AT TEN PAST MIDNIGHT on 9 August 1945, three days after America dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, over 1.5 million Soviet and Mongolian troops swept into China along a huge front stretching more than 4,600 km, from the shores of the Pacific to the province of Chahar — far wider than the European front from the Baltic to the Adriatic. In April, Mao had ordered those of his troops who were near the Russian points of entry to be ready to “fight in coordination with the Soviet Union.” As soon as the Russo-Mongolian army entered China, Mao went to work around the clock dispatching troops to link up with them and seize the territory they rolled over. He moved his office to an auditorium at Date Garden, where he received a stream of military commanders, drafting telegrams on a Ping-Pong table he used as a desk, pausing only to wolf down food.
Under the Yalta agreements, before entering China, Russia was supposed to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, but it stormed in anyway without one. A week after the Russians invaded, with their army driving hundreds of kilometers into China, Chiang’s foreign minister reluctantly put his signature on a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, which formally severed Outer Mongolia from China. Chiang compromised in return for the Russians recognizing him as the sole legitimate government of China and promising to hand back all the territory they occupied to him and only to him.
In spite of his promise, Stalin found myriad ways to assist Mao. His first ploy was to refuse to commit to a timetable for withdrawal. He made a verbal promise to withdraw his troops within three months, but refused to incorporate this in the agreement; and it was attached only as a non-binding “minute.” In fact, Stalin was to stay much longer than three months, and was to use the period of occupation to thwart Chiang and secretly transfer territory and assets to Mao.
Japan surrendered on 15 August. The occasion was greeted in China with firecrackers and street parties, tears and toasts, drums and gongs. Most of China had been at war for eight years, and some regions for fourteen years. During that time at least one-third of the population had been occupied by the Japanese. Tens of millions of Chinese had died, untold millions had been crippled, and more than 95 million people — the largest number in history — had been made refugees. People yearned for peace.
What they got instead was an all-engulfing nationwide civil war, which broke out in earnest at once. In this, Stalin was right behind Mao; in fact, the Russians did not stop their drive south when Japan surrendered, but pressed on for several weeks afterwards. The area Russian troops moved into in northern China was larger than the entire territory they occupied in Eastern Europe. Russian paratroopers landed as far west as Baotou, the railhead due north of Mao’s base, some 750 km west of the Manchurian border. By the end of August, with Russian help, the CCP had occupied much of Chahar and Jehol provinces, including their capitals, Zhangjiakou and Chengde, both only some 150 km from Peking, to the northwest and northeast respectively. For a while Mao planned to move his capital to Kalgan, and camel trains carrying documents and luggage set off thither from Yenan.
The key prize was Manchuria, which contained China’s best deposits of coal, iron and gold, giant forests — and 70 percent of its heavy industry. Manchuria was bordered on three sides by Soviet-controlled territory — Siberia, Mongolia and North Korea. The border with Siberia alone was over two thousand kilometers long. “If we have Manchuria,” Mao had told his Party, “our victory will be guaranteed.”
Neither the Communists nor the Nationalists had armies in the region, which had been occupied by the Japanese, efficiently and ruthlessly, for fourteen years. But Red guerrillas were far closer than Chiang’s troops. The Russians immediately opened up Japanese arms depots to these Reds, including the biggest arsenal, in Shenyang, which alone contained about “100,000 guns, thousands of artillery pieces, and large quantities of ammunition, textiles and food,” according to a secret CCP circular. Only a few months earlier, the Communist 8th Route Army had had only 154 pieces of heavy artillery.
