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.Wartime conditions were appalling.Disease and even starvation were major problems.In the Taihang region, malaria and typhus were widespread; locusts, floods, and droughts led to famines which relief efforts could limit but not eliminate.And if there could be mobilization of the peasantry, there could also be demobilization.That is, Communist organizers in north China initially benefited from the Japanese army’s decision to press the war quickly on to central China, which left a power vacuum across the northern plains.But by 1939 Japan returned military resources to the north, supplementing garrisoned towns with Chinese puppet troops.In some areas, villages were made collectively responsible for maintaining roads and railroads – if sabotage occurred, the entire village might be held responsible.21The “three-alls” extermination campaigns after 1940destroyed whole villages, and the Japanese built fortified roads designed to carve up base areas.Partisan activities declined, and the Communists faced desertion problems.If Communist guerrillas were forced to abandon an area, village peasant associations seldom survived.Morale plummeted, and popular hostility toward Communists grew.In effect, the peasantry was thus demobilized.None the less, in the long run Communist-led resistance in north China kept the Japanese at bay.The political scientist Kathleen Hartford has concluded that one reason the Japanese failed to crush resistance as they had in Korea and Manchuria stemmed from their decision in 1937 to march on central China rather than consolidate control over the north.22 Of course, in terms of defeating or cowing the main enemy – Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists – this decision was virtually inevitable.But it gave the embryonic Communist resistance a chance to grow stronger before it faced real repression.Later extermination campaigns were less effective than they might have been, since the resistance had built underground tunnels and storage areas around thousands of villages.The Communists responded to Japanese pressure with some flexibility.Secret guerrilla cells curtailed their activities until conditions became safer.The CCP could either assassinate Chinese puppet leaders, or, often, work with them.By absorbing Japanese-approved county leaders into CCP networks, the Communists drastically weakened Japanese knowledge of local conditions.Japanese officers no longer knew whom to trust, since any Chinese could be a double agent secretly protecting guerrillas or sending grain into base areas.If mobilization was sometimes followed by demobilization, Communists could also lead remobilization.Carefully timing their efforts, organizers would arrive in a village after a nearby military victory to reinvigorate the local Party and peasant activism.Mass meetings would conduct tax reassessments and challenge landlord rents, and eventually restore morale.It was during a period of great Japanese pressure that the rent and interestRevolution and civil war355reductions, the tax reforms, and the democratic election movements were carried out.In the words of one Communist organizer: Among the guerrilla units we have organized, there is a saying, “victory decides everything.” That is to say, no matter how difficult it has been to recruit troops, supply the army, raise the masses’ anti-Japanese fervor, or win over the masses’ sympathy or help, after a victory in battle the masses fall all over themselves to send us flour, steamed bread, meat, and vegetables; the masses’ pessimistic and defeatist psychology is smashed, and many new guerrilla soldiers swarm in.23Once the civil war was under way in 1946–7, the CCP abandoned its policies of moderation and returned to radical land reform.Raw class struggle returned to the top of the agenda.Rural elites were again expropriated, sometimes attacked, and peasants were encouraged to voice their grievances at “speak bitterness” meetings.These were emotionally charged events that local cadres carefully prepared for.But they also gave rise to spontaneous expressions of traumas and grievances that energized entire villages.Mobilization, then, depended on such “emotion work” as much as on fear of the Guomindang.24Peasant egalitarianism, suppressed during the Sino-Japanese War, was allowed to come to the fore again.Landlords and usurers were often accused of murder, if only because it seemed unfair they had lived (relatively) well while poorer villagers starved.Many were beaten to death
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