The China of Chiang K'ai-Shek: A Political Study. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
Communists had done almost everything which the Japanese now had to do—guarding railroads, pacifying disaffected and hostile rural areas, promoting industries and watching agitation—the Japanese forces might disperse enough to enable Japan to patrol and pacify enough of China to pay for the occupation. Chiang had to hold the Japanese together, immobilize large bodies of their troops, keep their war expenses up, and wait for the time to counter-attack. Meanwhile the guerrillas, together with the Communist veterans, were to prevent the Japanese from settling down, to worry them with agitation, to sabotage their economic efforts and to wear them out for Chiang's révanche.
One of the first governmental changes in wartime was the re-institution of an effective propaganda service under the Political Department of the Military Affairs Commission. In this Department, many of China's most active controversialists, censored or exiled for years, found officially sanctioned scope for their energies. Formal unity came slowly. Although Shanghai was attacked on August 13, 1937, it was not until September 10 following that a fairly definitive arrangement was reached in regard to the Communist-occupied zone in the Northwest.
The settlement transformed a pre-existing armistice into an intranational alliance; technically it amounted to submission by the Communists and their incorporation into the national government and armies. The area of the Chinese Soviet Republic assumed the name Special Regional Government of the Chinese Republic (Chunghua Min-kuo T'ê-ch'ü Chêng-fu), which it had been using informally for months; the Chinese Red Army became the Eighth Route Army (Pa-lu-chün); and the Chinese Communist Party accepted the San Min Chu I as the constitutional state ideology of China, abandoning immediate measures of class war and expropriation. The settlement was in the form of a Communist reply to Kuomintang terms offered in February 1937 and the reply of the Generalissimo as Chief of the Kuomintang to the Communist declaration.[8]
For the first few months the war kept its quasi-European pattern. The greater part of the fighting was done in the Shanghai area, while Japanese forces proceeded down from North China. The Japanese still had some expectation of localizing the North China and the Shanghai conflicts. At most, they expected the war to be a short one, not extending beyond the capture of Nanking. Occupation of the capital was counted on for the ruin of the central government, the end of Chiang and the reversion of China to a condition of malleable anarchy.
December 1937 was the blackest month of the war for the Chinese. The Japanese advanced toward Nanking, with Chinese resistance crumbling; part of the armies withdrew in good order, but on occasion there were hopeless, panicky routs. To this month the Japanese looked for victory, and were so confident that they formed the pro-Japanese Provisional Government of the Republic of China, in Peking on December 11.[9] Four days later the Japanese forces entered Nanking, and the ensuing fortnight set the record for atrocity in the modern world. The Japanese forces were preoccupied with their own disorder. The National Government escaped up-river to Hankow, where it promptly began to function under the three-headquarters plan: some offices at Hankow, some at Changsha and some at Chungking. The presence of the foreign affairs, propaganda, and military agencies at Hankow made this the practical capital of China, although Nanking was and is the constitutional capital.
The Hankow Period
The greatest part of the year XXVII (1938) was spent in continuation of slow retreat and heavy frontal resistance. Until October communications with the outside world were wide open through the railroad to Canton. Heavy supplies could arrive by the shipload. Hundreds of Japanese air attacks on the railroad disrupted schedules but never led to serious suspension of service. Leftist influence became overwhelming in Hankow. That city had been the capital of the ill-fated Wu-han Kuomintang-Communist government, which fell with the secession of Chiang to Nanking eleven years before; its connotations still lingered. Even conservative Kuomintang leaders, who had gone to lengths of appeasement at which Neville Chamberlain would have blanched, tried to talk like Negrin or Alvarez del Vayo.
In January 1938, two organizations were formed which, along with the Communist zone in the Northwest, were to be among the most active agencies of guerrilla leadership. The first of these was the New Fourth Army (Hsin-ssŭ-chün), which emerged in the area just south of the Japanese forces at the Yangtze mouth. It was composed of peasant and student militia, of regular army fragments, and of some Kuomintang volunteers, under the leadership of Communist remnants which had hidden away, banditti-fashion, when the Red Army trekked Northwest. Its emergence was recognized by legal order of the National Military Affairs Commission.[10] The other organization was the Provisional Executive Committee of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region (Chin-ch'a-chi Pien-ch'ü Lin-shih Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui), established by a conference at Fup'ing, January 8–15, and authorized by central government mandate. This agency also sprang from Leftist organizations—in this case, a bold, determined, student-peasant guerrilla army—which had first developed despite government opposition. It was designed to provide an emergency guerrilla government for those portions of the three provinces which were under occupation by the Japanese. Unoccupied portions of the provinces retained their existing administrations.
In the next month, February 1938, there was established an agency of supreme importance, the Supreme National Defense Council.[11] This replaced the Central Political Council,[12] which had exercised routine functions of the Party's sovereign control over the government; like its predecessor, the Supreme National Defense Council tended to act as the supreme governmental organ, although it was technically a Party organ. The Council provided and provides a unified civilian-military control for the duration of the war; but the Kuomintang shares its power with other groups only in the consultative organs of state, not in the executive.
March 1938 followed with another political step forward—the Emergency Session of the Kuomintang Party Congress. The Party Congress had the functions of a special constituent assembly in part, and in part those of a restricted parliament; in this session two further actions were taken. The first was the adoption of the momentous Program of National Resistance and Reconstruction (K'ang-chan Chien-kuo Kang-ling),[13] which provides a plan for the war and commits the Kuomintang and the National Government to a policy of victory, of industrialization, and of economic reform as a means to war.
The second step taken by this important Congress was the provision for a People's Political Council (Kuo-min Ts'an-chêng Hui, also translatable as People's Advisory Political Council). This was the first breach in the Kuomintang monopoly of government since the establishment of the Party dictatorship.[14] The government, through the constitutional fiction of appointing members as representative individuals, provided a rough, approximate, but fair representation of the active political forces in China.
While the Emergency Session of the Party Congress took these steps for further national defense, the Japanese were collecting a coterie of ex-politicians, friends of Japan, and old men to serve as the Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanking. They disregarded the anomaly of having two "Chinese" national governments—the Provisional Government in Peiping being undisturbed by these measures—and continued to seek the division of China, even on the level of the pro-Japanese States. The Reformed Government was established on March 27, 1938.
The autumn of 1938 brought another phase of discouragement. Relying on the prestige of British power and the nearness of Hong Kong, the Chinese were not watchful in the Canton area. The Japanese landed almost unopposed. Chinese negligence, corruption, and a little treachery worked in their favor. The landing forces performed almost superhuman feats of endurance in forced marches