China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 by R. J. Rummel

Author:R. J. Rummel [Rummel, R. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781351528757
Google: -SEuDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35866399
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7 4,968,000 Victims: The Civil War

R. J. Rummel

When the Japanese evacuated … Li and the other landlords went with them. The people then got together and divided Li’s land. When the Kuomintang returned to the region, Li came back with fifteen armed men. Just before his arrival, all the men in the village fled away.

Seeing the remaining women and children were frightened, Li tried to calm them. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, “we are all from the same family.” Late that night, however, when the village was asleep, Li and his men went around to all but four houses in the villages and took the people out. Ten people, he threw down a dry well and buried alive. Fourteen others, he forced to lie down in a ditch, then he covered them with earth. Among those buried were a two-month-old baby, a boy of ten and a woman of eighty.

With the end of the Sino-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek could now turn to the final struggle with the communists, the only remaining barrier to the full unification of China under his rule. But first, he had to prevent Japanese arms from falling into communist hands and prevent the communists from seizing Chinese territory that the Japanese had occupied, including Manchuria. This was a logistical problem of the first order. The communists were concentrated in northern China and closer than the nationalists to Manchuria. The nationalists were concentrated and isolated in the southeastern part of China.

After the Japanese surrender, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the communists to remain in place and the Japanese to surrender only to nationalist forces, to even fight off the communists, if necessary.1 The nationalists were the legal government to which the Japanese had surrendered and the Japanese, of course, tried to comply. But the communists, knowing well what was at stake, demanded that Japanese forces near them surrender to their units. When this was refused, the communists launched attacks against important positions and communication held by the Japanese and puppet armies; over a hundred such clashes were reported (not all the Japanese units were disarmed—subsequently the nationalists employed some Japanese units in offensive operations against the communists, particularly in Shantung and Shansi).2

Most important was to gain control over territory. For this the United States came to the direct aid of the nationalists, transporting their troops by air and sea to reassert nationalist authority over major cities and railway lines in northern and eastern China. Some 80,000 crack nationalist troops were airlifted into Peiping, Nanking, and Shanghai; and the American Seventh Fleet landed 53,000 American marines in the ports of Tsingtao and Tientsin. In total, the United States would eventually transport 400,000 to 500,000 nationalist troops.3 Manchuria was still occupied by the Soviets, who had taken it over in 1945 after declaring war on Japan, and continued to find one reason after another to postpone withdrawing their troops.

Moreover, while the Chinese public’s support for the nationalists had plummeted in the last years of the war, continued American backing of Chiang

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