The Second United Front in China

On the evening of 24 December 1936 in Xi’an, Chiang Kai-shek, for twelve days a prisoner of his own generals, received Zhou Enlai, the envoy of the Chinese Communist Party. It was their first meeting in ten years, since the days when Zhou had served under him at the Whampoa Military Academy. Chiang reminded him of this at once: “You were my subordinate; you should do as I say.” Zhou replied that if Chiang ended the civil war and took up the fight against Japan, the Red Army would accept his command. Chiang promised that his troops would no longer fight the Communists and agreed to further talks in Nanjing. Many chronologies date the Second United Front of the Kuomintang and the Communists against Japan to this meeting. In reality, all that was reached on 24 December was a verbal agreement in principle. The united front took another nine months to emerge and was formally proclaimed only on 22 and 23 September 1937, when the war with Japan had already been going on for more than two months.

The first front and ten years of war

The front is called the second because there had already been a first. In 1923 Sun Yat-sen, on Moscow’s advice and with Moscow’s money, admitted the Communists into the Kuomintang. Together they built an army and in 1926 set off northwards to unify the country. The alliance ended in April 1927 with the Shanghai massacre, in which Chiang crushed the Communists. The civil war began. The Communists created their own army and a soviet republic in Jiangxi, while Chiang, throughout the 1930s and even after the loss of Manchuria, sent his best divisions against them rather than against the Japanese. In 1934 he drove them out of Jiangxi, and the Long March brought the survivors to northern Shaanxi.

The road to agreement

The change began in Moscow. In the summer of 1935 the Seventh Congress of the Communist International adopted the policy of popular fronts: Communists were to form alliances with other forces against fascism and aggression. The Chinese delegation, led by Wang Ming, issued an appeal on 1 August 1935 for all Chinese to fight Japan together – still, however, without Chiang, whom it called a Japanese lackey. The party leadership in Shaanxi learned of the new line only in the autumn, and in December 1935, at a meeting in Wayaobu, it adopted the programme of a broad national front. In August 1936 the Comintern instructed it to seek an agreement with Chiang himself, and on 25 August the party sent an open letter to the Kuomintang proposing an alliance on the model of 1924–1927.

Chiang was also seeking contact, though for different reasons. From the end of 1935 he had been conducting secret talks with the USSR in the hope of help in the event of war with Japan, and Moscow let it be understood that the condition was peace with the Communists. His trusted aide Chen Lifu talked with the Communist envoy Pan Hannian, but Chiang wanted above all to disarm his opponent, and in the autumn of 1936 he was offering terms close to capitulation. At the same time the Communists concluded secret agreements with the very troops that were supposed to destroy them, above all with the Northeastern Army of Zhang Xueliang. The breakthrough came with the Xi’an incident of 12 December 1936, when Zhang imprisoned Chiang and demanded an end to the civil war. Joseph Stalin, who needed a strong China against Japan, demanded that the Communists find a peaceful solution. The talks of 23 and 24 December, attended by Zhou, Zhang, General Yang Hucheng, Chiang’s wife Soong Mei-ling and her brother Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), produced a verbal agreement: an end to the fighting against the Red Army, preparations for resistance to Japan and cooperation with the USSR. Chiang signed nothing, and on 25 December he flew back to Nanjing.

Nine months of talks

In public the Nanjing government maintained that its policy towards the Communists had not changed, but the fighting stopped. Government troops did not advance on Shaanxi, and in January 1937 the Communist leadership moved to Yan’an, which was to be its capital for the next ten years. On 10 February 1937 the party sent a telegram to the plenary session of the Kuomintang meeting in Nanjing. It demanded an end to the civil war, political freedoms, the release of political prisoners, a conference of all parties, preparations for war and better living conditions for the people. In return it promised to stop its armed struggle against the government, to rename the soviet republic a special region of the Republic of China and the Red Army a part of the national army subordinate to Nanjing, and to halt the confiscation of landlords’ land. The plenum, which sat from 15 to 22 February, responded with a resolution on “eradicating the Red menace”. It set four conditions that in practice coincided with the Communists’ promises: the abolition of the Red Army and of the soviet government, and an end to Communist propaganda and to class struggle.

Talks then went on for half a year: in Xi’an; in Hangzhou, where Zhou met Chiang at the end of March; and in June at Chiang’s summer residence in the Lushan mountains. The dispute concerned what the Communists were unwilling to give up: the autonomy of their own army and their power in their region. Chiang wanted to incorporate the Communist divisions into the army under government supervision and to subordinate the party to his government. The Communists wanted to keep their own command and their own administration. The talks stalled.

War settles the matter

It was the war that decided them. On the night of 7–8 July 1937 shooting broke out between Chinese and Japanese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, and in the following weeks the Japanese occupied Beijing and Tianjin. On 15 July Zhou Enlai handed over in Lushan the party’s declaration on cooperation with the Kuomintang, and on 17 July Chiang declared in a speech that if war broke out, every Chinese, from north or south, young or old, had a duty to defend the country. In August the fighting spread to Shanghai. On 21 August China signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, which for several years became its main supplier of weapons and aircraft. On 22 August the government’s Military Commission renamed the Red Army in northern Shaanxi the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army, with Zhu De as commander and Peng Dehuai as his deputy. It had three divisions, commanded by Lin Biao, He Long and Liu Bocheng, and, according to various figures, between about 30,000 and 45,000 soldiers. At a meeting in Luochuan in those same days the party leadership decided that its troops would wage above all an independent guerrilla war behind enemy lines and would keep their independence within the front. At the beginning of September the government of the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region was set up, with Yan’an as its capital.

On 22 September 1937 the government news agency published the Communists’ declaration. The party stated that Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People were what China needed today, that it renounced the policy of overthrowing the Kuomintang by force and of the forcible confiscation of land, that it was dissolving the soviet government, and that its army, as part of the national army, was taking up the fight against Japan. The next day, 23 September, Chiang issued a statement accepting the declaration and thereby recognising the legal existence of the Communist Party. Historians usually take this date as the formal conclusion of the Second United Front. In the autumn of 1937 a second Communist army, the New Fourth Army, was formed in the south from scattered guerrilla units that had remained in the old bases in Jiangxi and the neighbouring provinces.

An alliance of the distrustful

The united front was not an alliance of equal partners, and it was never set down as a formal agreement between the two parties. It worked best in the first year of the war. In the autumn of 1937 units of the Eighth Route Army fought in Shanxi alongside government troops in the Battle of Taiyuan, and on 25 September Lin Biao’s division destroyed a Japanese supply column at Pingxingguan, a victory that Communist propaganda exploited for decades. In 1938, during the Battle of Wuhan, the Communists had their representatives in government bodies, and their newspaper was published legally. After that cooperation weakened. Mao Zedong wanted his armies to avoid great battles and to build bases and power in the countryside behind Japanese lines. From 1939 there were clashes between the troops of the two sides. In January 1941 government troops attacked the headquarters column of the New Fourth Army in southern Anhui. Thousands of soldiers were killed or captured. After this incident the front existed in name only, and after Japan’s surrender in 1945 both sides returned to the civil war, which the Communists won in 1949.

Significance

The date of 24 December 1936 simplifies matters: the front was not created that day; there was only a promise, from which the road to it began. Even so, from that moment the civil war in China was suspended, and the country’s two largest political forces began to prepare for joint resistance. When in the summer of 1937 Japan, convinced that China would give way as it had before, launched a full-scale war, it came up against a country that for the first time in a decade was not fighting itself. The war did not end after a few months, as Tokyo had expected, but lasted eight years, tied down hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in China and pushed Japan towards the decision to strike at the possessions of the Western powers in 1941. The united front also had a second, more lasting effect: it gave the Communists legitimacy, time and space. The party, which in 1937 had about 40,000 members, had more than a million in 1945, and its armies and bases covered a large part of northern China. The front that was meant to save China from Japan also prepared the way for Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949.