Hope and the Second United Front in Wuhan
Hope and the Second United Front in Wuhan
Communists, the KMT and Regionalists Were All Cooperating in Wuhan in 1938. Press Freedom Blossomed.
Chinese nationalism came of age during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The arts and intellectuals embraced the struggle against the invading Japanese.
Nowhere was that more fervent than in Wuhan for ten months in 1938 when it was the heart of wartime China.
Wuhan, or Hankou as it was known in the 1930s, is the great tri-city which straddles the Yangzi River at mid-course. As a triangle combining three cities-Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou-Wuhan had long been a great commercial center.
By the twentieth century, it was also a major inland treaty port for foreign trade and light industry. It had been a center of revolutionary politics in 1911 and 1927. By the early 1930s, Wuhan was quietly prosperous and out of the political spotlight. Then suddenly, after the Nationalist government lost Nanjing in December 1937, and retreated up the Yangzi, Asia’s longest river, Hankou was the seat of the wartime united front until that city fell to the Japanese on October 22, 1938.
For ten months, from January to October 1938, Hankou was the staging and logistics base for massive counterattacks and defence of the central Yangzi region by two million Chinese troops against the onslaught of Japanese armor units from the north and east. To those in Hankou, the outcome was not a forgone conclusion. The city itself was not under siege until the very end.
The KMT formed the strategy of a ‘protracted war of attrition’.
Initially the Chinese victories were impressive. These included the major victory of Taierzhuang in March-April 1938 which made national heroes of Guangxi generals, Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi. They were independent regional commanders connected neither to the nationalist nor communist camp. The defeat of the Japanese at Taierzhuang and the devastating effects of blowing up the Yellow River dikes in June 1938, in northern Henan, mentioned last time, delayed the Japanese advance for months.
The Japanese navy was unable to penetrate the Central Yangzi without the support of Japanese ground forces. But these successes also misled the defenders of Wuhan into the romantic notion that the city could be saved.
KMT military officials treated riverine defences as composed of three separate elements: the army, the navy, and amphibious landing crafts. They did not appreciate that amphibious warfare in a riverine environment blurred the distinction between ground and naval operations. Ground troops were not bound to the land and could assault from and get supplied from the river. A breakthrough on one front could facilitate the other and ultimately neutralize the entire defence. The KMT compartmentalized riverine defence so that it relied on the environment of the Central Yangtze to deal with the Japanese army by conventional armies and the unconventional tactic of man-made flooding. The KMT defence strategy focused more on countering the Japanese navy because the Yangtze enabled Japanese naval movements, but undervalued the threat posed by landing crafts.
Central China’s terrain is defined by the Yangtze, a river enclosed by mountains, which flows through valley plains, lakes, creeks, and swamps. The environment between two mountain ranges forms a corridor with rough terrain. Forces going to Wuhan faced an arduous march. The uneven terrain rendered Japanese mechanized divisions useless, forcing the Japanese troops to fight on foot. It was hoped that this fact would give the Chinese forces bunkered down in the mountains and behind city walls more time to prepare and would enable them to be in a better position to fire on the approaching Japanese ground forces. The topography was expected to make Japanese large-scale ground maneuvers difficult and scatter them. Unlike the North Plains where there was more space for the Japanese mechanized forces to maneuver, the mountains on both sides of the Yangtze constrained the battlefield, protecting the Chinese sides.
The Chinese wanted ‘to prolong the war by using the favourable terrain to exhaust and impose attrition on the enemy while annihilating small groups of enemies in local areas’.
But the river also made travel easier for the Japanese navy. In September 1937, the Japanese naval aviation force had already wiped out most Chinese surface ships. The Chinese believed, “we have no navy. As a result, the Yangtze which should have been our natural barrier against Japanese invasion” had to be defended against. China built a series of fortifications along the river to provide defence. They also sunk ships to make obstacles in the river and laid mines.
The early fortifications did work and caused serious problems for the Japanese fleet. Here is a report on the first major fort. The Japanese minesweepers had trouble operating and the Chinese took out 5 Japanese minesweepers, two warships, several other vessels and a landing craft full of marines. But similarly to how I described how the Qing lost the Opium War to the British, the Chinese river defence batteries were vulnerable to land-based attacks. The Chinese defenders failed to properly plan for infantry attacks on the fortifications targeting the Japanese fleet.
The Japanese were able to take them by landing troops beyond the range of the Chinese artillery. Once the forts were taken, the Japanese fleet helped with logistics and transportation, while the Chinese defenders had to struggle on foot through the difficult terrain.
Chiang Kai-shek also made a mistake by ordering breaches of Yangzi River dykes. This time, it did not slow the Japanese down. In fact, by increasing water flow, it allowed the Japanese to use their boats more effectively to capture a Chinese fort that had not been taken in over 1000 years.
The human costs of the defense of Wuhan were enormous on both sides-the highest of the war. In less than a year United Front forces lost up to a million men, wounded or dead-more than their combined losses over the next seven years. At the leadership level, the losses were even more devastating. Eighty per cent of Chiang Kaishek's officer corps were lost. The defense of Wuhan permanently weakened the forces under Chiang Kaishek's command, especially at the officer level. It also split his ruling Guomindang party. Wang Jingwei, KMT party secretary-general, defected to the Japanese side along with his ally, the Minister of Information.
I will discuss Wang Jingwei’s puppet state in Japanese controlled eastern China in a future post.
After Wuhan, the Guomindang troops under Chiang Kaishek's control never regained the same level of unity and military capacity.
Why then had such a sacrifice been made? The battle for Wuhan did inflict on the Japanese side their greatest losses of the war. It had a sobering effect. By the end of 1938 the Japanese chose not to pursue the Nationalist government into Sichuan, turning attention instead to expanding their grip on the north.
Hankou blossomed until it fell in October 1938. There was an open political competition between the Guomindang and Chinese Communists and even tolerated Communist dissenters like Chen Duxiu (who had helped found the Communist Party), Zhang Guotao (who was humiliated by the Long March), and the Trotskyist Left.
At Hankou in 1938, more than in any Chinese city before or since, there was parliamentary-like debate and political experimentation, the flowering of a free press, and enormous creative energies unleashed in the arts-especially in drama and music.
Culturally and politically, the open treaty port atmosphere of Shanghai was transported to Hankou and reshaped to serve the war effort. There was a conscious analogy being drawn in the Chinese and foreign press to the heroic Republican defense of Madrid against Franco’s Fascists. Madrid fell the following year, in 1939 after a two-year siege.
Such an extraordinary open atmosphere was possible because Chiang Kaishek was not really in control. Regional militarists headquartered in Hankou like Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, as lead commanders in the field, neutralized Guomindang and Communist authoritarianism. Even the most oppressive arm of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li’s secret police, which had been so active in Shanghai, was tamed by military politics at Hankou and focused only on eliminating Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese.
The key figures reached a power-sharing consensus. They decided to execute one of their own for treason. At 7 a.m. on the damp, cold morning of January 26, 1938, a single pistol shot rang out in a quiet Taoist temple just outside of the eastern gate of Wuhan. A bullet was put through the head of the kneeling General Han Fuju by Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff. Han had been governing Shandong without interference and in defiance of Chiang Kaishek since the late 1920s.
The decision to execute him had been taken collectively at a military tribunal. It united for the first time in almost a decade independently powerful regional militarists like Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, and Feng Yuxiang with Chiang Kaishek loyalists. General Han's cowardly refusal to fight the Japanese in Shandong in October 1937, was seen as having led directly to the fall of the capital, Nanjing, in December and the massacre of much of the city's population. General Han remained defiant to the end, crying out at his tribunal that Chiang Kaishek's retreat from Nanjing was equally as treasonous.
General Han remains the highest-ranking officer in the history of the modern Chinese military to be executed. It was politically correct. His execution was hailed on all sides of the political spectrum, including by press in control of Chiang Kaishek rivals. The communists under Zhou Enlai and Wang Ming had just arrived and they too applauded the execution. Such unity was not forced. In fact, the reverse was true. For the next ten months the press of Hankou represented remarkable political diversity and free expression.
It was the absence of repressive power and the spirit of unity against the Japanese which permitted the Chinese press such a free hand. China's major publishers and editors from Shanghai, Tianjin, and elsewhere converged upon Hankou. The number of daily newspapers shot from three to fourteen in three months; the number of weeklies from twenty to thirty; and journals from thirty to over two hundred. All factions and political parties were represented in the press. Censorship was relatively ineffectual. No editors or publishers were arrested or assassinated.
The lengthy battle for Wuhan and the competition between militarists and their political representatives in dispensing patronage was what widened the playing field for the press. The Wuhan Ribao and Xinhua Ribao were operated by the Guomindang and Chinese Communists respectively. In between was a newspaper which had moved from Tianjin, whose ties lay with the liberal wing of the Guomindang. But most important was one under the wing of the major military figures who controlled Wuhan at the time, Guangxi warlords Bai Zhongxi and Li Zongren, who were usually opponents of Chiang Kaishek.
The importance of military patronage was equally important in the arts. Urbane, treaty port cultural forms were imported from Shanghai and reshaped to appeal more broadly to rural fighters. Dramatists went to the front and worked closely with the Guangxi generals in the creation of a new kind of guerrilla theatre. At the same time a Beijing dramatist, allied to the Christian Warlord, Feng Yuxiang, wrote five plays about the war from Hankou. A Shanghai YMCA worker organized mass singing of patriotic songs, often in celebration of the victory of Taierzhuang.
The flowering of third-party movements and democracy reached a peak at Hankou. In July, the People's Political Council met with two hundred members of whom half were not Guomindang. This was the first major public political forum during Nationalist rule. Four or five important third parties became highly visible. None of them had over a thousand members, nor did they have significant military backing. But they demanded a voice in government and denounced corruption and dictatorship. Best organized was the China Youth Party and its journal. Differences between parties broke out over the degree to which all parties should subsume their interests to Chiang Kaishek because of the war effort. The question was: must democracy wait because of the war?
The Guomindang and the Communists competed not only against each other but against other parties for the hearts and minds of the people. Not surprisingly, both major parties showed that they were interested in control of Wuhan's press and politics and not in promoting free speech or tolerance.
In the spring of 1938, the government issued regulations aimed at control of the press. Enforcement, however, proved impossible when a publication had solid political or military backing from an official or general in the united front government. Still, by August a few publications had closed. When possible, Guomindang officials tried to obstruct distribution of Communist publications outside of Wuhan, especially at the front and they were partially successful.
The Communists likewise attempted to control the Hankou press. They infiltrated Guomindang publications as much as possible. There is no question that they softened the anti-communist tone of some Guomindang newspapers in 1938. Communist thugs halted distribution of small anti-communist publications by buying up copies and intimidating shopkeepers. Ye Qing, a founding member turned virulent anti-communist, was harassed. Prominent recent defectors from the communist camp like Chen Duxiu and Zhang Guotao aroused the most communist attention. A concerted campaign was launched to discredit them and counter their statements. Eventually for Chen and Zhang, life in Hankou became too uncomfortable and threatening, and they retreated upriver to Chongqing by mid- summer of 1938.
The defense of Hankou brought China into the international spotlight. The key was connecting Hankou to the siege and isolation of Republican forces at Madrid by Franco in 1938. In terms of the international crusade to combat fascism, the 'progressive' Western press like New Republic in New York saw an analogy to Madrid in Japan's naked aggression as well as her use of the latest weaponry of mass destruction. Sympathetic war correspondents and film crews from all over the world descended on Wuhan. Directly from Spain came the Canadian Dr Norman Bethune to bring medical care to the Eighth Route Army in the northwest. Robert Capra filmed the heroic defense of Wuhan. Military aid was forthcoming from both the Soviets in the form of air defense and the Germans, who had Nazi military advisers on the ground until late spring, 1938. World famous poets like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood visited the war zone and wrote a book about the heroic Chinese defense of Wuhan. The result was much international publicity and sympathy. And with it, came Western cultural influences to the interior of China on a much larger scale than before the war. There was a new openness in style and content of novels and poetry produced by Chinese writers during the war. What was emerging in Hankou was a reshaped wartime theatre, film and propaganda industry conscious of foreign models. Cartooning was an example.
What made Hankou a tragedy was the promise unfulfilled. The Sino-Japanese War profoundly transformed Chinese society and politics at enormous human cost. Initially the changes seemed hopeful. At Hankou in 1938, war and mass mobilization liberalized politics, culture, and social distinctions. But the Hankou experiment was short lived.
Politically for Chiang Kaishek, the defense of Hankou produced a tragic outcome in another sense. The loss of his best troops and officers left him isolated in Chongqing and politically and militarily vulnerable. Within the struggle inside the Communist Party, the failure to hold Hankou had tragic consequences as well. It was the turning point which pushed party leadership towards closing ranks behind the leadership in Yanan of Mao Zedong and his secret security leader Kang Sheng.
In terms of the history of the Chinese Communist Party, Hankou represented an exception: a year when the united front integrationist lines of Wang Ming, Bo Gu and Zhou Enlai played out as an alternative to the more separatist rural approach of Mao. Hankou in 1938 was the last stand for an internationalist, Moscow-directed leadership of the party. With the fall of Hankou in October, and the dissolution of the Central Yangzi Bureau of the party, Chairman Mao and Kang Sheng began to recover the reins of power and moved towards the triumph in the party purges of 1942-44. Hankou was the last time that Zhou Enlai exercised independence from Mao in party struggles at least until 1971.
Wang Ming, Bo Gu, and Zhou Enlai, all members of the 28 Bolsheviks who had been pushed aside by the Long March, arrived in Hankou from Yanan with a mandate to lead the Central Yangzi Bureau of the party and to apply the renewed internationalist, united front policies of the party. The link between the Chinese struggle and the siege of Madrid was taken very seriously. Countless times in newspapers and elsewhere Zhou Enlai linked Madrid with Hankou as the forefront of the international struggle against fascism. They saw the Communist Party as part of a coalition government, needing to be integrated as fully as possible into the Guomindang-dominated government. This included cabinet level positions like that of Guo in the cultural field, Zhou Enlai as deputy minister of the military council, with substantial representation on the People's Political Council.
The negative cultural effects of the fall of Hankou were not apparent at first. From Hankou intellectuals dispersed in various directions-creating cultural renaissances in Hong Kong, Kunming, Guilin and elsewhere. But the momentum was broken. By the middle of the war, and especially after the New Fourth Army Incident of 1940-41, when Communist forces attacked the Nationalist Army and the second united front was essentially over, the push towards mass culture became more simplified and rural focused. The visual arts, drama and fiction underwent a 'folk' movement. Fading fast were the more international concerns of Hankou. Ironically, as the Chinese war effort became more dependent upon American military support, foreign cultural influences were reduced. Gone was the inspiration of Madrid and the easy exchanges between Chinese and Western intellectuals.
With Mao's Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Chinese culture on the mainland was put into the social realist straight jacket that lasted well into the 1980s.
Cultural policy under the Guomindang in Chongqing went into a similar repressive direction. Both parties suspected intellectuals of being secret agents. As a result, the energy of Hankou was dissipated. The Shanghai intellectuals left the country in some cases or became cautious because of the new repressive atmosphere. The gifted playwright, Hong Shen, attempted suicide in 1941. On both left and right, violence against dissenting intellectuals increased. In the Rectification campaigns around Yanan writers like Yang Shiwei were executed. In the Guomindang areas, there were engineered assassinations in Kunming. As the war ended and civil war began, the free spirit of united front Hankou became a distant memory.
The social and political transformation during the Sino-Japanese war period was profound. The suffering of the people was extreme. The conflict also politicized the citizens. Maybe the most promising period of change came at the beginning of the war, when Hankou was the center of united front China… until it fell.
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