The New Fourth Army incident

In mid-January 1941, in the mountains of southern Anhui, a few dozen kilometres south of the Yangtze, a week-long battle in which Chinese fought Chinese came to an end. Government troops of the Third War Zone had surrounded, near the small town of Maolin in Jing County, the headquarters column of the Communist New Fourth Army – some 9,000 people who, on the government’s orders, were supposed to cross to the north bank of the river. After seven days of fighting most of them had been killed, had gone missing or had been taken prisoner. On 14 January the army’s commander, General Ye Ting, went over to the enemy to negotiate terms and was detained. On 17 January Chiang Kai-shek declared that the New Fourth Army had mutinied and disbanded it; three days later the Communists re-formed it north of the Yangtze. The Chinese call these events the Southern Anhui Incident (Wannan shibian) or the New Fourth Army Incident.

War chronologies often record under 15 January that the rivalry between the Nationalists and the Communists “becomes more visible” and that many Communists are “forced to lay down their arms”. That version greatly softens what happened. The Communists were not disarmed but defeated in open battle, and those taken prisoner were the ones who had survived. The fighting lasted from 6 to 14 January. On 15 January, the date under which the event is recorded, the last units were trying to slip out of the encirclement, and the first full reports of the defeat were reaching Chongqing and Yan’an. The public learned of it a few days later, when the government announced that the army had been disbanded.

An army of guerrillas

The New Fourth Army was created under the Second United Front concluded by the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party after the outbreak of the war with Japan. When the main Communist forces were incorporated into the National Revolutionary Army in the autumn of 1937 as the Eighth Route Army of Zhu De, the government agreed that the scattered guerrilla detachments as well – those left behind in the old southern base areas in 1934, when the rest of the Red Army set out on the Long March – could form a single formation. The headquarters of the New Fourth Army was organised on 25 December 1937 in Hankou. At first the army numbered about 10,000 men in four detachments. Its commander was Ye Ting, a distinguished officer from the days of the Northern Expedition who had not been a party member since the late 1920s and was therefore acceptable to both sides. His deputy and the army’s real leader was the Communist Xiang Ying, secretary of the party’s South-East Bureau, who in 1934–1937 had led the guerrillas in the mountains of Jiangxi. The two men could not get on. As a non-party man, Ye Ting took no part in the meetings of the army’s party leadership, and he twice tendered his resignation.

Formally, the army was subordinate to General Gu Zhutong’s Third War Zone. From 1938 its headquarters was in the village of Yunling in Jing County, in southern Anhui. Some units crossed to the north bank of the Yangtze, where they grew rapidly behind Japanese lines. Mao Zedong, who from 1938 was increasingly clearly in charge of the party, advocated expansion to the north and east, towards Jiangsu and the Huai River basin. Xiang Ying preferred to keep the headquarters in the south, close to mountains he knew. In 1940 there were increasingly serious clashes with government troops north of the river, and on 4–6 October 1940 Chen Yi’s units routed the troops of the Governor of Jiangsu, Han Deqin, at Huangqiao.

The order to move north

On 19 October 1940 the Chief of the General Staff, He Yingqin, and his deputy Bai Chongxi demanded that all units of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army move within a month to the north of the old course of the Yellow River. The telegram listed the charges: the Communists were operating outside their designated zones, expanding their forces beyond the authorised establishment, disobeying orders and attacking their allies instead of fighting the enemy. On 9 November the Communists replied in the name of Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Ye Ting and Xiang Ying. They rejected the charges and refused to march beyond the Yellow River, but promised to move the units in southern Anhui to the north of the Yangtze. The party leadership in Yan’an knew that the headquarters in the south was defenceless against government troops, and throughout November and December it urged Xiang Ying to set off.

In December matters became more complicated. The Communists in Jiangsu did not wait. At the end of November Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yi attacked the remnants of Han Deqin’s troops at Caodian, and in mid-December they suffered a defeat there. For the government this was proof that the passage of the New Fourth Army headquarters through southern Jiangsu would strengthen the Communists who were attacking government troops on the north bank. Originally the Third War Zone had accepted an eastern route through southern Jiangsu, with a crossing near Zhenjiang. Now He Yingqin proposed that this route be forbidden, and Chiang Kai-shek demanded that the headquarters cross straight to the north, between Tongling and Fanchang, towards Wuwei, and do so by 31 December. This route led across a river patrolled by Japanese boats, and on the north bank stood the government troops of General Li Pinxian, which, according to the Communists, were preparing to attack. The Communists regarded it as a trap, although Chiang had instructed Li Pinxian to let the crossing units through. On 10 December Chiang ordered Gu Zhutong that if the New Fourth Army failed to move north in time, or if the Communists in Jiangsu attacked Han Deqin’s seat at Xinghua, he was “to deal with it at once”. On 25 December, in a conversation with Zhou Enlai, he warned that if the army did not obey the order it “would certainly be defeated”.

At the end of December the Third War Zone prepared for battle. At a secret conference in Huizhou in southern Anhui (today She County) on 27 December, General Shangguan Yunxiang, commander of the 32nd Army Group, was given command of all troops in the area. Eight divisions were assembled against the New Fourth Army – according to most accounts, about 80,000 men – including some brought in from the front in Zhejiang. On 28 December Xiang Ying decided that the headquarters would go neither straight north nor straight east, but by a roundabout route: south through Maolin, then east through Jingde and Ningguo, round the Tianmu Mountains to Liyang in southern Jiangsu, and cross the Yangtze there. On 3 January 1941 Mao and Zhu De replied that this plan was “entirely correct”. On the same day Chiang telegraphed Ye Ting that the army was to assemble near Wuwei, on the north bank.

Seven days at Maolin

On the evening of 4 January 1941 the headquarters and the units from southern Anhui, about 9,000 people in three columns, set out from Yunling. Among them were many non-combatants: political workers, printers, medical orderlies, women. Some 3,000 others, mostly from the army’s rear services, had already gone in December by the route through southern Jiangsu. It had been raining for several days, the roads were sodden, and the columns marched by night, slowly, laden with equipment. On 5 January they reached the area of Maolin and halted for a day’s rest. In the meantime the government troops closed the ring. On 6 January units of the New Fourth Army clashed with the government 40th Division. Each side claims that the other attacked it. According to the government’s official communiqué, the Communists “burst into” Maolin and fell upon the 40th Division, which had to defend itself. According to the Communists, it was the 40th Division that blocked the route that had previously been agreed. That same day Gu Zhutong ordered Shangguan Yunxiang to “clear the area completely” of New Fourth Army units.

On 7 January the Communists tried to break through to the south-east, across the pass near Xingtan, and were halted. According to participants, a commanders’ conference near the pass dragged on for seven hours. Ye Ting wanted to throw all their forces against Xingtan or to turn round and break out to the west, but Xiang Ying hesitated. In the end he decided to fall back the way they had come and look for another route. On the night of 8–9 January, as the encirclement tightened, Xiang Ying, the head of the political department Yuan Guoping, the deputy chief of staff Zhou Zikun and several other commanders quietly left the column without telling Ye Ting. They found no way out and returned on 10 January. Ye Ting and Rao Shushi informed Yan’an. The party leadership stripped Xiang Ying of command and placed everything in the hands of Ye Ting, with political affairs entrusted to Rao Shushi.

On 10 January about 5,000 people, all that remained of the army’s concentrated forces, were holding out in the Shijingkeng valley. That evening Ye Ting sent a telegram to Yan’an saying that after four days of fighting the army was “on the brink of annihilation” and its commanders were ready to die, and asking the party to threaten Chiang with breaking the united front if he did not order the encirclement lifted. Mao instructed Zhou Enlai to lodge a strong protest, and at the same time, on 12 January, ordered the Communists in Jiangsu and Shandong to prepare to destroy the government forces there should the units in Anhui be wiped out. On 12 January government troops captured the hills above the valley, and that night the remnants of the army began to break out in small groups. The composer Ren Guang, author of well-known patriotic songs, was killed at this time. On 13 January Ye Ting, on Rao Shushi’s advice, wrote to Shangguan Yunxiang that he wished to come for talks. On the afternoon of 14 January he went down to the quarters of the 108th Division and was detained. According to some accounts this happened a day earlier, and he was detained by soldiers of the 52nd Division. On the evening of 14 January government troops took the last positions around Maolin. Yuan Guoping, badly wounded during the breakout, died on 15 January. According to Chinese accounts, he took his own life so as not to be a burden to his comrades.

Losses

The figures come mainly from the parties to the dispute and are uncertain. According to Communist sources, of some 9,000 people about 2,000 broke out in small groups, including the detachments of Fu Qiutao and Huang Huoxing, which crossed the Yangtze near Fanchang in the following weeks. The remaining 7,000 or so were killed, went missing or were captured. The prisoners – over 4,000, according to the same sources – were held in a camp near Shangrao in Jiangxi province. Many of them died or were executed in the years that followed. The British author Jonathan Fenby gives estimates of between 2,000 and 10,000 killed for the New Fourth Army, while the losses of the government troops, according to some accounts, exceeded 2,000 men.

Xiang Ying and Zhou Zikun got out of the encirclement and hid in the mountains. On 14 March 1941, in a cave not far from Maolin, they were shot in their sleep by a headquarters adjutant, Liu Houzong, who took gold from the army’s treasury and gave himself up to the government troops. After 1949 he was tracked down and executed.

Disbandment and rebirth of the army

Chiang Kai-shek hesitated for a long time. His diary, which historians cite, contains entries from 9 and 12 January saying that all he wanted was for the Communists to obey the order and cross the river, and that Bai Chongxi, in wanting to destroy the Communists at once, “does not understand the situation”. Once the New Fourth Army units had been crushed, however, and most of the military commanders had come out in favour of a hard line, Chiang adopted it. On 17 January the government’s Military Affairs Commission announced that the New Fourth Army had mutinied, disbanded it and handed Ye Ting over to a court martial. The communiqué presented the affair as a matter of military discipline: the army had disobeyed an order, attacked allied units and been “punished”. Government propaganda was instructed not to attack the Communist Party or the Eighth Route Army over the matter.

The Communists responded quickly. On 18 January, when the censors suppressed an article in the party daily Xinhua Ribao in Chongqing, a handwritten inscription by Zhou Enlai appeared in the blank space. It played on the surname Ye, which means “leaf”: he wrote of “a wrong unheard of through the ages” and of “a single leaf from Jiangnan”, and asked why brothers of one house were in such a hurry to kill one another. On 20 January the party Central Committee’s Military Commission announced the re-formation of the army. Chen Yi became acting commander and Liu Shaoqi political commissar. The new headquarters was established at Yancheng in Jiangsu, in territory won at Huangqiao. All Communist units south of the Longhai railway, from both the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, were combined into seven divisions and an independent brigade, more than 90,000 men in all. Those who had broken out of the encirclement in Anhui joined the 7th Division, the weakest of them. On 22 January Mao, in an interview given as spokesman of the Military Commission, accused the government of preparing to capitulate to Japan and put forward twelve demands, from the punishment of those responsible to the release of Ye Ting. In March the Communist delegates boycotted the session of the National Political Council.

Echoes abroad

News of fighting between China’s allies alarmed everyone who was supporting China against Japan. On 22 January the American journalist Edgar Snow reported the incident from Hong Kong for the press in the United States and lost his right to work in China as a result. Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Ching-ling, and other politicians of the Kuomintang left protested in Hong Kong. In Washington the State Department let it be known that a fratricidal war would make aid to China more difficult, and Roosevelt soon sent his adviser Lauchlin Currie to Chongqing, where in February he tried to persuade Chiang that America wanted a united China fighting Japan. The Soviet Union, at that time China’s only major supplier of arms, reacted even more sharply. On 25 January the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Panyushkin, asked Chiang whether the government wanted civil war, and Moscow soon replaced its chief military adviser. What mattered to Stalin was that China should go on tying down Japan, not the fate of the Communists of Anhui. The same pressure worked in the other direction: Moscow and the Communist International advised the party against breaking with the Kuomintang. According to Chiang’s diary, the Japanese received the news with satisfaction and hoped the quarrel would widen. At the end of January they launched an offensive in southern Henan, which reminded both Chinese sides who their common enemy was.

Two versions

To this day the two sides tell the story differently. According to historians in the People’s Republic of China, it was a premeditated attack by Kuomintang “diehards” on an army that was obeying orders and marching north, and the very word “incident” obscures an act of treachery. According to historians in Taiwan, the New Fourth Army had been breaking orders throughout 1940, extending its territory at the expense of government troops, and failed to obey the final order, since instead of going north it set off south; the government merely restored discipline. Western scholars, above all Gregor Benton, author of a substantial history of the New Fourth Army, show that both parties had been preparing for a confrontation for months, and that Communist expansion in Jiangsu, including the attack at Caodian, gave the government a pretext. Culprits were also sought within the Communist Party itself. After 1941 the main responsibility was attributed to Xiang Ying, his hesitation and his delay in carrying out Yan’an’s instructions, which strengthened Mao’s position. Some historians point out, however, that Yan’an itself had approved the route through Maolin and had sent contradictory signals for several months.

Its place in the war

The Southern Anhui Incident ended real cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Formally, neither side announced the end of the united front, as it suited neither of them: the government did not want a civil war in full view of the Americans and the Russians, and the Communists did not want to lose their legal status and their standing as a party fighting Japan. In practice, however, the government stopped paying the Eighth Route Army, and its best divisions blockaded the Communist base in northern Shaanxi. The Communists stopped reporting to the government and no longer carried out its orders. The shattered army was reborn in Jiangsu stronger than before, and the case of Ye Ting, held in prison until March 1946, became for the Communists a symbol of Chiang’s perfidy. In the years that followed the two armies fought Japan separately, each preparing for a showdown with the other.

For the Japanese this was a good sign. After the Hundred Regiments Offensive and the Anhui incident, they could concentrate in 1941 on pacifying the Communist bases in northern China, knowing that their opponents were not acting together. The Americans, who after Pearl Harbor became China’s principal ally, tried in vain throughout the war to reconcile the two parties. When Japan capitulated in 1945, two armies faced each other in China, one of which had been growing behind enemy lines throughout the war. The civil war, resumed in 1946, ended in 1949 with a Communist victory, and many commanders of the New Fourth Army re-formed in January 1941, Chen Yi first among them, were among the victors.