Read Online Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan - Free Book Online Page B

Guomindang hounded the remaining Communists, Chou and his wife abandoned Shanghai for the relative safety of a Communist guerrilla base in south-central China where Mao and others were trying to hang on. Over the next four years, as Guomindang troops closed in, Chou maneuvered adroitly through the shoals of vicious internal party struggles, managing to choose the winning sides. At the beginning of 1935 he threw his support behind Mao. Perhaps he did so out of conviction, or perhaps, as a recent biography of Mao suggests, because he was blackmailed into doing so: in 1932, Guomindang newspapers had published a notice in which Chou renounced Communism, and although Chou denounced the story, almost certainly truthfully, as a fake, Mao held it over him for the rest of his life. 13 Chou became Mao’s faithful lieutenant, never bidding for supreme power himself or joining with those who dared to disagree with Mao. As he said in 1972, in one of his last and most humiliating self-criticisms, “I have always thought, and will always think that I cannot be at the helm and can only be an assistant.” 14 In 1976, toward the end of his life, as the attacks from the radicals around Mao were mounting, he refused to go into the operating room until he had finished a letter to Mao saying that he had never betrayed the party. 15 His survival in the recurrent savage and bloody intraparty struggles won him a comparison to a popular Chinese doll that always righted itself when it was knocked over.
    While the Communists struggled to survive, the Guomindang appeared to be consolidating its power and starting to build a new China. Chiang Kai-shek, the young soldier who had emerged as Sun Yat-sen’s successor, and the Guomindang might have brought the remaining warlords under control and finished off the Communists; they might have built a proper infrastructure for China, with roads, airfields, railways, heavy industries, and a sound educational system; they might in time have been a good government. They never had the chance. At the start of the 1930s, the Depression hit the world. China itself, as a largely agricultural economy, was spared the worst of the economic downturn, but it could not escape the impact on international relations. The Western democracies, including the United States, which had helped maintain a stable international order in the 1920s, turned inward, preoccupied with their own problems. Unfortunately, nations like Germany and Italy took a different tack: to secure what they needed, whether territory or influence, and by force if necessary. The Japanese, too, moved down an increasingly nationalistic and militaristic road—necessary, so many of them thought, to protect Japan from the indifference of the great powers. In 1931, Japanese militarists seized Manchuria outright and the world did little to stop them. From 1931 onward, the Japanese maneuvered to extend their sway into the parts of China south of the Great Wall. The Guomindang was forced to divert its resources to dealing with the Japanese threat.
    In 1937, Japanese armies invaded China proper, eventually bringing the whole of the rich coastal area into a new Japanese empire. The war with Japan, which was in time absorbed into the Second World War, cut short the prospect that the Guomindang would bring stability and prosperity to China. It also opened the door to the rapid growth of the Chinese Communist Party. Without meaning to, the deeply conservative Japanese militarists saved Communism in China. The Guomindang was distracted from what was an increasingly successful campaign to wipe out the Chinese Communist Party, and the Communists themselves were able to tap into a burgeoning Chinese nationalism. When the Second World War ended, the Communists controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze and had a formidable army. In 1946, after fruitless talks brokered by the United States, the two sides embarked on a civil war, which ended with the victory of the