The Japanese did much of Mao’s work for him. They smashed a good part of the Chinese army and air force, and Chiang Kai-shek tended to keep his best troops in relative safety, in the south-west (thus alienating Churchill, who thought that he was not seriously fighting the war at all). Japanese depredations (which had included the killing of hundreds of thousands in the Nationalist capital, Nanking) caused chaos, and the war ended only with the Soviet invasion of August 1945; it had taken 20 million lives and caused 100 million refugees to flee. When the Japanese advanced on Chiang’s headquarters at Chungkin they even dropped fully one third the tonnage of bombs on it that the Americans used on Japan.
Chiang Kai-shek was under strong pressure from the Russians as regards arms deliveries and had more or less to do as he was told, but he was also pressed by the Americans, who looked at him patronizingly. Roosevelt had a network of informers who included Edgar Snow, while the British ambassador, Clark Kerr, said that Chou En-lai was worth all the Nationalists rolled into one. Chiang Kai-shek’s regime could be portrayed in much the same way as, say, the exiled Polish government in London, representative of ‘reaction’, capital, landlords, etc., and when Ernest Hemingway submitted a report comparing the Communists’ tactics with those he had observed in Spain, it was sidelined by a White House economic adviser, Lauchlin Currie, who said that the Chinese Communists were just ‘socialists’, and that the White House approved of ‘their attitude towards the peasants, towards women and towards Japan’. It was also Currie who chose as American representative Owen Lattimore, a considerable expert (he even spoke Mongolian) but also forthrightly sympathetic to the Chinese Communists (as was another considerable expert, the Englishman Joseph Needham: both men looked somewhat foolish when the truth emerged). Chou En-lai now devoted his energies to the Western powers, persuading Mao that they could be far more useful than Mao had realized. Meanwhile, the Communist base was strengthened financially through sales of opium, grown on 30,000 acres in Yenan and marketed in part through a Nationalist general to the north. This at least allowed Mao to ease up on the exploitation of the peasants. Later on, another considerable expert, Gunnar Myrdal, was to observe a village in that area, and to offer wide-eyed praise at the ‘traditions’ being observed. Mao had the grace to burst out laughing.
He meanwhile built up his party (it now had over 700,000 members) and many were well-educated volunteers from the Nationalist areas as they arrived (40,000 of them) in Yenan. In 1945 an effort was made to bridge the gap towards well-intentioned neutrals, school-teachers for instance, because Mao would need ‘cadres’ to run things. He himself was by now wholly in charge, chairman of the top bodies of the Party — Central Committee, Secretariat and Politburo, having, Stalin-fashion, eliminated all of his rivals and several others for good measure; all opposition had been swept aside, and when in April 1945 the seventh Party congress was held, of the 500 previous delegates half had dropped out, whether by suicide or nervous collapse or arrest. But still, in this period Mao could present himself as the genuine reformer, and was accepted as such by many foreigners; he went out of his way to emphasize that he would not discriminate too far and his lieutenant, the then young Deng Xiaoping, announced that ‘our policy towards the rich peasants is to encourage their capitalistic side, though not the feudal one’ (‘rich’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘feudal’ being entirely relative terms). The Kuomintang, by contrast, counted as corrupt and tyrannical; the wayward and vainglorious Chiang Kai-shek — his mausoleum in Taiwan must count as the greatest ever monument to failure — did not impress. Besides, the Chinese Communists were given a great shot in the arm when the Soviet Union intervened in the Far Eastern war.
At Yalta Stalin had been given the Far Eastern railway and two major ports in Manchuria (presented as reparations from Japan) in return for the promise to intervene. When the atomic bombs were dropped, the invasion occurred, and Soviet troops moved into the north-east; they swept all before them. Stalin as ever played both sides. He recognized, and had an alliance with, the Kuomintang government because it had in effect ceded Outer Mongolia to him and because he thought he could manage it. But he also helped Mao. The Communists took areas only a hundred miles north-west and north-east of Peking, secured the northern half of Korea, and took over Manchuria, which had coal, iron and gold, with giant forests and over two thirds of China’s heavy industry; it also had a border with Siberia that was well over a thousand miles in length. The Russians at once gave Japanese weapons stocks to the Red Chinese, who also conscripted troops from the puppet Japanese government in ‘Manchukuo’ (along with the titular emperor, who ended up as a gardener in the palace of his ancestors).
The sequel showed how well Chou En-lai had understood the weakness of the West. Chiang’s best troops were in Burma and southern China and he could get them north only in American ships — and the Americans insisted on negotiations with Mao. In late August Mao did go to Chungkin (he insisted on the American ambassador’s accompanying him, as an insurance against an air accident) for six weeks followed by a treaty that the foreign embassies wanted. Chiang and Mao even met over a breakfast. But as soon as Mao was back in Yenan in October 1945 he started operations in Manchuria. At the turn of 1945-6 matters did not go well for the Communists — Chiang Kai-shek’s troops had had experience of fighting the Japanese and once they came north gave a good account of themselves, thousands of Communist troops deserting. The Soviets left Manchuria in early May 1946, and Mao made an initial error of trying to hold the cities, whereas his real strength lay with the peasants. The Nationalists did well, chasing the Communists to the north; at one stage Mao even planned to give up Harbin and retreat into Siberia. But in Jonathan Spence’s account the rush into Manchuria was a mistake: Chiang should have concentrated on building up China south of the Great Wall, not on a complicated adventure into territory where the Communists had ready Soviet support. However, Chiang was desperately anxious for victory, and at the same time unwilling to use his tanks and heavy weaponry; he neglected the countryside and mismanaged Manchuria when he ran it in 1946-7. Kuomintang finances went into an inflationary spiral, and even the Shanghai business people were alienated, while troops deserted for want of proper pay.