IN IHE spring of 1947, though the loyalty of his troops was shaky and the morale of his officers low, though his reserves throughout the country were getting closer to the bone, though rebellions were springing up in his rear and devouring troops that he could ill spare, though a people's war was spreading around his front line troops and though General George Marshall had returned to the United States and given every indication of abandoning him to his fate, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, instead of learning caution from his straitened circumstances, at his headquarters in Nanking, rashly gave sanction to a plan of grandiose proportions, yet of a dangerous and terrible nature.
To his cause he summoned the treacherous nature of the Yellow River. The Yellow River over several thousand years has shifted its course from time to time, flowing now into the Pacific Ocean through Shantung, now through north Kiangsu. To tamper with the river is like tampering with China itself and, to Chinese, almost like defying God. In 1938, Chiang had cut its massive dikes and diverted the river south across the path of the invading Japanese to halt them before the town of Chengchow. In doing this he submerged eleven cities and four thousand villages and made two million peasants homeless, but he stopped the Japanese.
Now Chiang wished to repair the breach he had made in the dikes and to send the river back once again to the north - that is, into Communist-held areas. No matter what was the real intention of such a move, its military effect would be to place a wall of water between the two main Communist armies in North China - those of General Chen-Yi and Liu Po-cheng - and split them apart. If Liu Po-cheng's raiders were immobilized with water, Chiang could also release enough troops for an attack on the Communist capital at Yenan. Finally, the switching of the course of the Yellow River at this time would deal a heavy blow to Communist economy in Shantung Province and might create an environment of flood and misery.
UNRRA had been co-operating with Chiang Kai-shek in 1946 in the engineering work necessary to repair the broken dikes on the completely valid understanding that the. restoration of the old channel was necessary to heal China's war wounds. Even the Communists had agreed to cooperate in the work. But all three groups - UNRRA, Communists and Chiang's - were parties to an agreement that the river would not be diverted back to its old channel till provision had been made for the peasants who were tilling the dry bed where the river had flowed before 1938. There were some four hundred thousand of these Shantung farmers cultivating eight hundred thousand acres of land in what had once been river bottom - and most of them lived in Communist areas.
During 1946, the dike might have been closed, but Nationalist generals were transporting troops north through Honan on a railway over the dried-up river bed and they interfered with UNRRA's work.(1) By 1947, however, the front had shifted to the east, the government troops no longer had need of the railway, and they brought heavy pressure on UNRRA to close the gap.
(1) Cf. UNRRA monthly report for November 1946. "Military objections which had hampered the work in the spring [1946] because of the danger to the Nationalist military supply line to Hsien Hsiang by rail across the dry bed, were withdrawn and replaced by demands for rapid closure." What military demands had to do with a land reclamation project the report does not disclose.
Informed of Chiang's intentions, the Communists requested UNRRA to stick to the tripartite agreement. UNRRA wavered. Chiang's generals immediately moved to close the breach. At the same time, his pilots bombed UNRRA ships carrying dike-repair and relief materials to Shantung and his American fighter planes strafed farmers erecting dikes near their native villages.
Each time a bombing occurred, shipping was paralyzed for weeks. The people of Shantung, under the threat of flood, were deliberately deprived of means to fight that flood. Though protesting Chiang's bombings, UNRRA did not break off relations with the generalissimo.
Whether Chiang himself meditated on the political effects of what he was to undertake is something we do not know. China's dictator was accustomed to gaze steadily at war, he never added up the sorrowful details. He seems to have suffered no alarm at the possible consequences of his act. He played with the Yellow River as if he were a god playing with a garden hose. He gave the order for the breach to be closed. (2)
"China's Sorrow," the peasants of many centuries have called the Yellow River, and China's Sorrow, indeed, it is. Within a short time of the closure of the breach, nearly five hundred villages were inundated, over one hundred thousand people were rendered homeless and, according to the Communists, almost five million mow of crop land were destroyed.
(2) March 1947 report of UNRRA's Agricultural Division gives a more cold-blooded account of this whole affair. In part it declares that the closing of the breach "was carried out by the Yellow River Commission with UNRRA equipment, foodstuffs and construction materials and with the assistance of UNRRA engineering and mechanical personnel. . . . The final closure operations had been rushed under strong Nationalist military pressure and in disregard of agreements previously made with UNRRA and Border Region representatives. . . . Its immediate effect would be to divide the movements of their armies Concurrently with Nationalist military drives in that province, and in the high-water season would flood the agricultural lands in the river bed. Plans which UNRRA, CNRRA and Border Region personnel had made to alleviate the adverse economic effects of the river diversion . . . had not been carried out. Dike work was made difficult by frequent Nationalist air attacks upon the dike workers."