Guerrilla Governments
The special area second in importance is the Hopei-Chahar-Shansi Border Region (Chin-ch'a-chi Pien-ch'ü Lin-shih Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui). Widely publicized in the Western world as the Hermit Government, this regime functions altogether within the Japanese lines. A number of competent Western observers have visited this area, among them Major Evans Fordyce Carlson, Mr. Haldore Hanson, and Professor George Taylor. All have come away most enthusiastic about the work of the government. The governmental picture which emerges from their and other accounts is one of a highly flexible mechanism, working with great efficacy and superb morale.[16] The driving power behind the regime is social revolution as a means to national resistance, made easy by the flight of many former local bureaucrats, and by the treason of some ultra-conservatives, who affiliated themselves with the Provisional Government established by the Japanese in Peiping. The personnel is as genuinely United Front as may be found anywhere in the world; the position is eased by the circumjacency of the Japanese, and the formal recognition of the area by the Military Affairs Commission and the Executive Yüan.
The Border Region, like smaller guerrilla areas elsewhere in occupied China, is scarcely a domestic political problem because it is enfolded by the Japanese armies. Even a United Front area, such as the Border Region, would lead to far greater difficulties in political adjustment if established in Free China. The tension and balance between the Parties is such that this strain might not be borne. Behind the Japanese lines, where the central armies cannot do anything even if they wish, the Border Region finds Chungking's acquiescence to be stimulated by Chungking's impotence. What could or will happen if the Japanese leave the dividing area, and the Border Region has to settle the issue of status quo v. status quo ante bellum with the central government, no one knows. The Generalissimo told the present author that he did not fear the encroachments of the guerrilla groups, because he and they were all working for democracy.
Following from this involuntarily protective and insulating role of the Japanese forces is the constitutional theory of the Border Region. Unlike the Frontier Area, where it is exceedingly difficult to gloss over the autonomy of Communist rule, the Border Region is definitely established as a war-time agency, controlling territory beyond the reach of the provincial governments. The provincial governments still function, in unoccupied corners of their provinces, or in exile, and the openly provisional (lin-shih) nature of the Border Region makes it palatable even to Kuomintang conservatives.
The pattern of government is one of devolution from an Executive Committee, which was established by a meeting of officials, volunteers, mass organizations, and others at Fup'ing in January 1938. The area is divided into provincial districts which are able to function with economy of personnel. The following outline illustrates the structure of this area:[17]
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Secretariat
Civil Affairs Department
Financial Affairs Department
Education Department
Industry Department
Justice Department
Inspectorates of the Seven Provincial Districts
Hsien Governments or Joint Hsien Governments or Sub-Hsien Governments
Hsien Districts
Village Committees
A very high degree of direct popular government has been achieved. Over wide areas, the average age of the hsien magistrates is in the twenties. Recruitment to the Region of numerous professors and students from Peiping has helped to fill the need for trained personnel, and has assisted in maintaining the area as a genuine multi-group affair rather than a Communist front. Communists, although present and highly esteemed, do not hold the highest formal offices. (For further consideration of the United Front problem, see below, p. [123].)
The New Fourth Army (Hsin-ssŭ-chün), third of the special zones, was formed by re-consolidation of the small mutually isolated Soviet areas left behind when the main Communist forces made the celebrated Long March. When first assembling under the truce, these Red units faced a certain amount of difficulty from the provincial military who did not grasp the United Front idea, but the Military Affairs Commission recognized them. The Army did not establish a government except through its Political Department, which coordinated political work of the volunteer village committees.[18]
According to available reports, the Army stands far to the Left of the Border Region. Formally United Front, its proportion of Communists is much higher and Communist control more telling. Operating in East Central China—the Anhwei-Kiangsu-Kiangsi-Fukien-Chekiang area—which provided the base of ten years' Communist insurrection and was long the home of the Chinese Soviet Republic, the New Fourth Army Zone represents a recrudescence of Soviet activities under different names and with a different military objective. This fact has caused intense dissatisfaction among some Kuomintang generals, who spent half their careers trying to root out Communism in that same area. They do not mind the Communist zone in the Northwest, where an effective informal cordon sanitaire can be drawn, but renewed Communist activity in the Yangtze valley impresses them as an evil not much less than pro-Japanese treason.
The New Fourth Zone, the Border Region, and the Frontier Area—together with a wide scattering of guerrilla areas and governments individually of less but collectively of equal importance—are the military step-children of the Chinese government. They all receive subsidies for their work, varying in amount. Usually this is calculated on the number of hsien actually occupied as bases, so that the sum provides for a far smaller number of villages than those directly affected. In the case of troops, the salary allowances are based on the permitted size of the units, in almost all cases below the actual numbers. The money is paid to the commanders or other leading officials, who then set salary rates incomparably lower than those of the central forces. The money thus saved is applied to the general budget of the forces. Corruption, while occasional and inescapable, seems to be more sharply punished in the guerrilla than in the government areas.
In January 1941, the New Fourth Army was officially abolished, following a clash with regular National Government forces. The clash arose from a fundamental difference between the Generalissimo and the New Fourth leaders concerning the nature of the Chinese government. The Communists and their sympathizers held that the unity of China was a political union between separate groups. When the Generalissimo ordered the New Fourth Army to move North, and oppose the Japanese forces above the Yangtze, the New Fourth countered with a demand for arms and funds. Treating this as military insubordination in war time, the central forces attacked the New Fourth—each side claiming that the other opened hostilities—capturing Yeh Ting, the commander. The rest of the Army was officially abolished, although its main forces were within the occupied zone and outside the Generalissimo's reach. A full Communist-Nationalist clash was avoided, however, and the Red leaders unwillingly acquiesced in the Generalissimo's interpretation of the episode as a military and not a political affair. The conflict brought forth the fundamental Communist question: are the Chinese Communists loyal first to the Chinese government, or first to the Communist Party? No answer was forthcoming, although the Communists failed to rebel elsewhere. The Generalissimo, by military swiftness and political acumen, had triumphed in one more particular instance.
With the parsimonious policy of the central government keeping them in fiscal extremity, the more Leftist guerrilla units make up their lack of funds with direct economic measures. These include suspensions of rents to landlords, regulation of share-cropping, lowering of taxes on the poorer farmers, and creation of cooperatives. The Communists have strained every point to avoid actual class war, and the economic reforms of the guerrilla and special areas are smoothed by the usual absence of the landlords. The political necessity of a bold economic policy remains important, if the special areas are to continue their activity against Japan or—in the Frontier Area case—their independence. Political development thus is inclined to stress the use of popular machinery of government, not for the creation of systematic, modern, responsible bureaucracy, but for pushing vigorous mass action, direct popular government, and socio-economic reconstruction, revolutionary by implication if not by immediate content.
Not all the guerrilla areas fall into the Left pattern. The Kuomintang, so long habituated to control of the state mechanism that its revolutionary background is somewhat dimmed, is bringing Kuomintang guerrilla work into action. The Party and Government War Area Commission is the chief supervisory agency for this work, and an enormous amount of planning has been done. Actual application of mass-movement work seems as yet to lag behind that of the Left. Meanwhile, in most areas except the Communist Northwest, Kuomintang officers, officials, teachers, and volunteers are active. The guerrilla groups all accept the same flag, hail Chiang as their leader, recognize the San Min Chu I as the state ideology, and maintain the cherished symbols of unity.
The Government and the Kuomintang were reportedly seeking a settlement of the whole special-area problem, in anticipation of the close of war, by urging the movement of all Communist or Communist-infiltrated forces Northward, so that a more or less continuous Left corridor would run from the Border Region to the Frontier Area. This precipitated the clash with the New Fourth Army; in March 1941 no settlement has been reached. Part of this is owing to the Communist desire to have unrestricted agitational rights, and to official Kuomintang insistence that no Party other than itself is constitutionally legitimate. The special areas meanwhile prepare fighters in the anti-Japanese war, and are helped by a government which is proud of them as Chinese but mistrustful of them as Leftists. And they develop vigorous applications of democratic formulae which challenge the reality and sincerity of everything the National Government does behind the lines.
Despite recurrent clashes, it is likely that the areas and the government will continue their present relations. In part this is owing to the genuineness of the universal hatred of Japan and the devotion to the long-cherished unification now achieved; in even greater part the wrangling, acrimonious, but effective cooperation of the government and the guerrilla Left depends on their equal and great desire for such cooperation. The highest Kuomintang leaders—above all others, Chiang—have pledged themselves to unity and cooperation, and are determined to eschew civil war in the midst of invasion; the higher Communist leaders are equally determined. In three years of collaboration, the highest officers on each side have developed very genuine respect for each other's sincerity. Quarrels are provoked by the men in-between, overbearing Nationalists or the doctrinaire Communists, who cannot forget 1927-37. (The author talked to one Communist leader who had an odd, not unattractive muscular tic in his face: the consequence of Kuomintang torture a few years past. Yet he collaborates, and so do his Kuomintang equivalents, men whose parents lie in unknown graves.) The common people on both sides want peace above all else, internal peace between factions, and peace—after victory, and then only—with Japan. The juxtaposed and competitive forces watch one another, compete in the development of institutions, and engage in an auction of good government: whoever wins the deepest love and esteem of the Chinese people wins China in the end. Few institutional reforms in the West have had such fateful stimuli.