Mao: The Unknown Story

But not Mao. Mao did not regard the Sino-Japanese War as a conflict in which all Chinese would fight together against Japan. He did not see himself as on the same side as Chiang at all. Years later, he was to say to his inner circle that he had regarded the war as a three-sided affair. “Chiang, Japan and us — Three Kingdoms,” he said, evoking the period in Chinese history known as the Three Warring Kingdoms. The war was to him an opportunity to have Chiang destroyed by the Japanese. In later years he more than once thanked the Japanese for “lending a big hand.” When after the war some Japanese visitors apologized to him for Japan having invaded China, he told them: “I would rather thank the Japanese warlords.” Without them occupying much of China, “we would still be in the mountains today.” He meant every word.

Mao had no strategy to drive the Japanese out of China without Chiang. Nor could he dream that the CCP could cope with the Japanese occupying army once Chiang was defeated. All his hopes hinged on Stalin. Mao had made his calculation clear in an interview with Edgar Snow in 1936, saying that Soviet Russia

cannot ignore events in the Far East. It cannot remain passive. Will it complacently watch Japan conquer all China and make of it a strategic base from which to attack the USSR? Or will it help the Chinese people …? We think Russia will choose the latter course.

Mao’s basic plan for the Sino-Japanese War, therefore, was to preserve his forces and expand the sphere of the Chinese Reds, while waiting for Stalin to act. So when the Japanese pushed deeper into the interior from northern China as well as from the Shanghai area, Mao got Chiang to agree that the Red Army would not be put into any battles, and would operate only as auxiliaries to government troops. Mao did not want the Red Army to fight the invaders at all. He ordered Red commanders to wait for Japanese troops to defeat the Nationalists, and then, as the Japanese swept on, to seize territories behind the Japanese lines. The Japanese could not garrison the vast areas of China they conquered — which were eventually much larger than Japan itself. They could only control the railways and the big cities, leaving the smaller towns and the countryside up for grabs. Mao also ordered his men to round up defeated Nationalist troops in order to expand the Red ranks. His plan was to ride on the coat-tails of the Japanese to expand Red territory.

He bombarded his military commanders with telegrams such as: “Focus on creating base areas … Not on fighting battles …” And when the Japanese were sweeping across the province of Shanxi, he ordered: “Set up our territory in the whole of Shanxi province.” He said years later that his attitude had been: “The more land Japan took, the better.”

Mao’s approach met with resistance from his own commanders, who were keen to fight the Japanese. On 25 September the Red Army had its first engagement with the Japanese, when a unit under Lin Biao ambushed the tail end of a Japanese transport convoy at the pass of Pingxingguan, in northeast Shanxi, near the Great Wall. Although this was a minor clash — and against a non-combat unit, which, according to Lin, was mainly asleep — it was the first time Communists had killed any Japanese (outside Manchuria). If Mao had had his way, this fight would not have happened at all. According to a report Lin Biao wrote in 1941 in Russia (where he was receiving treatment for bullet wounds), Mao had repeatedly refused to authorize the action: “When battles started between the Japanese army and the Nationalist army, I more than once asked the CC [Central Committee: i.e., Mao] for a decision to organise a powerful strike against the Japanese. I never received an answer, and I ended up giving battle near Pingxingguan on my own initiative.”

Mao was furious about Pingxingguan. This fighting, he said, was “helping Chiang Kai-shek,” and had done nothing to advance his goal — which was to establish Red territory. But for propaganda purposes, Mao had Pingxingguan inflated out of all proportion in an effort to demonstrate that the CCP was more committed to fighting the Japanese than the Nationalists were. One reason the Communists kept citing it was because it was, literally, the only “battle” they had with the Japanese for years, one that killed a couple of hundred Japanese at the very most.

The Red Army had a few other small successes, as minor players in collaboration with Nationalist troops. But all the time, Mao was urging them to stop fighting the Japanese and concentrate on taking over territory. By mid-November, the first new Communist base in the Japanese rear was formed, near Peking, called Jinchaji, with a population of some 12 million, making it many times larger than the Yenan base. This and other huge Red territories “created the condition for our victory” in conquering China, Mao told a Japanese visitor years later.