Suzanne Pepper

Nationalist China during the Nanking decade, 1927–1937

The Nanking regime was born of factional strife and bloodshed. In the early morning of 12 April 1927, gangs of thugs belonging to the Mafia-like Green Gang plunged through the streets of Shanghai, seized Communists and suspected Communists, and executed them on the spot with pistols or broadswords. Several thousand were massacred then and during the ensuing month. Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communists; the first united front was ended. Six days later, on 18 April, the Nationalist government was inaugurated at Nanking. The challenge confronting the new government was awesome – nothing less than to turn back the tide of national disintegration that, for a century and more, had been washing over the Chinese nation. A central, national government had virtually ceased to exist. Political power had devolved into the hands of regional militarists, ‘warlords’, who too often were unconcerned for the popular welfare and sought only to enhance their wealth and power by reliance on military force. The sense of moral community – the broad and pervasive consensus regarding the values and proper relationships of cultural and social life, which had so richly contributed to the stability of traditional China – had disintegrated, and in its place were confusion and contention. Even the economic foundations of the traditional political system had eroded. THE INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER Because the Chinese were profoundly sensitive to the abject condition of their nation, to the ravages of warlord struggles, and to the humiliations of imperialist aggression, the Nationalist revolutionary armies had been greeted exultantly as their Northern Expedition moved from Canton in the south (beginning in July 1926) to Peking in the north (occupied in June 1928) (see volume 12).

The KMT-CCP conflict, 1945–1949

NEGOTIATIONS AND AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT By 1944 the American government had become increasingly anxious to quell the dissension that was undermining the anti-Japanese war effort in China, and forestall a possible civil war that might involve the Soviet Union on the side of the CCP once the Japanese surrendered. The negotiations between the KMT and CCP, broken off after the New Fourth Army incident in 1941, had been resumed by 1943. The Americans became actively involved with the arrival in China of Major General Patrick J. Hurley, President Roosevelts personal representative to Chiang Kaishek, in September 1944. Appointed US Ambassador a few months later, Hurleys mission was, among other things, ‘to unify all the military forces in China for the purpose of defeating Japan’. The Hurley mission: 1944–1945 Optimistic interludes to the contrary notwithstanding, the first year of Hurleys efforts to promote reconciliation between the leaders of Chinas ‘two great military establishments’ bore little fruit. The Communist position announced by Mao at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945 called for an end to KMT one-party rule and the inauguration of a coalition government in which the CCP would share power. This proposal gained the enthusiastic support of the nascent peace movement in the KMT areas, where fears of renewed civil conflict were mounting as the fortunes of the Japanese aggressor declined. But it was not the sort of proposal that the KMT government was inclined to favour. Then on the day Japan surrendered, 14 August, Chiang Kai-shek invited Mao to journey to Chungking to discuss the outstanding issues between them. Mao eventually accepted, and Ambassador Hurley personally escorted him to the governments wartime capital from his own at Yenan.

The Chinese Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945

Chinese Communist leaders had long seen the war as inevitable because their experience and their ideology convinced them that Japanese expansion in China was fuelled by irreversible forces. ‘The main characteristic of the present situation,’ the CCP reiterated as a litany, ‘is that Japanese imperialism wants to turn China into a colony.’ The CCP also saw the war as necessary and, after the end of 1935, called for unified resistance at the earliest possible moment. Mao and his followers knew that in a Sino-Japanese war they could claim, as patriots, a legitimate, honourable, and self-defined role. Indeed, they intended to claim a leading role in moral terms. For them the only alternative would be a Sino-Japanese peace from which they would surely be excluded and which might be purchased at their expense. Every delay in resistance bought time which the KMT might use to continue campaigns against the CCP. Every delay prolonged the period in which Tokyo and Nanking might come to some further accommodation, possibly including joint anti-Communist action, as Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota had proposed in August 1936. One need not impugn the CCPs sincerity to note that termination of civil war, a broad united front and resistance to Japan would also serve the partys interest. Its platform matched the mood of urban China – of students, intellectuals, large sections of the bourgeoisie, and many workers – far better than the Kuomintangs repressive call for ‘unification before resistance’.