Well, its complicated . . .

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. I am enjoying this one a great deal. New information or insight on virtually every page. A great antidote for those who want their history to be manichean in its dualistic simplicity. Whatever you thought you knew, you realize it was even more complicated than you realized.

Take the example of China and its resistance to the Japanese in World War II. I knew the outlines of this story but the details are even more incredible. Page 18.

The Nationalists were appalled by the systematic violence unleashed by the Communists, and in 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek, the head of the military section at the Soviet-inspired Whampoa Academy, moved against them, with an arrest list that included Mao's name. The Communists reverted to the defence of ‘Soviet areas’ in which their appetites for bloodthirsty purges of real and imagined opponents were indulged to the hilt and with indescribable cruelty. In 1934 Mao embarked on the 6,000-mile Long March, a year-long extraction of 82,000 Communist fighters from encirclement and destruction in the south, with 8,000 resurfacing as survivors in the remote north. There the Communists could pose as liberators and reformers without fear of attack by either the KMT or the Japanese. Mao gradually emerged as primus inter pares of a statelet that harked back to Plato, with the Party cadres being the philosopher kings while the guardians were the Red Army commanders and soldiers, below whom were the drones whose labour supported them. Since the majority of those who flocked to the remote Yenan redoubt did so merely from a patriotic desire to fight the Japanese, ‘rectification’ campaigns based on confessions and indoctrination were used to re-engineer their personalities, submerging the individual self in the collective as embodied by Mao himself.

The KMT could not mobilize sufficient military power to defeat the Communists as well as resisting Japanese invasion. As elsewhere in East Asia, wealthy figures in cities such as Shanghai rallied to the Japanese cause. But so did many collaborators who were also covert Communist agents, with instructions to direct the Japanese against their Nationalist rivals. While Chiang’s armies fought the Japanese, Mao’s Communists avoided main-force encounters, even when urged to fight them by Stalin, who feared that the Soviet Union could be crushed between the Japanese and German onslaughts. Mao’s caution and evasiveness rankled with the Soviet leader and the only ‘battle’ against the Japanese, at Pingxingguan in September 1937, hardly features in the annals of warfare.

Communist guerrillas did have an impact in Manchuria, historically a lawless place which contained the world’s densest concentration of villages run by outlaws. But it was also the most industrialized region in China, which was why the Japanese had conquered it. The guerrillas who fought the Japanese in this wild, grey-brown place were ethnic Koreans, who also made up 90 per cent of the local ‘Chinese’ Communist Party. The ethnic Chinese Communists claimed to be fighting the Japanese as they husbanded their resources in their northern regional redoubt of Yenan for the anticipated showdown with Chiang.

Mao’s forces were sustained by subsidies from Stalin as well as by a revived opium industry, which they wisely kept secret from the ‘Dixie Mission’ sent to Yenan by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in July 1944 out of frustration with KMT military incompetence and venality and in order to glean actionable intelligence on Japanese strength in northern China from POWs taken by the Communists. While a large pool of 2,000 American advisers stationed in Chongqing by turns publicly lauded and privately denounced Chiang Kai-shek, some of the Yenan Americans became admirers of the iron discipline of the Communists.

Chinese Communist guerillas who are actually Korean. Capitalists who are actually communists. The KMT doing a better job of advancing Soviet goals than the Chinese Communists. The American advisors undermining their KMT allies while admiring the Chinese Communists. And on and on. Nothing was what it seemed.