China

War between Nationalists and communists

In the meantime, the communists had created 15 rural bases in central China, and they established a soviet government, the Jiangxi Soviet, on Nov. 7, 1931. Within the soviet regions, the communist leadership expropriated and redistributed land and in other ways enlisted the support of the poorer classes. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria and an ancillary localized war around Shanghai in 1932 distracted the Nationalists and gave the communists a brief opportunity to expand and consolidate. But the Nationalists in late 1934 forced the communist armies to abandon their bases and retreat. Most of the later communist leaders—including Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Lin Biao—marched and fought their way across western China in what became known as the Long March. By mid-1936 the remnants of several Red armies had gathered in an impoverished area in northern Shaanxi, with headquarters located in the town of Yan’an, which lent its name to the subsequent period (1936–45) of CCP development.

During the Long March, Mao Zedong rose to preeminence in the CCP leadership. In the early 1930s he had engaged in bitter power struggles with other party leaders and actually had found himself in a fairly weak position at the start of the Long March campaigns, but in January 1935 a rump session of the CCP Political Bureau (Politburo) confirmed Mao in the newly created post of chairman. It was also during the Long March that the CCP began to develop a new political strategy—a united front against Japan. It was first conceived as an alliance of patriotic forces against Japan and the Nationalist government, but, as Japan’s pressure on China and the pressure of the Nationalist armies against the weakened Red armies increased, the communist leaders began to call for a united front of all Chinese against Japan alone. Virtually all classes and various local regimes supported this, and the communists moderated their revolutionary program and terminated class warfare in their zone of control.

Chiang was determined, however, to press on with his extermination campaign. He ordered the Manchurian army under Zhang Xueliang, now based in Xi’an (Sian), and the Northwestern army under Yang Hucheng (Yang Hu-ch’eng) to attack the communist forces in northern Shaanxi. Many officers in those armies sympathized with the communist slogan “Chinese don’t fight Chinese”; they preferred to fight Japan, a sentiment particularly strong in the homeless Manchurian army. Zhang Xueliang was conducting secret negotiations with the communists and had suspended the civil war. In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek flew to Xi’an to order Zhang and Yang to renew the anticommunist campaign. Under pressure from subordinates, Zhang detained Chiang on the morning of December 12 (this became known as the Sian Incident).