Original subtitles

{n8}Subtitles by Andante

At the beginning of the 20th century,

China looked much the same as it had for hundreds of years.

The country was still ruled by an emperor.

Men wore their hair in long queues

as a sign of subservience to the ruling dynasty.

In the old days,

barbers carried all their stuff on a shoulder pole,

and they worked in the street.

If a barber saw a person who had no queue,

he could report him.

And if he did so,

the person could be beheaded.

The saying was,

keep your hair or lose your head.

Beneath the traditional appearance,

there was growing discontent with imperial rule.

In 1911,

a military revolt spread around the country,

and the emperor was overthrown.

Men cut off their queues in a symbolic gesture of revolution.

Sometimes at the city gate, I saw people with big scissors.

Whenever they saw someone with a queue,

they cut it off.

I saw people crying, saying,

now they say we are revolutionaries.

What are we supposed to do?

The cutting of queues was only the beginning of the revolution.

The Republic of China was declared.

The country was soon caught up

in an ideological battle.

Two men led the struggle,

Zhang Kaishek and Mao Zedong.

The conflict transformed world politics,

for in 1949, China became what it is today,

the largest communist state on earth.

This is the story of China in revolution.

In the early years of the Republic,

the central government was weak and ineffective.

Dozens of military commanders, called warlords,

moved into the political vacuum.

In the early days of the Republic,

the warlords fought each other.

When I was a child in Guangxi province,

I saw so many battles.

You can't imagine how many battles were fought.

Lots of people were so scared, they just went and hid.

When warlords got into a fight,

people's lives were completely devastated.

The warlords were a diverse group.

The warlord of Manchuria was a major figure in national politics.

The opium warlord made a fortune growing poppies.

The Christian general was said to baptize his troops with a fire hose.

Many warlords were landlords.

They were often supported by a certain foreign power.

In the early years of the Republic,

China was torn apart by foreign powers.

For instance, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces

were under the influence of England

and Yunnan of France.

Since the 19th century,

England, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan

had traded with China.

They based their interests in the major ports around the country.

Most foreigners lived in special areas called concessions

which they controlled with their own local governments.

We didn't have the term imperialism.

The term came later.

We called them foreign devils.

They were devils to us.

Why did we hate foreigners?

We hated any foreigner,

any foreign country that wanted to divide up China.

It was called divide up then, not invade.

They wanted to divide up China

just like cutting a melon into pieces.

People used to say,

now you want to divide up our country,

you foreign devils.

You're bastards.

In May 1919, for the first time,

Chinese took to the streets

to protest this dividing up of their country.

They saw that the problems of imperialism and

warlords had pushed China to the verge of collapse.

The demonstrations sparked a vocal nationalism

and an intense search for political solutions.

One of the few political leaders addressing these problems

was Sun Yat-Sen.

Sun was the leader of a coalition group

called the Nationalist Party.

He was a charismatic man

whose speeches attracted many to his cause.

Sun knew that the first thing he needed was an army

to defeat the warlords and unite the country.

He appealed to Western governments

for money for his cause.

At the time,

none of the imperialist countries wanted to help us.

Only the Soviet Union wanted to help us.

The Soviet Union had no friends in Asia,

so they had to work with us.

England and the other countries didn't want us to be united.

It appeared the Soviet Union did want to help us.

China had to be united, so of course,

we cooperated with them.

One condition of Soviet help was that the Nationalist Party allowed

members of the newly formed Chinese Communist Party to join.

Sun agreed, and in 1924,

the Soviets helped him set up a military academy

just outside Canton.

The Wampoa Academy quickly became a magnet

for patriotic youth from all over China.

Some were nationalists, some were communists,

some were not affiliated with any party.

They trained for a military campaign

that would one day unite the country,

The Northern Expedition.

Sun appointed his protege, Jang Kai-shek,

commander of the Academy.

Jang was a professional soldier.

Like many of his generation,

he had attended military school in Japan.

He had worked with Sun for over a decade.

Jang's son remembers

what his father and Sun Yat-sen talked about.

{n8}Although I wasn't usually included in their day-to-day conversations,

{n8}there were times when they were walking, having tea,

when I heard them talking about national affairs.

And when they talked about national affairs,

they were very serious, very enthusiastic.

They wanted to build up China.

Because in the East,

we had lived under autocracy for too long.

Jang was the commander of all the cadets

and of the Academy's staff.

Many of China's future leaders were under his command.

One of them was a young Communist Party member,

Zhou Enlai.

Zhou was the director of the political education department.

Under his direction, the cadets watched

and performed plays with simple political messages.

Without revolution, there was no hope for this country,

{n8}so political education was given on the front.

Song was played quite a big role.

The song goes like this.

As his army trained,

Sun and his wife Sun Chingling sailed to Beijing

to negotiate with the city's warlord.

But Sun was ill with cancer.

He died soon after arriving in Beijing

on March 12, 1925.

In death, Sun was revered

as the father of the Chinese Republic.

There was no one of his stature to take over the leadership,

and a struggle for power in the party began.

Jang Kai-shek emerged the victor.

In June 1926, he was appointed

commander-in-chief of The Northern Expedition,

the campaign to unite the country.

A month later, the young army set out.

Full of patriotic enthusiasm,

they won victory after victory.

In just six months,

they defeated 34 warlords,

and they swept up to central China.

All along the way, the people welcomed us.

For example, they would boil water and cook sweet potatoes

by the side of the road where our troops were passing.

They would say, brothers, come and eat and drink.

Help yourselves.

The army was well disciplined then.

And so the soldiers and the officers,

they always paid for whatever they ate and drank.

{n8}When the Northern Expedition Army reached our region,

{n8}they held mass rallies.

Everybody went.

At the rallies, speakers talked about the cooperation

between the nationalists and the communists.

They called for the defeat of

the Northern Warlords and the imperialists,

and they asked peasants not to pay land rent and debts.

I didn't know much about revolutions then.

I didn't know a thing about communism or opposing imperialism.

But it seemed like a good idea

to fight exploitation and the Northern Warlords.

Many in the army's propaganda teams were communists.

They explained the goals of the Northern Expedition,

and they called for the end of many deeply ingrained social customs.

Wang Ping soon joined the communists.

We knocked down Buddha statues in the temples.

Foot binding was still popular where I lived,

and we urged young girls not to bind their feet,

and women who had already done it to undo their feet.

At first, we didn't know better,

and often we ordered people to do things against their will.

If a young woman refused to cut her hair,

several of us would hold her and cut it anyway.

{n8}I didn't know what they were up to,

{n8}communism or whatever,

{n8}but I saw that they made trouble.

They tried to destroy our religion,

our family system, and our ethical structure.

For instance, young people's respect for the old.

My father told me that the biggest fault of communism

was that it was inhuman.

So what seemed to be cooperation

between the nationalists and the communists

during the Northern Expedition

was actually only our temporary concession.

So we wanted to purge the party,

but it was a pretty dangerous thing to do.

{n8}We could have been finished off.

{n8}Both sides might move at the same time.

The communists were all among us.

The problem was how to do the purge.

Zhang planned to purge the communists

when his army reached Shanghai.

Here, communist workers led by Zhou Enlai

had formed armed guards and taken control of the city.

They were completely unaware of Zhang's plan to break them,

and they eagerly waited for his army to arrive.

Nationalist troops moved into Shanghai.

Zhang struck on April 12, 1927.

About one in the morning,

I saw some guys in plain clothes run over.

Our guards asked them the passwords,

and they began to shoot.

We were already surrounded from all sides,

and there were machine guns positioned at the intersections on the streets.

They were standing there.

Back at headquarters, all our weapons were taken away.

They warned us. Your workers' guards are disbanded.

Go home, and don't make trouble.

Chiang Kai-shek's army was in firm control of Shanghai.

Communists and workers held a huge demonstration to protest the betrayal.

There were about 100,000 workers there.

{n8}They marched down the street towards the machine guns,

{n8}which fired.

And immediately, more than 100 people died.

Many more were wounded.

Many, many were injured.

It was raining that day.

Vashan Road was a river of blood.

I remember it was drizzling.

And I saw many people lying in the mud, still moving.

They were very sad.

When they arrested us, they beat us with rifle butts.

Yes, rifle butts.

Some of us were hit on the head and were bleeding.

Even then, all we said was,

good.

That was how we showed our defiance.

So they hit us, and we said,

good, good.

And we grit our teeth.

Zhang's purge spread around the country.

Unions were closed.

Communists and left-wing organizers were arrested.

Thousands were executed.

Only days after the purge in Shanghai,

Zhang established a national government in Nanking.

He now controlled China's economic heartland.

And over the next few years, he expanded his control.

The success of the Northern Expedition

earned Zhang tremendous prestige.

And he adopted the title, Generalissimo.

Zhang had made himself the heir to Sun Yat-sen.

He strengthened this position

by having Sun's body

brought to the new capital in an epic journey.

He married Sun Yat-sen's sister-in-law,

Sun Me-ling.

She came from a wealthy Methodist family.

She had gone to school in the United States,

and her English was excellent.

Her charm was a valuable asset to Zhang,

for he was a difficult, aloof man

who gained respect but not affection.

To many, especially in the cities,

it seemed a new era was beginning.

People were more open to the West than ever.

Zhang's government began modernization programs.

The modernization is the way

{n8}we keep our ancient tradition of virtues.

But we adopt Western technologies.

And Western modern social science,

in a way, brought to the poor.

Specifically, I noticed the medicine,

the building of new hospitals.

It was a time of construction.

Transportation and communications were modernized.

The currency system began to be unified.

Education was expanded.

Chiang Kai-shek appointed Chen Li-fu, a top advisor.

I organized and modernized the party.

We made it impossible for the Communists to operate.

I used American techniques.

They used Soviet techniques.

Vast security organizations were set up.

A top priority was to prevent

renewed Communist growth in the cities,

where remnants of the party had gone underground.

Shen Zui worked for the security police.

We knew they were Communists by their speeches,

their posters, or the articles they wrote.

Or if we searched their homes, we'd find Communist papers.

That was the correct way.

But if we had doubts, we'd say,

better to kill an innocent one by mistake

rather than let a bad one go.

After all, they were fighting the nationalists for power.

In spite of the security police,

the Communists began to rebuild support in cities

where working conditions were often brutal.

In factories, child labor was common.

In silk production,

very young children worked plucking cocoons from boiling water.

I came to Shanghai when I was 12.

We were so miserable.

You had to work 17 hours a day.

Later, a progressive worker in the factory

{n8}told us that people were not born to be poor.

{n8}One was poor because of the exploitation by others.

There is exploitation by the capitalist on one hand,

and exploitation by the labor contractor on the other.

You do the work and he takes the money.

I had no idea what revolution meant.

All I thought was that the worker made sense,

and that he cared about us poor people.

Well, he said, there is a country

where there is no oppression and no exploitation,

where everybody has a job and food.

All we dreamed of then was of having food.

So when we heard of this country, we wondered where it was.

If only our country could be like that.

That's what we hoped for.

So we liked to listen to him,

and we felt we could do whatever he told us.

We would follow him even if we had to risk our lives.

What country was that?

He wouldn't tell us which country it was.

It wasn't until later we knew that

what he referred to was the Soviet Union.

Chinese communist leaders believed that the revolution would be led,

as Marx had written, by workers in the cities.

But a small group in the party believed

the key to revolution lay in the countryside,

where most of China's people lived.

This renegade group was based in Jiangxi Province.

It was led by Mao Zedong.

Mao came from a prosperous peasant family.

He was a founding member of the Communist Party.

He had worked with the nationalists at the Military Academy in Canton,

training students to organize peasants.

After Chiang Kai-shek's purge, Mao returned to the countryside.

By 1927, he and a small group were

organizing peasants in Jiangxi Province.

Conditions made the area fertile ground

for communist activities.

In South China, there were huge gaps

between rich and poor.

Rents were high,

and taxes were often collected decades in advance.

Landlords were called the masters of the earth.

One of the four tyrant landlords

by the name of Zhou came to our house

{n8}and saw my 15-year-old sister and took her to be his wife.

He not only wanted to take my sister,

he also wanted me to be his maid.

I was only seven.

My father refused.

So he demanded one thousand silver dollars

to buy a maid instead.

My father didn't know what to do.

Rather than let me be a maid,

my father sold me as a child bride.

{n8}People told me if I joined the revolution,

{n8}I would have my freedom.

I could choose who I wanted to marry.

If I didn't join,

I'd have to marry this man who was over 30.

So I thought if revolution could save me from this,

I would join.

The communists organized peasant associations

and began social reforms.

Their actions unleashed pent-up hatred of local landlords,

and violent class struggles soon erupted.

We smashed the landlord's opium pipes

and took away his grain and clothes.

We started looking for his money.

The landlord wasn't home.

His wife was hiding in the attic where rice straw was stored.

We found her.

We questioned her for several days,

and then we killed her.

We gave the grain to those who had nothing to eat.

Some got about 50 pounds, some got 100.

We gave the clothes to those who just didn't have any,

so the poor were really eager to join us.

By 1930, the communists had set up a government in Jiangxi.

Mao had joined forces with Zhu De,

another veteran revolutionary.

Their men formed the Red Army,

which Liu Han Shao joined.

I often saw Chairman Mao.

He was tall and thin.

When he went out, he rode a white horse.

We didn't have cars then.

{n8}When he went to work, he would be followed by eight security guards,

three to carry lanterns and two to carry his lunchbox.

He wouldn't eat in someone's home.

He took his meals wherever he went.

Sometimes, when there was a meeting,

he would stand on a mound and shout slogans.

He would shout, Advance to Nanjiang!

Advance to Nanqing!

Take Jankai Shek alive!

Although the communist area was relatively small

Many nationalists were frightened by the violent events there.

Jankai Shek was concerned.

The people under attack, the middle and upper classes,

were the base of his support.

He launched a series of military campaigns in Jiangxi.

They were defeated.

Our main forces would lure their troops,

lure them into the mountains.

Like we did in the battle at Longang.

We would lure them in and then pull back.

This is called pulling back your fist before you strike.

It was like drawing them into a bag.

{n8}And suddenly we'd surround them and wipe them out.

Understand?

We'd lure the enemy deep, deep into the Soviet area.

And then suddenly surround them.

We wiped out their 18th division this way.

All 9,000 of them from the commander down to the cooks.

Not one escaped.

This is called mobile, or guerrilla warfare.

Jiang's forces were defeated by these guerrilla tactics four times,

but he continued to attack.

In 1934,

he launched an ideological offensive called the New Life Movement,

a mixture of traditional Confucian values and European fascism.

He hoped to create a disciplined and orderly society

by reforming social behavior.

People were instructed to button their clothes,

stand straight, and not to eat noisily.

The movement only reached a small section of the middle class,

and failed to solve the peasants' problems.

But Jiang's fifth military campaign was a success.

In an all-out effort,

Jiang had gathered nearly one million soldiers

and all the military machinery he could muster.

And he changed tactics.

{n8}We adopted the tactic of moving step by step.

{n8}The stronghold tactic, do you understand?

For instance, I could walk 20 miles a day,

but instead of 20, I would only do 10.

Then I would stop and dig trenches and build blockhouses.

Since the Communists didn't have cannons,

they couldn't take well-defended blockhouses.

So our troops worked very hard to build them,

and we wouldn't advance until a place was firmly in our control.

This was how we tightened our stranglehold on the Communists.

As the Nationalists began their new tactics,

the Communists changed theirs.

That was when our Party made

one of its biggest mistakes.

The biggest.

What happened was that the Communist International

sent an adviser, Li De.

{n8}Whose original name was Otto Braun.

He claimed that the golden age of guerrilla warfare was over.

And that it was now time to develop positional and regular warfare.

When Mao heard this,

he realized that he and Li De would never agree.

And after that,

Mao didn't go to any more meetings of the military committee.

Communist Party leaders supported Otto Braun,

the German Comintern representative.

Mao lost his position as head of the government,

and his guerrilla tactics were abandoned.

{n8}Then we used blockhouse warfare

{n8}to deal with their blockhouse warfare.

It was tit for tat,

but of course it didn't work.

They had planes and cannons.

We had nothing.

So the Communist area shrank and shrank.

The Nationalists were winning.

The Communists had already lost much popular support

because of their violent class struggle.

By the summer of 1934,

they were losing badly.

We were being killed off.

The revolution wasn't plain sailing.

They were people who wavered and were traitors.

They saw the situation was going from bad to worse,

and they changed with the wind.

Communist organizers were arrested by the Nationalists.

A Nationalist official wanted to bail me out of prison

to force me to be his concubine.

I didn't want to, but they threatened me, saying,

if you won't, we'll put a firecracker in your vagina

and light it.

Aren't you afraid?

Sitting or standing, I was just as tall as anyone else.

Why should I be someone's concubine?

I didn't want to, but what could I do?

Finally, they took a red hot wire this long

and forced it through my leg.

One from this side, and then from that side.

They put the hot wire through my leg.

I still have the scars.

I was hung up by the arms.

I was tortured three times, and then they let me down.

I was too numb to feel any pain.

My interrogation went on

from 9 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon.

Then they dragged me back to my cell and said,

tomorrow we'll send a platoon of soldiers and rape you to death.

That really frightened me.

I wasn't afraid of being killed,

but how could I stand being raped?

Though they were just threatening me,

they really made it look real.

When I was taken out the next morning,

there really was a platoon of soldiers waiting.

The officer said, just look at those men.

If you don't confess,

you'll be raped to death, right here.

I said, I don't know who is a communist,

and I'm not a communist leader.

I'm just a laundry woman.

I didn't tell them a thing, and in the end,

they sent me to the concentration camp at Jojang.

They never got anything out of my mouth.

In October 1934,

nearly 87,000 communists

broke out of the nationalist blockade.

They began a forced retreat

which became known to the world

as the Long March.

For over a year,

they walked an average of 17 miles a day,

often through hostile territory.

Nationalist troops chased them much of the time.

The soldiers crossed 24 rivers

and climbed 18 mountain ranges.

And they walked more than 6,000 miles.

For the survivors,

it is remembered as one enormous battle

going on forever.

By the time we got to the Xiang River,

we had lost half our troops.

We lost 30,000 to 40,000 people.

They weren't battle casualties.

We lost them on the road.

We were on the march day and night.

Everyone was complaining bitterly.

We didn't know where we were going.

Chairman Mao was out of power.

He marched with the troops.

{n8}When they reached Zuni, meetings were held.

Otto Braun and his supporters claimed that

the nationalists had won because they were stronger.

Mao said it was because Braun's tactics were wrong.

For the first time,

Zhou Enlai openly sided with Mao.

Zhou Enlai disagreed.

Zhou did not think we had lost because of the enemy's strength,

but because of our own strategic and tactical mistakes

since we had won in the past.

Then Mao spoke.

The atmosphere was calm.

Everyone was reasonable.

In the end, most decided that Li De and Bo Gu were wrong.

Most people agreed with Mao's ideas.

And wanted Mao as our leader on the long march.

We were so happy.

We called an officers' meeting.

We had a meal, two dishes.

We were banging on the tables with our chopsticks.

Yeah, yeah, banging on the tables.

We were so happy we were dancing.

We supported Mao.

That's what it was like, I'm telling you.

The meeting was a victory

for Mao and his belief in guerrilla tactics.

He became the leader of the long march,

and soon of the entire Communist Party.

Otto Braun lost his influence.

From this time on, the Chinese Communists

received virtually no help from the Soviet Union.

The march went on.

The soldiers continued to face the threat of relentless

nationalist attack and nature,

which was often just as lethal.

When they crossed the snowy mountains,

most of the troops who came from the south

were completely unprepared.

It was snowing,

and there were hail storms.

I had to stop because it was too slippery,

and if I fell off the edge, it would be all over.

And it would be easy to fall off.

So I decided to take my shoes off and walk barefoot.

When my feet touched the snow, ah,

it was impossible.

The coldness started from my feet,

and slowly climbed up my legs.

My legs went numb.

I couldn't walk.

Then I saw Yan Chenqing.

He was wearing a pair of straw sandals,

and he had an extra pair.

He couldn't stop walking,

so he just threw the sandals to me and kept going.

By then, the cold was already up to here.

When it gets to your heart,

you die.

After I put on the straw sandals,

I stabbed my feet for a few minutes.

And I could feel my legs again,

and I could walk.

I still have a photo of us.

If it weren't for him,

I'd have died in 35,

in the snowy mountains.

Hundreds did die of cold,

altitude sickness and exhaustion.

The shared hardships forged

firm bonds between the soldiers

and earned Mao unswerving loyalty.

Mao Zedong gave me his ration to eat.

Three little steamed buns in a little bowl this big.

At first, I didn't know that it was Mao's.

In one bite, I ate two of them.

When I found out it was his meal, I stopped eating.

He said, you must eat.

You still have to march.

He forced me to eat the last one.

So Mao was very kind,

very kind to his subordinates.

He took good care of us.

The army now had to cross the grasslands.

More people died here than on any other part of the march.

{n8}There was nothing there, absolutely nothing.

As far as you could see, all there was

was marsh, the endless marsh.

No trees, no houses, nothing.

Stepping on the grass was like stepping on bean curd.

It was soft.

From time to time, someone stepped in the wrong spot

and fell into the mud.

If he fell in up to here, it was all over.

When the mud was up to your chest, no one could save you.

You could die at any second, you just couldn't tell.

We finally got hold of a newspaper

and learned that there was a communist base

in northern Chanxi province.

It was only then that we decided to go there.

We needed to rest and regroup.

We knew it was extremely poor there,

but we had nowhere else to go.

The communists reached Yan'an,

the end of the long march,

in the fall of 1935.

95 % of the Red Army had been lost.

But Mao didn't lose confidence.

He asked us a question.

Although there are now only six or seven thousand of us left,

are we stronger or weaker than before?

His answer was that we were stronger.

He said the people who remained were gold.

Chiang Kai-shek had nearly wiped out the communists.

But he faced another threat,

a foreign threat,

which many considered more dangerous than the communists,

Japan.

For years, Japan had economic interests

in North China and Manchuria.

Throughout the 1920s,

it expanded its interests and defended them

with increasingly hostile military activity.

Japan's aim was to colonize China.

The Japanese posed the greatest threat

to the warlord of the region,

Zhang Shuliang.

Zhang Shuliang was one of the most powerful men in China.

He was the General Isimo's second-in-command,

and he retained his own huge, well-equipped army.

In September 1931,

the Japanese attacked Zhang Shuliang's troops.

We bore the brunt of the attack.

The brigade commander gave orders.

{n8}First, he telephoned me and asked me about the situation.

{n8}Then he gave the order, don't resist.

You are not permitted to resist.

I pointed out that the enemy had already begun to attack.

He said then,

collect the soldiers' weapons and hide them in the storehouse.

I said that there was no way

I could collect the soldiers' weapons and hide them

when the enemy was shelling us.

He said, then why don't you withdraw?

I said, I have only received an order to offer no resistance.

I have no order to withdraw.

He said, it would be better if you withdraw,

otherwise you will be held responsible.

Then the phone was cut off.

The Chinese troops did not resist,

and the Japanese quickly seized control of all of Manchuria.

Chiang Kai-shek, afraid the Japanese military would crush China,

had chosen a policy of non-resistance.

His deputy commander, Chang Shuliang,

protested the situation.

Many held him responsible.

Others believed he had received orders from Chiang Kai-shek,

and they blamed the government.

We should have resisted.

If I had been brigade commander,

I would not have withdrawn.

I would have resisted,

resisted until daylight.

When a foreign army attacks the cities of another country in broad daylight,

I don't think that can be justified to the world.

We have a saying, an army is maintained for a thousand days

to be used for one.

Why didn't they fight?

I was very angry.

The Japanese used Chinese protests

as an excuse to attack Chiang Kai.

This time,

there was hard-fought resistance.

Hello, everybody. This is Clyde Gibbons speaking.

This was the last stand,

the last barricade of the Chinese forces of the 19th Route Army,

that opposed the advance of the Japanese marines through these ruins.

Hardly a month ago,

families lived in these places, fathers, mothers and children.

This was all that they had in the world.

In that part of Shanghai occupied by the Japanese,

all means of communication are being destroyed.

All Chinese found in this quarter

are forced to undergo a thorough search as snipers.

Possession of arms is taken as conclusive evidence of guilt,

and the punishment is certain death.

A ceasefire was declared in Shanghai,

but prospects for peace were dim.

On March 1, 1932,

Japan set up a puppet government in Manchuria,

which they renamed Manchukuo.

They installed the former boy emperor, Pu Yi,

now a young man, as head of state.

The Chinese were angered and humiliated by the Japanese attacks,

and by the government's response.

These feelings were expressed in demonstrations, the arts,

{n8}and in feature films.

But demonstrations against Japan

were quickly suppressed by the government.

Chiang Kai-shek was afraid these disturbances

would provoke another attack,

which China would not survive.

We weren't ready.

We couldn't let a little event trigger a war between China and Japan

before we were ready to fight.

{n8}The best way out was to persuade the Japanese

{n8}to give up the idea of invasion.

We tried everything.

The nationalist policy was that to resist foreign aggression,

the country first needs internal pacification.

{n8}This was stated by Chiang Kai-shek,

{n8}and it was in all the papers.

It was absolutely necessary to wipe out the communists

before we could fight Japan.

Mao and Zhu De knew that Jiang would strike

while they were still weak from the long march.

In an effort to prevent this

and to harness popular anti-Japanese feelings,

Mao called for the nationalists

to unite with the communists against Japan.

Mao declared,

we cannot even discuss communism

if we are robbed of a country in which to practice it.

But Jiang continued his plans to attack the communists.

Again, Jiang Shuliang,

seen here next to Jiang, disagreed.

He and his men only wanted to fight Japan

to recover their homeland.

But they could not make the generalissimo change his mind.

In December 1936,

in a desperate act which shocked the country,

Jiang Shuliang ordered his commander kidnapped.

Sun Ming-ju and some heavily armed soldiers

stormed Chiang Kai-shek's residence.

When I got to the bedroom, I saw that it was a mess

and no one was there.

{n8}I felt Chiang Kai-shek's bed. It was still warm,

{n8}so I knew he hadn't been gone long.

So we went up, and behind the hill,

I saw him squeezed between two rocks.

It was a spot that everyone called Tigerstone Rock.

He was standing there.

He was very frightened.

His face was covered with dirt.

He was in pajamas because

he hadn't had time to get dressed.

I saluted and said, please, Generalissimo, come quickly.

I was afraid that someone might shoot him.

I felt a heavy responsibility.

The day he was kidnapped,

{n8}our Central Committee immediately held meetings.

In the evening, we held an emergency meeting.

Everyone was trying to figure out how to save him.

Madam Chiang flew to Xi'an.

Chiang Kai-shek feared he would be put on trial

and executed.

If anything should happen to Mr. Chiang,

no one in China would be able to fight Japan.

Nobody would be able to stop Japan.

And the Japanese would certainly march into China.

That would be certain.

No one would resist.

All China watched

as his fate hung in the balance.

Shanghai, China,

the Paris of the Orient.

In newsreels of the 1920s and 30s,

life here looked fun.

An exotic mix of East and West.

The reality of China was different.

Most Chinese lived in the country,

but their lives continued largely untouched by the 20th century.

But the people of China were about to be engulfed

in years of violent conflict.

Years which would dramatically change

their country and their lives.

In these years,

China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek,

faced two major threats to his power.

The Communists, led by Mao Zedong,

and the Japanese.

They controlled most of North China

and planned a full-scale invasion.

Many Chinese demanded that

Chiang's government fight Japanese aggression,

but he was afraid the Japanese military would crush China,

and he refused.

In December 1936,

anti-Japanese feeling boiled over

and created an astonishing crisis.

Chiang Kai-shek's deputy,

in an effort to force his commander to resist Japan,

kidnapped him.

New thunder over China,

a storm which the world fears.

Through the TV faces the shocking news of the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek.

Who is given credit for unifying the nation.

Some say the most ominous kidnapping in history

which threatens world catastrophe.

As the world waited,

Madam Chiang flew to be with her husband.

Zhou Enlai, for the Communists,

went to help negotiate.

The negotiations went on day after day.

Finally, Chiang was released.

Everyone had recognized

that he was the only man who could lead the country.

And he had at last agreed

to work with his old enemies, the Communists.

Against Japan.

It was the beginning of the United Front.

Mao Zedong's Communists

and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists

would stand up to Japanese aggression together.

Here's where it started.

The Marco Polo Bridge,

a few miles southwest of Beijing.

On July 7, 1937,

fighting broke out on this bridge

between Chinese and Japanese troops.

Within days,

Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China.

It was the beginning of World War II in Asia.

The Japanese easily overpowered United Chinese Resistance.

They took Beijing in days,

and then Tianjin.

The Japanese swept inland.

In October 1937,

they arrived outside Mehua Village,

a few miles from these scenes.

Japanese devils entered our village from the west side.

{n8}They started killing and burning their way through the village.

{n8}They were just brutal.

They killed 46 families

and even every animal they saw.

Then they got to my home.

We were hiding in the cellar.

Japanese devils shot into the cellar.

We children all cried.

I want to get out. I want to get out.

When my father got up,

three devils stripped him to the waist and tied him up.

He was tied up with more than 10 other men.

I was putting the pit.

It was full of people.

They'd been there a long time.

The Japanese kept bringing more and more people.

I was there for hours.

Later, about another 200 people were pushed in.

The pit was full.

Bullets were whistling.

A bullet hit my hand.

It felt numb and hot.

It didn't hurt.

It didn't move.

It got dark and ran away.

The Japanese killed and burned for three days and nights.

Then they left.

My grandfather and mother started looking for my father's body.

They found it in that big pit.

There were bullet holes in his chest.

He was killed by the Japanese devils.

When I got home, I pushed the door open.

It was quiet.

No one was there.

I wondered what had happened to them.

I looked everywhere and I couldn't find them.

I went outside.

I saw that there was fresh earth in the courtyard.

I thought someone must be buried in it.

And I went over to the well.

The winch had been torn out.

People were in there, too.

I asked a couple of people to help me.

I found my grandmother, mother,

and two sons buried in the earth.

I pulled my wife and three-year-old out of the well.

I hadn't seen them for just a few days.

And now none of them could ever talk to me again.

It was too horrible.

I buried them.

That's all.

I was bombarded.

There were huge civilian casualties.

Nationalist troops fought hard,

but they were forced to retreat.

Shanghai fell in November 1937.

In just five months,

the Japanese had captured half of China's seaboard.

Chiang Kai-shek and his wife appealed to the world for support.

To you, who are enjoying the serenity

and security of your own homes,

I wish to bring a message

from the women of war-ridden China.

It is this.

If you wish to avoid the calamities

that are befalling China now,

and the killings and mutilation

of your loved ones, and your fellow beings,

boycott Japanese goods.

The battle for the capital, Nanking, was fierce.

Again, the Japanese overpowered

nationalist resistance.

In December 1937,

the Japanese entered the city,

and they began to butcher civilians.

An estimated 200,000 men, women, and children were massacred.

It was called the Rape of Nanking.

By June 1938, Chiang was desperate.

He ordered the dikes of the Yellow River broken,

hoping the flood would stop the Japanese forces.

The people in the area were not warned.

For them, it was catastrophic.

Eleven cities and thousands of villages were flooded.

Millions were made homeless.

Hundreds of thousands died.

And the Japanese continued.

They had taken all of Chiang Kai-shek's power base.

Now he adopted classical military strategy

to trade space for time.

Taking advantage of China's huge size,

the government and the army retreated thousands of miles inland.

Schools, universities, and businesses followed.

And people.

From all over occupied China,

millions left their homes and fled in a massive exodus.

The government moved to Chongqing in Sichuan Province.

It was a remote, undeveloped region ruled by warlords

and had never been under Chiang's control.

The Japanese bombed Chongqing for weeks at a time.

The war effort was hopelessly undersupplied and underfunded.

Chiang shored up his government with propaganda and parades.

To boost morale,

Madame Chiang Kai-shek toured hospitals and orphanages.

Chongqing held on.

Many other Chinese traveled to the northwest, to Yan'an,

where the Communists had set up their headquarters after the long march.

They came because they wanted to fight Japan,

and because there was a sense here of building the new society.

The atmosphere of these early days is remembered

as one of enthusiasm and exuberance.

The Yan'an spirit.

Yan'an was still small enough

that most people had contact with the leadership.

Mao was developing some of his most

important theoretical works.

He was adapting Marxism to conditions in China.

His theories were studied by all who came to Yan'an.

I went to the anti-Japanese university in Yan'an

in the fall of 1938.

We had classes on current affairs, philosophy and so on.

{n8}None of us minded the hard conditions.

{n8}At night we shared huge beds.

Each person had just this little space,

about a foot.

One next to the other.

We got up early in the morning.

We did morning drill and we learned

how to use weapons to fight the Japanese.

The term was only a few months long.

Then we would be sent to the front

and we sang the song.

From Yan'an, the young people were sent to work in villages

throughout North China and Manchuria.

They recruited anyone who would resist Japan.

They also changed the face of North China

by initiating moderate reforms,

reducing land rent and taxes.

They held elections and introduced voting.

The communists carefully built rural middle class support

and they avoided the violent class struggle

they had used in the past.

Our slogan was,

if you have money, give money.

If you have a gun, give your gun.

And if you are healthy, come and fight.

{n8}We didn't attack the rich.

We even allied with landlords

as long as they were not collaborators

and wanted to resist.

I am from a rich farming family.

{n8}When the party started in our area,

{n8}why did they come to us who were upper class?

Because the poor peasants

couldn't afford to give up their work in the fields.

Besides, they were not necessarily more progressive than we were.

Women were the most constrained by tradition.

Even in the early 1940s,

many young girls still had their feet bound

and they were often treated as virtual slaves by their families.

For example, a woman had no rights in her own family.

Since she had no income, she was dependent.

{n8}When someone knocked on the door asking,

{n8}is anyone home?

She would say no.

There is no one here.

See?

She didn't even think of herself as a person.

Wang Xin-lan had married Xiaohua,

a young communist officer.

After work, Xiaohua and I used to walk through

the village holding hands.

Sometimes after dinner, we would just sit there

talking and laughing.

They were very envious.

They said,

you must have done a lot of good in your previous life

for God to have given you such a good husband.

I said, that's got nothing to do with it.

It's because women like me have changed our political status.

We are independent people.

Among us, men and women are equal.

We are equal even though he is the husband and I am the wife.

We tried to explain this to them.

It was all very surprising to them.

The Communist call to fight Japan,

combined with their moderate social reforms,

had a powerful appeal.

Throughout North China,

the party established a solid base of support.

And the resistance they organized

was effective.

Liang Yong-hung describes how he and a friend

ambushed a Japanese regiment which came to their village.

These two areas had more than ten landmines.

When the enemy came, we triggered the mines.

{n8}They got blown up on both sides.

{n8}We wouldn't let the bastards get away.

The enemy came towards us

and the two of us were really happy.

The guy with me was called Feng He.

I said, what about it, Feng He?

You get the officer.

I'll get the guy over there.

Feng He aimed at the Japanese officer.

Bang!

He got him right in the head.

He killed over.

I pulled my trigger.

Bang!

Got another one.

The enemy sent a regiment with 100 carts.

They came to take our wheat, but we didn't lose any.

Their carts didn't go back empty though.

They carried the bodies of 60 dead devils.

The Japanese responded to communist resistance

with a campaign of terror

called Burn All, Kill All, Loot All.

They decimated any village with communist connections

and fragmented communist control of the region.

The communists and nationalists

were still officially fighting Japan together,

bound by the United Front.

But there were frequent clashes between the two sides.

In January 1941,

nationalist forces suddenly attacked a communist unit.

The unit was wiped out.

It was the end of the United Front.

Mao sent a message to Chiang Kai-shek.

Those who play with fire ought to be careful.

If things continue to develop this way,

all the people of the country will throw you into the gutter.

Chiang's response to a journalist was,

the Japanese are a disease of the skin,

the communists are a disease of the heart.

Chung King,

the Japanese continued to bomb

Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital.

By December 1941,

the war had been going on for nearly five years.

Nationalist armies had taken beating after beating.

Japan was winning the war.

{n8}Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,

{n8}and the United States declared war on Japan.

I knew then that Japan was bound to be defeated,

bound to lose the war.

{n8}Today, we, the people of the United States,

{n8}fighting a desperate rearguard action against the Japs,

grimly realize that our future depends upon

holding a fighting China as our ally.

Well, may we ponder what might happen

if China should fall,

if the full force of Japan now deadlocked in China

were released to strike into India,

into Australia, into Mexico

or Canada, or California.

Despite the propaganda,

the Allies gave China low priority.

They were struggling to survive the war in Europe.

General Joseph Stilwell was named

the top American commander in China.

Stilwell had lived in China, and he spoke the language.

His job was to keep China in the war

and improve its fighting capacity.

He commanded Chinese troops,

and he believed that, properly trained,

they would be among the best in the world.

But he railed against the Nationalist command.

He would speak in expletives to me

about the Chinese generalship,

because he would find them pigheaded,

{n8}vacillating, they'd change their mind.

And again, Chiang would not want to commit

a large force

to gain an objective.

He would send it in in dribblets,

and it would then be consumed by the Japanese in dribblets.

{n8}Stilwell found that

{n8}the General Isamo was unwilling

{n8}to commit his troops against the Japanese

because he was saving them

for use against the Chinese communists.

He had 500,000 of his best troops

blockading the area occupied by the Chinese communists.

Stilwell soon saw the Chinese war effort

was hampered by another problem,

corruption.

It started at the top with Chiang's inner circle,

his wife's family and a handful of his oldest friends.

They controlled the economy

and made enormous profits from their positions.

Chiang himself was never accused of corruption,

but he did nothing to stop it,

and it spread to all levels in the Nationalist government.

Those it hurt most were the ordinary soldiers

Stilwell was trying to command.

Conscripts were treated brutally.

They were afraid we would run away,

so they would tie five or six men together on the same rope.

That's how we traveled.

We were strung up in groups.

I saw hundreds of our conscripts

{n8}strung up and pulled along on ropes.

At night, to stop them running away,

they tied their legs.

I saw it with my own eyes.

The Nationalists had corrupt officers.

They put sand in the rice to replace what they had taken.

We ate moldy rice with a lot of sand in it.

They said we were drafted to fight Japan

and defend our homeland.

If they really meant it,

why didn't they give us food and clothes?

Why was there corruption?

Poverty.

If America didn't have enough food and clothing,

corruption would exist there too.

As the Chinese saying goes,

only when one has food and clothing will he know ethics.

Nearly one and a half million men

died of starvation or illness

before ever reaching their units.

One out of every ten men drafted during the war.

Stillwell and the foreign service officers filed reports

about nationalist corruption and other problems to no avail.

Nationalist censorship and the American media

bolstered Chiang's image.

Well known to every American is lean, keen

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,

undisputed leader and idol of 450 millions of Chinese.

In 1943,

Madam Zhang visited the United States

and charmed Congress and the public.

Let us not forget

that Japan in her occupied areas today

has greater resources at her command

than Germany.

Let us not forget that

during the first four and a half years

of total aggression,

China has borne Japan's sadistic fury

unaided and alone.

She repeatedly requested

huge amounts of money and supplies for the government.

When the U.S. Treasury expressed reservations,

Chiang threatened to sign a separate peace with Japan.

And so millions of dollars were sent.

No one had to account for the money

and much of it simply disappeared.

To be fair, I must say that in any government,

at any time, there will be situations we don't like.

{n8}Some unfair and illegal behavior.

This can happen in any country,

any government, at any time.

Especially during a period of bad economic conditions

after years of war.

Naturally, some people are tempted by material things.

In August 1944,

a group of American officers flew

deep into northwest China to Yenan.

Anxious to improve China's fighting capacity,

Stilwell and the American government wanted to know

if the Communists could be used effectively in the war.

The Foreign Service officers who went to Yenan

were called the Dixie Mission.

It was the first official Western recognition of the Communists.

My first impressions,

well Mao Zedong was a large,

even then slightly tending towards

a plump individual with a very smooth face,

no facial hair that had been noticed.

And he was not what you would call charismatic.

He was straightforward,

did not dwell on polite phrases at all.

But there was no question that he was the boss.

Everyone was deferential to him,

including people like Zhou Enlie and Zhu De.

They looked to him and when he spoke,

no dog barked.

Mao was now the undisputed leader of the Communists.

The year before,

Mao Zedong thought had become their official ideology.

No criticism of Communist Party policies was tolerated.

The Communists wanted to create a good impression,

for they wanted American help

in the immediate struggle against Japan,

and they hoped for long-term support

when the war was over.

The American officers spent a year in Yenan

assessing the Communists' organization

and their military potential.

Apart from a few Russian advisers,

they saw no evidence of Soviet support.

With full US government approval,

the Americans instructed the Communists

on strategy and weaponry.

They watched guerrilla tactics.

They traveled out from Yenan

and watched the Communists attack Japanese blockhouses.

They saw that the Communists controlled huge areas

in the countryside of North and Central China.

Patrick Hurley,

President Roosevelt's personal representative, visited.

His mission was to mediate between Chiang and the Communists.

When Hurley arrived in Yenan,

the plane sat down and the door was flung open.

And there stood Hurley in his Major General's uniform,

glistening in his white mustachios and his six feet three.

And he let out a Choctaw war hoop.

And of course, the Chinese were much too courteous

to stand and say, what goes on?

They just... I suppose

they assumed that this is the way foreign devils behave

when they appear upon a scene somewhere.

China was a very complex phenomenon,

and it really baffled him, I think.

He had great difficulty with identifying

who the various Chinese were.

He had... Mao Zedong was Mu Stang,

and the nicknames that grew up there

in an attempt to identify people

was a very clear indication that he really was

somewhat at sea, shall we say.

Despite cordial appearances,

Hurley's mediation went badly

and led to deep Communist mistrust of him.

Hurley supported Chiang Kai-shek

and did not seem to take the Communists seriously.

The Foreign Service officers made a different assessment.

I reported on the Communists,

after my visit there,

that I thought that

they would probably win in China.

And the reason I think that

that would happen is that they had popular support.

I mentioned, I think, at the time that

they were a democratic force.

That was a misnomer.

They were a popular force,

and they had popular support,

and only in that sense were they democratic.

Relations between Chiang and Stilwell

were deteriorating.

Stilwell, on behalf of the American government,

demanded that Chiang make sweeping changes in his army.

Stilwell talked about the bad things in Chiang's government,

and Chiang's arrogance.

He also asked that

part of Chiang's troops be placed

under his direct control,

and that Americans be appointed high-ranking officers.

Chiang Kai-shek did not accept that.

But all those were not the main disagreements.

The biggest disagreement was that Stilwell wanted

to send weapons to the Communists

to arm Communist troops,

which was the last thing Chiang Kai-shek wanted.

Chiang demanded Stilwell's recall.

John Davies asked for a transfer.

Almost every American officer

with in-depth experience in China

was fired or resigned.

Chiang now had undisputed control of China's war effort.

Stilwell was replaced by General Wedemeyer,

who was much more sympathetic to Chiang.

And the war with Japan was soon to be over.

In August 1945,

the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,

and the Japanese surrendered.

In the victory celebrations,

Chiang was the hero of China.

But the quick end of the war

left an important question unresolved.

Who would take the Japanese surrender in North China?

The Communists raced to get their armies north.

Nationalist troops were airlifted by America

to arrive first.

General Lu Zheng-cao remembers

what Mao said about Chiang Kai-shek.

He wants to come down the mountain to harvest peaches.

That's what Mao said.

{n8}Our people and our army had made great sacrifices

{n8}behind the Japanese lines.

So we wanted to take the surrender in those areas.

I rode all night back to the front.

You couldn't say we were harvesting peaches,

but we did want to taste a few.

Civil war seemed inevitable.

Patrick Hurley, now U.S. ambassador in China,

persuaded Mao to go to Chunking for talks with Chiang.

The two men had not met in nearly 20 years

since the days of Sun Yat-sen in Canton.

Zheng addressed Mao as elder brother

and Mao made the toast long live Chiang Kai-shek.

But the talks led nowhere.

President Truman did not give up.

He sent General George Marshall to mediate.

An agreement was signed

and then quickly broke down.

The Civil War began.

At first, it went badly for the Communists.

In March 1947, Mao announced to his troops

that they would withdraw from Yenan

because of a successful nationalist advance.

But Yenan was only a symbol

and not the base of their power.

Their real power lay in the vast

countryside of North China and Manchuria.

It had been built up during the war with Japan

when moderate reforms had attracted support

from all economic levels of society.

Now the Communist leadership decided

to expand their support by concentrating on the poor.

They launched a radical land reform movement,

attacking their old allies in the prosperous middle class.

{n8}In Li Lao Chi's house,

{n8}we first drove out his cattle and pigs.

Then we took all the furniture,

cabinets and trunks out of his house.

We took all his clothes, too.

After that, we shut him up in a small room

and told him to write a confession.

Then the people wanted to struggle with him.

They shouted, Li Lao Chi, you must confess honestly.

Who did you exploit?

How much money have you piled up?

Where have you hidden it?

You must confess.

We struggled with him for a long time.

He had buried his silver dollars underground.

We got him to confess where he had hidden the money.

As the poor divided up the land of the prosperous,

many communists were torn between

the demands of the party and of their families.

Even veteran party members were attacked.

{n8}When the reforms came, you had to go along with them.

{n8}Because I was a party member, I had to take the lead.

My parents didn't agree with me.

Even though they were in charge of the family property,

they had to listen to me.

{n8}At the time of the land reform, my family had a new cart,

a horse, a donkey and about five acres of land.

We had a large family and enough food.

And so one night they sealed up our house.

All the landlords and rich peasants

were locked up in one spot before the mass rally.

I went and saw the situation was no good.

I was afraid the struggle meeting might go wild.

I was scared.

The meeting began.

My father was Wang De, and they tied him to a post.

Everyone in the village was there, and then they went crazy.

Some innocent people got beaten

and some bad people got beaten.

Village leaders tried to control the mob.

They even sat on the landlords to keep them from being torn apart.

What they did was wrong.

They ignored the facts.

If you weren't poor, if you were better off,

then you were guilty.

That's how they reasoned.

Land reform had become mob rule.

It tore families and villages apart.

The communists began to lose support.

In December 1947,

Mao urged restraint.

Five months later, the movement was stopped.

The communists tried to minimize the damage

and backtrack to their moderate wartime policies.

They managed to salvage peasant support.

In the cities,

people's lives had not improved after the war.

Massive economic problems were undercutting Chiang's support.

The government's financial policies were chaotic.

{n8}The currency system changed many times.

The old Fabi paper money was changed

to the new Fabi paper money.

Then that was changed to the gold yuan.

Then, when there weren't enough gold yuan,

it was changed to the yuan-shikai silver dollars.

It was also gold,

and even American dollars were used.

The currency system was in complete chaos.

So when people got paid in the morning,

they would rush to buy things,

because prices would rise by the afternoon.

Sometimes the price would double.

People had a rough time.

The homeless and starving filled city streets.

Black market trading and corruption were widespread.

To make matters worse,

in 1947,

floods in the south destroyed the rice crop.

And in the north, there was a devastating famine.

In response,

the United Nations Relief Agency sent millions of dollars in aid.

America continued to send vast quantities of war surplus

and millions more dollars to help Chiang

in his struggle against the Communists.

Many were certain that Chiang's family

was embezzling huge amounts of this aid.

He and his wife continued to ask for more.

In 1947, President Truman sent Albert Wedemeyer

back to China to assess the situation.

Although it was clear that Chiang's government was corrupt

and losing support,

for America there was no alternative.

Wedemeyer urged Chiang to affect immediate

drastic political and economic reforms.

At the same time,

he recommended more U.S. aid.

{n8}Wedemeyer's recommendation that we continue to support

{n8}the government of Chiang Kai-shek

has to be considered in the context of the times.

The times of the Cold War,

in which the Chinese Communists

seemed to be allied with the Russians.

And the hope that somehow or other

military aid might contribute

to the survival of Chiang Kai-shek's government.

But American aid

could not win the war for Chiang.

He made the crucial mistake of

overextending his forces in the north.

The Communists responded with a change in tactics.

They mounted a major offensive

against the nationalist armies in the cities.

The change of tactics worked.

By November 1948,

after only a month and a half,

the Communists won control of North China.

Nationalist troops were

crossing over to us in divisions and armies.

When we first got to the northeast,

we had a hundred thousand troops.

Now we were four or five hundred thousand strong.

Our equipment all came from the United States

and Chiang Kai-shek.

{n8}There was a joke among the soldiers.

They said that Chiang was our best supplier of American weapons.

That was the joke.

They said that after we win,

we'll give him a medal that weighs a ton.

Because he did such a good job for us.

{n8}After eight years of fighting Japan,

{n8}nobody wanted to fight anymore.

{n8}Even I didn't want to fight anymore.

Chiang Kai-shek reprimanded me.

This war has to be fought.

If we don't wipe out the Communists,

we'll die without a place to be buried.

We've got to go all out.

I couldn't say anything to that.

He was my teacher, my academy commandant.

He had been my commanding officer for many years.

All I could do was obey.

With North China under Communist control,

the battle for Central China began.

Huang Wei led Chiang Kai-shek's cracked 12th Army.

Our movements were slow.

Our equipment was heavy, cumbersome.

We were fighting, retreating,

and bringing up reinforcements simultaneously.

Our formations were beaten back bit by bit.

We would be wiped out in one day,

two days' time.

So I gave the order to flee.

That saved some people.

On December 15,

we broke out in several places.

My deputy commander and I got into a tank and fled.

We fled to a place about 15 miles from Chiang Dui-chi.

That evening, the evening of December 15,

the tank I was in broke down,

couldn't move.

So we got out and fled on foot.

The Communists were everywhere.

And they caught me.

I became their prisoner.

The Nationalists failed

because we completely lost the people's support.

I had heard that during the Northern Expedition,

the people gave us flowers and food.

During the war against Japan,

the people provided intelligence

and helped us resist the Japanese.

Once the Civil War started,

we couldn't find anyone to give us even road directions.

There is a saying in China,

the water that carries the boat

can also overturn it.

On January 21, 1949,

11 days after the battle for central China,

Chiang Kai-shek resigned.

In Shanghai, people were leaving in droves.

Chiang Kai-shek and his government

retreated to the island of Taiwan.

It was carefully planned.

They took a huge part of China's art treasures

and all of the central bank reserves.

U.S. aid followed.

The last shipments of arms and ammunition

were sent to Taiwan, not to China.

The government of Chiang Kai-shek

had already made its preparations

for transfer to Taiwan.

So we never stopped supporting Chiang Kai-shek.

Chiang did not give up all hope.

{n8}My father's first order was for us to examine

our past mistakes, both domestic and international.

Secondly, we should prepare to recover the mainland.

He never said we should fight our way back.

What we should do was help the people on the mainland

overthrow the regime.

So we've been making preparations based on this order

since the first day in Taiwan.

The war continued without Chiang Kai-shek.

The communists prepared to cross the Yangtze River,

heading for Nanking and Shanghai.

They quickly overcame nationalist defenses.

With the communists just outside Shanghai,

the remaining nationalist police

stepped up their anti-communist activities.

My husband had been arrested by the nationalists,

and I couldn't find him.

{n8}I was both happy and worried at the same time.

Happy because the revolution would soon succeed.

That was obvious.

And worried because my husband had been arrested,

and we didn't know where he was.

On October 1, 1949,

we listened to the radio.

We heard the ceremony of the founding of

the People's Republic of China.

Chairman Mao proclaimed

that the Chinese people had stood up.

All of us were overjoyed.

We jumped around.

We were really proud and happy.

My daughters were very young.

They asked why there was so much excitement.

I told them they would understand

when they were older.

As for me, it was the day

I'd been working for all my life.

October 1st,

I was locked up in the war criminals' prison.

I had no desire to go on living,

but I couldn't just die.

I was very stubborn.

I really couldn't change the way I thought.

So I was locked up in thought reform

for 27 years.

This man, I think he was a great man.

He was a hero.

But his methods were the old ones of China.

And he lost.

I put my life on the line for him.

In the end, I was buried alive for him.

You could say I was loyal to him to the end.

Loyal to the end.

I felt happy on the one hand

because I had been looking forward to liberation so much.

And I had come at last.

On the other hand, I felt sad.

For my husband was dead.

But then we thought that people always die in revolution.

No death, no victory.

{n8}Subtitles by Andante

Major funding for this program

was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Additional funding was provided by

the John Dee and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And the New York Council for the Humanities.

This is PBS.