Two Capitals: Chongqing and Yan'an in Wartime, Rectification, and the Civil War

Central interpretation

The war against Japan decided the civil war that followed it. In Chongqing, the Nationalist government survived eight years of bombing, isolation and inflation, but at a ruinous cost: its trained army was gone, its officials were impoverished and corrupt, its conscripts were dragged from villages that learned to hate it, and its prestige abroad, won at Cairo and in the United Nations, hid weakness at home. In Yan'an, the Communists turned the war into an opportunity. They grew from a remnant of 40,000 to a party of more than a million, won peasants behind Japanese lines with disciplined troops, fair taxes and endless organizing, and, through the rectification campaign of 1942–1944, made Mao Zedong Thought their creed. When Japan surrendered, Soviet help in Manchuria, the failure of American mediation, a strategy of surrounding the cities, and the collapse of the Nationalist currency and of public trust brought a quick end. The party that took power in 1949 had been made in Yan'an.

Part I: Two Capitals (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 450–451. Reading-guide sentence (p. 451): "Another serious disability for Free China was the lack of an industrial base inland."

Chongqing

Slides b through f follow Ebrey's catalogue of Free China's troubles. The deck gives a face to each: the bombing (slide b), inflation (c), the press gangs (d), the missing industry (e) and the airlift (f). Rana Mitter's Forgotten Ally is the best one-volume account of the Nationalist war effort and its costs, and it is more sympathetic to Chiang's choices than the older American literature shaped by Stilwell.¹ Lee McIsaac's essay shows how the government made bombed Chongqing a symbol of national endurance.² For inflation and conscription, Lloyd Eastman's Seeds of Destruction remains the classic case that the war hollowed out the regime; its evidence, much of it from the government's own inspectors, is still persuasive.³ Ebrey's "as many as a third" of conscripts dying on the way is kept, attributed; exact figures are not recoverable. William Kirby's chapter on the war economy describes the relocation of factories inland and the state-run industry that grew there.⁴

Two corrections. Ebrey dates "the end of Soviet aid" to 1939; Soviet aid dwindled after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 but ended only with the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941 (slide e). And she writes of aid "flown over the mountains from Burma"; by 1942 Burma was Japanese, and the Hump flights left from Assam in India (slide f). Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell is still worth assigning to strong students as a document of the American view of Chiang.⁵

Diplomacy

Slide g corrects Ebrey's statement that Roosevelt included Chiang "in major meetings of the Allies at Cairo and Yalta." Chiang attended Cairo (November 1943); Yalta (February 1945) was Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, and its secret Far Eastern agreement, which gave the Soviet Union rights in Manchuria, was made without China. The deck adds the treaties of January 1943 ending extraterritoriality, which tie back to the Opium War. Hannah Pakula's biography of Soong Meiling covers her 1943 American tour.⁶

Yan'an

Slide h tells the New Fourth Army Incident in Ebrey's words; Gregor Benton's history argues that blame for the clashes that led up to it was shared.⁷ Slide i keeps Ebrey's figures for party growth, forty thousand in 1937 to about eight hundred thousand in 1940, and continues them from the party's own statistics, used by Tony Saich: 1.21 million at the Seventh Congress in 1945 and about 4.5 million at the end of 1949.⁸

Slides j and k present the classic debate over why peasants followed the Communists. Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism argued that Japanese brutality made the Communists defenders of the nation; Mark Selden's Yenan Way stressed social reform; Chen Yung-fa's study of central China showed the decisive role of patient, sometimes coercive, organization.⁹ Ebrey's quip about taxes and meetings comes from Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden's study of Wugong village in Hebei.¹⁰ Instructors may want to add that the Border Region financed itself in part by growing and selling opium, a point documented in Chen Yung-fa's essay "The Blooming Poppy under the Red Sun" (1995) and not in Ebrey; it is left out of the deck.

Part II: Mao Zedong Thought (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 447–448 and 451–452. Reading-guide sentence (p. 452): "To reform the thinking of both old cadres who had deviated from the correct line and new recruits from bourgeois families, in 1942, Mao launched the first of many rectification campaigns."

The concept slide (m) uses Ebrey's three elements: the peasants as vanguard, the mass line, and voluntarism. Stuart Schram's study is the standard introduction to Mao's ideas, including the "Sinification of Marxism" he announced in 1938.¹¹ Slide n corrects a date. Ebrey writes that the Moscow-trained group "arrived in late 1935"; Wang Ming, the most important of them, arrived by air from Moscow on 29 November 1937 with Kang Sheng and Chen Yun. Raymond Wylie's study shows how Chen Boda and others built Mao's image as a theorist in 1937–1945.¹²

For rectification (slide o), the indispensable work is Gao Hua's How the Red Sun Rose, first published in Hong Kong in 2000 and banned in the People's Republic. It documents the methods Ebrey summarizes and the "rescue campaign" of 1943, when Kang Sheng's spy hunt led to thousands of false confessions.¹³ David Apter and Tony Saich read Yan'an as a community built on shared stories and confession.¹⁴ Wang Shiwei's "Wild Lilies" is excerpted in Ebrey (pp. 446–447); students who want to read it should be pointed there. Slide p quotes Ebrey's citation of the 1945 constitution and adds the "Resolution on Certain Historical Questions" of April 1945, which rewrote the party's history around Mao.

Part III: The Civil War (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 452–454. Reading-guide sentence (p. 453): "The unpopularity of the Nationalists had many roots."

Ebrey's account of the civil war is brief, so the deck leans on Odd Arne Westad's Decisive Encounters, which argues that the war was decided on the battlefield, by Chiang's strategic mistakes in Manchuria in 1946–1948, as much as by social causes.¹⁵ Suzanne Pepper's Civil War in China is the classic study of the political side, how inflation, corruption and repression cost the Nationalists the cities.¹⁶ Strong answers to Question 10 will combine the two. Steven Levine's study of Manchuria explains how the Communists built their decisive base there with Soviet tolerance (slide s).¹⁷

Three dates are corrected. Ebrey's summary says the civil war "broke out in 1947"; full-scale war began with the Nationalist offensive of late June 1946 (slide u). Her narrative says Chiang retreated to Taiwan "in early 1949"; he resigned the presidency in January 1949 but left the mainland only on 10 December 1949 (slide z). And she calls the Communists' land reform "moderate"; the land reform of 1946–1947 was often violent, until the party restrained it in 1948 (slide u, notes). Ebrey's statement that Chiang "had his secret police assassinate" liberal critics is softened on slide x: agents of the secret police killed Li Gongpu and Wen Yiduo in Kunming in July 1946, but how high the orders went is still debated. Edmund Fung's study of the liberal "third force" explains why their deaths mattered so much.¹⁸ Dominic Yang's book on the mainland exiles in Taiwan is a good place to send students curious about 1949 from the other side.¹⁹

The plain slide aa quotes Ebrey's own retrospective (p. 454), and the next slide (bb) points to Chapter 27, which has not yet been rebuilt for FA26.

Pierian Spring: Jiang Qing and the Dixie Mission

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 447–448.

Slide dd tells Jiang Qing's arrival in Yan'an from Ebrey's paragraph on p. 448. The story that party leaders made her promise to stay out of politics is widely repeated but rests on later, partisan accounts, and the deck marks it as such. Ross Terrill's biography is readable and balanced.²⁰ Slide ee tells the story of the U.S. Army Observation Group of 1944. Carolle Carter's history of the mission and John S. Service's reports, edited by Joseph Esherick, show both how impressed the Americans were and how carefully their hosts managed them.²¹

Corrections and Cautions

Where the deck departs from Ebrey, and why

Soviet aid (p. 451). Ebrey: ended in 1939. It dwindled after 1939 and ended in 1941. Slide e.
The Hump (p. 451). Ebrey: aid "flown over the mountains from Burma." The flights left from Assam, India. Slide f.
Cairo and Yalta (p. 451). Chiang attended Cairo, not Yalta. Slide g.
Wang Ming's arrival (p. 447). Ebrey: "late 1935." Wang Ming arrived in November 1937. Slide n.
The civil war's start (p. 454). Ebrey's summary: 1947. Full-scale war began in June 1946 (Westad). Slide u.
"Moderate land reform" (p. 453). Often violent in 1946–1947 (Pepper, Westad). Slide u, notes.
Chiang to Taiwan (p. 453). Ebrey: "early 1949." Chiang left the mainland on 10 December 1949 (Taylor). Slide z.
The assassinations (p. 453). Ebrey: Chiang "had his secret police assassinate them." The agents were secret police; Chiang's own role is debated. Slide x softens.
Kept as Ebrey's, with attribution: party growth to about 800,000 by 1940; "as many as a third" of conscripts dying; Japanese weapons reaching the Communists in Manchuria; 600,000 troops on each side at Huaihai.

Notes

Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). ↩
Lee McIsaac, "The City as Nation: Creating a Wartime Capital in Chongqing," in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), 174–191. ↩
Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). ↩
William C. Kirby, "The Chinese War Economy," in China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 185–212. ↩
Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (New York: Macmillan, 1971). ↩
Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). ↩
Gregor Benton, New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
Tony Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021). ↩
Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). ↩
Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 41. ↩
Stuart R. Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
Raymond F. Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1935–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). ↩
Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018). ↩
David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). ↩
Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). ↩
Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). ↩
Steven I. Levine, Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). ↩
Edmund S. K. Fung, In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ↩
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). ↩
Ross Terrill, Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon, rev. ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). ↩
Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists, 1944–1947 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); John S. Service, Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (New York: Random House, 1974). ↩