The PLA march into Beijing

If you've done your touristic duty and milled about Tiananmen Square, do you remember your first impressions? We'll lay good money you weren't contemplating China's grand dynastic tradition. You remember Mao's eight-meter portrait gazing placidly at his mausoleum, the Monument to the People's Heroes thrusting up defiantly, and PLA soldiers at every turn. "This is it, the heart of communist power," you mused, right before a man with a flimsy yellow cap and a camera backed into you.

It's hard to imagine there was a time when China's Communist Party despaired of making it through another winter, and taking the ancient northern capital was a pipe dream. But once you make it to the shady hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City, you'll inevitably see a good deal of folk in their eighth and ninth decades, far more than you see out and about in a western country. They'll be sitting on tiny collapsible stools, chuckling with their neighbors, or expressionlessly eyeballing the streams of visitors. And odds are a few of them remember, and marked yesterday's date, the 60^th anniversary of the PLA's taking Beijing.

There's a reason the date went largely unremarked, why there were no gala shows on CCTV, and only specialty cable programs delve into the guts of combat. War is the ugliest business, and the victors refer glowingly only to the outcomes in the history books they write.

 As heinously as the depredations of the occupying Japanese transpired, the following civil war between the communists and Kuomintang had its own unique stamp of cruelty. It turned China schizophrenic, as civilians found themselves not only starved and destitute, but forced to pledge loyalty to armed occupiers who the next day might be run out of town, its pursuers now torturing and executing all who had made those promises under duress.

Yet if we can zoom out from the daily chaos and insanity to a wide angle of historic objectivity, the communist's struggle and eventual triumph over a vastly better supplied opponent tells a classic underdog story, a parable of hearts and minds beating deep pockets and munitions.

China's civil war was perhaps the only such to start with a truce. With the Japanese no longer a threat, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong sat down to negotiate a peaceful reconstruction at the Chongqing Peace Negotiations in the fall of 1945. But the Soviet Union had occupied Manchuria following Japan's defeat, and the Kuomintang and PLA maneuvered to fill the power vacuum. Full-scale war broke out between the two on June 26, 1946.

Many amateur Sinologists know that the KMT received ample aid from the United States, but mistakenly believe the communists received direct support from the Soviet Union. In fact, Stalin saw no reason to doubt a KMT victory, at most a power-sharing structure heavily in Chiang Kai-shek's favor, and left Mao solely reliant on the peasantry.

Such were the makings for the guerilla force whose tactics would later inspire revolutionaries like Che Guevara and the Shining Path. While both sides were unremittingly ruthless, the Kuomintang made an intolerable burden of themselves in the cities they occupied. Lead by a cobbled-together coalition of venal warlords, the KMT festered with endemic corruption. This and chronic mismanagement fed the hyperinflation of any country paralyzed by fighting.

The KMT were not chary about passing the misery on to the populace. Flimsy charges of espionage or collaborating with the communists were used to seize assets. Relief supplies were requisitioned and sold by officers on the black market. Civilians lived in terror of coming under the KMT's notice, which more often than not meant torture, if not execution. Captured communists could at best hope for, but not expect, a quick death.

The PLA's approach, on the other hand, reversed the age-old Chinese paradigm of armies pillaging at will. Without the resources or numbers to take cities, the PLA hunkered down in the countryside, seizing landlords' holdings and redistributing them among the peasants. Not just their rhetoric but their actions convinced the masses that they were a heaven-sent force of egalitarian angels.

Most efficiently of all, the PLA implemented a policy of accepting into their folds all KMT troops who surrendered. As the cities starved, only KMT generals had enough to eat, and millions of regulars converted to PLA troops as the situation grew more desperate.

So it was that the "millet and rifles" militia, once reduced to long marches and hard rations, sixty years ago marched in triumph through Beijing's city gates. They were received with cheers and tears of joy by most, although sporadic skirmishes and acts of sabotage would continue until late summer. The dark years of communist turmoil still an unreality, February 3, 1949, was a day for that most numerous yet insignificant of Chinese entities - the commoner. But it's fitting to zoom in again on the moment-to-moment, to the public executions that followed the celebrating, as reported by Harrison Forman in Blunder in Asia:

When all the prisoners were ready, they were placed in an open truck. With sirens screaming and firebells clanging, the execution convoy raced through the city's streets to the intersection selected. A hush would fall over the waiting thousands as the execution party arrived.

The prisoners were lined up in the middle of the street, each with his executioner behind him. At a signal from an officer, the men were pushed to their knees and shot in the back of the head. As they pitched forward, a roar of applause would come from the crowds.

The police then used bamboo sticks, gun butts, and leather belts to restrain the people from rushing forward for a better view of the final death twitchings. Once, the wife of one of the executed men managed to slip through the police cordon. She knelt beside her dead husband and smoothed his blood-soaked hair while she moaned softly...A goose-pimply silence fell over the crowd, suddenly ashamed of its bloodlust. It melted away, quickly.