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

They were wrong. Zhang gave up opium and got serious as a Chinese political figure, supporting the Nationalists. In 1929, he invited two pro-Japanese Chinese officials to a banquet and had them executed in front of the other guests. Chiang named him commander of the renewed effort to cut the Communist cancer out of the Chinese body politic. But as 1936 wore on and the prospect of further Japanese incursions against Chinese sovereignty seemed imminent, Zhang balked at the idea of Chinese fighting other Chinese, and he opened up contacts with the Communists to plot what he would later call a coup d’état.
    At the end of November, Zhang told Chiang that his troops in Shaanxi province were close to mutiny at the prospect of fighting fellow Chinese, and he proposed to Chiang that he come up from Nanjing to Xian, a couple of hours by airplane, to talk to them. Chiang agreed to go. Zhang informed Mao of the unfolding plan. Mao called it “a masterpiece.”
    Chiang arrived with his usual retainers, including his foreign minister and military advisers, staying at a hot springs resort ten miles from Xian. He spent his time talking to the officers of the army organized to march on the Communists in Yenan, telling them that only “the last five minutes” remained to go before victory in that long campaign would be theirs. Then, in the wee hours of December 12, Zhang’s bodyguards, wearing the fur caps of Manchurian soldiers, burst into the cabin where Chiang was sleeping. They intended to kidnap him, but Chiang, wearing his nightclothes, escaped out of a window and climbed over the back wall of the compound, injuring his back when he fell. The Generalissimo spent a frigid night with a few loyal aides in a cave at the top of a nearby mountain, and in the morning he was taken into custody by Zhang’s troops.
    Within hours,Mao, in his more comfortable cave at Chinese Communist Party (CCP) headquarters inYenan, was informed of the kidnapping. Overjoyed at the news, Mao wanted Chiang and his top generals put on trial and executed. He sent a cable to Moscow asking for advice on the matter from the leader of the global proletarian revolution, Joseph Stalin, expecting no doubt that Stalin would rejoice in Chiang’s elimination. Stalin was also the main source of arms and funds for the Chinese Communists, who were only beginning to rebuild their strength after the last attempts by the central government to wipe them out.
    Stalin was appalled at the Chiang kidnapping and even more so at the prospect of assassinating him. Here is evidence of a certain pattern in the relations between the cautious Stalin and the more impetuous Mao. The Soviet leader’s overriding concern at the end of 1936 was the simultaneous threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In November, Japan joined with Italy and Germany to form theAnti-Comintern Pact, directed explicitly against the Soviet Union, and this raised the prospect that the Soviets would be attacked by Germany in the west and Japan in the east. For this reason, Stalin had for months encouraged the Communists to make an accommodation with Chiang so that they could be united in the anti-Japanese fight. Stalin therefore saw this threat on Chiang’s very life as reckless and dangerous. If Chiang were eliminated, he felt, the road would be open for the pro-Japanese faction inside the KMT to take power, facilitating Japan’s ability to roll into Soviet Siberia. Stalin issued strict orders to Mao that Chiang was not to be harmed; having received these instructions,Zhou Enlai, the Communists’ suave and skillful chief negotiator, flew to Xian and passed the message on to the Young Marshal, who found himself suddenly abandoned by his Communist ally.
    A negotiation spearheaded by Zhou then ensued in which Chiang promised to call off the campaign against the Communists and to join with them in a new united front against Japan, with Chiang recognized as the undisputed national leader. When, on the day after