The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [123]
Of the three, the key event was the defeat of Chiang’s forces in the Chinese civil war. Neither the cold war nor the Korean War—which began when the UN attempted to help South Korea repel an invasion by North Korea, and ended as a conflict between the mighty armies of China and the United States—would have strained Chinese-American relations without the Communist victory in China, which put the two nations in opposing cold war camps.
The fall of China to the Communists shocked many Americans. Only a decade earlier, Chiang Kai-shek had the insurgent Communists on the run. In the early 1930s, Mao Zedong established a Communist government in remote Jiangxi province, called the Jiangxi Soviet, and Chiang launched a campaign that appeared to destroy the movement. In 1934 the Communists were forced to retreat northward in an epic journey that came to be known as the Long March. For five thousand agonizing miles, the Communists fled on foot to Shaanxi, fording rivers and crossing mountains in an ordeal that fewer than one in four survived. The Chinese Communist Party as a national institution was surely dead: this exhausted, half-starved group of guerrilla fighters could hardly pose a threat to the central government of China yet again.
But Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 resuscitated Mao’s group. First, it demonstrated conclusively the inability of the Nationalist government to protect the Chinese people against a foreign invader. Second, it gave the Communists an opportunity to win the loyalty of the peasants in north China. As the war exacerbated poverty in the countryside, the Communists won widespread support by embracing land reform and organizing rural forces to fight the enemy. When the Japanese military imposed its ruthless “three all” policy—“kill all, burn all, destroy all”—it bred deep hatred against the invaders and compelled many Chinese to join underground Communist guerrilla forces.
The first priority of Mao’s guerrilla force was to defeat the Japanese military, and in the early years of the war it waged a hit-and-run campaign of harassment against the Japanese.31 But it also adopted a longer view, working to organize the peasants. Communists held meetings, called “struggle sessions,” that resembled religious revivals in their fervor, in which peasants were encouraged to share with others their stories of exploitation by powerful landlords. These emotional, cathartic sessions inspired a cult following among the poor in rural areas, and by the time the Japanese were expelled from China in 1945 the Communists were not only firmly entrenched in the northern countryside, but had also matured as a political and military force, with a trained and dedicated cadre in place. It was now much better prepared to launch a serious challenge to the KMT.
At the February 1945 summit meeting at Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin seemed to give Chiang’s Nationalist government their imprimatur as the legitimate government of China. The Communist Soviet Union, the only one of the three powers in close proximity to China, expressed “its readiness to conclude with the National Government of China a pact of friendship and alliance between the U.S.S.R. and China in order to render assistance to China with its armed forces for the purpose of liberating China from the Japanese yoke.”
But in international diplomacy every syllable of every word is important, and the Western Allies failed to note or question the Soviet Union’s assertion that it was pledging its readiness for friendship and alliance not with the “Nationalist” government of China, but with the “National” government of China, a term that could be construed to describe whatever government exercised effective control over China.
As the Pacific war ground