Japanese. The Nationalists believed it was a grab for more territory. Fighting soon broke out. It was deep winter, cloudy and very cold. An officer named Dong Nancai remembered the column rigging temporary bridges, and men so loaded down that "there were some comrades who fell in the water, and had to brave the cold to swim across the river." The fighting with the Nationalists was savage, with no quarter given on either side. Even the cooks, he said, went into battle with their kitchen knives. Some men fell to their deaths from the steep mountain ledges. In the middle of it, Xiang Ying disappeared. Whether he had panicked and deserted or was looking for another way out, nobody knows. Then he turned up again and reported to party headquarters on the tenth of January. He admitted, "This action of mine was really terrible. I await punishment." Headquarters called him a coward. On the fifteenth of January Mao told his colleagues that "all of Chiang's talk about virtue and morality is a pack of lies and should under no circumstances be trusted." Gu Zhutong's attack killed or captured nine thousand of Xiang's troops. Xiang himself was murdered in captivity on the fourteenth of March. Who wanted this to happen? Here the sources disagree. One view is that Mao himself was not sure what he wanted, half hoping and half fearing to provoke a clash. The other is that Mao most likely meant to use the New Fourth Army's move to provoke an incident that would justify keeping his armies where they were, and that the unit south of the Yangtze was expendable. Either way, Chiang won the battle and lost everything else. Most people who heard the news did not see Communist troops defying orders. They saw Chiang treacherously turning on his allies to beat his rivals at home, while he ignored the Japanese. An American magazine wrote that it was a victory for the generals around Chiang who hated the Communists. "But it was no victory for China." "Never before have we had such a mass of people on our side," Mao boasted to Moscow. Chiang knew he could not afford to drive the Communists into fighting him instead of Japan. He dropped his plans to push them north, and made no serious attempt to do it again for the rest of the war. And Xiang Ying had been a rival to Mao, with his own territory. His defeat and death bound the party's future more tightly than ever to Mao in Yan'an. The Americans watching all this were starting to split. An American officer who had travelled in the Communist areas, Evans Carlson, came back impressed by their discipline and warned that the Nationalists were drifting toward fascism. The American ambassador disagreed. Chiang, he wrote, had grown in stature as the symbol of united resistance to Japan, and in the end "it is he who makes the final decisions." That argument would run, louder and louder, for the rest of the war.

By now China had been at war with Japan for years, and there was no end in sight. From the fall of Wuhan to the seventh of December 1941, China's armies suffered another 1.3 million casualties. Europe's war had pulled every eye away from Asia. The first shock came in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact not to attack each other. Chiang had been desperate to bring the Soviet Union into the fight against Japan. Now the Soviets were, in effect, aligned with the Nazis, who were Japan's partners. A week later Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France were at war. The war in East Asia, already a side issue for the European powers, became a minor matter indeed. Japan's war in China was costing it five million dollars a day. Rationing had come to Japan as early as 1938. And Japan needed oil, rubber and other raw materials that it could only get from America, Britain and the Netherlands. In September 1940 Japan signed a pact with Hitler and Mussolini. Chiang told his officers that it would push Japan south, into a war with America and Britain, and that all Tokyo had really done was acquire powerful enemies in the Pacific who would be China's natural allies. And Chiang learned to use the threat of collapse. In October 1940 he warned Washington that China could not keep fighting without substantial American aid, including five hundred to a thousand aircraft. It was the first time he used that tactic on the Americans, and he would go on using it for thirty years. Roosevelt had promised, while winning re-election in 1940, that he would not send American boys into foreign wars. But with Germany master of Europe and China's door closed by Japan, neutrality was looking less and less possible. But America was edging closer. In February 1941 Roosevelt's man, Lauchlin Currie, came to Chongqing to tell Chiang that forty-five million dollars' worth of military equipment was on its way. Then, early in 1941, the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact with Japan, and in June some three million German soldiers poured into the Soviet Union. That left the United States as Chiang's only important backer, and America was still neutral. In July, after Japan occupied the south of French Indochina, the United States cut off oil sales to Japan. In October Prince Konoe, unable to hold out against the army and navy's pressure for war, resigned, and a general took his place. Tokyo hurried its preparations for war with the West. That autumn the Americans and the Japanese talked, more and more desperately, and the sticking point was China. America insisted that Japan leave it. Japan would not. At one point Chiang heard that Washington, to buy time, was thinking of softening its terms. He was alarmed, and fired off warnings to Roosevelt's ministers that any relaxation of American sanctions would bring about the collapse of China's resistance. On the twenty-sixth of November the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, gave the Japanese a note that repeated the old demand: Japan must withdraw from China. Chiang believed his warning had saved the situation at the last moment. On the first of December an imperial conference in Tokyo decided on war. In Washington, the two Japanese envoys paid a last, almost silent call on the secretary of state. They "turned without a word and walked out, their heads down." Owen Lattimore, an American scholar Chiang had taken on as a personal adviser, was ill and wanted to go home that December, by way of Hong Kong. Chiang told him to wait a while. Lattimore came to admire Chiang as a genuine patriot, and sometimes more far-sighted than Roosevelt or Churchill. When the German army was rolling through Russia that summer, Chiang told him confidently that the Soviets would rally and win. His agents in Southeast Asia had reported heavy smoke pouring from the chimneys of Japanese consulates. The conclusion was that they were burning their secret papers, ready for war. At 7:48 on the morning of the seventh of December 1941, two waves of Japanese bombers from six aircraft carriers fell on the American Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. They destroyed the battleship Arizona outright and damaged seventeen other ships. Some two thousand four hundred Americans died. Within a day Japanese forces had attacked Siam, Malaya and the Philippines. Roosevelt called it a "date which will live in infamy." Japan's leaders had made a desperate gamble, to knock the country with the deepest pockets out of the game. They had miscalculated. China would not be swallowed, and the United States declared war at once. In Shanghai, Zhou Fohai heard the firing as the Japanese took over the rest of the city. "From now on," he wrote, "the Pacific becomes a killing ground." "I heard they'd bombed Honolulu, Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong," he wrote. In Chongqing, it was one o'clock in the morning on the eighth of December when an aide woke Chiang Kai-shek with the news. Chiang called a special meeting of his party's leaders and dictated a letter to President Roosevelt, which his wife put into English. "To our new common battle we offer all we are and all we have," it said. China had faced Japan since 1937, four years before the Americans. Now the powerful United States was at last officially its ally. Next time, we find out what that alliance was worth, as America sends Chiang a general.

Sources

• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 164-166, 169-170, 172-173, 173-175, 175-176, 176-177, 184-185, 187-188, 188-190
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), p. 29-30
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 310-312, 312-313, 313-315, 316-317, 317-318, 318-319, 354-355
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)