Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [282]
The American reported to Washington: “I got the impression that here785 we were dealing with pragmatists—men who knew their limitations as well as their strengths. And they were confident—confident and patient. They have waited a long time to get where they are now. They are willing to wait much longer.” Likewise Raymond Ludden and the five military members of the U.S. Yan’an Observers’ Group—the “Dixie Mission”—who travelled on foot and by mule to visit guerrillas. “8th Route Army has a legendary fame in North China as friend and champion of the people,” Ludden enthused in February 1945. After years of cynicism and frustration in the Nationalist camp, such men as Service and Davies found the Communists intensely romantic. They swallowed claims for the decency and moderation of Mao’s leadership, when shrewder observers recognised that the Communist leader, like Chiang, was engaged in the ruthless pursuit of power. Soft words offered to American emissaries were meaningless.
Mao’s personal vices are starkly depicted by modern writers. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in an unremittingly dark portrait, highlight his maltreatment of his first two wives, and of a host of unfortunate young women whom he exploited. Many Western as well as Chinese scholars argue contrarily, however, that whatever Mao became after he achieved power, in the wartime years his excesses had not yet manifested themselves. What seems indisputable is that Mao had no interest in liberal socialism. American visitors to Yan’an were foolish to be deluded by the warmth of Communist greetings. They saw, or thought they saw, a group of austere, dedicated patriots committed to fighting the Japanese and creating a better life for China’s starving millions. This was fanciful. It is no longer denied in China that Mao’s regime in Yan’an engaged in large-scale opium trafficking, and almost certainly also made tactical truces with the Japanese. “Mao and the Communists786 engaged in the opium trade,” says Yang Jinghua, a historian of Manchuria. “How else could they pay their troops? Nothing else that would grow in Yan’an was marketable. In such a situation, you do what you must.”
Evidence about Communist parleys with the Japanese is circumstantial, but persuasive. It suited both parties to trade opium, a major industry for the occupying regime. Japan’s China Affairs Board, established by Prince Konoe, controlled a $300-million annual traffic, deliberately revived by the Japanese army to weaken the Chinese and raise cash. This was the body whose agents negotiated with Mao’s people for supplies. Several of the largest Japanese corporations administered distribution—Mitsubishi in Manchuria, Mitsui in the south. There was intense rivalry over markets, though all the interested parties sought to conceal their roles. By 1944–45 it also suited Communists and Japanese alike to avoid headlong military confrontation. “China was so fragmented at that time, that it remains hard to say with certainty what did or did not happen,” shrugs Yang.
Mao’s suppression of dissent, however, is undisputed. A young intellectual named Wang Shiwei had languished under house arrest since 1942 for denouncing in an essay the “dark side of Yan’an,” the “three classes of clothing and five grades of food,” of which the best went to senior cadres while