Communist–Nationalist clashes in China

In the second half of August 1945, as Japan announced its surrender and its armies in China waited for orders telling them whom to recognise as the victor, the rivalry between the Kuomintang government and the Chinese Communist Party ceased to be hidden behind the façade of a common struggle against the invader. Both sides issued conflicting orders, sent troops towards the same cities and publicly accused each other of starting a civil war.

The statement that fighting between the Nationalists and the Communists “broke out” at this time does, however, need a qualification. The clashes had never really stopped – the bloodiest of them was the New Fourth Army incident in January 1941 – and the united front had for years existed mainly on paper. What changed in August 1945 was something else: the common enemy had vanished, and the stakes were now the territory, cities, weapons and depots that the Japanese were to hand over. Larger-scale fighting began only in the last days of August and in September, above all in Shanxi province.

A united front on paper

The Second United Front, concluded after the Xi’an Incident in December 1936 and sealed after the outbreak of war in July 1937, formally placed the Communist forces under the government in Chongqing. The troops in the north-west were renamed the Eighth Route Army (officially the 18th Army Group), and the guerrillas in the south the New Fourth Army. In practice both formations obeyed the party leadership in Yan’an, headed by Mao Zedong, and were commanded by Zhu De.

After 1941 Chiang Kai-shek’s government maintained a blockade around the Communist Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, tying down hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were needed on the Japanese front. The Communists, meanwhile, expanded their bases behind Japanese lines in northern and eastern China. At the party’s Seventh Congress in the spring of 1945 Mao claimed that its forces numbered more than 900,000 soldiers, supported by more than two million militia, and that nearly a hundred million people lived in the “liberated areas”. These are party figures, but the Communists were undoubtedly emerging from the war incomparably stronger than in 1937.

In the summer of 1945 the Japanese were withdrawing from southern China, while the Americans had spent a year trying in vain to reconcile the two sides – Ambassador Patrick Hurley flew to Yan’an for this purpose, but the talks stalled over whether the Communists would keep their own armed forces and administration.

The race for the surrender

The news that Tokyo was ready to accept the Potsdam Declaration reached China on 10 August. That same day the headquarters in Yan’an issued, in Zhu De’s name, the first order instructing all units in the “liberated areas” to demand that Japanese garrisons and collaborationist troops lay down their arms and, if they refused, to disarm them by force. On 11 August six further orders followed; some of them directed units from Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong northwards – towards Rehe, Chahar and Manchuria, where since 9 August the Red Army, which had only just entered the war against Japan, had been on the offensive (the Manchurian operation).

The government in Chongqing responded at once. On 11 August Chiang Kai-shek ordered the 18th Army Group to stay in its present positions and await orders, taking no action on its own initiative. Government troops received the opposite order – to advance. The Japanese and the puppet forces, for their part, were instructed to maintain order and defend the places they held until government troops arrived, and to surrender only to them.

On 13 August Zhu De and his deputy Peng Dehuai rejected the order in an open telegram, and the Xinhua news agency published a commentary accusing Chiang Kai-shek of “provoking civil war”. That same day, at a cadres’ meeting in Yan’an, Mao argued that Chiang would try to rob the Communists of the fruits of victory and declared that the party would fight for every inch of land. On 15 August, the day the Japanese heard the Emperor’s broadcast, Zhu De, styling himself “commander-in-chief of the anti-Japanese armies of China’s liberated areas”, called on the commander of the Japanese China Expeditionary Army, General Yasuji Okamura, to have his forces surrender to the Communists – in northern China to Nie Rongzhen, in eastern China to Chen Yi, in Hubei and Henan to Li Xiannian, and in Guangdong to Zeng Sheng. At the same time the Communists handed the ambassadors of the United States, Britain and the USSR a memorandum demanding the right to take part in accepting the surrender.

Okamura had no intention of complying. He recognised only the government in Chongqing, and in many places his units defended themselves against the Communists while waiting for government troops. The Allies, too, backed Chiang Kai-shek’s position: General Order No. 1, approved by President Truman on 17 August, stipulated that Japanese forces in China (excluding Manchuria), in Taiwan and in Indochina north of the 16th parallel were to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek.

Moscow backs Chiang Kai-shek

An equally heavy blow fell on the Communists from Moscow. On 14 August the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Shijie and Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. It put into effect the concessions that Joseph Stalin had secured from Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta: the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchuria Railway were to come under joint Sino-Soviet management, Port Arthur became a joint naval base, and Dairen (Dalian) a free port. In exchanged notes China agreed to recognise the independence of Mongolia if its people voted for it in a plebiscite (held on 20 October 1945).

In return the USSR undertook to give moral and material aid exclusively to the National Government in Chongqing, to recognise its sovereignty over Manchuria and to withdraw its troops from there within three months of Japan’s surrender. Formally, then, Stalin had backed Chiang Kai-shek, and he advised the Communists to come to terms with the government. In practice, over the following weeks the Red Army in Manchuria, where it was accepting the surrender of the Kwantung Army, did not hinder Communist units moving in from northern China and allowed them to take over some of the captured Japanese weapons.

Invitations to Chongqing

At the same time Chiang Kai-shek was playing a political game. On 14 August he sent Mao a telegram inviting him to Chongqing for talks on “international and domestic affairs”. Mao replied that Zhu De would first set out the party’s position, and repeated the demands concerning the acceptance of the surrender. Chiang renewed the invitation on 20 August and, for a third time, on 23 August. In Yan’an a trap was feared, but refusing at a moment when the whole of China was longing for peace would have cost the party politically, and Stalin was pressing for talks. On 23 August the Politburo decided that Mao would go.

On 28 August Mao, Zhou Enlai and Wang Ruofei flew to Chongqing accompanied by Ambassador Hurley and General Zhang Zhizhong. The talks, conducted in practice by Zhou Enlai and Wang Shijie, lasted until 10 October.

The first clashes

Meanwhile the race went on in the field. Communist units attacked and occupied county towns from which small Japanese and puppet garrisons were withdrawing, and cut the railway lines along which government troops were to arrive. On 23 August the Eighth Route Army entered Zhangjiakou (Kalgan) – the first large city the Communists occupied after the surrender. The great centres – Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai – nevertheless remained in the hands of the Japanese, who were waiting for government troops.

The first open clash between larger forces took place in Shanxi. The ruler of the province, Marshal Yan Xishan, acting on Chiang Kai-shek’s instructions, sent some 17,000 troops under General Shi Zebo from Linfen to the Shangdang plateau in the south-east of the province to accept the surrender of the Japanese and collaborationist forces there. It was an area that had for years been surrounded by Communist bases in the Taihang Mountains. On 21 August Yan’s troops occupied the county town of Zhangzi, which the Eighth Route Army had earlier taken from the Japanese, clashed with Communist units near Shizhe, and then entered Changzhi and several neighbouring towns. On 27 August units of the Eighth Route Army surrounded Xiangyuan, and on 1 September they took it by storm. On 31 August the leadership in Yan’an ordered Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping to destroy Yan’s forces in Shangdang.

What came of it

The Shangdang campaign, fought from 10 September to 12 October 1945 in parallel with the talks in Chongqing, ended with the destruction of Yan Xishan’s forces and of the relief force sent from Taiyuan. According to Chinese Communist figures, enemy losses amounted to some 35,000 men, most of them taken prisoner; Shi Zebo was also captured. It was the first major battle of the new civil war, although neither side yet called it that.

On 10 October the two sides announced in Chongqing the so-called Double Tenth Agreement. In it the Communists recognised Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, and the government agreed to convene a consultative conference of all parties and to democratise the country. The most important questions – the size of the Communist forces and the fate of the “liberated areas” – remained unresolved. Meanwhile the Americans were moving government troops by air and sea to the great cities of eastern China, and from 30 September US Marines were landing at Tianjin and Qinhuangdao. The Communists, for their part, were sending tens of thousands of troops and cadres to Manchuria, which they saw as the key to the coming struggle.

The clashes continued throughout the autumn of 1945. The mission of the American General George Marshall brought about a ceasefire in January 1946, but in the summer of that year the Chinese Civil War broke out in full. It ended in 1949 with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and the flight of Chiang Kai-shek’s government to Taiwan. August 1945, when the two sides, instead of jointly accepting Japan’s surrender, began to race each other for its spoils, was thus less the beginning of the conflict than the moment when the war with Japan ceased to hold it in check.