This acknowledgement of “mistakes” was kept strictly within the Party. The public knew nothing about it, as the Party remained a secret organization. There was no apology to the public. Mao’s calculation was that he did not need to placate the common people, because they did not count. This went for both the Red-held areas and the Nationalist-held areas.
Although people in the White areas knew quite a lot about the brutality in the land reform, not least through the hundreds of thousands who escaped, they often attributed it to passing excesses by the oppressed. In any case, they had no way of doing anything to stop Mao’s advance, and having no great affection for the existing regime, often willed themselves to give Mao the benefit of the doubt.
Nationalist captain Hsu Chen had seen some terrors, which had made him strongly anti-Communist. In early 1948, when he came home to Ningbo, near Shanghai, he found that people did not want to listen to what he had to say, and saw him as a pain:
[M]any relatives and friends came to see me … I talked to every visitor, till my tongue dried up and my lips cracked … I told them about the heartless and bestial deeds of the Communist bandits … But I was unable to wake them up from their dreams, but rather aroused their aversion … I realized that most of them thought as follows:
“These words are Nationalist propaganda. How can you believe them all?”
“In a violent war like this, these are only transitional means …”
“We’ve been through Japanese occupation, and survived. You can’t say the Communists are worse than the Japanese.”
These views could be said to represent the way of thinking in the middle and lower echelons of society … People always have to learn from their own experience …
People were in denial — and helpless against Mao’s juggernaut. This fatalism was buttressed by disillusion with the Nationalists, who also committed atrocities, often against groups more visible to urban dwellers, and in a milieu far more open than under Mao — with public opinion, a much freer press, and where people could talk, gossip and complain. The Nationalists openly arrested large numbers of students and intellectuals, many of whom were tortured, and some killed. A Nationalist student wrote in April 1948 to the famous pro-Chiang intellectual leader, Hu Shih: “The government mustn’t be so stupid, and treat all students as Communists.” Four months later, he wrote again saying: “Now they are being slaughtered in great numbers.” Although Nationalist killings were a drop in the ocean compared with Mao’s, they raised strong feelings, and some even thought that the Reds were the lesser of two evils.
But however averse people were to the Nationalists, only a small number of radicals embraced communism. As late as January 1949, when the Reds were clearly on the verge of total victory, Mao told Stalin’s envoy Anastas Mikoyan that even among workers in Shanghai, who should have been the Communists’ core constituency, the Nationalists were much stronger than the Reds. Even right at the end, in Canton, a hotbed of radicals in the 1920s, the Russian consul noted that there was “practically no Communist underground … Therefore people did not go out to welcome the arrival” of the Communist army. In central China, Lin Biao told the Russians in January 1950: “the population is not evincing great joy at the change of power.” There was not a single uprising, urban or rural, in the CCP’s favor in the whole of China — unlike in Russia, Vietnam or Cuba during their revolutions. There were defections by Nationalist troops (as opposed to surrender on the battlefield), but these were not mutinies by the rank-and-file, but by top commanders, mostly prearranged “moles,” who brought their troops with them.
ON 20 APRIL 1949 a Communist army of 1.2 million men began pouring across the Yangtze. On the 23rd it took Chiang’s capital, Nanjing, in practice ending twenty-two years of Nationalist rule over the Mainland. On that day, Chiang flew to his ancestral home, Xikou. Knowing that this would probably be his last visit, he spent much of the time kneeling by his mother’s tomb, praying in tears. (Soon afterwards the victorious Mao issued an order to protect the tomb, Chiang’s family house and clan temple.) Then a ship carried Chiang away to Shanghai, and eventually he crossed the strait to the island of Taiwan.
A few months later, Mao asked Stalin for Soviet-crewed planes and submarines to help take Taiwan in 1950 or “even earlier,” telling Stalin that the CCP had a large number of well-placed moles who had “fled” there with Chiang. Stalin, however, was not prepared to risk a direct confrontation with America in such a high-visibility, high-tension area, and Mao had to shelve his plan, allowing Chiang to turn Taiwan into an island stronghold.
