Revolution and Civil War, episode 29

Tiananmen

In the spring of 1949 the acting president Li Zongren asks for peace, and Mao Zedong uses the talks to bring his armies to the Yangtze; on 20 April they cross, Nanjing falls in days and Shanghai in May. The episode follows Mao toward power in Beijing and Chiang Kai-shek, still pulling the strings from retirement, as he moves the gold reserves and two million people to Taiwan, and closes the season on 1 October 1949, when Mao proclaims the People's Republic, asking what thirty-three years of warlords, revolution, invasion and civil war cost ordinary Chinese and what they left: a party state with a victorious army, a revolution still to make in the villages and cities, and a rival regime on Taiwan. It leans almost entirely on scholars, with a little of the Communists' own documents.

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Transcript

On the morning of 21 January 1949, Chiang Kai-shek gathered about a hundred of the Kuomintang's leading men at his residence in Nanjing. They sat in silence while he told them, in a voice so low it was at times almost inaudible, that he would withdraw from office for the good of the country. Many of them wept. As he rose to leave, some cried out that he was the eternal leader of the party. He had good reason to go. In January, at the close of the Huaihai campaign, the Communists had wiped out the last formations of his general Du Yuming and taken Du himself prisoner. And at the end of that month, by agreement with its commander, Fu Zuoyi, the Communist army marched into Beijing without a fight. But Chiang's statement did not contain a single word about resigning. It named his vice president, Li Zongren, acting president, as if Li were only minding affairs while Chiang was away, and Chiang stayed head of the party. Everything in his statements suggested a man who expected to be called back soon to finish the revolution. He blamed the Americans for pushing him out, and he blamed Li. On the outskirts of Shanghai, children were singing a little song: old Chiang is dead and gone, come and hear this song, perhaps Shanghai will not be Shanghai. If you are just joining us, that is where things stand. The Kuomintang is the Nationalist Party, which Sun Yat-sen founded and Chiang Kai-shek had led for two decades, and since the late 1920s its government had ruled China, or tried to. Its enemy was the Chinese Communist Party, and the Communist Party's chairman was Mao Zedong, who had first come to Beijing long ago as a country boy from Hunan. This is the last episode of our season. It runs from a winter of peace talks that nobody quite believed in to an autumn afternoon on a gate in Beijing, and it follows the two men who had spent most of their lives fighting each other for China. Let's start with the man who now had to make the peace. Li Zongren was a general from the southern province of Guangxi, of old warlord stock but quick to adapt. He knew that if Nationalist China was to survive, it had to buy time to put its defences south of the river in order, and the only way to buy time was to talk. His hope was that three or four more months would make the Nationalist armies south of the Yangtze strong enough to throw back any Communist attempt to cross. He was also thinking of his home, the valleys and gorges of Guangxi, and what would happen to them if they became a battlefield. And he hoped that running the negotiations would give him real power, not just the scraps Chiang had left him. The Americans, overjoyed to see Chiang go, promised Li their full backing and held out the hope of a huge aid programme. Li feared it was not enough. Without real American support right away, preferably a big loan, he knew he would stay dependent on Chiang, who still held the real power in the party. He tried Moscow too, through the Soviet ambassador, offering a neutral foreign policy and hinting that the American presence in China could end. The ambassador, under orders to be very careful, gave him nothing but general support for talks. In Washington, President Truman took the Nationalist peace offer seriously at first, but his Secretary of State, George Marshall, talked him out of any American role. Marshall balked at dragging the administration through another Chinese nightmare like the one he had lived through himself three years before. At the end of January Li wrote to Mao himself. The civil war, he wrote, had now run for more than three years on top of eight years of war against Japan, the nation's resources were drained, the people had suffered badly, and all over the country they were demanding peace. Mao Zedong was not in Beijing to read it. The Communist leadership was still in Xibaipo, and Mao's mind was on the last battles in the north. With the Nationalists in trouble everywhere, he thought, this was no time to talk peace. Xibaipo was a village in the hills of Hebei province, southwest of Beijing, where the party's leaders had made their headquarters for the last campaigns. Beijing mattered to him more than almost any city in China. It was where he had first learned about Marxism, a city of the old empire that he partly cherished and partly resented, and whoever held it held the symbol of state power. Stalin had his own view. On 10 January he cabled Mao with a draft of how the Communists should answer the Nationalist offer: do not turn talks down, but insist on talks without the war criminals and without any foreign mediators. Stalin thought the Communists needed rest before pushing south, and he worried that crossing the Yangtze might bring them up against foreign forces as well as Nationalist ones. He also told Mao, once again, to put off his visit to Moscow. The advice came at a moment that angered Mao. In his reply of 13 January, he turned down Moscow's instructions and even suggested to Stalin how the Soviet Union ought to answer the mediation offer. For the leader of a Communist party in the late 1940s, that was an unusual way to speak to Stalin, and it did not endear him to Moscow. In mid January Mao issued his own eight conditions for talks. They included the punishment of war criminals, especially every Chiang and every Soong except Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling, the abolition of the "constituted authority", and the "reorganization of all reactionary troops". In other words, unconditional surrender. Had the positions been reversed, Chiang would have asked no less. And yet the talks went ahead, because they suited Mao too. As he and his colleagues saw it from Xibaipo, the point was never a settlement, which none of them thought likely. The point was to give the exhausted Communist troops on the central plains a rest, while Lin Biao's main armies were moved down toward the Yangtze. There were loose ends to tie up as well: Nationalist commanders and officials who wanted to defect, plans for taking over Nanjing and Shanghai, and the small democratic parties, who had to be kept from being lured into some coalition that Washington would back. Because Mao was sure there was a plot behind the peace. As early as the autumn of 1948 he had predicted that if Chiang was seen to fail on the battlefield, Washington would push forward Li Zongren or another general in his place. In his New Year message to senior party officials, he warned that the United States might send troops to occupy some of the coastal cities and fight the Communists directly. That possibility, he said, could not be ruled out. Now Li had taken over, and the Chairman's fears grew. The peace offer, he believed, was part of an American scheme to plant an opposition inside a new coalition government and split the revolution from within. His answer was to speed everything up, the political manoeuvres and the preparations to cross the Yangtze alike, so the Americans would have no time to carry out their plans. In mid February he spelled out the policy to Lin Biao. The main thing, he wrote, was "to rope in" Li Zongren, his ally Bai Chongxi, Zhang Zhizhong and Shao Lizi, "and those capitalists in Shanghai". Peace, in other words, was a net to throw over the other side's leaders, one by one. At the turn of January and February, Stalin sent one of his most senior colleagues, Anastas Mikoyan, secretly to Xibaipo to see the Chinese leaders for himself. For Mao it was the first time he had sat down with one of the Soviet top leaders to talk policy and theory, and he took it as proof that the quarrels of the past months were over. Mikoyan's report to Stalin was generally positive about the Chinese leaders, but he noted that they had much to learn. Their economic plans were general guidelines with no attempt to be specific, and he put it bluntly: "They are sitting in a tucked away village and are divorced from realities". They would not be sitting there much longer. On 23 March, Mao and the other leaders left Xibaipo for Beijing. Before they set out, Mao laughed and said to Zhou Enlai, "We're going to the capital to take our exams." "We must pass them," Zhou replied. "We won't give up." Mao answered seriously that giving up would be defeat, and that they would not become like Li Zicheng. Li Zicheng was the rebel whose peasant army took Beijing in 1644, brought down the Ming dynasty, and lost the city within weeks. Every educated Chinese knew his story as a warning about victories that are thrown away. Mao settled first in a villa in the Fragrant Hills northwest of the city, a retreat where earlier rulers had built pavilions and pagodas. He arrived in a season of sandstorms, when the dust blew in off the Mongolian plains and made it hard to breathe. He was in his middle fifties now, heavier and slower than the fit young man with an iron constitution he had been in the 1930s. He slept badly, caught colds often, and suffered dizzy spells; at times, he told his doctors, he felt as if he were walking on cotton. He still worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day, sleeping until the afternoon, meeting in the evening, and reading and writing until morning. On 26 March Mao named his team for the talks, headed by Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao. Li Zongren's team was led by Zhang Zhizhong, a Nationalist veteran and former commander in Xinjiang, and it included Shao Lizi, a Shanghai man with good friends among the Communist leaders. In Nanjing, the prime minister, Sun Ke, the son of Sun Yat-sen, had given up a job he could not handle; his colleagues said he had the air of a spoiled son of a prominent family. His successor, General He Yingqin, worked with Li, but made it clear that his first loyalty was to Chiang. Chiang Kai-shek, meanwhile, had gone home to Xikou. In his black gentry robe, he spent many days in a small cabin on the mountain above his mother's grave, walking the mountain paths with his son Jiang Jingguo, sometimes through the snow. His staff believed he was thinking. But a stream of visitors poured into the little hamlet, anxious generals, ministers, governors and party men, and Chiang gave the commanders detailed orders for a vast withdrawal to the coast, the south and the southwest. Behind the scenes, he demanded that the government in Nanjing stop the peace talks. He suspected Shao Lizi above all, and predicted that he would betray them completely. He was right to. Shao, it turned out later, had been a secret member of the Communist Party since 1922, and another delegate, the vice minister of defence Liu Fei, had reportedly been working for the Communists for years. The talks opened in Beijing on 1 April. On 6 April the Communists stunned the Nanjing delegates by demanding what amounted to full surrender as the price of peace. Communist officers would reorganize the Nationalist army, the Kuomintang would be outlawed as a party, and Communist units would march into the south. Li's government had two weeks to accept, or the attack on the south would begin. Neither Li nor anyone close to him wanted to put his name to a peace like that. On 17 April, Li made one last try to get the Western powers to save his government, at a late night meeting at the residence of the American ambassador, John Leighton Stuart. The British ambassador spoke for the others. They all admired Li's patience, he said, and would like to help him, but his government stood by its pledge not to interfere in China's affairs, and there was in fact nothing it could do. The Australian added that it was a Chinese problem the Chinese must settle themselves. Li, the American ambassador reported, was plainly disheartened, chilled by their reserved and rather formal manner. The Communist leaders learned on the morning of 20 April that Li had refused to sign.

At noon that day the Communists' Military Committee met to approve the final plans for crossing the river. The operation would start that night. The Communists called their armed forces the People’s Liberation Army. Waiting north of the Yangtze was an army of nearly two million men. The Yangtze is the great river of China, running from the Tibetan plateau to the sea near Shanghai, and in its lower reaches it is more than a mile wide. For centuries it had divided north from south, and southern dynasties had often made their stand behind it. Not every Communist general was sure it could be done. Su Yu, who had the main task of planning the attack, was worried, both about the crossing and about what lay beyond it, a southern China that most of the commanders knew nothing about. They expected to cross under fire, against the Nationalist navy and air force, perhaps with foreign warships too. Mao tried to reassure them. Secret talks were already going on with men in the Nationalist navy, he told them, and if the negotiations in Beijing worked, the army could expect free passage to the south. The generals still reported that it would be dangerous and risky. The plan used the Communists' greatest advantage, which was numbers, and aimed straight at the heart of what was left of Nationalist power. The first group, from Chen Yi's Third Field Army, would cross halfway between Nanjing and Shanghai and drive the Nationalist divisions of General Tang Enbo back toward Shanghai and the coast. Chen Yi was a Sichuanese veteran of the Communists' earliest armies, who had commanded their forces in the east through the Huaihai campaign. The second group, from Lin Biao's Fourth Field Army, would cross on both sides of Nanjing and encircle the capital. The third, from Liu Bocheng's Second Field Army, would cross southwest of Nanjing and strike into Jiangxi, cutting the Nationalists' coast off from their interior. From the early morning and all through the next day, tens of thousands of soldiers walked wearily down to the shore and climbed into boats the Communists had been gathering for weeks. The less lucky had no boat at all. They gripped buoys of straw or inflated pigskin and threw themselves into the water. Those who crossed remembered the silence. The boats were carried overland in relays in the dark, lowered into the channels and paddled to the bank, and the men lay along the gunwales with no lights and spoke only in whispers. The line of sails moved forward, lit up in one place by flares dropped from Nationalist planes, hidden in another by fog and by smoke the little boats laid down themselves. Apart from the splash of an oar and the creak of a boat as the men climbed in, they said afterwards, the only sound was the drone of mosquitoes. When they were a hundred yards out, the enemy opened fire. The boats bobbed in the waves of the falling shells, and when splinters holed one of them, a soldier who could not swim jumped over the side, clung to the boat and stuffed the hole with his cotton padded coat. It was a calm night, which was lucky for the eastern group at the river's mouth, with almost three kilometres of water to cross. In some places the landings came behind heavy artillery. In others, thousands of soldiers simply glided across to the far shore in silence, seemingly unopposed. To those who watched it looked eerie, like a flood slowly spreading from one bank to the other. The defenders might still have slowed them, if anyone had been coordinating the defence. But General Tang Enbo and his troops in the east refused to take orders from anyone but Chiang, and Chiang wanted them to concentrate on holding Shanghai and the coast. Chiang had stepped down as president, but the army in the east still answered to him. At the mouth of the river, the captain of the Jiangyin fort betrayed it, and Chen Yi's troops landed safely. Upriver, the whole Nationalist river navy mutinied and went over to the Communists, and Liu Bocheng's army crossed against light resistance. The great river that was supposed to buy Li Zongren his months of grace had been crossed almost as if it were not there.

Not every ship on the river that week was Chinese. Just as the crossing was beginning, the British tried to send a warship, the Amethyst, up the Yangtze to Nanjing. Under the treaties forced on China in the previous century, foreign warships had steamed up the Yangtze as of right for generations, to guard their nationals and their trade. To the Communists a British gunboat on the Yangtze was a symbol of the old China they were on the point of defeating, and they could not ignore it. Their units had been authorized in advance to resist any foreign interference with the crossing. They shelled the Amethyst, and she ran aground on a sandbank in the middle of the river. Some hours later another British warship, the Consort, came to her rescue, and the Communists shelled her too. Mao telegraphed Su Yu that the British were sending two warships to save their ship, and that they were not to be attacked unless they interfered with the crossing, even if they went on toward Nanjing. The message came too late. The Communist gunners had already opened fire on the cruiser London and another frigate coming up from Shanghai. In all, fifty British sailors were killed in the fighting on the river. The Amethyst stayed trapped in the river for more than three months, until her crew slipped her down to the sea in the dark at the end of July. For Mao, the incident was a warning about how dangerous it would be to let his soldiers deal with foreigners on their own, and he decided that any incident that narrowed his freedom in foreign affairs had to be avoided. But he could not hide his pride. It was the first major clash with a foreign power in the whole civil war, and on 28 April he told his generals that "the incidents with the British warships have shaken the world and become the headlines of all the main newspapers in Britain and America".

The capital was next. With its river defences gone and the main Nationalist armies retreating away from it, Nanjing's fate was sealed. Lin Biao's main forces arrived near the city on the morning of 22 April. Li Zongren was away in Hangzhou that day, trying to get Chiang to join him in a common plan of resistance. At that meeting, Li told Chiang that the peace talks had failed and that Chiang should come back and lead the government. Chiang brushed it aside: "Whatever you do, I will support you." Li did not believe it for a minute. Chiang gave him general promises of cooperation, and Li flew back to his capital that evening, just in time for it to be cut off. Li met his advisers through the night, while Mao ordered his troops to advance on the city centre. In the early hours of 23 April, Li learned that every member of his negotiating team in Beijing had gone over to the Communists, and he fled to the airport. Zhang Zhizhong, Liu Fei and Shao Lizi had all defected. When the news of it reached Chiang, back home, he and his son were watching an opera performance at a grammar school. The decision to leave was taken so fast that Li had not decided where to go. While his plane circled above his lost capital, he first ordered the pilot to make for Guangzhou, where most of the Nationalist leaders already were. Then he changed his mind. He would go home, to Guilin in Guangxi, and decide from there. In Guilin he got another shock. A clear majority of the province's leading men argued that he should hand power peacefully to the Communists, to save the Guangxi troops from defeat and keep some power for the province's elite. For a while Li wavered. It was Bai Chongxi and other generals arriving in early May who talked him into holding out, convinced that the Communists had no deal to offer that would suit them, and on 8 May Bai and Li went on together to Guangzhou. His government announced that the talks had failed and that it would move south to Guangzhou and fight on. When it did, the Soviets moved their embassy south with it, but the Americans kept their ambassador in Nanjing, a sign that Washington wanted to keep a door open to the Communists. Behind them, Nanjing was left to itself. For three days before the Communists arrived, people looted the houses of top Nationalist officials and generals, wildly but systematically, amid shouting and laughter. They carried out everything inside and then ripped out the plumbing, the light fittings, the doors, the windows, the floors, and every scrap of wood that would burn. The looters had waited, one foreign diplomat wrote, like vultures, until the officials fled in panic with as much as they could carry. At the airport he saw worse confusion. The families of the rich had climbed into scores of planes with their baggage, in one case he saw with their grand piano. The planes never left the ground, because the pilots had defected or vanished. The Communist troops entered the city quietly, with none of the parades Beijing had seen. The war was still going on to the east, toward Hangzhou, and many of the soldiers were only passing through on the way to the front. It took them a couple of days to take full control. There were still Nationalist snipers in some districts, and a citizens' committee of intellectuals and industrialists, which the Communists had confirmed as the city's temporary government, begged the commanders to deal with the snipers and the looting as carefully as they could. Some of the soldiers could not resist a look at the buildings their enemies had lived in. Early on the morning of 25 April a few of them walked into the American ambassador's residence and woke John Leighton Stuart in his upstairs bedroom. Looking around, they told him that all of it would go to the people one day. Even the commanders could not resist. Deng Xiaoping, one of the senior Communist commanders on that front, later remembered how he and Chen Yi took turns sitting in Chiang's chair in the reception room of the Presidential Palace. So the capital of the Nationalist republic changed hands not with a last stand, but with looters, snipers, and two generals taking turns in an empty chair. In Beijing, Mao waited anxiously to hear how the foreigners in Nanjing had taken it. He knew most embassies would not pull out their staff, and he wanted some kind of working relationship with them. The report of his soldiers waking the American ambassador alarmed him. That morning he wrote out orders: his people "should be indifferent to the foreign embassies and their diplomatic personnel, and should take absolutely no initiative to contact them." Party headquarters followed up with orders to protect all foreign institutions and enter no foreign owned building. Mao even let foreign radio and telegraph equipment keep working, against the party's practice in Manchuria. On 28 April he thought he saw the powers starting to bend. The Americans were sending messages asking about diplomatic relations, he wrote, and the British were trying hard to do business; if the Americans broke with the Nationalists, he might consider it. In his mind, the Americans had gone from plotters to suitors in a matter of weeks. Victory has a way of changing how the world looks.

That left Shanghai, the great port at the mouth of the Yangtze. Shanghai was China's biggest city and the heart of its industry and finance. At the end of April, Shanghai was still doing business despite crippling inflation and a river closed to trade, and many of its leading men believed they had enough friends in both camps to spare the city a disaster. Most of the liberal intellectuals had already given the Communists their hearts, if not yet their bodies. Leaders of the small Democratic League said openly that a Communist China was unavoidable, and that they would work with the new rulers to make them better. Then, at the very end of April, Chiang came back. After a defiant radio speech to the nation from his home in Zhejiang, he returned to Shanghai and declared that he would fight "to the end." To the city's intellectuals and much of its business class, who well remembered how Chiang had brought Shanghai to heel in the late 1920s, a last ditch defence of the city was more frightening than a Communist victory. Chiang and General Tang let the Nationalist secret police loose on defeatists and traitors, and prominent citizens fled for their lives. Even Du Yuesheng, the boss of Shanghai's underworld Green Gang, had to run for Hong Kong. Yan Huiqing, who had been leading the city's efforts to negotiate with the Communists, took refuge in a mental asylum. Hundreds more were arrested or driven out of the city, and suspected Communist sympathizers of lower rank were executed by the security police, sometimes in the streets. What was left of the city's commerce collapsed. The currency was worthless, every deal was done in gold or barter, and new taxes for the war effort were written out almost every day. Press gangs took men off the streets to dig ditches around the city and build a wooden stockade that Tang Enbo said would be Shanghai's impenetrable inner defence. Most Shanghai people believed it was built to make a timber merchant, a friend of the general's, very rich. By the second week of May the farmers from the countryside around had stopped bringing food into the city. The foreign consuls who remained begged General Tang and the mayor to declare Shanghai an open city, to spare it hunger and destruction. It was no use. By then Chiang was gone, as suddenly as he had come. Few who knew him had thought he would really fight for Shanghai. His purpose, they believed, was to squeeze out of the city every resource he could for the island fortress he meant to build. For the thousands of stateless Europeans in Shanghai, Russians, East Europeans and Jews, the city's fall meant the end of a refuge. Most scrambled for a passport, any passport, and few got one; the lucky ones became citizens of the Philippines or Costa Rica and paid their life savings for the ticket. Quite a few Western businessmen, on the other hand, chose to stay and offer their services to the new government. Any Chinese regime, they reasoned, would sooner or later decide it needed them, and the Communists would be no different. Chiang's son stayed behind on the Yangtze for a while, to wring the last drops of support out of the Shanghai capitalists. The terror against the government's opponents got worse through May, with frequent executions and killings in the streets. Not even journalists working for the Western press were safe. Several were arrested, and two Western correspondents were held and threatened with execution for breaking martial law. One witness, Harrison Forman, watched the executions. The prisoners were raced through the streets in an open truck, with sirens screaming and fire bells clanging, to a crossroads where thousands waited. They were pushed to their knees in a line in the middle of the street and shot in the back of the head, and as they pitched forward a roar of applause came from the crowd. Once, he wrote, the wife of one of the dead slipped through the police line, knelt beside her husband and smoothed his bloody hair, moaning softly. The crowd fell silent, suddenly ashamed, and melted away. The Communist leaders did not want to fight their way into Shanghai, but they did not want to hand Chiang the propaganda victory of a long defence either. Hangzhou fell at the beginning of May, and soon afterward Shanghai was cut off. The main Communist force came at the city from the north. But some units, by mistake, put themselves between the Nationalist troops and the coast, blocking their escape and forcing them to fight. It was a costly tactical mistake. It brought on fighting nobody needed, and it probably held up the capture of the city by a couple of weeks, partly because it made it harder to reach the troops guarding the city and talk them into surrendering. Shanghai went on being Shanghai. On 18 May, a couple of days after the Shanghai Country Club opened its grass tennis courts for the summer, the mayor left for Taiwan. By 20 May the Communists had surrounded both airports, and looting broke out in parts of the city, mostly of private houses, since Chiang had made sure there was little else left to take. On 22 May, at the naval yard, Chiang's younger son finished loading the last of his American tanks onto a commandeered freighter and sailed for Taiwan with his wife. On 24 May, what remained of the Nationalist authorities staged a Victory Parade down the main streets. Lots of people came out to celebrate, though few were quite sure what they were celebrating. That night, at the stroke of midnight, the first Communist units entered the city. There was no resistance. They took over City Hall and the central police station and raided the Nationalist archives, and in the morning the troops spread out across the city. They tied their horses and mules along the elegant facades of central Shanghai, and they were as much of a sight to the locals as the tall buildings and the streetcars were to them. There was real fighting in only a few places. The best known, which the Western residents called the Battle of Broadway Mansions, went on for two days, with Nationalist soldiers firing across Suzhou Creek and turning one end of the Bund, the famous waterfront, into a battle zone, while in the streets behind, life went back to normal. Across the river in Pudong the fighting was fierce, as Nationalist officers and officials tried to break through to the coast, where Nationalist, American and British ships still lay at anchor. In the end Mao let them go. Capturing them was not worth the damage, and his real target was the city. By 27 May Shanghai was taken. Its people and the soldiers of the Liberation Army went on watching each other in curious amazement, because there was almost no contact between them. The soldiers had been forbidden to enter people's houses, or even to talk to anyone in the street without permission. Most of the troops were moved out quickly. Propaganda teams stayed to put on street meetings and revolutionary plays, and the people of Shanghai stopped, watched, repeated the slogans, and went back to work. The river was opening to trade again. Chen Yi became the new mayor. He and Deng Xiaoping moved quietly into a hotel in the old French quarter, and for some of the new rulers it was a return to streets they had not walked in twenty years or more.

Now let's go back a few months, to follow where Chiang's attention had really been all along. Late one night in mid January, his son Jiang Jingguo turned up at the Bank of China in Shanghai with his father's orders in his hand, a group of armed political officers and a convoy of army trucks. He had brought along the bank's president, who dutifully opened the vaults and watched as the soldiers loaded boxes of gold bullion, silver coins and foreign currency into the trucks. A navy ship took the treasure down the river and on to Xiamen on the mainland coast, not to Taiwan. It was the first of two shipments of China's financial reserves, and sending it by way of Xiamen was meant to confuse Mao about where Chiang would make his stand. On the night of 10 February, with another order from his father, Jingguo led his men to the two state banks in Shanghai, loaded the last of the bullion onto trucks, and drove it to the navy yard, where a frigate took it straight to Taiwan. According to a statement made in the American Congress, the two shipments were worth three hundred million American dollars at 1949 prices. Chiang had long been saving them for the day he might have to escape to Taiwan. That left the man who was now, on paper, president of China, with barely enough money to pay his government's daily bills. When Li Zongren finally found the courage in March to ask formally for the state's gold reserves back, Chiang noted his irritation in his diary. It was not only gold. At the end of 1948 Jingguo had supervised the first shipment of thousands of priceless objects from Beijing's Palace Museum and other collections, the treasures of the emperors. Chiang had ordered those treasures packed into more than nineteen thousand crates after Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, and they had travelled to Shanghai, then Nanjing, and then up the Yangtze gorges to hiding places in the mountains of Sichuan. In all, about three thousand eight hundred crates went to Taiwan, only about a fifth of the collection, but the cream of it. Chiang also had the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, who had kidnapped him at Xi'an in 1936 and had been his prisoner ever since, packed off to the island. And then there were the people. From Shanghai south, the ports were in chaos. Officials, merchants and their families crammed aboard freighters, ferries, tugboats and anything else that would carry them across the Taiwan Strait, and whole army units with their weapons crowded the docks. The Taiwan Strait is a hundred miles or more of open sea between the mainland province of Fujian and the island. Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for half a century until 1945, and the Nationalists had ruled it for less than four years, with a heavy and bloody hand. Many of the well off did not go to Taiwan at all, since its future looked very doubtful. They went to Hong Kong and beyond, mostly to the United States. By May about five thousand refugees were landing on Taiwan every day, and Chiang's governor there, General Chen Cheng, had already declared martial law again, as an emergency measure. It would stay in force for almost fifty years. In the last days of Shanghai, tens of thousands of people fought to board the last ships to the island, many of them paying for their passage in gold. Years later, a man who got out with his mother and his brothers and sisters remembered a ship so crowded that it threatened to swamp as soon as it left the dock. The captain would not go on until the passengers had thrown enough gold into the river or onto the dock for the ship to steam safely away. They remembered that an overloaded ship fleeing Manchuria the year before had gone down with six thousand refugees aboard, and they did as he said. For every passenger who made it, others did not. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who reached ports still in government hands found there was no passage to be had. Taiwan could take only so many. By December some two million Nationalists had fled to the island.

Chiang himself did not hurry. He stayed in Shanghai harbour aboard the cruiser Taikang until 8 May, when the ship raised anchor and sailed slowly south down the coast. He spent another eight days inspecting defence works on the offshore islands before he crossed to Taiwan. His son flew back to Shanghai to give the last orders to the commanders still in the city, then joined his father on Zhoushan Island, and from there they set sail for Taiwan. When his frigate docked at the naval base of Kaohsiung, in the south of the island, General Sun Liren was there to meet him. Sun Liren was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute who had fought the Japanese in Burma, and he was now training a new army on Taiwan. Sun had told American officials in Taipei that he expected Taiwan to fall, not to a massive Communist attack, but to infighting and disorganization. He had little ammunition, he said, and no heavy machine guns or artillery. Chiang did not see it that way. His governor, Chen Cheng, reported that the flood of gold, currency, art treasures, modern machinery and American aid meant for the mainland provinces had come in even better than planned. One of the first things Chiang did was to name a small group of loyal men to study how to rebuild the party. In July he decreed that the Kuomintang must be a revolutionary democratic party, not a purely democratic one, and his guidelines kept its old structure of tight party control. This time, he meant the party's guardianship of the people to come with a real and thorough dictatorship, as well as good government. He lingered almost a month in the south. Then on 25 June he and his son flew to Taipei, and a black Japanese limousine, the departed governor's old car, carried them up a winding road to a modest house near the top of Grass Mountain, with a stunning view of the valley below. Since they had left Nanjing in January, father and son had spent many hours alone, talking about how they and the Republic of China could survive. The first priority, they agreed, was to secure their hold on Taiwan, and that meant rooting out Communist agents and Taiwanese dissidents. It was a strange mixture. In the middle of a reign of brutal political repression, Chiang's new team on Taiwan began a real land reform, brought inflation under control, gave native Taiwanese a couple of thousand posts in the provincial civil service, and set up elections for village and county chiefs, though only Kuomintang members and independents could stand. And on Taiwan, at last, the old warlords who had plagued Chiang for decades had no armies and no power at all. Bai Chongxi was given an honorary post, Du Yuesheng and the other Shanghai gangsters were kept off the island, and most of the Soong relatives, among them T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung, went to America. On the mainland his armies were still fighting, but Chiang had already chosen his ground. His hope now was a war between the United States and the Soviet Union that would let him take the mainland back, and to keep his power he even undercut efforts to defend the provinces south of the Yangtze. Later that year he told his advisers that what would save China was a third world war, which would come soon, and in which the Americans would need him.

In Beijing, Mao Zedong chose the date for his new state with care: the first day of October, the month of Russia's October Revolution and of the Wuhan uprising of 1911 against the Qing. On 30 September the Communists formed a coalition government of several parties, with Mao as its chairman, and among his deputies were Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Zhou Enlai, as premier designate, had been in charge of preparing the new government, and he would be its premier. In the new ministries, Finance and Foreign Affairs among them, Soviet advisers brought in procedures for information, decisions and control far beyond anything the base areas had known, and a good deal of influence over the decisions themselves. The new state's founding charter, the Common Program, gave legal standing to eight other parties, so long as they accepted the Communist Party's leading role. It guaranteed private property and encouraged private business, and the word socialism did not appear in it at all. The leaders' bodyguards were horrified at the idea of them appearing on top of Tiananmen, "in full view of everyone in Beijing," as one of them put it. The war was still going on in the south, and Nationalist planes were raiding targets in the north every week. In the weeks before, military patrols in the streets were almost doubled, and covert operations against suspected enemies of the new regime were stepped up. Even Mao seems to have had last minute doubts. But in the end, as so often in the party's history, the symbol beat the caution. Tiananmen is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the great gate at the entrance to the Forbidden City, where the emperors of China had lived. For centuries people had gathered in front of it to protest the injustices of the state. On 4 May 1919 the students had met there to protest against imperialism and demand freedom and reform, in the movement that gave birth to the Communist Party and to the renewal of the Kuomintang. On 1 October 1949, a cold, windy autumn day in Beijing, Mao Zedong stood on top of the gate and, in a high pitched voice, declared the People’s Republic of China. He was unwell and feverish. But he was cheerful too, smiling constantly, and he made no effort to hide his triumph. On the left side of his new dark brown jacket, pinned with a safety pin, was a red ribbon with two yellow characters, zhuxi, Chairman. Below him, tens of thousands filled the square, which was narrow in those days. Only official delegations from factories, schools and organizations were let in, but the parades, the dancing and the singing in the streets left little doubt that the people of Beijing were celebrating. In all, more than four hundred thousand people took part in the day's celebrations. For many of those who had protested at that gate over the years, women, day labourers, refugees, servants, it seemed as if 1949 meant they had finally been heard. A woman standing on top of the gate that day later remembered being carried away by emotion as she gazed down and saw so many women among the workers, peasants and soldiers filling the square, a sea of red flags and fireworks burning in the night sky. For Mao, the whole victory came down to words that became famous: "the Chinese people have stood up". The poet Hu Feng wrote a hymn for the day to his comrades. He had seen them, he wrote, dying in dank prisons and starving in deserted villages, feeding lice with their flesh, drinking bloody water on the battlefield. Today, he told them, they should forget all the past, except that the past had purified them, like a newborn child lying in a warm cradle. Six years later, the state he was celebrating arrested him, and he spent most of the rest of his life in prison. And Chiang? He came back to the mainland once more that autumn, arriving in Chongqing in the middle of November to show his troops and officials that he had not forgotten them. Li Zongren had given up by then. Exhausted and depressed, he flew to Hong Kong in mid November, and then on to New York, for medical treatment. In his diary Chiang called Li's behaviour "shameless and beneath contempt." Bai Chongxi, in perhaps the bravest move of his career, flew to Chongqing to offer Chiang his services, and Chiang's adviser Chen Lifu talked him into sparing Bai, on the grounds that it was safer to take him to Taiwan than to make a martyr of him. When the prime minister of the day, the old Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan, proposed land reform as the key to a new Nationalist policy, Chen Lifu answered angrily, "the Communists have not even arrived yet, and we want to persecute the landlords ahead of them?" On the morning of 30 November, with Communist troops closing on Chongqing, Chiang's guards woke him and begged him to leave at once. He refused to be seen in a hurry, and when his motorcade finally set out, the road to the airport was so jammed with terrified people that his cars almost did not make it. He went on to Chengdu. At two in the afternoon of 10 December, with Chengdu threatened and the loyalty of the local troops in doubt, Chiang and his son left it for Taipei. Chiang said he would leave as he had come in, and he and his son walked out through the main gate, reportedly singing the national anthem. Their plane, heavy with fuel, flew by dead reckoning for hours over country that now belonged to the Communists, and landed in Taipei in the middle of the morning. Neither of them ever returned to the mainland. Before the year was out, Chiang admitted that he had suffered total defeat. And yet he had begun, he wrote, to feel alive again, and he promised himself he would make a new beginning and create a new history. He took his son for a rest at Sun Moon Lake, high in the mountains of central Taiwan. On the first day, a message came that Chengdu had fallen. Chiang sat for a moment in thought, then waved his bodyguards away and walked with his son to the edge of the lake, where a local fisherman rowed them out in his small boat. So let's close the season where we opened it. On 28 June 1916, a hundred men carried the coffin of Yuan Shikai through the streets of Beijing to the railway station. Yuan was the general who had made himself president of the new Chinese republic and then tried to make himself emperor. The crowds along the route, the American minister wrote, looked on in silence. "There was no sign of grief, rather mute indifference." To the people, Yuan had been a remote master whose contact with them came "through taxes and executions." Yuan left behind a republic with no centre, and the question this whole season has been about: who would build the state the republic had failed to make? First the generals tried, the warlords who carved up the provinces after Yuan and fought over Beijing for a decade. Then Chiang's Nationalists tried, and for ten years at Nanjing it looked as if they might. Then Japan came, and in eight years of war, some fourteen to twenty million Chinese died. Some five hundred thousand of them died when their own government broke the Yellow River dikes in 1938, to hold back the Japanese advance. Some four million died in the Henan famine, in a province whose grain the state went on taking for its armies. And then came the civil war, in which the Nationalists lost half a million men around Beijing and Tianjin, and another half million on the plains of east China, before what was left of their armies crossed the sea. The answer, when it came, was the Communist Party, and it is fair to ask why. We gave that question its due in the last episode, so here I will only say this. In August 1946, when Chiang's armies outnumbered his by more than three to one, Mao told an American journalist that all reactionaries were paper tigers, and people smiled. Three years later, nobody was smiling. The Nationalists, with much of the blame resting on Chiang himself, threw away their advantages and made their problems worse, while the Communists did the opposite. And the revolution, it turned out, was not one thing. In thousands of communities, millions of men and women were chasing their own visions of a new life, and Mao's greatest strength was understanding those villages well enough to turn some of their people into revolutionaries. Its victory mattered far beyond China, too. It was an anti-colonial struggle harnessed to a social revolution, and it turned China's alliances from the United States to the Soviet Union. What did the winners hold, on that cold October day? They held a party state with a victorious army. In the newly conquered south there were too few party officials to govern, so the army kept order, and Mao and Liu Shaoqi both feared what would happen if their enemies saw how thin their hold really was. Mao called it the crisis of victory. They held cities they did not yet know how to run. The party had chosen to build its government from scratch rather than use the old regime's officials, so its cadres often had no records, no contacts and no experts, and one of them said they were starting to rebuild a wasteland. They held a revolution still to be made in the villages and the factories. In the newly taken cities, real control of many factories lay at first with labour activists on the shop floor, and land reform had only begun. And Mao did not mean to stop at a mild revolution. At a party meeting at Xibaipo in March he had almost entirely dropped the phrase New Democracy, the promise of a long, gentle passage that left room for private business, and in June he published an essay called On the People's Democratic Dictatorship. Years later he admitted that the plan to destroy the business class had been there from that March. Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, more cautious, went on speaking the language of New Democracy, and Stalin, for his own reasons, still urged a slow road. And across the strait they faced a rival regime on Taiwan, under martial law, with the gold, the treasures of the emperors and two million people, and a leader waiting for a war that would carry him home. In terms of real power, the first of October was in some ways just a date on a calendar. But for millions of Chinese who had backed the cause against the Nationalists, it stood for their victory. Mao stood on top of the gate of the emperors' palace, wearing a ribbon that said Chairman. For many long years to come, that word would be of the utmost importance in the lives of everyone in the People's Republic. The republic Yuan Shikai left behind had found its master at last. What that master did with the country, from the land reform in the villages to everything that came after, is the next part of the story. Thank you for listening to this season.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 347-348, 351-352, 358-359, 359-364, 394-396
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 398-400, 400-401, 405-406, 407-412, 419-420
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), pp. 208-209, 10-1, 1-2, 2, 19-220, 220-222, 236-237, 237-238, 239-241, 241, 241-242, 242-243, 243-244, 244-246, 247-248, 248-250, 250-251, 251-252, 269-270, 270-272, 272-273, 287-288
• Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China (1922), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56089
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 342-343, 359-360
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)