BOOK REVIEWS

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941,by Gregor Benton

This is an important book. It studies the movements of the New Fourth Army in central and eastern China (particularly Jiangsu and Anhui) during the early years of the Sino-Japanese war. Contrary to what the subtitle suggests, there is little on the Communist resistance against the Japanese invaders; there is however a great deal on the growth of the Communist forces at the expense of their allies and partners of the anti-Japanese United Front who represented the Nationalist government which had taken refuge in Wuhan, and which later moved to Chongqing.

The first (and the most important) conclusion of this monumental piece of research by Benton concerns the respective roles of the “masses” and the “elite” in the Communist strategy. The Communist Party’s ways of mobilising the masses have long been a point of discussion; even more so have been its levers. Were these above all nationalist (according to Chalmers Johnson) or (according to Mark Selden and many others) economic and social? Benton approaches the question from a different angle: this mobilisation came only after the rallying of the support of the elite (a part of the elite anyway) and was set in motion by their intermediary! Far from driving the people to their feet against their exploiters, the Communist Party initially tried to secure the neutrality, co-operation or support of local and regional notables, who the peasants were not ready to stand against, but who they were quite to the contrary ready to stand up for and follow. Chen Yi among others (and better than others) applied himself to gaining the confidence of influential members of the gentry with his good manners, his quiet scholarship (at times vociferously flattering, such as when mentioning a local hero of the resistance during the Yuan dynasty and the book put together in his honour by the prey whose favour he wanted to win), by exchanges of duilian or of poems and even through the creation of one Lakes and Seas Artistic and Literary Society (Huhai yiwen she): one can never do too much. Needless to say, he would carefully research in advance not only the works of the person he is dealing with, but also of this person’s relationship with Chen’s main adversary: the governor of Jiangsu province Han Deqin. Should this person, chosen by reason of his influence over the regional gentry, deplores the weakness of the resistance pitted against the invader by Han’s forces, along with the corruption and nepotism of the provincial administration, and Chen Yi will conveniently claim to uphold such ideals (patriotism, an administration with integrity and free of favouritism) as can seduce whoever it is that he has in his sights. Once taken, this major player is made to preside over official meetings orchestrated by fellow travellers and manipulated by underground Communists, and by the same stroke to bring with him in the furrow of the New Fourth Army a large enough number of the educated and socially outstanding who will provide its financial support. As the majority of these notables are big landlords, the adventure will end badly for them, with the exception—even then!—of a small minority who will remain in favour and hold honorary positions after 1949. For the time being however, they are persuaded to repress any afterthoughts and apprehensions all the while being kept in the dark about the ultimate goals of the revolution.

By giving endless examples of the rallying of the rich and powerful into supporting the New Fourth Army, Benton spreads out an impressive array of the possible types, very few of which presuppose a sincere conversion to the faith and to the revolutionary cause. Among these let us hold onto the exploitation of a common geographic origin or school (tongxiang, tongxue), of an acquired ‘kinship’ (sworn brotherhood), of a religious community (Taoist, Buddhist, Christian), indeed, of an ethnicity (the belonging to such and such a minority nationality), or even the adherence to a secret society. It is perhaps the tongxue, adding to this the relationship between teacher and pupil, which is the most common, even more so since a great many Communists in positions of leadership, themselves descended from the gentry or at the very least from well-to-do families, went to a local school and had a ready stock of guanxi at their fingertips. Lacking such guanxi they forge new links and make the new network blossom. Yet we should not race to denounce their duplicity: they use (and extend) their relationships without a bad conscience, and act completely naturally according to norms and customary behaviours learned from childhood. Far from being, as its detractors insisted, an exotic griffin transplanted from Europe (Marx) and in the service of the USSR, the Party was in its own way an authentic offshoot from Chinese land. Establishing links of a particularist nature by which to take its first steps in the world in its quest for power posed it no moral problems whatsoever: now there is an aspect of the famous sinicisation of Marxism that has been overlooked or overshadowed (turn to pages 173-74 and 185-86 to check that I am not reaching beyond Benton’s own thinking). Whatever the case, this book encourages us to turn towards anthropology, well away from the traditional analysis of the classes and class struggle that we have pinned—it should be acknowledged that Communist propaganda and historiography has encouraged us to do so—on Chinese society.

The book’s second conclusion is in part attached to the first: “it was the armies, and not the classes, that brought about the Chinese revolution” (p. 729). We will dwell less on this conclusion, primarily because it is the one more generally accepted (the revolution as conquest) but also because the strategies that were employed in order to rally the military potentates or render them harmless, are reminiscent, in the crudest sense, of those strategies that were used to mollify the gentry. Rather than assault them with politeness, refinement and culture, they exploited their passions and motivations such as ambition, greed, fear and face. What did not change was the systematic recourse (more often sophisticated than brutal) to intrigue and manipulation: the exposing of them takes up far more space in this book than do the accounts of battles and the taking of strongholds (although a good half dozen such events can be counted during the campaign of 1940 alone, none of which were directed against the Japanese). The heterogeneity of the armed groups that sprang up at the start of the Japanese invasion (as soon as 1939 Chen Yi categorised them into ten different types among the Mao hills, actually just bare hills to the south-west of Jiangsu: pp. 31 and 325-26) increased the clashes between the forces that from the outset had a tendency to declare themselves members of the resistance and call themselves guerillas. The New Fourth Army endeavoured at the very least to neutralise, or better, to absorb the large part of these forces, with the exception of the enemy that it had singled out: the dominant force in the region, whose place it wanted to take. At a higher level (and therefore at the next stage), it exploited and stirred up the rivalries between opposing factions and cliques at the very heart of the armies that were theoretically allies of or subordinate to the governor Han Deqin. Also in theory, the New Fourth Army allied with “enlightened” commanders and fought against “reactionaries”. However, these labels had no connection either with the political orientation of those involved, their social policies, or their more or less great determination to face the occupying forces. They gained their meaning through more immediate political choices: “enlightened” were those who were wary of Han, who intended to maintain their autonomy and, if possible, build up their strength at his expense; “conservatives” were the submissive who obeyed or supported him. They thus illustrate the pertinence of a hackneyed phrase: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, but let us not misunderstand it: is the enemy not, in this instance, the Japanese! In order to maintain the fiction of the anti-Japanese United Front, Chen Yi (and also Liu Shaoqi, director supreme of the east-central theatre) made sure not to attack the Nationalist army: contenting themselves, through their activities, to compel Han Deqin to attack them. The victories over him in the Autumn of 1940 owe much to the “skillful manipulation” by Chen Yi “of regional and political rivalries in Han Deqin’s military command” (p. 523).

These victories and, thanks to them, the establishment and consolidation of the Communist bases of Subei were the main cause of the Wannan disaster (southern Anhui) in January 1941: the surrounding and destruction of the headquarters of the New Fourth Army by Nationalist forces, the capture of its commander (Ye Ting) and the assassination of its political chief of staff (Xiang Ying). This famous incident, which was the coup de grâce for the United Front, brings the book to a close. Related and analysed in the minutest detail, the incident directs the reader’s attention towards a third focal point of interest: the inevitable Mao. The infallible Chairman appears to have had a significant share of the responsibility in the January 1941 catastrophe: through his hesitation and the contradictory instructions with which he bombarded Xiang Ying and Ye Ting, his obsession with interpreting Chiang Kai-shek’s strategic choices only in an international context (for example in October 1940, during the signing of the tripartite Pact among the Axis Powers), and finally, perhaps especially, his overwhelming determination to obtain concessions in exchange for the evacuation of Wannan at a time when all that mattered was that they escape at the earliest possible moment and at all costs from the Nationalist forces surrounding them. Xiang Ying himself also contributed to the time-wasting and procrastination, but his responsibilities were regional and he was even less able to conceive the necessary global (quanguo) strategy as Yan’an very often left him in the dark. Even so, he made an ideal scapegoat and, as usual, Yan’an made the most of it: Xiang Ying was a rightwing opportunist, an advocate of surrender, partisan and even lieutenant of Wang Ming… The myth had to be maintained whatever the cost: and Mao never made mistakes.

In a more general way and well beyond its final episode, this book puts a dent in the statue of the commander through its demolition of a historiographic tradition centred around Mao and Yan’an. The New Fourth Army often appeared in the history of the Chinese revolution at the hour of the Nationalist “trap” laid against its isolated units in Wannan, in other words at the hour of a defeat emblematic of its failure and its minor role, at best complementary to the Nordic epic of the glorious Eight Route Army. After Mao’s death, the veterans of the New Fourth Army finally gathered together accounts and memoirs, which Benton made his sources.

I only managed to get through the book’s main conclusions; among the others I will just underline the original sociological composition of the New Fourth Army, which recruited largely among Shanghai’s students, intellectuals and workers. It was not only more varied, but more modern (and more able to handle technical tasks or education) than the Eighth Route Army, even than almost any other Chinese army of the time.

For all that, and in spite of its richness, this remarkable book is not the great book that it might have been had it been more condensed and synthetic. Among the growing number of studies dedicated to the Communist bases at their most crucial stage (1937-49), it is in my view the other book on the Communist movement in the same region, that of Chen Yung-fa (1), that still holds the top place. For sure, Benton completes and corrects Chen on a number of points, particularly in substituting for the elite–popular masses dichotomy the infinite diversity of social groups encountered in “the kaleidoscopic world of the Chinese countryside” (p. 175, see also p. 216). Benton can also not be reproached for not having analysed with the same meticulous depth as Chen the mobilisation of the popular masses after the establishment of the Communist bases. Chen covers the eight years of the war, Benton three small years from the Spring of 1938 to January 1941: the period of military expansion (and he fixes the camera on the army more than on the Communist movement as a whole). No one would give Chen any grief for having in a first chapter, the least gripping of them all, summarized the military history of this same period, a necessary prelude to the understanding of the following chapters. By the same token we can put our trust in Benton and expect to find here a work that is complete: there is no doubt that he is already hard at a third volume (2), which will cover the period 1941-45 and will apparently discuss a good number of the questions masterfully addressed by Chen. Perhaps then he will confirm that the mobilisation of the rural masses did not in the final analysis occur through the intervention of a partially conquered elite, but in opposition to it. Neither does Benton make out that things happened this way even for the period before 1941 (although he does almost suggest it, p. 158: “their (the Communists’) ties to peasants tended to grow by extension from their campaign to befriend the rural elites”), he only attributes this calculation to the Communist leaders. There is overall very little mention of peasants in this hefty book, even in Chapter 3 which is entitled “Workers, Peasants and Intellectuals”.

If towards 2005 this second volume becomes part of a trilogy dedicated to the New Fourth Army from its heroic prehistory to victory, it will at that moment be tempting to haul Benton up onto the pedestal where his compatriot Mac Farquhar is currently enthroned. Between them they will have by then blackened thousands of pages covering only short stretches of time (1934-45 for one, and 1956-66 for the other), but it is for the most wordy of the two (Benton) that the “river of history” is least justified (3). In Mac Farquhar’s hands the meanders uncover a new landscape at every turn: in Benton’s they sometimes overlap and end up tired and weary. The layout he adopted for this second volume is partly responsible for this. Apart from the introduction and a final part (Perspectives), made up of an epilogue (which is very interesting) and a conclusion, the book is comprised of two enormous parts: the first thematic (in fact, a juxtaposition of topics of unequal importance), and the second narrative. There are fairly numerous repetitions and points that only really become clear when the reader comes to the narrative part. Furthermore, certain chapters such as Chapter 9 (“Footholds”) end up turning into an account, others a pot-pourri (for example, Chapter 4), and still others are a series of cases and episodes that make their point but are boring and drive the impatient reader to skip to the fortunately more forceful conclusion (take for example Chapter 8 and p. 245). The expansive number of mini-sections highlights a scattering that is at times excessive. The author is right to take bites at each facet of such a protean reality but he sometimes does no more than slip into reviews of them one after the other. Even the conclusion (a comparison that is both wise and stimulating, between the Eight Route Army and the New Fourth Army, and the Communist movement in northern and central China) examines a series of issues, at the risk of in the end reproducing the “lack of integration” that Benton justifiably ascribes to the Communist bases in the centre-east (pp. 724-28) and which a more centred argument (for example around the handicaps and the advantages of the centre-east against the north of China) would have helped overcome.

This conclusion (especially pp. 713-30) represents not least however, the compulsory starting point for all comparative consideration of the Communist movement in northern and in central China at the time when it was on its way to victory. As for the book as a whole, it is the abundance of details that hide the real gems, and they are there, you just have to look for them. It is precisely these great qualities and the originality of the book that have made me so (and over) demanding.

Translated from French original by Tina Frow