Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [278]
“Most nice people, clever people, chose to be Communists,” claimed Xu Yongqiang, who in 1944–45 was an interpreter with the Nationalist army in Burma. “They were real Communists, not selfish politicians.” He meant that many Chinese idealists and intellectuals gravitated naturally to the left in response to the Nationalists’ moral bankruptcy and the hyperinflation which ruined so many people in those years. “The professional middle classes found themselves bankrupted. The wife of the head of our university had to find work as a domestic servant. People were selling their clothes to buy food. It was the middle class who paid for the war.” Many Communists all over China languished in Japanese prisons, if they had been fortunate enough to escape execution.
Liu Danhua was a literature student in Harbin, Manchuria, when the Japanese took over. He was disgusted by everything about their behaviour, not least the fact that Japanese fellow students were so much better fed: “They had all the meat and fish. Everywhere we went, everything we did, was under Japanese control. The lives of ordinary people were wretched. I was young and angry. We tried to join the Communists, but for a long time we couldn’t find them—they were underground.” In 1940, Liu organised a student movement at Harbin University, which became known as the Left Reading Group. They made their pathetic protests by reading banned books, and urging peasants to defy Japanese orders about what crops to plant. They denounced collaborators. Liu taught his group revolutionary songs. He knew little Communist ideology, “but I could see the corruption and tyranny of the Kuomintang and the landlords. I was sure socialism must be the way forward for China.”
It was too dangerous to assemble in the university, so they met at the local tax office, where they incited tax collectors to defiance. In 1941, at last they made contact with the Communists, who began to use Liu as a courier. He was soon arrested, however, and interrogated by the usual Japanese methods—beatings, water torture, suspension by his ankles. When these refinements palled on their captors, prisoners were merely left to stand in the snow. After a trial, Liu was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, and served the first of them manacled.
Thereafter, however, his circumstances improved. He shared a cell with seven others, guarded by Chinese who proved not unsympathetic to the prisoners. He was allowed to receive a monthly visit from his wife, Yuan, who brought food wrapped in newspapers. These provided fragments of information about the outside world. He exercised constantly and took cold baths, because he was determined to be fit if he regained freedom. Some of his cellmates were Nationalists, “but there was no tension with us Communists. We were all against the Japanese.” He had no paper or pen, but composed poems in his head. Their only books were science texts and the Bible. “I read it, simply to keep my brain occupied. I can’t say I enjoyed it—it has always been abused by national rulers to serve their own purposes—but there are good things there.”
From 1944, Liu and his fellow prisoners knew that the Japanese were losing the war. Ironically, given Stalin’s indifference to China’s Communists, Liu felt passionately committed to the Soviets: “At that time, I thought the Russians were wonderful. I was sure imperialism and capitalism were doomed to collapse.” In his cell, he knew more about Stalin than about Mao. During the last months of the war, like every prisoner of the Japanese, he expected to be killed before liberation came. The tension between fear and hope became almost unbearable.
THE WAR POLICIES of Chiang and Mao had this much in common: each sought to strengthen his own power base, rather than to assist in the defeat of the Japanese. By a notable irony Mao, whose efforts to gain American support failed, profited vastly more