The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

by Frank Dikötter

Few ever made it past the communist lines. Lin Biao had placed a sentry every 50 metres along barbed wire and trenches 4 metres deep. Every exit was blocked. He reported to Mao: ‘We don’t allow the refugees to leave and exhort them to turn back. This method was very effective in the beginning, but later the famine got worse, and starving civilians would leave the city in droves at all times of day and night, and after we turned them down they started gathering in the area between our troops and the enemy.’ Lin described how desperate the refugees were to be allowed through communist lines, explaining that they: knelt in front of our troops in large groups and begged us to let them through. Some left their babies and small children with us and absconded, others hanged themselves in front of sentry posts. The soldiers who saw this misery lost their resolve, some even falling on their knees to weep with the starving people, saying, ‘We are only following orders.’ Others covertly allowed some of them through. After we corrected this, another tendency was discovered, namely the beating, tying up and shooting of refugees by soldiers, some to death (we do not as yet have any numbers for those injured or beaten to death). Half a century later, Wang Junru explained what had happened when he was a soldier: ‘We were told they were the enemy and they had to die.’ Wang was fifteen when the communists forced him to enrol in the army. During the siege he joined the other soldiers ord...

Hailed in China’s history books as a decisive victory in the battle of Manchuria, the fall of Changchun came at huge cost, as an estimated 160,000 civilians were starved to death inside the area besieged by the communists. ‘Changchun was like Hiroshima,’ wrote Zhang Zhenglong, a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army who documented the siege. ‘The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.’13

But everybody in Beijing knew what had happened to Changchun, turned into a ‘city of death’ by the very general who was now camping outside the city walls. Fu Zuoyi fell into a depression, tormented by the prospect of seeing Beijing, the cultural heart of China, desecrated for no good reason. At first he asked Chiang for permission to resign, but when the Generalissimo refused, he resumed the secret negotiations he had opened with the People’s Liberation Army through his daughter, who was a member of the communist party. After a forty-day siege, a surrender document was signed on 22 January 1949. All of the 240,000 troops under Fu were absorbed into the communist army. The treatment that he and his troops received served as an inducement to other nationalist commanders and officers to defect.31 For eight days the imperial capital seemed to float in a twilight zone, as the nationalists, some of them still armed, wandered about the city freely as it awaited the communists. Very little changed. In this strange vacuum, Beijing celebrated the Chinese New Year as best it could. Shops were crammed with lanterns traditionally placed outside front doors to welcome the New Year – in the shape of lions, brilliant green rabbits or yellow tigers. But Chiang Kai-shek’s portrait on Tiananmen Square was removed.

Fighting in the countryside was ferocious, as both sides battled for the country’s heartland. Nationalists and communists deployed tanks and heavy artillery, while government planes controlled the skies, using cloudless days and nights to wreak havoc on the enemy. Ancient towns with moats and walls were pounded. Orange flashes of shell explosions came from villages caught in the crossfire, leaving behind nothing but wrecked houses, smouldering amid fields sown with winter wheat. In a village just north of Caolaoji, everything had been set ablaze by mortar shells. Amid the smell of burned thatch and straw, children and women poked forlornly through roofless huts and blackened walls. On a slope in front of the ruins, an old woman bundled up in a black padded jacket rocked in silent grief. All her belongings had been lost. As one communist general later reminisced, the People’s Liberation Army wiped out village after village with blanket shelling: ‘In fighting Du Yuming, we practically flattened the villages, using thousands of shells and countless bombs.’ A returning pilot reported that every village in sight was burning: ‘the fields were covered with bodies’.36 The communists were supported by some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children, conscripted by a tough party leader called Deng Xiaoping: he imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when his orders were not met. These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, c...

A powerful propaganda machine presided over by Zhou Enlai mercilessly exploited every failing of the nationalist regime. In this war of images, the communists managed to project a vision of democracy and social reform, largely because nobody besides a few visiting journalists on guided tours ever managed to spend time in their home territory. But, most of all, people were tired of war. After more than a decade of fear and violence, they craved peace at any cost, even under communism.

On 23 April columns of PLA soldiers entered the city, sweating in their padded uniforms. The following day they could be seen sitting in orderly formations on their sleeping bags along the pavements, listening to political instructions from their cadres or singing revolutionary songs. Curious crowds gathered to stare at them or bring them hot water, poured into the mugs the soldiers carried on their belts. Neatly dressed students – earnest young men and women – came out of their dormitories, cheering the arrival of the troops, although most of the soldiers ignored them: they were worlds apart. In the Presidential Palace, Chen Yi and Deng Xiaoping took turns sitting in Chiang Kai-shek’s chair.

After a weary wait of several weeks, Shanghai fell to the communists on 25 May. Barely a shot was fired, as the business community and the triads had quietly switched sides. The nationalists were seen in full retreat, some of the troops marching almost in parade formation, others streaking through the city in terror and confusion, caked with mud from the battlefield. In the red-light district, fleeing soldiers desperately searched the shops for second-hand clothing; the streets were strewn with discarded uniforms.