Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
had removed the wooden planking. Large numbers of KMT troops
waited on the other side of the bridge, ready to resist any Communist
troops who attempted to cross it. At great odds and with enormous
casualties, the Long Marchers captured and crossed the bridge and
moved on.
The Long March finally ended in Shaanxi province in October 1935,
and by 1936 the Communists had holed up in the town of Yan'an, a
strategically important area that was nearly impossible to bomb from
the air because the dwellings were dug into the faces of nearly vertical
cliffs. There the Chinese Communists remained headquartered until
the end of World War II in August 1945, beyond the reach of Japanese
and KMT foes alike. The time in Yan'an was a breather for Mao, and
there he received foreign sympathizers, gave interviews to adventur-
ous American journalists, wrote theoretical essays, fine-tuned his
ideology, and regained his lost weight.
THE XI'AN INCIDENT AND THE SECOND UNITED FRONT
The KMT government of Chiang Kai-shek was, of course, not con-
tent to allow Mao and the Communists to remain unchallenged in
Yan'an. Because the approaches to Yan'an were heavily defended,
Chiang blockaded the entire area around the town to starve the Com-
munists out by choking off their supplies. He also continued his cam-
paign of hunting down other pockets of Communist activity in China
and violently eliminating them.
This did not always play well in Chinese public opinion. Many
Chinese who otherwise had reservations about the Chinese Communist
movement wondered why, during Japan's ongoing invasion of China,
Chiang was intent on ignoring the Japanese and killing large numbers
of his own Chinese people who happened to be Communists. Was not
an invasion by foreigners a greater threat and shame than insurrection
by a few thousand misguided rebels? By late December 1935, students
in Beiping and Shanghai were protesting against the anti-Communist
campaigns. Their simple insistence that “Chinese must not kill
Chinese” had a direct and powerful appeal to large segments of the
Chinese public, including the very military units in Shaanxi that were
manning the blockades and fighting the Chinese Communists.
These units were under the control of a young general named Zhang
Xueliang, son of a former warlord and himself only nominally allied
with Chiang Kai-shek's KMT government. Zhang and his men were
