The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (6 page)

On Tiananmen Square, a hastily sketched portrait of Mao Zedong was raised. Mao himself only entered the city several months later, driving to the Summer Palace on the outskirts in a bullet-proof Dodge limousine made in Detroit for Chiang Kai-shek’s personal use in the 1930s.
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While the Northern Corridor was being annexed by Lin Biao, an even more bloody campaign was in progress near Xuzhou. As in Manchuria and in the north, the war hinged on control of the country’s arterial railways. Xuzhou was a vital junction where the trunk line running from Beijing southward to Nanjing intersected with the only east–west railway, meandering from the country’s far west to the Yellow Sea. Xuzhou was the key to Nanjing, the nationalist capital, as well as to the prosperous Yangzi Valley.

In November 1948 over a million men surged towards Xuzhou in one of the greatest battles in Chinese history, also known as the Huaihai campaign. On their march out of Manchuria, the communists fielded a force of almost 400,000 men who marched past Beijing in the rush towards Xuzhou. Another 200,000 swept in from the neighbouring province of Shandong, where guerrilla fighters controlled large parts of the countryside. The nationalists deployed 400,000 troops in the flat, rich, water-laced plains around the railway junction. The bald and stocky General Chen Yi, commander of the communist troops, swiftly cut all railway lines and subjected the main airfield to artillery bombardment. Du Yuming, the general who had fought Lin Biao in Manchuria, desperately moved his men over rutted roads and torn-up rail tracks to establish a new line of defence to the east of the city, using the autumn floods to defend the swampy ground to the north and north-west.
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Fighting in the countryside was ferocious, as both sides battled for the country’s heartland. Nationalists and communists deployed tanks and heavy artillery, while government planes controlled the skies, using cloudless days and nights to wreak havoc on the enemy. Ancient towns with moats and walls were pounded. Orange flashes of shell explosions came from villages caught in the crossfire, leaving behind nothing but wrecked houses, smouldering amid fields sown with winter wheat. In a village just north of Caolaoji, everything had been set ablaze by mortar shells. Amid the smell of burned thatch and straw, children and women poked forlornly through roofless huts and blackened walls. On a slope in front of the ruins, an old woman bundled up in a black padded jacket rocked in silent grief. All her belongings had been lost. As one communist general later reminisced, the People’s Liberation Army wiped out village after village with blanket shelling: ‘In fighting Du Yuming, we practically flattened the villages, using thousands of shells and countless bombs.’ A returning pilot reported that every village in sight was burning: ‘the fields were covered with bodies’.
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The communists were supported by some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children, conscripted by a tough party leader called Deng Xiaoping: he imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when his orders were not met. These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, carrying food and material on their backs to the front, but they were also used as human shields, forced to march in front of the troops. Dense waves of unarmed villagers overwhelmed the nationalists. Lin Jingwu, an ordinary soldier in the trenches, remembered years later that his hands went numb from firing bullets into a sea of civilians. He felt sick at the idea of firing at them and tried to close his eyes, but kept on shooting.
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People fled the rust-red plain in droves. Trains packed with refugees rattled past the bodies of men, women and children lying beside the tracks, ‘looking like rag dolls’. They had lost their grip and slipped at night from the tops of trains after their hands froze from the cold. The lucky ones – women in ragged tunics with babies on their backs, men clutching bundles of their remaining possessions – had tied themselves to the train roofs. Others were jammed between the carriages.
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Xuzhou was a repeat of Shenyang: uncoordinated troop movements, a confused command structure, constant meddling by the Generalissimo, inaccurate field intelligence and low morale among the soldiers created a disaster. Under relentless fire, the nationalists soon retreated inside Xuzhou, becoming entirely dependent on airdrops to stay alive. They quickly ran out of food. Horses were slaughtered, while civilians scoured the streets for bark and roots. Just outside the city walls, women and children in small villages caught between enemy lines froze to death in their mud huts as there was no fuel for fires. Evacuation planes flying back to Shanghai were crammed with soldiers ‘dying in their blood and excrement’, in the words of one pilot. Panic set in as rumours spread that Chiang had ordered the city to be bombed to prevent any equipment from falling into enemy hands. One by one, the trapped divisions surrendered, as communist loudspeakers boomed out offers of food and shelter. Du Yuming, disguised as an ordinary soldier, was captured as he tried to slip away. By 10 January 1949 the battle was over. The communists had dealt a fatal blow to the nationalists.
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Once the north had surrendered, the demise of the nationalists was a foregone conclusion. The communists issued a harsh eight-point proposal for peace on 14 January 1949. Two weeks later, a defeated Chiang Kai-shek, for twenty-two years the dominant figure in China, stepped down. Clad in a simple khaki uniform without insignia, from a small drawing room in the Ministry of National Defence in Nanjing he read a formal statement handing over the peace talks to his vice-president.
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But it was too little, too late. Everywhere people were apathetic, beaten down by inflation and heavy taxes, sometimes even openly hostile to the nationalists. Despite a muzzled press, the abuses of an increasingly repressive regime were widely reported. The brutal methods used by the police in the hunt for underground agents in particular alienated large sections of the urban population. A powerful propaganda machine presided over by Zhou Enlai mercilessly exploited every failing of the nationalist regime. In this war of images, the communists managed to project a vision of democracy and social reform, largely because nobody besides a few visiting journalists on guided tours ever managed to spend time in their home territory. But, most of all, people were tired of war. After more than a decade of fear and violence, they craved peace at any cost, even under communism.

The communists, meanwhile, used the peace negotiations to rest and regroup. Along the village roads north of the Yangzi River a steady stream of wheelbarrows and donkey carts were building up food reserves. Engines were being dismounted from lorries and installed on river craft. By the end of March close to a million troops swarmed along the north bank of the river that divided the northern and southern halves of China.

As the communists prepared to cross the Yangzi and take all of China, the British government sent a naval sloop from Shanghai to rescue its citizens stranded in Nanjing, the capital on the south bank of the river. The
Amethyst
, with a five-metre Union Jack painted on each side of its grey steel hull, looked like a quaint reminder of a bygone age, when foreign gunboats policed the waters of the Yangzi. Midway between Shanghai and Nanjing, two artillery shells from the north bank hit the sloop. Crippled, it swung helplessly with the current and ran aground on a mud bank. Two white flags were hoisted but the shelling continued for days on end, killing forty-four sailors. The Royal Navy frigate remained trapped for ten weeks before it managed to slip its chain and escape, as the communists demanded that Britain, the United States and France withdraw their armed forces from all of China. Mao saw in the
Amethyst
the perfect symbol of old China and ordered his troops to ‘brook no foreign interference’. The attack on the Royal Navy made headlines around the world. Mao was delighted.
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The
Amethyst
incident put foreigners in Shanghai on alert. A few days later the communist troops started their final campaign. Nanjing offered only token resistance as the People’s Liberation Army crammed junks, sampans and launches to cross the Yangzi to the sound of bugle calls and martial music. The city was already weakened by large-scale defections of soldiers. Looting by civilians was rampant. In the bustling commercial district of Fuzimiao, shabbily dressed men, women and children pillaged in a good-humoured way, laughing and shouting to each other as they hauled sofas, carpets and bedding from the upper floors of the two-storey villas to the lawns below. ‘A grinning soldier, who had thrown away his rifle, gingerly carried off a lamp in each hand. An old woman, her grey hair pulled back in a bun, wearing a ragged black tunic and hobbling away on tiny feet, bound in the old custom, happily carried off four elaborately embroidered cushions.’ Everything down to the sash windows and plumbing fixtures was stripped from the Ministry of Communications. The floorboards were broken up for firewood. Crowds besieged the airport, trying to force or bribe their way on to planes, while soldiers swung their bayoneted rifles to keep them at bay. A nationalist general barked orders at underlings loading a grand piano aboard an aircraft.
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With darkness came fear, as the mood on the streets turned ugly. Shooting could be heard in the distance, and then loud explosions rocked the capital. Fire turned the skies deep red, as departing soldiers set alight ammunition and fuel dumps on the banks of the river. In a dilapidated hotel, members of a Peace Preservation Committee sat around small tables drinking tea and composing slogans to welcome the communists: they were in charge of the city and its million civilians, churning out posters appealing to the population to preserve order.
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On 23 April columns of PLA soldiers entered the city, sweating in their padded uniforms. The following day they could be seen sitting in orderly formations on their sleeping bags along the pavements, listening to political instructions from their cadres or singing revolutionary songs. Curious crowds gathered to stare at them or bring them hot water, poured into the mugs the soldiers carried on their belts. Neatly dressed students – earnest young men and women – came out of their dormitories, cheering the arrival of the troops, although most of the soldiers ignored them: they were worlds apart. In the Presidential Palace, Chen Yi and Deng Xiaoping took turns sitting in Chiang Kai-shek’s chair.
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Once the communists had poured across the Yangzi, China’s last great defensive barrier, they moved with great speed. Nanjing was taken in four days. Wuhan, the commercial and industrial centre on the middle Yangzi, soon followed. With a rapid eastward thrust towards the coast, they cut the Shanghai–Guangzhou railway. Shanghai, China’s financial powerhouse, was isolated. ‘Shanghai will be China’s Stalingrad,’ vowed the general appointed to defend the city. But most people in the permissive city revered as the ‘Paris of the East’, dreading the destruction a long siege would bring, hoped that the promise would not be kept.
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Shanghai’s main defence was a wooden fence, 50 kilometres long, made from stakes cut out of lumber originally delivered by a United Nations relief agency. Inside the city a sense of false calm prevailed, as it continued to pulsate with a boisterous life that seemed to deny the approach of the communists. Gambling proceeded apace in the clubs, cabarets and bars along the Bund. On impeccably manicured lawns, British expatriates continued to play cricket or sip their pink gins in the afternoon sun. At Duke Lear’s, the Tango or the Rainbow, hostesses perched on bar stools or slouched in armchairs seemed oblivious of the blockade. And despite inflation, everybody seemed to be trading, whether in dollars, in gold bars or by barter.

In an effort to avoid the looting that had taken place in Nanjing, martial law was declared. Firing squads executed suspected communist agents, black marketeers and other culprits on the outskirts of the city. Before the victims were lined up and shot in the back of the head by the nationalists, they were paraded through Shanghai’s busy streets, standing on the back of a lorry with white placards explaining their crimes. Elsewhere, on outlying roads, hundreds of labourers were conscripted to throw up machine-gun emplacements, barbed-wire entanglements and earthworks. At sandbagged sentry posts along main intersections, soldiers poked their bayonets into the bags and bundles of refugees entering the city. A Victory Parade was organised to boost morale, as lorries raced through the streets with workers and students shouting their allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek. From the top floor of Broadway Mansions, Shanghai’s tallest apartment building, tenants could see sharp flashes of cannon fire across the Huangpu River. The glow of burning villages appeared further to the north. Here and there tracer shells streaked lines of red across the horizon.
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As Chen Yi and his soldiers moved closer into nearby farming areas, fresh vegetables disappeared from the wet markets and sidewalk stands. The siege also forced fishermen to keep their boats idle at the docks. The price of yellow croaker, the city’s most popular staple, jumped six times in one day before the fish vanished altogether from the stalls. Crowds thronged around the rice shops, anxious about spiralling inflation and dwindling supplies. The mayor publicly appealed to everyone to plant victory gardens.
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After a weary wait of several weeks, Shanghai fell to the communists on 25 May. Barely a shot was fired, as the business community and the triads had quietly switched sides. The nationalists were seen in full retreat, some of the troops marching almost in parade formation, others streaking through the city in terror and confusion, caked with mud from the battlefield. In the red-light district, fleeing soldiers desperately searched the shops for second-hand clothing; the streets were strewn with discarded uniforms. A day later, in the middle of the night, small groups of soldiers under Chen Yi’s command began filtering through the French Concession in the south-west. Then they advanced cautiously down the pavements of Avenue Joffre and Great Western Road, hugging buildings closely for protection against the occasional fire from isolated nationalist snipers. By the morning they had reached the Bund.