Second United Front

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second United Front was born in an act of desperation. On the 12th of December 1936, two Chinese generals named Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng kidnapped their own supreme commander. Their prisoner was Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the ruling Kuomintang and the commander of China's most powerful army. The generals had one demand: stop fighting fellow Chinese and unite against Japan. What emerged from that standoff was a formal alliance between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. These were two movements that had spent years trying to destroy each other. How had they arrived at the brink of that impossible agreement? And once the pact was struck, how much of it was genuine?

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• 2. The Path to Xi'an

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  In late 1935, Chiang Kai-shek opened secret negotiations with the Soviet Union. He wanted a guarantee of military assistance if war with Japan erupted. The Soviets agreed on one condition: Chiang had to pursue a ceasefire with the Chinese Communist Party.

  Chiang regarded the CCP as rebels, not negotiating partners. He made cautious contact, but the two sides' demands were so far apart that talks broke down through the first half of 1936.

  Zhang Xueliang commanded the Northeastern Army, one of the Nationalist forces assigned to besiege the Communists in northwest China. The CCP quietly reached a secret ceasefire agreement with Zhang and a similar one with Yang Hucheng, who led the Northwestern Army. Both generals were frustrated by the same thing: Chiang kept prosecuting the civil war even as Japan's pressure on China mounted.

  Yan Xishan, a neighboring warlord, signed a secret agreement with the CCP but kept more distance from them than Zhang or Yang. The CCP wanted to use Soviet backing to build a resistance base across five provinces, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Xinjiang, under Zhang's command. Zhang, Yang, and Yan all preferred a different approach: persuading Chiang himself to lead the fight against Japan. To keep the Nanjing government unsuspecting, the alliance members staged fake military skirmishes against each other while negotiating in private.

  By mid-to-late October 1936, a military victory had lifted Chiang's confidence. The Second and Fourth Corps of the Red Army had marched north to collect Soviet supplies dropped in Mongolia. They found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the Yellow River and were cut to pieces by Hui cavalry allied with the Nationalists. Chiang began preparing a sixth encirclement campaign and ordered Zhang and Yang to take part.

  In early November, Chen Lifu presented Communist negotiator Pan Hannian with conditions so severe that Pan called them "conditions for surrender." Then Chiang ordered Zhang's Northeastern Army to attack the Communist capital at Bao'an. The Northeastern Army withheld most of its forces from the assault. The Red Army exploited the gap to ambush and nearly destroy Hu Zongnan's 78th regiment. The diplomatic balance shifted: Chen Lifu softened his terms, and the CCP recalled Pan Hannian from Nanjing on the 10th of December.

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• 3. Alliance in Name

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  After the Xi'an Incident forced a truce, the Red Army was reorganized into two new formations. The Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army were both placed under the National Revolutionary Army's chain of command. The CCP formally accepted Chiang Kai-shek's leadership and began receiving financial support from the Kuomintang-run central government.

  Two border regions were established as part of the negotiated terms. The Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region and the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region were both placed under Communist administration.

  In late August 1937, Zhou Enlai and Shao Lizi, the head of the KMT Central Publicity Department, reached an agreement on Communist press access. Two newspapers, Xinhua Daily and Chuin Chung Weekly, would be permitted to publish in Kuomintang-controlled territory.

  On the battlefield, CCP and KMT forces fought together at the Battle of Taiyuan. The high point of their cooperation came in 1938, at the Battle of Wuhan.

  Behind these visible gestures, the CCP's submission to KMT command was formal rather than real. The CCP acted independently, and actual coordination between the two sides throughout the war was minimal.

  By 1938, Mao Zedong was openly arguing that the CCP should trade space for time against Japan. His position was that the Nationalists should shoulder the heaviest burden of the fighting.

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• 4. Breakdown and Civil War

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  By late 1938, the uneasy alliance had begun to fracture. The CCP intensified its efforts to absorb Chinese guerrilla forces operating behind Japanese lines. A clash recorded in Chiang Kai-shek's own diary showed how hostile the relationship had become. In June 1939, He Long's Red Army attacked and wiped out a Chinese militia brigade commanded by Chang Yin-wu in Hebei.

  In December 1940, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the New Fourth Army to evacuate Anhui and Jiangsu Provinces. The CCP commanders agreed only in part. They consented to move the New Fourth Army troops in southern Anhui, known as Wannan, north across the Yangtze River. In January 1941, Nationalist forces ambushed and defeated those troops as they complied.

  The confrontation became known as the New Fourth Army Incident. Both the Kuomintang and the CCP blamed the other for having struck first, and the full accounting has never been settled. The incident weakened but did not eliminate the CCP's position in central China. It did bring any real cooperation between the two sides to an end for the remainder of the war.

  Inside Japanese-occupied territory, the remaining pretense of alliance vanished. KMT and CCP forces fought each other behind enemy lines. The CCP steadily destroyed, absorbed, or pushed into collaboration with Japanese puppet governments the Kuomintang's partisan units in those zones.

  Mao's party concentrated on building influence through rural mass organizations and through land and tax reforms that favored poor peasants. The Nationalists deployed multiple army divisions to blockade CCP-held areas, trying to contain the spread of Communist influence until Japan was finally defeated.

  After Japan's defeat in 1945, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong attempted peace talks. The effort failed. By 1946 the two sides were in all-out civil war. The CCP obtained seized Japanese weapons in the northeast with Soviet acquiescence and engaged an already weakened Nationalist army.

  In October 1949, Mao established the People's Republic of China. Chiang retreated to the island of Taiwan, and the question of which government spoke for China remained open long after the fighting stopped.

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