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Devastation
In the eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, it was not those who supported China to win the final victory, not only hiding in the rear, eating the peasants' rice, but also pumping the peasants' children to fight hard. It was the "superior people" who ate fish, wore silk, lived in high-rise buildings, and rode in cars", but thousands of peasants who "broke their limbs and feet, or died of blood, or died of hunger, plague, or ravines."
During the eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Nationalist Government paid extremely high political costs in the countryside: conscription, food requisition, and corruption, which almost exhausted the prestige of the government. However, the situation is not irretrievable, and after a few years of smooth weather, recuperation, and clean and effective governance, the people's will will naturally gradually recover.
Before the Japanese army retreated, it deliberately destroyed the city of Liuzhou.
However, there is no turning back from history, and in the ensuing civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the peasants in the Kuomintang area were once again subjected to even more brutal exploitation and oppression - people, money, and food, and this time they even demanded more and more ruthlessly.
On August 15, 1945, the Japanese government surrendered, and in the months that followed, millions of people began to use all means to try to return to their former homes. At any of the small stations along the railway, there were a large number of refugees who had lost everything and had nowhere to go, because they defecated everywhere, causing the stench around the station to be overwhelming.
China, the victorious power, was devastated, especially in much of central and southern China. Some people pushed wheelbarrows and carried their only possessions on flat shoulders, and tried to walk back to their hometowns step by step; the villages along the way were overgrown with weeds and there was no sign of human habitation; the towns where the battles had taken place in the previous year's Battle of Yuxianggui were littered with ruins and ruins—the devils had briefly occupied and plundered the place, and then completely destroyed them when they retreated.
Unlike the Henan Famine of 1942-1943, the Great Famine that swept through central and southern China after the victory of the War of Resistance was not only no less large, but also extremely slow to recover: according to an estimate by the United Nations Relief and Relief Administration in the spring of 1946, 33 million people were undernourished, of whom 7 million were facing imminent famine.
"Everywhere along the crossings and small villages along the road from Hengyang to Lingling, gangs ranging from 20 to 50 people can be seen begging for food. In order to attract attention and get food, they stand in groups on the road, obstructing vehicular traffic, climbing in and out of vehicles...... As they clung to the truck, screaming and wailing, they had to "pull the children away" from the truck every time. There is a spirit of harassment that pervades such groups, and any attempt to disperse them will almost result in a riot.
In fact, each and every one of these groups is only partially covered in filthy rags, while many of the children are naked, covered in sores and infectious diseases. ”
Those who had fled the previous year to escape the Japanese offensive had returned home earlier to find that the devils had left them with nothing but scorched earth:
Their grain was eaten, their livestock, pigs, and chickens were killed, their farming implements were destroyed, and their houses and entire villages were burned to the ground.
The destroyed city of Liuzhou
In Hunan alone, 945,000 houses were destroyed and more than 2 million people were killed or injured, and in Guangxi, 80,000 buffaloes were slaughtered in rural areas.
Farmers desperately needed to resume production, lacking everything from livestock to fertilizer, which forced them to miss the summer grain planting in 1945, and until early 1946, about 30 to 40 percent of the land in Henan, Hunan, and Guangdong remained uncultivated.
At the same time, due to the lack of human and animal power, the shortage of fertilizer, and the total abandonment of the land throughout the wartime, the production efficiency of the land that had been cultivated was not high.
Throughout the famine region, people had to rely on weeds, tree roots, wild herbs, wheat bran and grain bran for their survival, and the lack of nutrition further contributed to the epidemic, the most common being malaria, and other virulent infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, typhoid and typhus.
The Nationalist Government's response to the affected areas has been slow and resigned, with a scarcity of medical resources and medicines, resulting in high mortality rates, and children being the most vulnerable to hunger and disease.
The famine that struck south-central China in late 1945 and early 1946 affected 33 million people was probably the harshest and most widespread of its kind in any region of the world in the early postwar period.
The famine after the war mainly occurred in the provinces involved in the Battle of Henan, Hunan and Guizhou, and the peasants in other provinces could not escape the disasters brought by the Nationalist Government.
Forced conscription, see forced conscription again
The joy of Japan's surrender was short-lived, and for China in 1945, the victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression solved little problem, and another war was imminent. In other words, an old era is being buried, and a new era is breaking out of the cocoon.
The Kuomintang regime was faced with a country that had been greatly damaged by the war, was poor and backward, and the people were struggling to make ends meet. The achievements of the "golden decade" have long since been destroyed, most of the railways are no longer operational, the roads are in very bad condition, the bridges and culverts are almost destroyed, and the refugees who have returned home find that they have no jobs, no resources, and only fiat money on hand.
Cities that were occupied by the devils in the early stages of the war may seem to have suffered little disaster, but a closer look reveals that they had already been "stripped to the ground" during the occupation – Qingdao, Beiping, Shanghai – and the locust army had taken everything from lamps to faucets, including a lot of scrap metal.
The Kuomintang had made efforts to alleviate the suffering of those who had been under Japanese rule during the war:
On September 3, 1945, the Chongqing government announced a policy of reducing and reducing land endowments. During the period 1945-1946, the 24 provinces formerly occupied by Japan were exempt from any land tax (including requisition and county-level grain). In the following year, the provinces of the Kuomintang will also be exempt from paying land tax.
This was indeed a political trick to help the Kuomintang government win the support of those landowners. But (terrible but), this is a stab in the chest to the already struggling finances.
The fact is simple: in 1946 land revenues fell by 50 percent, but the Kuomintang regime's huge army and government expenditures did not decrease, but increased dramatically as it accepted the lost land and prepared for war.
The army and government teams who were ordered to take over the Liberation Zone found it impossible to rely on the transportation of enough food and grass from the far hinterland. It is better to expect the recovery troops of the national army to "starve to death and not loot, freeze to death and not demolish houses", it is better to expect saints from heaven to designate the world.
As a result, the army and local governments at all levels skillfully applied the grain requisition and forced requisition in the nationalized areas to the common people in the Guangfu areas, and the hopes that the peasants in these areas had so hard to muster were instantly trampled into the ground.
At first, these local governments relied on borrowing from the central government, but after the abolition of the land allowance, their borrowing increased by tens of thousands of times—the Jiangsu government borrowed 690,000 yuan in legal currency from May to August 1945, and 681,000,000 yuan from September to December 1945.
University cafeteria
When the central government stopped borrowing, provincial, municipal, and county finances became untenable, and a new round of apportionment began, and for those who lived in the big cities during the occupation, whether or not they had collaborated with the enemy, they were forced to pay fines or risk being accused of collaborating – and legal "extortion" became increasingly active with the acquiescence of the government.
With the outbreak of the civil war, hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang troops poured into the warring provinces, and at first, the Nationalist government settled the military rations by purchasing them through the market, but the price they paid remained the same, only 20-30% of the market price - soon no one was willing to sell grain to them.
However, there can be no delay in the supply of military rations, and in such a situation, the system of forced conscription is once again in force, whether in the Kuomintang or in the Liberation Zone, and the government actually intends to take away everything from the people.
Out of control
In 1946-1949, the countryside was rejuvenated, thanks to the bumper harvest of 1946, which gave the peasants who were struggling on the death line a respite, although the agricultural products were not enough to supply the needs of the whole country, but the Kuomintang government through the import of large quantities of food, barely guaranteed the supply of the big cities, and the threat of mass famine no longer existed.
But a variety of political and economic reasons, especially runaway inflation, have pushed the KMT-ruled region inexorably into the abyss. The transportation system, which had been badly damaged by the war, was now almost entirely used by the Kuomintang to serve the civil war, leaving food almost impossible to circulate and the cities complaining. (Note 1)
The peasants could not profit from the adjustment of the market, but at the same time the prices of all the necessities of life were soaring, and the price of labor in the countryside was more expensive, and most adult males either joined the army or fled to the big cities.
China's foreign trade was also greatly affected after the war, with the spread of plastic reducing the demand for bristles abroad, and women's nylon socks now widely replacing silk socks, which are one of China's main exports for a long time. Because of the long war, India and Ceylon also replaced China as the world's largest suppliers of tea.
A corner of the teahouse
Compared with the pre-war period, the number of Chinese exports fell sharply, and in 1946 the export of raw silk was only 1/8 of the amount in 1936, tea was only 1/9, pig bristles were only 1/2, and tung oil was only 1/4.
By contrast, demand for raw materials for cotton has been high in China's textile mills, and the former cotton-producing regions – Hubei, Henan, Shandong and northern Jiangsu – have been the hardest hit by the war, exacerbated by a chaotic transportation system. Therefore, the national government had no choice but to import large quantities of cotton raw materials from the United States, India, and Egypt.
In the end, it was the system of recruiting soldiers that completely shattered the confidence and approval of the government in the countryside - because the peasants would scatter and flee when they heard the news of the conscription team, and the Kuomintang conscription force was now changed to go out at night, surround the whole village, and then kidnap all the men from their beds.
The rich could get away with bribes, and the rest were tied up to fight the Communists, and unlike during the War of Resistance, these soldiers not only had no desire to fight the Communists, but they were also full of resentment against the Kuomintang army and government, and would turn against the Communists at the first opportunity.
In short, by the end of 1948, the countryside in the Kuomintang seemed to be completely disintegrating, the currency had lost its credit, and all human activity had returned to bartering, and more and more peasants had fled, and the increasingly chaotic and dangerous social environment had caused more landlords to flee to the cities.
Ironically, it was not until the eve of collapse that the Kuomintang regime seemed to have suddenly come to its senses and suddenly understood the miserable situation of the vast countryside and the serious consequences it would cause. And this was not out of their original intention, but because from 1948 onwards, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party changed offensive and defensive positions.
Shocked to realize that the "ignorant and lowly" peasants, whom they had so far neglected and despised, were connected with the decay of the Nationalist government, the officials of the Kuomintang government began to discuss enthusiastically how to eliminate the exploitation of the landlords and change the tenant system in order to deprive the Communist Party of its basic source of strength.
On September 1, 1948, 86 legislators finally introduced a bill advocating the abolition of the tenancy system and making every peasant the owner of his land. Unsurprisingly, this led to a heated debate within the KMT – and until early 1949, when the entire regime began to collapse, the debate remained fruitless.
Although we call the founding of New China in 1949 the victory of the great peasant revolution, for those peasants in the nationalized areas, only under the premise of being protected by the Communist army would they dare to rebel against the old order.
Unlike their compatriots in the liberated areas, the peasants in the Kuomintang areas made a direct and enormous contribution to the victory of the liberation war, and their contribution was indirect, but also crucial—they no longer provided the Kuomintang regime with food, taxes, and people on which it depended.
Beginning in 1946, the amount of grain collected by the Kuomintang from the rural areas never reached the target, and it continued to decline year by year, especially in 1948 and 1949, when the amount of grain requisitioned fell to a lower level due to the shrinking of the territory under its control and the increasingly unstable political and economic conditions.
During the Anti-Japanese War and the early days of the Civil War, income from rural areas supported government expenditures. By 1948, however, only 21 per cent of the Nationalist government's expenditures were provided by taxes, 11 per cent from the sale of public property, profits from state-owned enterprises, and the sale of bonds, and the remaining 68 per cent by the massive issuance of unmargined currency – and from then on, inflation skyrocketed and could no longer be controlled.
Note 1: At that time, the price of grain at that time varied greatly from region to region, for example, in May 1947, the price of rice per stone (about 120 catties) in Shanghai was more than 300,000 yuan, while in Hankou it was 170,000 yuan, and in Chongqing it was only 72,000 yuan.
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