China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice Read Online Free PDF

comparison. The world saw in Chiang a young, competent, visionary leader who would finally, after so many false starts for China, lead his country into the modern world.
    But Chiang was never able to overcome the deep divisions in China or the byzantine, sometimes literally murderous politics of rival parties. In 1927, he mounted a vicious coup against his allies in the reunification drive, the Communists, who he believed, probably correctly, were plotting, with Moscow’s connivance, to eliminate him, once he had served his purpose. The Communists, or those not among the thousands arrested or assassinated, were driven out of the cities and set up rural bases under the newly emerging leader Mao Zedong. Meanwhile, Chiang set up the capital of the Republic of China at Nanjing, a former imperial-era capital on the Yangzi River that was in territory controlled by the new government—in contrast to Beijing, which, though China’s capital for most of the previous six hundred years, was dominated by one of China’s as yet unvanquished warlords. For the next decade, Chiang presided over a promising and resurgent country, one whose economy grew rapidly and that made great progress against its poverty, superstition, and backwardness. In the early 1930s, having expelled the Soviets but advised by his German officers, he undertook several campaigns to wipe out the Communists in their rural bases, and he would likely have succeeded if he hadn’t had to address a Japanese threat at the same time.
    Chiang did not oppose earlier Japanese aggression in China, especially the conquest of Manchuria in 1931. Chiang felt China was too weak to fight Japan, and he concentrated instead on nation building and eliminating the Communists. It wasn’t a stupid decision. Chiang understood that as long as China was divided into warring factions, it was unlikely to be strong. But as Japan continued to press for more Chinese territory, an aroused Chinese public put pressure on him to forgo the effort to eliminate his domestic rivals and to enter into a united front with them to fight Japan, which he did at the end of 1936, though unwillingly and as the result of a comic-opera deception aimed at forcing his hand.
    In December that year, Chiang flew to Xian, the ancient imperial capital in China’s northwest, where he was to meet with a man known as the Young Marshal. This wasZhang Xueliang, who had seen his share of bloody intrigue in his short lifetime. Zhang’s father,Zhang Zuolin, was one of the more picaresque characters of the time when power in China was dispersed among a group of warlords, each with his own army, territory, and ambition to become the ruler of all of China. Known as the Old Marshal, Zhang Sr. was a thoroughly reactionary, antirepublican former bandit who, in good Chinese warlord fashion, liked to appear in a Prussian-style uniform with braids and sashes, oversize epaulets, medals, and a tassel swaying over a brimmed cap. He commanded an army of several hundred thousand men, had five wives, and for a brief time controlled Beijing. But in 1928, as the armies of Chiang Kai-shek advanced northwards in their reunification drive, Zhang was forced to retreat to Manchuria, where Japan enjoyed semi-colonial privileges, including the right to deploy a sizable military force known as the Kwantung Army—Kwantung being a name given to the part of Manchuria east of the pass dividing it from the rest of China. On his way back, Zhang was killed when a Kwantung Army soldier put a bomb under his train. The reason normally assumed for this assassination was Japanese anger at Zhang’s failure to stop Chiang Kai-shek’s forces from advancing north, but it seems equally likely that Zhang was deemed too independent at a time when Japan planned to turn Manchuria into a puppet state.
    Zhang Jr. was a decadent, opium-using womanizer whom theJapanese installed as the new warlord of Manchuria, apparently thinking he would be more pliant than his father.