DURING THE WHOLE of the Manchuria campaign, Mao never went there. He was at his new HQ at Xibaipo, 240 km southwest of Peking. After Manchuria fell in early November 1948, he ordered the army there under Lin Biao to come south. This army now stood at upwards of 1.3 million strong, and its new mission was to tackle the 600,000-man Nationalist army in northern China led by Fu Tso-yi, a celebrated general who had fought China’s first winning battle against Japanese puppets in 1936. The encounter between Lin and Fu, known as the Peking — Tianjin Campaign, was the second of the three key campaigns that decided the civil war.
Unlike Wei, General Fu was not a secret Communist. But he was surrounded by people who were, not least his own daughter, who was assigned by the Party to stay with her father in this period and report his every move. Chiang had some idea about this situation, but took no action to remedy it.
By November, even before Lin was on his way south from Manchuria, Fu had made up his mind to surrender, without telling Chiang. He had lost faith in Chiang’s regime, and decided to try to save the area under him from pointless devastation — not least Peking itself, the nation’s cultural capital, where his HQ was located. He did not do this out of any illusions about Communist rule, which, he said publicly at the time, would bring “cruelty … terror and tyranny,” and the decision to surrender caused him great anguish. He began to fall to pieces, and was seen slapping his own face, and contemplating suicide.
Chiang knew what was happening to Fu. On 12 December he wrote in his diary that Fu was “deeply depressed … and seems to be going insane.” But he still refused to sack him, and when Fu offered to resign, Chiang turned him down with a maudlin “10,000 Nos.”
Mao kept close tabs on Fu’s mental condition through Fu’s daughter, and he decided he could extract more from the situation than just a surrender. He could establish himself in the public eye as a military genius who had beaten Fu, the renowned war hero. So, when Fu sued for surrender, Mao strung Fu’s envoys along for two months, not accepting the surrender but not saying “No” either, while all the time keeping up attacks on Fu’s army. By now Fu was quite unfit to command. One officer recalled how during one key battle, when asked for instructions, “Fu dithered and faltered and then said listlessly: ‘Play it by ear.’ At that moment, I thought, we are finished …” Predictably, Mao’s army took city after city, including Tianjin, the third largest in China, which fell on 15 January 1949. Only when he had created an image of himself as a military giant-killer did Mao accept Fu’s standing offer to surrender Peking. Mao was thus able to say that Fu had opted for peace only after being thoroughly defeated on the battlefield — by Mao himself. The truth is that the whole campaign, which cost tens of thousands of lives, did not have to be fought at all. A broken Fu collaborated with Mao until his death on the Mainland in 1974.
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the sham Peking — Tianjin Campaign, a third huge, and more genuine, campaign was being fought in the heartland of China to the north of Chiang’s capital, Nanjing. Known as the Huai — Hai Campaign, this involved well over one million men, and lasted from November 1948 to January 1949. The chief commander on the Nationalist side here was not a Communist agent, or a mental wreck. But just below him there were strategically placed Red sleepers, including two generals who had been secret Party members for ten and twenty years respectively, who opened up the gateway to this battleground within forty-eight hours of the campaign starting.
The major saboteurs were two other men in Chiang’s own HQ called Liu Fei and Kuo Ju-kui, who were intimately involved in drawing up the battle plans for the campaign. They placed the Nationalists on the defensive in every move by deliberately making wrong deployments and recommendations, while passing the plans to the Communists.
Chiang was particularly dependent on Kuo, to whom he spoke on the phone almost every day, and whose ruinous advice he heeded. Kuo actually fell under suspicion at this time from field commanders, and was even denounced as a spy by no less a person than Chiang’s adopted son, Weigo. But the Generalissimo did nothing until it was too late, and even then he merely transferred Kuo to Sichuan — on the recommendation of the other key mole, Liu Fei. In Sichuan, Kuo would later surrender an entire army.
