Divide and Conquer?
Among
the multitude of claims and conspiracies “exposed” by Chang and Halliday in
their biography of Mao Zedong, one of the most outlandish allegation involves
the late leader and his “hidden” desire to partition China
during the War of Resistance. In
accordance with the rest of the book that portrays Mao as a vile, bloodthirsty
schemer, the biography states that “the Stalin-Hitler Pact opened up the
prospect that Stalin might do a similar deal with Japan,
with China a second
Poland…Now a
real chance appeared that Stalin might occupy part of China,
and put Mao in charge.”[1]
The implication of this assertion is to condemn Mao’s leadership and negate his
revolutionary rhetoric urging resistance against imperialist aggressors. Mao instead is denigrated as a traitor who
was willing to sell out his country for the sole purpose of obtaining
power. Because this view represents such
a drastic contrast from what has been commonly believed, it is important, for
the sake of history, to verify the sources that the authors have used to back
up their revisionist allegation.
Chang and Halliday
focus on Mao’s “desire” for the defeat of the Nationalist Army at the hands of
Japanese forces as a pretext for intervention from the Soviet Union in a
chapter entitled: [Mao’s] “Most Desired Scenario: Stalin Carves up China.” To support their caricature of Mao as a
traitor whose personal, power-thirsty ambitions surmounted his concern for China,
Chang and Halliday attempt to explain how the Soviet intervention in Poland
served as his inspiration for a similar strategy in China.
In support of their claim that “the Poland
scenario was now Mao’s model for China,”
the authors quote a 1939 interview with Edgar Snow. They write: “Asked [by Snow] whether ‘Soviet
help to China’s
liberation movement may take a somewhat similar form’ to Russian occupation of Poland,
Mao gave a positive reply: ‘It is quite within the possibilities of Leninism’.”[2]
However, the text itself, taken from the China
Weekly Review, suggests otherwise.
The actual question posed by Snow refers to the Soviet Union’s “aid to
the Byelo-Russian and Ukrainian liberation movement,”
and asks whether or not “it [is] possible that the Soviet Union may give these
liberation movements [in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang]
help by sending in armed anti-Japanese expeditions,” to which Mao responds:
“According to Leninism such a possibility exists…But the fundamental question
is whether the Chinese fight for themselves.”[3]
What becomes immediately clear is that the authors have substituted a Poland
partition scenario where the original source refers to Russian support for Byelo-Russian and Ukrainian “liberation”, so Mao’s response
should be taken only in the context of his support of the Soviet
Union’s involvement in these respective areas. The second part of Mao’s response, which
Chang and Halliday choose to deliberately omit, does not emit a “positive”
response, but rather implies his desire for the Chinese people to fight for
their own country without foreign assistance.
In fact, the term “Poland”
appears nowhere within this specific dialogue; its reference in the “biography”
is only a fabrication of the authors.
The “possibility” mentioned here merely reflects Mao’s willingness to
consider accepting aid from the Soviet Union in sponsoring anti-Japanese
expeditions, and not his desire to adapt the Poland scenario to China. A closer look at Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, which has also been
cited, also gives no indication of Chang and Halliday’s point. Mao’s words, as published by Snow, are as
follows:
The Nazi invasion of Poland presented the Soviet Union with this problem: whether to permit the whole Polish
population to fall victim to Nazi persecution, or whether to liberate the
national minorities of Eastern
Poland. The Soviet Union chose
to follow the second course of action.[4]
Any inferences to a possible Soviet
occupation of China
cannot be found, as Mao, in rather plain language, endorses and defends the
actions of his Soviet allies. (It might be noted that he does so in the face of
rather intense questions from Snow, who is clearly unsympathetic to Stalin’s
pact with Hitler.) Chang and Halliday
simply used selective parts of quotes and placed them in an erroneous context
to piece together “evidence” that blackens Mao’s image.
The
context for this 1939 interview with Snow should also be acknowledged in terms
of the political situation from 1937-1941.
During this crucial period the USSR
was the main source of military assistance to Chinese Nationalist resistance to
Japan. The authors’ concentration on the cooperation
between the Stalin and the CCP disregards the fact that “despite a decade of
strained relations between Moscow
and Nanking [the Nationalist
regime], the two governments shared a common interest in blocking Japanese
expansion on the Asian mainland.”[5]
Thus, because the Nationalist armies posed as the most viable resistance to
Japanese offensives, the “USSR supplied a total of about 1,000 planes, 2,000
‘volunteer’ pilots, 500 military advisors, and substantial stores of artillery,
munitions, and petrol…Significantly, virtually none of the Russian aid was
channeled to the Chinese Communists.”[6]
This tangible evidence serves to reinforce the idea that the Soviet
Union, far from its one-sided support of the Chinese Communists as
argued by Chang and Halliday, in actuality maintained a genuine interest in
Chinese sovereignty through its active assistance of Nationalist resistance to Japan. This unbalanced tide of aid towards the
Nationalists also suggests that Chiang would be the one holding ultimate power
in China over
Mao.
Chang
and Halliday further allege that Mao’s planned scenario for the division of China
would resemble that of France,
in which the nation was divided between a direct German occupation in the north
and puppet government of Vichy in
the south. They write: “referring to a
partition of the kind imposed on France,
he [Mao] went on to talk about the Reds ‘getting a better deal [relying on] the
Soviet Union stepping in to do the adjustment, and us
keep trying’. Again, Mao was hoping that
Russia would
partition China
with Japan.”[7]
Let us carefully examine this document for any “coded language” on Mao’s hopes
for China’s
partition[8]. The document in question is a three-page directive
from Mao to his military commanders, dated November 1, 1940, concerning Mao’s analysis of Chiang
Kai-shek’s intentions in the war. His
greatest fear is that England
will be defeated by Germany
and the U.S.
will not be drawn soon enough into the war on the Allied side. In this case, Mao fears that Chiang Kai-shek
will surrender to Japan,
a scenario he considers “the most likely possibility.”[9]
Mao then notes that in July and August, Chiang considered moving his capital to
the Northwest and leaning toward the Soviet Union –
which was the Nationalist government’s greatest source of military support –
but by October this strategy was abandoned.
Then comes the cited passage, which reads in full: “But there is still
the possibility that the Soviet Union will step forth to
mediate Sino-Japanese relations. If China
is to obtain a more favorable position than France,
the only possibility would be Soviet mediation and our own persistent efforts.”[10] Here, Mao’s reference to France
addresses a situation that he does not
wish to occur in China;
he insists that only through Soviet assistance and the Chinese people’s
persistent resistance will China
avoid France’s
fate. Nowhere in this passage is their
reference to any partition of China.
Chang and Halliday
go on to claim that they have discovered the border for Mao’s alleged wish to
partition China, which involved Mao “drawing a border…at the Yangtze, with us
ruling one half…”[11]
However, a further double-checking of the translated source, Gregor Benton’s New
Fourth Army, neither supports nor implies this logic. Instead, the passage cited was a communiqué
between Xiang Ying, head of the New Fourth Army, and
the Party Center
giving an outline of the general strategy for Communist troop movements in
central China. The mention of the Yangtze here as a
demarcation line actually refers to the Center’s plan for the separation of
Communist and Nationalist soldiers to avoid conflict between the two, as
expressed in the orders to “move north, to strive for a situation in which our
area of control is separated from Chiang’s by the Yangtze.”[12]
The other source cited by Chang and Halliday makes no reference to a Yangtze
division, but is instead another discussion by Mao of the possibility that
Chiang Kai-shek’s Chongqing
government will surrender like Petain in France
and China will
be divided with a puppet government in the south and the Communists in the
north[13]. There is no evidence here that Mao expressed
a desire to have China
split into separately-controlled halves—much less that these halves should be
controlled by Russia
and Japan. In
all of these cases he is exploring possible scenarios—often possibilities that
he clearly considers the worst case scenarios. Chang and Halliday have
distorted his suggestion of military separation between Communist and
Nationalist forces completely out of context in applying it to assume that Mao
wanted to share control over China
with Japan
through the Soviet Union.
Throughout
this alleged biography, Chang and Halliday have based their outlandish claims,
like the one above, through the abuse of omitting significant portions of
quotations and twisting others out of its original context to support their
personal bias against Mao Zedong. As
exemplified above, their claim to Mao’s desire for the partition of China
contains no substantive evidence, but rather a flagrant distortion of Mao’s
personal perceptions of the international scenario during World War II.
Tony Wan
twan@ucsd.edu