Chiang consistently let personal feelings dictate his political and military actions. He lost China to a man who had none of his weak spots.
This was partly on account of his close friendship with a man called Hu Kung-mien, who at the time was commonly assumed to be a secret Communist, and who has now been acknowledged by Peking as an agent. During the war against Japan, when Hu Tsung-nan was stationed south of Yenan, he made this man his representative to Mao.
Mao’s radios had been maintaining regular communication with Communist agents in Hu’s army, “so their action was entirely under our control,” one of Mao’s radio men told us, adding that “some of the identities of the underground are not disclosed even today” (1999).
MAO’S MOST FORMIDABLE weapon was pitilessness. In 1948, when he moved on Changchun, in Manchuria, and a direct assault failed to take it, an order was given to starve it into surrender. The actual words used on 30 May by Mao’s commander on the spot, Lin Biao, were: “Turn Changchun into a city of death.”
The defending commander, General Cheng Tung-kuo, was a hero of the war against Japan, and refused to capitulate. As there was only enough food to see the 500,000 civilians through until the end of July, he tried to evacuate civilians.
Lin Biao’s response, endorsed by Mao, was: “Strictly ban civilians from leaving the city.” The Communists let people go who had arms or ammunition, so as to encourage Nationalist soldiers to defect, but specifically blocked civilians. Mao’s calculation was that General Cheng was “a nice sort of guy,” as he described him to Lin Biao, and could be pressured into surrendering by massive civilian deaths. Though completely without pity himself, Mao knew how to manipulate it in others. As it happened, Cheng stuck it out to the end, although he was very torn.
Three months after the city was sealed off, Lin Biao reported to Mao:
The blockade … has produced remarkable results, and has caused grave famine in the city … The civilian inhabitants are mainly living on tree leaves and grass, and many have died of starvation …
“Our main policy has been to forbid exit,” Lin wrote.
On the front line, we have placed one sentry every 50 metres, plus wire and ditches, and blocked all the gaps … Those who got out, we persuaded [
This policy was so brutal that the troops balked at enforcing it. Lin told Mao:
The starving people knelt in front of our soldiers en masse, begging to be allowed to go. Some put their babies down in front of the troops and turned back themselves, some hanged themselves in the sentry posts. The sentries could not bear the sight of the misery. Some knelt with the starving people and wept with them … others secretly released refugees. After we corrected this, we discovered another tendency. Soldiers beat up, abused and tied up refugees [to push them back] and went as far as opening fire on refugees, causing deaths.
Even the hard-hearted Lin recommended letting the refugees go. There was no reply from Mao. Lin, familiar with Mao’s tactic of veto by silence, then took it upon himself to issue an order on 11 September: “Release Changchun refugees … at once.” But the order was not carried out, which can only mean that Mao rescinded it. The only people allowed to leave were those with something useful to the Reds, which usually meant they were relatively rich. One survivor remembered that Communist soldiers “walked up and down announcing: ‘Anyone who has a gun, ammunition, a camera — hand it over and we’ll fill out a pass for you to leave.’ ” Nationalist deserters and their families were given preferential treatment. This survivor’s family got out on 16 September, thanks to the fact that her husband was a doctor, and useful to the Reds.
After mid-September, Changchun’s mayor recorded a massive rise in deaths, when tree leaves, the last food, were falling. By the end of the five-month siege the civilian population had dropped from half a million to 170,000. The death toll was higher than the highest estimate for the Japanese massacre at Nanjing in 1937.
A Red veteran in the besieging army described how he and his comrades felt:
When we heard outside the city that so many people had died of hunger, we weren’t too shocked. We had been in and out of piles of corpses, and our hearts had been hardened. We were blasé. But when we entered the city and saw what it was like, we were devastated. Many of us wept. A lot of us said: We’re supposed to be fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are the rich? Which of them are Nationalists? Aren’t they all poor people?
