Peter Zarrow China in War

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.2Ensconced in Shaanxi, the Communists edged closer to their call for a second united front against Japanese aggression.They did not trust Chiang Kai-shek; at first they envisioned a new class alliance: peasants and workers united with the anti-Japanese bourgeoisie.This would have been a “united front from below” that was simultaneously opposed to Japan and to the Nationalists.As the CCP consolidated its rule in northern Shaanxi, it launched an expedition in the spring of 1936 across neighboring Shanxi to engage the Japanese to the east.Though the expedition ended in failure, it seemed to many to prove that the Communists had to be taken seriously.More and more Chinese outside of either part called for the GMD and the CCP to ally against Japan.The CCP resumed contact with the Comintern in late 1935.But Comintern influence had waned during the Jiangxi Soviet and disappeared in the Long March.When the Communists finally re-emerged into world consciousness in the northwest, Stalin, for one, seems largely to have dismissed them as peasant bandits.The Comintern did encourage the CCPto think of a new united front.(The Soviet Union hoped a strong Chiang Kai-shek would discourage Japanese incursions into northern Asia.) Locally, to gain broader support, at the end of 1935 Mao moderated the302War and revolution, 1937–49CCP’s program along the lines of the Jiangxi Soviet.The fields of rich peasants were not to be confiscated, and they were to have the same civic rights as poor and middle peasants; entrepreneurs would be encouraged; and it was to be easier to join the Party.By no means was Shaanxi the only site of Communist armies.Some 30,000 troops had been left behind in the Jiangxi Soviet when the Long March began.3 Chiang Kai-shek’s troops captured 16,000 of them by mid-1935, but, remarkably, remnant Communist forces survived and were even able to regroup over the next three years to conduct guerrilla warfare.When a new political reality unfolded in 1937 – as Chiang Kai-shek entered into a Second United Front with the Communists – they re-emerged as an organized military force in southern China.And after Zhang Guotao virtually split with the Party Center, his armies were fiercely pressed by Nationalist and local troops.In mid-1936 they decided to march north to join Mao in Shaanxi, a major political defeat for Zhang, who soon defected to the Nationalists.This gave Mao a significant force of about 30,000.The CCPhoped to develop a truce with the other northern army leaders, particularly Zhang Xueliang.Zhang was officially under the command of Chiang Kai-shek and, kicked out of Manchuria by the Japanese, was supposed to be attacking the Communists.But Zhang – and his troops – really wanted to return to Manchuria.He was thus receptive to Communist overtures.Worried about Zhang and his other northern commanders, Chiang Kai-shek flew to Zhang’s headquarters in Xi’an in December 1936.Rather than cooperating, however, Zhang held Chiang prisoner for a week in what became known as the “Xi’an Incident.” This incident has been much studied.It shocked Nanjing, which was left headless for a week.It has long been seen as a turning point: before, grudging acceptance of Japanese encroachments; after, national unity against outright invasion.Much about the incident remains mysterious – a frontier kidnapping with warlords and Communists and government representatives telling each other secrets.Chiang forever denied that he agreed to terms in Xi’an, but it seems likely he made an oral promise to ease up on the Communists.Negotiations were frantic during the week of his captivity.Some in the Nanjing government wanted to attack Xi’an regardless of the risk to Chiang’s life, for which Chiang never really forgave them (this spelled the end of the Blue Shirts).Most historians believe that some Communists wanted Chiang killed, but Stalin, in perhaps his last major act in China, made it clear that he felt Chiang should be left alive as the only leader capable of uniting China against Japan.Certainly, public opinion in China rallied around Chiang –but only with Zhang Xueliang and the Communists, not against them.The Xi’an Incident was not so much a turning point as a part of a string of events pushing Chiang to take a more active anti-Japanese stand.4 The Anti-Comintern Pact signed by Japan and Germany in November 1936had already forced Chiang to think about an alliance with the Soviet Union [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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