NOTES
1. The Japanese imperialists made temporary conciliatory gestures
after the Sian Incident in order to induce the Kuomintang authorities to
disrupt the internal peace which was being restored and to break up the
anti-Japanese national united front which was taking shape. They arranged for
the bogus autonomous government of Inner Mongolia under their control to
release two messages, one in December 1936 and another in March 1937, pledging
allegiance to the Kuomintang government in Nanking. And the Japanese foreign
minister, Sago himself, publicly wooed Chiang Kai-shek, slyly declaring that
Japan would improve its relations with China and help China achieve political
unification and economic recovery. Furthermore, Japan sent a so-called Economic
Study Group, headed by Kenji Kodama, a Japanese financial magnate, ostensibly
to help China "complete the organization of a modern state". These
were schemes for aggression and were known as "Sago's diplomacy";
they were called a "retreat on the part of Japan" by those people who
were deluded by the Japanese imperialist make-believe.
2. In "April 1937, the Kuomintang High Court in Soochow
tried Shen Chun-ju and six other leaders of the Resist Japan and Save the
Nation Movement who had been arrested in November 1936 in Shanghai. The charge
was "endangering the Republic", the usual trumped-up indictment the
reactionary Kuomintang authorities used to stigmatize all patriotic movements.
3. Prior to the Sian Incident, the Northeastern
Army was stationed on the border between Shensi and Kansu Provinces and was in
direct contact with the Red Army in northern Shensi. Greatly influenced by the
Red Army, it subsequently staged the coup in Sian. In March 1937, the
Northeastern Army was forced to go east to Honan and Anhwei Provinces, a move
taken by the Kuomintang reactionaries to cut it off from contact with the Red
Army and at the same time to sow discord in its ranks.
4. General Yang Hu-cheng was a military leader
in China's Northwest who staged the Sian Incident together with Chang
Hsueh-liang. Thus the prime movers in this incident were popularly linked
together in the double-barrelled surname "Chang-Yang". When Chiang
Kai-shek was released. Chang accompanied him to Nanking but was immediately
placed under detention. In April 1937 Yang, too, was ousted from his post by
the Kuomintang reactionaries and had to take leave of absence abroad. When the
War of Resistance began, Yang returned to China to offer his services, only to
be interned by Chiang Kai-shek for the rest of his life In September 1949, when
the People's Liberation Army was driving forward near Chungking, the Kuomintang
had him murdered in a concentration camp.
5. Tungkuan is a strategically important
gateway on the borders of Shensi, Honan and Shansi. At the time of the Sian
Incident the Kuomintang troops were mainly quartered east of it. Certain
reputedly "Left" people in the Party, like Chang Kuo-tao, then urged
that the Red Army should "fight its way out through Tungkuan", which
meant that the Red Army should mount an offensive against the Kuomintang
troops. This proposal ran counter to the Central Committee's policy for a
peaceful settlement of the Sian Incident.
6. For a long time after the October
Revolution, the French imperialists pursued a hostile policy towards the Soviet
Union. From 1918 to 1920, the French government took an active part in the
armed intervention by 14 powers against the Soviet Union and continued its
reactionary policy of isolating the Soviet Union even after the intervention
failed. It was not until May 1935 that, under the influence of the Soviet
Union's peace policy among the French people and because of the German fascist
menace, France concluded a treaty of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union,
though her reactionary government failed to observe it.
7. The students' patriotic demonstration in
Peking on December 9, 1935, led by the Chinese Communist Party. The movement
called for the cessation of civil war and armed resistance to Japan and won
nation-wide support.
10. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Manifesto of the communist Party, Part IV; V. I. Lenin, two Tactics of
Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Part XII and Part XIII; History
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, Chapter
3, Section 3.
11. See J. V. Stalin, "The Foundations of
Leninism", Part m, "The October Revolution and the Tactics of the
Russian Communists", Part II; "Concerning Questions of
Leninism", Part III.
12. See J. V. Stalin, "Address Delivered in
the Kremlin Palace to the Graduates from the Red Army Academies" in May
1935, in which he said: ". . . of all the valuable capital the world
possesses, the most valuable and most decisive is people, cadres. It must be
realized that under our present conditions 'cadres decide everything.'"
13. This difference was between the line of the
Party's Central Committee and Chang Kuo-tao's line of retreat in 1935-36. See
"On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism", Note 22, pp. 175-76 of
this volume. In stating that "the earlier difference ... has ... been
settled", Comrade Mao Tse-tung was referring to the fact that the Fourth
Front Army of the Red Army had joined forces with the Central Red Army. Chang
Kuo-tao's subsequent open betrayal of the Party and his degeneration into a
counter-revolutionary was the act of an individual traitor and no longer a
question of differences over Party line.
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