In Part 5, Mao’s troops in the hills of Yunnan grows food. His army, dressed in shabby clothing wearing straw sandals, doesn’t look like a fighting force. Mao says the people are the sea and guerrillas are like fish that swim in the sea. Within a year, Mao’s army grows to 200,000.
Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek’s army loses battles and cities to the Japanese. To continue fighting, his government and army moves to the deep mountain city of Chongqing in Sichuan province. In 1939, the Japanese start bombing Chongqing 24/7. When asked about the Japanese threat, Chiang says that the Japanese are a disease of the skin, but the communists are a disease of the heart.
Then on December 7, 1941, Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and America enters the war. War supplies start to trickle to China through India and across the Himalayas to Chiang Kai-shek’s four-million-man army. However, his government is corrupt, his troops are poorly fed and moral is low.
Chiang Kai-shek is accepted as an equal among the West’s leaders while Mao works to keep up the moral of his Communist troops through political training—something Western leaders don’t understand and criticize.
Continued in Part 6, The Roots of Madness or return to Part 4, The Roots of Madness
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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