Revolution and Civil War, episode 28
Huaihai
In November 1948 the Nationalists' last great armies north of the Yangtze meet the Communists around the railway city of Xuzhou in the Huaihai campaign, the battle that decided whether Chiang Kai-shek could hold the south. The episode follows Du Yuming, the Nationalist general whose army is trapped at Chenguanzhuang, where starving soldiers dig up coffins for firewood, and Chiang, who loses the battle, then Beijing, surrendered by its commander Fu Zuoyi, and then his own presidency in January 1949, and it gives real time to the season's last question, why the Communists won, by battlefield skill, by land reform, by Nationalist failures or by the exhaustion left by the war with Japan. It leans almost entirely on scholars.
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Transcript
Last time, Manchuria fell. In a few weeks of autumn 1948, Lin Biao's armies stormed Jinzhou, destroyed the Nationalists' last field army in the marshes around Heishan, and took Shenyang, at a cost to Chiang Kai-shek's regime of almost four hundred thousand of its best troops. The general who had refused to move his armies out in time, Wei Lihuang, ended under house arrest in Nanjing. And without stopping to rest, Lin led his huge army down the frozen roads of Manchuria and on past the Great Wall. But the fight that would settle the war was not in the north. It was far to the south, around a railway city called Xuzhou. In the village of Xibaipo, where the Communist leaders had made their headquarters, Mao Zedong spent much of early October bent over maps. He was studying the country of central China, ground he had been away from for twenty years and no longer knew well. And he was a changed man in his own party. The victories in Manchuria, helped along by a good deal of party propaganda, were put down to Mao's military genius, and even people who had known him for a generation now seemed to treat him as beyond reproach. Whatever he decided about the coming campaign would be carried out without question. He only had to make up his mind. In early September, he was still talking of finishing off Nationalist rule within five years. By late October, he was telling his closest comrades that he would chase Chiang out of China in a year. It was the news from Manchuria that set him free. Until then he had followed a cautious road to victory in 1951 or 1952, as his more careful colleagues and the Soviets advised. Now, in early November, he ordered his generals to destroy every one of the armies under the Nationalist command at Xuzhou. For Mao, this offensive was meant to change the war in China for good. It was also part of a deeper impatience, to move faster toward socialism and not be held back by comrades too worried about how backward the country still was. The campaign they were about to fight is known as Huaihai, from the Huai River and the coastal town of Haizhou, which marked the southern and eastern edges of the fighting. Xuzhou was where the two great railways of eastern China crossed, the line running north and south from Tianjin to the Yangtze, and the line running east and west from the coast into the interior. Whoever held it held the road to Nanjing. The Huaihai campaign was the largest battle fought anywhere in the world after the Second World War. At its height it drew in more than one point eight million soldiers, on front lines some two hundred kilometres long. And until the Communists won it, the outcome of the whole war was in no way certain. This episode follows the man who had to fight it for the Nationalists, Du Yuming, and the man in Nanjing who kept telling him how. Du Yuming you have met before, at the start of the Nationalist drive into Manchuria. He was one of the first cadets of Whampoa, Chiang's own military academy, and had commanded Chinese troops against the Japanese in Burma before Chiang sent him north. He had just come out of the Manchurian disaster. He would now take over at Xuzhou, and he had learned one lesson from Jinzhou. But we'll come to Du. First, the trap he was walking into. After September 1948, Chiang had built up his Xuzhou headquarters with about a hundred and fifty thousand more men, and made it clear that its job was to stop any Communist push to the south. Until the middle of October, neither Chiang nor his senior general at Xuzhou, Liu Zhi, believed that the Communists would launch a big campaign south before they brought their Manchurian armies down to North China. They were counting in months. They should have been counting in weeks. What they missed was how fast the Communist armies were filling their ranks with Nationalist soldiers. In September, when the Communists took Jinan, the capital of Shandong, they gained more than fifty thousand soldiers. Most came over when the Nationalist general guarding the western approaches went over before the battle had even begun. His troops, most of whom had fought on the Japanese side not long before, were put straight into the army of the Communist general Su Yu. After the autumn battles, the forces of Su Yu and of the Communist commander in the east, Chen Yi, had almost doubled. Mao knew this kind of recruiting carried political dangers, but he insisted on it. In principle, he told his commanders, no prisoner was to be let go. Most would be put into the Communist ranks. The men to defeat Chiang, he said, would come mainly from Chiang's own prisoners. He had a reason beyond numbers. That summer he had warned his commanders that the population of the Communist countryside had fallen fast, that in some places landlords had led uprisings, and that recruiting new soldiers in the villages had gone to extremes. The war could not go on long that way. Mao gave Su Yu, still a young general, the job of working out the first plan. Su had read the imperial chronicles. He knew that since before the Han dynasty, southern rulers had liked to give battle just here, where there were rivers and hills, but where the land was flat enough that their armies would not be cut off from their supplies in the south. He also knew that time was short. If the Communist armies from the north and the west did not move fast, Chiang might change his mind and pull back to the Yangtze, and the decisive victory might slip away. In Nanjing, Chiang was doing almost nothing but war now. His own government, his prime minister included, could hardly get in to see him. Worried by how fast the Communists were moving, Chiang wanted to pull most of his Xuzhou troops back to the Huai River, leaving a smaller force in the city. His field commanders hesitated. They feared there was not enough time to do it before the Communists arrived. By the end of the first week of November, they still had not made up their minds. On 6 November, one of the Nationalist army groups east of Xuzhou moved out to cover a unit coming in from the coast. Su Yu and Chen Yi had been hoping for exactly that. Mao agreed. He ordered them to race for the Grand Canal and cut that army group off from Xuzhou, while Deng Xiaoping's forces moved southwest of the city, pretending to be about to attack it. Two days later, when the Communists suddenly came down on the town of Tai'erzhuang, the Nationalist commanders there decided not to fight. In the middle of the night they built big fires, so the attackers would be sure to see their white flags. Almost without a shot fired, about a third of Chiang's Xuzhou command was cut off, and in less than a week the Communists had it completely surrounded. Even so, one of Chiang's generals insisted that the Communists' real target was Xuzhou itself, and he talked Chiang into sending in more troops from the south and the west. That was the moment Du Yuming arrived. He reached Xuzhou to take command on 10 November, just as the Nationalists finally discovered that another Communist army, under Deng Xiaoping, was moving fast to their south. Deng's aim was the town of Suxian, on the railway south of Xuzhou. Take it, and Xuzhou was cut off from the south. Here is the lesson Du had learned at Jinzhou: never let the enemy put his forces in the ground you may need for a retreat once the battle starts. So he proposed to Chiang that the Xuzhou armies first attack Deng's troops, and drive them away from the railway to the Huai River. Chiang said no. He insisted that Du send forces east instead, to break the ring around the trapped army group. Du was almost certainly right. If the Nationalists had struck south first, the whole Communist plan of cutting off their main armies and destroying them one at a time would probably have failed. Mao knew what Du was proposing, and he was worried that Nanjing would accept it. So at the Communist headquarters there was immense relief when, probably on 14 November, they learned that Chiang had ordered Du to send the main part of his forces, two army groups, east to rescue the army in the ring. On 15 November Suxian fell to Deng Xiaoping's soldiers. Xuzhou was, in effect, cut off. Three days later, among the hills and creeks east of the city, Chen Yi's troops stopped the armies coming out of Xuzhou, in some of the fiercest fighting of the civil war. The Communists fought the way they had in Manchuria. Heavy artillery pounded the centre of each Nationalist formation, while fast-moving regiments chewed at its edges, pushing the flanks into the path of the guns. The Nationalist advance ground to a halt. Communications started to break down, and fear spread. On 20 November the Communists overran the pocket at Nianzhuang. The Nationalist commander shot himself, and only three thousand of his soldiers escaped to Xuzhou. Two days later the rescue troops learned that the trapped army group had surrendered, and they made their way back to Xuzhou, carrying their dead. In the camps on the edge of the city, the bodies were stacked up in sight of the soldiers, waiting to be buried. Chiang's adopted son commanded a tank division in the relief force. Chiang got word to him not to let the Communists capture his hundred American tanks, and the young man sent most of them south, and then had them carried by rail and barge to Shanghai, to be shipped to Taiwan. The tanks, at least, were going to be saved. At Communist headquarters, the days of the Huaihai campaign began with something close to a ritual of joy. Mao, who had been up most of the night reading reports and sending orders, would greet his colleagues with the latest victories and predictions that Chiang's regime would soon collapse. They treated him with more and more reverence, and he sometimes mocked them for their caution. On 14 November, in a commentary for the Communist news agency, he wrote that "the PLA, long superior in quality, has become superior in numbers as well." Victory, he said, was at hand. The Nationalist regime, as Mao put it, was giving way like a soft wall. In a directive on military control in mid-November, he laid down that from now on everything the party did depended on the war. Its task was to help the army win a complete victory. In the cities, Mao still insisted that property be protected, but freedom of expression was sharply cut back. Newspapers, the party's instructions said, were weapons in the struggle between classes, not businesses. But the Communists did not win Huaihai with soldiers alone. Behind the armies moved an enormous supply operation, more than two million peasants carrying food and ammunition to the front. And a large part of it was forced labour. In the villages newly under Communist control, party cadres conscripted peasants almost the way the Nationalists had: a quota for every village, and harsh punishment if it was not met. Out on the plain, an American reporter riding back toward Xuzhou passed the body of a soldier lying beside the road. Nobody knew whether he had been a Communist or a Nationalist. Chiang now ordered another army group, the Twelfth, under Huang Wei, to make the long march north from Wuhan to join the fight. It never got there. When it was stopped, Chiang knew his plan was in trouble. He had Du flown to Nanjing for a round of meetings with his other main generals: Fu Zuoyi from Beijing, Bai Chongxi from Wuhan, and Hu Zongnan from Xi'an. None of them would send troops of his own to help the others, and above all not to help Du break out of Xuzhou. Du himself argued that it was probably too late to retreat. Better to stay put, he said, and let the Communists waste their strength on Xuzhou's strong defences. Chiang was furious with his generals. They thought only of their own positions, he said, and nothing of the country they were meant to defend. And at the end of the meetings, he overruled Du, and ordered him to march his main force out of Xuzhou at once, south toward the Huai River, picking up the trapped Twelfth Army Group on the way. Before dawn on 1 December 1948, with cold winds blowing across the plain from the northwest, Du Yuming led two hundred and thirty thousand men out of Xuzhou's South Gate. At least a hundred thousand civilians, most of them refugees from the north, scrambled to get out with them. Soon the southern highway was jammed with people, cars, horse carts and wheelbarrows, choking the column and making any orderly retreat impossible. Behind them, Xuzhou was burning. Du's troops had set it on fire by accident, blowing up heavy equipment they could not take with them. And the Communists were already coming.
To see what Du was marching toward, go back a week, to Huang Wei. Huang Wei was another of the first Whampoa cadets, one of Chiang's own. He had about a hundred and twenty thousand troops, most of them better trained and better equipped than the Communists facing them. His Twelfth Army Group was probably the best fighting force Chiang had left. The Communists did not have enough men to beat him in a straight fight. The only way, Chen Yi argued, was to lure him into a trap, where the ground itself would help them close the ring. They set the trap at Shuangduji, southwest of Suxian. Pretending to fall back in a hurry, by late November the Communist forces had drawn Huang's army onto the banks of an arm of the Huai River, with hills to the north and the east. When Huang saw the trap, he tried to pull out to the southeast, along the only road out. Liu Bocheng's forces blocked it. Liu Bocheng was the one-eyed veteran who commanded the Communist armies of the central plains, with Deng Xiaoping as his political commissar. So when Du marched out of Xuzhou, he was marching to rescue a man who was already in a cage. The exodus had taken Mao by surprise. He wanted to throw everything at Du's main force at once, before it could get south of the river and join the armies at Nanjing. Deng Xiaoping, awake at headquarters when the first word of the retreat came in, gathered every gun the forward units had and began shelling Du's rear guard. Without doubt, many of the civilians on the road died in those barrages. The next morning, every Communist unit within reach rushed to hem in the retreating army, and by 4 December Du's men were dropping where they stood. A few days later Du ordered a halt, at a place called Chenguanzhuang, about three days' march north of the Huai River. Mao's commanders at the front persuaded him that they could do both things: pen in Du's army and destroy Huang Wei's. On 6 December, Mao agreed. The fight with Huang Wei's crack troops was savage. Huang drew his tanks, armoured cars and trucks into lines of defence, and Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping almost despaired as their soldiers came up against them. The Nationalist air force flew sorties day after day, cutting down Communist troops who had no cover. Several times Huang reported to Chiang that he was about to break out. On 13 December the Communists split his defenders apart. And on the evening of 15 December, Huang Wei was captured, and his army of a hundred and twenty thousand men was no more. Carl Mydans, a photographer covering the war for Life magazine, travelled through that country in December and left a picture of what it looked like. A smudge of smoke lay along the horizon, and heavy guns thudded somewhere out of sight. The small villages rose like tiny atolls in an ocean of stubble, most of them wrecked by fire and shellfire, their mud huts tumbled and scattered. The villages still standing were full of troops, each ringed with foxholes where soldiers stood up to their chests in the ground. In one, every hut was packed with soldiers, and more huddled in the cold under lean-tos of reeds against the mud walls. Only a few villagers were left. Their houses were taken, the artillery horses were eating their straw, and their rice and vegetables and whatever animals they had left were vanishing into the soldiers' cooking pots. That village had changed hands a couple of times. When one of the photographer's party asked a survivor who was better, the Nationalists or the Communists, the farmer answered quickly that both were good. It was only the people who were bad. The same day, the photographer had to be evacuated south, because the Nationalist general in charge of the area had decided to go over to the Communists.
With Huang Wei gone, the Communists turned to Du Yuming. On 18 December, the five Communist commanders of the campaign, Liu Bocheng, Chen Yi, Deng Xiaoping, Su Yu and Tan Zhenlin, met in a village barn at Caiwa to plan the capture of Du's army and the advance to the Yangtze. They seem to have come out of the barn almost bewildered by the thought that if this last part of the campaign worked, all of China north of the great river would be theirs. A photograph was taken of them that day, in the wintry light. Chen Yi looks ready to march on the Yangtze that minute. Deng is ashen and unshaven. All of them look exhausted. Mao's orders were to surround Du's army, but to hold off attacking the main body until the new campaign in the north had begun. Su Yu admitted later that he was enormously relieved. For Du Yuming and his men, that delay was the cruellest thing that could have happened. A failed breakout on 16 December had already cost him almost a quarter of his troops. In the frozen fields around him, his soldiers lived in tents or in the open, kept alive by supplies dropped from the air. Deng Xiaoping, who was directing the Communist side of these battles, did not press the attack on them. He did not need to. Chiang told him not to try to break out south toward the Yangtze, but to attack to the north, in a final and decisive battle. "Don't think of evading the enemy," he said, "but destroy them." Chiang knew Du's army was doomed. But honour, and the time he needed to prepare a withdrawal to Taiwan, both demanded that Du fight to the last man. He may also not have wanted to be the Chinese leader who divided the country at the Yangtze. And by refusing a general retreat to the river, he may have been keeping big fighting forces out of the hands of the man likely to succeed him on the mainland, his vice president, Li Zongren. On 20 December it began to rain and snow, and the temperature fell. More than two hundred thousand men were crowded into a small area, with not nearly enough supplies. Every attempt to relieve them came to nothing. The air drops of food and ammunition missed more and more often, as the defenders were herded into tiny pockets in the fields. On Christmas Day, Du reported that his men were "eating tree bark and grasses and to keep warm they were burning houses, clothes and furniture." And still, of his hard core of fighting men, only about ten thousand had gone over to the enemy. By New Year's Eve, the frozen and starving soldiers were digging up coffins to burn, and slaughtering their horses for food. Around their camp, swarms of peasant labourers recruited by the Communists had dug ring after ring of trenches. On 6 January 1949, the Communists finally launched their all-out attack. Du radioed the Generalissimo that he had given everything he had and was preparing a last, desperate counterattack. He mentioned that he was also in pain from a kidney ailment. He had recently given one of his kidneys to a brother. Chiang answered that he had no other senior officer with the skill and the spirit to replace him. In the days that followed, Du's divisions fought hand to hand across those rings of trenches. On 9 January Du radioed that his best armies had all been destroyed, and that he and the survivors could only "fight to the end." Chiang told him he was sending a plane the next morning to bring him out. Du would not take it. He turned down the offer to rescue him and his staff, but he did little, either, to organize a last defence. On the afternoon of 10 January, Du Yuming walked out of his American army officers' tent and bowed to his Communist captors. One of his officers admitted, after he was taken, that his last meal had been his American sheepskin gloves. Du would spend the next ten years as a prisoner of the Communists. In Nanjing, Chiang told himself that he had held on to the presidency this long out of the responsibility he felt for Du and his men. "In my heart I am not guilty," he wrote. The Huaihai campaign was over. Mao and his comrades at Xibaipo were overjoyed, and also taken aback at how fast the Nationalists were collapsing, and at how much that now asked of them. The army's supplies were in a shambles, and its best units were worn out from marching hundreds of miles on foot. But all of China north of the Yangtze was now theirs, or soon would be.
Except for one corner of it, where Lin Biao was waiting, and not at all happily. Ever since Manchuria, Mao had been juggling two plans at once. The first and most important was the drive to the Yangtze through the central plains, which became Huaihai. The second, once Huaihai began to go better than even Mao had dreamed, was to take the great northern cities, Beijing and Tianjin. No one in the party leadership doubted what Beijing meant to Mao. It was where he had first come, as a country boy from Hunan, to learn about Marxism, and to his mind no city in China mattered more as a symbol of power. The problem was how to take it without pulling troops and energy from the battles in central China. In Beijing sat Fu Zuoyi, the Nationalist commander in the north, whose armies were still strong, with real support among the local elites. Mao ordered Lin to bring his troops through the Great Wall and, with the Communist forces already in the north under Nie Rongzhen, slowly cut off the Nationalists in and around the big cities. But no major attacks, not yet. It was better, Mao thought, to wait and see how Huaihai went. As long as Lin's Manchurian armies kept Fu's troops from going south and tipping the balance there, their strength was not wasted. Lin did not see it that way. Tiananmen is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the great gate at the heart of Beijing in front of the old imperial palace. Lin was often overheard saying that if he had to fight his way to Tiananmen, he could forget about ever using his armies to drive the Nationalists out of the south. He thought the battles in the north did not matter. He wanted to get his troops down to central China, where he believed the war would be decided. Waiting had its own danger, and Mao and Zhou Enlai knew it. Inside the cities, groups opposed to the Nationalists, not all of them under Communist control, were holding angrier and angrier rallies against unemployment and falling wages. The Communist leaders wanted to take the cities from outside, not share them afterwards with local radicals. So the underground in Beijing and Tianjin was told, again and again, not to provoke the military police. By early December both cities were under martial law, and the rallies stopped. Instead, the underground went after the soldiers. In Tianjin, Communist agents, some dressed as wounded soldiers back from Manchuria, spoke out openly against the civil war in the streets. Beijing that winter was full of the war's leftovers. That September the China scholar Derk Bodde, who was living in the city, went to the Temple of Heaven, whose steps had once been climbed only by the emperor and his train, at the most solemn ceremonies of the year. Every building was packed with hundreds of student refugees from Shanxi, some of them hardly twelve or thirteen years old. Their thin sleeping pads and few possessions covered the stone terraces and the temple floors. The great columns, faded from their old brilliant red, were plastered with notices, dust and rubbish lay everywhere, and parts of the courtyard, even the lower tiers of the Altar of Heaven, were fouled with filth. Fu Zuoyi could not make up his mind. He made no secret of his contempt for the chaos in Nanjing. But he still had more than three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, and he did not know what the Communists meant to do. If they went around the northern cities and headed south, he could sit tight and bargain with whoever won at Huaihai. Whatever happened, he had little to gain by breaking out to join the Nationalist armies elsewhere. So he pulled his forces in around the big cities and waited. Mao's own commanders pressed him to act, and in early December he let Nie Rongzhen try to catch Fu's armies as they pulled back from Zhangjiakou, northwest of Beijing. Nie's forces, with some of Lin's Manchurian units, trapped one of Fu's armies on its way back to Beijing. Fu sent his Thirty-Fifth Army, under Guo Jingyun, to rescue it, and it was surrounded in turn, at the walled town of Xinbao'an. The Communists hit Xinbao'an with heavy artillery on 22 December. The town's walls, the Communist commander remembered, were "torn off layer by layer". Inside, it took a whole day to wipe out the defenders, "fighting by breaking through the walls of the houses along the streets or walking on their roofs." By the end of that day, Guo Jingyun had taken his own life, and his remaining troops had surrendered. The Communists buried him in the frozen ground beside the railway platform where he died. A few weeks later they dug up his body and handed it to Fu's troops in Beijing, as a warning of what would happen if the city had to be stormed. Xinbao'an, and the fall of Zhangjiakou two days later, broke something in Fu Zuoyi. On 14 December, the Communists had surrounded Beijing, and Fu sent out peace feelers. He asked Chiang for permission to resign. Chiang refused, and told him not to take winning and losing too seriously. Losing, Chiang explained, "can teach us lessons and make us strong". Fu went back to his secret talks. And the Communists knew a great deal about what was on his mind. At least one of his advisers was a Communist agent, and with help from Soviet intelligence they had recruited his own daughter, Fu Dongju, through her fiance, a longtime party agent. Her reports gave them a close look at her father's fears. Still Fu would not surrender. He floated the idea of a kind of truce for the Beijing and Tianjin region while peace talks went on. Mao, planning his next moves, liked to joke that Fu was holding out for a few more catties of pork. A catty is the old Chinese pound, a little over half a kilogram. With his attention on the battles in the south, Mao had left the contacts with Fu to an unlikely pair: Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao, who were both against settling things in the north by force. Zhou thought big battles inside the cities would wreck Beijing and, above all, Tianjin, as factories for the Communist war effort. Lin wanted his troops spared for the south. In the end, Mao's impatience beat them both. The attack on Tianjin, mostly by Lin's troops, was set for 14 January, the same day Mao issued his stern terms for peace. Meanwhile the Communist underground in both cities worked to stop the Nationalists from destroying or carrying off machines and factories, and to talk key people out of fleeing south. In Beijing, late in December, it set up a secret corps of worker inspectors, to urge workers to guard their machines and to threaten managers and owners with harsh reprisals if any equipment was moved or wrecked. The party had tried for years to organise China's factory workers, mostly without success. Now it found that workers, and quite a few of their bosses, were happy to work with the people they expected would soon be in charge. Only a small part of the northern cities' industry was destroyed. Out at Yanjing University, just outside Beijing, Ralph and Nancy Lapwood watched the new army arrive in mid-December. Retreating Nationalist soldiers streamed past the gates one night. The next day there was heavy gunfire to the south. Then, on the Thursday morning, the victorious army came. The Communist troops were well dressed in padded clothes, fur-lined coats and huge fur hats, and their shaggy Mongolian ponies looked sleek and well kept. Fu Zuoyi's men, the teachers wrote, had behaved much better than they had feared. But the Communists took neither food nor fuel from the villagers, and would accept no gifts. They paid for everything with their own currency, returned whatever furniture they borrowed, carried water and swept the courtyards for their hosts. Beijing had seen many armies in the past fifty years, the teachers thought, but never one like this. In Tianjin, in the days before the attack, the streets were empty. The only people moving were at the exits from the city, above all the roads to the coast, where thousands were trying to get out before the Communists arrived. The Nationalist commander, Chen Changjie, had heard about Fu's contacts with the Communists, but his chief had never told him how the talks stood. At dawn on 14 January, as the attack began, Chen ordered his men to fight. At first the fighting at the western and southern approaches was furious. But by afternoon it was clear that most Nationalist officers had no will left to fight, and the Communists pushed toward the centre through the night. Chen Changjie surrendered at four in the afternoon on 15 January. Tianjin's Nationalist mayor, who had sworn to fight to the bitter end, was caught with his concubine in his secret downtown apartment. His wife turned out to have been a Communist agent. Did Mao storm Tianjin to force the Nationalists to the negotiating table, as he told the Soviets? Or to make sure real negotiations never got going? It is hard to say. There is little doubt that by now he wanted a clear military victory. But he also saw that the Nationalist regime might come apart on its own, quarrelling over whether to talk at all, and he even imagined Chiang's people and the Guangxi generals turning their guns on each other. Several of Mao's generals told him the Tianjin battle was strategically unnecessary. Inside the party, though, the chairman's aim justified his means, and his aim was clear: the whole of China for his party.
Now only Beijing was left. On 16 January, Lin Biao, commanding the armies around the city, sent Fu Zuoyi an ultimatum: start moving your troops out of the city, or face an all-out attack. Fu came to two last meetings with Communist officers and go-betweens, who by now included his own old teacher and several members of his family. And while the last talks went on, life in Beijing carried on almost as usual. The city gates stayed open. The restaurants and cinemas were full of people who wanted to spend their last gold yuan before it became completely worthless. When the Communists took over the main power station, they sent their own electricians in to work beside the city's, to keep the lights on. Fu had agreed to a face-saving accord, a non-surrender, to spare the ancient capital of China. But he had honourably put it off until Chiang was gone. Before dawn on 21 January, word reached him that Chiang would step down that day. Fu got up, and went out of the city to sign a declaration renouncing his loyalty to the government in Nanjing. When he handed it to the Communist representatives, they saw that his face was ashen, and his body stiff, as he walked back to his car. His twenty-odd divisions and several artillery brigades were taken into the People’s Liberation Army whole, and some of his generals even kept their commands, for a while. Fu himself, the most senior general to surrender without a fight, would serve the new regime as its minister of water conservancy, and later as a vice chairman of its National Defence Council. The Communists called it the peaceful liberation of Beijing. With it, their conquest of North China was, in most ways, complete. Only in the far western reaches of the north were there still Nationalist forces strong enough to fight, and the Communist leaders were happy to deal with them later. Their harder problem was how to govern the vast lands that had suddenly fallen into their hands. Three campaigns, Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Beijing and Tianjin, had redrawn the political map of China in less than nine months. On 31 January, in a bitter north wind, the people of Beijing, who three years before had lined the streets to welcome Chiang Kai-shek, came out to greet their new liberators. A great portrait of Mao replaced Chiang's over the gate to the Forbidden City. On 3 February the army held its victory parade through the city. Thousands of students and workers marched in it, their paper banners and portraits of Mao torn to tatters by the wind, and among them walked some well-known university professors. Derk Bodde was there. In about an hour, he counted more than two hundred and fifty heavy vehicles: tanks, armoured cars, trucks full of soldiers, trucks with machine guns, trucks towing heavy artillery. What struck him most was that it was almost all American equipment, captured from the Nationalists or bought from them with bribes. As the trucks kept coming, he heard people in the crowd exclaim in wonder, Still more! Still more! The welcome was jubilant. And it worried some of the Communist cadres, even in their moment of victory. Beijing had rapturously welcomed a great many conquerors before them. Mao warned that if they did not live up to the people's revolutionary hopes, they would face the same trouble the Nationalists had faced taking over in 1945. The cities were strange country to the Communists, and many of them looked on city people with suspicion and distaste.
And Chiang? At the end of 1948, he sat down with his diary. "Reports of lost battles swirl in like falling snow," he wrote. North China was on the brink of collapse. When the railway between Kaifeng and Zhengzhou was destroyed, he wrote that "the country is dead." Yet he took pride, he wrote, that in all the turmoil a railway had been rebuilt and some dams had been built. "I do not feel guilty. I tried my best." Since Manchuria, he had taken it as certain that he would end up on Taiwan. Across the country, people who had never had anything to do with the Communists wondered what would happen when they came. Almost everyone was fed up with the government, but Mao's party was an unknown. All that was certain was that everything was changing. On the outskirts of Shanghai, children sang a song that old Chiang was dead and gone, and that perhaps Shanghai would not be Shanghai any more. Many intellectuals and newspapers called for peace talks with the Communists, while others, among them Hu Shi, Wu Zhihui and Dai Jitao, urged Chiang on to a moral and military last stand. The pressure on him now came from his own side. From his headquarters in Wuhan, Bai Chongxi cabled Chiang that the campaigns north of the Yangtze had been a total disaster, and then sent an envoy to ask him to step down. Bai was the leading general of the Guangxi clique, the southern faction that had fought with Chiang and against him for twenty years, and its political chief was the vice president, Li Zongren. Li was saying the same, and openly talking about the Generalissimo's resignation. It stung Chiang, coming from Bai, with whom he had grown close since the start of the war with Japan. On 31 December he wrote in his journal that the Guangxi clique was once again plotting against him. That same night, New Year's Eve, he issued a statement: "If peace can be secured, I am not at all concerned about my own position." On New Year's Day 1949, Chiang formally set out in his journal the reasons for staying on and for stepping down. Staying offered only vague and uncertain gains. Stepping back, he wrote, would let him "shake up the inept party, military, and government machines" and start again from zero. He told Bai that any peace must leave the Republic of China's laws and way of life standing south of the Yangtze, and that any sacrifice for that, even the two of them hanging as war criminals, would be worth it. He knew the odds of such a peace were nil. His wife, in America, was working hard, but as he wrote, getting nowhere. He admitted the situation on the mainland was out of control. And yet he felt at ease. In the middle of this great calamity, he believed, his personal cultivation had made real progress. He was a better man. Li Zongren himself was not eager to push Chiang out. It took a great deal of pressure from his old friends in the Guangxi clique, and from the Americans, to bring him round. On the evening of 4 January, Chiang turned up unexpectedly at Li's house in Nanjing to tell him he would go. The Americans were overjoyed to see Chiang leave, and promised Li their full backing. In the middle of January, Mao published his eight conditions for peace talks. They included the punishment of war criminals, above all every one of the Chiangs and the Soongs, except Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling. In other words, unconditional surrender. Chiang knew his name would head that list. What if Li decided to hand over Chiang and his family as part of the price of a truce? He made a last appeal to Washington. The United States would not come to his aid. Chiang chaired his last meeting of the Executive Yuan, his cabinet. When most of those present called for a ceasefire and peace talks, he let them know that he meant to give up his office. By the middle of January, he had moved the headquarters of his air force and navy to Taiwan. He was moving other things too. After Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, Chiang had ordered the treasures of the old imperial Palace Museum in Beijing packed into more than nineteen thousand crates, and they had followed his government to Shanghai, Nanjing and up the Yangtze gorges to hiding places in the mountains of Sichuan. Since 1946 they had been back in Nanjing, still in their crates. Now, from the end of 1948 into January, Chiang's son oversaw their shipment across the strait to Taiwan. About three thousand eight hundred crates went, only about a fifth of the whole, but the cream of the collection. Early on the morning of Friday, 21 January, after learning from his ambassador in Washington that his appeals had come to almost nothing, Chiang called about a hundred of the Kuomintang's leading figures to his residence in Nanjing. They sat in silence as their leader announced, in a low voice that was at times almost too quiet to hear, that he would withdraw from office for the good of the country. Many wept. As Chiang rose to leave, some cried out that he was the party's eternal leader. But read the statement closely. It named Li Zongren acting president, and it did not contain one word about resigning. Chiang had stepped down. He had not retired, and he had not resigned, and he stayed on as head of the party, with most of its surviving generals behind him. In his statements, behind the humble words, his followers heard a note of defiance. He blamed his fall on American pressure and on Li Zongren's defection, and he seemed to expect that he would soon be called back to finish the revolution. When Li reached the presidential palace that afternoon, he found that Chiang's staff, on Chiang's orders, refused to take orders from him. Before he left Nanjing, Chiang and his son rode out to the Purple Mountain, to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen. Father and son slowly climbed the eight long flights of steep stone steps, resting now and then. Their guards left them alone, and they went into the mausoleum, and stood in silence with their heads bowed before the marble figure of China's first modern revolutionary. Then they drove to the airport, and flew away on a plane named Mayling. He did not go straight home. He flew first to Hangzhou, where the air force and several elite army units had their headquarters. Chiang had never stolen from the state, and he had no private hoard of gold. To pay his own expenses, he borrowed a million of the new gold yuan from a government bank. It was worth about ten thousand American dollars that day. The day after he stepped down, Chiang sat down and wrote his own short and remarkably frank account of why his regime had failed. This time he did not blame Marshall, or the Americans. The major reason, he wrote, was that China was caught in a time of transition, with the old system torn down and the new one not yet built. Between the lines he was blaming the quarrelsome, undisciplined party and army he led, and his own failure to build a modern organization. "From now on," he concluded, "the business of nation building and army reform must focus on building a system and a structure." So why did the Communists win? It is the question this whole season has been walking toward, and Huaihai is the place to ask it. There are four places to look for the answer: the battlefield, the land, the Nationalists' own failures, and the long exhaustion of the war with Japan. Start with the battlefield. Both sides made terrible military mistakes. In each of the three great campaigns the Nationalists lost, in Manchuria, at Liaoshen and at Huaihai, their armies could have badly hurt the Communists if their leaders had not made crucial tactical errors, so often the fruit of poor coordination, regional politics or rivalry between commanders. You saw it at Xuzhou: Du's sound plan overruled from Nanjing, and generals who would not move a man to help each other. And the Communists had weaknesses of their own that could have cost them victory even against a beaten enemy: Mao's rashness and meddling, armies that were never standardized, generals who knew nothing of fighting at sea or in the air. The Nationalists' bigger strategic errors went back further: choosing to settle things by force in 1946, not pausing to secure their gains, and staying in Manchuria after the Communists had the upper hand there. Together with the mistakes at Huaihai, those errors probably lost them the war. Then the land. The Communists' campaign to give land to the poor did help them survive, in places, as in parts of North China in 1946 and early 1947. But on balance, their drive to redress the gross inequality of land in the villages probably did them as much harm as good in the war. What mattered for the war was who backed the army and who opposed it. Unless the village elites had actually sided with the Nationalists, which they rarely had any reason to do, dividing up their land only stirred up trouble the army did not need. One reason the Communists won is that Mao was brought to see, by 1947, that in the new areas they took, cutting rents and settling debts was as far as they could go. Without that correction, taking central and southern China would have been much harder. And you have just seen what the villages gave the Communist army at Huaihai: more than two million peasants carrying its supplies, many of them conscripted under quotas and threats. Then the Nationalists' own failures. They tried to terrorize local elites and strongmen into obedience instead of winning them over. And they bound themselves to America, then defied American pressure to negotiate in 1946, and lost much of that alliance just when they needed it most. The Communists, by contrast, were held together by a leadership whose unity around Mao meant no defections in hard times and a single chain of command, the thing all their Chinese enemies sorely lacked. They were skilled at propaganda, painting their opponents as the enemy of every kind of Chinese and themselves as defenders of the nation. And they had the Soviet alliance, without which the great counteroffensives in Manchuria would have been very hard to carry out. Political subversion, the defections, the agents on Fu Zuoyi's staff and in his own family, did as much to secure Communist victories as the fighting itself. And the long exhaustion. A week after Chiang stepped down, Li Zongren wrote to Mao. Three more years of civil war, he wrote, had come on top of eight years of war against Japan. The nation's resources were drained, and the people had suffered terribly. The Nationalists had fought most of the big battles of that war, and it had cost them their best-trained armies and ruined their finances before the civil war even began. Put all that together, and it comes back to where we started this episode. Until the Communists won the Huaihai campaign, the outcome was in no way certain. And by the middle of January 1949, they had won it. Chiang went home to his village of Xikou. The family there had heard about Manchuria, and Xuzhou a few hundred miles away, and the president's withdrawal, and many of them were already packing. From Xikou, he wrote to his wife that she should stop making speeches for him in America. He meant to spend two or three years on solid party building. He sounded so optimistic he seemed almost delusional. "I think that in the next twenty years," he wrote, "I will be one of the few people in the world who will be able to achieve world peace." In Nanjing, Li Zongren took over a government whose staff answered to someone else, and set out to do the one thing Chiang had refused: talk peace with Mao. He hoped that a few months of talks would give the armies south of the Yangtze time to get strong enough to stop a crossing. On paper, Li counted three and a half million men in the Nationalist army, at least half of them armed and able to fight, against at least two million Communists. But he was short of ammunition and fuel, and Washington told him plainly that it would not even consider sending more. And Chiang's generals still took their orders from Chiang. When Li asked one of them to deploy his four hundred thousand men to defend the Yangtze, the general simply refused, and said he was following Chiang Kai-shek's plan. Mao, for his part, saw an American plot. He anxiously passed word to Stalin of an intelligence report that the United States meant to use atomic bombs and Japanese soldiers against his army. Stalin was not worried. Li's taking over only deepened Mao's fears. That is next time: the talks, the river, and the end of the Nationalists' China.
Sources
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 389-390, 392-394, 395-397, 397-398, 398-400, 400-401, 401-403
- Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), pp. 8-10, 10-11, 192-193, 195-196, 196-197, 198-200, 200-201, 201-202, 202-203, 204-205, 206-207, 207-208, 208-209, 10-1, 19-220, 220-222, 222-223, 223-224, 224-225, 225-226, 226-227, 227-228, 237-238