Awakening the Dragon: The Guomindang at war
Prologue: A nation in turmoil
China is like a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she awakes, she shall astonish the world.
Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, source unknown, possibly apocryphal
By the early 1930s, the China, the middle kingdom (Zhongguo) was in turmoil. Gangsters and warlords ruled most of the country. The last dynasty had been overthrown, and the last emperor was a puppet of the Japanese. Communists and Nationalists fought a brutal civil war for supremacy with competing visions of a new order. Foreign powers fought for influence, both political and military, some such as the Soviet Union seeking allies against enemies, some such as the USA, markets influence and resources, others such as Japan military supremacy.
It was a time when the destiny of the world’s most populous nation would be decided.
Part 1: Shifting alliances, Compromises, war and peace
Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack."
Madame Kai Shek
In this short space, it is impossible to do justice to the fragmented factions that took part in the Chinese civil war. Theoretically, China was a republic, with Premier Lin Sen as head of state, with a parliament and separation of powers between different branches of government. The ruling party, the Guomindang (Chinese National Party), originally founded by Sun Yat Sen, had become internationally recognised government of China, and had through diplomacy been able to reverse many of the unequal treaties that had been forced upon China by colonial powers in the 19th century. Foreign investment, particularly American, British and German allowed a small measure of industrial growth and to the outside world it appeared as though China was at last united under a stable, modernising democratic government.
Shanghai: A western skin on a Chinese heart
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun
Mao Zedong
The reality was far different- power in China grew from the barrel of the gun. The most powerful man in the Nationalist government was the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-Shek (Pinyin, Jiang Jieshi), who commanded the Guomindang armed forces.
Chiang Kai Shek, the Generalissimo of the Guomindang
Chiang retained his power due to certain "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion”, legislation which granted him emergency powers as commander in Chief of the Army. Also, he possessed a forceful personality, and few within the Guomindang were prepared to openly criticise his policies. When Chiang commanded, he was usually obeyed.
But Chiang’s power, and that of the government were constrained by the power of the regional warlords, who controlled most of the provinces away from the Guomindang’s strongholds in central and Eastern China.
The Warlords
Of the factions competing for power with the Guomindang, arguably the most powerful were the loose knit “Guangxi Clique”, led by figures such as Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren. Li Zongren’s opposition to Guomindang policies was unusual for the various warlords, as it was based at least partly upon moral principles, rather than simply safeguarding personal power. Li Zongren demanded 7 great principles before he would obey any Chinese government, including the release of political prisoners, a free press, and arrests without a warrant.
Li Zongren, the foremost power in Guangxi
Control of the heavily populated commercial and industrial region of South East China gave the Guangxi Clique large financial resources, which they used to equip armies rivalling those of the Guomindang, as well as a small air force and navy.
The mountainous region of Yunnan, was controlled by Long Yun; control of its mineral wealth gave him substantial resources. Long Yun was friendly with the French in Indochina, and much of his army was armed and trained along French lines.
Xingjang (Singkiang), with its old trading cities on the silk road and Uighur Muslim majority, was controlled by various warlords. These included Muslim warlords such as Khoja Nayaze, as well as ethnic Chinese warlords. Although aiming for independence, the warlords of Xingjang fell short of fully breaking away from China, and instead cooperated with the Communists, who offered promises of religious tolerance.
In the Shanxi region of Northern China, a variety of warlords competed for power, the strongest being Yan Xishan. With control of the old capital of Beijing (renamed Beiping by the Nationalists), the various Shanxi warlords were not the most powerful of factions, especially due to own divisions, but Yan Xishan’s natural cunning and skilful political manoeuvres kept his faction secure for the moment. Yan also possessed powerful artillery that was probably the best in China.
Power in the North: Yan Xishan
Yan Xishan showed a large degree of flexibility in social matters in order to combat Communist influence, and had enacted important social reforms in Shanxi, although he remained a military dictator. The other powerful northern warlord was Feng Yuxiang, the "Christian General", a warlord who's protestant faith had led him to mass baptise his troops with fire hoses.
Gansu and the surrounding area was controlled by 3 warlords of the Wu Ma clan. The Ma clans, led by Ma Hungkuei, Ma Bufang and Ma Buqing formed three muslim sultanates in northern China. Although possessing seperate administrations, the Ma coordnated their foriegn policy. The lands under the Sultan's controls were known as the land of 3 Ma, Xibei San Ma.
The Ma clans Ma felt sufficiently threatened by the Communists to cooperate with the Nationalists, and were surprisingly loyal allies of the Generalissimo. Xibei San Ma possessed a large army, including powerful cavalry forces which were ideal for fighting in Northern China.
The warlords all had a strange relationship with the government. The Guomindang was forced to compromise power with them to avoid conflict. Many warlords were technically members of the Guomindang, some were even government ministers. The fact that the warlords possessed an independent power base meant that it was difficult to control them.
Many Guomindang ministers were corrupt, particularly the notoriously brutal head of security, Zhen Guo Fu. Yan Xishan also used his senior position as armaments minister to siphon supplies to bolster his own personal forces. Many were disloyal, for a variety of reasons; Yan Xishan, for instance, had rebelled against the Guomindang in 1930. There was one item upon which most were united: the need to destroy the other Chinese faction yet to be mentioned, the Chinese Communist Party or Gonchangdang.
Mao and the Communists
Since coming to power in much of China in wake of the revolution, the Guomindang had originally been a broad coalition of different reformist groups. Some were socialist, some communist some nationalist, but all agreed on the necessity of reform. In the late 1920s the Guomindang split, and bloody factional war followed. The left wing of the Guomindang, increasingly dominated by the Communists, called for a policy of armed insurrection, while the remaining Guomindang, now dominated by the right wing headed by Chiang Kai-Shek, would begin a series of brutal crackdowns on the communists, while also attempting to begin expeditions against the warlords.
The Communists were initially divided and weak. Urban insurrections by workers failed, as did other rural based insurrections. However, the Guomindang had more trouble shutting down peasant based soviets in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces. Their leader was Mao Zedong, whose boundless faith in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry put him at odds with the Leninist Shanghai based Gonchangdang centre. In collaboration with his military commander Zhu De, Mao began organising a peasant based Red Army. In late 1931, Mao proclaimed the Chinese Soviet republic in Jiangxi.
Bitter fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces occurred all through the late 1920s and 30s. Chiang was determined to crush Mao’s communist forces, and launched many expeditions. The communist forces were small, but could never quite be destroyed, and several military campaigns against their bases failed.
In 1934, hundreds of thousands of Guomindang soldiers surrounded the Communist stronghold in Jiangxi province, and attempted to starve them into submission. Complete destruction of the Gonchandang seemed possible. To avoid destruction, in what has become known as the Long March, almost 100,000 Communist soldiers, functionaries and party leaders left their stronghold, broke though Nationalist lines and travelled over 10,000 km to establish a new stronghold far to the north in Shaanxi, where their presence was contested by neighbouring warlords such as Yan Xishan. Guomindang forces inflicted crippling losses upon the Communists. Of the original almost 100,000, only 8,000 remained, joined by another 22,000 along the way.
Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Yan’an
At the end of the long March, Mao had escaped destruction, and the communists had established new headquarters in Yan’an.
In many ways, the Guomindang and Gonchandang were mirror images, Yin and Yang. Throughout the Long March, Mao had become the supreme leader of the communists, whose authority was near absolute. Chiang’s was consistently undermined by the necessity of compromising with the warlords. Chiang’s army was large, badly equipped, poorly led and inexperienced, while Mao’s remaining cadres, though small, were experienced, committed, and well trained. Equally, the Communist leaders were disciplined and incorruptible, while those of the Nationalists were far from incorruptible.
Numbers alone favoured the Nationalists. But with better tactics, commitment and determination the Communists had perhaps learned the Art of War better than the Nationalists.
War is based on deception
Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Faced with superior numbers, the Red Army generally fought in small numbers, preferring to ambush small groups of the enemy and avoiding battle where possible. Mao’s guerrilla strategy, skilful use of terrain and the support of part of the population had held off far larger Guomindang forces, which were also reeling from the attacks of an old foe: Imperial Japan.
Japan
In 1931, on the pretext of a terrorist attack on a train, the Imperial Japanese Army had seized Manchuria and established Pu Yi, the last Qing emperor as its puppet ruler. Manchuria had become a Japanese colony, with the Japanese sending in hundreds of thousands of Japanese colonists. Chiang’s response was not encouraging to nearly all Chinese- he did not respond to Japanese attacks, and instead continued to wage war against the Communists, believing China should be unified and the other factions destroyed before tackling the Japanese.
The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart.
Chiang Kai-Shek
The Guomindang strategy of essentially ignoring the Japanese occupation of the North was disastrous in terms of popular support, as well as allowing much of China’s industrial capacity to fall into enemy hands. For the leaders of Imperial Japan, civil war in China offered further possibilities for expansion, which they would be certain to grasp.
By 1936, with the Communists entrenched in Yan’an and conducting guerrilla attacks against Nationalists and warlords alike, and the Japanese in the north, it was obvious to all that the Guomindang had failed to defeat either enemy. Its large armies were suffering from poor morale and poor training. Thus in 1936, the Guomindang stumbled forward, continuing the war against the Communist Red Army, allowing the Japanese to control Manchuria and warlords to control much of the country.
But in 1936, this was to change, and the Guomindang was to embark of a much more ambitious course, that would change the fate of China, Asia and even the world forever.