Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [283]
Western visitors were charmed787 by the apparent casualness of Yan’an, the charm and fluency of Zhou Enlai, the manner in which Mao dropped by people’s quarters for cards or gossip, danced energetically though with absolute absence of rhythm at Saturday-night hops. Foreigners joined the cadres to drink baicha, “white tea”—hot water. They witnessed a brilliantly staged pantomime. The choice for China was not between a corrupt, brutal, incompetent dictatorship and libertarian socialism. It lay between two absolutist systems, of which that of the Communists was incomparably more subtle and effective, possessed of wide appeal for peasants and intellectuals.
Those Americans in Chongqing and Washington who opposed an alliance with Yan’an made the right call for the wrong reasons. They disdained Mao because they were fearful of undermining Chiang Kai-shek. The proper grounds for refusing aid to the Communists were that war matériel would not have been employed to assist the defeat of Japan. The Soviets took the same view. Moscow’s emissaries in Yan’an reported most unfavourably to Stalin on the discipline, battlefield performance and alleged successes of Mao’s troops. The Communists had indeed created a remarkable political edifice. The problem from an Allied viewpoint was that their achievement had everything to do with the future of post-war China, almost nothing to do with defeating Japan.
Yet in the wartime years, millions of Chinese peasants passionately believed that Mao held out the promise of a better life. To this day, many of those who served with the Communist guerrilla forces in World War II remember the experience with romantic enthusiasm. For all his shortcomings, Mao was a profoundly inspirational leader. Those modern biographers who claim that his achievement and long maintenance of power in China were founded exclusively upon terror seem drastically to understate the popular support which he mobilised. “The Communists were so much better organised than the KMT,” said Wei Daoran, son of a famous Nationalist general, Wei Lihuang, who as a teenager accompanied his father on wartime campaigns. “They had an infrastructure788 that stretched right through the countryside. When Communist troops passed through a region, they left behind much better memories than the KMT. They offered the peasants some education. If you were talented, the party offered opportunities for advancement. They treated women as equals.”
Many women found a fulfilment in the ranks of Mao’s Communists which had been wholly unattainable in pre-war China. Bai Jingfan was the daughter of a prosperous merchant from Henan Province who dealt in grain and oil. When the Japanese stormed their village in 1934, the family fled. Bai herself, sixteen at the time, set off alone in determined search of the Communists, whom she perceived as the only convincing opponents of occupation. Initially, she took an eight-day bus journey to Xian. From there, she travelled to Yan’an, where she enrolled in the Party’s Women’s University. On graduation she became a propaganda officer. The hardships of her new life counted for nothing beside the exhilaration of working for the cause. She married a rising star of the Communist military hierarchy, and followed him to fight with a guerrilla regiment in Hebei Province.
By May 1944 she had grown accustomed to a wholly nomadic existence, playing cat-and-mouse with Japanese forces. One night, camped in a village, they were awakened at midnight by