by Mick Jones
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| Zhou Enlai chats with Fu Zuoyi, former commander of the Kuomingtang's North China Bandit Suppression Headquarters, after Fu surrendered Beijing to the PLA. |
T
he scream of shells and thud of nearby explosions stilled the daily hubbub of the streets below Beijing's city walls in the final days of January 1949. For over a month, 900,000 People's Liberation Army soldiers had stood outside the city awaiting a decision: would Beijing have to be stormed, or would the Kuomintang forces within capitulate without a fight?Life had become progressively more difficult for Beijingers over the preceding months. In August 1948, the Kuomintang authorities had introduced the Gold Yuan as part of emergency measures to halt an economic breakdown, but the result was an acceleration of inflation and growing misery and alienation among the urban populace. By October, the Gold Yuan was practically worthless. Many shops and factories were shut. Thousands were unemployed.
Fu Lie and her husband Ma Dequn were clerks at the Jibei Power Plant in Xicheng District. Ma recalls: "Just before the liberation, Beijing was really in a mess under the leadership of the Kuomintang. Corruption in politics and inflation had pushed people to the edge of the abyss. It is not an exaggeration that the price of rice changed day by day, higher and higher, and our salary was far from enough."
"We were ordinary clerks at that time, knowing little about politics," said Fu. "What we knew about the Communist Party all came from the propaganda of the Kumintang. Certainly, it was impossible that we could get some positive information.
Anyway, people in the city were besieged by fear. The rich people fled to the south, but we had no money and I was going to give birth to my second child. Therefore, we just stayed here, waiting and worrying. We didn't know what would happen to us."
Miserable economic conditions and severe food shortages sparked protests by primary and secondary school teachers towards the end of the year. Telecommunications workers went on "Hunger labor strike," claiming they were too hungry to work, in order to get around a Kuomintang decree that legalized killing striking workers.
As the PLA approached, "Kuomintang frenzy mounted to fever pitch," wrote American lawyer Sidney Shapiro, who was living in Beijing at the time. "They murdered political prisoners and arrested hundreds of innocuous people in a paranoic hysteria."
Ironically, their leader Fu Zuoyi, commander-in-chief of the Kuomintang's North China Bandit Suppression Headquarters, was at that very moment engaged in secret negotiations with the Communists, who reportedly had engaged his daughter to help convince him to change sides and hand over the city.
On 31 January, 1949, that is exactly what he did. Shapiro bicycled to Xizhimen to watch the troops march in and seal their victory in the 64-day Beijing-Tianjin Campaign.
"The PLA began marching in through Xizhimen, clean, smartly stepping, smiling young men. Contingents of jeeps, trucks, artillery caissons- all made in the USA [Chiang Kai-shek was ironically known as the Quartermaster General of the PLA, much of whose military equipment was captured from the US-supported Kuomintang] - rolled through streets gay with flags and bunting."
Ma said: "We were lucky enough to greet the liberation peacefully. The PLA controlled the whole city and took over all the administration, plants, stores... Everything was changing quietly, there was no chaos, no violence.
What the PLA did and what they said was quite different from the Kuomintang. The cadres of the PLA came to our office, shook hands with us and said, We should learn from you." That was really out of the question in the past."
"Our feelings turned from fear to wondering, then to trust," said Fu. "For the first time, we had the right to say what we wanted to say, to do what we wanted to do. We really became the owner of our country."