340. Chairman Mao: World War II, Japanese Invasion, & Massacre in Nanjing (Ep 3)

13:07Rana Mitter:No. First of all, of course, they're heavily influenced and they're providing finance and advice. And, you know, there aren't that many other communist mentors to turn to in the world at this point. But also the Soviets were never really able to get to grips with the reality that on a day to day basis, it was the Chinese communists, you know, in this very hardscrabble part of China who had to make decisions on the hoof day by day. And getting some crackly message from Moscow wouldn't really cut it when it came to making those sorts of decisions. So there was autonomy, too, in many decisions for the Chinese communists.

13:37Rana Mitter:But there was no doubt that Moscow's influence was real, continued and significant. And yes, being relatively close to the Soviet border, not bang next door, but not too far away, was certainly important in that way.

13:49William:And, Rana, you make the point that things were very hierarchical, that not only were the old guard and the senior members of the party getting access to younger women and so on, but they're also getting sort of treats, that they've got heating and all sorts of other things that the ordinary rank and file simply do not get access to. Oh, yeah.

14:16Rana Mitter:No, it's very, very regulated. So just take one example, meals. You mentioned heating. Let's take meals. Your meal assessments, in other words, your food rations, would be very much assigned on the basis, first of all, seniority. And they also kept really close tabs on who was being served what. So you couldn't save a bit of your food and give it to someone else. It had to be for you. And if you didn't have it, it went back. But you couldn't sort of pass it on to other members of the family. There were allowances made, pregnant women, for instance, such as those who were there.

14:43Anita:Well, that's nice of him. So kind.

14:47Rana Mitter:Yeah, well, I think we could at some point address the question of how far the Chinese Communist Revolution was a feminist revolution. I would just say at this moment, one of China's greatest feminist writers of the 20th century, Ding Ling, who we mentioned briefly in a previous episode. But yes, you know, she wrote very explicitly about, you know, the female sexual feelings in a way that nobody had really done in that way before. By the 19th, by this period, she's in Yan 'an. She's absolutely there. She has a hugely harrowing revolutionary life in which her husband, Hu Yipin, is a communist also, who is shot by the nationalists.

15:18Rana Mitter:She is imprisoned but not shot, escapes, makes her way to Yan 'an. So she's made many sacrifices. And yet by 1943, it's a bit ahead of where we're going, she's really complaining to Mao that actually the Chinese revolution is not taking account of feminist concerns. So that is a running thread, you know, from the moment they arrive in 1935.

15:36Anita:So during all this time, what is Chiang Kai-shek doing, the nationalist leader that we talked about? I mean, you know, we last left him obsessed with destroying the communists. I mean, even taking his eye off the Japanese thread and just being consumed with, we must smash the communists. So what is he doing? Sure.

15:56Rana Mitter:Well, let me let me come a little bit to Chiang Kai-shek's defence at this moment. Not a sentence I ever thought I'd hear myself saying. First of all, just to be clear, because it'll come up, Chiang Kai-shek was definitely not ignoring the Japanese threat. What he was trying to work out was how far, a bit like Neville Chamberlain in Britain, how far do you go for rearmament discreetly or not so discreetly while appeasing, knowing that there will be a conflict at some point, but maybe not right now. And, you know, the appeasement debate on the in the Western world goes on even today. There's a similar one in China.

16:24Rana Mitter:Just to give one example, he was already planning by this. You're asking what Chiang Kai-shek's doing. On the Japanese front, he's already planning for something that will happen shortly afterwards, which is the moving of China's capital from Nanjing to the interior at Chongqing, just in case there's a Japanese invasion which takes the eastern seaboard. And, you know, in due course there, in fact, was. So that preparation turned out to be very, very useful. But you're not wrong. He was absolutely still obsessed with the communists being, you know, eliminated. As I said before, if you run a campaign against someone called an extermination campaign, it's pretty clear what your worldview is on this sort of thing.

17:01Rana Mitter:So it was definitely a pause, but by no means a halt in terms of what he called the disease of the heart. He said the Japanese are a disease of the skin. The communists are a disease of the heart. And, you know, that meant that it was much more fundamental. What else is he doing? Also in 1934-35, at the time of the Long March, Chiang Kai-shek launches an alternative ideological movement that's supposed to push back against communism. It's called the New Life Movement, Xinjiang. If it has a slightly sort of Christian phrasing to it, that's not accidental.

17:30William:He was married to a Methodist. Methodist.

17:33Rana Mitter:He was a Methodist himself. He basically turned to him as a Confucian Methodist. If you read his diaries, he talks about Christ and Jesus and the Psalms all the time. It's absolutely genuine. it um anyway so yes there is definitely a christian tinge to what he's uh he's doing but basically this is a um a new life campaign in which you're supposed to basically sort of be the chinese people are supposed to learn discipline you know it's got some fascist influences too you're supposed to stand up straight uh one of my favorite um precepts within it is uh saying uh because you only you only give people a hard time about stuff that you know they're going to do so one of the precepts the new life movement is do not urinate other than in a toilet which suggests that there's There's a great deal of worry about where other than toilets this is actually going on.

18:17Anita:You've just reminded me of the most hilarious sign I've ever seen in my life, which was in India. I think it was, I won't say where it was, but it was, please do not defecate on the road. And I just thought, if anyone can read that, they're probably not doing that. Please do not defecate on the road. Anyway, so I mean, you did your sort of, may I say, mealy mouthed defense of Jankoshek. But you tried, which is great. But actually, 1937 shows that he has taken his eye off the ball and whatever the strategy was, because Japan is ready to launch its full scale invasion of China by 1937. Now, this is really your, I mean, you've shown the world a lot about this.

18:58Anita:How did this war begin?

19:00Rana Mitter:So I think the way to understand the outbreak of war between China and Japan, and let's be clear, this is the beginning of World War II. Yeah. Benighted souls may say that World War II began in Poland in September 1939, or even if you're an American of a certain sort, Pearl Harbor, 1941. Now, it begins on the 7th of July, 1937, just outside Beijing.

19:20William:There's that rather good Second World War in colour that also takes this view and begins in 1937 with this.

19:27Rana Mitter:I'd also recommend available on YouTube and other streaming services, China's Forgotten War, which is exactly about this particular period.

19:35William:Who did China's Forgotten War, Rana Bitter? Modesty forbids.

19:40Anita:He looked a lot like you, Rana.

19:41Rana Mitter:Well, you know, he was younger then, I think, in those days. But the way to understand it, I think, as a comparison with Europe, which a lot of listeners may be perhaps more familiar with, is not to think of it actually like what we think of as traditional start of World War II in Poland, i.e. a provocation by Nazi Germany, which basically triggers off a war that the British, the French, the Germans kind of know is coming. This is more like World War I, in that if the Archduke hadn't been shot, if he'd taken another turning in Sarajevo that day, maybe something would have set it off, but it wouldn't have been the Archduke being shot.

20:16Rana Mitter:But it was the Archduke being shot. So the equivalent of the Archduke, he also involves shooting, but weirdly enough shooting, which nobody gets killed, which is perhaps one of the tragic things. So basically, Japanese troops who are stationed under treaty in large parts of North China, and Japanese troops are drilling in this place called Wanping, a little village, which is right next to a bridge which was recorded actually in the travels of Marco Polo.

20:40William:So he talks very positively about this bridge.

20:43Rana Mitter:Yes. Well, of course, it wasn't covered in Japanese soldiers at the time that he saw it in the 14th century. So anyway, so these exercises are going on and obviously there are local Chinese troops who are not so happy about Japanese drilling. So they're drilling along. And anyway, something happens on the night of 7th of July and two of the Japanese soldiers disappear. and the Japanese commander accuses the Chinese of having kidnapped them, shot them, murdered them, whatever it might be, and escalates. Now, I don't want to make this entire episode of Empire entirely focused on urination, but it turns out that, at least in one telling, these two Japanese soldiers were not kidnapped or murdered.

21:20Rana Mitter:They popped off for a pee and they realized they'd missed roll call and they were kind of skulking because they couldn't go back and they were going to get punished by their commandant. But by the time they managed to sneak back, presumably the next morning into barracks, having emptied their bladders.

21:35William:The Second World War had broken out.

21:36Rana Mitter:Yeah, the Second World War had broken out. So this is the, how can I put it, urinaceous beginning of global conflict. The thing is, by that stage, and this is again the Sarajevo point, what was almost a trivial incident between two sets of garrison troops had then escalated up into, well, actually, this is not just about these local troops. This is about China and Japan. Japan and the government in Japan uses this as an opportunity never let a crisis go to waste to say well you're oppressing our soldiers so we need to have control of the entire railway junction in northern China which is based near Beijing Chiang Kai-shek is then in his cabinet thinking right what do we do and he holds this cabinet meeting he considers at some length what to do should we go now do we appease a bit more and finally says no this is the moment for decide and we're going to fight back and that's how the war between China and Japan begins in July 1937, which becomes, although they didn't know it then, the beginning of the Second World War.

22:33William:Rana, what is the Japanese narrative? They're just expanding an empire, or do they have some sort of quasi-historical claim on sort of seizing China? What would they have done to justify their aggression in Nanjing at this point?

22:47Rana Mitter:Oh, they've got a huge great case that they'd make. Essentially, I would summarize in one sentence the kind of clash that leads to this over the previous you know 50 60 years as being the clash of two great ideological forces on the rise chinese nationalism which we talked about previously talking about the may 4th movement in the earlier episode and japanese imperialism these are the two forces that are essentially you know incompatible with each other ultimately because china particularly its elites its political class wants to create a sovereign state which is no longer subject to being pushed around by other countries ever since it has been since the opium wars of the 1830s.

23:26Rana Mitter:Japan, in return, wants to sit at the top table of diplomatic interaction. It looks at Britain with the biggest empire in the world. This is the 1930s.

23:36William:Rising ever since the Russo-Japanese War in 1895?

23:41Rana Mitter:Yeah, but if only I had two kind of long-standing experts in the British Empire here. But am I right in thinking that the 1930s is pretty much a peak period for the amount of territory the Brits had?

23:50William:1921, some people say, is the year that it reaches its.

23:54Rana Mitter:OK, but 1935, it's still pretty, you know, 1931 is still pretty good going. 1937 is pretty good going. And then, you know, the French have got a lot of stuff going. Germans lost theirs in 1914. But, you know, so in answer to your question, what do they say? They say, look, why is it a problem that we want as a newly emergent, industrialising, rich, strong power to do all the things that the British and the French were doing 50 years ago and do them now? we too want to have our own autarkic imperial bloc we too believe we have a civilizing mission to take backward people and turn them into forward people whatever the alternative would be we believe that by and much of the rhetoric used towards china exactly this time was you don't understand how lucky you are to have us to be mentors to you and if we have to basically use violence and coercion to bring you forward into the modern world that's what we're going to do.

24:44Rana Mitter:It's very much a typical combination of a modernizing impulse, industrialized capitalism basically providing the need to go and seize resources, and a very strong ideological element that says, look, look at the example we've shown you. Even you admire us. You, the Chinese, admire us, the Japanese. So why won't you let us basically lead you forward to where you need to be? And the Chinese answer, because we want to do it ourselves.

25:10Anita:Because we are Chinese. Look, it's a good place to take a break because, you know, what will happen is that the Japanese forces will sweep south, whatever the Chinese are saying. We are going to talk after the break about something that is notorious in the annals of history, something known as the Rape of Nanjing. Join us then.

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26:40Anita:Welcome back. So Rana, the Rape of Nanjing is just a horrific chapter in the history of China. Can you, and I know some people are going to find this very disturbing, but tell us what happens and how this begins.

26:57Rana Mitter:I will, but I should actually warn by saying that this is genuine, very harrowing. So, you know, be aware that for the next minute or so, you know, it is the detail is necessary, but it is also deeply disturbing. This was essentially the unprovoked murder and also violent rape and sexual assault of unarmed civilians in the Chinese capital of Nanjing, which fell in December 1937. it was basically the capital city was undefended because Nanjing which as remember of course was the capital of China under the nationalist government was not defensible in the face of the Japanese assault on eastern China and therefore in careful planning which Chiang Kai-shek and his government had done some time before the government was moved first well the military headquarters moved first inland to Wuhan and then there was a kind of political capital and then ultimately military headquarters to Chongqing in the southwest of China, where it remained until 1946.

28:01Rana Mitter:But Nanjing was obviously still there as a city. Changgai-shek actually gave his commanding general there, Tang Shengzhi, orders that he should defend Nanjing to the death. Tang Shengzhi did not do this. He basically slipped out onto the river of the Yangtze in a boat the night before the Japanese arrived and disappeared. He reappeared elsewhere later on, but he was not around to defend the city.

28:25William:Were the nationalists in any position to resist the Japanese? And was it a completely unequal struggle or could they have done more than they did?

28:34Rana Mitter:I think in Nanjing they really could not have done. The point of Chiang Kai-shek's command was that they should make a brave stand to signal to the rest of the world that China would resist. Easy for him to say in that sense because he'd already legged it to Wuhan, I guess, at that point. I think it's also fair to say that very few people who were looking at it objectively could have doubted China's determination by that stage, because although we passed over it quickly and I won't go into details, there had been a three, four month battle for the control of Shanghai upriver from Nanjing between August and November of 1937, in which hundreds of thousands of the top trained Chinese soldiers, you know, German trained, were killed, you know, in trenches.

29:17Rana Mitter:They fought extremely hard, extremely well. There's actually a pretty good Chinese film called The 800 about one of the last stands made by one of those groups of soldiers in Shanghai. So I think Chiang probably had the hope that just as in Shanghai there'd been a last stand before the necessary retreat, the same thing might happen in Nanjing. But Nanjing was not strategically important in the way that Shanghai was, the major port. It was politically important and therefore holding it had a rather different implication. It was the capital. It was the capital.

29:47Anita:Yeah, but I mean, just I mean, I don't want to skirt over what happened in Nanjing. I think we sort of owe it to particularly the women who suffered, because that happens too often in history. And we're talking about the rape, the horrific sexual degradation of around, some people say 20 ,000 women. And this, I mean, it's fair to say this still haunts Sino-Japanese relations to this day, doesn't it? The way that the women were treated. Yes, it does.

30:13Rana Mitter:The historical memory of this particular atrocity is still something that there's never been agreed ground between China and Japan about it. I think no observer in good faith denies that horrific atrocity took place in the undefended city of Nanjing. the murder of many, many civilians, male and female, the rape of many women during that time. We're talking about thousands, tens of thousands, very large numbers. Nobody was keeping statistics at the time for obvious reasons. One of the reasons, first of all, that we have objective evidence, which we've taken seriously, and people can find it actually quite easily through online archives and so forth, is that, I hesitate to use the word fortunately about anything to do with this but perhaps in big quote marks, fortunately there were third party observers there, particularly American missionaries, educators, and they kept day-to-day diaries.

31:04Rana Mitter:A woman called Minnie Votrin who was a teacher at the Jinling College, which is now part of Nanjing University, kept meticulous and horrific records of young women, girls, in some cases just being dragged away and raped, Japanese soldiers turning up at the door demanding to have young women provided provided to them, exactly. And there is no reason, no reason whatsoever, why someone like Mini Votrin would decide to write this as fiction. And even if she had, which she did not, we have records of lots of other people. John McGee, a missionary, the most extraordinary one, one who's perhaps become famous because of the irony in his own life, is a man called John Rabbe, who was the head of the Siemens, the Siemens Electronics Company, the German Electronics Company in Nanjing, who was actually a member of the Nazi Party, which of course professionally was something people did in Germany at that point.

31:53Rana Mitter:He, I mean, it seems almost unbelievable. He was so outraged by what he saw and he kept records of it that he wrote to Hitler to get him to contact the Japanese to stop it. He said, you know, Fuhrer, you must stop them. Obviously Hitler wasn't going to do anything about it. But all of these witnesses stand as, you know, bear witness to the absolute horror that took place at that time. and I would say that there's you know one of the best and most in some ways kind of sophisticated and subtle cinematic portrayals of this is a great film by the Chinese director Lu Tran which is called in Chinese it's called Nanjing Nanjing but it's translated in English in the title City of Life and Death I think you get it on streaming it's done in black and white and it's done with brilliant devastating subtlety so much so that it was nearly banned in China films like that don't go everywhere because they're not propaganda but it gives some idea of you know how this kind of atrocity could have come about.

32:46Rana Mitter:And you asked about the Japanese apologies. It's a really complex question. It's not our subject because we're still going to say it to Mao. We'll get back to that. But one thing I would say is worth noting. Amongst the groups of people who were first responsible for bringing the horrors of the rape of Nanjing to public attention in Japan were left-wing Japanese journalists in the 1970s. People like Honda Katsuiti of the Asahi Shunwin, one of the great Japanese newspapers, who went to mainland China in the early 70s, when it still wasn't very easy to do that, interviewed people there and brought back the stories and put them in the Japanese newspapers.

33:21Rana Mitter:So the idea that this, you know, nobody was willing to acknowledge or talk about it really isn't the case. But there is no doubt that the political and historical controversy, which has largely to do about, you know, political identity, you know, what does it mean to be Japanese, Chinese, you know, would we ever do this sort of thing still roils the relationship between the two countries even today.

33:41William:So you've got 200 million Chinese living now under Japanese occupation in very horrific circumstances. Where is Mao in the middle of all this? And what's he got to do with the resistance to the Japanese?

33:53Rana Mitter:That's right. So, you know, the rape of Nanking, the labor of Nanjing, the Nanjing massacre, six weeks of horror, but it ends in early January 1938. And then Nanjing as a city under occupation, which remains until 1945. Much of eastern China is under Japanese occupation, including many of the great cities of its cultural eastern heartland, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, all under Japanese occupation. And China is essentially divided into three at this point, not three neat parts. They're not like Caesar dividing all into three, but three broad zones of control with very fuzzy lines between them. Broadly in the east, it's occupied by the Japanese, And in the end, they don't get to advance much further beyond the very broad and rich area of the eastern seaboard.

34:36Rana Mitter:In the southwest and some other areas, you have the area that is controlled by the nationalists, the Chiang Kai-shek government, who moved their capital to Chongqing and defended actually in the end until 1945. And then in various parts of the country, including the northwest in Yan 'an, the communists are in charge. And that, of course, is where Mao is at this point. So he's part of that Long March, which ends up in northwest China. And I mentioned before that Yan 'an, the city, small town where they're based, is chosen in part because it's defensible against a possible nationalist assault. Now, a nationalist assault becomes much less of a worry in 1937, because essentially, after a whole bunch of negotiations, good faith, bad faith, skullduggery, the Second United Front is formed, in which the nationalists and communists, with the strong encouragement, or orders really, of Stalin and the Soviets, agree to bury the hatchet between each other for a while to concentrate on fighting the Japanese.

35:33Rana Mitter:So at that point, the people in Yan 'an, Mao and the communists are not so worried about being attacked by the nationalists, But they are, of course, worried about being attacked by the Japanese. And again, Yan 'an is also defensible against Japan, as it was against the nationalists.

35:46Anita:I mean, the thing is, this is a really political hot potato with historians about, you know, what did Mao and the communists do? And some even putting sort of percentage numbers on what Mao was trying to do, you know, how much was he putting into expanding his influence? How much was he doing to fight the nationalists? How much was he doing to actually resist the Japanese and protect the people? I mean, what is your view on this?

36:11Rana Mitter:I think the view that either the communists did absolutely nothing, just sort of lurk behind the front lines, or the view that you get in the People's Republic today, which is really the communists were almost entirely in charge of the whole resistance effort. Both of these take it too far. Instead, what we need to look at is what the communists were actually doing. Now, first of all, in defense of the idea that the nationalists are bearing the brunt of the battles, I think that it's entirely defensible. When we talk about battles in the kind of sense in which we understand them in World War II in China, Taiizhuang, Shanghai, Changsha, Hengyang, these are not names unnecessarily well known in the West, but they're big set-piece battles.

36:57Rana Mitter:Those are all fought by the Nationalists. The only one that is a major battle significantly led by the Communists, by Peng Ngohui, one of the great generals, is the 1940-100 Regiments Campaign. But what the Communists do is to develop a form of warfare that becomes so influential that it's used by guerrilla movements throughout the whole Cold War. And that's guerrilla warfare. They don't invent it. The Nationalists have their own form of guerrilla warfare, too. but it is the case that going out into the countryside and harassing the enemy so that they're off balance the whole time is something the communists are very very good at and they talk about you know when the enemy advances we retreat when the enemy retreats we attack you know this is the idea that you have to keep them off balance the vietnamese the vietcong you know

37:42William:do this against the french and the americans but you avoid set-piece battles you avoid set-piece

37:47Rana Mitter:battles the you know the rhodesian bush war in africa so mao's advice at this time again he's still not the dominant leader. He's very important. He does a lot of military strategy, but there are other people involved as well. Peng Gehui, I've mentioned, who becomes very important after 1949. Zhu De and others are thinking about how they can best strategize. And this is perfectly reasonable. Why? First of all, because the parts of China where the communists are based are mostly rural. They have very, very rough terrain. Guerrilla warfare is the most sensible sort of way of harassing the enemy remember the term guerrilla which or guerrilla which is spanish comes to a peninsula war where again you have exactly that sort of idea that the best way to harass the uh napoleonic harrass the napoleonic armies is to is to use that kind of tactic uh as well and secondly all sides and this is true the nationalists with their set-piece battles and the communists with their guerrilla warfare know that neither side is going to win against the Japanese without the third factor, which is a big foreign power coming in to sort it out.

38:54Rana Mitter:It could be the Soviet Union. Even Chiang Kai-shek would have been happy with that in terms of defeating the Japanese. He'd live with that. Actually, it wasn't the Soviet Union. It turned out to be the United States. But without the US, you don't get that final decisive factor that makes the argument about set-piece battles versus guerrilla battles more moot.

39:12Anita:But Rana, bearing in mind that there is still this argument about how much the communists actually did, how much they engaged the Japanese and at what scale. And bearing in mind everything that you've said about guerrilla warfare, certainly the people seem to be thinking the Communist Party is a good thing because you see an explosion of party membership at this time. And I think it's just from 40 ,000 members in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945. So, I mean, And, you know, that's quite something. Although I'm guessing Chairman Mao, or soon to be Chairman Mao, Mao is not satisfied with that. I mean, he will want more and more influence.

39:52Anita:You know, total ideological conformity is what he would like.

39:55Rana Mitter:Yes, that's absolutely right, Anita. So basically, I think the tide turns in 1940, again, without going into huge detail, that's the moment at which, well, 1941, let's say, That's the moment, I think, at which effectively the second united front, the nationalists and the communists working together against the Japanese really begins to break down. Basically, there's something called the New Fourth Army incident where both sides accuse the other one of attacking each other. And, you know, it creates a huge kind of rift between the two sides. It's also the case that in Yan 'an, Mao and the other communists are now much more isolated from the rest of China, both from the nationalists and from the Japanese.

40:32Rana Mitter:And that becomes significant in terms of Mao's rise because many, many people over time were flocking to Yan 'an to sort of join the communist movement there. It's seen as a nationalist resistance movement against the Japanese. Many more people also are being sort of included in what the communists term their liberated areas. In other words, areas under their control. And there's a lot of things happening to try and embed that. There's new forms of local government, new councils set up, which have some communist members and non-communist members to try and bring in people who are not part of that particular movement.

41:07Rana Mitter:Mao writes a very influential essay called On New Democracy, published in 1940, in which he talks about the need to bring in people who aren't necessarily core to the communist movement. So the idea is both you boost party membership, but you also bring in other people who are inclined towards it to grow the size of the movement. But that isn't enough. Now, when you asked sort of the key question, we were asking it all through the podcast episodes, when does Mao become Mao? In other words, the kind of supreme leader who brooks no argument. I think this is the moment. And it comes during a set of political campaigns that are still remembered.

41:42Rana Mitter:Xi Jinping has name-checked them, and he's name-checked them positively. So it tells you something about how they're regarded. Zhengfeng, the rectification movements. Even that name has quite a sort of Stalinist feel to it. It's about ideological conformity. It's taking people who want to join the Communist Party and putting them through an education program that means that they will see the Communist Revolution in the right way, which means Mao's way. How is Mao in a position to do this? Well, first of all, a little bit earlier, he's managed to sort of purge, not violently, actually, in this case, but just in terms of political control, get rid of the other major faction led by a man named Wang Ming, who had been in Moscow in a way that, you know, There was some kudos attached to Wang Ming because he had actually seen the Soviet Union up close and Mao, of course, had never been overseas in his life.

42:32Rana Mitter:But essentially, Mao and his faction do manage to sideline Wang Ming and what became known as the returned Bolshevik students faction. So he's rising already at that point. But then he also does something. Again, this speaks to one of the reasons why Mao's an ideologue was and became so important and powerful. He wrote a lot. Mao was an autodidact. We talked about it in the first episode. He read a lot and he brought it together in some very, very creative ways in terms of creating that sort of ideological conformity. So basically, if you were going to be in the party at that point, you would go through a process in which you had to, you know, not quite memorize, but certainly know very, very closely 22 key texts.

43:14Rana Mitter:and all those 22 texts, 18, were by Mao. So that was an indication of whose thinking was on top and whose was not.

43:22Anita:It's just Orwell, you know, Big Brother, this is what Big Brother says, this is what you must learn, this is what you must parrot. I mean, it's exactly that.

43:30Rana Mitter:It's Orwell in another way because we now have a lot of records of what happens with party members who, you know, don't, I mean, I'm not talking here about kind of ideological deviance, I'm talking about people who maybe don't kind of get what's in the text. they get put into a sort of circle or at least this is one tactic they get put in a circle nobody touches them not necessarily at this point they don't get beaten up or hit but these people are surrounding them for hours and hours and hours you know you're wrong we need to help you i mean the cults work in this way um and you know people come out of them and they're saying that maybe the problem is that you're a spy for the japanese is that the issue have you been kind of suburban he's like no i haven't even seen a japanese person and he keeps going i remember there's one um letter from uh the wife of a very prominent communist official who actually writes in it's either a letter or a diary i almost wish i was a japanese spy so i could tell the party that i was and confess but i'm not uh you know this is really high pressure psyche psychological tactics so that high pressure psychological tactics the use of mao's writings as the kind of core canon of what's being learned and the sweet charming attentions of a man named Kangsheng, the Beria or Yezhov.

44:40Rana Mitter:He learned from the worst, I was going to say from the best, but actually it's from the worst.

44:43William:He's the kind of Beria of the Chinese.

44:46Rana Mitter:He'd been to Moscow, he'd learned directly from the KGB, actually in those days it was the Cheka, I guess, or the Ogpu, sorry, the Ogpu at that stage, he becomes the KGB later on and brings those terror tactics to Yan 'an. He literally, and, you know, the symbolism is extraordinary. Mao would ride around at times on a white horse. Kangsheng, dressed all in leathers, you know, think of that, rides around on a black horse. How about that? So, you know, there's a lot to basically, you know, shape people's thinking in the end at this time during rectification.

45:18William:So before we kind of close this period of the war, is it fair to say that the nationalists are doing basically all of the fighting of the Japanese defending the homeland while Mao is busy asserting personal control and crushing dissent?

45:34Anita:That's the row, isn't it, Rana? I mean, that's what people, I mean, you know. Yeah, there's still arguments.

45:40Rana Mitter:Well, the arguments amongst historians are not really about that. Because I think most people who actually look at the historical detail will say that the argument is about to what proportion should you attribute the military tactics of the nationalists, the guerrilla tactics of the communists, the importance I mentioned before of the American intervention, lend-lease, air cover. Just saying it was yes or no isn't really the way in which military historians, I think, analyze these questions. Without the very sustained nationalist war effort, certainly the first four or five years of the war, China would have collapsed and then it would have been a Japanese colony and the history of the world would be different.

46:22Rana Mitter:Communist guerrilla warfare was immensely effective in keeping the Japanese on the back foot in large parts of central China. They never really conquered those parts. And that was in large part because in those areas of communist guerrilla control. but neither the communists nor the nationalists could have outright won against japan without foreign military assistance i say there's two events that basically hasten the end of the war one is the atomic bombings the other of course is the final entry of the soviets into the war in asia after a short period you know may the war in europe is finally done hitler is dead you know Europe is finally liberated.

47:00Rana Mitter:And then Stalin, you know, ticks the box on his promise that he would turn to Asia once Europe had been completed. And he sends the troops, the tanks across the border into Manchuria. And that Soviet intervention, along with the atomic bombings, come together to create a crisis point for the Japanese empire, which, you know, has to ultimately surrender.

47:22Anita:And that Soviet intervention in Manchuria largely has the blessing of the Americans. I mean, we did this in the Yalta conference season that we did, that, you know, they were meeting behind closed doors, not even allowing Churchill in to hear this. But this was a quid pro quo. You help us when we need it. And what we'll do is we'll just turn a blind eye to our ally Chiang Kai-shek and all the things we promised him. And you can just take what you need. And they do. And that's what happens.

47:48Rana Mitter:Yeah, I think that's pretty much the case. I mean, Chiang Kai-shek also, of course, was not invited to any of the Potsdam and other meetings which involved the future of Asia being decided. You know, he was pretty cheesed off by the fact that he was excluded from the room. But nonetheless, the war ends and it ends in Asia much more suddenly than anyone would have realized. And suddenly we're in the post-war world for China and Mao, Jiang and others have to make their next move.

48:12William:So then in 1949, a couple of years later, the nationalist government begins to implode from within.

48:18Rana Mitter:Yes, essentially 1949 is the end game for the nationalist government on the mainland. In the years intervening 1945 to 1949, a lot had happened. There were attempts to try and negotiate a coalition government between the nationalists and the communists in which Mao, by now the undisputed leader of the party, goes to six weeks of negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek in the city of Chongqing. That was the last time they ever met, in fact, at that set of meetings. Even with the help of General George Marshall, the great American statesman and soldier who was sent in for a year in 1946 to try and sort out the dispute between the two, it didn't work out.

48:53Rana Mitter:And China descended into civil war by mid-1946. And essentially the tide turned fairly quickly against the nationalists. A combination of economic crisis, morale beginning to fall apart, and essentially just better military tactics in the end on the part of the communists who are ruthless. They get military assistance from the Soviets after a period. And they also manage a very kind of clever tactic of consolidating in the northeast in Manchuria and then striking into China across the Great Wall, into the northern part of the country. And then finally, as the nationalist armies begin to collapse at various points across the map, you get the final conquest of the south.

49:38Rana Mitter:And Mao, once again, is crucial to that. I just mentioned one campaign, 1947, the Da Bia Shan campaign, where he basically does a very daring thrust with troops into the center of China. If that had failed, actually, the communist war effort might have been put back, you know, on the back foot very, very significantly. But Mao was always a risk taker. And in this case, he decided I'll do this sort of very big, bold move, see if we can really steal a march on the nationalists. It worked. And that was one of the turning points on which the ultimate military victory of the communists rested.

50:11Anita:So the Nationalists are kind of smashed to pieces. What happens next is that in 1949, the Nationalists decide, right, we've got to get out of here. And you have Chiang Kai-shek going to pay his respects to his mother's tomb and then pegging it with the whole sort of senior cadre of the Nationalists. And half the National Museum. But also, well, I mean, you know, all these works of arts, the aviation, the aviation fleet.

50:36Rana Mitter:The gold. Don't forget the gold in the back of China.

50:38Anita:Yeah, 110 tons of gold. And they head, now this is important, they go to Taiwan with all of this booty and their freedom. Now, is that the point at which, you know, sort of Taiwan becomes this, as it's been described to me, this weeping sore in their Chinese psyche?

50:56Rana Mitter:The moment in which Taiwan becomes essentially a problem that is very, very hard to resolve leading up to the present day is probably not 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek leaves the mainland, but about a year or so later when the Korean War breaks out. Because up to that point, our sense is that the American government at the time, the administration of Harry Truman, was so disillusioned, angry with the nationalists that if Mao had tried to conquer Taiwan, I don't know that they would have stepped in actually to save Chiang. But once things flip in summer 1950 to the Korean War, where the North Koreans, the Chinese with Stalin's assistance, are driving in to try and capture the south of Korea, which was supposed to be divided under a UN mandate.

51:39Rana Mitter:This then turns Taiwan from being this kind of renegade state of losers who've run away to being a Cold War bulwark, which the United States has to protect. And as a result, Chiang Kai-shek gets, you know, a whole bunch of protection over the next few years for Taiwan, which then means that it becomes much, much more difficult for the mainland to actually recapture the island. And after about 1958, they really don't try through most of the rest of Mao's period in power.

52:05William:But in a single decade, Rana, the communists have come from very much on the back foot with losing 90 % of their troops and their members, ending up in the back end of China with harsh soil and living in caves, to being masters of this huge area of the earth. and having seen off Chiang Kai-shek. I mean, a completely unimaginable turnaround in a very short period of time. How much of that is Mao's own doing?

52:39Rana Mitter:You're right that, you know, it's an extraordinary trajectory in a short time. 1935, they're at the end of the Long March on the run. In 1949, they're in control of the entire country. You know, 14 years is long, but it's not that long for such a transformation. Mao is very crucial to that rise to the top, but he was not its only author, you might say. Amongst the people who came along, so you could see that Mao has his hand and his mind in each of the factors that leads to the ultimate revolution, but he's not the only other actor. So when it comes to ideology, he writes some of these essays, things like On New Democracy, that think about how the communists are going to bring in other groups to work with them.

53:19Rana Mitter:But he does that alongside Liu Shaqi, Chen Boda, and other people who are very involved in the ideological world. On the military front, as I mentioned before, he undertakes some kind of very kind of nifty moves on the military front that show his combination of calculus and risk taking. But you also don't get a military victory without the other great generals of the communist movement, Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai, Liu Huachin, who becomes actually the father of the Chinese Navy after 1949. 49. Or beyond that, in kind of economic terms, it's not very clear. I mean, Mao doesn't understand anything very much about, you know, economic Soviet or otherwise.

53:59Rana Mitter:And so figures like Liu Xiaqi have to be around to try and actually explain how the country is going to run its economy, of course, under huge advice from the Soviet Union at that point. So all the things that go up to make a regime that, you know, as it turns out, is pretty long lasting, have Mao in their DNA somewhere but he's never the only person who is actually responsible for that particular aspect

54:22Anita:rana we're going to pick up this story um in the next episode there's just so much to talk about

54:28William:thank you again it's it's wonderful history it's so exciting such a phenomenal story and the speed

54:34Anita:at which this happens um if you want to hear the next episode right now just join empire club at empire pod uk.com that's empire pod uk.com uh cheaper than a price of a point a month or a very posh coffee and you get early access to ad-free shows a weekly newsletter and you get a book discount on rana's excellent books so um do join the club till the next time we meet it's goodbye

54:59William:from me anita arnans and goodbye from me william dirimple